[EO Chicago] Embracing Innovation and Conquering Business Plateaus With Mike Maddock

Mike Maddock is the Founder of Flourish Advisory Boards, hyper-curated virtual peer advisory forums for CEOs and business leaders who are focused on professional and personal growth. He is a serial entrepreneur, international public speaker, expert in innovation, and best-selling author. Mike has served over 25% of the Fortune 500 companies, helping them envision and create new growth avenues. As the Founder of Maddock Douglas, a globally recognized innovation consulting firm, he has also assisted in developing and launching new products, services, and business models for over 25% of the Fortune 100 companies.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:05] Mike Maddock’s background and leadership influences
• [06:32] Lessons from successful disruptors
• [11:34] The tension between the operator and the visionary
• [14:15] The importance of diverse perspectives for creating a breakthrough team dynamic
• [16:52] How Flourish Advisory Boards facilitates breakthroughs for business leaders facing challenges
• [24:31] The partnership paradox and its impact on business success
• [32:08] Key strategies for successfully launching new products and services
• [44:41] Mike shares a profoundly personal lesson on love and purpose he learned from his late wife

In this episode…

What does it take for a company to embrace innovation and break through business plateaus? In the face of stagnation and resistance to change, how can leaders cultivate an environment that encourages fresh ideas and growth?

According to Mike Maddock, a seasoned entrepreneur and best-selling author, the answer lies in the diversity of perspectives within a team. He highlights that successful companies embrace their customers’ pain points and seek to innovate around what people hate about their industry. Mike also explains the importance of avoiding the “expertise trap,” where internal knowledge can blind leaders to new possibilities — as well as the critical role of reframing a business’ purpose, asking not just, “What do we sell?” but also, “What business do we have the right to be in?”

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Mike Maddock, Founder of Flourish Advisory Boards, to discuss the key factors that drive innovation and help companies break through plateaus. They explore how to assemble effective teams with diverse roles, tackle the fear of risk in established companies, and embrace market gaps for new growth. Mike also shares the personal story of how his wife’s strength and love influenced his perspective.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Mike Maddock: LinkedIn | Website
• Flourish Advisory Boards
• Maddock Douglas
• Plan D: Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Disruptors by Mike Maddock
• Free the Idea Monkey… to focus on what matters most! by Mike Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón
• McGuffin Creative Group

Special Mentions

• Mike Michalowicz
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO)
• Vistage
• Marshall Goldsmith
• John Corcoran on LinkedIn
• Birthing of Giants
• What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the Better by Dan Baker PhD and Cameron Stauth
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz
• Beth Comstock on LinkedIn
• Robert Wolcott
• Jack Welch on LinkedIn
• Simon Sinek
• “As I Mourn the Passing of My Wife, These Leadership Lessons Stand Out the Most” by Mike Maddock on Inc.

Related Episodes

• “[Top Chicago Business Series] Giving to Your Best Business Relationships with Andrea Herrera of Boxperience” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “EO Chicago | How To Start a Beauty Brand From Scratch With Anthony Standifer, Co-Founder of mSEED Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series & EO Chicago] Driving Digital Dominance With Mark Bealin of SearchLab Digital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Innovating Online Marketing Strategies for Law Firms With Rafi Arbel of Market JD” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Have Your Business Run Without You with Mike Michalowicz, Author Fix This Next” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Living with Purpose with Rabbi Mois Navon from Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments

• “Embrace the hate to innovate. You have to go to things that people absolutely hate about your customer experience or product.”
• “You can’t read the label while sitting inside the jar.”
• “Marketing and advertising are a tax you pay for a bad idea.”
• “The greatest teams surround themselves with people that see problems differently.”
• “Love is the answer. It’s the only thing that matters.”

