Scott Beebe is the Founder of Business ON Purpose. Scott's story is one of resilience and determination. From his days as a college football walk-on to the inception of his business coaching firm, his path was anything but conventional. Scott opened up about the challenges he faced and the opportunities he embraced, underscoring the significance of repetition, predictability, and meaning in carving out success.

A pivotal moment in Scott's life was an unexpected job loss, which became the catalyst for him to start Business On Purpose. He stressed the importance of taking action and seeking clients who understand the value of investing in their business's growth. This proactive approach is something that Scott believes is crucial for any leader looking to make a meaningful impact.

To learn more about Scott's work, check out their website at https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottebeebe/.

Key Points

Transcript

Craig Andrews 00:06

Today, I want to welcome Scott Bieber. He is the founder of MyBusinessonPurpose.com. He's also the author of Let your Business Burn. Stop putting out Fires, discover Purpose, and build a business that matters. I can't wait to talk more about that. Let your business burn. Scott founded business on Purpose because he saw there was a need to help business owners who are weighed down by chaos to have a clear vision when it comes to success and future of their business. His mission is to liberate businesses from the chaos of working in their business and help them get their lives back. Scott also hosts the business on Purpose podcast, sharing real stories of how business owners and their leaders build people, purpose, process, and profit. Scott, welcome to leaders and legacies.

Scott Beebe      01:04

Greg, thanks for having me.

Craig Andrews 01:06

So we were chatting in the green room. You're based in South Carolina. Most people would say that you're near Hilton Head. I would say you're near Paris Island. I guess it's all a frame of reference.

Scott Beebe      01:21

That's right. We're actually halfway in between. For anybody who's been down to the low country of South Carolina, very familiar with Hilton Head, most people, only a rare few, are familiar with the other island of Paris, island of which you are, which we're not that far away. And it can be a delightful place. It can also be a quite miserable place, depending on the time of the year, for sure. Yeah.

Craig Andrews 01:42

Well, I was know it's was I went through Paris Island. For those that don't know, it's marine boot camp. I went through July, August, and September, and the one thing I can say is I'm very thankful it wasn't winter. I would rather deal with the extreme heat than do some of the things that we had to do in the cold.

Scott Beebe      02:04

Well, it's certainly tough either way. We've got these life sized gnats, as you're very well aware of that. Love to swarm in the July, August, September heat. But either way, I've heard stories that come out of Paris Island. Sounds like if you're in the heat or you're in the cold, it's a tough place. So I told you offline, and I'll tell you again, congratulations, and thank you for enduring that for all of us.

Craig Andrews 02:26

Thanks. Yeah, if we killed one of those Nats, we'd have a proper funeral.

Scott Beebe      02:31

That's right.

Craig Andrews 02:31

A proper morning for the NAt.

Scott Beebe      02:33

Or a.

Craig Andrews 02:36

Anyway, well, one of the things that we were talking about. So you're a graduate of University of South Carolina. We'll call that the USC for our podcast today. And you played football under scholarship, but you weren't exactly like a high school football star.

