Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. Today on the podcast we have Terry McDougall from terrybmcdougall.com. Terry, welcome to the podcast.
Thomas, thanks for having me.
You’re welcome. Would you like to tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. I’m an executive and career coach and I’m an author of a book called Winning the Game of Work. I work with high achieving professionals to help them expand the overlap between their professional success and personal happiness. Prior to becoming a coach in 2017, I was a marketer for 30 years. I worked primarily in financial services, but also in publishing and a couple other industries, and what’s the coaching business like at the moment? It is booming, actually. I work with people who are in job search as well as people who just want to be more effective in their current roles and I think between, you know, the many layoffs that have happened and people, I think having the time and perspective to really re-examine what’s going on in their careers. A lot of people have reached out to hire me as a coach. It’s been a busy year.
Well, that’s good news. I think a lot of online businesses have seen a bit more demand as a result of everything that’s happened. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that as you know, I was pretty much online, anyway. I very rarely met with clients in person, but as many other people have had to adapt to this virtual way of doing business. I think people are getting a lot more used to the fact that, you know, they can hire people and actually never share the same space with them except for online. I know you’ve got a book out. What was the process of writing your book like? And can you talk a bit about the book in general? Yeah, well, so when I first left my corporate job, I think I had just had a lot of things to process. I was really, you know, talking about – I was talking earlier about people having a change of perspective. I think when I left the corporate world I really had time to process a lot of lessons and things that had happened over the course of my career.
So I started blogging, and I blogged for about two years on mainly on leadership and career type topics. And somewhere along the line, someone said to me, you know you probably have enough words for a book. And when I downloaded them all I had about 25 or 30,000 words. And I actually decided to write a book. And I did it through a book writing program that is run by a professor at Georgetown University. And it was an online program where you know, each week he sort of like taught lessons and how you actually go about writing a book. And the program was affiliated with a publisher called New degree press that they work with, it’s kind of what they call a hybrid model because I’m officially a self-published author, but I had the benefit of working with a publishing company that helped me with everything from cover design to the layout and the editing.
And you know, basically held my hand to teach me how to get lifted on Amazon and on Bondi noble and a lot of the other global online booksellers. So I would say it was a really great program. I’ve actually referred probably 20 people to the program because everybody is curious about, well, how did you go about writing your book? So, so what qualities or principles rather would you share from the book that you would say well, our most terrible, yeah, you know, the reason why I called the book Winning the Game of Work is because I think a lot of times when people start working, they think work getting ahead at work is really different than what it really takes to get ahead at work. For many people that are high achievers, they think, okay, I’ve worked hard to get here. So, you know, just continue continuing to work really hard is going to, you know, ensure that I’ll be successful and I guess I’m, my book is really about challenging that because I I can tell you, you know, both from my own experience and with a lot of people that I work with as a coach, that hard work is not always enough, and in fact, you know, people can really stress themselves out by working hard and not getting the results that they expect.
And so the book is really about actually, I’ll use this analogy, you know, a lot of times people you know, they’re so caught up in their day to day work, it’s almost like being in a scrum in a rugby match, you know, where there’s just a massive humanity that’s around the ball and there’s just no way to get any kind of perspective and so what I really suggest is that people step back and sometimes, you know, stop doing all the things that they think are going to get them success and really re-examine, you know, strategically really, what do you need to do to get ahead. And so I suppose the book is about treating work more strategically and I’ve got a lot of tips and advice on sort of shifting mindset in order to do that. And one thing that I like to talk to people about in my coaching is leverage points, because I see this particularly when people become new leaders that, you know, they’re used to either being an individual contributor or managing a small team and, you know, when you rise within an organisation, it’s really critical to be able to leverage the resources that are at your disposal, but often people will continue to come to work and do all of the things they did in that lower-level position and start to feel like they’re burnt out.
They’re not seeing the results. And it’s really because they’re not leveraging the resources that are at their disposal, and that could be everything from delegation being clear about community, communicating expectations to staff, making sure they have the right people and the right roles, developing systems to, you know, take care of ongoing processes. You know, sometimes people will just try to keep doing things and kind of like one off manner rather than stepping back and saying, you know, what’s our what’s our pattern here and what’s the consistent outcome that we’re looking for and how can we build that into the system. So that’s just sort of an example. I guess, you know, I really shared a lot of lessons from my own career. I also interviewed 11 people for the book about their careers. And frankly, that’s one of my favourite parts of the book, because I think it’s very easy to look at people who are successful and just assume that they are on this sort of like straight up escalator ride to their current, you know, high-level position and, you know, when you really talk to people about what it took to get there.
