From the Court to the Boardroom: How Coach Greg Hess Turns Adversity into Purpose
From competing against NBA legends to surviving pancreatic cancer, Coach Greg Hess has mastered the art of turning challenges into victories. In this inspiring conversation, he shares powerful lessons on building a winning culture, leading with purpose, and creating lasting impact—whether on the court, in business, or in life. We explore his journey from sports to corporate leadership, his battle with cancer, and the mindset shifts that fuel his mission to help others achieve peak performance.
If you’re ready to get present, embrace your “why,” and create a ripple effect of positive change, this episode will show you how.
Grab Coach Hess' free gift, Chapter 10: Breaking the Success Code – The Power of a Common Goal, at www.CoachHess.com.
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Transcript
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: From the basketball court to the boardroom, and from battling world-class athletes to beating cancer, Coach Greg Hess knows what it takes to win.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: He's here to share how you can unlock your full potential, lead with purpose, and achieve breakthrough results, no matter the challenges you face. Hi, and welcome to the UWorld Order Showcase Podcast, where we feature life, health, transformational coaches and spiritual entrepreneurs.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: stepping up to be the change they seek in the world. I'm your host, Jill Hart, The Coach's Alchemist, on a mission to help coaches and entrepreneurs amplify their voice
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: monetize their mission, and get visible, leveraging podcasts and Substack. Today, we are speaking with Coach Greg Hess, and Greg Hess, better known as Coach Hess, is an Amazon best-selling author, award-winning business coach, and voted Best Coach in Katy, Texas.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: His life expands… no, I'm sorry, his life journey spans decades of leadership, from captaining his university basketball team and competing against NBA legends like John Stockton and Dennis Rodman, to coaching at high school and collegiate levels, and managing major events like Magic Johnson's basketball camps.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: After earning his MBA in just 18 months, Coach Hess transitioned from sports to business, holding leadership roles across industries and serving as chief advisor for cloud services at Halliburton.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But in 2015, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer changed everything. Surviving and recovering renewed his commitment to purpose, leading him to launch the Cochess brand, dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, professionals, and teams achieve peak performance.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Author of Peak Experiences, Breaking the Business Code, and Achieving Peak Performance, The Entrepreneur's Journey, Coach Hess combines a real-world experience with the coach's heart to transform lives. He empowers clients worldwide through one-on-one coaching, strategic planning workshops, and his Empower Your Team program. Welcome to the show, Coach Hess. It's nice to have you.
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::Coach Hess: Wow, gosh, you know, you read all that, Jill, and I kind of feel humbled, and I'm so grateful.
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::Coach Hess: For, so many good things that have been happening in the life of Coach Hess.
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::Coach Hess: Bro.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, it… it's… You've done a lot of remarkable things, and one of them… That may not…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: that may just get glossed over in all of this is… is overcoming pancreatic cancer. That's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That's kind of it. An amazing miracle.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even these days, with all the technology that they've.
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::Coach Hess: they've come across its… I remind myself of that every day, and it makes it very easy to be motivated, and you know, when you think things are down, you find opportunities, because, you know, there's always opportunities if you have the right mindset, I guess, but … yeah, that was quite an adventure, and…
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::Coach Hess: You know, Going through that process, …
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::Coach Hess: you know, it was discovered in why I'm alive. I mean, I had an AFib situation going, and they did a CAT scan.
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::Coach Hess: And came back and said, hey, no blood clots in your lungs, which they wanted to shock my heart back into sink, you know, that's the whole AFib world. No, but this mass in your pancreas here.
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::Coach Hess: And they went too low and got that as far as in the CAT scan, and …
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::Coach Hess: 14 days after that, I had surgery.
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::Coach Hess: And, yeah, they, weren't sure whether they were God at all or what. I mean, it wasn't a guarantee in any way, shape, or form. I was told to get things in order, and…
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::Coach Hess: you know, people knew that I was, you know, that were close to me, because I had spent a lot of years being a coach and a mentor, and not only in the basketball game, but throughout 30 years of business, I was still called coach, you know, even though I was sometimes the owner of a company, whatever the role.
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::Coach Hess: I got a lot of messages from people, Jill, that said, look, you made a difference in my life, and a lot of people don't get to read those messages because they're in the coffin.
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::Coach Hess: Well, shoot, I came out of there and started to look at those, and I went, whoa.
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::Coach Hess: You know, … Big guy upstairs saved me for a reason.
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::Coach Hess: And it's because I did a good job throughout my life of following my why, and never really knew what it was until after, you know, after this event.
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::Coach Hess: And now, it's crystal clear, and I live it every day, and it's, it's fantastic. It's really, like I say, fulfilling the potential of others' lives, but my own as well, on a daily basis.
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::Coach Hess: It was a difficult time. I had a long, long process of drainage out of my side, you know, as my pancreas, they cut most of it out?
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::Coach Hess: You know, went through drainage, but I didn't go through the WIFL, technique, which means that you would have to live on enzymes for people, and that's very common… if you've survived pancreatic cancer, you're very commonly going to have to be in that situation. I'm not.
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::Coach Hess: You know, I got some nice bullet holes and scars in me because of it, but that's alright. I'm living with that fine, and I live a hundred… have for a long time now, and will continue to, so…
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::Coach Hess: Thanks for paying attention to that. It's not…
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::Coach Hess: But why do we need an event?
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::Coach Hess: To change our lives.
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::Coach Hess: A little bit. You know, when I was the chief advisor of cloud services at that time at Halliburton.
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::Coach Hess: And now I went through that. Once I came out in and read these messages and kind of realized, wait a minute, there's so much more to this.
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::Coach Hess: Came down to when I remembered.
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::Coach Hess: kind of, you know, is why I was going through when I was on the ward.
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::Coach Hess: It's kind of a death ward. I was gonna say that? In a big hospital here in Houston, and, you know.
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::Coach Hess: The buzzers would go off, and you would know what's going on.
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::Coach Hess: And I'd walk around the halls, you know, because they say you gotta walk, and I wasn't in bad shape. I mean, I'm riding bike a lot, and I'm all in pretty good shape, so I was able to get moving, but, you know, 5 steps, 6 steps, I mean, all that kind of dragging all the stuff sangin' out of you everywhere. And I started walking around, and I'd look in people's rooms, and you know what? They wouldn't move.
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::Coach Hess: They'd be in the same place from when I walked the last time in their room, they were just kind of in their… and I thought, wait a minute, we're supposed to be walking to get a car, what's up with these people? So I started going into these people's rooms, Jill, and bumping them and saying, hey, what's going on?
