Today's Guest

PJ Weiland is a certified award-winning coach, speaker, entrepreneur, mentor, and philanthropist. Since 2011, Coach PJ has coached a thousand business owners and executives to accelerate their progress to the next level and achieve their biggest goals. She brings more than two decades of corporate leadership experience in a broad spectrum of industries to guiding her coaching clients with strategic planning, improving their leadership skills, building engaged, high-performing teams, creating effective marketing plans, and managing change. Coach PJ shared her coaching journey and how she pivoted into entrepreneurship.

Resources Shared

• Business Prophet
• Thryv

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:                 Hey, hey, this Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, the show dedicated to helping small businesses succeed. And this week we have a really unique small business story. Want to welcome our guest, PJ Weiland.

PJ Weiland:                        Good morning, Gordon.

Gordon Henry:                 What should listeners get out of this episode? Many of us could use a coach to help us navigate professional business and personal issues. PJ may be the one for you.

                                               So this show is brought to you by Thryv, that's T-H-R-Y-V, Thryv. Small Business runs better on Thryv. So what does a business coach actually do? You hear about it, but what do you do? Is it, I sit on a couch like a shrink and you diagnose me?

PJ Weiland:                        That's a great analogy. Unfortunately, it's not quite that clear, I say it to the average person looking for a business coach. Typically, when someone's looking for a coach, they're looking for someone to guide them. They're trying to move forward and they need more guidance, more insight. They might be very successful, but they want to go down a different path or they want to open up a new location.

                                               And so as a coach, my role is to help accelerate what they're doing and to guide them along the ways, whether it be marketing, sales, it could be their financials. Some of the best ways to describe it is to kind of look through my calendar and say, "Well, what did I do all day long?" And in a given day, I will help someone with a commission structure to build a commission structure, I'll help someone choose a CRM, I'll help with a hiring of a new staff person, depending on what the situation is. I will help them identify how to sell from the stage if they're in a webinar style situation, how to sell from the stage, how to engage with their clients, how to use the social media and the technology that's behind them to help get their message out. So it varies dramatically, but intimate in a small business environment.

Gordon Henry:                 Now, we were talking a little bit before the show about your clientele. So who are your clients, small business, medium business, large business, all the above?

PJ Weiland:                        Primarily, it's that small to mid-size business. And it's not industry specific. It's really businesses that want to grow and that are looking for more than what they currently have. So whether it's a roofer, whether it's a home care, whether it's a marketing company, an art business, I have clients in all types of industries because all of them want clients. All of them want more revenue. All of them want more profit. So the commonality exists at that level.

Gordon Henry:                 Yeah. Okay. And what does an engagement look like? So to my shrink analysis analogy there. So take us through from maybe somebody hears this show and calls you or books, I think you have a free appointment available, what does the next multiple weeks look like?

PJ Weiland:                        Okay. So if someone is looking for either help or assistance or is questioning whether or not they should engage with someone else and they don't necessarily know who that is, and I get a phone call, most of my phone calls come from referrals or from people that I have some connection with in the social media world. So they call and they say, "Here's going on." And we do a diagnostic or a early on just kind of, "Okay, tell me what's going on, tell me what you want to get through." And then what we do is we sit down and we work through together, and this is all complementary, what are their goals? What do they want to get out of their business? And I really go to the bottom line. What's the financial goals they're trying to achieve? And we marry that with what are the things that they're either not doing or could be doing better?

                                               And we pull together a list, we pull together, "Here are all the things that you can be doing better and you can be doing it all." And through that list and through their goals, we determine whether there's an ROI for them to engage coaching because they need to make a good business decision. It's not just about, I like you. It's about, well, yes, I can get more clients, I can get more profit, I can get more because of the list we put together and because of their goals. So a great client or a great prospect would be someone who says, "I want to grow my business by make it a million dollar business, or I want to make a $2 million business. And we sit down and we go through and go, "Okay, how are you doing?" Go through your marketing activities, go through your sales activities, your margins, and we find that there's room for that growth in the work that I do with them. It's an easy decision at that point.

Gordon Henry:                 What's a example of a successful business coaching situation you had maybe where a client came in with a really defined problem and you felt at the end of that, that you were able to solve it or help them achieve their goals of growth or improved profitability or performance?

