Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep 286 | 5 Powerful Insights from Brad Smith to Unlock Business Success and Financial Growth
Imagine transforming your business and skyrocketing your revenue—all while deepening your self-awareness and understanding the mind-body connection. This episode of Chasing Financial Freedom features Brad Smith, a seasoned business growth coach who shares his incredible journey from the lab as an analytical and formulation chemist to the boardroom as a trusted advisor to CEOs and business owners. Brad opens up about his work with well-known over-the-counter skin products like CaliGel and Corticool, and how those experiences paved the way for founding Stellar Insights. He offers a compelling case study, illustrating the power of diverse thinking in driving business success, even under tight budgets.
But it doesn’t stop there. Brad delves into the essential role of self-reflection and self-worth in achieving financial success, drawing from his 28 years of meditation practice. He shares actionable insights into how understanding your subconscious can unlock both personal and professional potential. Discussing client relationships, Brad emphasizes the importance of rapport and aligning strategies with one's natural tendencies for optimal outcomes. He also outlines the criteria and qualities he looks for in new clients, encouraging listeners to contemplate the profound impact of significantly increasing their life achievements. This episode promises not just inspiration, but practical strategies to elevate both your business and personal growth. Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation!
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Hey guys, ryan DeMint from Chasing Financial Freedom podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Today on the podcast, we have Brad Smith, and Brad is making awareness matters in business. So, brad, welcome to the show. Well, I'm here. So before we get into what you're doing, how about a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? Hey however far you want to go. Okay, I've been coaching CEOs and business owners and executives on business growth for 28 years. Before that, I was an analytical and formulation chemist, which meant you take a concept, you build the tools into the beaker and you put it in the right conditions and you make it happen.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So what would be? Something that the general population or the listeners would know, something that you worked with in that space?
Speaker 2:Oh, we did my dad's company I think that just recently we sold it but Tech Labs, we made over-the-counter skin products. One of them was well, there's several CaliGel, which was a calamine-like lotion, only it was clearer. Corticool, which was also another gel product. Tepnir, poison oak and ivy cleanser was the first one my dad stumbled into which was pretty brilliant and it was because of grandfather Dan. The FDA says yeah, go for it, and it takes the urushi oils that cause from poison oak, poison, ivy poison, sumac off your skin. If you're slow enough to react before the rash sets in, she would go out into the backyard and pull poison oak out of the backyard with her bare hands. Coming to wash up would never get a poison oak rash.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about Stellar Insights and how you came about that.
Speaker 2:Stellar Insights. Second now Ed's wife brought me an article about a woman who'd gone through Kirch University and she said you're already doing this, Brad, you might as well have education for what you're doing. I was doing a formula sheet consulting. Now, excuse me, that's about the time. So formula formula consulting Okay, that was for a death company. You know me directly in the company. So they hired me as a consultant, just sort of.
Speaker 1:that was a decade okay, so then since then you've been coaching specifically ceos business owners, ceos. Yeah, is there a particular space that you focus in on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, human.
Speaker 1:So like business space, as in was there an industry.
Speaker 2:No, not really. I have found that there's a few I don't work with because they don't move fast enough inside themselves. They tend to be so higher education. I tried that. That doesn't seem to work well. Other than that, if someone is ambitious or curious and keepy kind, they're a good client. Curiosity means you're willing to listen to other ideas than your own.
Speaker 1:So what brings these CEOs and business owners into your space?
Speaker 2:Almost always they want more money. That's the visionary process. If they want more money, ask them what's the upper limit you think you can reach Getting the business with the business model they built? And they give me a number. And the fun part is we almost always if it depends on the situation, but almost always we can go way beyond what they think. The first time I'd been in my business maybe a decade I got a client and I took him from $3.5 million up to 12.9 million in our three-year period and then the following year with all the things we'd done. We restructured literally the whole company Sales, marketing, production and he went from 12.9 to 13.2 million. We multiplied his net profit by a factor of five. Wow. So we had all the pieces in place and he did a good job.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about what you do when you're working with a CEO and business owners?