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::Coach Hess: And you know when people are on their deathbed?
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::Coach Hess: What I learned from doing that experience.
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::Coach Hess: Is that family's the most important thing to them?
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::Coach Hess: And I think I kind of knew that, but until you actually spent the time talking with people.
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::Coach Hess: Well, then at the end, you know, when I'm 14 days or whatever, I get to roll out, and at that point, I could actually ring the bell. And so, I was being rolled out in wheelchair, even though I could walk, that was, you know, people who had not come out of their beds, or were still in there, that I had gone and talked to were standing at their doors, clapping!
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::Coach Hess: And I was like, whoa! I had tears in my eyes, and just awesome. And then afterwards, I thought to myself, why in the world would I do that? Are you morbid, or… what's up with you, buddy?
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::Coach Hess: And I really did a self-inspection, and it came down to, believe it or not, when I was 8 years old, I remember drooling the ball down the middle of the floor, making a fake, throwing a pass over to my partner, him catching the ball, scoring the layup, and we win the game.
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::Coach Hess: And the thrill of that moment, of giving an assist and seeing the joy of a group that we've achieved something together, is what I chased all my life.
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::Coach Hess: And I didn't realize until I was 63 or so, 64 years old, but I know now, when I look back, what drove me, it was that!
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::Coach Hess: I don't know how much money I made, or what I did. How could I bring that joy, and how could I make… give an assist and see things happen? And so now that I know that's exactly what I'm all about, I can magnify and put velocity to that, and I'm really enjoying that experience. And so can others. Everybody can. That's the point of why we're here, isn't it?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It is, and it's kind of why I do my show. It's to give the assist. My whole thing is get visible, well…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's… it's you! You and everybody else that comes on here and shares the message that they're trying to get out to the world, because it's really important that the world knows that
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: people are doing positive things! We can all lay around in our beds, like those people that were on the ward, that, you know, they know they should be doing something, but they're just laying there, waiting for somebody else to come and do it for them.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: When they could just, you know, maybe all you can do is roll your feet over and sit up on your bed.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Do that!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's enough, and it's a metaphor for life, you know?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even if it's just, you know.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: water in your neighbor's plants, because they forgot, or something. It's a silly metaphor, but it… it's just like…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Do something!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Don't just lay there and hope that somebody's gonna come along and live your life for you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You're here, it's your experience, I wanna see what you got, baby.
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::Coach Hess: Come home. Yeah, there's so much, and you know, you recognize the limitation of time in your life, and you know, part of the reason I've taken on the book writing and the thing that I recognize the legacy opportunities that you could have by doing that. I really realized, as soon as I finished Peak Experiences, and once it was posted and everything, it kind of…
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::Coach Hess: had this feeling of, wow, I've got something that not only my children can read, my grandchildren can read, but my great-great-grand, when I'm gone, they can read, and that's kind of nice to know that there's going to be something there that captures, you know, some of my thinking in this whole idea of…
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::Coach Hess: Making the world a better place, one day at a time, every day, and every… and be present to do it, you know?
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::Coach Hess: And… have the skills, you know, to come along, I think really helps a lot in guiding people.
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::Coach Hess: It's fun. I'll have my 70th birthday, I'll share with everyone on, Sunday I'm having a party here in Katy, Texas, and we've invited a lot of people in a local brewery, and it's just gonna be a big celebration, and for all the reasons of,
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::Coach Hess: I guess, you know, once you survive something like that, and you're gonna… you hit 70, you gotta… gotta punch it, you know?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Your dad's turning 90. Seven is a big deal. My dad's turning 90, and he had, bladder cancer that he's
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Made it through, and… Those birthdays, you just gotta celebrate them, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Every day you should celebrate life, but you really… you do need to slow down and let your family appreciate you, and accept appreciation from other people. It's kind of a hard thing for people to do.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But that's….
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::Coach Hess: Yeah. I think that's why we do birthdays.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Boy, I love birthdays.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Spotlight on you for a minute.
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::Coach Hess: I'm usually pretty low-key on it all, but on this one, I said, hey, now's the time. And I'm just fortunate enough to be in the position to host a party for, you know, over 100 people, and make it big and bad and fun, and just, you know….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: memorable.
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::Coach Hess: Drawing?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Grace.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, yeah, we're gonna have… what the heck? Gotta have fun doing it, and it's gonna be good.
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::Coach Hess: So, part of transformation for anyone, you know, I think is, …
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::Coach Hess: Sometimes we have to go through
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::Coach Hess: a bit of a sharpening your saw. We've all heard about this from Covey and so on, and…
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::Coach Hess: something I did that truly is a transformation in my life that I'll like to share with everyone, kind of as a big deal, I think. I had been a basketball coach and a high school basketball coach and school teacher for…
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::Coach Hess: 14 years, I guess, including, well, 12 years at the high school level, and part of that was in Canada, and part of that was in Southern California, a place called Westlake Village High School.
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::Coach Hess: And, while I was at Westlake Village High School, I basically rode my bike everywhere I went. I, you know, put in 20 miles a day, and it was beautiful. Of course.
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::Coach Hess: a lot of the, students, you know, had BMWs and Mercedes and what have you, and wondering, what's up with this teacher riding a bike? But, it was appropriate for where I was as the head basketball coach and so on, but, …
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::Coach Hess: Anyway, I got the opportunity to take the assistant job at the college there in town called California Lutheran University. It's in Thousand Oaks.
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::Coach Hess: And a guy named Mike Dunlap was the head coach, and he offered me the assistant job, and so I said, hmm, that sounds kind of like the right thing for me to do. And now it was the question of, what did I want to do a master's in? At this point, of course, I have my Bachelor of Education at the University of Calgary now, next degree, what do I want to do it in? And I thought, you know what, time to sharpen the saw.
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::Coach Hess: So I took my bike to Jasper, Alberta.
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::Coach Hess: Totally loaded with all my panniers, everything else, and I rode for 23 days, 2300 miles, right back to Thousand Oaks.
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::Coach Hess: And so, that long tour, in terms of sharpening a saw, and trying to make a decision, you know, a life-changing decision, and I wanted to be able to have impact, and really think it through, and good golly, did I ever, you know? A lot of time to do that while I was riding.
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::Coach Hess: But, what a fun experience, and I guess when I went into that, or as I came to some deep thinking, I realized at that time, mid-90s, we were still functioning quite a bit from a command line on our keyboards.
