How To Have Your Business Support Your Life - With John Nieuwenburg

Tom Bailey, founder of Succeed Through Speaking, interviews John Nieuwenburg.

John Nieuwenburg is an award-winning Business Coach, who has worked with hundreds of clients. John coaches in 3 primary areas. Business: getting things done using proven tools, strategies and techniques to grow your business. Personal Growth: working with you in areas such as decision making, leadership, delegation and time management. Accountability: helping you to stay accountable for the results you have chosen. In an earlier life, John was the President of the BC Liquor Stores that today does about $3Bn of which about $1Bn is profit. Before that he was an Executive with a national menswear retailer.

Why you've got to check out John's episode:

- Discover how John helps professionals, solopreneurs and advisors and the common challenges that they face.

- The typical challenge of being extremely well qualified technically but not knowing how to turn this technical knowledge into business acumen. The three issues that most of their clients face around Time, Team and Money.

- The effect of these challenges on their lives including being unhappy outside of work, unable to attend their children's sporting and school events and a poor work life balance.

- How and why you need to learn business acumen and the benefits of having access to coaches and mentors.

- Get access to a number of useful downloads from John's website using the link below.

Resources / Links

https://w5coaching.com/downloads/

Transcript

Tom Bailey: Hello and welcome to succeed through speaking the place for experts and entrepreneurs who want high value ideas to boost business results.

Hello. I'm Tom Bailey. And in today's episode, I'll be getting to know John Nieuwenburg, who's an award-winning business coach having worked with hundreds of clients and is the founder of w five coaching. So, John, hello, and a very warm welcome to today's session.

John Nieuwenburg: Thank you very much. A warm welcome was very appropriate. We're in having a heat bubble or having all-time record temperatures here is everyone's thinking about heat at the minute.

Tom Bailey: Of course. And whereabouts are you in the world?

John Nieuwenburg: On, in Vancouver, on the west coast, Canada.

Tom Bailey: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And I just want to share a little bit more about you before we do get started. So, John coaches in three primary areas, which is business, personal growth and accountability, and in an earlier life, he was the president of the BC liquor stores who today does around 3 billion in revenue and around 1 billion in profit. The title of today's episode is How To Have A Business That Supports Your Life. And John is going to show us how to do that in just seven minutes. So, question number one today is who are your ideal clients?

John Nieuwenburg: Typically people that are three types of, first of all, they have an advisory practice that it usually means they're accountants and lawyers and architects, anyone who finds professional advice, medical practitioners, they're in construction and trades. So, they're, you know, electricians and plumbers on that kind of thing. Or professional solopreneurs and they're typically realtors, smaller accountants firms. That kind of thing, construction. Sorry for stepping on you there.

Tom Bailey: The wide range of different businesses, is there a commonality in terms of the typical challenges that they face?

John Nieuwenburg: Yeah, all of them are well-trained. If you're a, you know, if you're a medical professional, if you're a lawyer took you seven years to get a law degree, if you're an electrician or plumber, you took you five years to, to get a journeyman's ticket. So, you're, they're very good at their technical work, but crap lousy at business because they've never had any business training.

And so, they, these are very small, smart people. and can't figure out why it's so difficult for them to navigate their business. Typically, they're thinking about things like time team and money. So, they're saying things like I've got too much to do and not enough time to do it. I can't get everything done. A team is getting the right people, hiring enough people. It's very hard to do that right now, getting the culture you want and money has got two sides to it. So onside is accounting KPIs metrics, having a dashboard in place and the other side of money. The very most common one is I need more money. I need better sales and marketing.

Tom Bailey: Got it. I mean, it may seem like an obvious question, but if they don't have these things in place, what's the biggest impact that causes on them in the business.

John Nieuwenburg: You know, it's funny and this relates to the title. It isn't really that they're having challenges in their business, which it is, but it is the effect of those challenges in their life. And so, you know, they're probably not as happy at home as they'd like to be. They haven't been to one of their kids, you know, games maybe in the entire season. And so it, it gets captured or articulated in the form of, you know, my business doesn't work, but really what it is, my business says work. And as a result, my life isn't great.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Understood . I guess this will resonate with a lot of people listening today. So, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give them to really get started in the right direction.

John Nieuwenburg: They're very good at learning. So, learn what it takes to run a business. There's lots of different ways to do that. Lots and lots of great books. Of course, get a coach. That's one of the things, but some kind of mentor or join a peer group. But find some kind of resource where you can learn from others, you know gone through what you're trying to get done for yourself. Go get help.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. And talking of resources. Have you got any resources you can offer guides? Downloads?

John Nieuwenburg: Yeah. There's I've got a page with a bunch of downloads. These are all free tools. They're the very tools that I use in some cases with my clients and. You're welcome to have them and if you can make great use of them.

Tom Bailey: Fantastic. Excellent. And I've got the URL here, actually, which is wfive coaching.com/downloads. I'll put that in the show notes so people can click on that and jump right in. Quick question about yourself, John. So what would you say is one of your greatest either mistakes or failures that you've made personally in life or business? And what did you learn from it?

John Nieuwenburg: Well, about 10 years ago, I attempted suicide. It was a very dark point in my life. I didn't learn much from it. Except later I did a TEDx talk in 2015. And in preparing for that TEDx talk, I learned a lot, not just about how to present and you know, speak from the stage, but that preparation to do that talk taught me a lot, crystallized everything that was going on for me as evidence of that, the powerpoint presentation. I was using to rehearse and script and write. It was open for 22,000 minutes, which I'll help you out that’s 16, 24 hour days. And that was a massive amount of therapy for me. And it really was what made all the difference. And here's the thing. It's been well about six, seven years since I did that talk 10 years since the attempted suicide. And the last five years of my life have been the best ever.

Tom Bailey: Amazing story. And if we wanted to listen to that TEDx talk, what's the title?

John Nieuwenburg: You can Google my last name the cultural taboos of suicide and depression.

Tom Bailey: Appreciate that. Thanks very much. I'll take a look myself later on today. And the last question for me today is what is one question that I should have asked you that will also give some great value to our audience?

John Nieuwenburg: Well a business owner that are trying to figure this out on their own. I urge them to read a thing called the E-Myth, the entrepreneurial myth, Michael Gerber. And if they're a business owner that's at the other end of the cycle, and they're thinking about exiting their business, I'd recommend the we'd built a sound.

Tom Bailey: Yep. Perfect. Thanks very much. Well, John, Greg, great tips today. Great advice. Great value, and really appreciate you coming here again. Thanks again for your time today.