The Secrets 🤫 of the Next Level, with Alex Brueckmann

Welcome. To Amplify, the personal brand entrepreneur show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Alex Brueckmann There are things that happen that you cannot plan. For example, a few months back, I bumped into Marshall Goldsmith at Seattle Airport. We've never met before, personally. So it was just one of these moments you cannot plan them. And we had lunch together because we both had a layover and we agreed on collaborating on a notebook. These are things that you cannot plan. But there are other plans and other ideas that help you establish yourself, even when you are planted in a completely new environment. Hi there and welcome back to the Personal Brand Business Show. My name is Bob gentle and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing and monetizing your expertise, intentionally growing a unique personal brand and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you're here and you still have your device in your hand, take a second to subscribe. Whether you're on YouTube or listening on audio, I know you still have your device in your hand. At least you might still have your mouse in your hand, so take a moment to subscribe. It really makes a big difference to me and it will mean you won't miss a single episode. If you're a regular listener, then consider sharing the show with just one person. It's the very best way you can help the show to grow and help me reach more people. If you're watching on YouTube, YouTube is new Alex, then please subscribe. It lets YouTube know that I'm all right and they should show this show to more people. And trust me, we both want this. Today's guest has been with us before and return visits are a very special thing. They don't happen all that often. One of the most powerful strategies for success is to understand what makes other people successful and then model that behavior. Knowledge is only power when you actually use it. But sometimes it's complicated to unpack. This week's guest is Alex Brockman, and his new book Secrets of Next Level entrepreneurs is a gift for anyone trying to beat the luck game and get a little bit more strategic about their success. Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back, Bob. It's a pleasure. Strategy, especially the strategies of successful people, are things that I always... In fact, this is the whole point of the podcast. That's why we're here. But sometimes, especially in more complex businesses, the strategy is harder to see and it's harder to understand. I think one of the things that especially the solopreneur or the independent entrepreneur struggles with is moving from one stage of success to another. What got you here won't get you there. And this is where people like you really come in. They come into their own because something I found, speaking to a lot of very successful people, and I think this is something we're going to talk about a lot today is, they're not the people today they were at the beginning of their journey. They had to embrace change, not only in their business, but in themselves. And that's something that can happen naturally in some people. But in others, it has to be a strategy. It has to be intentional. But I'm jumping ahead of the game a little bit. For the listener who's maybe meeting you for the first time, can you maybe tell us a little bit about who you are, where you are, what you do, in order that my rambling makes a little bit of sense? I'm an. Englishman in New York. Not quite, but almost. I'm a German guy living in Vancouver, Canada. Moved here about three years ago. In March 2020, we all know what happened in March 2020. It was probably the worst time to move to a different continent. But it was in the books. It was planned and we did it. Ever since, we've built our lives here and it has been quite a ride. As you can imagine, building a new business under pandemic conditions in a country where you're new to. It hasn't always been easy. But don't we all love a bit of a challenge? So I am a strategy consultant strategy facilitator. I write business books and I mainly work with small and medium sized enterprises starting in the multimillion dollar range all the way up to Fortune 50 businesses. Strategy consultant, to some people that might sound vague. I think strategy is one of these words that people use very, very loosely without really understanding what it means. So what is your definition of strategy? I come across a lot of business strategists, people that call themselves that, that are in a very specific, unique field or niche. So when I use the term... And by the way, that's totally fine. They can call themselves whatever they want. I'm not judging. It's just an observation. To agree with what you said, it's a very broadly used term. When I use the term, I talk about the overarching business strategy of a company, of an organization. So to give you a hierarchy, when we use the term strategy, when we start at the very top, we're talking about an organizational strategy, a business strategy, and then we break that down into either functional areas like an HR strategy, a marketing strategy, etc. And then within these, let's take marketing for example, people would use the term strategy often for something like a social media strategy and things like that. When I use the term, we're talking about the overarching strategy of an organization. I guess what would be really useful, because again, there's still a danger where it might seem vague, overarching strategy. Until it has some operational elements, it doesn't really mean anything. It would be very easy for me to say, I have an amazing strategy when actually I have an idea and I have a few tactics that seem to work. When you're brought in to work at the overarching strategy level, operationally, I guess, what does that, A, the process look like? And B, what does the deliverable