– Welcome everybody to today’s Building my Legacy Podcast, I have with me today, Don Markland. Don is interesting cause he’s done a lot of things. Here is what’s fascinating is, we were just speaking about it, Don and I, before this podcast began and there’s so many people who do coaching in this world and they come with different expertises, many very shallow expertises. He is one of those people who has a lot of background. He has worked with companies in digital marketing, putting together their marketing programs. He helps coaches work with their marketing programs. He writes for Forbes and a number of other business magazines. He’s a person who looks at what is happening in the marketplace, what’s needed and what do you do to be able to have an impact in the needs of what’s in the marketplace. So Don, you have a company called Accountability. If you would just share a little bit about your journey, what brought you to this place, and then we’re gonna talk about your company and some of what you do ’cause it is very fascinating. And by the way, hugely important for those of us who are thinking about building a legacy. So on that note, Don, please.

– I will and first, Lois, thank you. I love what you’re doing, the concept of building a legacy. It is not only important for leaders, this is a parental concept that families can grasp and understand. Obviously, businesses can, there’s multiple religious aspects to it. I love what you do with your podcast. Thank you so much for letting me be a part and share some thoughts. My company, Accountability Now, it’s basically exactly what the name suggests. When we founded the business, it was based on my program, the 4 CS of Accountability. I’ll share that story of how that came up in a second. But it really de-identifies one of the core problems that faces leaders when they’re building their legacy, when they’re building their teams, when they’re building their startups. One of the biggest problems is accountability. Either amongst their teams, adherence to a system or amongst themselves. They just can’t seem to stick to what they know they should do. And my program, the 4 CS, really is all about driving accountability, making us have better integrity towards what we know we can do. Then we add business strategy to that, to scale businesses faster and sell more and be more successful.

– So let’s start with, what are those four CS?

– The four CS of accountability, the first C is critique success. So we do it better every time, whatever you do, and I don’t care how good it is. Before you break your wrist, pat yourself on the back. That’s how you get into resting on your laurels, you don’t do that. You critique it. You surround yourself with people that will tell you the truth and find opportunities to improve. So the first C is, critiques success. The second C is we correct failure. This one’s really hard because so many times, not just entrepreneurs, but leaders, parents, kids, it’s the fear of failure why you never take action. And we teach, I want more failure, I want more misses, I’m gonna encourage misses, encourage try and fails because it’s there that we can correct the failure. Let’s figure out what assumptions were made wrong and what decisions were made and then just correct it rather than punishment and scream and yell. That doesn’t do anything. Let’s just correct the failure. The third one, I’ll go ahead–

– Can I just interrupt for a moment? I had a manufacturing company and everything we had was proprietary. We had our own patents and trademarks, and I had somebody from the Trade Association visit, and I had this really beautiful box sitting on my desk. It was a carved box with colors, and she looked and she said, what’s that? And I said, that’s my failures. And she said, you put your failures in a beautiful box. I said, yes, because I need to look at them. I have to want to look at them so I don’t make the same mistakes again. And that’s just–

– Yeah, that is correct failure at its best. Know them, learn from them. I love the beautiful box story. That’s really powerful and there’s good imagery there. The third C is we celebrate growth. You think about your life. The hardest thing you’ll ever do is grow. That’s the hardest thing. If you relate it to fitness, and you’re doing bench presses, anybody that’ll tell you that in fitness the hardest rep is the last one. The one that makes the muscles rip and the fluid come in, that’s the one that counts, and that’s what you celebrate. Not the fact that you hit a max rep, that’s the success. Now we’re gonna critique. But the fact that you made the choice to grow, we’re gonna celebrate that and that’s where we get excited and tell everybody, I made a hard choice, I did something that was out of my comfort zone. And I have had people tell me, why do you celebrate growth over success? Why do you do that? Because I believe every person from the lowest of the world to Don Markland to anybody, we’re all expected to be successful in some fashion, all of us are. When you reward somebody meeting expectations, that builds entitlement. So I’m not gonna celebrate you meeting expectations, I expect you to be successful. But when you make hard choices, growth, that’s a choice, that’s hard. I’m gonna celebrate that, I’m gonna go crazy for that That’s awesome. So that’s the third one is, celebrate growth. The fourth one is my favorite. It is crush mediocrity. I’m in Florida and we have big bugs in Florida. I mean, bugs that got the size of a shoe. They’re enormous. When they show up, we have what’s called a lonely flip-flop, somebody lost a flip-flop somewhere. When these bugs show up, I take that flip-flop and I have to end that bug’s life with that flip-flop. And when I hit a bug, I have to hit it with everything that I have. You have to crush it. ‘Cause I know if I just lightly tap a bug, it’s gonna scurry off. It’ll survive. And I have a feeling that bug is gonna tell all of his bug friends, hey, Don, Markland’s a wimp, come on over to the Markland house. Like it’s free game. That is the same thing with mediocrity in your life, when you identify mediocrity. And it can be anything, laziness, not pushing yourself hard enough, lack of integrity, you name it. We all have our own levels of mediocrity, but when you find it, you crush it with everything you have just like you would that bug. Take that flip-flop and crush it so hard that you realize I won’t stand for this any more. It is amazing what happens when you live those principles and start to think about them constantly. You become a powerful executive, a powerful leader and changes your life.