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::Coach Hess: I called it DOS, right? Probably heard of, and whatever else, our languages that we were using, but we weren't really using… really getting into the graphical user interface.
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::Coach Hess: And I saw that coming. I mean, I got, you know, Apple was doing their thing right at the point. You know what? This whole GUI world is gonna change the way people function.
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::Coach Hess: And I think it may be, at this point when I look at it, in terms of the transformation of society.
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::Coach Hess: It may be, you know, AI could be at the same, same plateau right now as what that was about at another level and a different way of thinking and where we are, but…
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::Coach Hess: I grabbed onto that and said, I'm gonna do a master's in business, and I'm gonna focus on business process re-engineering and get that figured out to make businesses better, and so that's what I did.
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::Coach Hess: And when I graduated from there, I continued to just pursue a learning curve.
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::Coach Hess: around that.
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::Coach Hess: You know, and people paid me pretty well along the way, it all worked out well, but I mean, realistically, I was on the learning. Am I going to learn more from this tech? And I had job over job until I ended up, you know, being the chief advisor of cloud service at Halburn, but I was also in charge of global energy for Sun Microsystem for quite a while.
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::Coach Hess: Had some fun roles, president of a company called StrataWeb that we grew and turned out, and some of the technology that I created there is still being used, so it's kind of fun to look back on all that.
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::Coach Hess: But it was a matter of chasing a learning curve, and I encourage people, when they transform from one event to another, or one part of life, or one phase of life, take the time to think about where you're gonna go, and what it means to you, and what you really want to do.
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::Coach Hess: Don't be afraid of it. No.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm 65, so I do remember all of these, you know, the command prompt for DOS.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And the floppy disks.
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::Coach Hess: And when you had… we got, like, two… I was a bookkeeper for a while, and….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: … Might have been Apple.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the Apple Books or something like that, but they were, like, two floppy disks, so I could… one for information, and one for the program.
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::Coach Hess: Right, right. I remember? Oh, gosh.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I was so sick.
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::Coach Hess: So, ….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: ago, and the transition to online, and how it's, you know, moved into becoming a part of our lives, and the people that were afraid of it. And then cryptos came along, and people were, like, so certain that, you know, it's a horrible, terrible thing, and, you know, I…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I have to say, in the next…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: couple years, we may find that currency looks a lot different than it did when we were young. And the whole AI thing, you can be mad at it, you can, you know, think it's the devil, or demons, or whatever you want to think, but
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: really, it's the future, it's where we're going. There's so much information, and we need a way to synthesize information in a way that humans can't do.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That… that well.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I mean, it's just, like, they can… it can just go deep into the store of the volumes of content that's been
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Dumped into what we call the web, but it's like….
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::Coach Hess: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, when Google got started, it was… it was small. You could get your name out there, but….
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, it's changing the SEO thinking, it's changing so much right now.
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::Coach Hess: I think the future is really about those
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::Coach Hess: It's not gonna be what you know, it's gonna be how you know how to ask the question.
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::Coach Hess: Yep. You know, in so many ways, and… because you can get the info that you need, you just have to be smart enough, and that's where the next level, I think, of critical thinking will go, because the tool is a tool, but it's sure pretty good at doing what it's doing. Most people I talk to, it's 10 to 12 hours a week.
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::Coach Hess: I was giving a talk yesterday at a Chamber of Commerce thing, and I mentioned that
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::Coach Hess: you know, you remember when the microwave first came out, and you know, if you're pregnant, don't get near that thing, baby. I mean, - no way. That went on for about a year or so, and kind of figured out that was foolish, and same thing with the cell phone. At one point, we were getting brain cancer or something from using our cell phones too much by our head, you know, and…
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::Coach Hess: Again, we're kind of at that phase a little bit with AI and some of the fear. Now, no question, these…
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::Coach Hess: AI… AI bots, or whatever we want to call them, companions that people will start to pick up on. Is this good or bad for the use of our society? And…
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::Coach Hess: again, it kind of scares me, but then again, maybe not. I don't know. See where it goes, you know? But, gotta pay attention, that's for sure, because it's just a tool.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It is just a tool, and you said, you know, asking the right questions. I think we're kind of going full circle, because it's always been important.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even 2,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, however long ago, it's always knowing which question to ask to get the result that you want.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It… it's….
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::Coach Hess: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then going about finding the information, and knowing where to look for the information.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That's… to me, when it comes to learning, That's learning.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, it comes to educating, it's teaching people how to ask questions, how to ask the right questions to get the answer they're seeking.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They're the information they're seeking, not even.
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::Coach Hess: You mentioned teaching, and I'd like to kind of throw out a little of my background there, and philosophy, and what I created, I think, is a very good
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::Coach Hess: Model that goes right into business and KPIs and how we measure those.
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::Coach Hess: And, you know, positive sugar goes a lot further than the lemon, typically, or however you want to put that. But the idea of how do we positively reinforce in an appropriate way that creates learning that isn't artificialized by whatever else is going on other than the real activities.
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::Coach Hess: So what I would set up in my classes, and it's kind of similar to what I do now as a business coach, only I do it by quarter, but the idea of a week or a two-week lesson that would be in my psychology class, or my economics class, or whatever I was teaching.
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::Coach Hess: We'd have the two-week lesson, we'd go through and kind of… but everybody would take responsibility somewhat in teaching their areas, and you know, it wasn't all just teaching and talking, Adam, it was interaction.
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::Coach Hess: But what I had them do then is start to create their own… I taught them how to build multiple choice questions, and so they started to build multiple choice questions, and then we would use their questions to test themselves.
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::Coach Hess: Right? Amongst themselves, and then we would have… we would measure item analysis between A, B, C, and D, how many people guessed one, and then we would discuss, why is… why did 50% guess this one and only 25? And guess what? Real learning started to happen.
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::Coach Hess: Now, within that, as I gave these tests, and of course I monitored the test question, it wasn't pure, you know, I kind of had control of that, but I knew the site of analysis would be a real learning process that I used.
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::Coach Hess: Well, then I put that into a frequency distribution structure, right? Meaning that if you had 25 questions, how many people got 20, how many people got 80, whatever. Then you can adjust your curve relative to how difficult the test was. I mean, if the top was 10, because it was really hard, you can't, you know, you give people grades accordingly.
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::Coach Hess: But what I did is, every time I would be measuring this with each class, when somebody took a quantum leap.
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::Coach Hess: In that… in that distribution, where they did much better.
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::Coach Hess: I'd get on the phone that night, and I would call those parents and say, guess what?