Action Steps

1. Embrace negative customer feedback to identify opportunities for innovation: By focusing on pain points, businesses can craft solutions that resonate with consumers and drive growth.
2. Infuse outside perspectives into your business strategy to avoid the “expertise trap”: Diverse insights can help companies recognize and seize opportunities they might have missed.
3. Diversify your approach with a “portfolio of experiments”: This strategy allows businesses to balance risk and explore various avenues for innovation and differentiation.
4. Form a balanced team of visionary and operational talents to drive sustainable innovation: The dynamic interplay between these skill sets can lead to a more robust and holistic approach to problem-solving and business growth.
5. Nurture an understanding of your company’s core purpose beyond its current products or services: By recognizing the broader market you are part of, you can unlock new realms of opportunity and expansion.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Mike Maddock. He has too many companies to mention, but I will mention them in the bio. So Mike, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out the podcast. This is in the kind of EO world. Big thank you to Andrea Herrera, amazing edibles, Gourmet Catering, making sure that Mike and I met, even though we live very not so far from each other, we did an amazing episode together. Check that out. It’s kind of in the midst of the pandemic, and she had pivoted and started a new business by experience during that time. So it was a really interesting interview to see her innovation and what she did. So check that out.

Also on the topic of EO, I had Vern Harnish on the show, author of Scaling Up, one of the original founders of EO. That was a really interesting episode. Anthony Standifer in EO Chicago, how to start a beauty brand. He’s co-founder of MC Group, and you’ll like the Mike Maddock, you know, I had Mark Belin on. Mark Bealin is sort of search lab digital, but he talked about how EO was critical for him and the accelerator group. And he runs, now heads the accelerator group for EO, so that was a great one. And Rafi Arbel of Market JD talked about just online marketing strategies for law firms, so that, and many more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So Mike, we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host so they can run their company, develop amazing relationships and create great content. For me and Mike, I know you’re very much similar, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I’ve found no better way, over the past 15 years, to profile the people in companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I am super excited to introduce Mike Maddock. He’s an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, best-selling author, CEO coach. He’s got several companies, which we’ll talk about on the book front Mike Plan D,How to Dream, Drive and Deliver Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Disruptors. I’m a terrible reader, so I was really excited to listen to this on Audible. Went to buy it and is not there, so hopefully I’m somehow going to force you to create that also Free The Idea Monkey to Focus on What Matters Most. He’s also the founder of Flourish Advisory Boards, which we’ll talk about, Virtual CEO Peer Groups, McGuffin Creative Group and The Innovation Consultancy Maddock Douglas. Over 25 is a fun fact, well, Mike over 25% of the Fortune 500 have trusted Mike Maddock and his team to help them envision and create new sources of growth. And Mike, thanks for joining me,

Mike Maddock 3:45 

Mostly my team, not me, but thank you, Jeremy, it’s great to be here. And thank you too for mentioning Vern Harnish and Andrea Herrera, two great leaders who have made me a better leader. It’s better than coffee in the morning. So thank you.

Jeremy Weisz 4:00 

Talk about that for a second. How have each of them made you a better leader?

Mike Maddock 4:05 

So I’ll start with Vern. I mean, I met Vern probably 30 years ago. I remember this moment. I was at MIT, and Vern was teaching, and he think about like psych 101 room, and there’s this big whiteboard. And he drew a line and said, 2, 6, 8, 10, 20, 30, all the way up to 200 and he said, at two employees, this is going to be your problem. At four employees, this is going to be your problem at 20 employees, at 50 employees, at 200 employees. And then he put the dry-erase marker down and said, does anybody have any questions? And I was in a room with about 80 different entrepreneurs, and a young lady from California jumped up and said, oh my God, it’s like you’re my psychic, which I thought was amusing, but the lesson for me was that even though we have, we all have what we think are really unique businesses.

We share so many of the same business issues. And that was a huge learning for me, because, I’ve been in boardrooms where the CEO of a company will say, Well, tell me what you’ve done in the toilet paper industry, like they want to know or tell me your experience with B2B businesses. And Vern, one of the first lessons he taught me was that we have more in common than not as business owners, and that opened me up to listen and go looking for wisdom in the EO community. And it’s been an amazing blessing for me. Andrea Herrera has a brain almost, almost, almost as big as her heart, and she’s taught me that love is the answer. She responds with love and care in moments when people really need it. She’s just really good at that. So it’s no small mistake that she owns a really good events company. She makes moments more magical, and she’s perfectly engineered to do that as a human.

