Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh

Shattering the Leadership Myth with J. Bryan Bennett and Grant Mcgaugh on the Follow the Brand

• Grant McGaugh CEO 5 STAR BDM • Season 6 • Episode 34

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Ready to transform your leadership potential? Gain exclusive insights from J Bryan Bennett, the CEO and Chief Leadership Innovation Officer of the Elite Leadership Academy, who reveals a data-driven approach to mastering leadership skills. Discover why continuous practice is essential for leaders, just as it is for elite athletes, and learn how healthcare analytics can be the unexpected key to identifying and filling leadership gaps across various industries.

For those looking to climb the career ladder or venture into entrepreneurship, Brian shares foundational steps for developing leadership prowess. From university courses to personalized coaching, he explains why tailored programs outperform generic training. Plus, understand how your personal brand as a results-oriented leader can significantly impact your career trajectory and business growth, making your leadership journey not just about skills, but also about reputation and influence.

Explore the evolution of leadership with Brian as we discuss the importance of robust digital presence, the role of research and AI in leadership training, and the need for continuous learning. Hear success stories of leaders who have transformed their capabilities and extended their influence beyond immediate circles. Whether you're a seasoned leader or an aspiring one, this episode offers a comprehensive roadmap to becoming a recognized leader and 'fixer' in any professional realm. Tune in for an enlightening conversation that promises to elevate your leadership game.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest marketing trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates from us, be sure to follow us at 5starbdm.com. See you next time on Follow The Brand!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to another episode of Follow the Brand. I am your host, grant McGaugh, ceo of 5 Star BDM, a 5 Star personal branding and business development company. I want to take you on a journey that takes another deep dive into the world of personal branding and business development using compelling personal story, business conversations and tips. Development using compelling personal story, business conversations and tips to improve your personal brand. By listening to the Follow the Brand podcast series, you will be able to differentiate yourself from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make it one that will set you apart, build trust and reflect who you are. Developing your five-star personal brand is a great way to demonstrate your skills and knowledge. If you have any questions from me or my guests, please email me. At grantmcgaw, spelled M-C-G-A-U-G-H at 5starbdm B for brand, d for development, m for masterscom. Now let's begin with our next five-star episode on Follow the Brand. Five-star episode on Follow the Brand. Welcome to the Follow the Brand podcast. I am your host, grant McGaugh, ceo of Five Star BDM, where we help you build a five-star brand that people will follow, and today we are taking you all the way to sunny San Diego California. All the way to sunny San Diego California. Not to Los Angeles, not to San Francisco, but to one of the most beautiful places in California that is San Diego. And today we're not just talking about the beauty of the place, but we're also talking to one of the most remarkable individuals that I know. It's a pleasure to introduce our guest for today, j Brian Bennett. Brian is a powerhouse in the realm of leadership, innovation and development. He serves as the CEO and Chief Leadership Innovation Officer for the Elite Leadership Academy, a privately funded organization dedicated to providing to enhance leadership capabilities using a unique data-driven approach, and Brian is a true data enthusiast at heart. He has leveraged his extensive background in analytics to revolutionize leadership training, and his passion for data and analytics has led him to create assessment tools that uncover leadership gaps and provide deep insights that many leaders might not even be aware of. And his work is not just about identifying these gaps, but also about helping leaders to continuously improve and practice their leadership skills every single day. And Brian has been teaching leadership at the graduate level since 2008 and has a rich background in healthcare analytics. His journey in healthcare highlighted the critical role of leadership in successfully implementing healthcare analytics, which further fueled his mission to address leadership challenges across industries, and he is also the author of multiple books on leadership and analytics, and his innovative approach has even been adopted by the military for training new leaders. And Brian's approach to leadership is holistic he combines vision, data and continuous practice to help leaders at all levels achieve excellence. So, whether you are a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this episode is packed with invaluable insights that you won't want to miss. So join me in welcoming Professor J Brian Bennett to the Follow Brand Podcast, where we are building a five-star brand that you can follow.