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::Coach Hess: Billy scored so much better on this test. Man, he's doing great. Pat him on the back. I just wanted to call and tell you.
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::Coach Hess: Well, what is Billy thinking when he comes to my class the next… for the next unit?
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::Coach Hess: Right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm gonna give it all I got, cause I don't want that flavor again.
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::Coach Hess: And there it went, you know? And so the learning was, you know, I didn't fit in the state government exam structure real well, but I'd still… all my students did extremely well on those, and I didn't just follow the curriculum, so to say. I let it… let them build it and test themselves and learn together.
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::Coach Hess: Of course, I guided, but that was the best experience I had in teaching, and I did that at Westlake Village High School for 3 years.
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::Coach Hess: I still get messages from students, from those, like, what a difference, and what a difference it made in my future of learning.
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::Coach Hess: Because you teach them to learn, you give them, you know, teach them to fish, and they can feed themselves forever.
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::Coach Hess: Fish warm? Me. Yeah.
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::Coach Hess: How's this spell?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The… the… I can see the connection between that and coaching on, like, the basketball court.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because it's all about the team, and working together as a team towards a common goal, which is…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To understand a subject or a topic.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Or to win a game, but it… it's… it's all the same. It's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's being goal-oriented as a community.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I can see that happening in the world in some cases. The more that we all come together and put our ideas in the pot, and we're working towards a common goal, but it's not like any one person has all the answers, or has to have all the answers.
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::Coach Hess: And be right.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, it's… the one person has to be right, and we have to depend on that one person. It… it just doesn't work.
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::Coach Hess: As soon as you put a percentage on a test.
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::Coach Hess: I think you've crossed that line. I mean, the trick is a little deeper than that real quick. It's not…
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::Coach Hess: you got a 90%, therefore you, you know, are you 90% of what, and what are we really measuring? And, you know, how well you can trans… copy something out of a textbook, or whatever. It's got to be the real learning, and I don't know, I'm hoping that that's passed, but at least in my experience with teaching, though. And then when I take that.
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::Coach Hess: back to business, you know, and the idea of building my K… or building KPI structures, or standard operating procedures, or whatever we want to put in place for a business, we go back to the same kind of principles, you know, everybody's involved.
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::Coach Hess: We all have, you know, seven… one of the key things on my 7 points of a Winning Team, you mentioned common goal, that's a chapter I wrote in this book. It's called Common Goal.
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::Coach Hess: Let me tell you a story about Common Goal real quick, in terms of making a difference, because I think common goals create culture, and like you said, community, and involvement, and enthusiasm.
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::Coach Hess: while I went to Westlake Village High School.
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::Coach Hess: I was brought in from Canada as kind of the guy, because I could teach the economics classes, and I had a pretty good rep… you know, I had a good record and reputation.
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::Coach Hess: And, I walked into the gym, and here were kids that were 6'11", 6'10", 6'8", I mean, big, big kids, right? And I'm looking at these guys going, wow, and I watched them play for a little while without really saying, just kind of hitting the corner, and I could tell that they were really interested, probably more interested in looking good.
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::Coach Hess: Rather than being good.
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::Coach Hess: And that's typical. Take a 16-year-old, 17-year-old's got that kind of skill, talent, he's been told he's gonna be great all his life, he's gotta figure out, wait a minute.
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::Coach Hess: New coach in town got a new idea.
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::Coach Hess: And my concept, in order to bring the team together and give them all an opportunity to win bigger than they've ever won in their lives, was I created something called, right away, I created it called Psycho D.
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::Coach Hess: And the idea was that we would go crazy about defense, right? And we were defensively mindset.
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::Coach Hess: So every practice for a half hour, I had a section where I cranked music on it, and we just went nuts through defensive drills, and got this mindset built. And then we set a common goal of holding every team under 50 points.
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::Coach Hess: And we achieved that many times, and we won a lot of basketball games, and in the end, 5 of those guys that were on that, in that program got Division I scholarships.
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::Coach Hess: Which was a real feather in the cap for these guys, you know, to get there, because even…
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::Coach Hess: The reason college coaches want them is because they could play defense.
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::Coach Hess: Everybody can, you know, kind of put the ball in the hole and everything, but it was a real….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Kind of the minimum.
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::Coach Hess: Beautiful.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Minimum.
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::Coach Hess: The culture spread, like, the cheerleaders had cheers that were Psycho D, everything just kind of spread and spread. Then the next thing I do for the schools, I say, you know what? I'm a very big believer in Special Olympics.
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::Coach Hess: So what we did is we set a tournament up between Ventura County and LA County that we were going to run at our school in LA, and we did it. And all of my team, part of being on my team was you had to give 20 hours of community service if you were on my team. That was just a rule I built.
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::Coach Hess: I think it's the right thing that all coaches should be doing that with their high school programs.
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::Coach Hess: And even their college programs.
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::Coach Hess: So anyway, here it was, I gave them the opportunity, we brought the tournament in, and what a transformation of a community. Oh, I mean, it was great for the kids, you know, you know, from the Special Olympians. They loved the tournament, you know, they like getting their medals and all the things that go on, and I still am very involved in Special Olympics basketball tournaments, by the way.
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::Coach Hess: But, in this case, It was the change of the community.
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::Coach Hess: These people in the community, it was a very wealthy community, but them being involved in that, and then guess what happened? Because we have banners up in our gym. Well, everybody wanted to be a part of our program.
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::Coach Hess: Right? The culture was there, the culture of Psycho D, one thing, now we've got this giving community culture thing feeling, and everybody wants to be a part of it. They're paying big money for these banners all of a sudden that never happened before, you know, at least in that school. So, …
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::Coach Hess: There's a lot to be said about building a culture and getting it to grow, and being part of a community, and…
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::Coach Hess: I just wanted to share those as kind of successes in my life that I… and I bring that to the companies I work with today. How do we create a culture? How do we hit the common goal? How do we get everybody rolling the same way? Get our orders in the water, take ownership, accountability, responsibility?
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::Coach Hess: These things have to be ingrained, and self-discipline's the only discipline. So, quit trying to fool yourself by trying to get people to do things.
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::Coach Hess: Bring them to things.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I'm just over here going,
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::Coach Hess: Sorry. I told you I'm not afraid to talk it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I… yeah. If we could just get the world to realize that we're all in this together, and it starts… you know, it starts in families, it starts in schools, it…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then it progresses out to communities, and those communities build into societies, and countries, and states, and then it goes everywhere.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And, you know, people used to wander around going, I'm just one person, what can one person do?
