How To Stop Ignoring Your Entrepreneurial Mindset, With Molly Thompson

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast. On this episode of Multiplier Mindset, we have Molly Thompson. And Molly comes from Perrysburg, Ohio, which is way in the north of Ohio, right on Lake Erie. And I know that because I grew up 20 miles from her. She said so many useful things that I'm just going to highlight three. I'm going to lump two of them together, and then I'm going to create a third one. One is that she knew she was different at age 12, and I find that's generally true with the entrepreneurs that are in Strategic Coach. My sense is that the entrepreneurs more and more that we have advancing through Strategic Coach are more like who they were when they were 10 years old than other adults. And that is something happened to them when they were very, very young that gave them an enormous sense of self-assurance about themselves that they weren't going to play by other people's rules. One of the upsides is that they start developing really, really unique capabilities. One of the downsides is it makes them unemployable. That's the first point I would like to make. You have this vision of doing something different with your life than maybe your family members. Maybe they don't share this. Maybe your people you're growing up with, they don't share this. And it becomes more unclear as you get older. And that would certainly be true of me, and that would be true of thousands of entrepreneurs in Strategic Coach. The second point, which also strikes home for me, is their ADHD. I have the shortened version of that, which is just ADD. So Molly moves around a lot more than I do. She's very, very active. But the big thing is that you're only interested in what stimulates you, and anything that doesn't stimulate you, you just don't do, you avoid doing, which is another factor which makes you entrepreneur-bound. You have to go into entrepreneurism to do it. What I've noticed is that people who really get a handle on their ADHD, ADD, whichever it is, that they can't do things in a normal transactional way in the marketplace. They have to do something that's transformational. And she has a real riff, a long riff, where she's going like this, and then we put this together, and we put this together, and we put this together, and we put this together. That comes from transforming your ADD, because what ADD people is, they take something from here and they take something from here. When they become very positive with their approach to everything, they like pulling things together. And I want to put a special emphasis on the word transformation, because there's a word being used right now that seems to be very, very sexy, but I don't find it sexy at all. And that's disruptive. I'm going to create something new that disrupts the marketplace. And if you try to be a disruptor, what happens, the world disrupts you and constantly disrupts you. You don't disrupt things, you create a higher value creation. What she did is she took things that were never together before and she put them into a new form. And now she's got a 10x business model, 10x revenue model for her business. So I'm extraordinarily excited about what Molly is doing. And what she's actually describing is a Free Zone. So we have the third level of Strategic Coach, where you take your capability. So I'll use her example. She took the capability of the silos, the people who own the silos. And she took their capability. Then she took the city's capability. Then she took the county's capability. And then she started taking the capabilities of non-profits like universities. And she put all of them together. Plus the maker of the solar, she put them together and she put it into a new model. Okay? And none of them would have connected ordinarily, but she connected them. So she created a higher level of value that now becomes a model for her entire business going forward. But she also creates a model for anybody in this industry. And the thing that isn't working about the whole energy area is people say, we got to get rid of this and replace it with this. Well, all you create is adversarial energy there. Nothing's going to work. And everybody's going to hold to what they're doing, and they're not going to move. She's created a pathway where it can work for everybody, including the power company, because they can provide more of their energy to more places. And lighting is a big deal. Lighting uses energy. And how do you get lighting where it's self-sustaining, where the everyday sun creates the power needed to power the entire project? So what a wonderful, wonderful thing, and I really appreciated her comment about what we've discovered with my teamwork with Babs Smith, who's my partner in life and my partner in business, that you've got to have total intimacy and teamwork there between the two partners. I mean this has happened almost as a form of grace for the two of us. It just happened to happen. These were two individuals who wanted to get together that way. But there's some very definite rules to how you do that. So I just thought this was a wonderful gift that Molly's given to us with this,
 
Molly Thompson: My name is Molly Thompson and I'm the CEO of Perrysburg Energy Solutions. We are a unique problem-solving energy solutions company. So what that means is we are a mission-driven energy solutions company and we provide creative solutions to sometimes challenging problems about how organizations can include renewable energy projects like a solar project into their organization that far transcends the typical measure of a more transactional project. In the realm of entrepreneurs, they ask, how did you know that you were entrepreneurially minded? And I have known really since the age of 12, like I knew at the age of 12, I was different. I looked at the world differently. I thought about things differently. I just had a very different perspective, and I didn't have any kind of a framework or vocabulary for it then. But even going back farther than that, maybe this is a little bit oddball, but I used to see people's