Scott Beebe      02:59

No, not at all. In fact, you could have called me more of a band star. I know a lot of people use that as band nerds. I was a drummer for the marching band in high school up in Greenville, South Carolina, is where I went 10th, 11th, and twelveth grade. I was there my last year. I thought I probably ought to maybe try football. My dad had taught me how to deep snap. Just throw the football upside down and backwards. I like to refer myself as an upside down quarterback, back to the punter, and also to the holder for what they call point after attempts or field goals. And so I tried doing that in high school. I was very bad at it. It's very weak, very slow, and just not a great athlete, quite honestly. And ended up going out for the team. I don't think they cut anybody. And so I was able to be a part of the team. And the only time I got into the game was on the kickoff return team, and it's because of pity. And quite frankly, they wanted to rest some of the better players, and so they put me on that side of the ball. I did touch the ball one time. The onside kicked it, and somehow I landed on it. Everything hurt after. Then it was all kind of dark and bleary underneath, but nonetheless, that was my one starring moment. And then ended up going to the University of South Carolina as a student, not as an athlete. And my freshman year, my roommate, who was a legitimate star on our high school team, was a manager for the South Carolina Gamecock football team. And he came back to our dorm one night, and he said, hey, didn't you try to deep snap in high school? And I was like, yeah, I tried, but obviously, I wasn't very good. I didn't play even in high school, where they're desperate for those positions. And he said, well, the team only has one and every D one sec. School carries two, but nobody else wants to do it. And I like, well, bring home a ball. Because he was a manager, he could get access, so he would bring home footballs. And for months, Craig, our dorm hallway was cinder block, so that helped. And it was 16 yards long, and you needed 15 yards for a deep snap. And so every night, poor Wade. I don't know what his life was like, that he was relegated to be the guy catching the balls that I was snapping, but I would snap every night, and then I would lay in bed, and I would work on snapping drills and hand drills and all that kind of stuff for months. Ended up meeting the brand new head coach, Brad Scott, at an event out in town. Met him, shook his hand, told him I was going to walk onto the team. Kind of patted me on the head like a dog. I'm like, yeah, that's great. And then I met with him again, set up an appointment in his office. Hey, I'll do whatever I can to, yeah, come out to tryouts, whatever. So I went out to tryouts. Craig, this is not a lie. I was the slowest, weakest, most uncoordinated guy out at tryouts, but I was the only one who knew how to snap a football. And I was cutting a guy's yard in the summer in Greenville, working for a landscaping business, and I got a phone call, one of those old ringtone phones that were like $3 a minute in the truck. This was in the mid ninety s. And it was the coach, it was the offensive line coach calling and asked if I would come back to two a days. And so, sure enough, I went to two a days. First game of the season was against the Georgia Bulldogs. My name was on the dress list. I was second on the depth chart as the deep snapper. And I dressed out and traveled to every single game for the next four years. Ended up playing. The first time I ever snapped a football in a live football game was at a small little town in southeast Louisiana called Baton Rouge, with a very small stadium, home to the LSU Tigers. 82,000 people pouring down rain. Both my parents were alums from there, so my whole family had come to be a part of that. I'd never snapped a football in a meaningful live football game up until that point. And I looked, and Derek Gregory, our number one snapper, was coming off his shoulder, was hanging out, and so I was in, and I snapped the rest of the game and snapped the next two games. Derek came back. I didn't snap at all. My second year, in my third and fourth season, ended up being the number one on the depth chart and got a scholarship. It's a pretty cool story.

Craig Andrews 07:01

That's amazing.

Craig Andrews 07:05

What's it take to get a scholarship? So this is a little bit I always think of. They recruit you out of high school and you get the scholarship that way. What's it take to get a scholarship once you're actually there?

Scott Beebe      07:18

Takes a lot of sympathy from the coach to give you one. I don't know that I've got the formula, and I'll be honest, the mid 90s, playing at the University of South Carolina, today is not what it was playing back in the mid 90s. Things are very different, even in my position as the deep snapper, punters, kickers, there are camps all over the country now for those things where for deep snappers, there was nothing like that. So it's not very rare to have a highly recruited deep snapper today, whereas back in those days, it was very rare to have that. So I tell my kids all the time, I have to remind them, life is very different. Your dad was not an All Star going in. He happened to do a little market research, found a need in the market, and tried as best as he could to fill the need for about four years and then give it a couple more years. Lou Holtz came in, Steve Spurrier came in, and I promise you, I would not have been on the depth chart once those guys were.

Craig Andrews 08:15

You know, I hear different talk about what people are seeing in the economy right now, and there's a lot of people that are scared. And my perspective is every single economy we've had ever has created opportunities. And, like, you found the opportunity of, there was a need for a deep snapper, and you turned that into opportunity for

Craig Andrews 08:47

you. Do you feel like that kind of fell into you? Was it a surprise that that was an opportunity? How did that play?

