[Podcast Series] The Most Important Leadership Lessons From 2,000+ Business Leaders

Among all of the influential leaders they’ve interviewed, there’s a major lesson that sticks out for both Jeremy and John: leaders should constantly be learning, growing, and expanding their skillset. As a business leader, it’s vital to strive for improvement for yourself and your employees, business, and community. What other characteristics are key for successful business leaders?

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

Dr. Jeremy Weisz talks about leaders who exude positivity and resiliency
John Corcoran shares stories regarding the importance of listening
Successful business leaders who are constantly learning and improving
The value of preparation through diversification
Why did Jeremy and John get into podcasting?

In this episode…

Together, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran have a collective two decades of podcasting experience. They’ve each interviewed over 1,000 guests, from CEOs to billionaires to entrepreneurs across all industries. By connecting with so many business leaders, Jeremy and John have learned what it takes to succeed.

In this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Rise25 Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran discuss the most important qualities they see in top business leaders. Using examples of the inspirational people they’ve connected with through podcasting, they bring the stories and insight straight to you. Stay tuned to learn how you can become the best leader possible!

Resources Mentioned:

Sponsor for this episode

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.

We’re a professional podcast production agencythat makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?

When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy.

We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agencythat wants you to win?

Rise25 Co-founders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

About Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran

Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the Co-founder of Rise25. He has been involved in podcasting for 11 years and was a Senior Producer for one of the early business podcasts; he assisted in putting all of their systems in place and helped them add volume, feature, and edify various business leaders.

Dr. Weisz has also been running his podcast, Inspired Insider, since 2011. He has featured top entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs of P90X, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, the Orlando Magic, and many more.

In addition to running Rise25, Dr. Weisz owns a nutritional supplement business and runs his chiropractic and massage facility, Chiropractical Solutions & Massage.

John Corcoran is a recovering attorney, an author, and was a former White House writer and speechwriter to the Governor of California. Throughout his career, John has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and has run his boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area catering to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

John has been the host of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast since 2012. He has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, authors, and entrepreneurs, from Peter Diamandis and Adam Grant to Gary Vaynerchuk and Marie Forleo.

John is also the Co-founder of Rise25, a company that connects B2B businesses with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners and generates ROI through their done-for-you podcast service.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 media, we featured top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.

John Corcoran 0:20

Hey, welcome, everyone. John Corcoran. Here I am the co host of the Top Business Leaders Show and every week we talk with, you guessed it top business leaders, CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, of all kinds of different companies. I’m also the co founder Rise25 where he helped connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. And today we’re going to be talking about the three things the three lessons the most important qualities that Dr. Jeremy Weisz, my co hosts and co founder of Rise25, and I have learned have found are the three most important qualities for top business leaders that help business leaders to get ahead. And this is based on over 1000 interviews that I have done and over 1000 interviews that Jeremy has done with a wide range of founders, from CEOs of publicly traded companies, to billionaires to worldwide famous entrepreneurs. And so based on all of that knowledge, we’re going to share that with you. And I’m really interested to know Jeremy, what your top three most important qualities are, and you will learn what my top three most important qualities are. And of course, this episode is brought to you by Rise25 Media where we help b2b businesses, their clients, referrals and strategic partnerships with done for you podcasts and content marketing, you know, it’s fastly fast becoming a world where like, it was in the 1990s, where companies didn’t have websites. And they quickly realized they needed a website. And it’s just like that with podcasts. If you’re listening to this, and you have a business, and you don’t have a podcast yet, you need to get one as quickly as you can. It’s really a land grab, I would highly recommend it. And I don’t just say that as someone who helps others to do that. But I say that as someone who has done a podcast personally and reaped so many benefits from it. So if you want to learn more about that, go to rise25media.com or email us at support@rise25media.com We’ve got all kinds of resources we can share with you to help get you started. Alright, Jeremy, you’re

Jeremy Weisz 2:18

good at explaining that. Thank you, sir. Appreciate. Yeah. And we were saying that 10 years ago when it was not self serving, you know, the same? Absolutely. So

John Corcoran 2:28

yeah, absolutely. Yeah. For the first six or seven years of doing a podcast before we ever had anyone pay us to help them to do a podcast I told everyone I don’t ever met you, but is it’s great. It’s wonderful. You meet amazing people drive great connections, so many different benefits. And yeah, so that’s, that’s a great point is that we were saying it long before. Um, alright, so let’s start with yours. So you’ve talked

Jeremy Weisz 2:54

when we did these independently, right, so and I hesitate to say top three most important, but we’ll say very important qualities and I chose three don’t paint myself into a corner. But um, so these are three that I looked at past guests. Um, you know, we both had some amazing people on and what lessons they taught us and lessons in leadership and the one that sticks out over and over again is positivity, positivity in spite of challenges, which kind of bleeds into resiliency. And a couple come to mind with this. I remember Andrea Heuston, who runs an amazing podcast, who’s got a great company, Artitudes Design. She had three tragic events happen in her life, one being in a coma, another her house burned down and three, a really key staff member got really sick and she talks about how she overcame it, how she, you know, kind of was resilient through the whole entire situation. That was one Andrea Herrera had a catering company and during COVID A redefine our business had to pivot and she started by experience. And so which kind of goes into Jason Swenk and Jason Swenk, um, you know, talked about seeing the.com period where things melted down in general, he saw that as an opportunity and Andrea Herrera saw as an opportunity in her catering business or during COVID You start another company and so he helps agencies and when COVID hit and was wreaking havoc the same thing give the same exact advice that he saw in the.com period which is look at what opportunities are out there now despite everything so I’ll we can go back and forth. So my one of positivity in spite of challenges and resiliency.

