Chaos to Clarity: Recent Episodes
Gary Vanbutsele
Welcome to “Chaos to Clarity” with your host Gary V of Whale! There’s a ton of entrepreneurial advice out there. Too much! A lot of it is too ethereal. We went on a mission to find the most ACTIONABLE knowledge from the world’s best. Our only requirement was it had to be able to 10X a business in 10 minutes.
Dr. Tracy Brower, PhD, MM, MCRW is a sociologist studying work life fulfillment, happiness and the future of work. She is the author of two books. The Secrets to Happiness at Work provides insights for joyful work and life. Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to WorkIn addition, her work has been featured in TEDx, The Wall Street Journal, Work-Life Balance in the 21st Century (book), Globe and Mail (Canada), InsideHR (Australia), HR Director (UK), T3N (Germany), Real Estate Review Journal, Fortune.com, Inc. Magazine.
We specifically spoke to her on "How to Bring Work to Life" for Entrepreneurs.
On this show we asked;
- Should employee engagement matter?
- How to get your team to take responsibility and ownership for their wellbeing at work?
- Why employee engagement doesn't mean what you think it does.
- The 5 conditions necessary for people to perform at their best
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
According to Gallup, recognition not only boosts individual employee engagement but also has been found to increase productivity and loyalty to the company, leading to higher retention.
We spoke to David Kravitz, Co-founder of Karma on why employee recognition matters.
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Organizations spend over $160 billion a year hiring consultants to develop and execute strategies, and yet 80 percent of corporate strategies fail.
Why? Because we forget the most important factor in successfully executing strategy: People.
Aric Wood is the CEO of @XPLANE, a Design Consultancy that helps transform organizations through their #vision, #strategy and #culture
He is also the author of The Strategy Activation PlaybookIn this episode of the Unlocking Growth Show, we spoke to Aric about; 4 ways to bring your strategy to life, and make it work!
- Envision,
- Discover,
- Design, and
- Execute
If you want to align your teams and empower individuals to move forward together toward a common goal, then this episode is for you.
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Tom Bronson is the founder and president of Mastery Partners, LLC, a consulting business that helps business owners grow and exit their businesses. As a business owner, he has been in the owner's shoes a hundred times (literally), and he knows what most business owners don't know, yet.
We spoke to Tom on his book Maximize Business Value: Begin with the Exit in Mind
Building business value and ultimately transitioning that business is a process that is very different from running a business.
Tom says business owners need to keep these 6 steps in mind;
- Consider all options
- Plan for success
- Build a moat of leaders
- Identify risks
- Execute relentlessly
- Understand the process
We hope you love the insights as much as we did!
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Eli Schwartz is an SEO expert and consultant with more than a decade of experience driving successful SEO and growth programs for leading B2B and B2C companies.
He's also the author of Product-Led SEO.
We started this show to help entrepreneurs unlock growth easily, efficiently, and in a systemized approach.
So we wanted to understand how Product led SEO helps companies unlock growth?
Eli's advice?
- Understand your buyer. Understand your customer.
- Understand what your customer is looking for
- Understand your customer's pain points
- Create content that answers the customer's pain point and questions
Hope you love the show!
Please drop us a line or check out more on our blog!
Gary and the team at Whale
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
How to optimize a people team budget (especially a small/ frugal one)?We spoke to Nadia Vatalidis to talk about 3 ways to optimize small people budgets.
Nadia is the Head of People & Culture at TestGorilla and is excited to support their mission of putting one billion people in their dream jobs.
Previously VP of People at Remote, where she scaled the company from 70 to 1000 employees in more than 60 countries. Nadia started her first remote-only role at GitLab, where she lead People Operations, People Engineering, and International Expansion.
She helped scale GitLab from 75 to 1300 employees, and they have since become a public trading company. When she is not working, she is hiking with the fam, trying out new plant-based recipes, chasing Frenchies around the garden or taking her Scott Spark 910 29'er for a spin!
Listen up if you want to hear
- Why budgets matter
- How to still have great tools with a small budget
- How to align headcount to budgets
- Being the strategic partner to the organization in sustainability and efficiency
Here's to unlocking the next level of growth!
Gary and the team at Whale
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Well if this episode isn't the Holy Grail for all you B2B businesses out there, we don't know what is?!
