Scott MacGregor, founder and CEO of SomethingNew LLC and The Outlier Project, author of Standing O!

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show, programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implied shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helena.

0:52 Thanks everybody for joining in today. As you heard, I am Kevin Hallanan. Welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W four c why dot com. We are streaming live on talk for the number four TV dot com and of course we're on Facebook streaming at at Winning Business Radio as well as we're available in podcasts after the live show on tons of platforms including you know, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, pretty much wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice to help people avoid some of the mistakes of others, right to learn the best practices, the how tos, the what toos, the what not tos, to be challenged, and I hope to be inspired by the successes of others. But you know, virtually every successful person that I've ever talked to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. So, as I say every week, while we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it today.

1:57 My guest is sorry for the word old friend. It's not year old. It's just we're old friends. Scott MacGregor, founder and CEO of Something New LLC, and The Outlier Layer Project and more you'll hear. Here's his bio. Scott McGregor is an entrepreneur at heart. I first met him as a forward thinking VP of Sales, then chief Revenue officer when he brought me in to train their sales team back in twenty eleven. Since then, his list of accomplishments is nothing short of impressive. He's a three time company founder, a four time author, magazine publisher, has a ton of awards and accolades to his credit, like a record eight consecutive American Business Awards for Innovation, Best of Staffing Winner NET for those of you that know NPS net promoter score of ninety four point four percent the staffing industry averages twenty eight percent, Winner of Sales, Executive of the Year, American Business Awards, Founder Magazine, one hundred Top Founders to Follow, contributor to Forbes. By twenty nine, he was recruited by a tech startup as chief revenue officer, the youngest national account manager in the history of Fortune five hundred company Pitney Bos, and I have no doubt there are more to come. Scott's a member of the Advisory Council Harvard Business Review. He's a LinkedIn Hiring Advisors member, is a past chairman of the board for Elevate New York, and a member of the Walter Camp Football Foundation. For those who follow my show on podcast, you know I'm always complimentary where it's warranted, but I never embellish, Okay, wink Wick, I really try not to. Having said that, though, Scott's what I call one of the good guys. He's always been a supporter of mine, always been super helpful.

3:27 If you were to have a cup of coffee with him, he'd want to get to know you and understand what gets you excited. He truly cares about others, and yet he's been a constant high achiever. He was a high school football state champion, a high school all star baseball player. Earned his undergraduate degree in organizational communications from University of Hartford. Has many graduate certificates including marketing strategy, ethic leadership, viral marketing, and leading diverse teams and organizations from some of the best schools around. He and his wife Meg live in Madison, Connecticut. It's a town I know quite well since my brother and sisters and I spent considerable time there with our cousins who lived there as kids. Very fond memory. You may recall that Scott Scott, welcome to the show, Winning Business Radio and TV. Appreciate you being.

4:10 Here, Kevin. That was one heck of an introduction my friend. I mean, I was not Ai. I wrote every word of that. If that's what fifteen years of friendship gives you, like, I'm down for it. Thank you, no sweat. You earned it, not me. So tell the audience about Madison. Madison's a magical place. So I never in a million years would have thought that the town I grew up in would be the town I live in today and the town that my wife grew up in. So it was an interesting place to grow up. So Madison is a short, you know, shoreline town in Connecticut. I would say pretty very affluent. I happened to grow up extremely poor, so economically I stood out like a sore thumb. Athletics kind of leveled the playing field for me. It's a big sports town, so luckily for me, that was a game changer. But I love the town. It's changed over the years, but it's still home for me and I absolutely love it. I've spent a tremendous amount of my business career in New York and Boston, and it's equidistant between Bolts, so it's been just an absolutely ideal place to live.

5:35 I love it. So tell us other than sports, we know football baseball. What were your early interests. You just named him. Yeah, I was a sports not growing up as a kid, just absolutely obsessed by sports. It took me places that I thought, you know, I aspired to go. But I remember being vividly in elementary school and reading every single autobiography Mickey Mantles and Willie Mays and Jim Thorpe.