Scott Beebe      08:57

You know, I think it's Guy Roz on his podcast how I built this, who always asks the question at the end, was it luck or was it skill? And I hate the question. I really hate the question about this idea of luck. It was not skill, by the way. What it was was a mixture of forward leaning action to some degree. Nobody knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to go be a deep snapper. I didn't get that magical phone call or anything like that. I'm sure there's some people that get that. I had no history of it. I had anything. What I had was I had a football, I had a 16 yard long hallway. I had time, and I had repetition over time. And we talk about this to our business owners all the time. We call them the RPMs of great leadership. And this is not going to be mind blowing. It's very much like an undersized, under talented young man who was 19 years old walking on to a very overpowered football team and playing. But what I go back to and I look at is to go, wait a second. I had repetition, I had predictability, and I had meaning. So when you put all those three things together, those are the ingredients, or what we call the RPMs of great leadership. Repetition, repetition. Repetition. My first ever manager told me, he said, scott, repetition is the mother of all learning. Repetition is the mother of all learning. He would always say it three times, by the way, just to reinforce the point. And then the second idea of predictability, of just getting up and doing predictable things on a repetitive basis. But why is because of that third element, that M of the RPMs, and that's meaning. And I had real meaning as what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a part of something. I wasn't part of a fraternity. I wasn't really a part of a club outside of FCA at school. I wanted to be a part of something, know it's kind of mine. And so that bringing that meaning into what I was doing, I think that's the only thing I could look back and go, was it luck? I don't know that I want to place people's action on the idea of luck. Coach Scott was very generous to me. I was generous to myself in terms of showing up with repetition, predictability, and meaning. And so were there some opportunities that I was present for? Yes, if you want to call that luck, then that's your definition of it. That's fine. But the reality is there were opportunities. And every time an opportunity was lit up, I wanted to be standing right there, so I would be the one that that light was lit on.

Craig Andrews 11:18

That is so powerful. I mean, that's just so incredibly powerful.

Craig Andrews 11:24

Opportunity is not always available, but being there, being ready when opportunity is, that's right. Now, there was a time in your life when opportunity looked like a boot in your.

Craig Andrews 11:39

When you walked into work and you found out you were walking out more permanent.

Scott Beebe      11:46

Yeah. So I had a background. I've got a fragmented blueprint professionally of how we got to where we're at. After the University of South Carolina, I went to theology school. So I actually have a master's in theology, what they call divinity, which did that. And then once I graduated there, I actually did what most theological students did. I went and sold drugs legally for Pfizer for a couple of years, and then was a pastor, an associate pastor, and then a lead pastor for about five and a half, six years. And then I went back to work for Pfizer because I missed business. But while that second stint in Pfizer, we were doing a lot of volunteer work over in West Africa, and so been back and forth to West Africa probably 30 or 40 times during that season. And while we were over there, the organization that we volunteered with asked if I would leave Pfizer and come on, staff as what they called their international director. So after a couple of years of batting that back and forth, we finally did that and in 2013, went to be the international director. It's really, really small organization. Fast forward about a year and a half in, we're doing some internal audit work. We're looking at the organization, want to make it better. And I take it to the powers that be. I'm not a board member, just I'm representative to the board. And turns out that we had had a series of miscommunications among the board, I'll just put it that way, in a very diplomatic setting. And it led to a series of emergency meetings over a period of months, from 14 into 15. And, Craig, I walked into a mid city's Dallas board meet room on Friday, February 27, 2015. I'll never forget on that Friday, it started snowing right at about 850. And pretty rare, maybe once a year for the Dallas Fort Worth area. Started snowing. When I walked out at noon. Eight of the nine board members had resigned. My job role was dissolved, and there were three inches of snow on the ground. It was the most upside down day that I could remember for a long period of time. I was 39 years old, married, three kids. But don't worry, Craig. My wife was a public school teacher, so we were swimming in cash. We would be just fine. I say that completely tongue in cheek. And I got on a plane from the Dallas Fort Worth Airport back to the Savannah airport. And you talk about an isolated, alone feeling to fly back, not realizing how you're going to be able to provide for your family. And that was a Friday night and Saturday. Sunday, I wake up Monday, I called two of my friends who were both business owners and dear friends of mine. They kind of knew what was going on with some of the tough stuff. And I called them both on Monday, and I said, hey, I'm going to start a business coaching firm, and I want to coach both of you. And this is literally how it went. They said, well, that's awesome. We're supporting you. What are you going to coach us on? I'm like, I don't know. What do you need? One owned a construction company. Another owned a landscape supply company. And they were like, we don't know. And I asked them both, I said, where are these businesses? They're both making money, and they've been going for years, and where are these businesses going? And they both said, we don't know. Nobody's ever asked us that. And so I built a vision, mission, values, workshops first. Workshops first deliverable I had ever developed. Remember, I didn't come from this background and so developed it. And then I did a two week follow up meeting with one of those guys to sort of give them the results from their vision story. And I'll never forget, he sat across the table from me, Craig, and he looks at me and he goes, this is the most clarity I've ever had in my business. What do we do?