Gary got together with Lars Lofgren, Cofounder and CEO of Stonepress to talk about "5 Steps to Generating More Leads With Less Work".
Lars has spent his career driving traffic, lead, conversion, and revenue growth across multiple industries. He got started by leading Marketing and Growth teams at KISSmetrics, then led Growth and Product teams at I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
TLDL - too long, didn't listen? Lars says you have to...
- Pick a Channel that Fits You
- When Something Works, Do More of It
- Avoid Spreading Yourself Too Thin Across Channels
- Focus on Your Headlines
- Skip Small Tests and instead, Test Offers
Drop us a line and let us know what you thought!
Here's to unlocking growth!
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Do you struggle to connect with your customers?
Do you want to stand out in a very competitive market?
Or do you want to accelerate your sales career?
We spoke to Philipp Humm on the latest edition of The Unlocking Growth Show.
Philipp is the Founder of Power of Storytelling, is the author of "The Story Selling Method" and TEDx Speaker.
In this episode, we spoke The StorySelling Method, how to tell powerful stories that actually work in sales and the 5 techniques to crafting the perfect sales story including;
- Focus on pivotal moments
- Bring in elements of surprise
- Make it emotional
- Bring in relatable challenge
- Keep it concise
As always enjoy the show and here's to unlocking the next level of growth!
Gary and the team at Whale
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
"Less than 6% of startups and small to medium businesses have a formalized advisory board, and the ones that do are seeing 3X revenues and 2X productivity for a substantial impact on profitability." Business Development Bank of Canada ReportThe value and power of advisory boards is one of the best knowledge-based investments with a very high ROI that delivers monetary, performance and relational capital rewards.We spoke to Nancy Mayer, co-author of the book "The Advisory Board Playbook" on 5 Steps to creating a winning advisory board.
Nancy is an independent Business Advisor, Profit Strategist, Innovation Coach and the Founder of Power Play Profit Solutions, which was created to help entrepreneurs take back their power, empower their people and create a positive, collaborative work environment where people are playing at their best.
We'd love to hear from you if you loved the show!
Gary and the team from Whale
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Étienne Garbugli is a three-time startup founder (Flagback, HireVoice, and Highlights) and the author of The Lean B2B, Find your Market, Solving Product and The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook.
So we figured Étienne knows a thing or two about a thing or two. We like people who know a thing or two about a thing or two, so we invited him onto The Unlocking Growth Show.
Now he’s the CEO of GROWTHOMATOR, an agency helping SaaS and eCommerce companies grow revenue and increase customer retention via email and marketing automation.
We spoke to Etienne on the 7 ways to win at email marketing.
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Amos Schwartzfarb has been growing businesses for twenty-five years and investing in startups for the past decade. Since 1997, he’s helped build companies that sold to Yahoo!, R.H. Donnelly, The Home Depot, and more.
Today, Amos is the Managing Director of Techstars and author of the best-selling book Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups. More recently, he co-authored “Levers the framework for building repeatability into your business.”
We spoke to Amos on this episode of The Unlocking Growth Show about the framework and the steps you need to take to apply this in your business.
This includes;
1) Articulating your Mission and Vision publicly
2) Defining your customer set using the W3 method (that means who, what and why by the way)
3) Defining your Revenue Formula along with the drivers and sub-drivers
4) Prioritizing the assumptions that need validation
5) Setting a measurement structure (KPIs) to measure movement in assumption validation
6) Building a data-driven model and plan and use it as a primary tool to run the business
We hope you love the show as much as we did!
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
We've said it before "No one cares about your product".
They care what it does for them!
Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs to be Done Playbook says entrepreneurs, product developers and marketers alike need to think "Jobs to be done!"
In the first episode of The Unlocking Growth Show, Jim shares 5 essentials in aligning your markets and organization around customer needs.
And what that looks like!
So if you're wondering who's going to buy your product and why, take a listen!
About today's guest
Jim is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy.
He wowed audiences with his presentation at TedX on collaboration 2015 and has also authored 3 books including Designing Web Navigation, Mapping Experiences, and most recently The Jobs To Be Done Playbook.
He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix.
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Philipp Wolf is the Founder and CEO of Custify.
When founding Custify, Philipp made it his mission to help SaaS businesses retain clients and scale their operations by providing a tool that lets agents focus their time on clients instead of CRM data.
