Episode 188 Transcript
Heather Porter (00:02.23)
and thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really really grateful, especially because it's your evening where you are. Where are you by the way? Feel us in.
Alan Gregerman (00:08.889)
I'm in Washington, DC. And know, evening is good. It's quiet here. The phone isn't ringing. I'm happy to be on the show. Thanks very much for having me on.
Heather Porter (00:17.454)
Thanks for being here. We have so many great little stories and directions we're going to take this interview, but I love to start with some tangible tips and takeaways and get people into your mind of how you run your business and life in busy or stressful times. So what are a few tips that you could leave our listeners with on, you know, how you get through those moments when you're stressed or going through tricky times? How do you downgrade and stay sane and, you know, be, I guess, more balanced?
Alan Gregerman (00:47.547)
Okay, well there are a few things. So one is I tell myself periodically to get up.
and take a break, even if I'm in the middle of something. And so that's really important to me. I actually have three dogs and so they always enjoy a walk and so I'm glad to get up and take them for a walk. That's good. I do a little bit of meditation. I mean, I'm not like a rock star meditator, a bit of meditation. have kind of five minute and 10 minute meditations that actually help me to.
Heather Porter (00:57.943)
Okay.
Heather Porter (01:12.034)
Ha
Alan Gregerman (01:20.283)
kind of decompress at times. And then I try actually maybe because I've been in business a long time and you I know some of the people listening have been in business for a while. Some are relatively new. I've been in business a long time and so I think the plus of that is I realize we're gonna keep moving forward. Business is kind of ups and it's kind of downs and it's ups and so if I take a break or I slow down a little bit, my business is gonna keep running as long as I always stay connected.
with my customers. Yeah, so those are the things I personally probably do. I take a lot of time off. I work really, really hard when I'm at work, but then I take chunks of time off.
Heather Porter (01:58.155)
Okay.
Alan Gregerman (02:05.977)
My wife's from Sweden and in Sweden they have a mandatory five weeks off a year. So I absolutely wanted to beat them. Okay. I didn't want another country to really show kind of a better behavior. So I do that. I'm always engaged with our customers. You know, I could be traveling, but I tend to not let it preoccupy me. And I take some time off. And then one of the things I hope we talk about, because my field is innovation is
Heather Porter (02:30.455)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (02:35.977)
I regularly wander around looking for brilliant ideas. So I walk through cities, I walk in parks, I take a notebook, I write down things I think that are brilliant that I might be able to use at some point to be more valuable to our customers. Yeah, so those are the types of things I do.
Heather Porter (02:52.235)
I love it. I'm just staying on that point of innovation because I know that it's very you. I actually want to know, so you say you walk around with notepad and find brilliant things around. What for you, what would you define as something that's innovative and interesting?
Alan Gregerman (03:07.043)
Okay, good. Well, first, let me give a little bit of background for your listeners because this is really important. Oftentimes,
Heather Porter (03:10.273)
Yeah, let's do it. Sure.
Alan Gregerman (03:15.495)
they're deciding that they need to be more innovative. They need to come up with a new idea. So they get all their people or their smartest people in a room and they give them a blank sheet of paper and they say, okay, we need to be more creative. Does anyone have an out of the box idea? Well, it turns out actually that's not how innovation happens. It turns out 90 % of all new ideas actually closer to 99 % are based on someone else's thinking or something found in nature. So the reality is if I want to be
brilliant, I should actually get out, look for ideas, then connect the dots and adapt them to my world. So I wander around, what am I looking for? Well, I know that the world is going to be different five years from now and our business needs to compete and be relevant in the future. I don't know exactly what it's going to be like five years from now, but I know it's going to be different. So I wander around looking for clues. What new technologies are out there? What are new customer trends?
Heather Porter (03:52.449)
interesting.
Alan Gregerman (04:15.165)
What are young people looking for when they do business? Do they want high touch? Do they want to kind of do it themselves? So I look for all those things. I look at Waymo cars, know, cars without drivers. I wonder what that's all about and how that has implications for what we do. I think about AI and I look for all the uses of AI. I look at new restaurants and I say, what are they doing differently? I literally just go out and say to myself, let me be present and pay attention and think about all of the cool things that are
happening, the future is happening right before our eyes. And so I mentioned that because I love everyone who's listening to actually do the same thing periodically get up from their desks and wander around trying to stay relevant and pay attention to what's going on.