I mean, you know, people have been fire, they were, you know, they had certain crossroads and they were career where they could have gone in a different direction and for whatever reason they decided to take the direction that led them to their current level of success. so I found that extremely inspiring because it just makes you realise that if you’re in a place in your career where you’re not necessarily happy with it, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to a place that you’ll be happy with. And sometimes what we might view as failures are actually really critical points turning points in your career. Yeah, I definitely think something you touched upon sometimes referred as letting go when you say when you’re rising up as you say in a corporation and you’ve got all these responsibilities and you let’s say you get a promotion, I do think letting go of some of those responsibilities. it can be really tough for people because they’re used to doing it well and perhaps, you know, maybe you don’t have someone who is as good at doing that thing as you.
And so not only do you take on your new role, but you actually incentivise two jobs in a way. Yeah, absolutely. And I I’ve heard from many people that they say, oh it’s just quicker to do it myself and you know, this kind of hearkens back to a memory that I have from business school and my organisational behaviour professor said, you know, if the fastest typist in the corporation was the CEO you still would not allow him to do the typing, right? You really have to look at what is your highest value work and focus your time and energy on the work that only you can do. You know, even if there’s somebody on your team that you know, has to take over something that you used to do and it takes them twice as long to do it. If it’s low value work, that’s actually a good use of resources. and when you free yourself to be at that higher level, that’s whenever you come up with the innovative ways of doing things.
That’s whenever you can focus on strategy, that’s when you can look you know, with a discerning eye at your team and what they’re accomplishing sometimes, you know, maybe there aren’t the right people in the right places, maybe there are systemic things that need to be addressed, but if you’re if you’re in the middle of the scrum, you’re not gonna be able to see that. I really liked that analogy. I’ve not heard that before about the CEO doing the typing, it’s really apt because I don’t think anyone thinks their CEO should be should be transcribing or something. Yeah. You know, I think that one of the other things that you’ll see is that you know, people that tend to rise also tend to be multi-talented and so you really have to be selective about how you use your time and energy and even if you like doing something or you’re good at it, if that’s not the primary focus or that’s not your highest value work, you need to have the discipline to delegate it.
Good point. So you said you were in marketing for a long time, How did you end up getting into coaching? Well, it’s really interesting because I think that coaching and marketing have a lot in common. I suppose that, you know, when I look back over my career, I I’ve always been sort of a helper. I’ve always been interested in solving problems and you know, I like I like people I hired coaches a couple times during my career where I, you know, I was kind of running into some challenges that I didn’t feel like I could deal with on my own. So I was familiar with the profession. but I ended up leaving my corporate job after the last corporate job I had, I was at the company for about 12 years and I felt like I had kind of come to the end of the road with where I could go with that company and with some changes, changes that were going on with the organisation, I just decided to leave and when I left, I thought, you know, what am I good at and what do I like to do?
You know, I had, I had a little time and space to really think about what my next move was going to be, I decided to get a certificate certification and coaching because as a leader I had always really enjoyed the coaching and mentoring aspect of you know, managing staff and I got feedback that I was good at it, people ask me to mentor them and that kind of thing and so I got the certification of coaching, but initially I just thought I would get another job and I would just sort of have this in my back pocket, maybe I’d have a couple clients on the side and as I approached retirement, maybe I’d do it full time. But you know the funny thing is going through the program. There were about 40 people in my cohort and I’d say probably half of them were looking to become full-time coaches. And so I think just being in that environment, it just opened up my mind to realise that you know, why not now and I realised I could always get another job later, but I already had the momentum coming out of the program and I was among you know, colleagues who are doing the same thing I was, so I just decided to go for it and it’s coming up on four years and still out here well having the marketing skills to be able to market yourself at the same time, I think a lot of people don’t have that when they have a particular skill.
Very true. That’s helped you. Right. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And what do you think makes a good executive coach one of the qualities? Well, I think being a good listener, being empathetic, certainly understanding some of the pressures that executives are under. I know that in my case, a lot of times people will tell me after they’ve hired me that they decided to hire me because of the depth of experience that I had in the corporate world. I think, you know, for people that maybe haven’t worked in the corporate world or haven’t been a leader or been in the boardrooms, it might be hard to understand some of the pressure or some of the um, you know, political situations that people can find themselves in. yeah, I think those are probably the most important ones from my perspective. Okay, I had a look over this site, your website and the next few questions are about what’s based on, on that.