Scott Beebe      15:15

I think we start meeting every week. And he goes, that sounds great. How much? And I was like, and, Craig, I'm literally making up the number. And I just gave him a number. And he was like, sounds awesome. When can we start? I said, I think next week. He's like, yep, I'm ready. And that guy's still a client of mine, by the way. Eight and a half years in both. Those guys are still clients of mine. They're good friends of mine, so they can't leave either. But anyway, it's a whole nother story. But since then, that business, our business, has grown to nine full time people. And we work with 80 businesses around the country, about 81% in the construction infrastructure space. But, yeah, all of that came out from, to your point, getting a boot in my rear end and waking up on a Monday, not even seeing a clear light of opportunity, just hoping for opportunity. And then that hope leads to a walk, and lo and behold, there's a little light on. And I'm like, all right, that's what I want to do. I don't want to go back to where I was. I'd like to go forward to what I see.

Craig Andrews 16:16

One of the things that you described was when you went back to your budy with the results of your assessment. He said, hey, that's great. What's next? And how much? We call that the ideal sales conversation. When your prospect comes to you and just says, what do we do next? I want to keep working. What do you think was critical in the set up of that? That made that easy, because from a sales perspective, that's ideal. All you're doing is responding to a request they make of you, which is basically, hey, can I just give you money to help me solve this?

Scott Beebe      16:57

Yeah. So maybe a cocktail of some divine intervention in the right moment along with, and I want to be very clear about this, I always want to make sure I give the backstory because I don't want this to sound easy. It is. Not at all. But the other thing was sitting in front of a guy who's an action guy. He wants to do something, and he wants to do something. Now, not all of your prospects are going to be that. And I'm still a numbers guy, meaning it's going to take 100 conversations to get the ten right ones. And out of those ten conversations, three are going to want to go a little deeper. And out of those three, you're probably going to get one or two that go, hey, let's get married. And so I'm still a numbers guy. That one just happened to work out of a one of one. But since then, I could also walk you through literally thousands of conversations we've had this year that have led to hundreds of situations where we're like, okay, that then led to tens that were really serious to the individual ones, twos, threes and fours that we ended up getting married to and doing business with. And so I think finding people who want to take action don't see the service and the product you're offering as an expense instead of as an investment. And what they're going to be able to do with the growth of the vision that they see.

Craig Andrews 18:12

Yeah, that's so key. So you've had really interesting path, one with how you landed on the football team in college and how you started your business. What are some leadership lessons that you've learned along the way?

Scott Beebe      18:35

So I want to go back to the RPMs because I think those are really serious. There's a great book called Endurance Written by a guy named Alfred Lansing. And what he does is he documents Ernest Shackleton is the first trans Antarctic explorer, or at least one, who tried to explore and cross the Antarctic. And he took his ship, 144 foot ship, down to the waddle Sea just outside of Antarctica and got in there. And it's an incredible story about how this 144 foot ship, 28 men, the ship ended up getting stuck in pack ice at the beginning of 1915. So January 1915, and the dates are important, by the way, gets stuck in pack ice and then October of that same year. So think about that. January to October, it's stuck in pack ice. Can't move on a frozen tundra, no forest, no vegetation, no nothing to be able to go hunt. And then in October, it cracks, and in November of that same year, it sinks. They're now living on lifeboats right outside the Antarctic. 28 men, not one has died up until this point. Fast forward to the end of 1916. So now we're almost two years into this, and the final man was rescued. I think it was August or September of 1916, and not one man died. Not one person died. And so there were elements that we call the elements of great fitness, the fit, if you put that into a little acronym as well. Number one, remember the old adage out of Green Bay, Lombardi, who would show up at the first day of practice, hold up a football to a bunch of grown professionals, and say, hey, this is a football. Let's go back to the fundamentals of what we're trying to do. When we think about leadership, we run away from fundamentals so quickly because we think they're so kindergarten that we're better than that. The reality is there is real value in us to creating the fundamentals and bringing in scorecards to our own life to where every day we're working on some of those fundamentals. The second thing is this idea that Ernest Shackleton invested in his people. He was very, very clear. And every day while they were out on this frozen tundra, he had a weekly schedule. And a daily schedule. Every single day. They woke up at the same time every day. There were some days it was 24 hours of light and some days were 24 hours of dark. They woke up at the same time every day. They had breakfast, us. At the same time. They did chores. Some of the chores were just digging holes and filling them back. And every night they played cards, they read aloud and they sang together every single day. He invested in people proactively because he realized that if he took hope away from them, they would die. And so he had a very clear aim. So he always went back to the fundamentals and he invested in his people with great clarity and a daily. And a weekly schedule. Annie Dillard, who's a poet, she says this about a weekly schedule. Don't lose the fact that it's bizarre that a poet is talking about a weekly schedule. But nonetheless, she says this. She says a weekly schedule is made up. Excuse me, it's willed and it's faked. And so brought into being. A daily schedule is willed, it's faked, and so it's brought into being. And she describes a daily schedule as a net for catching days. Isn't that powerful? A net for catching days or a scaffolding by which a worker can work with both hands. And so he went back and invested in people by creating a daily schedule so that they could follow and have hope. And then the third element is this idea of trailing a mentor. Ernest Shackleton was said to have a lot of mentors and did a lot of reading as he planned for his expedition. And so a question I think we always have to ask ourselves, Craig, and we have to ask other people in a leadership environment, who's got your ear? Whose voice are you listening to that's outside of you, who's farther along than you are, and their voice is meaningful and impactful to you right now? What mentor are you trailing? So the fundamentals, the investing in people and trailing our mentors, a few of the things that I've been learning over the last few years that really play out in a lot of real life scenarios from a leadership perspective, wow, that is incredibly powerful.