Heather Porter (05:01.567)
I love this so much. It's for me, that's having like a curiosity mindset. It's almost like back when you were a kid and you'd walk outside and you'd see a butterfly and you'd think, what makes that butterfly have colorful wings or how do they fly? It's that's to me, it's such a beautiful way to live. What you're describing is looking for these clues. Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (05:19.131)
Well, no, so you're exactly right. But think about this. know, all these people tell me I go into companies all the time. We've worked with like 400 companies around the world and people say, well, you got to understand, Alan, I'm not particularly creative. And I say, well, actually, I would argue with that because as kids, we were all creative. We were all curious. We all asked questions. We all wondered. We all put things together that didn't belong. And some of them turned out to be pretty awesome. And so
Heather Porter (05:33.589)
Mmm.
Alan Gregerman (05:49.138)
We can have that all back. It's just somewhere between the world of the sandbox and our adult life. We lost the knack for being curious. So I actually make that not only a part of our practice, but I make it part of the life of our customers. I say if we start a project, we're going to start our project actually not in a meeting room. We're going to start our project wandering around looking for brilliant ideas.
Heather Porter (06:13.221)
fantastic, Alan, I love it. Now I wanna know more about your business journey because we don't know much about it yet. tell me a little bit, tell me more, tell me more about what you do right now in your business and how did you, I guess, travel down the road to get to this moment in time?
Alan Gregerman (06:20.971)
Okay
Alan Gregerman (06:29.879)
Okay, so a bunch of things conspired, probably like lots of people who are listening, a bunch of things conspired. Our business is basically a strategy and innovation consulting and education firm. So I like to say that we help customers to come up with new product services solutions, business models, customer experiences, all by having kind of an approach to innovation that I think is different and seems to work by last count like 90%.
of our customers actually successfully launched new innovations. So I think that's pretty good in a world where most innovations fail. But so we help our customers to think about what's an idea that will be compelling and then how do they implement it. Unlike big consulting firms, we actually want to hang in there until something gets implemented because that's fun for us. We don't want to write a report and say you know you could do this and then when it doesn't happen say well you know the customer screwed up we're awesome. We want to kind of be
Heather Porter (07:28.78)
Ha
Alan Gregerman (07:29.753)
committed to it. Tied to that, we're the only consulting firm I know about that offers an unconditional guarantee of satisfaction. We tell our customers if they're not happy with the work we do, they don't have to pay. Kind of an insane thing. I did that to start our business 37 years ago. I was competing against big firms and so I would suggest to people listening, you know, if you want to stand out and you're new, guarantee what you do. It's hard for somebody to say no to somebody who guarantees
what they do and you can literally guarantee everything. So how did I start out? I began my career. I was a really bad high school student and so you would appreciate because you grew up in the Bay Area. So my dad who was one of the kind of creators and the first general manager of operations of BART, he said, you know, maybe you shouldn't go straight to college since you're not as disciplined as you should be. Maybe you should work and so he got me a job
Heather Porter (08:03.405)
Brilliant.
Alan Gregerman (08:29.479)
nights as a mechanic for the subway in San Francisco. And I did that for two years. And I tell you, if you ever wanted to do a job that would make you think maybe you should work harder and go to college, that was a good one. But during the two years I was there, I made 10 suggestions for ways they could innovate and improve their performance. And while I was there, they accepted none of them.
