Craig Andrews 00:05

All right. Today I want to welcome Lauren Goldstein. She is the biz doctor. She's also the host of the Biz Doctor podcast and the founder of Golden Key Partnership, which is a business consulting firm. Her superpower is helping seven figure service based business entrepreneurs uncover what is keeping them stuck in in the trenches of their business so they can have more freedom, impact, success, happier teams, and can breathe a much needed sigh of relief. Lauren has been featured in Thrive Global, Huffington Post Authority Magazine, and is a trusted expert to Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Nike and at and T. Lauren, welcome.

Lauren Goldstein             00:53

Thank you so much for having me.

Craig Andrews 00:56

Yeah. So obviously you're here in Austin, Texas, but you haven't always been you spent some time in Queensland, Australia.

Lauren Goldstein             01:12

Yeah, so I've been all over the place. I lived in Queensland when I was studying abroad during undergraduate. I grew up in Colorado, then was in Dallas, San Francisco, and then settled here in Austin about eight years ago.

Craig Andrews 01:27

So for those of us who are geographically know Australia is a big country, what side of Australia is that on?

Lauren Goldstein             01:34

It's on the eastern side.

Craig Andrews 01:36

Okay. And what's it like know what would be the closest sort of climate in the United States that would match what you see there?

Lauren Goldstein             01:50

I mean, Australia is basically the size of the United States, so you're going to have many different climates. I happen to be on the Gold Coast, which is more of a tropical area. It's pretty cold in the winter, which is the summer, our summer, and pretty hot in the summer, which is our winter.

Craig Andrews 02:13

Wow. So that's interesting. Wouldn't often think of tropical as being cold in the winter. So what made it tropical? Were there like, tropical trees? What would be kind of the identification with tropical?

Lauren Goldstein             02:30

It's humid, there's tropical trees and animals and things. Like, know, if you go down to Sydney, it's a little more cityscape, less tropical, and then you go north and know the Whitsunday Islands, Cairns, which island reefs, great barrier reefs. So you're just going up the coast, you're getting more and more to the islands and the beach and all of them well, neat.

Craig Andrews 02:59

And what was the draw for Australia?

Lauren Goldstein             03:04

What was the draw to Australia? Gosh, you're testing my mind. I think I just had always wanted to go there, and I speak a couple of languages, but I always thought it was good to go to a country where I wouldn't have a language barrier. I think in hindsight, though, I absolutely wouldn't change it, but if I'd gone to Europe, I would have been able to explore a vast amount of countries versus just the two of New Zealand and Australia. When I was.

Craig Andrews 03:39

You, you were studying when you were there. Well, let's back up. So you went there. You had originally started studying in cognitive neuroscience before you went to Queensland, is that correct?

Lauren Goldstein             03:55

So my degree is in cognitive neuroscience, so psychology, biology, and chemistry. And that's one of the things that I love really diving into with my clients, is understanding the connection between your mind and your business and success and what's happening between your ears. I'm also a board certified NLP practitioner, but there's a lot of psychology that goes into building a business and being an entrepreneur and being a leader.

Craig Andrews 04:22

Yeah. So what was the original interest in cognitive neuroscience? That's a deep subject to take on in your undergrad.

Lauren Goldstein             04:31

Yeah, well, I was going to be a doctor, so I had my whole life planned. And I'd always been very fascinated with the brain and psychology and science and how it all works, because there's so little that we actually know about how the mind works. So I really wanted to dive into that. And I spent after undergrad, if we fast forward and leave undergrad in the past, I worked in pediatric neurology and epilepsy research and was going to be a doctor. That was my plan. And then I realized that insurance companies really dictate patient care instead of doctors, and so I left. Felt a little bit like a cork in an ocean, but had a great mentor who really put me on the path to being a business consultant and solving problems for business owners because they're too close and it's hard to read the label when you're in the bottle. And he told me very early on in my search for this new career that the way that I diagnosed tiny humans was very helpful in business, because all business owners should have that unbiased third party to come in and help you see what you can't see because you're so emotionally attached to it. And so much of the work that I do in scaling and leadership and teams is about what emotional, psychological things are happening in your brain and your business that are keeping you from getting out from underneath your business into that next level.