Jeremy Weisz 6:13 

We’ll get into the timeline of your businesses. But I know when people write a book, they really pour their heart and soul, and it’s a lot of work, so I’d love for you to talk about Plan D a little bit in some of the lessons from the world’s most successful disruptors.

Mike Maddock 6:32 

So Plan D is one of my favorite books, because I essentially wrote it about my friends. So having been in business for a long time, the thread was, what are the superhero powers that give people the ability to pivot while other people are panicking? You know what? What is it about, specifically entrepreneurs, or entrepreneurial thinkers, that under pressure, they reinvent. They break things better for the good of the whole. And so, what I did was I had a list of tendencies after working in an innovation consulting firm, and I saw these people in companies that would just leave a wake, and I started to take notes, and then I reverse-engineered those superhero powers back into friends that I had, like good friends who had done use that method to transform.

So some of the things are frameworks. For example, I have friends that are just masters at using a framework. They have a model or a framework for everything. Mike Michalowicz is like that. Dan Hiriz is like that. So that’s number one. I have noticed I’ve never met an incredibly successful business person that isn’t either being chased by a ghost or chasing one. The question is, who’s got who, great disruptors are very aware of that ghost and that maybe it’s a coach, maybe it’s their English teacher, maybe it’s their dad or mom that has them working harder, longer, faster. They won’t give up. Purpose is a superhero power of a lot of disruptors. They’re all about purpose. They refuse to play the role of the victim. They just won’t play the victim. They’re always in the Creator mode. So those are some of the things that are covered in the book. But more importantly, it’s how they do it, like, What are the methods they use, when under pressure, to disrupt things.

Jeremy Weisz 8:46 

Mike, there was one story I remember you telling, I think you were, I don’t know if you were at a board meeting or a meeting, and you went up to someone, I think it was you, and said, Wow, you’re so creative. Person said, I’m not, can you talk about that?

Mike Maddock 9:03 

Yes. Yeah, that’s Joe Kim. I worked with Joe for many years, and Joe is a wonderful guy. He now leads a creative firm, and we had this meeting, and he immediately began brainstorming and came up with dozens of ideas on the spot. And afterwards, I said, Jeremy, you’re the best Ideator, I think I’ve ever been with that was amazing. And he’s like, I suck at ideas. Mike, I was actually using a framework, which he showed me later. It’s covered in the book. He was literally using an acronym to come up with another idea and another idea and another idea. And that was his go-to punch, because he realized on the spot he wasn’t good at brainstorming. So he found a framework that helped him do that.

Jeremy Weisz 9:54 

What was something in that framework?

Mike Maddock 9:58 

Well, so I’ll give you a framework. One of my favorites, Brett Miller, I’ll give him credit for this. He came to work one day and he said, hey, I saw What Would Jesus Do bumper sticker. And he goes, you made me think, what would Jesus do, or what would Elon Musk do, or what would Oprah do, and so we, we created dozens and dozens of cards with famous thinkers they picture in the front, and then a little bio and some of the things that they had come up with on the back. And when we were with clients, we’d say, okay, let’s stop thinking about this problem ourselves. Come up with an idea that Oprah would have embraced, or Steve Wozniak, etc, and that is a framework that anyone could use.

Another simple framework is taking money off the table. People get stuck because they can’t afford it. So to say, okay, it’s the magic wand. If you had a magic wand, what would you do? I’ve got 10 million if I gave you a 10 million budget, how might you solve this problem? And once you have that solution, you can reverse engineer it and find ways to do it less expensively.

Jeremy Weisz 11:06 

I love it. I can’t wait for it to come out on audio.

Mike Maddock 11:12 

Nudge, wink, wink.