Three years later, I got a letter that said several of my ideas were really good. They're implementing them. But because I'm no longer an employee, I'm not eligible for the reward that came with it. So my first sense of it was big organization. I was actually working for Westinghouse, which was the main contractor working for BART. I didn't want to be in a big organization. The boss, the plant manager periodically drove around the plant in a golf cart and said hi to all the employees. And when I said I submitted an idea,
He just said hi and continued to go on. So I knew I didn't want to work in a big company, but I thought maybe someday I'd like to help big companies actually make it possible for people to innovate. Then for some odd reason, I was a really good college student after being a really bad high school student and I went on to get a PhD. And I thought for a moment maybe I would be a professor till halfway through my doctoral program when I said, God, I never want to stay at a university. In fact,
It's kind of like a miracle that I finished my PhD. While I was working on my PhD, I spent evenings and weekends volunteering with entrepreneurs. It was an association of African American entrepreneurs in Detroit who were trying to grow businesses in a tough environment. I loved these people. I loved working with them. I loved the passion, the amount of hours they put in, their willingness to try new things. So it dawned on me. I hated being in a big company. I didn't like
being at a university, I loved working with entrepreneurs, maybe I should go into business and think about doing that. And so 37 years ago, I started our company doing that.
Heather Porter (10:37.162)
Incredible. And so right now you're consulting. So tell me about how you work with clients. What's like an ideal client look like and how do you actually help them?
Alan Gregerman (10:46.443)
good. No, I appreciate that. So an ideal client is someone, a company that really wants to be innovative. You know, the trouble is you go on the websites of every company around the world and of course it says we're the most innovative company in our industry. That's easy to kind of write up there. You just need to know the software to do that. But most companies aren't particularly innovative. Most companies are afraid to launch new ideas. So
For me, the ideal customer is a company that actually really wants to innovate. And there actually are like two buckets of those folks. One is companies that have been innovative in the past. They see the value of innovation. Those are fantastic because they want to figure out new ways to innovate and new things to do. The other are folks who are about to go out of business because now they're desperate to do something new. And the vast group of people in the middle...
You know, it's okay. So they're gonna kind of keep hanging it. So I love to do that. I love to work in lots of different industries. I have no expertise in any particular industry. In fact, you know, I think we'll get to it. My new book is called The Wisdom of Ignorance and a customer said the other day, when it comes to knowing nothing, Alan Gregerman is a genius. And so, no, it's fine. It's fine. I mean, I know a lot about a fair number of industries now, because we've worked in a lot of industries, but
I like industries that really make a difference in people's lives. So I like places where they want to work hard. I like industries that help people to be healthier, to lead a better lifestyle, to change their relationship with the planet in a positive way. So I like those types. But, you know, we've worked with lots of companies and
Heather Porter (12:17.942)
I like that.
Alan Gregerman (12:36.313)
The driver for me is the right kind of people who are clear about what they want to do and want to do something that matters.
Heather Porter (12:43.894)
Hmm, really beautiful. now you briefly had to slip in a little comment about your book and I want to know about the book you, cause you told me something before I hit record that your audio book is climbing the charts. So, let's start with the book. What is the book and what's it all about and talk to me about the audio. Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (13:02.019)
no, no, no, I appreciate that. So the book is called The Wisdom of Ignorance. I'll put it up here and then I'll put it down.
Heather Porter (13:08.266)
Perfect.
Alan Gregerman (13:09.369)
And the book is about a really simple idea that I hope resonates, especially for a lot of your audience who are entrepreneurial, they'll understand this. So this is my fourth book about innovation. I tend to write about counterintuitive ways to think about how we can innovate. And the fundamental idea here is if we know a lot about something, we can make it better. If we know nothing about something, we can create a breakthrough. Because nothing allows us to have a fresh look
to imagine solutions that no one has ever thought of before. And that's what I'm trying to do with our customers. Help them to figure out how to create compelling value for whoever they serve. Value that's never been created before. So the book provides a formula for what we all need to do in fast changing times to be able to create breakthroughs and to be able to not know stuff in the right way. You know, when I talk about the wisdom of ignorance, the book's not called the wisdom of stupidity. The book's not about
why it's really good not to know anything and not to care. The book is called The Wisdom of Ignorance because it's really good to have what I call enlightened ignorance and that is I don't know the answer to this but I really want to figure out an awesome way to solve it. And that's I think what's going to guide all of us to be successful. And so I've created kind of this formula six things we all need to do to remain relevant and have an impact in the world. And I guess everyone who's listening if they take the time to listen to your podcast I believe they
Heather Porter (14:30.464)
Yep.