6:16 And you name it one of those. I devoured them. Love that it actually spawned a love for reading that, you know, really was beneficial later in my life. But I learned a lot about history through reading those autobiographies. I was inspired to achieve great things. I saw, you know, examples of people going through tremendous resiliency. I saw humanity at its best. I remember reading Roberto Clemente's biography and and just being very inspired by him. So long winded way, Yes, sports were my I entire you know, if you saw me in my backyard, I was throwing a baseball against our shed, I was kicking a football around. I was doing something that had to do with sports.

7:12 What made you choose Hartford University of and a degree in organizational communications? Probably well, hopefully both interesting answers, So I, you know, like most people had delusions of grandeur. I graduated, you know, thinking I was going to play in the major leagues, and so I wanted to play Division one baseball. Most of my offers were for really good D two D three schools, a couple of D ones, including Yukon and MBU, but I was very good friends. I grew up with Jeff Bagwell, who wound up in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

7:55 And you know, Jeff said, and another guy who wound up playing for the Orioles, Pat Hedge, said, you know what, we're building a great program here. Why don't you check out the school. And I went up on a recruiting visit and met coach Dennehye, unbelievably inspiring guy, and decided, you know what, it's a D one program. I think I can play there. And I was very comfortable with Pat and Jeff, having grown up with both of them. So that's you know why I decided to go there. I blew my back out. My baseball career ended like that, and I just poured all of that work, ethic and discipline and resiliency into school organizational communication. I kind of knew I wasn't going to be a doctor. I wasn't going to be a lawyer. I wasn't going to be an accountant. And I was always a relationship guys, So I thought sales was probably where I was going to wind up. And I knew that communication, both you know, written communication and verbal communication, we're going to be really important.

9:14 So I kind of put myself in a position where those things were going to be things that I had to do in order to graduate, and you know, turned out to be, I think, a decent choice. And yeah, no, no regrets. All right, So audiences, the viewers and listeners are gonna they're going to learn this before we're done. But characteristic of Scott McGregor's you never missed a class in four years of college, How the heck did you? I was on a full ride scholarship because we didn't have any money, and so you know, I was very, very grateful for those scholarships. So it wasn't one scholarship.

9:59 It was a a bunch of scholarship kind of cobbled together that I paid for everything. And I just thought like it was disrespectful to not hold up my end of the bargain. My end of the bargain was you know, show up. I grew up. I was very very fortunate. Both of my football coaches are in the Hall of Fame. So I was very fortunate to you know, be mentored by incredible coaches, and they were just people that instilled a work ethic and that you just didn't miss stuff. Yeah, so you know that was controllable for me. And it didn't matter, you know how many beers I drank. I was going to show up for every class and I did.

10:52 I never missed one one class in four years of school. Outstanding, outstanding. All right, now the interview is going to take a turn for the better. Okay, it's gonna be way more interesting. Tell us about Meg. Oh, my lovely wife. You know, I grew up. I think every town has somebody that they're kind of the it girl. That was my wife. She was great ahead of me. She was signed a modeling contract when she was a senior with Elite in New York, which at the time was you know, you named the big supermodel at the time. That's who they were with. She was killing it. She was the ray band girl. She was doing all kinds of stuff TV, print in magazines.

11:39 But had your picture on her wall. She barely knew who I was. I was lucky enough to be incredibly good friends with her sister, who was in my grade. Meg and I reconnected fourteen years ago and have been married for twelve incredible years. She's also the person who encouraged me ten years ago to follow my dream and jump off the cliff and become an entrepreneur. And without that support and encouragement, I likely would not have done it because I thought it it seemed irresponsible to walk away from a job as a chief revenue officer making a lot of money, even though my heart and soul was into building what I thought was really necessary in the talent strategy space. But Meg, you know, gets all the credit for really kicking my ass off the cliff and getting me to do something that I was hesitant to do.

12:47 Love that, which we'll talk about shortly. We're gonna have one more question for the break, and this is, you know, not a short question, but not a short answer. How did you said you probably were going to be in sales? How'd you know that? How did you navigate to a career in sales? And what would you say are one or two most important lessons from selling as a career. I knew I was going to be in sales because I knew that, you know, I had already kind of checked off the more obvious things. I didn't know it at the time. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, which I've done nothing to try to overcome, because I think I built kind of all these mechanisms to overcome it throughout my life. So I was, you know, there were certain things that I just struggled with, and I think going to law school or I'm a doctor, it just was not in the cards for me. But I love people, I love building relationships. I can get very passionate about something that I really believe in. And I had a mentor growing up. His name was Ken Green.