Craig Andrews 06:05

Interesting. So kind of going back, you wanted to be a doctor. That changed, and you went into neuroscience. And one of the things you mentioned.

Lauren Goldstein             06:15

No, I was in neuroscience the whole time. That was my degree. I went into business after I decided to leave the medical field.

Craig Andrews 06:22

Okay. And you said that once you finished that you went over to Queensland. I think you mentioned in the green room that you're wanting to take all the courses that you didn't have time to take when you were doing your undergrad.

Lauren Goldstein             06:43

Yeah. So Australia was, like, deep in undergrad. So that was 15 years ago.

Craig Andrews 06:50

Yeah. So what were some of the things that fascinated you, those courses that you were looking to take over there?

Lauren Goldstein             07:02

So, for me, undergrad was a lot of science because psychology, biology, and chemistry. So if you haven't taken those subjects, it's a lot of lecture, and then you have lab. So there wasn't a lot of time for me to explore other subjects. And so I really took my time abroad to really expand my mind and look at different subjects. So I took everything from a marine biology class where we got to spend a weekend on the Great Barrier Reef and swim with sharks and see all the things, to an art history class, to a literature class, a poetry class. So it was really expanding my view on so many different things outside of the life sciences.

Craig Andrews 07:46

That sound like a fascinating time.

Craig Andrews 07:54

So few Americans make it south of the equator and so few make it south of the equator on that side of the world. What an amazing treat to kind of round out the education. What was your favorite class from that time?

Lauren Goldstein             08:11

Probably the marine biology class.

Craig Andrews 08:14

Yeah, that is cool. So you've always had a love for sciences, then you took that and applied that to business.

Craig Andrews 08:31

So how did you make that connection?

Lauren Goldstein             08:37

Sorry, I didn't realize that was the question. So once I left, my mentor said, I think the way that you solve problems and the way that you diagnose tiny humans is very relatable to business. And I thought he was crazy, but I gave it a try. And so now, really, what I do is take all the symptoms of a business that present on the surface, like a dysfunctional team or a higher fire cycle, or lack of time, or revenue peaks and valleys, and really figure out what the root cause of those things are, because it's never really what you think it is. There's always something below the surface that if you don't treat, then you'll just be playing whack a mole for a very long time with your business.

Craig Andrews 09:27

So what are some examples where you've seen that played out in business? Obviously obscuring businesses names and people's names. But what are some examples of what that's looked like when you've found something under the surface that's really turned around a business?

Lauren Goldstein             09:45

Yeah, so I can give you two examples. One, a client came to me and said, we have a revenue problem, and I can't figure out operationally why we're losing so much revenue. So whenever I hear we have a revenue problem, I always know that it's not generally sales, because what I work on is what happens after somebody says yes. So why come in as fractional COO in certain cases, or business advisor and others? And so she said, we're just hitting this revenue plateau and I can't figure out why our revenue isn't growing and our profitability is just staying status quo or sometimes going down. So we uncovered a lot in that business. One being they had a really terrible customer journey, so they were losing a lot to Churn because it wasn't that they didn't have a good product, it's that the customer care was missing. And then the biggest shocker was actually that the managing partner was subconsciously sabotaging the business. So their leadership, or rather lack of leadership and not being transparent with the actual big partner who owns it, was actually driving the business into the ground. And so they were probably about three to six months away from falling off a cliff. So we caught them just in time. And then the other one was 175 person team, almost $60 million business, and they were having some challenges in leadership. And one of the things I was fractional COO for this company that I come in is I look at the team and see do we have the clarity around roles, do we have the right butts in the right seats? So I interviewed the top leaders and one of those leaders, it was very clear, had been promoted when they should not have been promoted and was really lacking accountability and leadership. And so I very rarely will adamantly recommend that somebody goes, but this was one of those cases. And we did a post mortem, which I recommend everyone to do. What happened? Why did it happen? How do we make sure it doesn't happen again? And we discovered that actually, this person was costing the business $250,000 in losses for the past eight months. So basically, my diagnostic and working with the team stopped a coronary bleed that was just getting out of control due to mismanagement.

