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Breaking Through Business Growth Plateaus

by | Oct 19, 2021 | Brand Strategy, Grow and Scale, Podcast

Cap’t Jim Palmer, best known internationally as the Dream Business Coach, is the creator of the Dream Business Mastermind and Coaching Program and host of Dream Business Radio podcast, interviewed Six-Point’s CEO, Meghan Lynch, about helping break through business growth plateaus.

Hosts & Guests

Jim Palmer

Meghan Lynch

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podcast transcript

business growth plateaus

Jim Palmer:

Good afternoon, everybody. This is Captain Jim Palmer, the dream business coach coming to you from North Carolina as we slowly make our way north to the Chesapeake Bay. I’ve a wonderful guest today, Meghan Lynch and Meghan actually lives in the town where I grew up. It’s a very small world. Meghan is the founder and CEO of Six Point Creative, a brand strategy agency that helps second stage companies’ breakthrough growth plateaus, which is an interesting thing as part of her mission to help small business owners challenge the Goliaths, the behemoths, the big box or whatever it is in your niche. Meghan has served as an expert advisor to second stage clients in a wide range of industries from fast casual restaurants to industrial manufacturers. Meghan was named an enterprising woman of the year in 2019 and enjoys testing her limits as an endurance runner. Wow. Meghan, welcome to the show.

Meghan Lynch:

Hey, thanks for having me, Jim.

Jim Palmer:

It was so interesting, I would have killed half an hour just talking about Springfield, Massachusetts.

Meghan Lynch:

I know. I know, that was fun.

Jim Palmer:

It’s such a tiny town. My goodness. So anyway, so you were born and raised in Springfield, East Longmeadow?

Meghan Lynch:

Yes, indeed. Lived most of my life there.

Jim Palmer:

So, you graduated from East Longmeadow High School. And then did you go to college?

Meghan Lynch:

I did go to college. I went to Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and went to Boston College for my master’s.

So I was an English major. I had no desire to be in business. I’m not even sure how and why I got here other than I was going down a Ph.D. track and kind of looked around and was like I think academia is like more corporate than corporate America. And I’m kind of like in my day job in marketing more and that was kind of all she wrote. My kind of standard joke is that I learned to read businesses instead of books, but kind of same skills of seeing patterns and kind of asking good questions and stuff like that.

Jim Palmer:

It’s so interesting, this will be episode 448 so I’ve interviewed a lot of people and I’m so amazed at how many people went to college for something, whether it’s accounting, lawyer, political science and they turn into an entrepreneur. It’s like, well, so much for that education, right? Or I’m sure maybe it helped in some way, so you didn’t have any parents or grandparents, did you have any entrepreneurial role models at all?

Meghan Lynch:

No. It’s funny, my mom was a teacher and my dad is an Episcopal priest. So, we were about as far away from a business mind as you could get.

Jim Palmer:

So Sunday morning you definitely went to church.

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly. Like it or not, whether I was awake or not, I was pulled out of bed, for sure.

Jim Palmer:

Oh, that’s funny. So when did you start Six-Point Creative? And was there some kind of a big event in your life? I interviewed somebody, David Phelps who just wrote a book and he talked about a lot of entrepreneurs who have a cataclysmic event, some people lose their jobs, some people it’s just whatever it is. What prompted you to say goodbye to the every other week paycheck?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah. So for me, it was being kind of young enough not to know any better. I was working with my partners who I eventually started Six Point with at another agency and they got it, well, I kind of was cheerleading in the background for them to go out, do your own thing. You guys can do this. I’ll come work for you. And so they finally were like, “No, we’re going to do it. And we want you to come with us, but come as a partner, not as an employee.” And I was like, “Sure, yeah, why not? I don’t have anything else going.”

So, we just kind of left from there and they were both much more into the doing of the work. They were more like the creative types, writer, and designer team and I was more like working on the business and leading the business. So I really started to just get into that, the more I learned and kind of that trial and error, the frustration of learning on the fly and then realizing that there were people who could help you do it smarter, faster, better.

Jim Palmer:

So were they the creative ones and you kind of ran the business?

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly. I’ve always liked strategies, so I would kind of do sort of strategy consulting, and then as I started to get more knowledge about how to run and grow a business. My partners have both retired and now I’m in my own work. I really bring the business strategy and the brand and creative strategy together and that intersection of that is my sweet spot.

Jim Palmer:

Got you. Are you the rainmaker, are you the one that brings in the business, or is there somebody else?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, for the most part, I do the relationship development and we’ve got a bit of a system behind me, but for the most part, I like to connect with people on a personal level and we don’t have a ton of clients, we kind of handpick the companies that we want to work with. So it’s a lot of fun to meet people and get to know their stories and see what we can do to help.

Jim Palmer:

When you started out Meghan, did you look for clients locally in East Longmeadow, Longmeadow, Springfield, just keep going out from there? Or did you, obviously with the internet, you can attract clients anywhere.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, I mean, again, kind of this gets into sort of like my entrepreneurial journey and kind of where now Six Point is focused but when we first started, we were very kind of like general full-service marketing. We just had local accounts, in Western Mass and Connecticut and kind of stayed pretty close to our own area. And we’ve just got a reputation of being pretty easy to work with and providing good values. You kind of grow organically just through that word of mouth, somebody tells somebody, you pick up another client, you add another employee.

Then it was also probably about eight years in, we just hit a plateau where it was like, you kind of tapped out all of the companies that you want to work within the area, and you kind of start to hit the boundaries of your own network, you kind of know all the people who you’re going to know.

For us it was kind of like as my partners were starting to talk about transitioning out of the business, I was trying to decide like, well, they’re the real creative brainpower here, what the heck is this company going to be when it’s just me? So I took those two problems and sort of mushed them together and realize that as I was kind of working on what do I need to do to grow and scale this business and kind of lead it into its next generation of our business growth.

I started doing a lot more peer learning. Like I know you lead a mastermind group, those kinds of groups where you just start to hear from other business owners who are ready to be vulnerable about what they’re experiencing.

And I realized that number one, I wasn’t terrible at my job, and number two, that we were a thing that was called a second stage company and we had very predictable business growth pains. As soon as I learned that I was like, oh man, why didn’t somebody tell me that this was going to happen? I could have been prepared.

Jim Palmer:

It’s almost like when the doctor finally gives a name to what you’ve been experiencing.

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly. Just that relief of having it named and then you can move forward and problem solve it once you know what it is, once you have that diagnosis, it’s like, okay, well, if I’m this and there’s a solution to it, well now I’m just going to implement the solution. So that was kind of what we started to do with the company. And that was where I really focused Six Point on brand strategy and helping companies solve positioning problems to kind of unlock that business growth because that was a big game-changer for us, that kind of focus and expertise.