13:54 He was my best friend's dad. He was the vice president of sales, and I'm like, this guy, you know, he dresses the part he made. It looks like he makes really good money. I like the things that he did. He had super, super high integrity. So I think I really got lucky Kevin early on that I didn't have all those preconceived notions that a lot of people have about a career in sales. I think a lot of people think of the you know, the the dirtier side of sales. And I thought of sales as a profession to aspire to, and I thought my skill set was tailored to it. And I also loved the fact that I was told very early on, you control your destiny.

14:45 It's how hard you decide to work. It's how you know resilient you are, how much you can bounce back, And having gone through lots and lots of life struggles, I knew I was super resilient. So getting a know in sales was kind of like enohing to me, and it didn't deter me at all, and I love to challenge. I saw sales as very much akin to sports. There was a scoreboard and I love that and I wanted to be on the top of that leaderboard. So that's what really drew me to sales, and it turned out to be, especially later on as an entrepreneur, such a key thing because I think some entrepreneurs get into it.

15:37 They're subject matter experts, they're passionate, but they have to wear that sales and marketing hat for the first time, and that becomes very challenging. For me. That was the easy part. Love it. It's a great answer all right. We're going to take our first break right here. Everybody will be back with Scott McGregor, he's founder and CEO of Something New LLC and the Outlier Project. We'll be right back. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio.

16:22 Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now is your chance be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes, you heard it, Free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com. Call five six one five zero six four zero three one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one. Get your free advertising now. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenan presenting exciting topics and x for guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helenette.

17:14 We are back with Scott McGregor. He's founder and CEO of Something New LLC, as well as The Outlier Project, one other firm we'll talk about in a little bit, but I wanted to talk about two particular roles. Icon. You're at Icon Lots of Success. You were named the youngest national account manager in the history of the company. How did that happen? That was actually a Pitney Bows Pitney Bows. Excuse me? Excuse me? I knew that and had the wrong YEP. That was a type on my part. YEP. I've always been pretty strategic. So I left a company to go to Pitney because it's Fortune five hundred company, and I thought, boy, having that on my resume, I know is going to be helpful. I'll see what happens.

18:02 And I knew there was going to be opportunity if I did well to do different things. So I took that job and strategically moved from one division to the next, which is actually not an easy thing to do. Within Pitney Bow's it was kind of frowned upon. I was incredibly lucky. I had a sales manager. His name was Spencer Glickman, and not a great sales manager, but a wonderful person because he gave me this opportunity. I was his number one sales rep and I was literally writing his team's quota, and I got an opportunity from a gentleman.

18:45 His name is Don Poster, and he said, I'd like you to come over and be a national account manager in a different division. And I had to get permission from Spencer to do that. Remember, you know, going, oh boy, went into Spencer's office and I said, you know, here's this opportunity in front of me. It'll put me in a position to be the youngest national account manager in the history of the company, which at the time the company was probably eighty years old. And I said, it's really something I want to do, but you really hold the keys, and I understand the position that it puts you in because of the business that I was writing for his team, you know. And he didn't really even hesitate.

19:38 He gave his blessing and without that it wouldn't have happened. And that was a very strategic move. I wound up doing that job for a couple of years and did very well, and then at an opportunity, at still a very young age to take a job as a sales manager in a different divis vision and I jumped on that because I wanted that leadership experience and was able to get it. So I owe a lot to so many people in my life, from Spencer Glickman who let me leave, to Don Poster, who believed in me, you know, at twenty something years old to be a national account manager, which was a job most people within Penny Bows they really worked their entire career to get to that job because that was That's kind of like the pinnacle at Pitney and I'm just super fortunate and very very grateful.

20:42 And then flow Tech that's where we met. You were hugely instrumental in getting me in there. We had a good partnership for a number of years. You were there for seventeen years, and that's what I want to talk about. In the world of selling. You know it, we're laughing, right, it's unheard of, but yet you were there, and you were there very productively. Talk about how you I mean, did you set out to be there there that long? I didn't. I want to hear about that. I knew that the opportunity to lead up and build a sales marketing and customer success department was going to be meaningful. I mean it was a five person startup.