Speaker 1:

Welcome everybody to the Follow Brand Podcast. We're going to go all the way up to California. We're talking about San Diego California, not LA, not San Francisco. We're going to the most beautiful place in California, in San Diego, and we're going to talk to one of the most beautiful persons that I know I've not talked to you before. We talked about Brian Bennett. I mean, he has some amazing, amazing skills that he wants to impart to a lot of people in leadership. This is a must-listen-to podcast. If you're in leadership, you're trying to figure out the pulse of what's next and I guarantee you. If you're trying to utilize strategies that you did five, ten years ago, maybe even five months ago, you're going to be in for an eye-opening understanding of what's next and what's coming down the pipe. So, brian, would you like to introduce yourself?

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you, Grant. I'm Brian Bennett. I'm the CEO and Chief Leadership Innovation Officer for the Elite Leadership Academy, and it's a privately funded organization to provide leadership training and improvement throughout all the industries. We work with CEOs all the way to managers. We work with everybody and we have data. That's one thing that's really good. I'm a data guy at heart, but I like to analyze things, so I had pulled some data from our assessment tools and we have so much information we know about these leaders that they don't even think they. They don't even know how good or bad they're doing their leadership gaps.

Speaker 1:

And that's amazing. We're not a data driven society, we're a digital first society. So the fact that you're utilizing data to actually inspire leaders to be better leaders and a thing that you just put out I looked at that and it was saying something to the fact that leadership or leadership skills are not all what you need. I mean, you need more than that.

Speaker 2:

Tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker 2:

Well, everyone has some kind of leadership skills. You know whether they're born with it, whether they're in it or whatever like that. But the problem with what we teach leadership nowadays is focus on the leadership skills. They don't focus on having a practice and improvement routine to get better at it. You have to work at it. My favorite phrase is lead every day, because you have to practice to be a leader every day.

Speaker 2:

And the examples I always like to do is look at some of the sports people, like the GOATs, like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady. They were okay when they came into the league, but they got so much better because they practiced hard. They weren't settling for what they were when they came in, they got better and they knew they had to change their physical nature or they had to do the shots, all their other practices so they got a whole lot better because of that. And that's the same way leaders need to think about it. You have to focus on okay, this is who I am now. I want to do this. I need to get better at it. I need to keep working at it. When I started a workshop, I asked people who wants to be a better leader? And if everybody doesn't raise their hand. I say a workshop. I asked people who wants to be a better leader and everybody has to raise their hand. Okay, you need to all raise your hands. Everybody should be trying to be a better leader.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm still learning how to become a better leader, and I think that's so important. Leadership skill starts from the bottom as well as the top. We need to understand we all need to be better leaders. How do we manifest more of what's within us in the endeavors that we're undertaking? Now, the thing I loved about working with you and I take one of your mini courses your bodybuilding and you had this process. Before we talk about that, I want to talk about you as a brand. What motivates you to do elite leadership training? What was your Michael Jordan moment or your Tom Brady moment? Let's hear about that from Brian Bennett.

Speaker 2:

It's funny. You ask that because I've been teaching leadership since about 2008 at the graduate level, university level, and while I was teaching it, I started listening to the theories that they were spouting in the classes. I said, you know, this makes sense, it doesn't make sense, and so forth, and so I came up with my own kind of leadership philosophy based off of that kind of leadership philosophy. Based off of that. What really brought it to a head was, you know, my background is in analytics, like I mentioned, but I was working in healthcare analytics because I knew when healthcare was going electronic, they needed somebody with my skills to help them out.

Speaker 2:

When I was speaking at a big conference in Chicago one time we asked people it was a three-hour workshop asked people what was the biggest challenges of healthcare in the healthcare analytics. People thought it was going to be, you know, the talent or the data and so forth. By a long shot, not even close leadership issues Like who owns the data, where's the data housed, all these things that leaders need to decide. And then there's a thing that really scared me was we asked people what their titles were on these surveys and we broke them down between people who are wide span of control, who are like C-level executives, and to vice presidents, and then to narrow span of control, who only control basically what's in their point of view. And the answers were the same throughout the CEOs, the executives, still thought leadership issues were the big problem. It's like, okay, you guys don't understand what your role is right now. That's the problem. That was the emphasis on my second book. My first book was on analytics and my second book was on healthcare leadership.