look like at the end? What does somebody walk away with when they actually have a strategy? And how is that going to tangibly affect the business? Because I think that's a useful place to start. Absolutely, I totally agree. The first tangible take away for my customers is a shared understanding of the term strategy and how they use it. And that sounds really weird, but that is often more valuable to them as they initially think. Because you got to imagine there's a room with, let's say, eight to 10 executives, and they all have their unique experiences. Some of them might have been in the business for a long time. Others are new to the business. Everyone has a different age, a different academic background. Some of them don't have an academic background. Now you're standing in a room with these people and your job is to help them create a business strategy. And everyone in the room has a different understanding of what that means. And that's just a recipe for disaster. So unless we know what we're talking about and everyone has a shared understanding of what that is, what are we talking about, once you reach that, you're off to the races. And what we often achieve is that the common definition in the room of business strategy as your top priorities to achieve a desired state of the company in the future. And that is often our starting point. So to simplify it without dumbing it down, we could say in that room, those executives are trying to understand what will truly move the needle to build the business or to grow it to that stage where they want it to be. It's not about operationalizing the strategy at this point in time. It's really about understanding the big picture, the big success levers, and to talk about it in a way that it's not about them as, let's say, leaders of sales or another department. It's about the business as a whole. And this is often a challenge for executives because they became very successful in their subject matter. So a CFO, for example, would often, in the discussions already, think about the numbers. But at that point in time, we're not necessarily need the numbers. We need a broader, more creative approach to what we want to build and how to get there. I had a bit of a moment as you were talking there because this has always been a big question for me. But you take a group of executives, they got there because they are energetic people. They get stuff done. And the problem with people like that is they have a lot of energy, they never have a lack of ideas, they don't have a lack of ambition. They know how to get stuff done. And it's a little bit like a powerful explosive. The problem with a powerful explosive, you can put it against a wall, but unless it's directed, it's not going to blow anything up. So strategy really provides the direction to that energy that will make it effective. And I think on that basis, I can see how you might have a group of people, a group of executives, for want of a better word, that are incredibly potent individuals. But until they have a shared and agreed direction, that energy can't be converted into value. I don't know how I got to that rather random image, but it was useful for me. But I think the analogy holds true in a lot of small businesses as well. So businesses like mine, where there's only one or two or three people. You can't do more of the things. It's even more important in those businesses, by the way, because those small businesses, they don't have a lot of body fat that they can trim off. So it's very often straight to the bones. And you feel it when you are too busy and you hustle all day without that direction that you mentioned, Bob, you are fairly fast quickly depleting your resources and you realize it often when it's too late. One of the things that you hear a lot of business strategy advisors recommending is diversification and multiple streams of revenue. That's what they recommend to people like you and I. But actually listening to what you're saying and what I also know to be true from the people that I know are the most successful, simplicity actually becomes really important. If you can't make one revenue stream work, you should probably not be looking at adding others until you can make one thing work. And it really comes down to, okay, what is your strategy? Not what could you do, but what should you do? And then directing all your energy towards that one thing, again, as a strategy. I think to add something to that, Bob, when we think about diversification of revenue streams for small business owners, we are not talking about hedging risk. We are talking about adding value in each of these streams and thereby exploiting different streams to generate revenue for you. It's not that you have these revenue streams as a risk hatch. It's that they all work at the same time. And that's the huge difference. Yeah. And I think a lot of people look at diversification, as you said, to mitigate risk. It's a fear response. To come back to what I was saying earlier about modeling, the most successful people I know are successful because they land into simplicity rather than complexity. And this is really what you're offering at the SME or the corporate level is it's simplicity again, it's not complexity. A good strategy is going to eliminate rather than include. That's the difficult piece, by the way, for most people to distill the essence out of their thinking and to make something complex so simple that it makes sense for them and for the clients. Any fool can make something simple complicated, but it takes a lot of focused work to take something complex like an organization, like a business, and bottom line the value that you deliver, and then make it really easy to get to that point. What was rolling in my head was you can't do all the things. The problem is a lot of businesses actually try and do that. T hat's where maybe we're experiencing the absence