On this episode of The Unlocking Growth Show, we spoke to Philipp about his Customer Success Playbook;
The 3 ways to use Customer Success as a growth channel, not a cost center!In this episode, you'll learn;
- How to lower customer churn
- How to boost revenue by giving customers more value
- How to create customers as advocates
Ultimately your customer success team isn't there to cost you money; they're your fastest route to growth!
Take a listen and please rate us on iTunes!We'd love to hear your thoughts!
Gary & the team at Whale
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Jeff Donnelly and his team at Megafans have created a mobile gaming tournament software that allows gamers to earn prizes.
His winning piece of advice is “Venture into the unknown spaces”
His three tips for business owners are;
- Be a pioneer. You MUST go out seeking what’s next and innovate from there.
- Lower your threshold for risk. Whatever you need to do to get over taking some healthy risk, do it - entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.
- Look for the places where you can make the biggest impact
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
Keith Perhac is a marketer, developer and the founder of SegMetrics. After running a successful marketing agency, he became frustrated with the time-sink and limitations of existing reporting tools. He launched SegMetrics in 2015 to bring accurate attribution metrics to all marketers.
Keith's no 1 piece of advice for all business owners?
You can only improve what you can measure!
Hia helpful tips?
- Your customers are people, not browsers. You need to be able to understand how different customer personas respond to your marketing, and who your best customers actually are.
- A dashboard of what needs to get measured is how you align everyone’s efforts towards growth.
- Data allows you to be more creative in your business, not less.
Take a listen and for more resources, go to usewhale.io
For more great resources, go to usewhale.io
As entrepreneurs, we tend to think of our businesses and ideas as our babies but this is a bad idea says Bram Kanstein a Dutch creative internet entrepreneur with 4 acquisitions to date. The most notable a startup resources website with 1M+ users. He is currently building EARLY ONES (https://earlyones.co), a market research platform for Web3.
In this edition of the chaos to clarity show, we spoke to Bram about the fact that nobody cares about the fact that you built "a thing” and how NOT to fall in love with your own ideas!
For more great resources, go to usewhale.io
Thomas Van Eeckhout is a father of two daughters who spends his free time running and reading. He's also all about getting and giving opportunities.
Thomas started his career as an Internal Sales & Administration officer at Easi back in 2006. After having evolved in Easi's sales department, Thomas took on the responsibility as CEO of the company, a role which he shares with Jean-François Herremans.
Thomas is driven by company culture & values and dedicates a big part of his time to fostering a strong company culture. He must be doing ALOT right because Easi ranks as the 3rd best employer in Europe!
Easi is a Belgian IT company, that combines software development (Adfinity & Smartsales) and consulting with Managed IT & Security Services and believes companies can achieve better, smarter performance by using humanised technology, based on trust.
In this interview Whale CEO Gary Vanbutsele, spoke to Thomas on the importance of replacing yourself.
Certified EOS Implementer® and co-author of Process! Lisa González says entrepreneurs need Process! in their businesses.
We recently spoke to Lisa on the top 3 mindsets that could be getting in your way of getting process done:
- “I’m not process-oriented.”
- “Process takes too much time.”
- “Process destroys freedom.”
Lisa gives really practical advice to getting Process done, and you can check out our review of the book Process! here.
Lisa grew up supporting the operational side of her entrepreneurial family’s many exciting businesses. She pursued practicing law to help business leaders but, finding she missed making an impact in day-to-day operations, she joined a family start-up. After years of cobbling together different practices, she discovered and implemented EOS. The result? The organization became one of the nation’s largest residential remodelers, boasting consistent revenue and profits while having fun along the way!
Take a listen!
The media doesn't care about you unless you're Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Martha Stewart! Says Stephanie Burns, the founder of The Wyld Agency, an amplification and visibility agency focused on building the legacy and personal brands of company founders.
But that doesn't mean you should ignore them.
Being a “best-kept secret” is the worst thing you can be in business, says Stephanie!
We recently chatted to her on how to harness the power of the media!
In this interview, Stephanie tells us why being a teach matters and how to use the media in your visibility strategy.
And if anyone knows her stuff, Stephanie does!
After being a contestant on the Wheel of Fortune, Burns used her winnings to launch her previous company, Chic CEO, an online resource for over 100k female entrepreneurs. With an MBA in Marketing, she's also a contributor to Forbes Women, Entrepreneur, and TODAY, as well as featured in notable press outlets like Inc., Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, Amex Open, Cosmo, New York Times, among others.