21:25 When I went there, I was twenty nine years old, and I really thought, what do I have to lose. Yeah, I've got the background of a fortune five hundred company. I could very easily go back if I wanted to. But again, thinking somewhat strategically, I thought, if this goes well, it's probably going to vode very well for me and open up some opportunities. I didn't really know exactly what that would look like, and if it didn't, you know, then it blew up. I could go back and do something else, or you know, people would just say, well, it's a startup. You took the chance, and you know, I was able to build something from scratch. There was no sales department, there was no marketing department, there was no client success. So over the course of seventeen years, you know, we grew it from five people to three hundred, grew double digits every single year for seventeen straight years, which in the beginning was incredibly easy. Basically from scratch.

22:27 When you're starting to do thirty forty million and you're still growing at double digits, that's a little bit more daunting. It was a great, great experience. I would say, for the last number of years that I was there, I was dreaming and building this fictitious company in my head that I did not have the guts to actually start until Meg gave me that encouragement. But I wouldn't trade that experience. I learned a tremendous amount. I give Leo Benetti a lot of credit. You got a twenty nine year old really kind of I mean, this is this part Kevin is absolutely crazy to me. I didn't think of it. I didn't think of it as crazy at the time. So twenty twenty COVID, all of a sudden, everyone's talking about working virtual yep, And I had built a solely virtual sales force twenty seven years ago, and people act like it's revolutionary now it's you know, it just made sense to me. If you hired the right people, if you knew what you were doing, why not let them work from home? Why not hire the best people

23:58 from wherever they are beh. So you know you did have good people too, that you had a good group of people there lived and worked out in Marketia. We went nine years and didn't lose a person, which you know, I'm never going to be in the Guinness World Book of Records, but if I ever was, it would probably be for that. I don't think many people go nine years and don't lose anybody. A couple of those guys are still there. And and a bunch of them are still there making crazy money. Yeah, shout out to Matt. Yep uh million dollar Matt. Yeah, no kidding uh. And he was a kid right when I first met him, when you first met him?

24:41 All right, now, tell us this dream. I want to know what's behind the name. I think I do, but something new LLC tell us people don't know who they are, what they are, what you are, who it is, describe it. It's a talent strategy business. But it grew out of you know, when you're growing double digit, it's every single year for seventeen straight years. We're constantly hiring people. In two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, during the you know, the recession, no one was hiring. So every recruiter and their brother was calling me saying, you know, we have great talent, please use us. Because we were hiring people like crazy. I was drinking from a fire hose every single day. So I thought, boy, if I can outsource anything, I'm gonna give it a shot. So I was trying to outsource our talent acquisition to recruiters, and I just kept being very, very frustrated that the industry was very antiquated, it was very dysfunctional, and I had bad experience after bad experience, and I knew that the key to business was hiring the right people. I knew it wasn't our technology. I knew it wasn't our products or services. I knew it was our people that would make or break us. And that's no different from any company. You could be Apple, Google, or a startup.

26:13 You're going to succeed or fail based on the people you hire. And I wasn't getting that support. So in my mind, I created this different version that would solve all of the problems that I had, So not rocket science, just identifying all the frustrations that I had and saying what can I do that would be different so that I could build a better mousetrap and ultimately help other startups with what I think is the most important thing you need to do in business, which is hire the right people and build the right team. So that's what's something new, is to stay true to our name, we had to be innovative. That's why you know, I'm very very proud of a can secutive American Business Awards for Innovation.

27:02 So you know, it's easy to innovate or be creative. Once you do that year after year after year after year after year, it's meaningful. But I wanted to name the company something new because I wanted to put that stamp on it that this was not your same old, same old. This was a totally different mousetrap, and I was happy to try to prove it. And tell us about the culture. You said people are important. What else is important to you? I mean, I believe in people over everything. I believe that, you know, people make or break you. It's the secret.

27:44 I believe in basic stuff, work, ethic, and resiliency. You know, when I talk to founders and they're telling me that they want somebody with industryans and they want this or that, I think those are all things you could teach somebody. You know, it's really hard to teach somebody work, ethic, discipline, and resiliency. So you know, when I first got into leadership, this was back at Pitney Bows. I took a team over that was under forty percent of quota, and I fired everybody except for one person, and I built a team that looked kind of like the Bad News Bears.