So I think the first one was about goals. So what do you think are the biggest mistakes on setting goals? Well, I think the first thing that’s it’s really necessary and I suppose this is the biggest mistake is getting really clear on what the goal is. Because if the goal is fuzzy, it’s gonna be impossible to map a path to get there. And one of the other things that I have noticed with clients is that sometimes they may deep down inside know what they want, but they won’t boldly say what they want because there’s fear that they won’t be able to get it. And so I always tell people like, okay, let’s separate these two things, you know, get clear on what you want, but separate that from how you’re going to get there because once the goal is clear and then you can start to evaluate, okay, what’s the gap between where you are and where you’d like to go?
And that’s just more of a sort of strategic exercise of like, okay, what’s the first step to towards getting that goal. But if that fear clouds the ability to, you know, clearly state what the goal is and then it’s not going to be an easy path to get there. Have you got any opinion on continuing from, from your answer on the setting realistic goals or setting goals, which you, which you may not even meet. So the reason for the question is that I’ve heard multiple people, multiple people talk about it from with different opinions. One of them being, I think it’s less brown who said shoot for the moon and you might end up among the stars. I think I have that quote in my book, It’s A Good one. Um, and then the other one is obviously smart goals, so they should be realistic. Have you got any thoughts on that? Well? I mean, I think that if you really want something that there’s nothing wrong with setting that as a goal, you know, if I, you know, wanted to be the president of the country and I set that as a goal that’s great.
I mean, it’s probably not very realistic, but if I really want it, then the journey is probably gonna be worth it. And you know, I love that quote by Les Brown about, you know, shoot for the stars. They would shoot for the moon because you will end up among the stars. It’s true a lot of times we may start off with a certain goal, but along the way we find something else that is equally or even more interesting that we never would have known about, had we not started the journey towards that goal and you know, we can change our mind about what our goals are at any time. But to me, it’s really about, you know, getting in touch with what you really want, what’s gonna make you happy and going for that and realising if you decide at a different time that you want to change your destination, that’s fine. as far as the smart goals are concerned, you know, I think with goal setting, it’s all about sort of like nesting goals if you will, right, I mean if you’ve got like a big giant project or a goal, there’s gonna be a lot of small goals that stack up to reach that goal, right?
And that’s okay. I think that I suppose going back to your question earlier about what are some of the mistakes that people make in goal setting? Sometimes, I think it’s not breaking down their big goals into small enough goals and then getting overwhelmed before they even start. And you know, one of the things that I will challenge people to do is that when they’re starting towards taking that first action towards their goal, you know, say like what is the smallest thing that you can do that’s going to support, you know, you’re getting towards that goal, what’s the smallest thing you can do without failing? and it could be that I’m just going to google something, it could be that I’m going to write this commitment down on a piece of paper, it could be, I’m going to call somebody that knows something about them and ask them about what my next step should be, but you know, sometimes when people have really big goals that they just get overwhelmed before they ever start because they think that they’ve got to take a giant dive off a craggy cliff instead of just dipping a toe in the water, I did some productivity content and I use that principle as well, I think Tony Robbins calls it chunky, so just break down your biggest stuff into as smaller, smaller steps as possible because lots of little steps in the right direction, reach your destination.
Yeah, you know, and I think yeah, definitely, and also from a, you know, continuing momentum or motivation standpoint to be able to sort of look back and say, oh, well look how many steps I’ve already achieved towards the goal, because it is very easy sometimes that say if you’re like climbing a mountain and you’re looking at the top, even if you’ve made a lot of progress, the top of the mountain still looks really far away. But if you look behind you and you see how far you come, you realise like I’m making progress. And do you have any examples of how goals have helped one of your clients? Yeah, I mean for many of my clients and job search in particular a lot of times they’ll come in and just, you know, think that they just have to use the same old applying for jobs online approach and, you know, I’ll challenge them to expand their linked in networks to commit to having a certain number of networking calls per week.
And I think that that helps in a number of ways because when they’re interacting with other people, they sort of can you know, their energy can increase from the energy of the people that they’re talking to the encouragement and the energy and you know even if they’re not getting a lot of interviews they feel buoyed by the fact that they’ve you know I committed to talking to five people this week and they can check that off, but I’ve also seen that like when people take action that a lot of times you know unexpected things happen. I’ve had I’ve had a number of clients that you know kind of surprisingly just in doing like networking coffee’s obviously before coded have had these turn into actual job interviews, it just was like a network and get together but it turned into a job interview. So I think that that that bias towards action can really yield positive results.