Craig Andrews 12:24

Wow. Good thing for them that that was caught. So when you said in the first example, you said they were subconsciously sabotaging the business, what's that look like? And how would somebody know if they are subconsciously sabotaging the business?

Lauren Goldstein             12:43

Well, the tricky thing is, if you're subconsciously sabotaging it, unless you're very self aware, you wouldn't know. But that's where leadership in the business comes into play and why, especially if you have partners, there needs to be a checks and balances. This particular partner was a managing partner who, when we got down to the root of it, hated managing people, didn't like people in general, and just wanted to do very behind the scenes stuff. But as managing partner of a practice, you're pretty much the face of the practice. And so there were a lot of things that were very much outside of her DNA as a person where she was setting herself up for failure and instead of saying, no, I don't want to do this, she was continually saying yes to stuff. And then what happens? I have seven C's to a high performing team in business, but most people think that somebody needs to get fired or let go because they are not capable of doing their job. So the first three C's are clarity, capability and capacity. Most people fire or let people go because of capability, but in reality, most of the time, it's capacity. And it's not that you've given them too much, it's that you've given them too many things that are outside of their wheelhouse or unrelated. So in this case, the subconscious sabotaging was she was given a laundry list of things to do as managing partner, but she knew that, let's say this 80% of the list was not in her superpower. So subconsciously, and this happens with everyone, and this is why managers will get mad and say, you knew this was a priority. Why didn't you get it done? It's not because they didn't want to get it done. It's that they knew that this wasn't really in their skill set. So they deprioritized it in hopes that maybe somebody else would do it or they could just get to it after all the things that they knew were their skill set were done. So it was a very interesting dance of how to extricate a managing partner to save a business.

Craig Andrews 14:52

Wow. So you've talked a lot about leadership. What does leadership mean to you?

Lauren Goldstein             15:01

Leadership to me, means creating more leaders and inspiring others to be the best version of themselves that they can be.

Craig Andrews 15:10

Okay, well, what would you say are the traits of a good leader?

Lauren Goldstein             15:18

I think it depends on what's needed in the leadership in the moment. But most leaders are patient, generous, inspiring, and willing to lead from the front, the side behind, and really empower. So I think a lot of people sometimes think that leadership means that you go first or you're doing all the things, and sometimes it does. But sometimes leadership is letting our employees make a mistake so that they can learn the skills and leadership that they need along the way.

Craig Andrews 15:58

So that's an interesting one. Allowing them to make a mistake. I mean, that can be a scary proposition. When you see somebody in the process of making a mistake, how would you advise somebody to allow that mistake to be made? Because there's a desire in some people to kind of rescue and prevent that mistake from happening. How would you advise somebody to say, no, you need to allow that to happen?

Lauren Goldstein             16:24

Yeah, well, the first is recognizing there's a difference between saving and supporting. And if you're always saving your team, you're not empowering them and you're actually giving them a crutch. So you're going to create this cycle of they're always going to rely on you, or they're not going to catch their own mistakes because you're always there to catch them. So it's always fun to remind people that in business generally, there are no emergencies and there's nothing really that you can't undo. Like, sure, there are some egregious mistakes where maybe you like, oh, I laugh because one of my clients, one of the team members that we ended up letting go, transferred half a million dollars to the wrong account. That's an egregious mistake. Right. But there was actually nothing in that moment that could have stopped the mistake except the person transposed some numbers. But if we were doing surgery, that's a different conversation. But just if you think about your employees like kids, and this will kind of make sense. When a kid is trying to learn how to walk, you're not trying to not let them walk because you don't want them to fall. You have to allow them the energy and the space and the encouragement to go from crawling to standing to walking to running. And I think so often we get really emotionally attached to our businesses that we don't want anybody to make any mistakes. But we're all human. We're all going to make mistakes. So the difference is knowing which mistakes will have collateral damage so you can stop those versus the ones that are pretty low risk.

