117: Daniel Marcos on Becoming a Lifelong Learner
In order to grow your business, you have to recognize that you are often times the bottleneck. Everything needed to grow your business starts with you! This is why it’s important to become a lifelong learner to better develop yourself and grow your business.
Daniel Marcos is the co-Founder and CEO of Gazelles Growth Institute. He is also a long-time coach and an international speaker who has shared the stage with thought leaders like Peter Diamandis, Guy Kawasaki, and Jack Canfield. On today’s show, Daniel dives into what it means and why it’s important to be a lifelong learner and how it accelerates your career.
Daniel was a very bad student academically but he built his first internet company in Mexico City back in 1999. As Daniel began hiring Stanford and Harvard graduates to come work for him, he felt uncomfortable that he wasn’t able to understand what they were saying to him. They were using jargon he had never heard before. This experience prompted him to study for his own MBA and to better understand the people who work for him.
When Daniel started his next company in the U.S., it went under during the 2008 crash. It was awful and he lost a lot of money. Verne Harnish reached out to him, and after complaining for 30 minutes, Verne asked, “What’s next?” Daniel, feeling like an absolute failure, said he was going to return to Mexico and get a salaried job to pay for his kid’s education. Verne thought this was nonsense and offered him a new opportunity. The rest is history!
Through that experience, Daniel has become obsessed with KPIs and looking at the numbers. He now has insight into what good numbers look like to help prevent others from suffering the same faith his company did back in 2008. Back then, he saw the warning signs but ignored them. Today, he helps entrepreneurs avoid them.
Daniel has a very extensive book collection, but the problem with books is they tell you how to do things, but they never mention at what stage or when you should do those things. As we go through different stages of growth, each company is going to experience something different. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work the way the books say it does.
Daniel saw a chart that stated the U.S. today has 28 million firms and 96% of them will never do over a million dollars in revenue a year. Only about 0.4% of companies go over $10 million a year in revenue. In the end, only 17,000 companies go above $50 million in revenue each year. And in each of these financially diverse companies, they all need a completely different level of attention and systems.
Interview Links:
Resources:
Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops.
Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach
TWEETABLES:
“The reason we’re great coaches is not because we’re so ‘brilliant.’ It’s our willingness to share the things that didn’t work for us.”
“Everything was backward for me. How much money we made, we were looking into the past. Now, a lot of my metrics are for the future and I can see what’s going on.”
“Are you, yourself, coachable?”
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Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles.
We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).