Speaker 2:The first thing I do anytime I talk with someone is I'm listening. My key skill is listening and insight right. I sell insight right. So what happens is I listen for what they're currently experiencing, what the business is, what the revenue is, what the people are and what is interfering with improving the rate of their growth. In other words, if you take someone from, let's say, 20% growth to 40% growth, you change the trajectory, and that's where I work today, whereas what's working, what's not working, what are the gaps, what are the blocks, and then, in the process, I help them figure out what part of them is interfering with the growth of the company, who you are.
Speaker 2:The short way to put it is you can't grow a company beyond the limitations of the leader period. The point of having a coach is to have someone outside that bubble talk to us, help us understand and help us expand our, if you will, our universe. I think that's one of the major things of a relationship, whether it's romantic or not. Right Relationships reinvented the human race. More than having just one human on the planet planet, we have more than one, so we can learn from each other.
Speaker 1:There's the adventure so how do you take that approach with ceos and business owners?
Speaker 1:Because I can tell you this, I've got some of the same problems, but I know that only way to grow my business is surround myself with people that are not like-minded, they think differently than me, but we have the end result of the businesses to grow it and to help our clients. The challenge is and this is just me personally is, as I'm growing this side of my business like the lending side, I'm also on the affordable housing space side you have to watch your budget and you can't just go out and spend willy nilly to bring people on. So I always have this joke is you need to work with people that you not just can't afford but also can't miss out with, because they bring a whole nother set of skills that you don't have. And that's a struggle, for I know, for me as an entrepreneur and a business owner, because I'm like my gosh, I'm turning over so much to this individual, but in the end it's there's a weight off my, my chest or my back that this person can do all these other things that I struggled with.
Speaker 2:We can't be all things, all people. We can't. We have a limitation. There's a reason for that we have a limitation. There's a reason for that we have to learn how to listen.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I tell people is what you know about yourself is the only way you can understand what you know about other people. In other words, if you care about somebody, you can read other people's ability to care by reading yourself. If you can't see me, but put your hand on your chest, that radar right there is how you can read other people. You can't. If you don't get any attention here, you can't hear other people. One of the ways I stumbled into that was if someone is very depressed, what do they do? They drop their chin. What they're doing is they're focusing all their energy and their awareness internally. They're listening to their heart and they're trying to build a better connection there. Depression is not a fun state, right? But if you hold your chin level, then you are in an equal relationship with yourself and the outside world. There's a few people that lift their chin above level. That means they're disconnecting from themselves because they do not want to know what their radar is telling them.
Speaker 1:How did this all come about and how you came across it?
Speaker 2:I've been coaching for about 12 years. I was part of a networking group to get more clients. If we had a gentleman show up and, other than being obnoxious, he had his chin above level almost the whole time. I watched that really carefully how he interacted with the group. It was just interesting to watch that.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite things to do is to watch couples shock together. You can watch what is the rapport place in them and watch where they disconnect. If you watch deeper than that, you can read their whole character in a picture. If you're careful even more deeper, you can listen to them. So I used to do phone coaching online when I started and people across the country. We didn't have Zoom then we didn't have video. At that time I could hear their whole character in their voice. Took a little more work in watching them. It's all there. We broadcast constantly who we are. At almost all of our level Character comes out of us. If you think about that and being able to watch it, then you flip over and you what's the universe doing with that? What are the mechanisms for that?
Speaker 2:I have a short story that I'll drag you into. Okay, when I was 18, fall term, freshman year at Oregon State studying chemical engineering. I developed an ulcerated colon and the doctor said to me when I got to him a month later he said gee, brad, if you'd waited such weeks to come see me, you'd have bled to death. Wow, I didn't know it was that bad. I have no clue because I was 18, right. And he said you'll never eat strawberries, corn or lettuce or anything with roughage, ever again in your life. My 18 year old brain said that's not happening. Then he said this sentence changed my life. He said you have a psychosomatic disease. Your emotions affect the severity of your symptoms.
Speaker 2:I was in pain all the time. I was conscious, I was in pain and I was bleeding, and so I figured, if it was psychosomatic and I knew what that meant I created the disease. If I created it, I could uncreate it. Would it quit? No, it took me about six months to stop or at least wear down the bleeding, probably a year to get it to where it was just episodic, and then the pain took another three years, but it was then still episodic. So that was 18, 21, and that range. When I was 47, I finally figured out. There was a key memory that I had at about 11, 12 months old. I went back in with hypnosis and reworked that memory to an adult perspective instead of a toddler perspective, or my disease went away.