auras. And I'm not really in that realm, but like very vividly, I could see them. And I just thought that everybody else did, too. So that maybe was a glimmer. But really, from the age of 12, I was aware that I was different. But also at the age of 12, being different and not conforming is not really a good thing. So I really spent a lot of time kind of suppressing that instinct, even though I've always had it as far back as I can remember. But I developed a few skills, not the least of which is a good, robust sense of humor, because it was sometimes debilitating. I went to a very small school and people would make comments and sometimes 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds can be really mean. And so when they did that, I started making jokes and I got responses. So that has really been useful as an entrepreneur to really, you know, kind of have some levity in sometimes when it's a tense situation. It also means that sometimes at funerals, you may not want to sit next to me if you're a close friend, because I'll probably crack you up. But it's just in those moments where it's really needed. I have been an entrepreneur since Super Bowl Sunday of 2000. And that's when four girlfriends and I sat down at Super Bowl Sunday at a party at someone's house. And we decided that we wanted to write a book to empower women to just be themselves, like their most outrageous, self-expressed beings. And we wrote a book called I Am Diva: Every Woman's Guide to Outrageous Living. At the time, none of us had ever written books. We were, you know, no published authors. We were kind of all in different industries doing our thing. So nobody told us as a first time self-published author, like there's no way that you get one of the major publishers to publish your book. And there is no way that they will actually put your photo on the cover. But we did, you know, we didn't know to not ask. So we did. And that was it, was amazing to write a book where people all over the world could really kind of explore their own self-expression. And we went to all the major publishers back then. And AOL Time Warner, when they were still a big publishing company, we got an editor who said, this is great. I love this. I'm going to be your champion. And so we were off and running. One of my co-authors and I developed a TV show called The Devo Report. We had a couple of episodes in the can. And then life got kind of lifey and we went in different directions. We kind of went our separate ways and did other things. So if you look at my resume, one common theme that people say is, wow, that's a lot like, wow, you've been in a lot of industries. But if you talk to me long enough and you know me well enough, you see that there's a very common thread of entrepreneurship. And again, I didn't really have the ability to articulate it in the way that I do now, like all the tools and people and resources that I have at my fingertips now. Someone would bring a problem to me, like, how do we help kids navigate with food? And I went to this nonprofit and I was like, okay, so Chipotle should be one of our sponsors. This was a tiny farm. And they were like. Right. Chipotle. So two years later, Chipotle was our first national sponsor. But I didn't operate the same way they did. So I was very good at thinking very fast, thinking far ahead, having a great big sometimes scary vision, but then saying, okay, so here's how we're going to get there and creating a road map and some action items. But for an in-person farm where people show up every day, I didn't fit that mold. So I raised more money than they had ever gotten. I brought on Chipotle and a lot of other sponsors and I got fired. And it wasn't the first time, but I hadn't quite had my bell rung yet. So I went into the university and started teaching entrepreneurs about business model development, which was really fun to me because it's like, oh, my God, I'm a lifelong learner. I just am attracted to that growth mindset. And I love to be able to then spit it out and share with people and give them ideas and help guide them along, not tell them this is how you do entrepreneurship, because that's not very effective, but to really be that resource for them. But at the same time, I grew that program. We blew it up. I relaunched it as, you know, remarketed, rebranded it, made it a community hub, brought in fundraising from the state and from local sponsors, did these great pitch events. And three years later, I got fired from that because it's not what they wanted, even though it was very successful. And after that, I started getting the picture. And there were a number of instances in between going way back until right after that. And then I worked for one other company and like I had a different vision. And finally, my husband said, you know what? I really need your help. You have this ability to create a vision. You have the strategic mind to be able to connect the dots and see how everything fits together. And he's an engineer. So my partner in life became my business partner. And then I took over the company and we were doing commercial LED lighting. It was fun and interesting at first, and we expanded from kind of one industry into several different industries. But I got a little bit maybe restless because the biggest danger for an entrepreneur is to be bored. So I talked about this with my workshop coach recently. We talked about it in our workshop. The worst thing for an entrepreneur is boredom because then we become arsonists at our own hands. Like we create messes. We kind of start things on fire out of boredom. And I started seeing where I was doing that and started looking forward. So at the same time, we had talked about getting into solar, but just didn't really have how to make that happen until we had this one project basically come right to us. And it was lighting this concept of a mural, 160,000 square feet on the side of these grain silos on the river in Toledo, Ohio. And at first we were like, I don't know. It's a little bit big of a project for what they're like. I'm not sure they're going to be able to do this. And