PJ Weiland:                        One that comes to mind is a husband wife team. The husband was running the business for many, many years and the wife had a typical, I wouldn't call it corporate job, but kind of a traditional job. And she didn't like it and she wanted to work in the business. And that was their goal is like, can we get the business to a place where we can afford to bring her in and it makes sense to bring her in and she can have a little bit more balance in her life than she had at that point. And we did that. That was huge. It was an opportunity for her to quit her job, come into the business, and she's a dynamo. So from the standpoint of a great asset to the company, we took the company far enough to get her into the company. And now with her in the company, the mix of the two of them at the leadership level has so much potential.

Gordon Henry:                 What are some of the most common problems that small businesses face? What's the sort of classic one, two, three top problems you find?

PJ Weiland:                        They're not engaging with their customers enough. That's probably the biggest one because social media, communication, any kind, whether it's email, social media, YouTube, you name it, all of that is a way in which to create leverage in a small business. And business owners get busy and they don't have the focus or the discipline that they need to just keep that plate spinning. And that's been one of the big ones. Another big one is just financially, they're just not looking at a bigger picture of what's their business model and can they create a business model that creates leverage and is taking them where they want to be.

Gordon Henry:                 Yeah. I thought you might say something like working harder, not smarter, where so many small businesses just put in more and more and more hours and they think that's the way to dig themselves out of the hole. And often, the hole just gets deeper. And it seems like the way you deal with that, I guess there's a number of strategies, but one is building technology into your business where the systems can do some of the work for you, automate your email sending or automate your billing or your invoicing, things like that.

PJ Weiland:                        Yes, very much so. And technology can be a little intimidating, especially depending on the age of the business owner. It can be a little intimidating. I happen to have a technology background, so it's not very intimidating and it's very comfortable and I can help educate and help allay the fears and try and make it very simple for them to engage with this. I love the tools.

                                               There's many, many tools out there that people can use, and we're hearing more and more about them these days as we hear about ChatGPT or some of these other tools and people want to use them, but they don't know how. So that's a key role that I play in helping them navigate that and helping them identify how to use the tools. I'm a big proponent when it comes to tools, is to keep it simple and keep it just do things in a way that's very congruent with who they are. Because if they don't, it won't happen this week, next week, the week after. It just won't. So they have to be willing to kind of figure out, "Okay, how can I start communicating with my customers?" And not do fits and starts, but just how do I start, do it in a simple manner and then add to it as I continue to get that rolling and operationalized.

Gordon Henry:                 Our company, Thryv, does a CRM. And there are many CRMs out there, but the goal of this really is to start with the idea of having a digital database. That you have a customer list really. You have a list of your customers, you have their profile information. But way beyond just having name, address, telephone number, you have a history of the interactions between you. What jobs did you do for them? Did you fix the roof? Did you fix the basement? What was the job? And then of course, what did it cost and did they pay you and all those things. And then have the capabilities. Do most businesses have that type of record?

PJ Weiland:                        My clients do. But I would say before they become my clients, that's hit or miss. It's not a primary focus because it isn't something they need to run the business as a day-to-day. It's a little more strategic. And unless they're thinking more strategically about, where did my leads come from? What was the size of my transactions? Things like that. They're not tracking it. So that's one of the earliest things I have my clients do is track and begin to see patterns, because we also want to do cause and effect. That's a big thing with my clients. If we're going to change the way you communicate with people or we're going to add social media, I want to know that adding social media actually drives more people through the door. Actually, it brings your current clients back. We want to see that there's a cause and effect because otherwise, it becomes an exercise and it's hard to keep people motivated and interested in those types of activities if they're not seeing that they actually have an impact.

Gordon Henry:                 I want to ask you a couple questions, maybe more general business questions. Just thought like you might have some intriguing ideas here. Office politics, you probably see this in small businesses, you certainly see it in large businesses. What are your kind of words of advice about those types of issues?

PJ Weiland:                        I learned a long time ago, and I teach my clients this, that abundance and prosperity cannot exist among distraction and drama. And distraction and drama cannot exist without your participation. So let's unpack that just a little bit.

                                               So with a owner, it's the shadow of the owner. The owner sets the tone. And as long as you entertain or engage distraction or drama, which I'll call it drama. Office politics can manifest itself that way. Then you're going to have trouble reaching your goals. And you have a role, as distraction and drama cannot exist without your participation, as to how much you allow to happen, how much you participate in, and how do you nip it in the bud. Certain businesses are more prone to it in the element of, I do a lot with DISC profiling, which is behavioral profiling, and there are behavioral profiles that are more aggressive. And all of them have a different piece of it, but their drama shows up in different ways. One profile's more aggressive, another profile's more passive-aggressive. Another profile might be just kind of stonewalled and disengagement. And others can show up as bullies. And those are the worst case scenarios. But there are ways in which the politics kind of start to play out in an extreme mode.