Speaker 1:Can we kind of transition that into how did that play out of your life and the coaching you do today? I'm guessing you're applying some of those things to the coaching you're doing today.
Speaker 2:I had to work my body. I had to watch how it felt and I had to study my emotions and the interaction between my emotions and my body. I studied that. Then I started watching patterns and then I started watching. Where did the initial decisions, where did the energy come in that led me to understanding character, and then the subconscious, and understanding all of those things we don't consciously will ourselves through the disease, but we also don't consciously will ourselves into poverty or wealth. Right, it takes conscious effort to do that.
Speaker 2:If you work with patterns within your life, I know that when I need to go dig another layer down and clear out another layer of my subconscious, because there are little thoughts running around the edge that never voice themselves unless you go talk to them directly. So I'm a 28, 28-year, 29-year meditator. That means that all you do is you sit, no matter what method you use, you're sitting and you're watching your mind and, as a result of that, you learn how to be objective and subjective at the same time. When I'm working with clients, I watch their character, I watch the character of their business. I watch the character of their customers. What is it that their customers are actually getting? And then how does that flow? You have a customer optimize it so they can get more customers, and that is the process, or they didn't get more customers.
Speaker 1:And that is the process. Doesn't that also start with the CEO or the actual owner of the business and how? That I love what you're talking about. I'm just that's a very interesting way to take basically an approach to coaching. It's totally different. But when you have somebody that's struggling with this, how do you find out that you can work with them to be able to help them? Anybody can change. It's just a matter of do they want to put the time and effort in?
Speaker 2:Well, we have three ways of learning. We can learn from brick walls, which are the really beautiful ones, right. We can learn from the words people say and the words we say beautiful ones, right. We can learn from the words people say and the words we say their thoughts, right. Or we can learn from the whispers.
Speaker 2:I like to listen to the whispers, the things that are at the back of the mind. My job is to listen to all of them and bring out the stuff they can't quite get to. Before they can get to it, I just catalyze and shorten the distance and time it takes to get placed. That's my job. I like that. Or if someone could stumble to it in five years and get all the answers they need to do that, I'd like to shorten it up to a year. That happened Then the next time we turned it around. The shortest client was six months. We changed his natural native speech pattern. The longest one was 13 years and he built a whole new. He was an attorney. He built a whole new national practice out of it, so that was pretty fun too.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's interesting. As a business owner and a CEO who would be your ideal client that you'd want to work with. Or if someone's listening right now to the podcast, how would they know that they would want? They need your type of help. One but two where to really start and understand all this.
Speaker 2:Are they frustrated with the growth of their business?
Speaker 1:Very simple.
Speaker 2:I love it. Is there a possibility that they could grow their company faster and not be in frustration or pain?
Speaker 1:No, that resonates with pretty much every business owner Going a little bit deeper under the hood, and so forth the struggles. But where do you jump off and say this is the ideal client for me and it's not? Is that in that initial contact that you have with him or her and understand where they're at to make that decision? And how do they determine if you're the right person to help them get to that next level?
Speaker 2:Depends on the resonance the rapport we build. If there's no rapport, there's not really going to be movement. Okay, if there's no record, there's not really going to be movement. Okay, if there's a recorder I mean you know what, pretty close to the first five minutes we're talking that's a recorder then there's alignment. If there's alignment, then I can call things out of their mind and their subconscious and their situation. It will help them understand. Do you know? Anybody who does has known Epiphany, my word of the year is.
Speaker 2:I draw Epiphany to them faster. I talk to someone for an hour. I pretty much know they and their organization, what Epiphany is, the whole organization and the individuals, the CEO I'm working with. Organization and the individuals the CEO I'm working with. I don't know anywhere from an hour to a month to six months ahead of time because it takes time to filter ideas through the bubble every once in a while.
Speaker 1:So, once you've done that, what's the game plan? To be able to help them grow their business, where do you? I know you want to peel the layer of the onion back, but just some nuggets and some high-level items that you could share with the audience I sat down.
Speaker 2:I had to do this at one point with myself. I sat down and I was having trouble wanting to grow my business. So I thought, oh, at that point I need to do cold calling. I went to the library, checked out the largest, the largest clients or the largest companies in the Northwest region and checked out the books on selling, found one or two that were really good, studied them really deeply and I started cold calling.