Also figuring out oh, I actually love these people who I’m in these peer groups with, they’re good people, they care about their communities. They care about their employees. They give back, they’re working super hard and just trying to do what they love. Then I would be talking about brand strategy, kind of bringing that to the peer group. Some people were like, “Oh, this is really helpful. We’ve never heard this before.” And I was like, maybe I can kind of combine these, these two things that I love and kind of make that sort of the next generation of Six Point. So that’s what we’ve done.

Jim Palmer:

So interesting in that term, a second-stage company. In one of your blog posts, I was checking out your website, it’s like, what the heck is a second stage company and I totally get it, but a lot of people might be going, what is a second stage company? Why don’t you explain that a little bit?

Meghan Lynch:

So a second stage company usually starts around when you have 10 employees, but the definition of is 10 to 100 employees, about a million to $50 million in revenue. Again, that varies a lot based on the industry so I find the number of employees is probably a better marker.

Basically what happens is you just start to experience different kinds of business growth pains. You probably grew organically and got business organically for a certain period of time and then all of a sudden the things that used to work so well when you were starting out now just don’t have the same result. So you’re kind of like, oh my gosh, we used to send out this mailing, or I used to go to these events and it used to be so meaningful. And now I’m not getting the same lead or sales results or business growth.

Or you might find you’ve kind of tapped out a niche like your food company that’s overly invested in the restaurant business and you need to diversify into retail or family business that’s kind of grown over time into a certain market.  Then you realize, oh, there’s this whole new opportunity to do what we do in this market over here. But you’re not really positioned to like go after that business. So you start to kind of hit those business growth pains.

Then the other big things are systematic things you need to delegate the brand, the marketing, the sales, but every time you let it go as the owner, founder, other people just don’t do it as well and so it’s not as effective. It just kind of reinforces these patterns of see, I can’t give these people anything and this is why I have to stay involved. Nobody knows how to do this better than I do. When really it’s a matter of clarity. You’re not able to articulate what you want and how you want it and what the brand is and what it stands for in a way that other people can access it. It’s still kind of living too much in your head.

So,  that’s what we work with owners and founders and teams to do is to start to pull those things out of that first-generation and start to pass it on to the second generation, whatever that might look like. It’s really fun work because it both empowers, let’s say like the marketing coordinator or the salespeople who have been frustrated right along with the owner. It also helps the owner take a step back and really enjoy watching their company grow and flourish without them having to work so hard for every single lead, every single sale, all those fun things.

Jim Palmer:

So you mentioned, I have the Dream Business mastermind and I’ve been coaching for 12 years. And it’s interesting to me that one of the things I’ve noticed after 100 or so clients is that they often don’t know what they need. It’s like they’re drawn to you because they have a prior relationship, they’ve heard of you or they see what you do, but then in the end they kind of need something else. I’m guessing that you have found that also with second-stage companies, they’re kind of plateaued but don’t know what, and they think, well, do I need a new brand? Do I need new marketing? Do I need what? And really in a lot of ways they need some internal systems and ways for the owner to actually remain the owner and not the floor sweeper like he was the first week he opened, right?

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly. I mean, in a lot of the conversations I have started out with, I think we might need to update our logo or I think we might need a new website or we just need a marketing plan to get into this market. The more we kind of work with them and do that kind of root cause analysis, the more they start to see if we just did a new logo now or a new website now that is not going to number one, solve the problem.

And number two, we aren’t even set up to engage because we see fabulous design shops and really great website companies and search engine companies who try to apply their expertise to the second stage companies, but they can’t articulate what they want. They can’t articulate what success looks like,  what they do, or how they organize their products or anything. There are all these major questions that they can’t be clear on. So the person trying to design a logo or the person trying to do a website for somebody who can’t articulate what they want, it’s impossible for them to get the benefit of these people’s skillsets until they do some groundwork that really unlocks the ability to use expertise. Because that’s the other thing that second-stage companies need is they outgrow the kind of homegrown logo on Fiverr or the one that your cousin made.

Jim Palmer:

The niece who built the website, niece or nephew.

Meghan Lynch:

Those things were right for that time and place when you were starting up and that was what you needed. But then they start to outgrow them and they need somebody who really understands our ERP system or really understands how to integrate with Salesforce or you start to need specialists.  Specialists need you to be clear though about what you need. So we can basically kind of help bridge that gap between the second stage company who needs the specialist expertise, whether it’s internal hiring it or external contracting it. Then help them get the most out of their people and others who they bring in to help them grow.

Jim Palmer:

Imagine the struggle for you though, Meghan, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is the person that’s coming in or the company coming in, they don’t know necessarily what they need because they have never been a second-stage company, even if they are by definition so they don’t really know what to ask for, is that right?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah. And I think that it’s where it just becomes meeting people where they are. I think one of the things, again, having been there and having made those mistakes myself. I recognize them when they’re coming to me. So for me, a big thing isn’t to shut them down right away and be like, hey, you’re asking for a website, but hey, dummy, that’s not what you need. Instead of just being like, well tell me about why you need a website and what problem that’s going to solve for you, and just kind of meet them where they are and ask probing questions so that it becomes self-evident to them.

I find you ask a few good questions and these people are smart, you don’t build a successful business because you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve just never experienced this problem before. So usually through some questioning, they start to see oh yeah, I see what you’re saying. This probably isn’t what I need. Ooh, yeah tell me more about this.

I think it’s just not shortcutting that journey for them, just respecting their brain enough to say you know what you need, you just need a little bit of guidance to help you make the right decision. That’s where a lot of companies really appreciate how we and I work with them that way, because sometimes if you go to a web development company and you say, I want a website, they’re going to sell you a website.

Jim Palmer:

Yes, exactly.

Meghan Lynch:

They can’t help it, that’s their job. For us, we just have a much broader toolkit of being able to really do that, take that time and do that due diligence to really match them with a solution, I was talking to somebody the other day and I got to the end, finally, I asked,  “Have you been selling on Amazon?” And she’s like, “Yeah, our Amazon sales have really gone down over the past year.” And I was like, “Whoa”.

Jim Palmer:

Whoa, Amazon’s through the roof and you’re going down?

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly. Hold on. And she was calling me up for a marketing plan and I was like going to say you don’t need a marketing plan. You need Amazon’s help. That is low-hanging fruit sales that you need to be capturing and revenue that you need to be capturing.” So I hooked her up with an Amazon brand accelerator and I’m like, “Eventually, maybe we’ll work together, but first take care of this place where you’re just bleeding opportunity. Then let’s come back and do something.”  I think she appreciated that I took the time to get to that root cause. She’s like, “Nobody’s ever said that to me.” I’m like, “Well, yeah, because you’re asking for a marketing plan. Why would somebody?”

Jim Palmer:

Yes. So where do brand and culture intersect? I mean, I think the culture initially is obviously with the entrepreneur who starts it, it’s him or her or whatever, but then second-stage companies, I mean, it really take on a life of their own, it has the company brand to a large degree.