of strategy or the illusion of strategy. I think as a foundation, we've isolated, Okay, we know what we're talking about in terms of strategy now. This isn't your first book. I know you've written another one. What have you tried to do? By the way, which comes out at a later point. That's the funny part about these two books. I thought the other book was out. Yeah, I thought so too. But then a publisher picked it up and it's coming out in October this year. So the first book is actually the second one that I wrote. Right. That's crazy. So yes, I realized that this book was with a legit publisher. We spoke previously when you were other, but I think you must have self published it last time then. Well, the idea was to self publish and then within a few weeks time, two different publishers picked up those two books and they're both being published now in 2023. It's been quite a wild ride, to be honest, with the book publishing the world. All right. So tell me about the Secrets of Next Level entrepreneurs book then. That's the one that's coming out shortly. What's. Your goal with the book? What are the key reasons? I guess people should go and get it. The title might be a bit misleading. The book is not only for entrepreneurs in the narrow sense of the word. It is a book for anyone who is leading a business or a part of a business and at the same time would like to live a balanced life. We know that this often feels very difficult, especially when we are in a growth phase or under a certain stress in an organization. We tend to sacrifice our personal lives for our, let's say, business success. And the book addresses various aspects that help you achieve balance, whatever that means for you. That doesn't mean... So we don't use the term work life balance here. We don't suggest that it needs to be 50 50 or any other weird split. It is more a feeling than a mathematical formula. And we talk about three different levers in the book that anyone who is in charge of an area of a business or who leads their own company, for example, should embrace to let go of those things that take energy from you and focus on what gives you energy. That's all about balance. And so the book is structured in three different themes. One is about what is it that I need to learn? Really hard skills. Which hard skills do I need to learn to lift the business that I lead and the people that I work with to that next level? The second theme is about leadership and culture. What does that mean? What is an impactful work culture? And we offer various perspectives to leadership and to approaching these questions. How do I lead a team through really challenging times like what we saw in the past years? What does that mean in terms of innovation and disruption? And the third theme of the book is all about understanding myself as a human being at a deeper level and therefore being able to consciously decide, intentionally build that balance. We offer a few hyper specific tools that you can use. It's not an academic textbook. It's a book that was mainly written by entrepreneurs and corporate leaders for entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. So it's very, very tangible content. I come back to what I said earlier on about... It's something that I've seen again and again and again that the most successful people I know are not the people that they were when they began the journey. Their businesses grew largely because they grew. And I think a lot of businesses fail to thrive because the business owners fail to embrace personal change. There's a little bit of an arrogance that, Well, I'm successful enough, I got myself to this level, I can just keep pushing and pushing and not have the humility to understand that I need to evolve as well. For me, that's a key success ingredient. It's so clear through your book that you offer a roadmap to that. I think for me, that's one of the biggest gaps in the entrepreneurial literature. There's an awful lot of how to, but there's not very much how to become. And. For me, there's the things that need to be done in a business. But then there's the person that needs to grow into that role as well. And I think this is really important for the smaller business owner to understand that you're not finished, that nobody's fully formed as a human being ever. Growth never ends. And the image that I often have in my mind is if you were to parachute me into Richard Branson's business, I would destroy it in a week because I'm not the person that I would need to be in order for that to be successful. The same of anybody whose business is possibly levels to use your book title ahead of mine. There are achievements that need to be unlocked in order to operate at these levels. And I think the book illustrates that really nicely. From your perspective, what are the biggest barriers that you experience on this threshold of what you would call the solopreneur or the micro business stepping into the SME leadership role? Because they're quite distinctly different experiences. I think the most apparent and something that probably resonates with everyone who has been on that journey already is that at some point in time, it's not about your sub treatment or expertise anymore. It's about, can I hire the people that will make the growth work? And am I able to embrace a different role, which is that of leading a business rather than managing it? And am I willing to throw myself into that role and to humbly accept my own limitations and to learn about what it is that I need to do better and learn to thrive in that role. And. That is very different from being a successful subject matter expert, a solopartner. And I've been there myself. I know how difficult this can be. I failed at least several of the people that I hired in terms of offering what they really needed when I was way younger than now. But I learned and I humbly accepted my limitations. And