28:34 But what they had was incredible work ethic and resiliency and discipline, and we wound up becoming the number one team in the country out of almost two hundred teams. So I knew that was the secret. So I value those things way way more than the things that are very very visible and very obvious to see with, which is you know what industry did you work in? How many years experience? I really don't care about that stuff at all. Yeah, I'm with you, I see it every day. People put the wrong part first, How difficult was it to start the company? And who were your first Who was or were your first clients?

29:19 It wasn't really hard to start the business, to be honest, because I've been thinking about it for ten years, so I knew what our differentiators were going to be. I knew who our market was going to be. I mean, I had it very dialed in, not because I'm smart, because I had a decade to think about it. And then because I had a lot of really good relationships, I was able to get some low hanging fruit right away, and that just spiraled into some really substantial relationships, and then we hooked into a couple venture capital firms that really became kind of the flywheel to our success because every time they invested in a new portfolio company, that business became our business. So we never had to prospect for business, which is why you and I never, you know, never never reconvened and did sales training because we always had a business development mechanism built in because of our relationships with venture capital firms.

30:35 All right, hold that thought right there, We're going to take our second break. We'll be back in about a minute with Scott McGregor. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews. Or if your car breaks down, you can use the YP app to find the closest repair shop, or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night.

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31:58 Tell us about soft Land Partners. Software and Partners. We started doing business with a lot of companies that were not based in the United States but wanted a presence in the United States. So a friend of mine, Bill Kenney, started soft Land Partners, which helps companies establish a presence in the US. So it's an organization that I've been involved with for a number of different years, probably about five years now, and that part of our business is not a big part of something News Business plan right now, but at one point it was a pretty substantial part of our business. We had about forty customers who were not based in the United States. They're all over the world, but they wanted to set up a presence in the US and we help them do that, and soft Land Partners really was a part of that.

33:00 Like some law, maybe some immigration, various things as well, cultural understanding, probably right, a lot. Of it cultural, a lot of it understanding, you know, how that dynamic was going to work between the mothership in you know, Germany, Japan, you know UK, you name it in the US. So it was a fascinating period of time. It is, you know, turned into a very very small part of our business, but at one point it was. It was a substantial part of our business. Again clever, all right. The Outlier Project, I am proud to say I'm a founding member. It's in my LinkedIn bio co check it out. Anybody who want to check it out. Tell tell the folks about the Outlier Project.

33:47 The Outlier Project is the most professional fun I've ever had in thirty years. So I want I didn't want to build another three hundred employee company, but I wanted to build something that was impactful, something that had to give back component, something where I could share some of the amazing people that I've built friendships with over the years. And I knew that a community would afford me that opportunity. And I love to help people maximize their life and understand that the dash between the dates has got to be meaningful. We cannot sleep walk through life. This is it.

34:33 We have one at bat and I personally want to live an extraordinary life. Now, my definition of extraordinary might be different from other peoples, but I really believe that building an organization of outliers. I always knew I was an outlier. As a kid, I thought differently, you know, in school, I thought differently. In business I definitely thought very very differently. And I knew that going with the thundering herd, while it seemed like the safer out was not the secret to success. It was taking the road less traveled. So starting something like the Outlier Project was, you know, something that I was very passionate about, and now I'm like over the moon excited about what we're doing.

35:25 We have about seven hundred and fifty members in thirty four countries and growing like crazy and just really really truly changing lives at scale. And some of the folks that you bring in and exposed to members are incredible Olympians, professional athletes, business leaders. What's the common thread there? They've all they're all incredibly resilient. Whether you're talking to to hap Claw who started North face in nineteen sixty eight, or you're talking to Joe Foster, who started reboking nineteen fifty eight, or whether you're talking to Brandy Chastain, who you know has two Olympic gold medals, or you're talking to Meryl Hodge, you played for the Steelers, or you're talking to Rudy Rudiger. They have all gone through major adversity and their resiliency in their mindset. I would say mindset is the common denominator. But that mindset comes probably in part from the adversity that they've overcome in life, and that has led them to live extraordinary lives and accomplish incredible things. And I've always been drawn to people that have accomplished great things. It doesn't matter whether it's