Meghan Lynch:

It’s such a good question because we do see the overlapping of these a lot. In order to be able to delegate a brand and empower your people, you really need a strong and clear culture, people need to feel, there needs to be a high level of trust and people also need to be clear on what the company stands for and you need those right fit people. Because if you delegate the brand to, let’s say, sales representatives or customer service representatives, those people have an outsized effect on how customers, in whatever industry you’re in, feel about the brand and the company. Any brand interaction that is with individuals is person to person and is more than a few minutes long has a really, really lasting impact on how we perceive the brand as humans.

So for me, they almost become inextricably linked. You can’t kind of separate the brand and the culture. If you have a great brand, but a terrible culture that is not going to be a sustainable position to be in. If you have a great culture, but a terrible brand, then you have this asset that you are not leveraging. I think the two really go hand in hand. And we’ve done a lot of work, we’ll partner with culture experts if we feel like, oh, this company has opportunities, but they’re just not healthy. We’ve got people who excel at that, that we can kind of bring in and introduce them to, and kind of help them get the kind of back of the house in order before we do the front of the housework.

Jim Palmer:

Got you. What have you found, Meghan, as far as some of the fears that hold back, let’s say high potential companies from business growth, going beyond their initial roots, so to speak?

Meghan Lynch:

I think the biggest one is that when you are at second stage and you’ve had success and you’ve started to build up a team, you now have something to lose. When you are an entrepreneur and it’s just you, or it’s you, and one or two other people, you’ve got nothing to lose, it is do or die. You just go for it and everything’s an opportunity and it’s kind of fun and free in that way. One of the big things that we find is that companies who start to hit second stage and get larger, you’ve got 10, 20, 30, 40 people depending on you for income, now, all of a sudden, every decision you make is loaded. And so it’s like, oh, well, we could enter this market, but these other customers, they pay everybody’s salary, so are they going to freak out when we try to penetrate this other market.  Then they’re going to leave us and then I’ve just destroyed everything that I’ve spent so many years building up?

They feel like big problems and they feel like real problems, but they can be solved very easily. Companies pivot markets all the time and it’s really a matter of putting together a strong communication plan, really training your team. These are the things that we will walk companies through of like, hey, if you want to pivot into a new market, here’s the way you do it in a way that engages your existing customers and brings them closer to you so that they become allies in it. It also opens up a new market for you with positioning and a plan. So you can have both, but I think companies often feel like they have to choose one or the other. Either I’m going to choose business growth or I’m going to choose to protect what I’ve built. I feel like our job is to say yes, we can do both of those things.

Jim Palmer:

Right. We got about three or four minutes. I want to keep jamming as many questions as I can while I have you. I know on your website, I saw this thing called Solve for Y, the letter Y. Is that like your mantra or is that how you approach business with new clients or?

Meghan Lynch:

So Solve for Y  basically is this brand program for second stagers that I developed. I developed it on Six Point when we were kind of making our big pivot, so I kind of practiced it on ourselves first of how would I, as an entrepreneur get clear, how do I empower my team? How do we pivot our positioning in a way that brings us closer together and brings our customers closer to us?

We basically just took that and then we’ve applied it on lots of second-stage companies and have really codified it and dialed it in. So it’s like our process that we walk people through how to solve that seemingly impossible question of saving what we have and grow into this new future that is going to be the next generation.

Jim Palmer:

One of the challenges I’ve helped a lot of my clients with, I’m just curious if it happens for you also is, they don’t charge enough for the value of what they’re doing.

Meghan Lynch:

Yes, and I think the brand is a big piece of solving that problem, price sensitivity, which is directly related to how strong your brand and positioning are. I’m sure this is exactly what you see too, as a marketer, that the more clear you are on the value you bring, and the more clear you are on what makes you different, and the more clear you are on who your ideal client is and how well you know that customer, that’s what allows you to charge that price premium. It also allows customers to not be price sensitive so that you’re not constantly doing that race to the bottom. And for a lot of companies, there’s just so much pressure to commoditize that in order our mantra is that challenge the Goliaths mentality. In order to challenge the big guys, we’ve got to be more focused, we’ve got to be more nimble, we’ve got to be more specialized, again, regardless of what kind of business you’re in.

Jim Palmer:

Well, I could talk to you for a long time, but the clock dictates everything. So I’m sure people want to follow up with you. I’m thinking of a website, or you mentioned you may have a landing page where people get a little more information.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, exactly. Our website is sixpointcreative.com. If you just go to sixpointcreative.com/dreambusiness, there is a quiz that you can take if you think you might be a second stage company, but you’re not sure, or kind of want to get a scorecard on where you stand there, we’ll put together a customized report for you for free.  There are also some other tools, a little eBook that you can download or we’ll ship you a hard copy. And a couple of other tools that those folks can use that are particularly helpful for second-stage companies that are looking for business growth. So just some tools and resources.

Jim Palmer:

sixpointcreative.com/dreambusiness, see, there’s some good creative right there. Meghan, thank you so much. Really a pleasure talking with you today.

Meghan Lynch:

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Jim Palmer:

Hey, folks that wrap up this very special interview with Meghan Lynch from Six Point Creative. I am Captain Jim Palmer, the dream business coach, and connect with me at getjimpalmer.com. Www.getjimpalmer.com. If you are interested in the dream business mastermind, that is dream biz coaching, dream B-I-Z coaching.com. But until this time next week, another fantastic interview. You take good care.

What branding fears are holding you back?

by | Oct 19, 2021 | Brand Strategy, Family-Owned Business, Grow and Scale, Podcast

Bill Black, a high-demand speaker to Business Owners Groups and host of Exit Coach Radio podcast, interviewed Six-Point’s CEO, Meghan Lynch, about the fears holding high-potential companies back from growth.

Hosts & Guests

BIll Black

Meghan Lynch

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podcast transcript

Bill Black:

Thank you for listening. It’s a pleasure to have you with me. And, you know, we interview a wide variety of advisors, as I mentioned earlier. Over 1500 advisors have been on exit coach radio. So if you think about it and you want to listen to 20 minutes of business oriented information, head to wherever you listen to podcasts and look for Exit Coach Radio. My next guest, Meghan Lynch is a CEO of Six Point Creative, a brand strategy agency that helps second stage companies breakthrough growth plateaus. As part of her mission to help small business challenge the goliaths, Meghan has served as an expert advisor to second stage clients in a wide range of industries from fast casual restaurants to industrial manufacturers. And Meghan was named an enterprising woman of the year in 2019 and enjoys testing her limits as an endurance runner. Welcome to the show, Meghan, thanks so much for joining me.

Meghan Lynch:

Thanks so much. I’m glad to be here.

Bill Black:

My pleasure. Wow, you have an interesting background, I’d love to hear more about that. Tell our listeners a little bit more about you and your business and we’ll get into some of the questions.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, sure. So I started Six Point it was around 2007, just as the market was crashing. So I made it through one grade.

Bill Black:

Perfect timing.