then they came back to us and really said, we need your help. We need your vision. And then I was like, you know, music to my ears. Fantastic. Okay, so a simple lighting project to light this big mural quickly became something different when the owner of the grain silos said, yes, it's a cool project. You can put lights on our property, but you cannot add power to our grid. So suddenly we're looking at, well, what do we do? How do we solve for this? And it was like, well, let's put a solar array up. So we were off and running and it has been a crazy project, a massive community collaboration, and later this year when we're done, we will have created the largest lighted mural in the world. So we are intending to get it fully lighted and completed with the solar array this fall of 2024. The mural is there, and you can see the mural at glasscityriverwall.org. And when we're finished with it, it will be the largest lighted mural in the world. We're very excited about that. And we are going to be updating our website. That's been a recent development. So stay tuned on that. But our company will for sure have lots of photos along the way because we're it means something. Toledo, Ohio is a mid-level market. So it's not huge. It's not rural. It's a mid-level market. But if you look at what attracts people, people want to live in a community where they resonate and say, I think I could be a part of this community. So to do something where we literally shine a light on Ohio's rich cultural history, while at the same time embracing the future of sustainability and technology and doing it collaboratively, like that means something to people. And so it really put this mid-level market on the map. And so, you know, we want to be able to do that for other organizations, other communities, but really I'm born and raised in Toledo. and this is something that means a lot to our community. So, long story longer, yes, the Glass City River Wall is the project. So, it's fun, it's interesting, exciting, like that to me was, okay, this is something I can sink my teeth into. I'm engaged, I'm excited, so now what? So about a year ago, maybe more than that, I started looking at this project and I thought, this can't be a one-off project. Like, it would be a shame to just say, okay, we did this, now we're moving on. So I started looking at what are the things that make this project unique that we also provide as a company. And that's where we came up with the model to go from transactional projects to transformational projects. So around the same time, and I had just started Strategic Coach, maybe four or five months after I started, I woke up one morning and I like I had all these great ideas and I just felt like I was slowing down and things were just grinding to a halt. And one day I literally got out of bed and I was like, oh, my God, there's something wrong with me. Then I said, I literally got back in bed, pulled the covers over my head, and I was in tears. And I said to my husband, there's something wrong with me. I don't know what it is, but this is different. Like, I think I'm having a nervous breakdown. The good news is it wasn't that. It's that after several weeks of research and talking to a psychologist and a functional psychiatrist, I learned that I was diagnosed with ADHD. I've had a lot of turning points in my life, but that's been one of the biggest gifts of my entire life. And so having just started Strategic Coach, all of a sudden the whole world became available to me. So I'd spent my whole life fighting against myself and suppressing my entrepreneurial mind and that kind of spirit and masking and the guilt and shame that came with that. I mean, it was exhausting. It was like every day wearing a heavy suit of armor. And I looked at it and it wasn't the diagnosis itself. It was, okay, what am I going to do? What's the game plan? I'm a strategic thinker. How do I look at this strategically? So I thought, okay, I'll take meds. But that wasn't enough. Like, I didn't want to be like, okay, box checked. I wanted to get to, what do I do with all of this? So it was through Strategic Coach that I got the people, the tools, the resources to help me really delve into this and go into a yearlong program through another Strategic Coach member. And it's changed my life. It's changed how I look at business. It's helped us really develop this really cool new model that's getting attention from local, regional, statewide press, international press. And now we're able to provide assistance for organizations that like a solar project was never available to them. And now we're able to come in and help them think way beyond that. And then just beyond doing the project, it's looking at, okay, what's the impact that we can provide? So there's so many tools that you can talk about in the Coach community. You know, The Gap and the Gain was really instrumental to look at how much of my life I spent living according to some ideal, which, like the horizon, you can never get to. And once I let go of that and started measuring backwards against myself, it was a big wake-up moment. Like, wow, I've spent literally my whole life measuring myself against other people. And now that I'm measuring against myself, like the results we're producing are faster. The projects that we're taking on are now like this project alone is 10 times what our annual revenue was just, you know, a year or two ago. And it's exhilarating. It's not overwhelming, like not even a little bit. Like now I know where I want to be playing. And so it's really finding being able to go through an experience, recognize what it is, and then look into the community and say, what are the people, tools, and resources I need to carry me forward? So what for some people has been a defining moment that makes them feel less than for me has been truly a catalyst to move forward. I literally went through my whole life and thought there was something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with you. Your brain works differently. And it's really important to understand how your brain works. So some people may whatever