36:55 an entertainment or sports, or cooking or the arts, or it doesn't doesn't matter. It's fascinating to me. Give me one second, I should add this teed up. I can't find his name. You'd know him in two seconds. The climber. Could be Colin O'Brady. It is colinor Brady. It is colinor Brady. Tell us just a little bit about his story to me. That's yeah, Colin. O'Brady is a good friend of mine. He has eleven world records, so too many to mention right now, but probably the most prominent are he has summitted the highest summits on every continent and going to the North and South Pole, and he did that quicker than anyone in world history. And he was the first person ever to walk across Antarctica unaided and unsupported, so pulling a sled that weighed and hundreds of pounds. He's just a remarkable guy.

38:06 Yale grad was burned severely in Thailand when he had graduated from Yale. They said he might never walk normally again, and now has accomplice some of the greatest feats in human history. So he's just a tremendous guy, a great friend, somebody that I draw inspiration from all the time. And I'm not necessarily trying to highlight him. I'm trying to highlight the type of personality and the type of human person with the mindset of to me, dealing with adversity is huge, right, Well, we all do. Some are some are more dramatic, some are less dramatic, but we all have diversity. I mean adversity to overcome and He's just a really good example of the type of people that members of the Atlayer Project drugsosed to. And I went to a global leadership summit last week and there were some incredible coach k I mean just the knowledge and wisdom more wisdom that that got. That guy has the John A Blank. There's an incredibly powerful woman who founded a uh sports management firm. I look up her name before we're done. But just powerful, mentally powerful and high achievers.

39:32 Right. And so you I'm gonna get back to the magazine and the Standing O series in a moment here. But you don't want to be ordinary? You know that's I've known that about you for a long time. Why not? And what does that look like? And what would you say to others to encourage them to not be ordinary? I don't want to be ordinary because it's boring. I've got one at that I'm going to maximize this life that I've been given. And you know, I've got a choice. Everyone that I just mentioned they were extraordinary not because they were born with Michael Jordan's DNA or Steve Job's brain.

40:15 They're extraordinary because of the choices that they made. They chose to live an extraordinary life, and I think we all have that choice, and all of a sudden, you know, when I think, Okay, here's this kid who grew up, you know, with a lot of not a lot of economic means. But I've lived my version of an extraordinary life. Now my version has to do with impact, because I truly believe that when all is said and done, no one is going to care about the companies I built. They're not going to care about the books I've written. They're not going to care about the house I live in or the car I drive. They are going to care about the impact that that I made. I just lost a very good friend last week, John Rulin, who wrote a book called Giftology. And while John passed way way too soon in his forties, he left an indelible impact on tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands of people. And to me, that's what it's all about. So my version of living in an extraordinary life is a life of impact.

41:27 And for those of you that don't know, which is probably most people listening here don't know, Scott, he's characterized. Sorry, I'm gonna probably embarrass you a little bit. I've seen comment after comment after comment of people that have met you and your powerful network or connector. But they always say, I mean, so many of these people have said, but he gets to know you. He's a friend, he's not just in it for you. In fact, you're a giver. You're very generous. You are you know, you give back a lot. If we have time, we'll talk about that. But you know it's genuine for you. You're truly trying to lift up others around you. It's just a fun testament. Life is more fun that way. It's this is a team game, this is a team sport, like we're better together.

42:11 Absolutely. I mentioned a few things where you have given back. Walter Camp Football Foundation, Charitable Corporation, Blankets of Hope, College Collections, Team Red, White and Blue, Close to Free Wounded Warrior Project, Ronald McDonald Health's Charity's Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, Elevate New York, Look for the Good. And I'm sure there are others. What would you say to others to encourage them to find something important to them and to make a difference. And it doesn't take much. It feels Nothing feels better than giving back. When I started my company, Something New ten years ago. Giving back was incredibly important to me. But I had a major problem. I didn't I knew I was going to bootstrap the company because I'm a little bit of a control freak, and I didn't want to take outside money to build to grow the company. So I had a big dilemma.