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::Coach Hess: Oof.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Something.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: just do something! And it doesn't have to be elaborate, but just…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you know, take ownership of something. I have a story for you about….
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::Coach Hess: I went to Camarillo High School, I wanted to tell you that.
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::Coach Hess: Oh, well, they were….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Just over the mountain from you?
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::Coach Hess: They're in the Marmani League, they played it yesterday. Isn't that amazing?
219
::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: water polo against.
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::Coach Hess: Yet.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Westlake.
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::Coach Hess: Like, when I said that, you knew, that's fun.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I knew right what you were going through. We have a… I live in a very small town, and we have, … we have all the things that you do in a small town. It's the town where they film Napoleon Dynamite.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Our town is really like that. But we do… we do the, the Festival of Lights over Thanksgiving weekend for the holidays.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I know the guy that is… is in charge of putting up the lights now, and he's… he's really about… he builds fences for people. He has another job, job, but he… he also puts up fencing.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And he, …
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: he's getting the whole community involved in putting up these lights in the park for the lights festival, because it's a huge job!
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::Coach Hess: Check it up.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: so many lights, and last year, it was just him and his wife, and this year, I think he's just like, no, no, no, no, I need everybody. We're gonna have this big party, and we're gonna talk about how everybody's gonna….
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::Coach Hess: With the lights up! Yeah.
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::Coach Hess: And they'll have fun doing it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And the park is just such a great connection center in our town. Everybody goes to the park, you know, we take our grandkids to the park on Thursdays, and it's just, like, there's baseball and soccer, and it's right next to the fairground, where they have the rodeo, and it's just like….
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::Coach Hess: Oh, yeah.
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::Coach Hess: A lot of people missing out on that in this world, that kind of experience, you know.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They… they are, but they don't have to be. That's my whole point, is just start with you. Roy's not anybody's super special, he's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, nobody in our town is super special.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They're just, like, they're just those people that… they used to be this, and now they're doing this position, and they're gonna do a different position.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because we're a small town, but…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you can look at a bigger thing like Apple, and they built community. And it's not, you know, just the people that work at Apple that are so excited, it's their consumers! Their consumers will stand in line for days to get their latest product.
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::Coach Hess: That they don't even need!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: teeth!
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::Coach Hess: Right, the loyalty's out of control.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that has the latest… the shiny object world, as you know, is out there in so many ways.
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::Coach Hess: Well, I think the community thing's a big part of, you know, certainly what I've engaged with here in West Houston.
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::Coach Hess: you know, the Katy area. I'm a member of the Rotary Club here, and we raise a fair amount of money every year, you know, over a quarter million dollars that we put 100% back into the community and the needs that we see arising here.
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::Coach Hess: And, I take a lot of pride in that. That's one of my big philanthropic activities. I sit on the board and, you know.
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::Coach Hess: But fun events, just to give you an idea, we do 3 main events every year. One of them is the, the Brew Fest.
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::Coach Hess: Brew Festival we created was a, where
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::Coach Hess: all the microbreweries would come for a kind of a festival, and we'd give out awards. We've been doing it for 12 years now.
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::Coach Hess: and has grown into kind of a small little community thing to something now that's just huge. So I think the biggest in the, in the United States. They may have one in Denver, but it's not quite the same theme.
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::Coach Hess: And, yeah, we do really well on that. Multiple bands, and now we have a wine grotto. Anyway, we've raised a lot of money, and especially through sponsorships and that. Second event we do, which is just coming up, is the Katy Triathlon, so we sponsor and organize and plan and manage
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::Coach Hess: The whole triathlon that they run here, and it's a, a qualifier.
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::Coach Hess: for the, I guess Hawaii, or wherever, the other… where people go up.
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::Coach Hess: And then the third thing we do is there's a local city festival called the Harvest Festival that goes on, and so we manage that completely for the city.
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::Coach Hess: And, we end up, you know, we get maybe $80,000 out of that by just managing it for them and being there. And so everybody in the Rotary Club's glad to volunteer and make those things happen. We have a force of about 100 people.
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::Coach Hess: To get out there and get involved in all of those.
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::Coach Hess: And it feels good. It's a good community thing, and we're doing the right thing for communities, and …
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::Coach Hess: You know, I don't mind spending my time that way. Like you say, be present and do something.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It, it allows…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Businesses to introduce themselves to a community, and to new people coming in to visit, because those kinds of events draw from other communities, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Draw from across the country.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, for sure, Rufus.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: common….
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::Coach Hess: all over.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, to come and be part of that, and it gives exposure to the local businesses and the local people who are coming out and… and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Putting up their… Their little tents, or whatever they do to… to share their wares.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But it's just…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's real connections with real people, and it's, like, how humans were designed to interact with each other, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And to share their gifts and skills.
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::Coach Hess: Here's a crazy communication story for you. When I was riding my bike down, …
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::Coach Hess: you know, the trip that I took, and I've ridden a lot of other tours, that's not the only one I've done.
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::Coach Hess: But, when I got into Northern California, the Oregon-California border, I started going into the redwoods there and so on, find a really cool place to camp, and I got my whole setup, and here comes another guy in, big, strong German guy. He's got ski poles sticking out of the back of his, out of his pack.
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::Coach Hess: you know, we're sitting around the campfire there we had that evening, and I kind of… I just had to ask, what's up with a skiful? His name's Axel. And he says, well, when I was climbing around up in Alaska, you know, I figured I wouldn't ship that stuff back. They're pretty light, you know, and I'm thinking, oh man, I'm thinking every ounce, every ounce counts, right? Right. It was gone.
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::Coach Hess: Cotton-carried water, couldn't have it. Gone. You know, that kind of stuff. And so, anyway, next morning I get up, and kind of, you know, he's still sleeping, I go, whatever, I'm on the road. You know, you only can go about 10 or 15 miles before you gotta get all your stuff and dry it out, right? Because it gets wet every night along that coast. I mean, it's just…
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::Coach Hess: Fog sits in on it.
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::Coach Hess: I'm drying my stuff off, put it all back on, go down the road, next, you know, go to the next campsite, camp out, don't see any, you know, don't see them at all, but the next day, I'm in Modesto, an area along the coast there, on the PCH, and I'm sitting having breakfast.
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::Coach Hess: And there's the… what I call the Peacock Riders, which I am one now, and those are people who ride road bikes with all the colors they gotta have on.