Speaker 2:I had one afternoon that was horrific. Person after person, I was calling them up and saying, because we didn't have the internet, I said may I send you a brochure about the work I do? And I got 40% of them to say yes, but 60% of them and the last five people, and certainly the last gentleman, just annihilated. I stopped myself and I said said just doesn't feel good. And then I sat down and I said okay, what are you actually doing? You're offering people an opportunity, but what's interfering?
Speaker 2:I realized I didn't have enough character strength at the time and even though I knew the script and I knew how, what I found was I made everyone responsible doing a call, responsible for my self-worth. That's a ridiculous idea In Colandone. What I realized was I didn't even give my parents that they're still alive. At the time I didn't even give my parents the responsibility for setting my daughter up here. Why would I give her a complete stranger, not responsibility. Then I understood we live our lives from the outside in instead of from the inside out. I know, yep Right, live our lives from the outside in instead of from the inside out. Yep Right, and if I'm living my life from the inside out, it means that I'm offering people an opportunity, but I don't make them responsible for who I am or what I am.
Speaker 1:That's pretty deep and we all struggle with that. I have a pod. The other podcast is called Chasing Happiness and that's truly just a play on words, because we do chase happiness from the outside, because we're chasing all those materialistic things that are out there and we're chasing the Joneses, and the Joneses are broke, they're in debt and ready to fall off the edge. But I love that we have this instant gratification. Love technology, love the Internet, love social media, love technology, love the internet, love social media. But majority of the stuff that we see on social media is fake, just to get likes and views and shares. So people can feel good about themselves when they're realistically are fighting the battle that no one else knows about. I relate that to business too. It's not always rosy in business and you have to be transparent with yourself and know exactly where you're at and what you can and can't do, and I don't think we have those hard conversations at times.
Speaker 2:So I'm 74 and I just realized, maybe four or five years ago, you know, I'd helped several people become millionaires. Brad, why don't you do that for yourself? So I sat down and started working through all of my issues. What are the things that, in the back of my mind, kept me from believing that I could be a millionaire? Then, beyond that, focusing my energy on not money, that's just a measurement, one of my friends comes to me and says oh, I want to make more money. I say, okay, we'll use that as a measurement. But why do you want to grow your company? And we did. I have a client. We take it in from about two and a half million to 35 million, which is fun. My goal is to add at least one more zero to his life. That would be a lot of fun. But then the process moved him from being able to say your, my main goal is to get more money to find your billion dollars in your life.
Speaker 2:What are you going to do to make yourself complete? Who are you and what is that I? I can't do. Someone comes to you with a bad opinion of you. What do you do with it? Do you make it yours and inside your heart or do you just study it? You can have it outside yourself, right, yeah? What do you do with your self-worth? How do you grow your self-worth? There's people that say that I think this is true. Self-worth is a measurement of how much money you're worth. Money is a reflection of that. If you self-worth is a choice and if you're working on self-worth, all of us have met narcissists, people that are arrogant, and what that means is underneath they're hiding their insecurities or they never understood. We all go through the narcissistic stage when we're about owning us, right, but some people don't get the chance to outgrow that and become aware and empathetic of other people. What are you aware of? What do you need to know? And then, where are you reading yourself into other people, kurt?
Speaker 1:did I answer your question? Oh yeah, I like that. That's great, we got to wrap this up. So a couple more questions and then we'll get going. One is are you currently working or looking to take on new clients?
Speaker 2:Yep, okay, the four requirements, what you asked about Smart, curious, ambitious and kind, because I don't work with unkind people?
Speaker 1:Okay, and if listeners want to reach out to you, where's the best place for them to connect with you?
Speaker 2:My website is stellarinsightcom.
Speaker 1:Okay, I will also link that in the show notes so they can actually get to that. Thank you very much for coming on. Love the conversation, love what you're doing. You have a very unique approach, but also one that's very good because you're going inside out instead of outside, in which we're all struggling with. Thank you for your time today and love what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I want everybody that's listening to know if you add a zero or two to your life possible.
Speaker 1:And the last piece is when you do add that one or two zeros, what are you going to do with it? So, thank you, sir.
