Daniel Hill: Welcome to today’s episode. I’m the host of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast by Permacast Walls, Daniel Hill, and we’re here today with Andrew Poles. Andrew, welcome.
Andrew Poles: Thank you, Daniel. It’s great to be here.
Killer Quotes
“I have found that founder growth and company growth are a flywheel effect. And if a founder’s professional growth or personal growth stalls, it’s almost always shortly thereafter when their business growth will also stall in some way.”
“If you wanted to do that, you could do it.” – Andrew’s wife’s belief that changed everything
“Bigger is not better intrinsically. It really isn’t and it’s a mistake to think that it is because if what you really love is the freedom your business gives you and you decide you want to scale up because bigger is better, you may find that it costs you your freedom to scale up and you’re not happy.”
“You always have to start with the ultimate end in mind. What is the outcome you’re shooting for? That has to inform your answer to the question: When is it time to scale up?”
Key Takeaways
- Personal and business growth are interconnected – When founders stop growing personally, their companies typically stagnate shortly after.
- Coaching focuses forward, not backward – Unlike therapy which explores how you got here, coaching identifies where you want to go and bridges that gap.
- Market conditions require sector-specific analysis – Economic factors like interest rates and inflation affect different industries in unique ways that require tailored strategies.
- Scaling isn’t always about getting bigger – Sometimes improving efficiency and profitability with your current size delivers better outcomes than expanding headcount or revenue.
- Define your end goal before scaling decisions – Whether you want to sell, create passive income, or maintain freedom determines when and how you should grow your business.
Background & Expertise
Daniel Hill: Andrew, for people who might not be familiar with you, can you tell us who you are and what it is that you do?
Andrew Poles: Yeah, I am an executive coach. My company is Andrew Poles Executive Coaching. And so executive coaching in the way that I do it, because it’s not like, let’s say being a surgeon where you’re a cardiothoracic surgeon or you’re a cardiac surgeon, people know what you do with executive coaching. You might do lots of different kinds of things with the people you coach.
In my case, what I’m doing is I’m working with founders of companies to scale themselves as a key lever in being able to also scale their companies. I have found that founder growth and company growth are a flywheel effect. And if a founder’s professional growth or personal growth stalls, it’s almost always shortly thereafter when their business growth will also stall in some way.
So my focus is really on assisting the founders and entrepreneurs to scale themselves and their companies side by side.
Ultra Marathon Mountain Biking
Daniel Hill: That’s a very unique take. I like that a lot. One of the things that you had put in your bio, which I saw is in addition to doing the executive coaching, you also run ultra marathons. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Andrew Poles: Yeah, it’s actually mountain biking, ultra marathon mountain biking races. So the races that I focus on are a hundred miles or greater, and they’re almost always at eight to 10,000 feet of elevation at the base of where the race starts. So we’re riding up and down mountainous trails for over a hundred miles, usually 10 to 12,000 feet of climbing involved in these races. They’re intense to say the least.
Daniel Hill: That’s incredible. Yeah, how did you even get started doing that?
Andrew Poles: So it was completely serendipitous if you believe in serendipity or it was divinely inspired depending on your point of view. I was languishing around with COVID at the end of December of 2021 and I was reading this book called Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It’s a great book by the way. And he talks about in this book, which is all about running and being a human being, this incredible race that takes place in Leadville, Colorado called the Race Across the Sky. And it’s a 104 mile long foot race in the Colorado Rockies.
And I’m reading this book and I’m thinking to myself, I don’t understand how these people are human beings and doing this. Like, this is ridiculous. And I’m telling my wife about this and she tells me, there’s a Netflix documentary about this. So we sit down one night to watch this.
Now here’s the serendipitous part. Every year in December, I go through this ritual with myself of reviewing the last year of my life and looking at where did I grow? Where did I not grow? Where did I break through the whole year? And then I kind of put it on the shelf like a book. I just read a great book. I set it aside and then I look forward to the next year and I come up with a theme for the year that I want to live from.
I like themes over resolutions because themes are just, they’re just robust and they’re powerful and they’re inspiring to me. And I come up with this theme for 2022 of accomplishing the seemingly impossible. It just really called to me.
Now, I hadn’t thought about anything I wanted to do with it yet. Like there was no specific goals. So I sit down with my wife, we watched this documentary and lo and behold, it’s not about running. There’s a race on the same course in Leadville. That’s mountain biking.
Now I was a mountain biker, but I mountain bike for fun. I would go like 10 miles and that would be dead at sea level. I’m watching this show. There are these people who are mountain biking a hundred miles at 10,000 feet of elevation. And I turned to my wife and I’m like, Honey, I could never do that. That’s crazy.