John Corcoran 4:50

Yeah. And you know, Jason has been a great friend and a mentor to both of us he went to one of his events recently and you know, he’ll he was running an agency during In the.com meltdown, as you mentioned, also during the oh eight financial crisis. And so frequently, I’ve heard him say it so often that, you know, when you have a crisis, when you have a challenge of economic downturn, you really should view that as an opportunity. And, you know, pivot, make iterations changes to your business, you just have to be really nimble. So that’s a great lesson, I’ll start with my, one of my most important qualities in top business leaders is one of those is to be a good listener. And what I mean by that is, you really have to have your ear to the ground, listening for opportunities, listening for changes in the marketplace, listening for what you’re, you know, sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s really soft. But you can make little tweaks in your business that can have massive changes, just from listening for what the market wants or what your clients want from you. And one example, a guest of mine, Jennifer Rotner, she had a business where she was creating different written content for clients. And she lost one massive client lost about 80% of her client revenue virtually overnight. But what she did was she went home that night, she whiteboard it with her husband, and thought about different things that she could do and realized that there was a big opportunity to helping her clients to create books, they were really interested in doing that. So he started a whole new division of her business, helping people to become authors by writing a book. And she actually got it up to over seven figures in I want to say about a year. So really an amazing turnaround helped to rebuild her business. And now it’s going really well.

Jeremy Weisz 6:45

You know, on that being good listener, I don’t know the exact story. But I remember listening or hearing about PayPal early on, and people kept telling them, You need to integrate with eBay, you need to integrate with eBay and like, yeah, that’s, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to do that. And they avoided it. And they finally just, people kept telling them to do it. And they finally listened. And we kind of know what happened after that. And I believe eBay, eBay, and PayPal, millions, but it’s right. So listening always helps. Yeah, and one of the next one for me was lead by example. So you know, you’re in the trenches with your fellow colleagues and staff. And one that comes to mind was Cameron Healy, Cameron Healy, CO was co founder of Kona Brewing Company and the original visionary behind Kettle Chips empire. And he was telling stories of, you know, in the area where they’re trying to get the oil temperature, right, the potatoes right, getting the right potatoes, and he used to do all the jobs. And, you know, he started off kind of just delivering goods to different vendors, before he figured out and stumbled upon and with hard working grit, created kettle chips, and he did every job. And so it was an amazing story. And it’s not always you know, now it looks you go to any grocery store across America, and you could find kettle chips, but it was not like an easy downhill journey.

John Corcoran 8:24

Yeah, yeah. It’s funny. Another chip story, another podcast. Stacy’s pita chips, similar Sauterne story where she had started with just a one little food truck and, and it was actually they were serving sandwiches like gyros on pita and they had waste leftover. And they thought, what can we do with this, and he started creating these hard little paid pita chips that they serve to people while they were waiting to make their sandwich. And people loved them so much that it became a whole Empire became a whole business. That’s a great one. So next one I will mention is top business leaders are constantly expanding their skill set. As their business grows and changes and evolves. They need to grow as a leader, they need to grow as an executive, they need to grow as a business owner as a founder. And one of the guests that I had on who talked about that was Paul Orfalea. He’s the founder of Kinkos. He took his business from and you can imagine this kind of growth right? From 110 by 10 shop 100 square foot shop. Next to UC Santa Barbara, which is where I went to college. I remember this location is no longer Kinkos but was still coffee shop, but I remember this location next to the campus. And he was running at doing everything literally he just like, bought a copier or rented a copier, parked it in a room and started making copies for local students. He took that to 2 billion in revenue. And you can think about all the different you know a skills that you have to evolve and adapt and learn. Over time, and one of the big ones was working with his, they called him I believe franchise partners. It wasn’t a traditional franchise type of model, but basically had business partnerships with all these different different owners that own the local kind of like franchises. But they didn’t call them that. And so he basically had hundreds of different business partnerships. You can imagine all the different coaxing and the different relationships he had to manage. So that’s a great example, I think of a top business leader did a great job of expanding their skill set.

Jeremy Weisz 10:33

That’s an amazing story. I remember we did an event at the popped up in one of my feeds. Recently, when we did the event in Santa Barbara and one of the co working spaces were

John Corcoran 10:45

interested in he was an investor in that co working space. Yeah, very cool. E Tron tout heat. Fun fact, he has invested in a bunch of local businesses just kind of for fun, including a local bowling alley that he recently sold, he said it was really profitable. And he said, he said it actually was in the same is the same kind of business as Kinkos. Because Kinkos is selling time on a copier. And a bowling alley is selling time on a bowling alley lane. And if you lose that time, if no one’s using it, you can’t get it back. It’s not like you have unused inventory, you can hold on to it and you can resell it. So he drew a parallel between the two.