– So it does change your life and change always brings with it a whole lot of fear. How do you get people outside that comfort zone, that fear zone that I’m afraid, start looking at that, to really begin to tackle these four CS.

– That’s a great question. One of the things that I’ve written about on Forbes is about the concept of confidence.

– Competence?

– Confidence. Confidence is a skill. It’s a developed skill. I would love to say that as my coined phrase, Mel Robbins is the first person I heard use it. She used it in her book, The 5 Second Rule. You can develop just like any skill. I play the piano and I’ve played the piano for years. My first few years playing the piano, I was a disaster. I wasn’t very good. And whenever I had recitals, I was terrified to do those recitals. You want to talk about fear, that was real fear. But now if somebody said to me, Don, can you go up there and play jazz piano in front of a 1000 people? I do it in a heartbeat, because confidence is always a skill. Just like learning the piano, I’m going to take a client or take a leader and say, we’re gonna do one thing really small and we’re gonna do it repeatedly until you’ve learned the skill of confidence. It’s not magic. It’s not Pixie Dust with a ferry, It’s a developed skill. So many times we get obsessed with this concept of insecurity as leaders, well, I’m not good enough, I should be better, I should be Elon Musk. I should be Sarah Blankley. I should be these people. That’s just not true. That’s what I call the bully of the brain. The person inside your brain that’s telling you, you’re not good enough. That isn’t real. That bully of the brain is not a real thing. It’s your insecurity trying to discourage you from growth. And you just develop confidence through small little steps, repeatedly over time. That’s where the power of a coach comes in, who can push you to do uncomfortable things repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, so you can be your best self.

– Who comes to you for coaching? Because it takes a certain… I break professionals into several different categories. There are people who are entrepreneurs, who are just sorting, sorting, sorting. There’s a lot that they are learning. They they’re early in the process. They haven’t really figured out what they’re good at. Then you have sort of that next level who’s really gotten some very good technical skills. They want to be and do more in terms of influence. Then you have those who have really kinda been there, done that, but they’ve had kind of a process in a motor behind them pushing, and they look back and they see where they wanna go with legacy above, but they look back and they go, okay, I’m not healthy, my relationships have fallen apart. And you start going through the list. So who do you really target? Because I think that takes a certain amount of maturity to look at these four CS as a leader, and be able to say, I’m gonna go for it. That’s exactly what I need and I’m going for it.

– That’s a very poignant question. So much of coaching and particularly business coaching, but it also applies to people that pursue life coaching needs or even relationship coaching. So much of it is trigger-based, based on a trigger event causing an emotional concern. You would relate that to the insurance industry. Anybody that works in insurance sales, any of your listeners that are in that business will know exactly what that means, is they target people that have had a trigger event in their life, and they know they will buy based off the trigger events. Coaching is no different. When somebody has had a trigger event in their business or relationships or insert event here, oftentimes that’s when they will start to say, I need help. Now to your point about maturity to receive coach they have to be willing to learn and receive coaching. I have in my 10 years as a coach fired two clients, where I’ve said, hey, I know like they wanted to continue to work with me and pay me. I’ve said, I appreciate that, but life’s too short. It is not fun for me to work with you every week only for you to argue with what I’m advising you and to say you disagree. You give all the money in the world, it’s not fun. I wanna grow this business, I wanna help. My methods are a little bit different whereas I approach coaching the individual for part of it and building the business for part of it. It’s a more all in structure so that the real results come as the business scales, not just the individual.

– So talk with me a little bit about that, because I think that’s really important. People look for ROI, does it really matter? I think when you put those two pieces together, you can show ROI much more effectively. So would you speak to that a little bit in terms of that business component that you bring?