Speaker 1:

That's insights, and you don't know what you don't know. No one has a 360 degree viewpoint on themselves and in life and what they influence, and I believe you're helping people to do that. We're in a digital first society now, and the fact that you've been using data-driven methodologies to help leaders to be better managers, better analysts maybe they need to be better advisors when does that go? I mean, what kind of insights have you really gained from the studies that you do?

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the things that we found is, like we always do, we always ask people their titles on their survey forms. So we've been using the same tool for now about eight years, and so we were able to break it down between C-level executives, vice presidents, directors, supervisors and so forth. And the three things that I found the most interesting was at the C-level executive level, they're not practicing leadership, they're going on autopilot. They're really good at visioning, but the rest of the stuff that is what they should be doing they're not doing that anymore. They're on autopilot, which is, you know, vision is good, but you still need to be trying to practice leadership. That's one. Two at the vice president and director level, they're still striving to become leaders. So they're still practicing leadership, so they're aspirational, but then you get down to the supervisor and manager level and they're not getting any leadership support whatsoever. You know, they're just barely you know, and that's the problem.

Speaker 2:

We all know that For most of mine, especially in technology functions, you know, this person's a great programmer, this person's a great DBA. Let's make them in charge of the team now. Well, you know what? He or she may not be the best person to be in charge of the team, or they may not want to have the responsibilities. It was a party that worked at Microsoft, you know. They asked me to help build their first global analytics department, so they put together job descriptions, career paths and organization charts, and one of the things we came out of that was we need to have multiple career paths for people. Some people just want to be a programmer or database administrator or whatever, and some want the responsibility to make sure their jobs are both engaging.

Speaker 1:

Man, this is so interesting and it begs me to ask more, better questions. The biggest question I got now, if you just kind of went through that, is how do you define leadership? What is leadership and how do you define it?

Speaker 2:

A leader is somebody who. My definition of leadership is someone who directs and inspires a team or an organization to achieve a particular goal. So you have to have all four. You have to direct and inspire. You can direct all you want to, but if the people don't want to do it, they're going to do the job and leave at five o'clock, Okay. And you can't just be inspirational and not give me a direction. That'd be lost walking around in circles. You have to have a team or organization to work with and you have to have a goal. If you have to have a goal, If you have those four things, those major components, then you can lead.

Speaker 1:

See, this is important and I want people to really tune in and understand what he just said. And I want to go back further. When you're talking about people that are, maybe they've been in a supervisor role, maybe they're just a a sole contributor, but they may or may not be looking into, you know, a higher promotional role, let's just say, or even even entrepreneurship, because you still have to lead in an entrepreneurial type environment. How do they get the skill set? I? I mean you can go to school, you're a professor, you know doing things at, I think, different universities I think you mentioned University of Maryland, western, some others. How do you get this skill set? Do you take a course in leadership in college, or most people? They get out there and they just start doing work, like I said, to get the technical skills but to get to the opportunity to lead people, people, leadership is a whole other animal. How do you get that kind of acquired skill?

Speaker 2:

Well, you saw, you know you're taking some courses to give you some foundations in leadership. That's why, the first day you know our course, that we do with a two-day onsite or if we're doing our leadership circles, you know the first day of our course that we do whether it's a two-day on-site or if we're doing our leadership circles the first session is all about the foundations. What is leadership? Talk about the definition of leadership, talk about the innate qualities of leadership and so forth. Get that and then you start walking through. How do you put that in practice? You put together your leadership vision. You put down how you're going to execute on that vision. You reflect on how you did and you have a coach or mentor who says okay, brian, great job on that, but you could have done better on that one. Okay.

Speaker 2:

So you know, the key thing is, if you're sitting in a leadership program and they all teach everyone the same subject, all the same skills, then you're in the wrong program you need to have. Then you're in the wrong program. You need to have a program that's going to be personalized. It takes what you're good at and say Brian, this is what you're good at, this is how you should lead. Help you figure out how you should lead based on who you are. Everyone can't lead like I, can't lead like you. You can't lead like me Two different people.

