Dr. Relly Nadler: In these shows, we have been really focusing on our new book that is going to come out, Emotional Brilliance. What kind of emotions do you have? What can you learn from your emotions? What are your go-to emotions? In a challenge like we have today with the pandemic, what is your go-to so that you have just the right response, the right situation, using all your emotional intelligence tools and competencies?
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Today is going to be a very interesting program with my friend, Daniel Marcos. I met Daniel probably a decade ago. Daniel is an amazing person. He is the co-founder and CEO of Gazelle’s Growth Institute. It’s a leading online executive education company for C Suite executives. It is a very fast-growing organization. He also co-founded Inflection for Gazelles Mexico, which is a management coaching company that helps business executives and entrepreneurs grow their companies faster and as he likes to say, with less drama. We’ll talk to him a little bit about that when he comes on the show.
He’s also an international speaker. I love his accent. He knows, I tell him that all the time. He has shared the stage with thought leaders like Guy Kawasaki, Jack Canfield, just to make you familiar with some of the folks that he has shared the dance with.
Daniel has his own style, his own exciting and engaging voice and his message is truly, truly enabled many people to get to a place much faster than they would have without him. Daniel is a blogger on Capitalemprendedor.com, he can say that a lot better than I can. He’s a graduate of EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants,” and its continuation, “Gathering of the Titans.”
He holds several degrees, including one in systems engineering. He has an MBA from Babson College, where I used to teach, Wellesley. I’m very excited to welcome Daniel to the show. Hello Daniel!
Daniel Marcos: Hello! Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m super excited to be here. Thank you guys.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Daniel, we are really excited to have you today. We are going to ask you a series of questions. Maybe we will first start with some of them around the pandemic and the economic downturn, and then we have some questions that really are helpful around emotional intelligence and emotional brilliance.
Let us start off with you talking a little bit about your business and a little bit more what you do, but then from your standpoint, how can a business survive during this economic downturn?
Daniel Marcos: Thank you very much. Let me start a little bit with that and then I’ll come back to the history. We see that in a crisis or a time that people have more stress, everything gets amplified. If you are a good leader and have good emotional intelligence and you are a person that really treats people with respect and really reacts positively thinks, this is a great time for those kinds of leaders. They are completely being shown above everyone else and they become much stronger after this. I really believe that the way you treat your employees, the community, the way you treat your investors at this moment, is going to carry for the next 5-10 years. People are going to remember for at least 5 or 10 years.
Also, if you treat without, in this moment, refuses to do that based on the cash flow and the problems that we are having, people are also going to remember that in the next 5-10 years.
Dr. Relly Nadler: I love what you said that longer perspective about the memory. Sometimes organizations talk about the shadow that you cast over your people. Well, this is a long, long shadow. I love what you said, they are going to remember these moments. These are these defining moments.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Daniel, tell us a little bit about what motivated you to start Growth Institute.
Daniel Marcos: I have been an entrepreneur in the field myself for my companies for the last 20 years. I had a mortgage bank in Texas, and I was doing sub-prime loans. I was financing a lot of undocumented Hispanics. There was a lot of banks that were lending at that moment for people that could pay taxes and all that, even though they were undocumented in the U.S. I was doing a lot of that so when the financial crisis came down, of course, all of that was shut down and I really had a hard time. I had a really, really, hard moment. I remember that I was waking up at 2:00 in the morning sweating cold and having a really hard time because entrepreneurs mostly they believe if their company is successful, they are successful. If their company goes under, they believe that they are not successful.
I was having a really hard time for myself because of the situation I was having. I remember that I got a call from Vern Hardish who is my mentor. Vern called and said, hey, how are you doing? In that moment I have studied with him, he was someone whose books I had read, but I had very little in touch with him.
I said I was going to go back to Mexico and get a job. He said no, you have to become a coach for CEOs. I said, no way, I don’t trust myself to be a CEO, I cannot coach anyone else. He said that is precisely why. Because you went through such a hard time yourself that you have to make sure this doesn’t happen again to anyone else. You know how hard it is. You have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So, let’s build something to help entrepreneurs that are going through that.
Now, eleven or twelve years after, we are in this situation today. That’s why we are having the growth that we are having. Because we built, as you said in the introduction, the tough companies grow faster, but most importantly, we review the trauma of the operation.
As we know as CEOs, being an entrepreneur or being a CEO creates a lot of strength for you, for your team, but also for your family. For your body, you bring a log of that strength to your personal life. We help you be able to run a company with more control so you will have less of that stress coming to you and your team, your family, and the rest. That’s why the Growth Institute was created.
Listen to the entire interview, above.
Relly