So not only does it help to achieve the end goal, but it also helps whilst you’re on your way to achieving, it helps with other things. Yeah and you know I always say like if you have a goal just like start walking on the path a lot of times we don’t know what’s around the corner and you know we can’t see it’s sort of like a winding path and people say wanna I don’t wanna start because I don’t know what’s around the corner. But when you start you start to see the other opportunities or you meet people who can help you on your journey and sometimes around the corner there’s something that’s like even better than what you imagine. I mean, again, it’s kind of going back to those coffees that turned into job offers. They weren’t expecting that, but had they not taken action, that never would have happened. So what is a road map? What is a roadmap? Well, roadmap is just the steps that one would need to take in order to reach the goal. And you know, it’s much like mapping out how you’re going to get between Point A and Point B if you’re going on a road trip.
Sometimes, you know, we may say, okay, well these are the major routes that I want, I need to take and that’s going to get us there, but once we start, maybe we’re going to decide to take a back road or we’re going to decide to stop or turn around or whatever. But just having that roadmap is sort of the rough outline of how you’re going to get to where you need to go and you may adjust it as you’re on your journey, but it’s the starting point, so making it formal putting it down and it’s like a plan essentially. Yeah, absolutely, because I think that you know, life gets in the way right, we’re busy with our day to day work and you know, often were sort of like zooming from being in the weeds too, you know, trying to be at that higher, 30,000 ft level to see the bigger picture. And if we haven’t written down what our roadmap is, we may forget, oh yeah, or or you know, forget where we are in it, like, oh what did I did I call that person?
What’s my next step? And like I said earlier, like with the analogy of climbing the mountain that when we have documented what are steps are, you know, there’s a lot of inspiration and just checking off the things that we’ve done, right, that helps us have more momentum. And it’s very easy often for us to just be like onto next. I’ve done something onto next and never really looked back and give ourselves credit or celebrate what we’ve already achieved. And does that the, both the goal setting and the road map and also looking back, does that play into mindset? What your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that it’s as much as possible, you know, maintaining a positive mindset is really critical to being able to achieve goals. You know, it’s, it is natural sometimes for people to get negative because that’s a form of you know, protection or defensiveness, you know, we want to protect ourselves from feeling hurt.
But if we tell ourselves more positive things like, you know, if we, or if we reframe failure, if you will, I think a lot of times we don’t want to move forward because we’re afraid that we’re going to quote unquote fail. And I always think that failure is only failure if you stop moving, you know, because a lot of times failure can actually result in something really positive happening. You know, you just have to think of it in a different way. There’s an acronym like fail is an acronym for first attempt in learning and I really like that because, you know, that really is what failure is, failure is like, okay, I’m not going to do it that way again. You know, what am I going to do next time to try to get a different result? Well, in marketing, we don’t even call it failing. We call it testing. Exactly, and that helped with a lot of the things that I’ve done, because that’s carried over into some of what I do.
So rather than saying I’m going to try something out, I’ll say I’ll test it. Exactly, Tim Ferris has a quote where he says test your assumptions. So if you think something is not going to work or this isn’t gonna work for me, you can test your assumptions and find out whether you’re right or not. Yeah, absolutely, and you know, time, you know, goes forward, okay, so we’re always on this um, you know, sort of horizon going into the future. We don’t know even things that have happened and worked in the past are not really, you know, a clear roadmap for what’s going to happen in the future, right? We can only use that as somewhat of a guide and form hypotheses about what we think is going to work going forward and you know, I think a lot of times what can trip people up is that they judge themselves really harshly when their hypothesis doesn’t prove true.
And, you know, I think that if we can just let go of our self-judgment about, you know, things that don’t turn out the way that we hoped and just say, oh, well I learned something from that, what am I going to do next, that preserves the energy for action, you know, at any time that we’re shaming ourselves or worrying or judging ourselves or others for that matter. we’re wasting energy that could be focused on achieving a goal carrying on from what is on your website. And also given the fact that you’re an executive coach, I’m not sure whether this will be relevant to you or not but do any of your clients have any issues with implementation. So how, how much is you giving advice and guiding and then someone going away and doing it and how much is trying to encourage people to actually do what you’re recommending? well I deal both with what I call external and internal.