Jeremy Weisz 11:24

That’s cool. The next one I have, which is dear to my heart is always learning and growing. And some some examples of this, you know, I Oh, it never ceases to amaze me, some of the titans of industry, who are still humble learners and students of the craft and Brian Kurtz comes to mind he’s one of the top direct response marketing experts he’s sent over, he sent billions of pieces of mail to people. I’ve imagined how much that cost was stamps, but billions of direct response pieces. And he is I think he’s wins the award for still being in the most amount of masterminds. Still reading in listening to all the books around direct response, or marketing, and he’s always learning and I totally respect that. Michael Simmons is another one who is he always puts out amazing content about this topic on not only growing and learning, but how do you do it and shortcut it and what’s the 8020 of it? And he’s, I know had done extensive research on this topic. And he talks about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and I think there was some video that they asked What if you could have any superpower and Warren Buffett said something about reading faster? That’s what he would choose. Yeah. And that’s an interesting superpower. But that’s just I think he reads just a large portion of the

John Corcoran 12:58

day every day. He does, yeah, yeah, I heard that. Yeah. All right. My final tip, or my final important quality is, is these two are kind of slightly different. I realized, but I called them preparation and diversification. So being prepared through diversification, I guess, is a better way of saying it for the types of crazy things that we see happening. So we live we are living through we’ve lived through a pandemic. It could be a flood, it could be a key employee leaving, it could be some kind of server meltdown, it could be a key software, it goes out. But I think the really successful long term sustainable business owners that I’ve talked to, that do a great job are ones that are constantly thinking about, Okay, what’s the risk here? How can I diversify my business and I think like Katty Doughergy I think is how you pronounce her last name. Apologies, Katty, if I’m mispronouncing that, she was a guest on my podcast. And she had a rough period where she lost a couple of key family members, including parents, and just went through a real tough, tough time there. And so you have to be prepared for these types of life events to happen. Another example Scott and bring him he was a guest on my show. And he had a digital media media company, where he was working with, he had a couple of key clients in big clients in the auto industry space, like audio auto manufacturers, and he and he had three of them that just kind of shifted their business model. In about a 90 day period, they decided to take some of the work that he was doing in house and he lost like a tremendous amount of their revenue. And by the time he realized that he didn’t really have his finger on the pulse on the KPIs that would have told him a little bit further in advance and 90 days have gone by, and the whole business basically came to a complete collapse, and he had to rebuild it. Fortunately, he has really rebuilt it gone beyond Haven’t figures again and he’s regrowing it not to the level that he’s at that he was at before. But he’ll, I’m sure he’ll get there. And so for me, the good, the big lesson there is to be prepared and to diversify your risk in in very many different ways, whether it’s geographically, whether it’s in terms of key people, whether it’s in terms of software, whatever the vulnerability could

Jeremy Weisz 15:23

Yeah, that’s good. I mean, even we’ve seen with with the pandemic, people have pivoted and shifted and, and diversified if they have imperson components to virtual components. So that’s definitely a huge, huge part. Yeah.

John Corcoran 15:40

And, you know, I think it’s worth mentioning, one of the reasons that I I like what we do in the world of podcasting is that podcasts are diversified. Unlike if you build your your home on one tech companies platform, where you are at risk, you know, it could get shut down, the rules of road can change. Podcasts are built, so that they are diversified, you have one RSS feed that you control, you own it. And then that gets distributed across dozens of different channels. And so you’re really are much more diversified. And then I also think of it in terms of you’re diversifying your network, you’re meeting more people, you’re building more connections, you’re building more relationships, that’s important in any business, any type of business that you’re in, you should be doing that you should constantly growing your network and meeting new people.

Jeremy Weisz 16:34

We get asked sometimes, John, well, it’s kind of crowded, you know, should I even start a podcast? Or, you know, When should I start a podcast? And I told this person, it’s kind of like, when you plant a tree, there’s two best times to plant a tree 10 years ago, and today, yeah, and so they were laughing I go, you know, cuz they still haven’t started their podcast, but like, I know, 10 years ago or today, but it is really, we look at things and the lens of how do you give to your relationships, and we have found no better way to give to our relationships and to profile them and what they’re working on is not even about us. It’s about what they’re working on. And so the guests get to share their story and we get to pass along the knowledge to to other people from that one conversation.

John Corcoran 17:26

And on that note, where can people go to learn more about Rise25 and the work that we do,

Jeremy Weisz 17:31

they can go to rise25.com There is a video of us bantering a bit, which we tend to do and you can there’s a lot of resources there and you can also contact us on the rise25.com page.

John Corcoran 17:47

All right. Thanks, everyone, and have a great day.

Outro 17:50

Thanks for listening to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25. Visit rise25.com to check out more episodes of the show and to learn more about how you can start your own podcast

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[Podcast Series] The Most Important Leadership Lessons From 2,000+ Business Leaders

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

In this episode…

Resources Mentioned:

Sponsor for this episode

About Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran

Episode Transcript

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