As someone who is trying to grow your business, what can you learn from the biggest of companies out there? We define fast-moving companies as gazelles and we depict the big, larger, companies as elephants. However, there are important lessons you can learn from both that should not be ignored!

Mike Maddock is a serial entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker. Currently, Mike is the Founder Partner of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consulting firm that has helped more than 25% of the Fortune 100 companies. Mike has personally launched five successful businesses, written three books, and he is also a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and Forbes.

Mike worked all throughout his teen years and has seen what good bosses and bad bosses looked like. A year-and-a-half after graduating high school, Mike started his own marketing communications company and grew the business up to 50 people.

Mike had a ‘Jerry Maguire’ moment and shifted his focus more on innovation. He started a new company and made $3.5 million in revenue within a couple of years. Since then, he’s learned a lot about research, consumer behavior, and fear!

Whenever you’re changing anything, people freak out and they go to what makes them feel strong, which is often the worst thing you can do when the world is changing around you. Fear makes people go ‘back to the basics.’ At the end of the day, it’s a balancing act between the creative/innovation types and the analytical types in an organization. When you can get the right balance of both, these companies survive and thrive in new environments.

Mike shares an example of a meeting gone wrong, at least it appeared to be. Mike was presenting research to dentists about an emerging marketing, teeth whitening, and they ripped into him. Mike and his team predicted teeth whitening would be a $4 billion opportunity, today it is an $11 billion market. The dentists that ripped into him were experts in their market. However, the more you’re an expert in something, the harder it is to see growth, opportunity, and possibility.

Interview Links:

Maddockdouglas.com

Mike on LinkedIn

Resources:

Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops.

Scaling Up Website

Gazelles Website

Bill on YouTube