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::Coach Hess: So, I'm sitting there with a whole bunch of Modesto people like that. They're looking at me going, oh, buddy, what have you been doing? And of course, I'm a bit of an anomaly. Guy has ridden, you know, I don't know, at that point, probably 1,600 miles or something.
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::Coach Hess: And, you know, they're asking me stories about what I ran into, how do you do this, well, you know, all the different questions, and I'm talking, kind of, you know, feeling like, hey, I'm… because I've been kind of lonely, you know, you weren't around people that much when you're riding, so I was loving to tell a story, and you can tell I like to talk.
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::Coach Hess: So I'll look up while we're having breakfast, and all of a sudden I see ski poles go down the road in front of me.
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::Coach Hess: I freak out, I jump out of my chair, and I run to the door, and I open the door, and I yell, Hey, Axel! Hey, Axel!
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::Coach Hess: So, he stops, and I'm going out after, you know, out to grab him, you know, and just say, hey, I wanna, you know… well, when I'm going out, I look back, and all the people in the restaurant have their faces right up in the window, because they think it's gonna be a big battle, because they thought I was saying, hey, asshole.
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::Coach Hess: And you believe that?
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::Coach Hess: There's a communication problem.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That is hilarious. So, I want to ask you the question first, and then I want to ask you a little bit about how you actually organize your coaching, which I would assume is going to be in groups.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Or do you do coaching in… Do you do… like…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: in-person coaching, maybe I should ask it.
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::Coach Hess: I do three things in my coaching program, real straightforward. I do one-on-one coaching, but when I say one-on-one coaching, that's with a company, typically, not only the owners. I'll go deep into the team.
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::Coach Hess: Right, so that's… I'm hired by a company to be their business coach, and I've had.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Okay.
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::Coach Hess: my retention on that's about 4 years right now, for my clients. It's done very well. Second thing I do is called Empower Your Team. So now I go in and I use DISC as my assessment tool.
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::Coach Hess: We use DISC, and we do an analysis, we learn about ourselves, we learn about our team and how we communicate better, and we learn about how to communicate with our customers, our clients, or whoever we're working with in that program.
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::Coach Hess: The third one is very much a team thing, it's called Quarterly Kickoff. Every quarter, all of my clients come together for a planning session. Now, they have…
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::Coach Hess: a workbook, shall I say, or something, you know, that's get prepared, that gets it down to, they better show up. They have to show up. The next one will be September 25th, but they show up with their plan already done. And so the exercise of having a two and a half hour session is getting business owners together, sharing in their successes.
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::Coach Hess: Some of the fun stuff in terms of, …
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::Coach Hess: your future self and things. I employ very strongly into that, meaning you build a 90-day plan. Your 90-day plan, 3 goals is all I have people build, and then it gets down to, actual what time you're going to allocate on your calendar
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::Coach Hess: for the tasks they're going to apply to that goal, right? And so that whole thing gets built out, and then the end of that, I have everybody write a letter to themselves as if they've accomplished everything in this plan.
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::Coach Hess: And so when I give out awards at the end of the quarterly kickoff, as I give out the awards, then they read their… my next 90 days are gonna be, this is the celebration I'm gonna have.
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::Coach Hess: And, I think getting the mindset, as far as a coaching technique, getting the mindset around where I'm going to get, again, same thing, you know, a lot of Covey stuff, what's the end in mind?
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::Coach Hess: That's what I try to build in that. I got a note from a guy named Jack Canfield the other day. You've probably heard of him, you know, his chicken soups guy, and he's saying, hey, come on out to my place in Santa Barbara, let's have a little get-together for the weekend, and come as your 5-year future self.
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::Coach Hess: Dress the part, live the part, play the role for the whole weekend.
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::Coach Hess: Wow.
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::Coach Hess: That's kind of interesting. But then I realized that I've been doing that with only a 90-day thing with this letter.
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::Coach Hess: I thought, well, I've been using that technique, but breaking it out in 5, and so it's kind of interesting when you think of what you're 5. My 5-year future self will be, I'll be 75 years old, and I'm gonna shoot my age in golf.
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::Coach Hess: I'm gonna hit a 75, 75.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I like it.
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::Coach Hess: Gotta set something in front of you, right, to go get.
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::Coach Hess: Shoot.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And, you know, practice has gotta be, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Oh, darn, I gotta get those… to those links, because I, you know… I got a goal!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Must go play golf!
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::Coach Hess: That's right. Gotta go play golf. The part of this whole book….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: honey.
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::Coach Hess: This whole book, Jill, the idea of peak experiences, is when time slows down, and we gather a lot of information in a really short time.
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::Coach Hess: And once we've got this information, we can't manifest it at that point, it's too much.
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::Coach Hess: But we do manifest it over time. So what I've done in the book is try to capture those specific kind of things, which comes down to, as you were just mentioning, a lot of deliberate practice.
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::Coach Hess: To get a true peak experience in one's life. I think they gotta put the time in, typically, or at least to get a higher level.
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::Coach Hess: You know, I talk in the opening para… or the opening chapter about me skiing in snow up to my, up to my neck off the back of Lake Louise, you know, in sun… or up in Alberta. And, when I was going… the idea of skiing in the snow.
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::Coach Hess: rather than on the snow, is totally part of that, meaning you have a 3D feel where you're really, you know, and people have skied powder and know that feeling, it's an unbelievable feeling.
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::Coach Hess: But that peak experience of having that, where time has slowed down for sure for me, even though I'm on a fall line going straight down, but I grabbed so much information of confidence, of what I've done to practice to get the opportunity to have this feeling.
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::Coach Hess: And therefore, my speaking abilities, my confidence in what I did and all my… all of it grew out of that. And so what I try to capture in the book is for people to get those moments where they have them, and learn how to take
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::Coach Hess: Geometric curves out of them to grow faster.
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::Coach Hess: That's my purpose in that book, and kind of my vision of what that's about. How to share it with you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I love it, I love it. And… just…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Lots of gold nuggets in here.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So… Let me ask you that question.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: what… Let me find it first.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So I can… so I can ask it appropriately.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: What's the most significant thing, in your opinion, as individuals, we can do to make an impact on how the world is going?
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::Coach Hess: Well, we set it up.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: at the end.
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::Coach Hess: No, that's great. I… I think you've…
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::Coach Hess: Your approach of leading this is fantastic, and you brought it out multiple, multiple times, and it's being present.
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::Coach Hess: Really being present in the moment.