Speaker 1:

We have two different skills completely, I'm sure. Well, that hyper personalization is so important and I see that happening now in our society that we're breaking away from that cookie cutter. Is that okay? You know, when there's personalized learning, there's certain things that are foundational, as you said, fundamental that. But then there's that point where where are you at? Because we're experiential, we experience things differently and that's going to form our beliefs, it's going to form what we trust in, that's going to dictate what our actions are going to look like and what is all that going to come out. Now I want to ask you this, because I'm into personal branding how do you feel personal branding fits within the leadership ecosystem, especially in career development and business development?

Speaker 2:

Well, it depends on what kind of brand you want to have. You know my brand is. You know I'm a leader. You know, when I'm working in corporate America and so forth, I'm a leader. I get things done. So that was my brand. You know I was the one. You know some of my clients call me I'm the fixer. You know, when stuff is off track the product is not on track, they need someone to come in and straighten it out. I the product is not on track, they need someone to come in and straighten it out. I come in and in a few months I got it straightened out and I'm working smoothly again. But that takes leadership. You got to be able to get people to do what they sometimes may not want to do and that's the challenge.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes that's a huge challenge, and right now, what you talked about is branding. In a particular organization, you're that guy and everybody knows you're the fixer, right, how do you get outside of that? Now you have to have a bigger digital presence. You've got to have an expanded reach and you've got to be known as that fixer in realms that you're not operating in on a daily basis but you never know. You want to be that guy when they're going to have a conference or you're going to be invited onto a show or a podcast like this, that you're known for something. You're known for leadership. There's no doubt about it. I'm going to tell everybody and I hope you can give us more information about your program, because I went through just a small little bit that you gave to people that joined your session. It was an online conference and I joined this session and you kind of walked us through some modeling that I thought was very impactful to help me go like hmm, this is something I should really pay attention to. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, from the data standpoint. Once again, I think the session you saw was what we call our leadership resources management solution, and that works on the individual team level and the organization level. And that works on the individual team level and the organization level. As an individual level, it helps us use our basic assessment to understand who you are as a leader. That's what we use in all our classes. I can say we've been using it for the last eight years now and it helps us understand who they are as a leader, finding their gaps and so forth.

Speaker 2:

When you start getting into the team level, that's when you we just we did a couple of parties last year and we had one this year where we're taking their initial individual assessment and having their team members assess them using almost the same tool. You know, it's the same structure but the questions are worded differently. And so they say, okay, well, brian is a really good leader. This is a general question. To say Brian is a great leader, I may think I'm a great leader. The person who reports to me or my peers may say, well, brian has a lot to work on.

Speaker 1:

That's good, I hear what you're saying, right.

Speaker 2:

And then there we did a project. On the project we did last year, it was really great because it was a huge organization and the people that we're working with. We found introverts, we found toxic leaders all these kind of things Because leaders who thought they were great but the team says, no, you're not.

Speaker 1:

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Speaker 1:

Today there's a lot of that going on. There's misalignment. You have a perception of yourself and you have a perception of how others see you. And then, if you can take people out of context, meaning, oh yeah, tell me about Brian. They don't know, I talked about it. Just tell me about brian, and I get this whole image. Uh, and you know I read through that. Okay, it sounds good. Then I go talk to you. If you don't know, I've talked to them and that's all right. Brian, tell me about yourself. And it's like wow, is this guy in the same ballgame? That's right.

Speaker 2:

And that's why we use a data approach, our assessment tool, to help people understand where they are, where they start taking one of our programs and where they are three months, six months or 12 months later, Because most programs all they do is they either have a feeling that they say they feel they're doing better or they have interviews. So you may talk to me today and say, Brian, you're doing great, and somebody else may talk to me tomorrow and say, Brian, you still have a lot to work on, Because bias is built in all kind of subjective measures. Objective measure is the only way to go to a major leadership effectiveness.

Speaker 1:

Talk to me about if you had I'm sure you have a few, you've been doing this eight years a success story. Somebody came to you, went through your program, they had a client state and they had a desire, and then now they're at a different level because of what they went through. Can you share with us some of the things that maybe someone else may be able to gain by engaging with your coursework?