So a lot of times we are talking about, you know, trying to diagnose what the situation is within the organisation and figuring out what they want or need to do about it. and so that’s the external obviously, and then sometimes the internal is like okay, they’ve agreed to take this action, but they’re not doing it. And so there’s usually some kind of belief, it could be subconscious that’s keeping them from taking that action and it could be that they’re afraid it’s not going to work or you know, they have to have a conversation with someone that they’re avoiding because they’re afraid it’s not going to be positive. And you know, my job is really to help them pull those concerns up to the surface so that we can deal with them and you know, sometimes it might be us doing a little bit of role playing, like okay if they’ve got a difficult employee that they need to have a tough conversation with, you know, I say, well, you know what’s keeping you from doing that, like, oh well, you know, I’m afraid they’re gonna cry or I’m afraid, I don’t know what to say or something like that and we’ll role playing and I’ll say, well how about either I play you and you play the employee or vice versa and we’ll just see how it goes.
And the thing that’s really interesting is that a lot of times once we’ve done that they’re like, oh well that really wasn’t that hard, right? But it’s just that when we haven’t done something before and it’s different from what we usually do, it can be scary. Yeah. yeah, we can build things up in our minds basically to more than what they actually are. Right, right, right. It’s been so interesting sometimes when people come back and they report and they’re like, I had the conversation with them and it was it was nothing, you know, it was no big deal at all. They just said the person just said okay, you know, but they were so fearful that it was going to be like lots of drama or something. So I think this is the last part from your website, anyway. What would you say are the most important principles on leadership? Or can you talk about leadership for a bit? Yeah, I mean, I think when I think about leadership, I think about followership because you know, in reality we can’t make anybody else we can’t I I don’t really believe in that kind of compulsive type of quote unquote leadership because to me that’s not leadership, that’s manipulation.
And so being a good leader, I think means setting a very clear vision on, you know, where they want to go and where they want to lead people and then also making a strong case for why it’s in everyone’s best interest to go there and you know, kind of painting a picture about how, you know, I suppose more like the context of how the people fit into this vision because I think when people can understand how they’re going to contribute and how they’re going to benefit from where the leader is taking them, and then I think that means they get on board and they feel like they’re part of it and as a leader that that means that they’re really tapping into the potential of the entire group and you know when people use more you know, kind of compulsory forced coercive type of quote unquote leadership, usually people give the minimum right?
They’re just trying to they’re doing enough to avoid punishment but they’re not willingly giving their best and I believe great leaders inspire people to give their best. Not a school of Steve Jobs then. Well, you know it’s funny because I mean I feel like what Apple did – he had a vision now, right? He had he had quite the vision and I still I just ordered some Air Pods yesterday because I love the integration of all of the Apple products. So I don’t know, maybe that somewhat of a dictator in that case worked. Okay. Exception. Maybe on that topic. Who are your mentors? Oh my gosh, I’ve had some, you know, many great mentors over the course of my career. I’ve had a couple of bosses actually one boss who I feel like really pulled back the veil on a lot of what really goes on at work, I think that I was quite naïve, it’s you know, it’s not anybody that people would know, but it was a head of marketing at a bank that I worked with worked out about 15 years ago and you know, he really, I guess I guess you could say he taught me the rules of the game of work because I really was focused on the wrong things before that and I was really kind of naïve about how to influence within the organisation and what people’s motivations are within organisations.
And once he sort of helped me focus on what was really going on, it really did a lot for my career, frankly, because I understood more about how to influence within the organisations. You know, I guess currently I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have active mentors right now, but I am part of a mastermind group of other coaches where we really help and support each other and that’s been really meaningful and helpful to me as I have, you know, stepped out and become an entrepreneur because it can be very lonely, it can be very lonely. You recommend the mastermind environment then? Yeah, I really enjoy it and you know, I think it’s important to make sure that you have the right people in your mastermind. I mean certainly in the one that I’ve been in, we’ve had some people that, you know, I think it’s important that people are really reciprocal about supporting as much as getting support and you know, we’ve had some members in the past that it wasn’t so reciprocal, and I think that’s really critical, and do you find now you’re an executive coach that you’ve become more of a mentor to other people?
Yeah, I mean, although I suppose I this was always something that was important to me, I mean I just, I like helping people be the best that they can be and also when I learned things, I like to share it with other people, so I always did that, you know, even whenever I was, you know, working for companies, even before I was, you know, a manager, I like to share things that I that I learned. but certainly as a coach, you know, people do rely on me and my perspective and you know, sometimes we want to check in to not necessarily ask my advice, but I suppose like bounce things off of me to see if what they’re thinking about doing, if they’re if they’re missing anything if there’s an angle that they haven’t thought of and that’s I love that kind of partnership, it’s really great sort of like a brainstorm. Yeah, yeah, and I think that it it can help people feel more confident to, right, okay, am I missing something here, right?