I know that I will do things differently the next time when I'm in a similar situation. That's when writing a book is a bit of cathartic as well. You have to accept those moments as being part of yourself and to use them to distill the essence and the learning out of it in a way that it can be applied by someone else, not only by you. I believe that the magic that comes with reading that book is you can just open it at any page and you will get a full meal. Every chapter in this book holds so much value and is so specific and in itself packaged that you can read that chapter and put the book back into the shelf. It's not a book that you need to read cover to cover. There is a red thread throughout the book, but every chapter works on its own. Let's give you an example. When you are in your business currently thinking about, Oh, my God. How on earth should I probably price my products and services in the best way? Then you open the chapter by Dr. Seem on and read about value pricing. And you put the book back into the shelf. And then sometime down the road, you probably realize, I want to know more about disrupting my industry. Or I feel I'm totally stressed out. I'm losing myself. Then you read a chapter about whole person self transformation and life balance. We offer very specific input depending on where you are on your entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial journey. And I think this is something that everyone who is on that threshold that you described, Bob, at some point in time realises. You hit a wall, you hit it once, you hit it twice, and you're like, Man, weird, that wall doesn't fall down. What is it that I need to get over this wall? Because let's be honest, these walls are too thick, you can't just break through. It doesn't work like that. As you were speaking, I was reflecting on a lot of experiences I had when I was leading a larger company, and it was no fun at all. But I can see reading through them. For the person watching on YouTube, I keep glancing off to this side because I have the chapter list in front of me here, and it really does speak to me. The one thing that you keep mentioning is we. This isn't an entirely Alex Brookman generated piece of copy. So tell me a little bit about the people that were involved in producing this work. Even my second book that comes out later this year, even if it just has my name on the cover, these books are typically never the work of one person. And with Secrets of Next Level entrepreneurs, I personally took this to my next level. I invited contributors to the book that I admire for their way of approaching their subject matter expertise, for their way of leading their businesses. I invited them to contribute a chapter that holds so much value that I could never have produced on my own. And I wrote the concept for the book and everything in between these chapters, how I weave them together and how they generate this red thread and value for you. That was something that emerged in the aftermath of a business summit, a three day business summit that I ran some time ago. And out of more than 40 speakers, these ideas really stuck with me. And I saw the red thread and I asked them whether they would be willing to contribute their tremendous value. And we created this book together, an anthology that I could have never written on my own. And this is why this piece of copy of this work is even more valuable to me, because you can sit down and write a book front to end based on your subject matter expertise. But stitching a book together that holds so many different aspects, from conflict management to building consumer touch points based on your sustainability efforts. It's a very broad range of topics that we cover. What they all have in common is they are on the mind of every business leader at one point or another in their career. And that's why they are so valuable, in my opinion. I think what's really cool about this way of producing a book as well is a lot of authors, they have one idea that's the main idea in the book. And then not to be cruel, there's often a lot of padding in order to hit a word count. Here, you have a lot of people participating, so they're each injecting a different central idea. It doesn't really leave enough a lot of room for padding other than your narrative stitching together, creating the whole out of the parts. I can see, as you describe that, why you have this enthusiasm for. It's a book that you can pull off the shelf and find useful again and again, depending on what you're struggling with. Because each chapter is essentially a self contained unit. It's both a self contained unit and providing a narrative arc, I guess. That's correct. That's absolutely it. And for us, it was more the other way around. We had to take out approximately 15,000 words to go down to the word count that we needed. Every chapter is a full meal. I guess what I'd like to talk about next is you moved to Canada from Germany, three, four years ago now? Three years, yes. I think when we spoke last, the pandemic hadn't quite happened yet, but it must have happened the next day or something. It has been quite a ride. As you mentioned, a very challenging time to establish a new identity in a new country, new networks, not knowing anybody. I empathise with that a little bit. I moved to city a year and a half ago. I don't know anyone in this city, literally nobody. I have no clients in this city. It's a very new experience for me as someone whose entire business was originally built through local word of mouth. Like you, my business has been through a very big change. But I'm interested to know how you approach that because you've thrived. Thriving doesn't happen by accident. So how have you approached repositioning yourself, reestablishing this identity? You mentioned summit, you're writing the books. What's been your strategy there? It is certainly a wild ride. And