Speaker 2:

well, uh, one example I can I can talk about is we had a person when we first started the assessment tool, you know I had this person took one of my classes and they took the assessment and so forth and they came out they were okay. But over the years, you know, you know as they, as they can retake the risk assessment again and as they come back and talk to me about different things, I've seen them grow as a leader. I mean not just me personally talking to them, but I can see their social media platform, their social media outputs and everything and they are like I was like so happy. This person's like wow, you've really grown as a leader since I first met you and that's what we want to see is that transformation.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they apply the principle. Don't just read it like, oh no, that sounds great, but apply met you. And that's what we want to see is that transformation that they apply the principle. Don't just read it like, oh, you know what, that sounds great, but apply it and then be able to assess growth. You can see the difference.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Now you're about to do some couple of seminars, conferences that you got coming up and I know you've got some. You talked a little bit early about some topics you're going to talk about. Share just a little bit with us about what you're going to be talking about and, more importantly, why did you pick those particular topics?

Speaker 2:

Well, the one topic about leadership skills not being enough you know, because that's all I ever see on social media is about leadership skills not being enough. You know, because that's all I ever see on social media is about leadership skills. And that's not how we teach it in graduate school. It's not taught that way, it's taught as a process. People need to learn the process. You know, learn who you are. You need to come with your own leadership vision. You know plan to execute on that vision and so forth, and the key thing about it is that process. You know plan to execute on that vision and so forth, and the key thing about it is that process. You know, I'm kind of proud of this grant, so just bear with me for a minute.

Speaker 2:

It's been adopted by the military for a new leader training. So they came to me and said you know, we had these up on a leadership program. I looked at it and I said this is all. It was all Navy originally. It's all Navy stuff. And I said they said so. I said you need something that you hang stuff on. So we showed them the process and now we add all the Navy stuff to that process and so now when they teach it, they teach the concept and then they say how you're going to do deck level leadership and all this other kind of stuff. And that's been great. They even do it now. They do three classes a year. About 80 people teach on that program.

Speaker 1:

And that's your program, that's your intellectual property. Yeah, yeah, wow, that says a lot. Now, how many books have you written?

Speaker 2:

I yeah, yeah, wow, that says a lot. Now, how many books have you written? I've written three, uh. First one was on health care analytics, and then I thought I found the challenge I talked about earlier. Uh, the last one. Next one was on the health care leadership and then, uh, during covid, when hospitals were kind of busy, I wrote the uh, general leadership program it's kind of busy.

Speaker 1:

I wrote the General Leadership Program. It's kind of busy. Yeah, they're pulling their hair out. They're probably like Brian. This is a whole new kind of leadership here.

Speaker 2:

I know. So I just wrote a general leadership book, took the old book and just kind of rewrote it basically, and so yeah, so these are important topics and understanding.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I do within my own framework is that you know I have a brave framework to call it right, and the r in brave is research, research, and I've seen you. You do a lot of research, you accumulate a lot of data. You look at these things almost scientifically so that you come to almost a mathematical outcome, like we know that one plus one equals two. That way we put things together so you know the desired outcome one plus one will get the desired outcome of two. Do you apply that kind of principle to your particular program?

Speaker 2:

Yes, I do, because I'm always researching. You know, I learned early on, when I first started writing my first book, someone told me how to help, you know, pull my research together. So now, you know, as I'm reading articles and stuff online and so forth, I clip it to you, clip it to my research. And so now, when I sit down and actually write the start chapter, when I start writing the chapters of the book, I can say, okay, chapter one is this topic, pull out my research and outline the chapter based off of that. And I like having the quantitative part because, you know, not just because I'm an analytics person, but because that's undeniable you can come up with opinions all you want to. My favorite saying is from Peter Drucker. The famous management consultant says without data, you're just another person with an opinion.

Speaker 1:

That's right. There's a lot of people with a lot of opinions out here these days. I tell you what are your facts, what are your resources, what is your proof of work? I need a little bit more empirical information to substantiate what you just said so I can understand behaviors which are so important in what you're doing, especially in leadership skills and leadership training. I wanted to ask you this because we're now in this digital first society. Artificial intelligence is a game changer because now you can get data at the speed of light, basically on a lot of different things, and you can get written information in a blaze if you know how to input it correctly to get a desired outcome or resolve some insights. How has that changed what you're doing in your program?