Meghan Lynch:

Recession then. Yeah, perfect timing. And basically, when we started, we were a very generic, local, regional full-service marketing agency. And I’ll put full service in air quotes because it was a few of us, a few smart people in a room, just kind of getting stuff done. And over the years, as I started to grow that business and kind of get myself more educated about what it means to grow and lead a company, I started joining more peer round tables, and really educating myself because I don’t have a background in business or anything like that.

And while I was doing that, I just started spending more and more time with a lot of family-owned businesses, second-generation businesses, closely held businesses that people were starting, and kind of growing and trying to sustain. And I just realized these are my people. That I love working with these kinds of businesses that are devoted to their communities and are really trying to make something sustainable for themselves, their families, their employees. And it was also where I started to realize that the brand strategy work that I was doing for other kinds of companies was particularly helpful to these companies. That they didn’t often really know how to build equity in their brand or how to use brand strategy to create business outcomes.

Bill Black:

There’s a lot. There are many facets of what you do that intrigue me. But one question I have before we get into it is what do you … when you say a second-stage company, tell us what you mean by that.

Meghan Lynch:

So second-stage companies are between 10 and a hundred employees. It’s usually around then you start to have this tipping point early on of starting to feel some of these, just pains of oh, we used to just grow with no problem, and now we’re kind of plateauing. Or it’s not as easy to get customers as it used to be, or we need a lot more processes or the people problems are getting out of control. All of those kinds of early-stage pains.

Then later on in the second stage, often the issues are much more about,  now that we have processes and systems in place and we’re really ready to grow, how do we keep alignment? How do we kind of bridge where we came from and who we used to be, with what is going to get us to this next level and not kind of lose the DNA of who we are in the growth and scaling process? So that kind of tends to be what second-stage companies are all about. And it’s sort of both a uniquely painful business life stage, but also kind of a uniquely exciting and just transformational one. If you could make it through second stage, you can do anything.

Bill Black:

Very good. And you know, I’ll use a golf analogy I know a lot of people, when they start, they start tracking their handicap and it’s probably in the twenties or something very high. And it’s fairly easy with some regular practice to get that down to about an 18 or 17. And then you get into the next phase, maybe this is where the second stage comes in, where you have to start changing your game to get better.

Meghan Lynch:

One of the things that we often remind our clients is, what got you here won’t get you there.  Whatever made you a better golfer early on, you have to kind of get into more like nuance finesse work to make that next leap.

Bill Black:

And that’s where you need, that’s where you really need an outsider to help you to maybe … because there are rules of the road and tricks of the trade. So there are things that need to be probably looked at differently and implemented. What are some of the fears that hold high potential companies back from growth?

Meghan Lynch:

I think that that fear of loss is it’s a very strong, human feeling.  I feel like particularly for second-stage companies, for family businesses, it is something that really does strongly hold them back from growing and from even building equity in their company. Because they have a lot to lose, right? They have employees who are counting on them, they have a reputation, they have customers who are counting on them. Oftentimes their identity is very tied up by this point in the business and what they do in their community. Sometimes they are like pillars of the community. So the stakes are not low for them. Sometimes they let themselves get so afraid of, oh well if we change anything, we’re going to lose what we have. And I think that in our experience you can kind of have both, right? You can keep what you built and you can also make the changes needed to position yourself for that next week.

Bill Black:

So it’s a kind of a case of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but they don’t realize that it is broken or it’s not going to achieve high growth from here on out if they don’t make some changes. And I think one of the areas that might hold back some companies is they’ve always done it this way. And I work with a lot of family businesses and they basically … there’s a new generation coming up saying “things have changed. We need to change up how this business looks, how it looks to the world.” What are some of the brand strategies that you run into that need to be put in place for family businesses?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, it’s such a good question. I think particularly for family businesses and especially that are working, not generational, like conflict or transition, a lot of what they’re dealing with I would say over … of all the family businesses that we work with, I would say most of them when they come to us have 70% or more of their customer concentration in one market, or even in just a few big customers, big relationships. And it’s just super, super common when you’ve had this long track record of success, family businesses are very relationship-oriented. So this idea of doing anything new becomes also sort of like a threat to the stability of the business because it’s like, oh, well if we enter this new market, if we do too much digital, we’re going to lose these customers who got us to where we are.

But at the same time, that level of concentration is so high risk, that it’s really not a sustainable way to be around for the next 20, 30, 50 years. So a lot of the work that we do is around helping them diversify that customer base and really say okay, well, how do we talk to these existing customers, make sure that we are not going to lose them, and create a strong communication plan around whatever’s happening. Look at some of these new opportunities that are on the table and pick the ones that are the strongest and also craft a strategy that opens up some new business, diversifies the business, strengthens the brand. So I think that brand strategy becomes a lot about that diversification piece, especially as a first problem to tackle.

Bill Black:

In the COVID environment and hopefully post COVID environment, things have changed obviously over the last year or so. And is brand … have a lot of people have been forced to change their branding, to appeal to the online marketplace more, into the worldwide market, if you will? The companies that might have been perceived as too regional in the past, as they changed to more of an online footprint, are they … what are some of the things that they’re doing to reflect that?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen just obviously like an explosion in e-commerce, and even for brands that historically have not dipped their toe into e-commerce or really haven’t paid much attention to it, they really started seeing growth and the business case for like, okay, well we’re getting growth and we’re not even doing anything, so maybe we really need to do this. Or they were seeing their competitors grow while they were staying out of that game. So that’s definitely something. And I think, for a lot of companies one of the things to realize about digital is that it’s really no different. Like the basics are the same, you create good relationships, you’re authentic, you are clear and consistent in your messaging. The same true basics that make other channels effective are the same here.

I think it’s where people get tripped up, they don’t know what they need to pay attention to. They don’t know which channel is right for them,  where their customers are or where their prospective customers are. Again, they kind of get frozen with, we don’t even know where to start. So often the starting point that we use with our clients is to just start serving and interviewing your customers and talking to them and saying, what is your life like? It’s not about satisfaction surveys. How often are you online? What sites do you go to? What devices do you use?

Just kind of understand what their buying behavior is like, in a way that’s relevant to your business. But all you need to do is do 10 or 12 of those interviews and you already start seeing some patterns and it starts to demystify … if a company’s like, oh my gosh, do I have to worry about Tik Tok? Should I be on Instagram or Facebook? Or should I be on LinkedIn? Should I be doing e-commerce? Your customers will tell you that information. We’re just often, for whatever reason, reluctant to ask.

Bill Black:

Yeah, so many platforms, so little time. One of the things I’ve heard from companies is that as they start to think about future generation ownership or whatnot, or passing the baton, that they’ll change from a name-based company to maybe initials instead of the name. Or if they say we’re the Orange County, they’ll pick out that region, so that they’re more … so that they’re not confined in the consumers’ mind to only working in a certain region. What are some of the other common mistakes you see that companies make when they’re contemplating rebranding?