sometimes you connect the dots looking backwards and they make sense. And I. Don't want to take full credit for what I did because some of these things, they really just happened. And while I believe that good things happen to people who persevere and work hard and consistently, and I don't really believe in the concept of luck, there are things that happen that you cannot plan. For example, a few months back, I bumped into Marshall Goldsmith at Seattle Airport. I think we've never had Met before, personally. So it was just one of these moments you cannot plan them. And we had lunch together because we both had a layover, and we agreed on collaborating on a notebook. So these are things that you cannot plan. But there are other plans and other ideas that help you establish yourself, even when you are planted in a completely new environment. And that means not letting go too early of what you've been doing successfully in the past, which allows you to explore your ideas and build networks where you are now. So it's this ambidextarity that gives you the opportunity to create something new while still being successful with something that made you successful in the first place. And you quoted Marshall earlier when you said, What got you here won't get you there. And it's exactly that realizing that what made you successful in your old environment might not necessarily be what's needed in your new environment. And that is a lesson that I really had to learn hard because at the beginning I thought it would be possible to thrive with a similar offering. And then I realized, but that's actually not even what I'm passionate about anymore. And allowing myself to explore what it is that I'm passionate about and then rebuilding my personal brand around it, that was a painful experience in many ways. But there was no way around it. I am in my mid 40s and I really love working on purpose, on passion. I had to give myself permission to tear something down for something new to emerge. And the balance act was not to tear down what I had already, but what I was thinking was the right thing, realizing it wasn't, and then tear it back down without affecting everything around me in a negative way. That was quite challenging, to be honest. It is. I think there's always the temptation when you want to do something new to destroy. I think that's a bad approach. You have to honour where you've been and that moving towards something new is a process, not an event. Everybody wants to rush that. I think to come back to the question of luck, I think this is something that a lot of people, when they see really successful people having really amazing things happening to them, it can trigger jealousy sometimes. What I've come to realise is, you take your example of meeting Marshall Goldsmith in the airport and then agreeing to collaborate on a new book, that's a dream for some people. It was for me, certainly. However, there's very few people for whom that could have happened because A, you knew who he was, you recognized him. 99 % of people wouldn't. You were an existing author, you'd written a book, so you had things in common. You have shared experience. So you were positioned for that to happen. And that doesn't happen by accident. That is the consequence of consistent effort over time. I couldn't have achieved it. Even if I'd met them, even if I'd recognized them, I'm still some guy. You have shared experience. Luck happens to those who have set the foundations and the things in motion for events to happen at certain times. That's a beautiful way of putting it, Bob. Pardon? That's a. Beautiful way of putting it. I never thought about that in that way. I like the idea of... I can't remember where this comes from, but vision is really important, knowing where you want to go, but not worrying about all the individual steps on the way, but knowing that's the destination. And all you worry about is the individual transfer links on the way. What's the next thing that needs to happen? And as long as you're consistently taking action in those directions with a destination in mind, I'm going to say the universe will be helpful. I'm not a big fan of the law of attraction. Simply having the vision in mind is insufficient. You have to take action on the transfer links along the way. And that's what you did. And that's why you can be lucky. Luck doesn't happen by accident. Sorry, it's a bit of a ramble here. I loved it. I enjoyed it very much. I guess where I'd. Like to go next is, what does the business in your vision look like next? Because as we said, nothing's ever finished. You must have a destination in mind. And I guess there may be people listening who would like to support you on that journey. So from your perspective, being a strategic person, what does the current destination look like? Make it to. The end of this year. But honestly, quite frankly, this year I published two books and it's a ton of work to do that because what people often don't realize, even if you are lucky enough to work with a big publishing house, you do the marketing. What book marketing is concerned, publishers, they have distribution networks and that is an important piece of marketing. But what people generally see as marketing, like anything on social media, like anything that lands in your email inbox, this comes from the author. So it's a lot of work to publish these books. That's what I say. I want to make it to the end of this year. And obviously, the second book that comes out later in the year is a book that is entirely written about the work that I've been doing for the past 15 to 20 years around strategy facilitation and what it takes for businesses to embrace the essence of strategy and do something with it that is just great for them. So my personal vision for my business, which is, as you mentioned earlier, a very small business right now because it's basically me with a network