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::Coach Hess: of where you are, and what you're doing, and of course, obviously being cognizant of what you're doing within that whole moment, that that's all part of it. I think you gotta show up, and you gotta show up as who you want to be, and
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::Coach Hess: be the right person to do that. And then there's the element following that of being true to yourself.
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::Coach Hess: Lots of people are real good at the internal voice versus the external voice being two different things.
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::Coach Hess: And therefore, authenticity falls out the bottom of the bucket.
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::Coach Hess: You know, so I think those are key things for people in terms of significance. They're very internal things, but hey, you know, we have control of ourselves.
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::Coach Hess: When I teach DISC and work with people, and they're kind of looking at their profiles, and kind of, you know, I gotta remind them that they can be whoever they want to be.
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::Coach Hess: It's just knowledge to know what maybe you need to work on in order to be better. When you get into an argument with somebody, do you really want to be an S? Maybe you want to be a D. You don't want to be a dove? You need to be an eagle at this point. How do you adjust that?
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::Coach Hess: raising children, you need to know when to draw the line, and some parents have a hard time with that, and on and on. But it's the present of where I'm at now, what I'm doing, and what I'm gonna do at this time to make a difference, you know, in the world.
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::Coach Hess: I mean, you can do it by random kinds, acts of kindness, right? I love it. Go to the grocery store, see somebody, you can help them out, you can help them out. I couldn't do that kind of stuff that far back. I got a new hip put in about, I don't know, 6 months ago.
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::Coach Hess: And now I'm mobile and active like I never was before, and so if anybody's listening to this and thinking about getting a new hip, do it! If you're a candidate, because what a change in life.
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::Coach Hess: But that I can do better random acts of kindness now, I guess, and that's part of being present.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Just being aware of what's happening around you, too. There's opportunities for you to do things.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you may never experience The result of what you're doing?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But that ripple effect will go out in a way that will impact you at some point.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Later. And you may never understand.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But it will… it will come around. I… there's… there's a habit that people get into at Starbucks. It's happened a couple of times that I'll go through Starbucks, and somebody will…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, the… The by the person behind them's order.
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::Coach Hess: Right.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And so when they get there, it's like, oh, no, you've been paid for.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's just, like, it's fun!
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've done that many times in restaurants and stuff, especially if my wife and I are at a restaurant, and I see a young couple that, you know, are enjoying the heck out of their lives, but they…
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::Coach Hess: you can tell they probably don't have a lot to spend on that, and then all of a sudden their bill's paid for, and they're like, what, what, what? Just… I don't let them know that I've done it either, I just do it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, you don't have to, it's….
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::Coach Hess: I don't need any credit for it, I just went to fear.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Inside, it's like watching.
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::Coach Hess: make somebody's day is well worth it, you know? Funny, the more I give, the more I get as I go along, I've noticed, throughout my life. I mean, it's a pattern.
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::Coach Hess: When you get out there and give, when I donate more, all of a sudden, something shows up that didn't… I didn't expect. You know, and I go, okay, I guess it's all working out, big guy's got control of things, just get out of the way, man, and do your… do what you feel is right.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah. Yeah.
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::Coach Hess: It doesn't have to be that complex, does it, Joe?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's just little things.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's just the little things that make such a big difference. People just want to be seen.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And acknowledged.
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::Coach Hess: you noticed as soon as you got on that my boat bored in the back. I know, always so sweet.
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::Coach Hess: And… part of what I coach, right, is the idea of getting from
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::Coach Hess: what you get is an expected person versus appreciated. Well… That takes people from expected to appreciated immediately, and I think that's a good starting point, rather than working on, what am I getting as expected? And the ideal situation is taking people to a distinguished state rather than just the expected, where…
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::Coach Hess: They know, you know, you know from this call, or you get to know me going, you know, if somebody needs a business coach.
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::Coach Hess: Coach S is the guy.
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::Coach Hess: And it's not about whatever he charted, whatever it is, it's about his philosophy, his life, what he's going to do to make a difference. Well, then you're in that distinguished category. And what people say about you when you're not in the room is very important.
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::Coach Hess: Good.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It is.
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::Coach Hess: Good.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Might not be a lot of your business, but it is very important.
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::Coach Hess: Yep.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, you offer people your… 10th chapter of your book.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So that they want to go back and read the first nine.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Well….
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::Coach Hess: I offered the 10th chapter of this book, right? Now, this is an anthology, and so there's 9 other… or 8 other authors.
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::Coach Hess: 9, so I just….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Cracking the success code.
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::Coach Hess: Cracking the Success Code, you know, the best business lesson I ever learned. I'll just share with everyone, I mean, this is kind of a big deal, but I became an Amazon bestseller because of that book.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And so what happened was that all nine of us, you know, wrote our chapters, put it together.
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::Coach Hess: And of course, got it on KDP and all the regular publishing process, and then we made sure we reached out to our network and had everybody buy one within a 24-hour period on Kindle.
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::Coach Hess: At 99 cents. And we sold more than anybody in the world for that period, that one-day period, and therefore I am an Amazon best-selling author.
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::Coach Hess: Stamped for the rest of my life, and so do all the other 9 authors of the book.
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::Coach Hess: So that's why I'm giving that book away, or that chapter away, it's a chapter out of that book there, so it's not like I'm teasing them like you were suggesting.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: No.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But they… they might want to go and get your other book.
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::Coach Hess: Oh yeah, Peak Experience is worth reading, people are loving it, I get a lot of good positive feedback. And then the new one, it'll come out at the end of September.
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::Coach Hess: … Achieving Peak Performance, The Entrepreneurial's Journey. I've written that in conjunction with a lawyer.
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::Coach Hess: A guy named Stu Levin, and he covered some important areas that, you know, I don't have the expertise in. How do you set your LLCs relative? You go C-Corp, S-Corp, those kind of things.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, the right way to set your tax structures from a legal perspective.
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::Coach Hess: You know, and … certainly a lot on copyright, and making sure you're trademarked properly, and so on. He covered, of course, I covered all the rest of building, scaling, running, and exiting your business.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, exiting your business. So many people don't think about that.
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::Coach Hess: I force all my clients into building 3 plans. Gotta have a business plan.
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::Coach Hess: Number two, you gotta have an operation plan. How are you gonna operate? You know, you write down your KPIs and what you're gonna do there. But the third one is completion plan. What does your business look like when it's done? Let's think about that now, and build towards that, back to the end in mind. And, they struggle.
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::Coach Hess: But… and it changes. You know, once we go back to it after a year, it's not the same it was, you know, oftentimes the year before, but it's nice to have a marker out there looking at it, yeah.