Alan Gregerman (14:39.069)
want to make an impact. And so this book is all about how you do that.
Heather Porter (14:43.605)
Can you give us a little sneak peek into maybe one or two of your favorite tips?
Alan Gregerman (14:45.281)
sure, I mean the book is out I'm delighted to. So here I'll really quickly tell you like the six things. So the first thing I want people to think about is innovation actually happens when we're focused and purposeful.
Heather Porter (14:53.684)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (15:01.637)
for all those folks who run businesses or lead parts of businesses or work in a business that they really believe matters, the key is that we need to be clear about what our purpose is. We need to make sure our purpose resonates with the marketplace. And then we need to make sure that every single person in our organization understands what they do and why it matters to our purpose. So we start with being purposeful, picking a purpose that matters to us that will wake up on a Monday morning or stay late
on us today. It's Wednesday where you are but it's Tuesday evening for me that we're delighted to spend time thinking about and focusing on our purpose. The second is and we talked about it a little while ago the powerful idea of curiosity and that is if I'm purposeful then I should say now let me be curious about whether or not there are remarkable ways to solve the challenge that I need to solve and curiosity should lead me to go out and engage the world.
Heather Porter (15:46.527)
Yes.
Alan Gregerman (16:01.557)
head-on. You know, let's go back to the idea that most new ideas are based on somebody else's thinking. I ought to go out there and find those ideas. I don't need to be brilliant in coming up with them. There's so few original ideas, but what I need to do is connect dots that lead a brilliant idea to adding value for the folks that I serve. So that's the second. The third is humility and this is the hardest one especially for leaders of companies. In a world changing super fast, is
presumptuous to believe I can know everything and yet leaders act as though they have to know everything. Otherwise it looks like they're incompetent or they shouldn't be the leader. The best leaders can say I actually don't know the best answer but I think together as a team we'll find the best answer. We need to go and do that. We need to be better. I'm always told it's so kind of
Heather Porter (16:42.431)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (16:56.197)
consistent for me. Folks say, well you don't understand Alan, we're really successful. Our customers love us. And I say your customers love you because they haven't seen anything better yet.
as soon as they find something better, they love you way less than they do right now. So you better be the better. Okay. So now think about it, AI, social media, the cloud, robotics, all kinds of things are happening that are going to allow somebody who's entrepreneurial to make your customers happier than you are. And so I think that we need to be humble and say,
We don't have all the answers now. We have no idea yet what we need to do in the future to remain valuable to our customers. We need to figure that out. But humility is really hard for existing companies. They all think they figured it out. The graveyard of the world's best companies that figured it out and went under is really full. And so I want people to think about if you don't change, you're not gonna win.
Heather Porter (18:00.584)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (18:05.081)
The fourth thing is respect and that is, so I think I mentioned.
actually have a PhD in geography. You know, I don't have a business degree which I actually think is an asset in working in business but I have a PhD in geography and I've always been fascinated that it's a big world filled with ideas and yet when most of the people listening want to come up with a breakthrough they're going to look at the best practices in their industry or their discipline even if their industry or discipline isn't renowned for being brilliant at what they're trying to do. You know, companies say
me, I need to be as good as the other banks in terms of customer service and I go
have banks ever been renowned for providing a high level of customer service? And then they say, well, not exactly. say, so you're aspiring to be the best of the worst. Why wouldn't you look at Ritz-Carlton hotels or the Peninsula hotels in Asia or Nordstrom, a remarkable kind of department store, or all kinds of folks who are amazing at customer service and adapt what they know to your industry? So it just seems to make sense to me. So the idea of respect is ideas can come from everywhere, but we have to be
respectful of that fact. have to believe that I can learn as much from a homeless person who knows a lot about being resilient as I can from another CEO. The fifth is I need to be future-focused. Okay, and I mentioned a little while ago that I wander around all the time looking for clues to the future. I think everyone listening to your podcast should be doing exactly the same thing because we have to survive and be successful in the future. And if we're not engaging, if I
Alan Gregerman (19:45.646)
just sit at my desk and I don't pay attention to the future I can't win. And then the last one which some people might think is funny but to me it's natural is I have to be paranoid in order to be successful in the future I have to be paranoid. What do I mean?