Meghan Lynch:

I think sometimes it’s stressing too much about those details. We think that we put way too much weight in a name and we’re like, Oh, this has got to explain the full scope of what we do and capture it. And I often think that’s wasted energy. You think of all of the most valuable brand names, they’re all nonsense names, Xerox and Apple and Google. It’s like, the name is what you make it, and your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room to quote Jeff Bezos. It is your reputation.

So if you build equity in a brand name, it always hurts me a little bit in the gut when people change their name to initials, because it’s like even it was a person’s name, that name has personality. That name has an emotional connection and you just stripped all that away and became initials. I would rather change the story, Let’s not necessarily jump right to a name change or a logo change or whatever. Sometimes it’s really about communication strategy, not those kinds of superficial elements that I think sometimes we spend a little too much time on.

Bill Black:

Very, very good advice. How about for some of these multi-generational family businesses where it started with the parents. Okay, then they had their few children get involved. Now those children had each had a few children and now the third generation is now 15 potential people getting involved in the business. And pretty soon you have this big kind of mushrooming number of people that want to be involved in the business, whether they’re qualified or not. What about … have you run into situations like that? Where families have said, look, let’s do this. Let’s get involved in the community in another way, maybe with a family foundation, and really get involved with some charitable groups or others. And let’s give some of those family members a job of working with that. How do you figure out how best to show up in the community as a family business?

Meghan Lynch:

I love that question. I think that there is such power, again, oftentimes these family business brands, and once they get to that third-generation stage, they truly are very powerful in their community and their reputation, their name, just their presence at certain events, and things like that are very symbolically powerful and then also, it can be economically powerful for a community. So I always love it when you can create a much wider brand impact and brand story by getting community members or family members involved in different ways. Like you said, setting up a foundation, sponsoring events, creating marquee events in the community. And then oftentimes too they’re leaders in their own industry as well. So I think to think both locally of where can we make an impact and where can we build the brand and the story and the loyalty locally.

If you work nationally or internationally, where could we also expand the value of the story in our industry? How could we as a family get involved in policy, in trade organizations, things like that, where it does really have a connection back to the family, even if you’re not involved in the day-to-day of the business. Getting to know the industry, being influencers in the industry, all of that comes back to the family eventually, and supports the work of the business and supports the equity that you’re building in the brand and therefore in the value of the company. So, yes, it’s such a good question. I think it’s such an overlooked asset that people don’t usually think about spreading out their influence in that way. So I’m really glad you asked that.

Bill Black:

Yeah, it’s branding and it’s really interesting, especially as a lot of our listeners head towards their thinking about exiting their business. Maybe they’re thinking about selling it to a much larger business in their industry as a strategic sale. And so they need to really work with someone to think about, well, how do we start showing up better, differently, in our industry so that we’re not begging them to look at us. They’re begging us to let them look at us. And so it’s really important. What you do is really, really important. And how do our listeners learn more about you and get in touch?

Meghan Lynch:

Sure, our website is sixpointcreative.com. And we set up a landing page for your listeners, so if you just do backslash exit coach, there is a free brand assessment on there. So if people want to take that quiz, you get a customized report based on the answers to see, where is your brand. If you’re thinking about exiting, how much work is there to do and where should you start and focus first? So that’s a helpful tool and there’s a couple of other resources as well about building brand value in your company, right on that site.

Bill Black:

Great information. We went through a lot of information pretty quickly and I hope you’ll come back and share more with us down the road. Because I think again, we just started to scratch the surface, but you really gave our listeners a lot of great tips today, Meghan, I really appreciate it. And thanks so much for joining me today.

Meghan Lynch:

Thanks so much for having me on Bill, appreciate it.

 

 

 

Approach your Business with Radical Courage

by | Aug 11, 2021 | Family-Owned Business, Podcast

Founder and host Scott MacKenzie, of Industrial Talk, lives and breathes his passion for Industrial growth and success. From humble beginnings as a lathing contractor and certified journeyman/lineman to an Undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Business Administration. He interviews our CEO, Meghan Lynch, about letting go of your Legacy Thinking and Approach your Business with Radical Courage”.

podcast transcript

 

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let’s go.

Scott MacKenzie :

All right, thank you very much for joining the Industrial Talk Podcast where we celebrate you the industry heroes, you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly, you solve problems, you’re transforming lives and you’re transforming the world that’s why we celebrate you. Thank you very much for what you do to make our lives better.

All right, in the hot seat, her name is Meghan Lynch. She is definitely the President and CEO of Six-Point Creative. And I got to tell ya I was jacked on this particular dog-gone interview because we talk a lot about being bold, brave, and daring greatly. It’s one thing to talk about it she does it. Let’s get cracking.

Yeah, which is really interesting when you get right down to it. I’ll sit there and I’ll talk about the necessity to be bold, to be brave, to dare greatly, specifically in this time of whatever the new normal, next normal, whatever we call it. I got to come up with a better name, however, whatever we’re living through.

You’ve heard me talk over and over again about, yeah, there’s the negative side, but I think there’s the positive side. And I think that there is a desire to be more vulnerable, to be open, to be… Just the necessity to be able to collaborate because we need to educate, collaborate, and of course innovate, especially now.

But it’s all great, and it’s all wonderful, and it’s all just dandy words. However, there’s got to be action to it. And what’s great about Meghan is the simple fact that she does. She recognizes the necessity to be bold, brave, and dare greatly. But what does that mean? How does a business do that? How do we take it today, whatever this world we live in today, and be able to survive, rebuild, and succeed?

And she brings that real-world. That ability to be able to do that, so that… I mean, we need people, we need to constantly be out there and innovating. We need to be out there collaborating, and definitely she brings the tools to be able to do that. Now in line with what she’s doing I just plant the seed again, Industrial Talk 2.0 is really just a neighborhood of industrial professionals.

Yeah, it’s a network, but it’s a neighborhood because we have a desire to make everybody succeed whatever that might be, whatever that level is. But more importantly it is a great location to find where people are truly innovating and truly having a desire to collaborate.

That’s Industrial Talk 2.0. It’s in the works. We’re doing it. It’s a neighborhood because we are bound together. We have ties. And whether we like it or not I think a pandemic has really highlighted the fact that we are. We don’t have all the answers.

But you know what we have out there, incredible professionals that understand what to do and how to do it, and be able to share that knowledge with you so that you can survive, rebuild, and prosper.

That’s my intro. It’s always the same because it doesn’t change. I mean, we just got to collaborate. It’s important to collaborate. All right, Meghan Lynch, President, CEO, Six-Point Creative, we’re going to be talking about real tactical solutions to that point of you got to be bold, brave, and dare greatly. You can’t have that legacy thinking. You got to do it. What does that mean? How do you find that help?

She’s all about that. She’s great. All right, enjoy the interview. Meghan, welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast. Again, an absolute honor that you made time in your busy schedule to talk to the wonderful and bright listeners of Industrial Talk. That’s what they are.