And she looks at me and she goes, Oh yeah, you could do that. Right now. She says that to me. And I just, I’m like, I laughed at her. I laughed in her face. I’m just like, babe, you don’t ride bikes. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I really appreciate how much you believe in me. I do, but you have no idea what you’re talking about. I could never do that.
And she like looks at me, Daniel, and she grabs my metaphysical shoulders, like with her whole being. And she goes, no, you don’t get it. If you wanted to do that, you could do it.
And something in that moment, in the way she was being with me, it just like penetrated in my chest. My heart started to race and I sat there kind of like boggled for a second and I started thinking, my God, what if she’s actually right about this? Like, what if I’m wrong? She’s right. And then I’m starting to think about, am I going to sign up for a hundred mile? Wait, what?
And I had no plans of doing anything like this, but it just drove up this sense that I had that I just can’t do hard things. With everything I had accomplished in my life, I just had this sense, especially in the physical domain, like I can’t do hard things. And so then I remembered my theme and I’m like, so this is what it’s gonna be, huh? I thought it was gonna be like some business goal, can I reach eight figure, you know, whatever. No, it’s gonna be a 100 mile mountain biking race in the Rockies.
So that’s how I got into it and it took me a year and a half to finally be able to complete one. First time I tried it that first year, I wasn’t able to finish. But when I finished the race, almost two years later, it just changed me as a human being to discover that I could do something that I really believe was impossible for me. And it was so impactful. I actually wrote a book about it. That will be coming out sometime next year.
The Executive Coaching Process
Daniel Hill: So let’s talk about the executive coaching that you do. Can you tell us about some of the clients that you’ve worked with in the past and how you’ve helped them?
Andrew Poles: Yeah, there’s a really broad spectrum. I’ve been coaching for 20, 22 years now, so I’ve gotten to work with over 10,000 people and they just cover this spectrum. But in terms of the people who are likely listening when it comes to like entrepreneurs, small business owners, I mean, I’ve worked with people everywhere from pre-revenue to the founders of a company that was acquired by Netflix. And now, you know, coaching people at Netflix or Epic Games or NASA.
So I really have gotten the opportunity to work with people at kind of all parts of this journey. And myself have started three companies. I’ve also run several multimillion dollar companies for others. So I have fortunately just lots of different kinds of experiences in the domain of business that I get to bring to bear on my coaching engagements to help my customers, my clients grow their businesses.
Daniel Hill: And how do you help these people? Let’s say that they have a stair hand rail business, things are going pretty well, but they want to hit that next level, whatever it is, they want to go from being two or three employees to 10 employees or they whatever it is. Let me just pick that one as an example, but how do you actually help people in that scenario?
Andrew Poles: Well, the people often ask me if they’ve never done coaching before, like, well, what is coaching? Like, what’s the difference between coaching and say therapy or something like that? And I think this is relevant to what you’re asking.
Because and people who participate in therapy or a therapist listening to this, please don’t hate me for doing characterizing this way. This is just the best way I could think of to make a distinction here, because, you know, coaches are not mental health professionals, so we don’t have that kind of training. But typically when people are going to therapy, a part of what they’re trying to do is understand how they work and how they got to be the way they are. Why am I this way? What happened? et cetera. So a lot of it is backward looking.
Coaching by contrast is about identifying where do you want to wind up and then finding a way to empower that person to bridge the gap between here and there. So coaching engagements, at least the way that I do them, they always start off with a series of objectives. And those objectives can be both professional, like revenue, growth, headcount growth, as you were saying, but also personal in terms of people’s leadership, their professional skills, their ability to lead team meetings, their ability to pitch investors for things like that.
So there are gonna be a number of goals in different domains they wanna accomplish that they can’t see how to do from where they are on their own. And that’s where the coaching becomes useful. My job is to equip them, to empower them to find their way across that gap in the time of the engagement.
Now, how do I go about that? It’s a combination of coaching them in the domain of being, which is something that most people don’t talk about. And it’s weird because human beings operate in three domains, right? We are human beings, so we have ways of being. We can go about what we’re doing, being loving or being irritated. We can go about what we’re doing, being open or being closed. So ways of being are fundamental for human beings, and that’s important area of life.
So you have being, then you have action, and you have results, the things that you have in life. And there is a flow naturally in life from being to actions and from actions to results. So you go, I’m married. If I go have a conversation with my wife, if I’m being loving, no matter what we’re talking about, I take one kind of actions. If I’m being righteous, I take a very different set of actions and I get a very different result if I’m being loving or I’m being righteous.
So some of the coaching I do is in the domain of being and giving people access to new ways of being and new ways of seeing the world that allow them to take actions they couldn’t take before or couldn’t take effectively. And that enables them to produce different results. So some of my coaching is about that. Some of my coaching is straight up about how do you think about business in a new way that allows you to take different actions. So we’re working in both domains, both that personal domain and in the business domain on filling in what would make the difference and then accomplishing their goals.