of people around me that support me specifically in certain areas, I would like to stabilize that business and to make it to that five year threshold, which is big for new businesses because we all know that the vast majority of new businesses don't make it to that five year threshold. So that is my time horizon right now. I'm in year four now. Making it to five would be amazing. I don't see a reason why I wouldn't, but you never know. And in that, obviously, my big goal, and this goes full circle to what we talked earlier, my big goal is to help organizations use that knowledge, the essence of those two books, to create a future for them that is centered around the three key themes, their people, the profits that they make, and what I call planet. But I don't mean just planet, I mean social and environmental responsibility and delivering a strategy that has an impact beyond just the bottom line. I think. What's really interesting listening to you is something that I've experienced myself, and I see it quite often in ambitious people, I'll call it, that you have a vision, you have a goal. It's actually quite rare to see people getting very close to those goals. And you're on the threshold of that. The goal was to write these two books to get that in the can. You haven't really thought much beyond that because that was the goal. And what's really exciting is, I guess it can be a danger point in some businesses where you achieve the goal and you spend a lot of time thinking, I've done it, I've done it, I've done it, and then you get complacent and you fail to set the next big goal. It's a danger actually if you set that next big goal too early. So it's very exciting to see somebody so close to where they've been trying to get to. Yeah, quite thrilling. And I don't judge it that you haven't really planned what's next in detail because it's not right. I think when you achieve a massive milestone in your career, it is important to celebrate that milestone. I'm not talking about the small victories on the road. I'm talking about something like writing a book and publishing a book. This is a year long journey, and I'm not talking year and singular, but this is a plural. So that easily two to three years. And once you've achieved that, and I'm not talking about this book now specifically, but in general, about big goals that you have as a business owner, it's time to celebrate. And obviously, you think about the next steps because there is always a next level. But to unlock these levels, it's like a computer game. You can't just jump to the end game. You have to go through every level. And to be very honest, Bob, I don't even know now what that level looks like because I'm not yet there. Once I push the door open, I see this new universe that I can then fill with something that hopefully connects to what I've been doing in the past. But you never know. I actually, I really found pleasure in writing the books. Maybe I write more books in the future and work less. I don't know yet. Maybe I want to go back further out and work more with my customers again and write less books. Let's see what that future brings. Well, hopefully. The books bring some commercial success as at least a foundation. But I'm quite sure they'll do amazing things for your personal brand. I'm very aware of the time that you have a meeting in a little while and I don't want to abuse your goodwill too much. I guess there will be people there thinking, I want some more Alex Brodman in my life. If people want to connect with you, how would you like them to do that? The best. Way is to download the first chapter of my upcoming book. It's for free, it's on my website and it's a great way to explore my writing, how I think, and I hope there's value in it for you. The best way to do that is to go to next levelbook. Co and just download the free chapter. When you do that, you automatically receive also an invite for our live launch party on the 28th of March. I would love to meet as many people as possible there. It's a virtual event and I'm super excited to share the book with the world. I will. Hopefully be there and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Wherever you're watching and listening, just scroll down, click the link and get the first three chapters of the book. Alex, I guess to bring things to a close this time, we can maybe talk again soon once the new book, the next one rather, is ready to come out again. But what's one thing you do now that you wish you'd started five years ago? To allow. Myself to fail on a small scale and not push it out too far. I think what I didn't do in the past years too well is to embrace my own limitations to a degree where I not only became aware of them and maybe even accept them, but it's the action piece that I was dragging. And that's what I would do. I would act faster when I realize that I'm hitting a wall consistently in a certain area and not only doing that on my own, but actually ask the right people for help. There's an abundance of people out there that have specific knowledge in specific areas. And over the past years, I realized that using these has tremendous value for your inner peace as well. Yes, I think that's definitely true. That's one of the joys of having a podcast is you know all the people, so you never stay stuck for long. But I absolutely agree. It's a big world and I think a lot of business owners are so used to being self contained and self sufficient that it can seem like a weakness to ask for help. But it's actually astonishing how many people are happy to offer their advice and their support without it costing money. Absolutely. Alex, thank you so much for your time. I will hopefully speak to you again sometime really soon, but good luck with the book launch. And thank you so much so much for your time and for you listening and watching. Again, thank you for your time and I will see you next week.