Jeremy Weisz 11:13 

I’m just gonna keep planting the seed. What about Free The Idea Monkey. I love and by the way, there’s a video version of this. If you are listening to the audio, we do have it pulled up here. You can find the books, probably on Amazon, but Mikemaddock.com also on the author page. I love the cover here. Talk about Free The Idea Monkey.

Mike Maddock 11:34 

Well, so here, let me see you, Jeremy, because I do better when I look at someone. Thank you for promoting the books. I’d rather look at you. The Free The Idea Monkeys about the tension between the operator and the visionary. I call them idea monkeys and marine leaders. This preceded Gina Whitman’s book, where he calls them, you know, the integrator. And what I’ve noticed is there’s a tension between great partners and someone so many of us as entrepreneurs make two great decisions, usually unwittingly. We pick the right wave and we pick the right partner. It’s amazing how, if you pick their — if a surfer picks the right wave, they look like the greatest surfer in the world. But if the greatest surfer in the world picks a lousy wave, they look like they can’t serve. So picking a business trend that is the right way is so important, and most of us get lucky if we pick the right wave.

Same thing with partners. When you’re just starting a business, it’s so critical to pick the right partner. And some of us get lucky. Some of us pick if you’re a visionary, they pick a great operator. The thing is that we tend to pick people we like that laugh at our jokes and think like us. So you wake up one morning and like I did, and you’re surrounded by a bunch of visionaries who are really good at starting things and really, really bad at finishing them. So that book, just after that book became a best-seller, I was in a room with a company that had gone from five to $20 million inside of three years. We thought we could do no wrong, and then we went to 18 million and 15 million and 12 million, and my hair was on fire, and we hired an outside coach who gave us the Colby test, and I was stunned and embarrassed to find that everyone on our team was a quick start, except for our CFO.

And so it was really that moment, incredibly humbling moment that was the seed that started Flourish advisory boards and the whole the basic thesis there is the greatest team surround themselves with people that see problems differently, and that’s how they break through one plateau after another.

Jeremy Weisz 13:55 

So maybe we’ll go in reverse order for a second and start with flourish advisory boards. But I do want to kind of hear the inception, the growth of Maddock Douglas as well. So start with Flourish Advisory Boards. And what made you decide to start it?

Mike Maddock 14:15 

Well, I told you about the moment where we had grown tremendously, and then we started to shrink, and we couldn’t figure out why. The reason why was because I had an incredible team of brilliant people that were great at pivoting and not so good at execution. And so Flourish is about my and forums, EO, YPO, Vistage, are so incredible and they tend to be unintentional. So the thought was, what if you took the intimacy and the confidentiality of a forum, had a professional moderator and tested members so that you had not a bunch of visionaries that laughed at your jokes, but an operator, a strategist, a rainmaker, a visionary, a tech future and an orchestrator, along with an operator and a professional coach.

And the thesis was that if people looked at your challenge and saw it differently, you’d be able to get unstuck more quickly, and that has turned out to be very true. So that’s what flourish is. It’s a virtual group of CEOs or P&L owners that meet once a month, and they take on their toughest personal and business challenges together, and it’s in seeing the challenge differently, where the breakthroughs happen.

Jeremy Weisz 15:43 

Who’s a fit for Flourish Advisory Boards?

Mike Maddock 15:47 

Well, you have to be a curious learner. You have to be generous in terms of wanting to help others. You have to run a P&L, no victims. You need to be able to take an idea or a problem or a challenge, or put it on the ground. You can’t complain that your boss, your dad, your mom, won’t let you do it. And then I have groups. One of my groups, the average revenue is about 600 million. I have another group, the average revenue is 5 million. I have a $20 million group. I have a $75 million group. So it’s up to me to place you in a group that fits in the same zip code as your revenue. And then there has to be a seat for you there. If you’re a strategist, there has to be a strategist seat available. So in terms of a business model, it’s pretty clunky, but once the members are together in a group, great things happen.

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