Speaker 2:

Well, we are actually in the process of adding some AI content in the program and how to use AI a little bit better, but some of the things that we've been talking about with our team is when a leader has to make the decision. It's so easy. Instead of going through spending hours looking up stuff and finding looking up stuff and getting supporting that documentation, use a chat, gpt or some other AI generated tool and say what are the consequences of doing this or not doing this, or something like that. Pull it together and then say, okay, now this makes sense, this doesn't make sense, and so forth. You still have to apply the human brain to it because it's not perfect, and that will help the leaders do things a lot faster and be able to respond to some things a lot faster.

Speaker 1:

And that's important. Speed, speed to market, speed to the answer. Timing is everything, especially in our society that's running at breakfast speed. Basically, I wanted to ask you this because I think it's so very important. Let's just say a person says I don't need to work with Brian, I don't need leadership training, I don't need leadership skills. They're already in a particular role, so they live past that. What would you say to an individual with that kind of attitude?

Speaker 2:

Well, I have a quote, a Brian Bennett quote. The moment you believe you've learned everything about leadership is the moment you cease being a leader Right, because you always. There's always something more to learn. Just think about it. One of the and one of my programs I talk about in my speeches I talk about how leadership has changed over the years, over time, and one of the examples I use, which I'm using in a session about leadership skills, is that you know Star Trek.

Speaker 2:

Look at Star Trek. Back in the sixties, captain Kirk was the only one in the middle of the deck. He was in charge. Everybody knew what he said. Flash forward 30 years later to the next generation, you had Captain Picard sitting on the deck and you've got his number one to his right. You have his counselor or his coach or whatever you want to call her. You know next to him and you know decisions come up. You say so what do you think? What do you think? You know they're doing something sideways and they're looking at them and asking for their opinions. And that's the way people have to be nowadays. You have to be more inclusive, because no one knows everything. Back in the day, people thought they knew everything, but they didn't, but now people have to admit that they don't know everything and need help.

Speaker 1:

I think that's so important to understand that everyone has a particular skill set that they're very, very good at. I can just put a football team analogy. That guy right there usually is the best person that can throw a pass, like, let's say, or maybe the best person that can read a defense to that effect, and then somebody else you know, that person there can run very fast or they're able to catch favorite this. Everyone has a particular uh skill set and, depending on the situation at hand, what is the challenge in front of you? Is it a mental challenge? Is it an emotional challenge? Is it a physical challenge? Is it a spiritual challenge? Whatever that challenge is, you should have at your disposal others around you that are experts in those fields that can help you understand the situation, because I've seen that a lot as well is that people just don't understand.

Speaker 1:

You know, what is that IT department doing? I don't know what they're doing. They're doing this whiz-bang stuff. I don't need to know about that. Or someone who's in HR? I don't need people management programs, I don't need to know about that. So they've got to know about that. So how do you? They got to bring all that together and speak that common language to to solve a common problem that I see a lot on. Now I'm going to ask you do you, do you do team coaching and you know what? Just bring in your team, not just an individual. Talk to me a little bit more about your leadership program.

Speaker 2:

Okay, typically we do most of our programs. You know we can do them either individually we have a few different companies or we can do it as a team, as part of the organization, and you know we work typically in smaller groups. You know I'm not trying to train 200 people at a time. Some people try to do that. I don't think that's very efficient because I'm trying to get people to have their own personal leadership vision. When they walk out the door, they want them to know exactly what they need to do individually, not what Brian did, but what you need to do. So that's important. So we work with the teams and say and that's the most fun because we can sit around and, you know, talk about different things. That happens in the organization. You're in the same organization and say, hey, this is probably that it's time to resolve it. And we get their input from other groups that they may have even talked to before.

Speaker 1:

That is so important. Everything you said is just you've got to have that catalyst to have that happen. Now you're doing a couple of different talks that you've got coming up. Tell us about where you're going, who you're talking to and then how to get in touch with you via your website. Is it on LinkedIn and that?

Speaker 2:

type of thing. Well, we have the I'm all over LinkedIn. You can just Google my name, you'll find me out. I post regularly, probably three or four times a week, and then I do articles about twice a month also, so you'll find me all over LinkedIn. You'll find some of my photos on Instagram. I take most of my own photos. I'm an avid photographer, so I do that also. But as far as my speaking, I've got the thing with the Filipino American Chamber coming up soon. We have topics in August, september and October. I have another event coming up with the San Diego Tech Hub here. I have another event coming up with the San Diego Tech Hub here, and then I've got put together what I call Speaking Information Package, which is my own speaking portfolio, and in there, you know, I talk about some of the topics that I've done before that people really liked and they've gotten really good ratings.