Take a listen and drop us your thoughts.
We'd love to hear!
Gary and the team
In 2016 Mathilde Jakobsen founded Freshland, the disruptor of the fruit and vegetable value chain that allows consumers to order fruit that still hangs on the tree, directly from farmers.
During the pandemic the organization experienced hypergrowth and Mathilde and the team found themselves trying to cope with demand. The company went from a handful of employees to over 50.
Mathilde has since shifted the business to an agile framework and one that's adaptive to change. In this episode of the Chaos to Clarity show, Mathilde shares her top 5 tips for creating an agile organization!
You generally get two types of entrepreneurs. Those that say;
1. Marketing is a waste of time and money - focus on sales OR
2. Marketing does add value for scale-ups but where to start?
In this episode, Whale CEO, Gary speaks to Jennifer Zick, the founder of Authentic Brand on 6 ways to overcome random acts of marketing for entrepreneurs.
A passionate and driven leader, Jennifer has 20 years of B2B marketing experience in innovative, entrepreneurial, and accelerated-growth companies. With the process she utilizes for clients, Jennifer shares her MUST-HAVE checklist for marketing for scale-ups.
Jennifer advocates using a proven process, a habit-forming system that builds high-performing revenue teams and utilizing an agile structure for shaping annual plans and quarterly activities.
Wondering just 'how' to do marketing in your scaling business?
Take a listen!
Adi Klevit is a process consultant and the Founder and CEO of Business Success Consulting Group, an organization that provides businesses with the infrastructure, processes, and systems they need to thrive.
Adi says that connecting with the right people helps you expand your business, find partners and create more impact as an entrepreneur.
BUT HOW?
In this episode, we spoke to Adi about her 5 essential steps to networking in business
- Step 1 - prepare!
- Step 2 - be intentional about your networking
- Step 3 - nurture connection consistently
- Step 4 - acknowledge referrals and value
- Step 5 - have a system on how to record and track your connections, be it on a CRM or even just a spreadsheet!
Love this episode or have comments?
Leave us a review on iTunes or drop us a mail!
Who cares about purpose? It's so intangible and fluffy.
Not so says Pepe Marais.
Pepe is the founding partner, and Integrated Group Chief Creative Officer of brand and communication group Joe Public United: South Africa's award-winning, number one ranked and most-admired ad agency. He is also the author of Growing Greatness: A Journey Towards Personal and Business Masteryand Growing Greatness: 20 Habits That Break Habits.
"When you start a business as an entrepreneur, you might assume you're doing it because you want to make money, but in your heart, you know there's something greater. There's something far bigger because if it was just for money, I don't think you'd find the depth that you need to get a small business, to grow into a medium business, and eventually potential large business."Whale CEO and show host Gary spoke to Pepe about what it means to have purpose as your uber strategy. 🚀
On this episode of Chaos to Clarity, we spoke to Alex Thuema, Founder & CEO of SaaStock a conference to help SaaS companies get traction, grow and scale.
Alex helps SaaS Founders get to $10MM ARR 🔥 and we wanted to know how?
His advice? Community Building!
Alex launched SaaStock in 2016, building on the popularity of his blog and podcast. On today's show, Alex shares his
5 steps to building a highly engaged community in your business:
- Identify and clarify your target market and ICP (ideal customer profile/persona)
- Name your 'Why', like Simon (Sinek) says!
- Pick a platform and technology to make it work
- Activate and support your members to grow your communities
- Celebrate your champions
And Alex's bonus point?
Well, you'll have to tune in to find out! 😀
Until next time!
Love your work!
Gary
I wish we had another Zoom meeting, said no one ever! 🙄
We spoke to Isaiah Nolte, Integrator and President at Traction® Tools, on "How to gain traction in your business by SUPERcharging meetings - 4 tips to getting it right" on the first-ever episode of the Chaos to Clarity podcast.
- Start with a system
- Document for accountability
- Be SMART
- Focus on wins and goals in and post-meeting
Please feel to drop us a mail to let us know what you thought of the podcast or to recommend any guests you’d like to see featured in our upcoming editions of Chaos to Clarity.
Until then, love your work! ✅Gary!