Craig Andrews 22:44

We're about out of time, but I wanted to wrap up with maybe just a minute or so of legacy. So you've been talking about leadership. Let's talk about the other side. What does legacy mean to you, and what's your goal in terms of legacy?

Scott Beebe      22:59

Oh, man. Ashley and I, we've just been married 25 years at the time of this recording, and we've got a family mission to be a light, to create space through wisdom, adventure, and time around the table. And then we've got four what we call unique core values. These aren't excellence and respect and responsibility and integrity and all that. Those were Enron's core values, by the way, the ones I just told you. Our core values are generosity, intentionality, togetherness, and perspective. And so that mission tied with those unique core values, those are the decision making filters that we put together when we as a family are making decisions. And particularly when Ashley and I as a couple right now, as empty nesters, make decisions. We want to build them around. Okay, how can we be a light? How can we create space? How can we do it through adventure, wisdom, and time around the table? And what are those filters that are going to allow for generosity, togetherness, intentionality, and perspective to be able to come in? And so the legacy we want to leave is a legacy where we take intentional things, write those things down, and then make decisions through those things on a regular basis. Whether we've got kids that were in diapers at one time, we've got kids who are running through high school at one time, now we have kids that are managing and navigating through the young adult life, and we're navigating through a whole new life, Ashley and I are right now. But we need to make sure that we're doing it through something that's central. And so from a legacy standpoint, I'm not sure it works yet, Craig. So give me another 30, 40, 50 years and I'll come back and tell you. But that's what we're banking our legacy on, is to write things Michael Gerber said this. He said, if you don't write it down, you don't own it. I'm going to take it one step further. If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist. And so we've written these things down and then we look at them on a regular basis when we're making thoughtful and intentional. Well, that's.

Craig Andrews 24:49

Thank you for sharing that, Scott. So your business is my business on purpose, and you have the business on Purpose podcast. How else can people find you?

Scott Beebe      25:01

Yeah, the easiest way is one of the biggest things that we do is allow a lot of business owners to start to diagnose and understand the back end health of their business. We tend to look at businesses through the lens of logos and equipment, all the exterior stuff. We want people to look deep inside their business. And so if you go to myBusinessonpurpose.com Healthy, there is what we call a healthy business ownerassessment. It's a legit assessment. It's not one of these little quick, funky little things. You'll get a numerical value on the back end between zero and 45. That actually shows you the numerical health of your business. It's an actual diagnosis of the health of that business. So just go to myBusinessonpurpose.com healthy.

Craig Andrews 25:43

Excellent. Well, I hope people reach out. I think you have a lot of wisdom for business owners out there, and I hope they'll reach out to you. Thank you for being on leaders and legacies, Craig.

Scott Beebe      25:53

A hard work to build a podcast, and so I'm grateful that you would allow me to share the stage. I don't take it for granted. So thank you. Thank.