Speaker 2:

So if people want, to hire me for a corporate event. You know they can do that From there. Just go to EliteLeadershipAcademycom slash speaking. It's very easy to get to. It tells you all about my. You know who I've spoken for before. You know view the portfolio, see some videos out there and so forth. So and you can, you know, send a booking request in from there.

Speaker 1:

I like that you also teach at a couple colleges, right.

Speaker 2:

That's right, I'm teaching a marketing research class. Marketing research and analytics class.

Speaker 1:

I think that's important Market research and analytics. I got a lot of entrepreneurs that listen in to the podcast and need to understand that. Some people they just want to rent out and get brand assets together because they like the cool video or the dynamic website to get a lot of information, but they haven't done the research to understand the marketplace. They can become more unique and a differentiator. You've got to pull all that together to do that. So leadership runs into a lot of different gamuts and I really really appreciate it. Before I let you go, is there any one thing that we haven't talked about that you really really want to get off your chest and let the audience know.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think the thing that's the most important to realize is you know, any kind of the getting ahead of leadership program has to be process-driven. That's number one. It has to be personalized to the individuals. It has to have follow-up, coaching and mentoring okay. Without that you're never going to become. You have no one to talk to. We just talked about how important it is to have someone to bounce things off of, and then it has to be measurable. You know, that's the number one thing. You know, one thing that most leadership programs do not have is any way to really objectively measure how well they're doing. So I just wrote an article, published it last week. $60 billion a year is spent on leadership training programs, and that's in the United States. $60 million, $60 billion, and most of them don't know if it's doing any good or not.

Speaker 1:

That is a shocking stat and I love that because you've got to be able to evaluate what you're doing and measure, because you don't know if you're missing the mark, and I love that. What you're doing, you have a feedback loop right. You've got to have a feedback loop that aligns to everything to see if this is being effective or not. And and I've seen a lot of people oh, another leadership program, oh, here's another, and they keep going and it doesn't stick. Nothing is done but what you just described there the process and the personalization that sticks. And I've gone through some different training programs, leadership programs, and I remember the ones that stick and those are the ones that really resonated with who I was and where I needed to go, and I still utilize those principles today and some of that was to your point five years ago. So I love the portfolio that you put together, because everything doesn't have to be brand brand new. You can still get great, great put together. Because everything doesn't have to be brand brand new. You can still get great, great information and guidance from things that were done in the past. That's why a lot of people reach into the past when they're looking for insights, because it's still applicable in the foundation of the state. So I really really like it.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, brian, for being on the Fallen Brand podcast. I want to encourage your entire audience to look into all the different episodes that we've had, because they're there as a library of knowledge in different areas, whether it's in executive presence, or it's in technology innovation, or it's in career and business development, or financial empowerment, or personal branding and brand mastery. All these things are there Because I know people can look back. These last three years that I've been doing this program is to get information. You understand like, hey, if I start a startup on my own, yeah, I'll get there, but it's going to take me a lot longer. Do you have the time to do that or do you want to get there quicker by talking to an expert like yourself? And I encourage everybody to look into your program. This is so important. Thank you again for being on the program podcast and tell everybody they can tune in at 5 Star BDM that's the number 5 Star S-T-A-R BDM that's B for brand, e for development and M for masterscom.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, grant, appreciate it. No, no, no problems, no worries. This has been wonderful and I will talk to you soon. Take care.

Speaker 2:

Okay, thank you and take care. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1:

Bye. Thanks for joining us on the Follow Brand Podcast. Big thanks to Full Effect Productions for their incredible support on each and every episode. Now the journey continues on our YouTube channel Follow Brand TV Series. Dive into exclusive interviews, extended content and bonus insights that will fuel your success. Subscribe now and be a part of our growing community sharing and learning together. Explore, engage and elevate at Follow Brand TV Series on YouTube. Stay connected, stay inspired. Till next time, we will continue building a five-star brand that you can follow.