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::Coach Hess: I've got all those templates built, and they'll be available for people to buy the book when I put it out on Kindle or whatever. People can link and get all the templates to build all of that. I've got all that structured.
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::Coach Hess: I think that's the way I wanted this book to be, more like something that's a help manual.
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::Coach Hess: Rather than, you know, peak experience a little more enjoy, read by a manual. This is more like, you want to build a business, follow some of these principles, and you'll do much better.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And people… it's not hard to start a business. There's so many things, so many gaps in the world that need filling. Yeah. It's just like stepping out and doing it. I have a daughter whose husband, she and her husband.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: have their own business in San Diego, and they, … Basically, they…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: they do swales, but they do, liners for, like, golf courses, you know, the ponds. Okay.
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::Coach Hess: I'm with you, yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And they deteriorate over time, so he does that. He's a…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I want to say he's a mechanical engineer, but, they've done amazingly well, just, you know, starting out on a shoestring with an idea, and Mike.
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::Coach Hess: Are there….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Another one on my.
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::Coach Hess: Excellent.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: He's… his wife started a business, doing some soil testing or something, and
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They also live in San Diego. But it's just… it's just… get out there, get started, have an idea!
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::Coach Hess: Yes.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: better if you have a plan and an exit plan, and an idea of how you're going to operate, but don't be… you don't have to be married to it. You know, it's going to change and adapt, and you can change all three pieces of that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: As you grow, and, you know…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: What you want at 30 is not the same as what you want at 55 anyway, so….
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::Coach Hess: Well, isn't that the truth? And you know, I encourage people, you know, like… like you're…
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::Coach Hess: The idea of building a small business.
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::Coach Hess: And creating a win-win scenario.
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::Coach Hess: with social impact, why you do it. And every business can have social impact, I don't care what business it is. You just have to have a mindset that says, here's what we're going to put in place to do that. And it can create more business, and also create a positive social impact. And I really work with businesses to make that.
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::Coach Hess: make that parallel happening for them, because they're better off, society's better off, and, you know, but some people don't have that mindset, and I've found, when I've run across those, they're probably not the people I should be coaching.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah. Yeah, I just… unless they're gonna change, and I give them a good chance and opportunities to change, but if it's not happening…
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::Coach Hess: Gotta move on to what you can make a difference with.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, and it really is about people
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: not just wanting change, but willing to actively participate in change. And not everybody's cut out that way, you know? Some people, they just want to lay on the bed and hope that somebody's going to come along and make them well suddenly, without actively participating in life.
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::Coach Hess: Even business owners don't take the time to know their numbers.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yep.
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::Coach Hess: It's in that bit of that category. It's amazing how many people… and I get it, I get a… a lot of my clients are very creative in nature, and they don't think… think in numbers, so to say. But, you know, my job as a business coach is to make sure everybody knows
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::Coach Hess: really knows their numbers. Four types of cash, I go through every client's meeting.
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::Coach Hess: Obviously, revenue, it's pretty straightforward, but you gotta figure out how to make that so that, number two, you have profit, because if you don't have profit, what are you doing?
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::Coach Hess: And then, third one is cash flow. And that's where it makes all the difference in the world, is I have everybody build a pro forma for at least 12 months in front of them, off their profit and loss.
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::Coach Hess: And by putting the actuals in against what they're projecting to happen in the front, makes all the difference in the world for people making good decisions to grow their business.
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::Coach Hess: I mean, it gets down… that's where the rubber hits the road.
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::Coach Hess: And then the fourth type of cash is equity. What's your business worth?
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::Coach Hess: Are you building a business that you can move on to somebody else? Or, you know, who's gonna pay for it? Well, if you don't have systems in place and things running where it's running without you.
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::Coach Hess: or close to that, you're not going to get a lot of value for your business. Those that are just built on my back, kind of thing, you know?
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::Coach Hess: We've all heard about work on your business rather than in your business, but this is where the rubber hits the road, I think, when you talk the equity game and get people thinking that way.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the cash flow thing is what trips up so many small businesses. They… they may have a lot of revenue that they've generated, but it's that payables thing.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: When is that actual cash coming in?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. Contribute as well.
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::Coach Hess: cash gaps, especially when they make the move from about $350,000 into the $500,000 bracket. That's when cash gaps start showing up.
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::Coach Hess: Because they're working with bigger suppliers, or whatever else, and they've got bigger jobs, and then it gets worse. It'll escalate if they don't understand how to manage that at that point, because you get a million dollars on your revenue side.
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::Coach Hess: You're trailing behind on your receivables by, 90 days, you're screwed.
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::Coach Hess: If you don't know.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Oh, yeah.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And… I had conversations with my son-in-law about that, because…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They get million-dollar contracts with the government, who's notoriously bad at paying, and so then you have to fund that
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: all up front. Yeah. It's like….
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::Coach Hess: Tell your laborers, we're gonna pay you when we get paid. Good luck on having them show up.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, yeah.
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::Coach Hess: And then when you do business with the government, they have all these rules about who you're gonna hire as well. So it's just like….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: there's… there's a lot to it that people… and it's not to scare people from starting, because I… I believe everybody should…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Give it a go.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But just recognize that there's going to be a learning curve, and there's information out there available. Heck, Coachessa's writing the book, so get that. There you go.
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::Coach Hess: That's right, yeah, yeah. It'll help, yeah. That'll help.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, the stories I hear from my clients at times is just amazing, and … I learn… the beauty of my job, I get to learn every day, all the time, you know, back to that continuous learning, and it's really fun to have that.
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::Coach Hess: It's been great being on this podcast with you and sharing some of that, because sometimes you do a great job of pulling it out of me. I appreciate that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Wow, I appreciate you coming and joining me today. This has been an amazing conversation.
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::Coach Hess: Yeah, well, thank you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To learn more about Coach Greg Hess and grab his free gift, the Chapter 10, Breaking the Success Phone…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Breaking the Success Code, The Power of a Common Goal, please visit www.cotest.com, and we will be sure to put that link in the show notes below.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Thank you for tuning in with us today. If you have a podcast or are interested in starting one, be sure to reach out to us at support at heartlifecoach.com. We love to help spiritual entrepreneurs and coaches amplify their voice and monetize their mission, and offer a variety of ways to do this, leveraging Substack. Join us for our next episode as we share what others are doing to raise the global frequency. And remember, change begins with you. You have all the power to change the world. Start today and get visible.