Somebody is following all of us. Somebody is paying attention to you today and trying to figure out how to be better than you. And if I don't regularly turn around and look to see who's following me and figure out how to be better than them, I can't win. And so I think what happens is so many businesses get complacent. You if you're in the U.S. or North America, you know the story of Blockbuster.
Heather Porter (20:17.919)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (20:27.311)
Blockbuster was amazing. Blockbuster owned Saturday night 9,000 video rental stores and suddenly they didn't own Saturday night because the folks at Netflix first figured out how to mail you a DVD. You didn't have to go to a store and then the folks at Netflix capitalized on streaming. We all stream stuff now. The folks at Blockbuster don't even exist anymore and it's because they didn't pay attention.
to the folks who are sneaking up on them. So we all need to be honest and say, who could sneak up on me? And it's likely not to be competitors who are like me, it's likely to be competitors who are different. So that's it in a nutshell. I hope that wasn't too fast there.
Heather Porter (21:09.71)
No, that was absolutely brilliant. There's so much in there that I absolutely love. Like there's so many quotes and one liners and just the idea of, you know, getting ideas from other industries and people outside. Like you said, with your degree, you know, you're happy that it wasn't a business degree. It makes sense. Alan, there's a there's a quote from my old boss, Tony Robbins, and he something along the lines of the quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. I feel like you're living, breathing example of that by asking better questions.
everywhere around you and questioning whatever you see helps breed innovation, what you're saying. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (21:45.626)
Well, and go back to what you said because you hit on one of the fundamental things and that is the most curious people are going to win in a world engine fast because
Heather Porter (21:53.662)
Yeah. Ugh.
Alan Gregerman (21:56.346)
They ask questions, they look around, they see something interesting, they imagine whether or not that can be valuable to what they do. That's really the most fundamental thing we all need to do. If all of us could pay attention and be in awe of things that are remarkable, and then not just be in awe of them, but say, what can I learn from that that could help to transform my business? We would change all of our businesses tomorrow.
Heather Porter (22:04.648)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (22:22.42)
So true. Okay. So I'm really excited to ask you this next question, especially from you. What have you done exceptionally well in the last year in your own business?
Alan Gregerman (22:32.255)
no, so that's a great question. I hope what I've done in the last year with an update because the world changes and technology changes is that I've...
always tried to be as close to my customers as possible. Because remember, in the absence of having customers, I have no reason to have a business. And so I need to regularly hang out with them, talk with them, find out what's new, what new things they want to accomplish. And then I need to be sharing valuable information to them, whether or not they're paying me.
Heather Porter (23:07.582)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (23:07.811)
You know, so I think all of us who go above and beyond are likely to be in a better position. I just need to keep making my customers smarter so they can think about their options and then I need to help them on the journey that they need to get to. Not on the journey I want to take them on, but I need to apply my creativity to helping them get to where they're going. So I'd say in the last year, I kind of doubled up my effort to regularly hang out with my customers.
And I feel like that's a really important thing to do. I think whenever we lose touch or we just assume we know what the customer's doing, then they begin doing something else.
Heather Porter (23:50.731)
Ooh, good one. So I'm gonna flip that and ask you if you could go back and talk to yourself a year ago in October and say, hey, Alan, you know, this is something you should have done differently in the last year. What would that have been?
Alan Gregerman (24:07.076)
Well.
No, I mean it's fine. You know, I can't control like the big trends that are going on. Certainly, I had no impact on COVID or the global political situation. What would I do a bit differently? Something that I probably don't do as much as I could have and that is I would probably do a bit more marketing and selling than I do. You know, because when times are challenged, you need to weather it. You need to have a bigger pipeline.
right? So I often joke when I give speeches and I have the privilege of giving speeches. Often, I often say 90 % of success in business is being awesome at what you deliver and 90 % is being good at getting customers. And then someone will raise their hand and goes, well, that's 180 % and I'll go, well, that's what business is. It's 180%. So I probably should spend a little bit more time marketing. I've kind of cranked
my presence in places like LinkedIn because you know social media is a bigger way that people find out about you. I send out a fair amount of kind of personalized messages to folks. I'm not keen on like mailing lists. I have a mailing list but I use it to send personal messages to people and twice a year I send handwritten notes to people and people go, wow you have such beautiful handwriting and I
Heather Porter (25:25.492)
Yeah.