Economic Uncertainty & Market Conditions
Daniel Hill: You explained that so well. One of the things that I think a lot of people are feeling is some uncertainty right now in terms of the economy. Is it a time to grow or is it a time to scale back? What would you say you’ve seen in your experience of the impact that the recent changes in the economy causing uncertainty? How has that affected small businesses from your vantage point? And if we picked an example like commercial real estate agents, what would you say in that regard?
Andrew Poles: So I actually have a couple. It’s interesting that you asked about that. I do have some clients who are commercial estate agents. And so one of the things that you’re seeing right now in commercial estate, for example, is interest rates are a part of the current environment. And although interest rates did recently go down, I think 25 bips, they’re generally higher than they’ve been in some time.
So if you’re in commercial real estate, let’s say, and you are a landlord, you’re on the landlord side, so you own this property and you’re investment only really returns anything to you if you can keep the property occupied and leased, et cetera. So if interest rates are high and you, let’s say you bought the property 10 years ago and now it’s time to refinance your loan and the interest rates are two points higher now, so they’re two percentage points higher now than they were when you purchased and you have to refinance, that completely changes the financial model of your business. So that’s there, right? So there are a lot of commercial loans coming up. So this is a challenge for the landlord side of things.
But then at the same time, if you’re a tenant, so you’re a retail business, you’re a restaurant, whatever, you know, the costs of goods have gone up for you. Because right now pricing is high, there’s a little inflation in the market. So now your business model is being stretched, your profitability is being stretched at the same time that commercial real estate prices are wanting to go up to cover this refinancing challenge. So in that particular industry, you can see how that’s how this plays out.
It really you have to look at it sector by sector. But since you asked about that sector, just to give you some sense of it, that’s some of what is going on out there right now.
Geographic Business Considerations
Daniel Hill: I definitely agree with that. And the point you make about how people view it to interest rates versus inflation and so forth is incredibly valid. What would you say for a business that is geographically fixated in some way, say a CPR class, for example, that’s serving a specific demographic area. What type of needs, business needs would a company like that have to consider?
Andrew Poles: Well, for one thing, you have to consider how the current market conditions we were just talking about affect your target demographic. And that could be anywhere on the spectrum from it’s advantageous to disadvantageous to it’s somewhere in between.
So for example, you said a CPR class, right? So maybe, maybe I’m someone in an industry, in a job, and I’m thinking, man, I think AI is going to gobble up my job in the next year or two. I need to find a different thing to do that AI is not going to gobble up. Well, hey, maybe I could go learn how to be a paramedic, you know, and I don’t think AI is going to gobble up a paramedic skill. So maybe I need to go start getting myself trained in what that takes.
So maybe now if I’m the business giving that class, I’m going to think about marketing to someone with a message that’s hitting that note. Like, hey, concern that, you know, changes in artificial intelligence might steal your job. Think about a career and da da da da, right?
So geographically located businesses could think about, now it’s interesting because a CPR class, I personally wouldn’t think of that as necessarily a geographically located class if it can be done online, but if you have to be actually pumping dummy chests and things like that, then yeah, okay, I could get that. So then you’re gonna think about Google, maybe keyword searches in your geographical area, bidding on those kind of search terms, people who are searching for like, need, I’m looking for a job that’s not going to get gobbled up by AI. So things like that. That’s one way you could think about it.
Scaling Up: When Is The Right Time?
Daniel Hill: Yeah, I like that approach too. And good point on the Google AdWords because that is something that someone who wants to take that class, who’s thinking about their future, who potentially would want to teach their own CPR class. I absolutely love that approach. One similar question, but in a slightly different vein, what would you say is the key to knowing when is the right time to scale up?
If you have a home services business, like maybe a Nashville pool installation company and things are going smooth, how do you know when it’s the right time to expand and to scale up?
Andrew Poles: I think that question needs to be answered maybe with just a little bit of nuance. So for example, I have two very different types of entrepreneur that I coach. I coach venture-backed Silicon Valley-style startup founders. And I also coach, just because it’s a love of mine and it’s where I started my entrepreneurial journey, I coach small business owners.
So if I’m a venture-backed company, the word scale up means something very different than they do if I am a pool cleaning contractor or remodeling contractor. Those are two completely different connotations of the word to scale.
