No One Can Scale Alone – The Importance Of Finding Strategic Partners
01:13 About Melissa
02:58 The shift point in the business
06:18 what is important in building a corporate strategy
09:40 no one can scale alone
11:15 how important it is to have smarter people surrounding you
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Video Transcript:
Marina: Hi everybody and welcome to Grow To Scale your business.
My name is Marina, your growth to scale strategist.
Today I’m super excited! We have Melissa Glossup with us, she is the Co-Founder and CEO of Safety Biometrics.
One of the best, smartest, brightest individuals that I’ve ever met and I’m not saying it to kiss up to her, but it’s because it’s true!
We’re not going to cover today all the things she’s doing that treat I will save for you for another video, but today we’re going to dig a little bit deeper into her motivation and how important is to build the right strategy for a business.
So, hi Melissa! Thank you for joining us… love to have you!
Melissa: Hello Marina, thank you so much for inviting me… this is such an honor to be on your show, so you know how well I respect you, so this is quite an honor thank you
Marina: Thank you for joining us
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what do you do, and why you started doing
It.
Melissa: Absolutely! So my name is Melissa Glossup, and I am the Co-founder and CEO of Safety Biometrics, and honestly business sort of found me.
I had a career in education and I, you know was going through life, I got married, and I married a very innovative man, and he had a fantastic idea and I had the background in technology and in technical writing so we decided to write the patents and develop a company. And as we started going through it.
So our company is Safety Biometrics and the company was developed on the thought of bringing men and women home safely from work.
We use biometrics to consult companies on the safety and wellness of their employees and we believe that every employee deserves the right to a safe and well work environment.
As we’ve evolved along in that, we realized that a sort of leadership path, sort of uh
fell before me…. and I had great relationships and I really decided to step into the
ownership of being the CEO of the company and so far so good.
We’re growing and evolving and it’s been such an amazing path to build something from idea to go to market and it’s not a path for um you know the faint-hearted, but it’s definitely worth it.
If you know, have thick enough skin, and you know really focus on that end goal.
Marina: It’s fascinating the way we met. So we
met at a networking event, and uh during that event specifically, you were basically beaten down.
The person who was running it, shredded all your ideas and they said it’s a horrible idea, it will never work, this is stupid, you don’t know what you’re doing and so on and so on…
And how did it make you feel when it happened? What did it make you do how did it…
did it strengthen you? Did it weaken you?
How do you progress? I know the answer to it, but I would love you to tell everybody else because you’re so in another place these days… it was like four years ago? I think four years ago… yeah…
Melissa: Absolutely. So that moment was the lowest and potentially the greatest turning point I could have had, and when I said that sort of that leadership role sort of developed before me, it was the moment where I had the conviction of heart I know that our product is going to revolutionize workplaces for industrial employees and make safer multiple multiple industries.
So i knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I have a purpose, that our technology is solid and I have to get it to market.
The being shredded like that, and being told that it’s not feasible, it made my conviction even stronger.
But one thing was said: I was told to stop hiding.
I have an amazing team of really senior level male executives and they’re phenomenal. But the main biting point that really impacted me, is I’ve got to step out from behind my team and I’ve got to lead from the front. And that changed everything, once I took the role of really leading from the front and creating the opportunities and building new relationships.
It’s been night and day with our company.
So I was before allowing things to happen and try to wait and be patient and sort of
passively grow the company.
Well when you’re convicted in something you have to go get it there’s there’s no way to
just sit on your haunches.
Success is not going to come to you, you have to go find it!
Marina: So it sounds like several things happen
first of all, you had to start taking action and stop working in the business and start working on the business.
The second thing you have to create a strategy how to do it, how to empower your team to do what they’re great at, and empower your skills and and use them in order to grow and scale your connections, your contacts, your everything that you needed in order to
recruit the right power team, in order to um get the grants get the money get the investments that you need in order to actually take it from an idea into execution, where the product exists and you’re almost there it’s like this close.
What is important in building a corporate strategy when you know you need to grow and scale?
How do you build that strategy?
Melissa: The main focus that an entrepreneur needs to have is you can’t have
a single thread of revenue, or you can’t have a single thread, or a single
conversation towards funding.
What you have to do is you have to almost play your odds you have to create as many opportunities as you can, work those opportunities at the same time and understand that you also want to be selective.
We’ve taken a little bit longer in our strategy because not all money partners are equal. You need the right money partners, you need you don’t just need the capital, you need
capital that can come along with relationships and manufacturing and different things that’s going to take the company to level b-c-d-e.
If it’s just capital and I had only the relationships that I had when I started, the company would have failed.
So as you’re growing one strategy, you’ve got to have your relationship capital, have that strategy, have to grow at the same time that your monetization or money capital has to
grow the same way that your equity…. as far as like you know… do you own buildings, do you own IP? You have to be developing all of these three at the exact same time and then making sure that they’re all going to that final point of funding into market.