                                               So teaching those tools to owners. And oftentimes, I'll engage with the team if there's some politics going on and some office dynamics that are not as healthy as they should be, we'll do some work with the entire team to help them learn more about how each other operate and how each other best communicate and try to clear the decks so that you can have a restart on that and have a more healthy conversation.

Gordon Henry:                 Do you find businesses operate a little differently now? Is it better or worse with people working from home?

PJ Weiland:                        Well, I'm just about ready to publish a book that has that element. And I've been working on some different chapters around remote working and flexibility and things like that because it is a different expectation. I get a lot of questions from my clients over COVID and during that time about, "What do I have to do? What do I need to do? What should I be doing? Do I have to accommodate?" And all of that has nuances. And it all goes back to do you have roles defined for people? If you take the person out of it, some tasks are better done in the office and some tasks can be done remotely. It's not the person necessarily, it's the task at hand.

                                               And that's why even the FLSA says, you have every right to say where an employee works because not that you always want to take that heavy hand, but you have the right because you're defining the tasks. You're not going to put a waitress to work from home. Doesn't make sense. That's an extreme, but it is a common question.

                                               I also tell people, particularly my clients, don't confuse flexibility with accountability. Just because you're flexible doesn't mean that you're fluid all the time. I don't know when they're coming in. I don't know whether they're going to answer the phone if they're at home. Flexibility is not necessarily void of accountability.

Gordon Henry:                 I see you either are or were a marathon, well, you listed as marathoner. I assume that means marathon runner. Do you still do that, and how has that helped your work?

PJ Weiland:                        I've done two marathons. I'm actually a streaker, which means I run daily, not what you think it is. I run daily and I've run daily for over five and a half years.

Gordon Henry:                 Oh my god.

PJ Weiland:                        And that has translated briefly to consistency to teaching clients, what do you do in your business that's considered a streak? Do you post daily? Do you look at your numbers daily? What do you do? So streaking or creating a streak, huge.

Gordon Henry:                 Wow. Impressive. And you live in Chicago, right?

PJ Weiland:                        Yes. I'm an outdoor runner.

Gordon Henry:                 Yeah. It's cold.

PJ Weiland:                        Yes.

Gordon Henry:                 What do you read?

PJ Weiland:                        Everything I can get my hands on. Literally everything I can get my hands on. I do a lot of podcasts. I do a lot of Audible, so most of my reading is-

Gordon Henry:                 Business books?

PJ Weiland:                        Business books. I like biographies. Biographies, my father was a big biography and he gave me the love of learning through people is a big one. But anything I can get my hands on, always.

Gordon Henry:                 Now you coach people probably in the areas where they need to improve. Where do you need to improve?

PJ Weiland:                        I was telling someone the other day, I'm not warm and fuzzy. That's not my core strength. My core strength is results. My core strength is the focus and things like that. So I'm always working on my empathy, always working on my empathy. And that, it's a muscle, so you have to keep it up.

Gordon Henry:                 Yeah. Great stuff, PJ. Well, thank you so much for your time. This has been great. And before we go, I want you to tell listeners where can they find you and what can they expect from this? First, I believe you do this sort of trial coaching session. How do they find you and what does that look like?

PJ Weiland:                        Sure. You can find me online at business-prophet.com. That's my website. I'm also on YouTube as Coach PJ Weiland. I produce two to three videos a week. So there's a lot of content that you can enjoy there. If you were to reach out and want a complimentary coaching session, we will spend about an hour together going through what are the goals in your business and how might they align to the types of things you should be doing. And we'll decide whether it makes sense to work together. And if it doesn't, you still have a list of things that you should be thinking about in your business.

Gordon Henry:                 That's awesome. Well, you really shared some great insights and I hope people will take advantage of that and then look you up and hopefully become clients of yours.

PJ Weiland:                        Excellent.

Gordon Henry:                 Thank you so much for coming in. We really appreciate opportunity to talk to you today.

PJ Weiland:                        Thank you so much, Gordon. Have a good day.

Gordon Henry:                 And I want to thank our producer, Tim Allemand and our coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. They do a great job. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends, and family to subscribe and please leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate. It helps us in the rankings. Small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo of Thryv at T-H-R-Y-V, that's Thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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