– So when I got into this space, I want it to be a different type of coach, and I didn’t wanna do just specific individual coaching. I do some of it, but the majority of what I do is I partner in with a business and I offer lower entry rates than many of my peers do at my level. But I do that based on metrics and we have a tier-based system. So as the business grows and performs, then everybody can win together. It comes back to my roots of being a sales person and a chief revenue officer. I just always come from the mindset of, hey, we should be growing and growing and growing and growing. I have found business owners, particularly smaller business owners, have an appetite for that type of arrangement, because from a cashflow perspective, it’s easier to bite off or invest. I win because in a year down the road, the business has grown from 1 million to 5 million. Now together, we’re both doing very, very well.

– So we need to do that. How many clients can you work with at a time?

– I have 25 right now.

– Okay, wow. That’s impressive. How often do you meet with your clients when you do that?

– It all depends upon the individual relationship, because some clients that want intensive work, I meet with every single week without fail. Some I meet every other week and then some, I just meet with once a month. But one of the unique things about Accountability Now and working with me is I call myself the Netflix of coaching. So Netflix is where you do a once a month… My wife says, you should call it Disney Plus, that’s more popular now. But the Netflix of coaching is you do a monthly subscription and you get unlimited downloads. I try to engage with my clients much more than once every other week, or once a month. We are much more, lack of a better word, intimate than that. For example, one of my clients, he’s a big CEO of a $20 million business out of Vancouver. And we worked so hard to get him a speaking engagement. We got him to speaking engagement in Las Vegas. He was an introvert. We worked on a speech together, we practiced it, we role-played it. I was in the Philippines for work, he landed in Las Vegas to give his speech and then while he was in Las Vegas, he needed prep. He was nervous, as somebody in that situation might be. He called me, which was in the middle of the night, for the Philippines. We got on the phone, we role-played it again, got him ready and he jumped on stage, killed the speech, got three deals from that presentation. If I had said to him, hey, wait till our Thursday call, we’ll talk about it. That’s not what a coach, that’s not what a teammate does. That’s where I try to be a little bit different. I tried to really be engaged at that level.

– Actually, it’s much more fun too. It’s more fun to be a part of something, isn’t it?

– Yeah. It’s this entrepreneur in me. Early in my career, I was lucky to own a company in Salt Lake city, Utah, with another friend of mine that we built and got up and sold it just a couple of years ago, which was really nice. I won some entrepreneurship awards for the growth scale that we had on that. I’ve always loved getting involved with a business and growing it and building it from that perspective. In fact, I have a rule, if a business is over 25 million, I don’t wanna be involved, because that’s when you get a board, sometimes private equity is gonna start to come sniffing around and I’m like, hey, you need to find a different coach. My job is to get you to 25 million and try to get you to a sell. Other than that, it’s not as fun for me.

– Don, time goes so remarkably fast. You have so much to share. What have we not talked about that you think is really important for people to know and to think about?

– One of my favorite saying to the Chinese proverb, everybody uses it but it’s, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is today. UPS did a study that showed 70% of small businesses that invested in coaching lasted five years longer than those that didn’t. Any small business owner that might be thinking, God, do I need the right coach? It might not be me, you don’t have to use me. You could use myself, you could use Lois. You could use so many other people. ‘Cause you have to like your coach. You have to connect with them. But investing in coaching is the best thing you can do for your business. It’ll take it to the next level. You can go to my site at accountabilitynow.net. I know you talked about we’ll share that and learn more about it. But more importantly, learn about how you can help yourself by hiring the right coach and scaling your business. You can’t do it alone, get somebody to help you.

– You know, I think that one of the things that especially entrepreneurs struggle with is you go into entrepreneurship often because you want to do it alone. You’re independent in your spirit. The disservice that has happened, I think to entrepreneurs, is there has not been a robust discussion about no one does it alone. And if you do, your odds of really being able to grow and scale and have the revenue that you’re looking to have, or the profitability, which is more important probably, is it will elude you. The independence can be a deterrent. It’s a great skill to have because you have the drive, but it can also be what kills you.

– And so many into tie it back to the whole concept of your awesome podcast, that independence sometimes alienates against the staff and hurts them from leaving a legacy and really building something that lasts. It’s the outside perspective of somebody that has learned and failed and gone through it, that can say, okay, you’re making mistakes. There’s another old saying, I believe it was Buddha that said it, “A wise man learns from his own mistakes, “but the wisest man learned from the mistakes of others.” And that’s the whole point of hiring the right coach is you can just cheat off of their mistakes and get ahead faster.

– Well, our time is up. For those of you who are listening, we will put information about Don in the show notes so you can be in contact with him. He has an e-book that talks about some of these things that he’s working on. There’s a way for you to be in connection with him. Should you need further help or assistance, please let us know, we will be glad to connect you with Don. Don, thank you so much for being with us today on Building my Legacy Podcast.

– Thank you so much, Lois. Really appreciate it.