Create a vision and follow your own path with Scale Up specialist Nick Bradley
Host of Scale Up Your Business podcast, Nick Bradley has been CEO of multiple companies, successfully growing and scaling venture capital and private equity-backed businesses.
Nick joins me in this episode and shares his insights on decision-making in business and he reveals how he maintains focus and achieves peak productivity.
In this episode we discuss:
01:26 Introduction to Nick Bradley
- What you might not know about Nick [03:17]
03:55 How Nick went from being an employee to leading companies
07:24 Nick talks about being unemployable
09:06 Egotistical decision-making vs customer-centric decision-making in business
12:48 Nick shares a few lessons from his experiences
- One important question every budding entrepreneur must ask themselves [13:47]
- Two things a lot of people ignore in business and in life [14:39]
- Nick talks about emotional intelligence in business [17:48]
- Two things that kill a business [18:31]
- Change your programming [22:21]
24:46 Nick’s biggest failure and what came out of it
- Nick’s lowest point and how he got past it [29:18]
35:36 How Nick maintains focus and peak productivity
49:53 Bonus: Where does Nick find the time to run nearly a hundred marathons
Quick Juice Questions
44:24 When you buy businesses, What do you look for in a business, and why?
“A lot of people ask me to invest in startups and technology businesses. It’s not that I don’t like those businesses, I just tend to prefer to buy traditional, “boring,” EBITDA, net-profit businesses.
So, I buy businesses that I know I can scale up, I know how to exit them, and I know that I’m going to be making money all the way through the process from the deal being done to the cash flow of the business all the way to the capital event.”
46:43 What most inspires you? When and where are you most inspired?
“I’m always inspired by personal development, by growth.”
47:38 Which book has inspired you and changed your thinking the most?
“The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer.
It’s about an ideology about life happening FOR you at all times as opposed to TO you.”
48:57 What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“Don’t follow someone else’s path. Follow your own and trust that you can achieve anything you want to achieve if you just put in the effort and do the work.”
51:21 If there’s one last bit of Executive Juice you can share for people who want to get to the top of their property game, what would it be?
“When you’re making decisions around your career, around your business, around your life, look at both the paradigms of achievement and fulfillment.”
Quotes
- “A lot of people don’t have a clear view of what they want to do other than they think they want to have a successful business.”
- “When the world’s changing, you can’t stop that. Your brain’s natural reaction is to try and put up walls and create some level of safety and security. It takes a certain individual to realise that that’s not something that’s going to make them happy long term.”
- You’ve got to have a destination first before you can work out the decisions you’re going to make to get somewhere.
- People make their best decisions when they’re at the height of pleasure or pain. If you’re in the middle where it’s not quite good enough but not quite bad enough, you can stay there forever. [23:43]
On asking for help
- […] I was trying to solve these problems myself. That’s probably my biggest failure and biggest mistake. The biggest learning is, you just can’t do these things by yourself. You’d do best surround yourself with great people who can inspire different thoughts and actions.
On focus and scheduling
- If you have a goal and you don’t schedule it, it’ll never be achieved. And if you have too many goals and too many things you’re trying to do, you won’t have the time to schedule so you’ll lack in focus.
- “What gets scheduled gets done.”
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Books mentioned: