2318 - Finding Your Epic in Business and Beyond with Phoenix Growth Partners Inc's Kelly O'Neil

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Kelly O 'Neill. Kelly, you are the founder and CEO of Phoenix Growth Partners. You're found on the web at kellyoneal.com. You are also the host of the Epic AF podcast, which we have all linked up. And again, to our friend that's listening to a podcast right now, you could just search for Epic AF podcast with Kelly O 'Neill. You'll find that. Kelly, you are also the author of a few books, including Insolvent, Epic AF, and The Fusion Paradigm. Kelly, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Yes. All right. Before we kind of get into your superpowers and the work that you do, I always love learning, you know, hobbies, passions, things that, you know, high level leaders do in their spare time.

1:44And you've got an interesting one. Tell me what you do. I do. So one of the things that I'm really passionate about is wake surfing. So for those of you who don't know what that is, wake surfing, you use, there's a specific boat you use. It's called a wake surf boat. And you basically like wakeboarding or water skiing. You get up behind the boat, but the surf boat creates a wave behind the boat and then you surf the wave. So I am an avid wake surfer. I've had my own boat for years and I get out to the lake as many times a week as humanly possible. In fact, I've got Wednesdays blocked out. My team thinks I'm at a board meeting.

2:23It's really a surf board meeting. on the way. So I am, I am passionate. I am 52 years old. And this year I am committed to landing a 360. Yeah. Now do you, are you always holding, I've seen some wake surfers who will actually even let go of the road. Let go of the road. Do you? Oh yeah. And it still works. That's crazy. Because the wave, the wave creates a pocket in it. And as long as you know how to stay in the wave, yeah, you surf the wave. So I throw the rope in. If you actually go to my social media, I put up lots of surfing videos of me practicing different tricks and doing all the things.

3:07It is my happy place. Well, I don't necessarily live in the surf capital when we go out to either the Gulf or I'm in Central Florida. But, you know, if I do manage to get up on a board, you know, it's like your ride is, if you're lucky for me, I'll just speak for myself, maybe like 10, 15 seconds. If I'm lucky, I mean, that would be a really good ride. But like when you're wake surfing, it's like, as long as you want. You've got this built-in wave constantly. Yeah. Until you fall. There we go. Well, very cool, Kelly. I, and I'm looking at pictures. This looks like an absolute blast. So let's talk about the work that you do, your website, kellyoneal.com.

3:50Tell me who you work with and what your superpowers are. Sure. So I've been doing this for a very long time. I started my career in corporate America doing publicity and brand marketing for tech corporations. And I've really been doing the same thing my entire career since I was 19 years old, which is I help companies achieve the results that they desire in the marketplace, whether that is going public, whether that is a go-to-market strategy, whether that's repositioning them or helping them generate an exit. So what I do is I provide intuitive business strategy. So I work with founders of companies.

4:29Typically now my clients are seven and eight figure entrepreneurs, some six, and I get hired in to help them achieve their next level of business. Right now I'm doing a lot of work with Gen Xers as we are, I am a Gen Xer. So as we are heading into a transition phase in our business lives, you know, where we're looking to start, we're like at the kind of at the tail end of our, of our careers. I mean, I don't know that I'll ever quit or, or retire per se, but I'm definitely transitioning into my legacy work. And I know a lot of other entrepreneurs are doing that as well. They're looking to transition into this final phase of their career.

5:10Some want to retire, Some want to exit out of their existing companies and some want to, some want to just, you know, do something new and, and find more purposeful and meaningful work in their world. So that's what I'm helping them do. Well, you know, and Kelly, I love, um, you know, the, or identifying this phase of life. I've just been so obviously as someone who's as a fellow Gen Xer and kind of stepping into this phase. And we were talking just a little bit before we hit record about, you know, generally, you know, there's this feeling that, you know, for the first half of our life, we're usually living for other people, kids, bosses, that sort of thing.

5:42And then, you know, you kind of stick around, keep doing what you're doing for any length of time, you know, kids start getting older and then you start looking around like, okay, now it's time for me to do all the things I want to do. Right. And, and of course this, this really, you know, we see this in business, you know, a lot of people saying, you know, look, I I'm, I'm doing okay professionally, but you know, is this all I want? Like, you know, do I want to do something on the side? Do I want to consult? Do I want to build my own personal brand? Do you mind maybe just addressing a little bit, maybe of like, almost goes like, what's going on developmentally with us?

6:20Right. So, I mean, I just think that the different phases of our lives, we have different, we have different desires. So, you know, I talk a lot about this in my book, in Epic AF, is I really encourage people to find their epic. And I think our epic changes. I know mine has. If you asked me what I wanted to do when I was 30 years old, I wanted to be a little Tony Robbins running around on stage. And now that sounds like my worst nightmare. I don't even want to leave the house, right? I don't even want to leave the house to go down to the Las Vegas Strip where I live to do a speaking engagement.

6:53So I think that as we progress in life, and you're right, You know, we are in this kind of, you know, 50s is kind of the new midlife. And for a lot of us, like our kids are out of school or they're getting to the place where they're going to be out of school. We've been running our companies for a long time. We started companies out of a different place oftentimes when we started them. And sometimes we're looking at this going like, just like you said, you know, is this really what I want? So I encourage people to identify their epic. And for me and how I define your epic is it is where your life purpose, which is that thing that gives us meaning of why we're even here on this planet, where your life purpose meets your genius, which is what is the thing that you are gifted at?

7:41We all have gifts and different people have different gifts for different things. Obviously, one of your gifts is using your voice, right? You're obviously very gifted at that. And that needs to be a part of what it is that you're doing in the world. And then it meets your desires. And this is the thing that I think really changes for us. Like, I think our purpose, you know, once we understand it, like if I look at my purpose, which is to liberate people from the status quo, I've been doing that since I was four years old, right? You know, I was always challenging people like, why are you even playing in that sandbox?

8:14Why don't we take the sand and go outside the sandbox? Like, we don't need to be in the sandbox to play with sand. Right. So I've been doing that since I was a baby, you know, and our genius, we kind of know what our genius is because it shows up even as we're playing as children. But I do think the thing that changes for us is our desires. And like I said, my desires when I was 20 were different from when I was 30 were different from when I was 40 were different from when I was 50. And even just recently in the last 12 months, I'm like, I don't want to be doing what I did anymore. And that's the beautiful thing about being, it's about the beautiful thing about being at a place of choice is you get to change it.

8:57You know, we, we are not a tree. We don't have roots. We can, we can move, we can change. And so when you, when you change those desires of what it is that you want, you then can pivot your entire world in terms of your life, your business, and the outcomes that you want to generate. And I think for a lot of us, you know, I talk to Gen Xers every single day and all of us are like, you know, again, our kids are up and out. Our, our careers, you know, a lot of us built companies and the people that I'm talking to, they're like, yeah, I loved it. And it's been good to me. And I love what I do, but what I really want to do and how I really want to work differently because we're done grinding.

9:47We've, we've been there. We've done that. We got the t-shirt. We know how to grind and hustle. We were birthed on it and now we want to do it differently. So, you know, now, now people are looking, they want, they want to work differently. They've got different priorities in life. And a lot of us are looking, you know, the entrepreneurs that I work with, no one's like, I want to retire and go sit on the porch. No one's like, that sounds terrible too. Right. But we do want to do it differently. And so that's really what I'm helping people do is how do we not throw away the last, you know, for me, it's been 30 years of being an entrepreneur.

10:29for some people, maybe it's been 10 or 20 or whatever. It's how do we still capitalize on everything that we've built? Because we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But then how do we transition into this next phase that allows us to have our cake and eat it too? Do you mind sharing just a bit, Kelly, about what that looks like then tactically? Because I wonder if there are people who are thinking, I just don't see a way that I can do what I really want to do. I'm stuck. I can't leave my job. I can't do this. Or, you know, maybe, you know, my business, I just don't know how to grow and scale it beyond, you know, where I'm at.

11:03Because, again, they might have these perceived roadblocks or obstacles that are keeping them from figuring out how to get to that next step. And maybe you share like a story of someone that you've worked with or just, but I'm hoping maybe we could share some very tactical ideas for someone to break out of this. So here's the deal, guys. And this is I love that you brought this up because the truth is lots of most people are stuck in in that that stuck point. They just don't know what to do. And that's when you have to hire someone to help you. Right. That is why I exist. That's why Phoenix Growth Partners exists.

11:41Right. is to help people transition to their next generation. Just like if I wanted to achieve a specific health goal or I wanted to train for wakeboarding, I don't know how to do that. I'm gonna have to seek experts. I'm gonna have to seek people who know how to do that to help me and it's the same thing. It's the one thing we will never have in our own business is perspective because we're in it, right? We cannot root a label of the bottle from the inside. So even me who does this for a living, I've got a whole team of people that helped me see inside my own bottle, right? We have to have people to help give us perspective.

12:24And that's what I do for my clients. So I'll give you an example. I had a client, um, I have a, uh, a client that I've been working with for eight years. Um, and they had, you know, when they came to me, they had a mom and pop store, uh, that was selling, uh, devices, microcurrent devices for, to eliminate pain, right. To help resolve chronic pain in people. And when they, when they came to me, they were like, this is the greatest device on the planet. we're helping a lot of people and people are getting really amazing results, but we just don't know how to transition this business. And at the time they're the owners of the business at the time were, you know, Gen Xers, but like at one was a Gen Xer, but one was, one was more of, of in the boomer era.

13:10And they're like, we want to, we want to grow this company, but we're running out of gas. And I, they wanted to bring their son into the company, but the son didn't have any experience in running businesses and that sort of thing. So they hired me to come in and help create that foundation and that, and that pivot point. So that's what we did. You know, we, we started, I started working with the, the son, I became their fractional chief strategy officer. And I started as we, as we were pivoting that business to become a family, a family business, and then ultimately ended up creating an exit for the owners, um, to their son.

13:50You know, that's, that's one way. Like they had never really thought of like, how are we going to, how are we going to do this? And now we've taken that business through immense growth, like tens of millions of dollars of growth. And now it went from selling devices to, we have an entire educational arm. We've got a university where we're certifying people and we're helping people all over the world eradicate chronic pain. And now we're starting to position this for how does he then want to exit out of the business? Because there's ways to be able to set yourself up to do that with intellectual property, with seeking buyers, but you have to plan for it.

14:34It's not something where you can just all of a sudden one day be like, I just want to sell this and then not be ready. There's things that need to happen. So there's bringing on investors, bringing on junior partners, there's intellectual property plays. I mean, there's so many different ways for you to create this infrastructure in your business to transition it so that you don't just let the business die. Yeah, yeah. Kelly, let's share where people go from here. So obviously there's your website, kellyoneal.com. You've got your podcast, The Epic AF, which folks can search for. And then also, of course, your books, but I'll let you kind of talk about next steps for a friend that's been listening to our conversation.

15:16Sure. So one thing I'm going to actually gift your audience because this is something I do when I when I speak on podcasts. So if you actually go to the link that we provided, Epic is the new hustle. If you go to Epic is the new hustle, you can actually download an electronic copy of my book as well as the workbook that goes along with that. And then also, if you are interested, you know, follow along, follow me on social. I have very edgy conversations that are not for the faint of heart. So, you know, you can follow along, engage with me. I love talking to people. I do that personally. It's not like I outsource all of that.

15:59And then if you are interested in exploring what it would be like to work with us, just go to Phoenix Growth Partners and request a complimentary consultation. someone from my team will talk to you about whether or not we're the best fit. Kelly O 'Neill, founder and CEO of Phoenix Growth Partners. Your books include Epic AF, which again, those are all available at your website on Amazon and everywhere else. And then of course, your podcast, the Epic AF podcast with Kelly O 'Neill. Kelly, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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