Meghan Lynch:

Thanks so much, Scott. So excited about it.

Scott MacKenzie :

It’s so cool. Man, I’m going to have a great conversation. I mean, listeners we were having a conversation offline. As you know we do all the time. We do that just because we have to, and we were sort of wrestling with the necessity to educate, and the companies that truly are committed to education will have, no guarantees, don’t go to somebody and say Scott guaranteed if I educate I’m going to be a success. No, that’s not what I’m saying.

I’m saying companies that have a greater focus on education have a greater opportunity for success, and that’s all we’re trying to create here. And Meghan brings the lumber in this particular conversation. Before we get into that interview, Meghan, before, give us a little 411 on who you are and why you’re such an incredible professional.

Meghan Lynch:

Absolutely. So I have a company called Six-Point Creative. My background is in brand strategy. But really kind of what Six-Point’s focus is to help companies who are at an inflection point, we call them sec`ond-stage companies.

They’re often family-owned businesses. Companies that have kind of hit this point of a plateau of we’ve kind of tapped out our existing network. We’ve tapped out our growth opportunities, but we’re still looking for more, and we still feel like there’s more opportunity in the market.

Those are the companies that we really honed everything that we do to try to help. And I really did that because I have a second-stage company, and I just realize how different the needs are of companies that are established in the marketplace, who have a reputation, who have something to lose. How different they are from a startup company, and also how very different they are from a large corporation with deep pockets and multiple levels and lots of internal expertise.

These companies are really in this messy middle. And I feel although they’re being served, I don’t know that they’re often being so intentionally served right around that life stage.

Scott MacKenzie :

Isn’t that interesting because I could see if you’re at that position and you talked about second-stage companies, define what that looks like?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, so a second-stage company is a company that has anywhere between 10 and a hundred employees, those are loose cutoffs, but it tends to be the range that you see it happening. And basically, what happens is early on when you’re going into second-stage there’s often these, you start to see just the need for more process. Everything that you’re doing just feels like, oh man, when we were super small this just hummed and now everything’s just so much more difficult.

It’s hard for me to delegate things. People aren’t listening. You have a lot more people problems. People are asking for more process and you can’t give it to them. And then on the later side of the company this is usually when they’ve matured through that cycle and they have some expertise and they have some systems and processes.

And oftentimes, maybe if it’s a family-owned business maybe they’re bringing in a professional or CEO with industry experience for the first time who’s going to kind of lead this company into the next kind of generation.

And oftentimes what you start to see then is this push-pull between the past, which is valuable. And it’s where the relationships are, and it’s all this historical, again, from a brand perspective it’s kind of the reputation that you have and the goodwill that you’ve built up over time.

That track record that’s so important. And then the push-pull between that and then this vision for a future, which might mean doing things differently than we’ve done them or pivoting, taking our existing product line and moving it to a new market where we see opportunity, something that’s coming down the line and that innovation piece.

And there are these tensions between do we stay with what exists or do we do this new thing? And I think often companies look at this as I can only do one or the other. And I think what we’re really there to say is, no, there’s a third path where you keep your reputation. You keep your customers. You keep that strength that you’ve built.

All of that is super valuable and that’s an asset that you need to leverage, and you also have this other thing, which is this innovation, this new market, this maybe new sales strategy, whatever it is, new product, innovation, all of those things.

That’s going to be what’s going to sustain this into the future because it does become a little bit of that grow or die piece of if you’re not growing then you’re probably shrinking if you’re not out there.

Scott MacKenzie:

So this is what I… This is my head and I’m processing this information. All I hear is you need to change and you need to change more.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, exactly.

Scott MacKenzie :

And you need to change, and over here you need to change and change and change and change. And nobody… You figure if a company gets to this particular second-stage they’ve changed, they put a lot of sweat equity in that.

And now you’re saying, “Hey, hey, you still need to change.” I would imagine many of these companies are saying, “I just want to glide on into whatever the future.”

How do you keep them from saying you don’t want to do that?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, well, I mean, I think, again, it does become figuring out what is important to them. If change… If they’re really totally unwilling to change and they have no vision for the future well then that’s not going to be, that’s not really a second-stage company because they don’t have that next stage vision.

They’re not trying to grow into the future. So if really what they want and what they have is where they want to stay then that’s great. I don’t want to… I’m not going to mess when somebody’s vision for their business… Where we really thrive is with the companies that are struggling in this kind of middle area of we want to change, we see opportunity, there’s more people who need our product. They often call themselves we’re a best kept secret in the market.

I often hear that, that they’ll refer to themselves as like, Ooh, we are a best kept secret. And I’m like, okay, well, do you want to let that secret out because that’s not, it’s great that you have the confidence in what you’ve built and also you don’t have to be a secret.

Scott MacKenzie :

Yeah, that’s true. It’s sort of, I’ve heard that same thing, sure, absolutely, we’re the best kept secret. Well then you’re leaving money on the table or you’re not growing, or you’re not doing this, and that’s fantastic, but, but, but, but-

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly, yeah, they’ll say it proudly because they’ve built so much equity in what the product that they built or their service team or whatever it is. And the… But I always look at it as there’s probably more companies, more people. You’re always talking about these people are change makers. They are people who want to help their products get into the right hands of people who can do something amazing with them.

And so for me the question is always, don’t we want to get that into more hands? Don’t we want to increase that innovation in the market? If you have something that’s going to change an industry you need to let those engineers know, you need to let those product managers know, and give them the opportunity to use what you’ve built.

Scott MacKenzie :

Yeah, so okay, listeners, what we have, we’re talking about second-stage companies that’s between 10 and a hundred employees. But I think the key here, what Meghan has pointed out is that these second-stage companies want to definitely focus on growth. They’re willing to deal with the pain of change and go through that process, and that’s a great thing, and don’t be a best kept secret. That is where we’re at.  Now when we start talking about that, outside of all that, I would imagine because of COVID a lot of these companies have been hit pretty hard?

Yet they’re trying to survive, rebuild, and then try to prosper in this next normal, and what does that look like to you?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, so for me again, that one of the things that COVID has done is that a lot of the companies we work with were about to have their best year ever going into COVID. I heard that so much, like we are poised for our best year ever, and then they get the rug ripped out of them.

And that has an emotional, psychological effect on you, well, now I’m going to be a little bit more fearful. I thought I was doing everything right. I thought I had this figured out, and then this thing that I totally couldn’t control takes all that away from me, and we did not have the year that we wanted to have.

So, it becomes this balancing act of making sure that companies stay in some kind of comfort zone and keep some kind of realistic safety net for themselves.

But at the same time, I think, it’s also given companies a sense of like, hey, we were resting on our laurels a little bit. We were a little bit complacent. We didn’t make some of the big decisions that we knew we had to make, whether that was getting a product launched quickly, or whether it was some personnel changes that they needed to make, they’re carrying some dead weight. And I think that one of the good things about COVID is that it created a sense of urgency, right?