Alan Gregerman (25:38.125)
well I'm just grateful you read my handwritten note. It wasn't written by AI or a computer. But I need to stay connected with all the folks I do business with. I need to thank them regularly. I need to always understand where they want to go and I need to never assume that I know the answers.
Heather Porter (25:56.81)
So much on that. Do you mind actually, I think it'd be really interesting for you to share something that happened to you a few years ago. And the reason why I want you to share this story is because we all have difficult moments in life and business, all of us, interesting journeys that happen behind the scenes. And when I read this, I was really quite blown away about what's happened to you and how you've come out of it. What happened to you back in 2021?
Alan Gregerman (26:24.897)
Okay, no and I think the point you're making is also a really good point before I get into my story that I think everyone should think about and that is everyone has a backstory and
Heather Porter (26:31.429)
Sure, yeah.
Heather Porter (26:37.363)
Yep.
Alan Gregerman (26:37.963)
even when we know our customers well, we don't often know their backstory. And so, if we knew that, we might act differently, but we have to act always as though there's way more to a person than we'll ever have the privilege of knowing. Having said that, four and a half years ago, I'm having dinner with our family. Our three grown children have come home and I'm having dinner with my wife and our kids. And suddenly, I believe I'm speaking and everybody says,
can't hear you, you speak up? And so I try harder to speak and I can no longer make a sound that can be heard by humans. A few moments later, I lose the ability to see them. Turns out I was having a stroke. A stroke that's kind of a rare stroke and the two main symptoms I got was for months I lost the ability to see and speak. Actually I had 18 months of speech and vision therapy to be able to
make sounds that humans could hear. I was told that somewhere in the ocean a dolphin could hear me but no human could ever hear me. Then it took me 14-15 months to get my driver's license back because I had to go to an eye hospital regularly to have them work on my eyes. I had several eye surgeries.
Heather Porter (27:40.328)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (27:44.969)
Hmm.
Alan Gregerman (28:00.026)
What I learned was that we live in an uncertain world. For those of the folks listening who run businesses, they know the world's uncertain. Things change, customers change, policies change, technology changes. For me, it became very, very personal. One moment I thought I was kind of at the top of my game, and the next moment I was sitting in a rocking chair on our porch listening to books on tape to keep my mind going, hoping that I would speak again.
because initially the doctors didn't think I would speak again. That's actually a cool story. know, I write about the wisdom of ignorance and the idea that expertise doesn't always save us. So my doctors at a leading, Johns Hopkins, leading medical institution, after I had my stroke said, we hope you'll speak but we're not certain you'll ever speak again. The first day I got home from the hospital, my speech therapist came. name was Diane and Diane pulled up a chair in the
your room and said okay try and speak and I spoke and you said can't hear a word you're saying but damn it I'm gonna stay here with you until you start speaking again I don't care if it takes a year all I need you to do is pay attention to me and it's gonna be really frustrating because you're gonna do all these exercises and things I ask and you won't be able to speak for a long time but that's okay we're gonna get you to speak
So was kind of exciting. She was the first moment when I started to be optimistic that at some point I would speak again.
Heather Porter (29:24.04)
Wow.
Heather Porter (29:32.093)
Yeah, my goodness. What in your mind to get through this moment, what were you telling yourself?