Craig Andrews 18:19

And then once somebody makes a mistake, so it all plays out. What's the role of the leader after all the dishes are broken and it's time to clean up?

Lauren Goldstein             18:31

Yeah. So this is where one of my favorite things happens. It's called a post mortem. I recommend you do these at all hands once a month where you talk about something that didn't go well and then how everybody can learn from it, but essentially it's, what happened? Why did it happen? How can we make sure it doesn't happen again?

Lauren Goldstein             18:51

I don't know if I can think of a good example in this moment, but let's say your employee, I don't know, makes a mistake with fulfilling something. Oh, actually, here's a great idea or a great example. In one of my other businesses, we had a customer that needed to send something back, so we sent them a label. Our employee at the time didn't double check what kind of label she was sending. So this $150 product got $130 label of next day Air International back. So we made absolutely no money on this because not only did we lose it on processing fees, we lost it on getting shipped back. And so the lesson here this was an expensive lesson for us, but she knew then every time she did a return label to check what the speed was, and it never happened again. And I could tell her over and over and over again, check this. But there's a certain level of I get it now when they make a mistake, because nobody likes to make a mistake. So in that situation, I said, what happened? And she said I was going too fast. I didn't double check. And I said, okay. That's what happened. That's why it happened. How do we make sure it doesn't happen again? And so she walked me through her process, how she made notes. It was fine. Everything's great.

Craig Andrews 20:24

Cool. Well, let me ask about you. Can you think of a time, sort of a white knuckled moment where you feel like your leadership was put to the test? You had to make a decision. It was a little scary. You weren't sure how it was going to work out, what happened, and how did it play out.

Lauren Goldstein             20:42

I'm juggling between two, so I'll share one. This probably will go down in my book as the biggest mistake I've ever made. When I was fractional COO for my family's business, we needed to upgrade our technology to really come into the 21st century. So I'd been researching ERP systems for a very long time and I thought that I found the right one. But sometimes with technology, especially big technology, like an ERP system, it's very hard to know what you have until you're fully implemented. By that time, we had realized that what we got sold was a brownie that was not fully done in the middle. But then we also realized that my father, bless him, was really not willing to change the operations of the business to suit not only this new direction we were going, but also this new technology. And so what I learned in that moment, because I pulled the trigger, oversaw the implementation, and so this might have been one of my biggest mistakes, but the lessons that I learned were vast. First and foremost, it does not matter what the technology is. And actually, I had this conversation with a client a few days ago where he was talking about a CRM. And I said, Listen, you might want a CRM. A couple of you might want your CRM. But the question is, will the team use it? Are they going to be on board and happy to learn new tools and move the business forward? And so for me now, it's not just about the technology, it's about how likely are we to have success with implementation? How much resistance am I going to get from the team? What threats do I have to implementing this successfully? The other thing that I learned is, at the end of the day, if you peel everything away from this technology, what was the one thing that it needed to do? Needed to do, and did it do that? And had I asked that question, we would have very clearly seen that there was a component of this software that was under baked that was going to create a lot of friction in the business. So that's one of the, I would say, white knuckle moments that probably gave me a lot of gray hair.

Craig Andrews 23:13

Well, thank you for sharing that and thank you for coming on Leaders and Legacies. So, again, you're the host of the Biz Doctor podcast and founder of Golden Key Partnership. How can people reach you?

Lauren Goldstein             23:31

Yeah, so the best way to hear more about what I do and how I think is on the Biz Doctor podcast. We have some great resources@goldenkeypartnership.com. I'm an elder millennial, so I'm not on all the things. I'm just on Instagram, at Goldstein or LinkedIn. And yeah, that's probably the best way.