43:01 I knew I was going to pour all the money back into the business to help it grow. And I thought, oh boy, what am I going to do? You know, I can't write checks for these organizations that mean so much to me. And I thought, what are my assets? And my assets were the relationships that I built with extraordinary people over decades. And I thought, you know, let me ask fifty two friends to write chapters of gratitude for a life lesson learned, and then I'll put it in a book and I'll give all the money to charity. So that was a book called Standing Oh and. Right behind you.

43:42 Dick for Meal will want a Super Bowl with the Rams and is in the National Football Hall of Fame. He wrote the forward, Ticky Barber, I was a longtime friend uh and all time great for the New York Giants. He wrote the cover quote, and then fifty two amazing people were chapters of Gratitude, and then I've kept doing that. I figure I had more than fifty two friends, so did it again with a book called Standing Oh Encore. And then I have a huge affinity for the military. Both of my boys served in the military, so I wrote a book purely for the military called Standing O Salute. And then I wrote a book called Standing O Tribute, and we have Standing O Honor coming out later this year.

44:29 I was gonna ask, what's next? Yeah, looking forward to that one. All right, this is a big question, take it anywhere you want. What do you And it's probably a limiting question too, so feel free not to consider it as a single answer. What are you most proud of in your professional career thus far? I've withstood all the body blows. I've been resilient through. You know, we had broken into the New York market not that long before nine to eleven, and you know, I had to navigate not only that environment, but also just trying to figure out how do we continue to sell in an environment where it just really doesn't seem appropriate to sell anything. And whether it was that or COVID or two thousand and eight or whatever the case may be, you know, you're always going to get hit by a bus. It's just a matter of how resilient you are. So I think I'm very proud of the fact that I've been able to withstand the body blows, and I've been able to for my family, for my employees, for my friends, for the people that rely on me.

45:57 I've been able to stay very steady in stormy weather. I'm probably proudest of. That outstanding About two minutes left. What do you do it in not working? I hang out with Meg an awful lot. I work a ton, but because I enjoy it. I've been an empty nester for a long time. Definitely into challenging myself. So whether that's climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest in a weekend, I've done that numerous times. It's called twenty nine oh twenty nine, to doing things like the Calendar Club or you name it. I like to challenge myself.

46:47 So Luckily I have a partner in Meg that loves to do the same stuff, so we're always off to our next adventure. Love it all right, Who in a listening audience and viewing audiences, sorry, should reach out to you? And why anybody anybody uh, you know that wants to learn about, you know, how to live an extraordinary life. I think the Outlier Project is a tremendous resource. Uh. I think it's extremely unique. So anybody that uh, you know needs that in their life, anybody that is struggling. Uh.

47:34 I have gone through a tremendous amount of adversity. Uh, you know, kids with drug problems and jail and all kinds of things that I would have never fathomed would have happened with my children. And I love the ability to help people that are going through similar challenges. So, you know, I think if people feel compelled to reach out, reach out to me. LinkedIn is my social media platform of choice, reach out to me there. I love to connect with the people and build real relationships. I'm not a transactional guy. I want to build real, long lasting relationships like the one that we've had for you know, we're closer to probably two decades than we are to one.

48:33 You bet, you bet. I've enjoyed it. So it's try something new now. Dot com is the is the firm website the Outlierproject. Dot co is the other. They were both on the crawl. I'm sure people saw those Scott McGregor M A C. That's the correct on LinkedIn. Scott, It's been awesome to have you here. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Kevin, you you are the man. I love your coach and you've met a lot to me throughout the years, and I appreciate this conversation very much. Thank you and listen. Thanks everybody for watching and listening. This is the show about business, often business challenges. If you've got concerns about the growth of your company, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn at Winning Business Radio or my name. Drop me a note if you like it. It's Kevinatwinning Businessradio dot com.

49:27 As I say one of my many email addresses, our company is Winning Incorporated. Were part of Sandler Training. We develop sales teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Listen, We're not right for everybody, but maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you to producer and engineer one. Appreciate you one for another job well done. Be sure to join us everybody. Next Monday, August nineteenth, my guest will be good friend David Klayman, co founder and CEO of Twelve Points Wealth Management and the Twelve Points Family of Companies. Until then, this is Kevin Hallanan. You have been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host, Kevin Halenan. If you missed any part of this episode, the podcast is available on Talk for Podcasting and iHeartRadio.

50:11 For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio w four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Halenan and Winning Business Radio