they will tell you about yourself. Like, start to trust your intuition and don't go it alone, because I have one person I know who said that she was terrified of the stigma. She'd known that she had ADHD for several years, and I was the only person she'd ever told aside from her husband. And I thought, don't do that. Like there's such a supportive community. It's not a disorder now. It's a whole community of people whose brains were different, faster, other than, you know, what maybe people who don't have ADHD. So figure out who you need in your community and tap into that because you can for sure leverage it to your advantage. I have spent the last year and a half thinking about, we have this one really big project, and with every day it grows, the interest grows, and so do all the moving pieces and parts. One of the things about it, the pieces and parts, were that in order to do this project, so when the mural was created, they had primarily individuals, kind of like crowdsourcing, to provide financial support. I thought, why would I do that if maybe there's a way to go out and get public funding and shorten that timeline? It's 10x is easier than 2x. It's a lot easier to ask for a million dollars than it is to ask for $200,000. So there was that kind of a component and really looking at, well, why not? Why not just start talking to people? If we're going to do a solar array, who owns the property right next door? Let's go talk to them. And that was the city of Toledo. And we did things now we see in backwards order, but it ended up working in our favor. So the first thing we did was we went to city council and got an easement to build this on their land, which was then unusable land. So then we started looking at unusable land. We have the world's largest and original solar manufacturer here in our backyard. So we went to them and they said, this is amazing. We want to donate the panels. So we had them and then we had, okay, we're going to use these panels. It's going to take a little bit more property. Who owns the property next door? And it was another company. And so all of a sudden we had this kind of building momentum of companies and the city and the county wanted to be part of it. And like, see, of all these different groups of people. And as that started coming together, we thought, okay, we're not just lighting an array now. We're actually developing something that is a massive community collaboration. And we're taking this unusable land and we're providing a sustainable project. We're going to be using union labor. We're going to be increasing tourism. And the more that we started pulling all these bullet points together, being the person who looks at patterns and trends, we started organizing them in buckets and I was like, okay, so we have economic impact. We have social impact. We're working with local technology and equipment. We're elevating the community. There is environmental impact of converting unusable property into something sustainable. And then all of a sudden we thought, well, isn't there a way that we can help with kids and engage students? So we came up with this idea of an energy dashboard and created the educational impact. So as we looked at this, we started thinking about are there other organizations where they would love to do a project like this, but they have no understanding of the resources available, like the people and the tools and the resources. So really like right out of Strategic Coach. So we went to a couple of non-profits like schools and universities and a health system and a museum. We said, okay, so here are a couple of things that we can do. Not only can we create these different areas of impact, we can create this project. But how did we raise the money? We did all the fundraising ourselves. That was the linchpin for this. I don't know of any contractor out there that's going to go out and do fundraising for their projects. But it's just something for me like I didn't know that you don't do that as a contractor. I just did it because that's what there was to do. It was like seeing that bigger picture and finding the better way, finding the best avenue or all the alternate paths and then working with the stakeholders to say, can we do this? And then more people said, yeah, I mean, it hasn't been done that way, but absolutely, let's do it. So all of a sudden we started developing this business model and then being in the Coach community just reinforces that. And hey, here are some things you can think about. So, you know, it's kind of a lot of this is like trial and error and experimentation and being willing to go out and try it and crash and burn. Well, I had done that with many start-ups. I've started like seven or eight companies. This is the first one that we're like actually moving it forward. So that willingness to go out and experiment. I'm a very experiential person. I just took all of that and applied it to the business model and found out that there are a lot of people who would love that. We met with a university yesterday and a school last week. They would love to be able to do this. And then we can take this solar project and pull the PR impact out of it and give that to them as a hugely valuable resource that they can use to then attract more students, more donors. And then all of the money that they're going to save through these projects gets to go back into things that are meaningful to them. So once we started down that path, it kind of flowed naturally. But again, it was 100% a function of, who are my people that I can talk through this with and think through this with along the way. And so, you know, it's very convenient that we have quarterly workshops so that we can think through this and say, I'm stuck here. Who are other people I need to be talking to about this? So this is something I have always known about myself. I didn't know the words to use, but I've always known that about myself. I always think 10x, 25x, like that's not where I'm inhibited. It's the lifetime of believing other people and the limiting beliefs that I'm not good enough or that there's something wrong