All the business owners that I’m talking to are like, hey, we made decisions that I knew I had to make I just didn’t want to make the tough decisions and COVID forced my hand.

Scott MacKenzie :

So this is interesting. Yeah, this is exactly what… I’ve heard the same thing. It’s like, I believe, yeah, there’s the pain of COVID, got it. Everybody knows, yes, yes, yes, yes, and we’re not going to go through that.

But, I think, there’s a silver lining in the COVID conversation, and that is the conversation of resilience and truth. Now we’re having conversations that make sense. I’m not going to sit there and lollygag and be lazy.

I want to build a business of resilience because when this happens again, if it happens again, heaven help us, I’m ready, I got a business of resilience. So I see it as a positive and a conversation in the business of resiliency. Do you agree?

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you’re totally right, Scott. And I think, one of the things that you talk a lot about is collaboration, and I think that that’s been the other silver lining of COVID.

And I’ve seen so many really cool collaborations of companies coming together to solve some really complex problems. I was just talking to somebody the other day who they have a kiosk and cart company and they serve industrial manufacturers of food products and they collaborated with some people doing some work in an electric vehicle technology, and some cold storage people, and they put together these cool mobile vaccine units that are now being used in healthcare.

This is a company that never had anything to do with healthcare. And now all of a sudden they’re in the healthcare industry. And it was through three or four small businesses putting their expertise together and saying, What do we all have that could help solve this problem, and maybe if we do it together we could do something bigger than we might be able to do on our own.

And I think that that’s such a cool opportunity, especially for these smaller players in the market. If we aren’t collaborating with each other then we are missing a huge opportunity to challenge those big guys.

Scott MacKenzie :

Huge, absolutely spot on, huge opportunity. And I think that the other positive associated with COVID is the fact that I can be humble. I don’t have to have all the answers. I don’t have to be… I go to Scott and he has all the answers, geez, that’s a heavy, heavy thing to carry around.

Now I could be humble and say, “I have this answer, but I don’t have, I need help, I need to help.” And I think it’s just a really, in a weird way a beautiful realities of the marketplace. I just, I don’t know how else to put it because-

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah. Well, and it’s stripped away a lot of the pretense because I think people who didn’t have anything of substance to offer people quickly kind of turned away from them and said like, “Okay, well, I don’t have time for any more BS I really need.

 

To be with people of substance. I need people who are problem solvers, people who are humble, people who can collaborate, people who have ideas, not just people who are kind of sitting back going oh shoot what do we do now? But the people who are out there saying like, “I don’t know exactly what to do, but I do know I have this. Does anybody need this?”

And I think that that’s been really valuable too. I’ve seen, again from relationships that I have, I’ve seen kind of who are the people who you can count on, and who are the true experts, and who are the people who are those people who really truly care about what they’re doing and the people that they do it for. And then you’ve seen the other people kind of fall off.

Scott MacKenzie :

So I see this resiliency model including you got to educate businesses. These second, let me look at my notes, second-stage companies, the ones that are going to probably fair okay are committed to education, committed to collaboration, and well as there’s an innovation component there. They want to be more efficient going forward, I would imagine.

Is that sort of the mindset of these second-stage companies that truly want to be successful in the future?

Meghan Lynch:

It is. It is. I think that those are, when they’re at their best that is their mindset. I feel the kind of dark side of this is that these are companies that have put a lot of sweat equity into building what they have, whether it’s their IP, whether it’s their processes, whether it’s their people, whether it’s their relationships with their customers.

I mean, these are companies who have put decades of experience into what they have built. And so I think in their best moments they are innovative, they are collaborative, they are educational. At their worst moments they are fearful that they are going to lose everything that they just built.

They are fearful that the customers that have been so critical to that process are going to leave them. If they see them let’s say talking to another market or skipping a distribution model, or kind of innovating too much.

Scott MacKenzie :

Wow.

Meghan Lynch:

And they’re also afraid of their competitors. Well, we can’t educate people too much because our competitors are going to steal our information or copy us. And so they turn into, which, and all of those things, like what you were talking about are all these things-

Scott MacKenzie :

Legit.

Meghan Lynch:

Open people up and make them bigger than what they are. The things that I sometimes see are things that shut companies down and make them smaller than what they are.

Scott MacKenzie :

Well, that’s fascinating.

Meghan Lynch:

And so those are the types of things that we kind of have to help companies work through. And they’re legitimate. They’re founded on real fears. It’s not like, oh, you shouldn’t be worried about that just do it anyway. These are real fears.

Scott MacKenzie :

No, no, they can’t

Meghan Lynch:

But they can be problem solved.

Scott MacKenzie :

That’s… Boy, that is just a brilliant point. I appreciate that Meghan, because I always think because I’m just going to go out there, that’s me, but these companies that fall into that category who have invested time, energy, effort, money, and all of that over the years that is a difficult thing to stop. But that’s… And we were talking specifically about that fear of what’s holding companies back and that might be part of that, right?

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly, yeah, and I think that one of the things is that you really have to kind of meet those companies where they are and acknowledge that this fear is real because it’s so easy to come in as a consultant and be like, hey, well, you should do this, you should do this, you should change this.

Scott MacKenzie :

You can change this, yeah.

Meghan Lynch:

And they’re… And it’s like, well, you’re playing with other people’s money. These people are playing with their own money with their own team. It’s people that they have to look in the eye, whether it’s their customers, their suppliers, their employees. And so I think that if we as kind of the consultants, the coaches, the strategist, if we don’t take that seriously and really truly listen to those fears and help not just dismiss them, but help them problem solve for them then I think that we are doing them a disservice and we could put their company in jeopardy, which is something I would never want to do.

So for me it’s a lot about kind of like, hey, your fear is your brain telling you something. It’s trying to protect you, right? So let’s do a deep dive into what exactly is this worst case scenario that you’re trying to protect yourself from, and then let’s just come up with a plan to mitigate that risk.

And I think that again, risk mitigation has to be big in the way that we’re thinking about growth post-COVID because we both need to innovate and we need to protect what we’re building. We don’t know when the next pandemic is coming or whatever the next disaster will be, so we need to be smart about that and we do need to mitigate risk.

And I think that that’s important. So helping companies work through that change management in a way that takes those fears seriously and helps them put a very concrete plan together.

Because usually really most of those problems if I’m going to get to the heart of it could be solved by a really good communication strategy. If you’re worried that your customers are going to leave you, you need to talk to those customers. You need to confirm those fears or allay those fears, and that will bring them closer to you. People do business with people. And so have that conversation.

Scott MacKenzie :

That’s right.

Meghan Lynch:

And chances are if they’ve been with you for that long, and you see opportunity in another market and you’re committed to still serving them they are going to be like, hey, go for it, we want you to succeed because when you succeed that means you’re going to be better able to serve us too. So I think oftentimes some of those fears once you actually start putting a plan in place and doing something about them they’re not as big as people feel like they are when it’s just kind of this, ooh, we can’t take this move.