Am I gonna walk in and have this interaction and you know, have something come out of left field and you know, blindside me. So I think it’s helpful to people just have another set of eyes and somebody to help think through all of the angles. Yeah, I have a business partner, so I kind of have that, but I think it would be difficult if you don’t have anyone that you say it’s a bit lonely otherwise. Yeah, for sure. So if someone were to be considering hiring a coach, when would you say is the right time to get one? Well, I guess that there’re different times, right? I think that if somebody’s got a big goal and they’re not sure how to get their hiring a coach to help them develop the strategy can be really helpful. I think another situation as if someone is finding themselves feeling really you know, stressed and not sure about what to do differently. It can be helpful to work with a coach to understand whether there’s something that they can do differently or if there’s some skill gaps that need to be developed so that they can be more effective in their roles.
You know, that’s one of the things I see sometimes when people come to me and they’ll say, you know, I really, I really want another job and once we start digging into the areas of dissatisfaction in their job, what we really uncover is that they actually might like their job better if they were able to overcome, you know, some specific challenges and, you know, kind of going back to that leverage, those areas of leverage. I worked with a client um, a couple years ago who she worked for an insurance company and she started off, you know, early in her career as an individual contributor, she moved up and was the manager of a team of eight people And then she finally was elevated to department head where she had a team of 50 people under her and she did really well as the team leader of eight. And her way of approaching things was that if somebody, you know, I was behind on a project or something like that, she would just kind of jump in and she was sort of like a player coach and she would just take the, um, the things off their plate to keep everything moving well.
When she got elevated to the, um, being the department head of 50, she was continuing to operate in the same way. And when she came to me, she said, I’m actually thinking about asking my boss to demote me because I’m working 70 hours a week and you know, I’m just so stressed out and I’m really unhappy. And I said, you know, I think that you can put some systems in place, you can make some small tweaks so that you don’t have to work 70 hours a week. And in fact, that’s what we did. We did a lot of the things that I’ve talked about, you know, we looked at okay putting systems in place. She actually had this idea of an open door policy and so she never got to do any of her work at work because people were constantly coming in her office to solve problems and I said listen you gotta close your door at least two hours a day. And so she started doing that. And the interesting thing about that too is that when people can’t just come in and, you know, have her solve their problems, they were figuring out how to solve their problems on their own.
So you know, as time went on, she felt she didn’t want a demotion anymore, she was working fewer hours, she was getting satisfaction because she was just doing things differently than what she had done before, but initially she was, she didn’t know what to do differently. Have you heard of the iceberg? Yeah, I’ve heard of the iceberg, yeah, so for those that haven’t just imagine like an iceberg and like the smallest part of it, you can see right at the tip or I should say the tip of the iceberg and the vast majority of underwater and people only focus on the tip right. Yeah, exactly, and that’s just that’s just the symptom, right? You’ve got to diagnose what the underlying issue is. And you know sometimes the underlying issues even though like an iceberg, like it’s big under the water, sometimes one small change can make a big difference, like closing her door for two hours a day. And you know the funny thing about that was the thing that kept her from doing that is that she was afraid that she’d be looked at as you know like an unhelpful boss that you know she closed her door, that she wasn’t, you know, she wasn’t supportive and you know I think just putting that boundary in place made a big difference.
So, what are your business goals? Well, my business goals are to double the size of my business or the revenue of my business this year. I have also launched a podcast which is called marketing Mambo, which I’m really focused on talking to people in the marketing field. I say I chat with movers and shakers in the world of marketing. You know it’s one thing you know I’m not a full-time marketer actually, it’s interesting because I actually am a full-time marketer. I think anybody who’s an entrepreneur is a full-time marketer? but I’m not immersed in it in the way that I was when I led the marketing and my last company and I miss talking to people about marketing and I love marketers anyway and I love all of the challenges and the thoughts and the trends. And so that’s why I’m launching my podcast this year to talk to people about marketing.
It reminds me of what business are you in. Yeah, everyone’s in the customer getting business, right? Yeah, exactly. We’re all in sales and marketing. So thank you very much for all of your great answers. Where can people find you? People can find me at my website, which is terry bmcdougall.com. And that’s B as in boy. And that’s also my handle on LinkedIn. And so I’d be happy to get LinkedIn with any of your listeners if they want to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Okay, well, thank you again and I’ll speak to you soon.
Okay, great. Thanks a lot Thomas.