Alan Gregerman (29:41.785)
Well, so I have a real advantage. Well, I have an advantage for me that I believe a lot of people listening who are entrepreneurs have and that is I'm really a future person. I'm not a detailed person. I have to work really hard to attend to all the details of our business and I typically have people that I hire to do those things. I'm a future person and so I was instantly saying to myself, okay, let's kind of suck it up because you're going to speak
can see again. And so you better actually do even more when you have those gifts than you've ever done before. So I started trying to coach myself and suck and kind of stimulate myself, energize myself to be ready to hopefully be
awesome in some way. Now I have to admit the first few months I was probably not a happy camper so you know nobody was inviting people to hang out with me because I was modestly depressed. I mean you don't go from speaking around the world to not speaking without getting a little bit depressed. that's
Heather Porter (30:35.511)
Heh.
Heather Porter (30:41.254)
Yeah, of course.
Heather Porter (30:45.276)
No.
Alan Gregerman (30:47.877)
Yeah, but then I just said to myself, I'm going to get through this, you know? And I think the advantage of being an entrepreneur and going through all kinds of things like recessions and COVID and things like that is you realize there's light at the end of the tunnel. I just had to say for my personal challenge, there'd be light at the end of this tunnel.
Heather Porter (31:07.729)
What an optimistic way of looking at such a time. My God. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And you were bang on when you said, I think why you're asking me this question is because yeah, you got it. So good context. As we start to get closer to wrapping up, first thing is how do people reach out to you if they're interested in buying your book or learning more about your business?
Alan Gregerman (31:31.438)
Okay, well the book I hope it's called the Wisdom of Ignorance. I hope it's available everywhere in the world. know, certainly everywhere where there's an Amazon and I think they've taken over the world. But certainly if you have a local independent bookstore that you like, go and ask them about the book. I believe they're capable of getting it for you. So that's where the book is. I can be reached at my website which is alangreggerman.com.
Heather Porter (31:41.053)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (31:51.507)
Excellent.
Alan Gregerman (32:01.381)
connected with on LinkedIn and I say connected, I really would prefer that people don't follow me. I'd like them to connect with me. I'd like to get to know you and what you're working on. I'd like to learn from you and when you just follow me you kind of are a little bit hidden so I don't want that happening. So that's probably a good way. They can send me an email and I'm guessing in the show notes we'll have the email but my email is simply innovate at venture-works.com. Send me an email
I read all of my emails that aren't spam and just write in the subject line, this is not spam, you know, and I'll probably, I'll eagerly read it. Yeah, so there are lots of ways to reach me. I'd love to connect with people, you know, that's how I learn new things and yeah, so that would be great.
Heather Porter (32:51.132)
That would be wonderful, you guys. Yeah, it's all in the show notes as well, so you can come and find those. As we start to wrap up, are there any last things that you would like to share with our listeners?
Alan Gregerman (33:02.255)
Well, yes, I mean, there's a bunch. So I don't know. I don't know if people can see behind me. So on one of the doors in our office, I have a card with the word next. And so I believe next is the most important word for any entrepreneur or anyone in business. And here's what I mean by it.
Not everybody is going to resonate with you and your company or your product or your service or your solution. That doesn't mean that what you offer isn't awesome. It simply means it's not right or we can't do a good job of convincing other people that what we do is valuable for them.
I could be really sad. I could take it personally. I wrote this book and I sent it out to 21 reviewers. 17, including Mel Robbins, who's reasonably well known, thought my book was fantastic and wrote quotes for it. Three didn't respond and one said he didn't like my book at all. I could have put my tail between my legs and said, God, that's pathetic. That's just so sad.
but I just said next you know we need to find people who resonate with our ideas and our businesses and we don't need to dwell on people who just don't seem to get it. Now they might be suggesting things that would make us better but the truth of the matter is we all need to move on. We need to find the people who are the right customers. We need to find the team members who are the right team members and we need to believe that as long as we're
trying our best to deliver value and make a difference in the lives of the folks we serve. That we're doing something that matters and it's okay if not everybody loves us.
Heather Porter (34:51.176)
Okay, that couldn't be a more perfect way to end our conversation. So thank you for also sharing your personal journey as well, because that's quite profound and amazing what you've been through, Alan. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for all your knowledge.
Alan Gregerman (35:06.999)
well, thank you for having me on. I've loved the conversation. I hope it's been valuable to your audience. Thanks.
Heather Porter (35:13.019)
Incredibly. Thank you.