Scott MacKenzie :

See you’re touching on a point of you can be vulnerable, like as a business owner you can be vulnerable. That doesn’t mean that you’re weak. That doesn’t mean that you’ve got flaws. You’re just… It’s as simple as a conversation.

Scott MacKenzie :

You’re not… And when you start talking about… Nobody and I mean nobody had global pandemic in their business continuity plan, not one.

They might’ve had hey, this, that, and the other thing, but not the global pandemic. And so it starts with a conversation. It starts with just recognizing, being vulnerable doesn’t mean that you’re weak you’re just saying, “Hey, I’ve got to figure this out.”

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah. Well, and honestly-

Scott MacKenzie :

I like that.

Meghan Lynch:

You’re like everybody else. I mean, that was one of my biggest pain points starting up my business was I’d go to events, a Chamber of Commerce event, an industry event, a trade show, a conference, and you ask all these people like, “Oh, hey, how’s business,” and they’re like, “Oh business is great, duh, duh, duh,” and then you get the same CEOs in a room with just them and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding me, this is blowing up. This person isn’t doing well. I’m worried about cashflow. I’m worried about supply chain.”

All these things start coming out and you’re like, “Whoa, you just told me everything was great.” And for me it was such a big lesson. Now I start conversations with maybe one win that I’m having and one thing that I’m struggling with because chances are somebody else who’s in your business and in your circle wants to help you.

So if you tell them something that you’re struggling with they might have a solution for it. They might have somewhere for you to go. And so much of that stuff we keep so close to ourselves so unnecessarily. It’s crazy.

Scott MacKenzie :

Meghan, you’re hitting on really, really, great, great points. And I hope the listeners are looking at that. We’re talking about resiliency. We’re talking about collaborating. We’re talking about educating. We’re talking about risk mitigation, change management, and it gets right down to being vulnerable and having a conversation.

A real conversation, not something that is all, hey, I’m the best in the world, and then you go behind closed doors and you’re just, oh my gosh, what am I doing? Oh, I can’t get it.

And do you know what the best part about it is the fact that everybody, if somebody comes and tells me, he goes, “This was a fantastic year and all that stuff,” I’d have to just say, “Buddy, I’m not sure about that.” I think it just opened everything up and just said, “Yeah, my mind can’t handle it I need help.” I hope that’s the case.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah. Well, and I think again, COVID even the people who are winning, are in some industries that have the business, have the sales they’re struggling with workforce and labor issues or they’re struggling with supply chain issues. The people who don’t have the sales are struggling with well, we need to get the sales up. We’ve got the people we don’t have the business.

And so, I think again, it’s such an even playing field right now. Even the people who you think like, ooh, they’re so lucky to be in such and such a niche because that niche is doing well right now. We work in a lot of industrial, like construction and things like that, people making knives, blades, things, and those businesses are doing really well right now because everybody’s working on their homes, they’re building. That’s going well, but they have problems too. That creates its own issues that they have to solve for.

Scott MacKenzie :

Isn’t that something.

Meghan Lynch:

So I think, it’s just a big piece of our process. We call our… The process that we created for these second-stage companies Solve for Y because, and Y as in the letter Y, but also kind of like the why are you doing this thing? Why do you want this growth?

Scott MacKenzie :

Why?

Meghan Lynch:

Because I think that everybody has some issue and they have some vision of how they want things to be in kind of a new future. And if we can take a very systematic approach to looking at that and dismantling it and then come up with a plan to address it then they can move forward.

But right now, so many of these companies are caught in this really emotional space of we want to do this, but we don’t know how.

And so we have these very circular conversations internally of like, are we going to launch this product? Are we actually doing this? Are we going into this market? We’re not sure we’re going to position ourselves that way.

Scott MacKenzie :

I like that.

Meghan Lynch:

And the internal teams get so frustrated because they’re just like, “Are we doing this or we not?” They don’t care.

Scott MacKenzie :

Right, right.

Meghan Lynch:

They just want clear direction on what they’re supposed to do.

Scott MacKenzie:

Again, we’re going to have to wrap the conversation up.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah.

Scott MacKenzie :

And I think that the beauty of what you’re just saying is that somebody is just looking for just… I mean, I would imagine I’m wrestling with a lot of ideas and a lot of things, but I don’t know where to go and I think a conversation with you and your company and others will go a long way to sort of lay that path out. It could be incrementally approached.

Meghan Lynch:

Exactly, yeah.

Scott MacKenzie :

Just something. Just something.

Meghan Lynch:

Yeah, just to get them one step in the right direction. And yeah, so speaking of that… If people are listening to this and they’re like, “Ooh, I relate to some of these pains. I think we might be a second-stage company,” we have a landing page set up. So, my website is sixpointcreative.com

And then if you just go backslash Industrial Talk we have a quiz that they can take, your listeners can take.

And about 10 – 15 minutes of their time they’ll get a not a standardized automatic score, but we’re going to put together a customized report for them on this is what we’re hearing you say and here is some step one, step two, step three. Top one to three recommendations that we would make.

And just again, so that they can have that first step of how do I start to get out of this hole.

So all that’s for free and on our website. And there’s a couple other tools there as well that people can check out that are particularly valuable to second-stage companies.

Scott MacKenzie :

All right, it’s going to be out on Industrial Talk, so don’t fear. If you didn’t get the URL it’s going to all be there and you’re not going, you need to take advantage of this great opportunity. Meghan Lynch, thank you for being on the Industrial Talk Podcast. You are absolutely wonderful.

Meghan Lynch:

Thanks so much, Scott.

Scott MacKenzie:

I love it. Love the points that she was bringing up. Talk about bringing the lumber, man. All right, listeners, we’re going to be wrapping it up on the other side. Stay tuned.

Speaker 1:

You’re listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

Scott MacKenzie :

All right, again, thank you very much for joining the Industrial Talk Podcast, that’s Meghan Lynch, Six Point Creative. She is the President and CEO of how to get stuff done. You need her. You need what she brings to the table because she is definitely all about your success and being able to do that in a way that expands your market.

As you can tell, boom, in the interview bringing the pepper, absolutely like it. So go out to sixpointcreative.com find out more. I mean, she needs to be in your rolodex. If you’re old enough to remember rolodex she needs to be in it.

All right, we’re all about being bold, brave, and daring greatly. We’re all about the necessity to educate, absolutely collaborate, and of course innovate. We’re all about that. We’re all about taking action. We’re all about making things.

And we’re part of this neighborhood, this industrial neighborhood that is focused on everyone success. We need everyone to be rowing in the same direction. Industry is changing lives and changing the world. That’s what you’re all a part of. Hang out with people that are bold, brave, and daring greatly. All right, thank you, we’re going to have another great interview shortly.

 

 

Hosts & Guests

Scott MacKenzie

Meghan Lynch

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