100: Kevin Eikenberry – The Future of Leadership — Chris Spurvey

“It’s Time to Sell’s 100th episode is here! I am so grateful to everyone who continues to listen to the podcast. Do you have ideas on how we can make this show better? I’d love to hear it in the comments!

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Our guest for today is Kevin Eikenberry, Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group. He helps organizations, leaders and individuals reach their potential through remarkable learning approaches.

He is a world-renowned leadership expert, a two-time bestselling author, speaker, consultant, trainer, coach, leader, learner, husband and father (not necessarily in that order). Kevin’s specialties include leadership, teams and teamwork, organizational culture, facilitating change, organizational learning and more.

He is the bestselling author of Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time (Jossey-Bass Publishing 2007), a leadership primer designed to help you learn and master the 13 competencies of remarkable leaders; and Vantagepoints on Learning and Life (Dog Ear Publishing 2006), a collection of his email essays on learning from everyday experiences. His other books include #LeadershipTweet: 140 Bite Sized Ideas to Help You Become the Leader You Were Born to Be (Happy About, 2009), and the co-author of From Bud to Boss: Secrets to a Successful Transition to Remarkable Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Read Kevin's Full Bio

In this episode, we talk about the importance of having a sales mindset when running a business, how his company has grown, the future of leadership, and more.

There’s a lot to learn in this episode so click that play button to listen. Enjoy!

If You Have a Business, You Have to Have a Sales Mindset

When it comes to running a business, it’s not about having the best product, or having a world-changing product – it’s about selling it to those who need it.

We have to have a sales mindset because it’s not about the best product – really.

You’ve got a good enough product, and you may have a great product, and you may have a world-changing product, but it doesn’t mean people are just going to show up. I don’t know if I embodied it, but I certainly understood it.

There are people that would probably say, “Well, Kevin, you’re naturally good at that” – which I think is silly; I don’t think anyone is.

To anyone who’s here who say, “Well, that’s not my natural gift,” I say, “So what? You ride a bicycle. You weren’t born being able to ride it; you learned how to ride it by putting your butt in the seat.”

You’re not going to grow your business without it and you can’t delegate all of it.

Kevin’s Journey

If we were to go back, I would say it was just me for probably the first 10-ish, 8-ish years. It was just me, and I worked for some folks on a subcontractor basis.

It started about 15 years ago, I started having team members and for a long time, there was just one. Or one in a day, or one intern in the summer kind of a thing.

But Chris, our team now is 14 or 15 folks spread out across the United States, not counting subcontractors that do coaching and training for us as well.

There is a transition. I think it’s a really important one for the people listening if you’re in that spot where Chris is. But you want to be in a place where you have a broader team, for whatever reasons.

Long-Distance Leadership

Kevin and I also talked about his newest book, The Long-Distance Leader. He shares that this book is all about where the world is and where it’s going in terms of leadership, which is more and more leaders are leading more and more folks who aren’t down the hall.

If you look at my team, I’ve got some people in the building today. I’ve got some people who work and could’ve driven here today but didn’t, or don’t. And I’ve got people spread out literally across the United States, nearly from sea to shining sea.

That’s where the world is and that’s where the world is going.

Leadership doesn’t change, but how we do it in some ways does need to change, and those changes are nuanced and small, but super important. You know, small hinges swing big doors.

We believe this book finds a place in the marketplace that hasn’t been served, and it’s going to help a whole lot of leaders who maybe even – and our research for the book even says that a lot of leaders say, “I think I’m holding it together and doing this pretty well” but they’re not sure, and what a lot of them are doing is just paddling harder.