So if you’re looking at the venture-backed startup and you’re trying to grow into a unicorn, a billion dollar company, the time to scale up is when you’ve demonstrated what people call product market fit. When the market is screaming at you, you have something I really want. And now the challenge you have is you are not resourced appropriately to answer the demand for the size of market you have found a fit in. So in that case, when you have demonstrated you have product market fit and the market is clearly telling you, if you can get a million things of this out, you can sell a million of these things, now it’s time to just pour on the capital and put in a bunch of sales functions and a bunch of manufacturing functions if it’s a widget or whatever.
But for small business, it’s completely different and the considerations are different. And what I would say is, and this is where I find many small business owners skip an important step, is you always have to start with the ultimate end in mind. And I don’t find very many entrepreneurs who do this.
And what I mean by the ultimate end is, is what you want to do, sell your business at some point, is what you want to do, own a business that you don’t have to work in, that pays you sort of what they call mailbox money. Is it that you just love what you do? What you want to do is extract yourself from all the administrative stuff you don’t like so you can just do the technical work you love. What do you want to do? What is the outcome you’re shooting for?
That has to inform your answer to the question. When is it time to scale up? Because bigger is not better intrinsically. It really isn’t and it’s a mistake to think that it is because if what you really love is the freedom your business gives you and you decide you want to scale up because bigger is better, you may find that it costs you your freedom to scale up and you’re not happy, right?
And so you really need to know what is the ultimate outcome you’re going for and that answers your question. I know I’m not answering your question directly. That’s only because I don’t think you can without understanding your business goals first.
Daniel Hill: No, I think that’s a fantastic answer because to your point, if you have a different goal from someone else, right, just because you want to scale up, if it comes with more stress, more anxiety and more, you know, unfun work that you now have to do, is it really worth it? Was the growth at all costs that you were willing to do really worth it? And I think a lot of times small business owners are just so focused on, you know, the next month or the next quarter or whatever. So thinking that far ahead gives a lot of perspective. Where are you trying to go? And that really makes sense from a executive coach, from a leadership perspective. What is that goal that you have in mind that’s right for you? And then tailoring the plan to do that. That makes complete sense. And I really liked that approach.
Andrew Poles: Great, yeah, and you know, it’s like, if someone’s answer to the question is, and I want to make more money, you don’t necessarily have to scale up to do that. I mean, it’s like, how much do you look at your margins? Are you leaving money on the table? What if you could make the same amount of take home money right now with half the top line revenue, because your business is inefficient? Would you take 50% less headache with no equivalent pay cut to cut your, like, yeah, most entrepreneurs would like, I’ll take that all day long.
So maybe what we ought to do is get really efficient before we start thinking about regrowing the revenue. Maybe we need to get rid of half our customers because they’re not profitable. You know, whatever. So yeah, the end goal is really important to consider. And again, something I find many entrepreneurs skip mostly because they don’t know that it’s important to do or they don’t know what their answer is. And they find that embarrassing or frustrating. And so, you know, sometimes people just need to do that in a conversation because they think out loud better then they think in their head when it comes to those kinds of things.
Where To Connect & Future Projects
Daniel Hill: That was an excellent explanation. Andrew, this has been fantastic getting to chat with you. Can you tell us where we can find you online and what we can look forward to you creating in the near future?
Andrew Poles: Yeah, great. So I’m very active on LinkedIn. And so you can certainly contact me there. Send me a connection request. I’ll accept it. Especially if you let me know that you heard about me on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. Or you can connect with me through my website, andrewpoles.com. My LinkedIn is also my name. It’s linkedin slash in slash Andrew Poles. So either one of those you can get to me.
As I mentioned, I have a book coming out next year about that whole experience of taking on that race. It’s called Over the Gate. And so that’ll be coming up soon.
And I’m also beginning to do some work on products that I’m gonna be putting on a learning hub online that will be a much lower cost option for entrepreneurs, because I know many of them really need that right now. Professional coaching is more expensive than self-paced learning, so I’m gonna be developing some products like that as well, so stay tuned.
Daniel Hill: That’s a great idea. Then people can watch and listen at their own pace, right, and digest it while still getting to access your expertise. I think that’s a great approach.
Key Interview Insights Recap
| Topic | Key Insight | Action Item |
| Founder Growth | Personal and business growth are a flywheel – when one stalls, the other follows | Invest in personal development as a business strategy |
| Scaling Decisions | Always start with your ultimate end goal in mind | Define whether you want to sell, create passive income, or maintain freedom |
| Market Strategy | Economic conditions affect each sector differently | Analyze your specific industry’s challenges and opportunities |
| Business Efficiency | Sometimes profitability matters more than growth | Audit margins and eliminate unprofitable customers before scaling |
| Coaching vs Therapy | Coaching is forward-focused on bridging gaps to goals | Use coaching when you know where you want to go but not how to get there |
| Geographic Businesses | Local businesses can leverage economic trends in marketing | Target customers affected by job displacement (AI fears, career changes) |