Now if you’re focused on one strategy only, everyone’s like have plans b-c-d-e, I disagree with that, because what that does for you is:
If I’m working plan A and it fails and I haven’t started working on plan B at all I’m constantly starting over and that does three things to the entrepreneur:
One it’s demotivating. it’s really hard when one of your focuses in the business falls apart, you hit rock bottom again, now you’ve got to motivate yourself and start over with
a completely separate plan.
So what you need to do is you need to be strategizing every day along the way you
need to have those pin points or those those stepping stones in place, that if I fall off of A, B is not that much farther behind A… so you don’t fall all the way down to zero.
You know you go from a four to a three or four to a two, but not four to zero so that would be my best advice for anyone starting out or anyone with you know a successful business.
If you’re not looking for multiple ways to grow and you only have one thing that you’re implementing right now to evolve, your business you’re already three steps behind where you should be.
Marina: That’s a very good point.
It’s also important when you grow in scale not only to focus on what you’re what you’re doing but like you said you’re not only looking for money you’re looking for those relationships and in many cases in your in your case it was money and relationships but in many other cases there are companies that in order to get the right relationship or the right growth uh type of growth type of scaling they actually need to either acquire or partner up with other businesses that do something that they don’t do but the complement their abilities and their skills and in your case it was people that you
needed to partner up with.
Melissa: um so marina you’re absolutely spot on.
Even with Safety Biometrics, one of our strategies, we knew that as a team of 10
really successful individuals that to take over a niche in the tech space, the 10 of us could not do it alone. So we developed channel partners with large organizations that have existing clientele in the industries that we want to break into that way once we are in manufacturing once we go to market we’re simply white labeling our product and
allowing it to be distributed much more quickly effectively and efficiently with less
cost for my company by using these channel partners so relationships can benefit organizations many ways.
But the only no one can scale alone. You must have those relationships to be able to really leverage and build and you know grow the opportunities for your business.
Marina: So last question.
How important it is to have the right (and not mentorship or coaching per se), but how important it is to have somebody that completes the knowledge you’re lacking?
Because you have a great team, with great knowledge and contacts that you know everything right now… but you didn’t know most of it when you just started and you needed those, that kind of help in order to build the right strategy. So how important is it, and how much did they help?
Melissa: So that is really key for any organization, and I’m going to talk about it um in two facets:
The number one facet: Within an organization you have to have the right person in the right position. If you have the right person in the wrong position it’s going to thwart
their ability to grow and it’s going to stagnate your company so that is keenly important having the right partners within the business and then having the right mentorships
and relationships outside of the business is paramount.
One of the reasons I was so extremely convicted about our technology is I had had conversations with the leadership of many of the industries that we want to break into and the feedback was all unanimous, “we need a product like yours, nothing out there exists, so you know we’re ready to test it or we’re ready to roll it out as soon
as your company is ready to go forward with it”.
So when someone not from the industry, who is a brilliant businessman did not see the exact vision that I had initially, it didn’t break me because I’ve had enough of the right conversations, that it wasn’t just me knowing I had validated the technology and the product from the end user before we had taken it this far down… so it’s extremely important to get the right information outside of your company and then have the right people in the right place inside of your organization.
Marina: There um there are a lot of coaches or thought leaders that would say “well if you don’t have an order number that’s submitted to your business to prove that they’re willing to pay… if they don’t put money where their mouth is, then it’s not worth it. What do you say about that? because your technology, unless it exists they can’t put in an order in… right?
Melissa: Right.
So the three things. Yes, I did not have initially work orders from organizations, but I was receiving introductions from large companies to their top clients and I don’t think if I didn’t have something of value the introduction to someone’s top client most likely would not have occurred.
The second thing, I had industries reaching out to me, looking for expertise on how to for example, the American Foundry Society… I’ll be speaking next week at their
internet 4.0 conference in Chicago. And they reached out to me because
the industry that they are, you know a part of is so antiquated the only way they can monitor wellness of the employee is by other people observing whether or not the person is sweating through their coveralls. And to say this day and age that’s the best
you’ve got that’s no longer acceptable so when they reached out to us they placed me on the team that actually consulted Osha and Cal Osha on using technology to improve
heat management in the workplace and how to use biometrics with individuals and the opportunities that exist there far beyond you know just see something say something within the workplace.
Marina: I know that everybody who are listening to this are fascinated and intrigued by what your company does, which we will not cover in this video…
You will have to subscribe, like and share this, so that you get updates when the next
video comes out.
Thank you so much melissa we will do this again to record a full information package
about your company, because it is fascinating, it is life-changing, transformational for all the industries out there and I’m looking forward to share this with the world.
So I’ll see you on the next video Melissa, and I’ll see you on all the next videos if you do the right choice and subscribe and share and like.
Bye guys
Bye Melissa thank you
Melissa: Bye thank you