with me. That's what I'm unlearning and have been unlearning the past couple of years. And it's fun because now I get to, like, step into who I've always known that I've been. But I get to do it and trust myself and trust my intuition. And, you know, I'm very fortunate that I have a partner who's my partner in the business and in life. And he's like, okay, if you think it up, I'll help you create it. So he's always encouraged me to go down the rabbit hole, find out what you find out. And we got to keep moving things forward. So he keeps me grounded. But I've always had that mindset. I think there's so much value in going throughThe Signature Program, not to mention, you know, just coming out of COVID. So I took over the company in March of 2020, kind of like the ultimate movie prize. But out of that and what I've learned in the ADHD transformation program is, I think faster than other people who are non-ADHD, like I just do. But there's a great opportunity when I just slow things down. And that's one thing that the workshops provide, is to just take a step back and think about things, you know, from a different perspective. That's really valuable for me. And so I've been envisioning myself in The 10x Program since before I started the Coach program and I think there's some value to get out of going through this initial process so that when I get there, I can really take off, spread my wings and fly. You know, if you look at LED lighting or even solar, it's a pretty linear conversation. Like a 2x, you go in, you do lighting, hooray, they save money, that's great. But if you can go in and add all these elements where you get interest and you draw people in and engage them, and you're able to provide impact in a lot of different areas, that's what makes it transformational. And the more people we got involved in this and the bigger the scope of the project got, that's when things got really interesting and fun. Instead of being debilitating, Teresa Easler says this, as do probably quite a few people in the Coach community: The obstacles are the opportunity. It took me a few times to hear that to get that the obstacles are the opportunity. So when ADM, the owner of the grain silos, said, absolutely do the lights, but you can't put power on our grid. That's kind of a roadblock. So thinking through that and being able to come up with all of this and to then accelerate that and then to take that and put it into a package and disperse that out to other organizations, the obstacles really are the opportunity. When I signed up for Strategic Coach, which by the way, I had been following for years before I actually signed up. You know, if you're coming from a, a 2x or a linear growth model, $10,000 is not a small investment. And given where we were in the business, it's a big investment, but I took that seriously and made my focus. I promised my partner, my husband, I'm going to get way more than $10,000. In fact, I'm going to get a hundred thousand dollars of value out of this course this year. And after the first year, it was like I had his undivided attention. Then after that, it's like, okay, now I can see this. So what I would tell people is, it's a big investment, and it depends what you're willing to put into it and what you're willing to get out of it. So. I went into this like, helmet on. Here we go. I'm on a mission. But I had to be willing to like, after four months or five months, call my Program Advisor in tears and say, I just found out that I have ADHD. I don't think I can continue. Like I called her tearfully and said, I think I need to drop out of the Program. And she was just this enormous, generous space for me to just work through, and she never said, no, you can do it, didn't talk me into it, just gave me the tools and a way to think about this. If you are open to creating a shift, a fundamental shift in how you think about your business, and also maybe the people that are on the ride with you, that was a really, really big, scary one for me because there are part of that transformational journey for me. And I knew there were going to be people in a year who aren't going to be on that ride with us. And it's just happened personally and professionally in the very recent, like past few weeks. And it can be very mind bending. You have to be open to be vulnerable and to, you know, really be clear about what you want out of it and what you're willing to put into it. So with that said, literally, it's changed my life. It's changed my relationships with my family. It's changed our business model. I'm an enthusiastic, hell yes. And not that everybody has to be in the same place that I am, but the sky's the limit. If you're open to it, the sky's the limit. Literally, you cannot bump into somebody within the Coach community without having resources, tools, and people who want to help. That to me is worth it. Thank you, Dan. He sent out an email maybe a few weeks ago and it was like, makes me a little bit weepy. You know, it's a hard road. People think entrepreneurialism is sexy. It's not. There's a lot of times when it's very isolating. It can be. And so having a community means everything to me. So Coach sent out an email from Dan a few weeks ago. And it was about, are you doing everything to develop your lifetime intimacy and teamwork? And that has created this fundamental shift with my partner in life and business, who's the same person, because I got to see a few cracks in the armor where there was daylight between us and people use that to try to drive a wedge. And that's gone. And so what I say to Dan is, you know, in the Coach community and everybody who stands for what Dan and Babs stand for, like, that's who I want to spend my time with. So the bottom line is, thank you. There's no reason to go through this alone. You know, suffering certainly can be optional, and there are times when it's a lonely, isolating road, and it doesn't have to be. If you're willing to reach out to people and to your community, it makes the suffering a lot shorter, and it makes the end goals so much bigger, so much sweeter than you can ever imagine possible.