In Episode 44 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast, Rennie interviews Shawn Johal, co-founder of DALS Lighting, an LED lighting business. In 2009, he implemented the Scaling Up Growth System and led the company to triple its revenues well into the 8 figures. Shawn then went on to found Elevation, a business growth coaching and consulting firm, working with entrepreneurs and their teams to help accelerate their own growth, while helping them find personal balance and happiness. Recently, Shawn released his book ‘The Happy Leader.’
In Episode 44 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast, Rennie interviews Shawn Johal, co-founder of DALS Lighting, an LED lighting business. In 2009, he implemented the Scaling Up Growth System and led the company to triple its revenues well into the 8 figures. Shawn then went on to found Elevation, a business growth coaching and consulting firm, working with entrepreneurs and their teams to help accelerate their own growth, while helping them find personal balance and happiness. Recently, Shawn released his book ‘The Happy Leader.’
In this episode Rennie and Shawn cover:
About Shawn Johal
Shawn is a Scaling Up Certified Business Growth Coach and TTI certified to complete DISC Assessments.
In 2009 he co-founded DALS Lighting, an LED lighting business. He successfully implemented the Scaling Up Growth System and led the company to 3X its revenues well into the 8-figures.
Shawn went on to found Elevation, a business growth coaching & consulting firm, working with entrepreneurs and their teams to help accelerate their growth – while helping them find personal balance and happiness.
Former President of EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organization) Montreal, Shawn remains an active member and mentor to numerous young entrepreneurs, helping them improve as business leaders and as individuals. A Finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Shawn also sits on the Board of Directors for “Champions for Life,” a non-profit foundation helping children develop their physical literacy.
With a passion for endurance sports and rigorous goal-setting, Shawn is obsessed with high-performance, the pursuit of happiness & the power of mindset to fuel a successful life – and he’s committed to bringing his message to the world.
Contact Shawn at https://www.elevationleaders.com/ for the Happiness Guide.
Recommended Books in this Episode
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Rennie Gabriel 00:09
Hi, folks, welcome to Episode 44 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. This is where we talk about money, tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration. In past episodes, we spoke about how to build an income and expense report, how to measure the level of pleasure, based on where you're spending your money, how to track your money in 5-10 seconds, what to look for in a net worth statement to see how close you are to Complete Financial Choice™. And last week, we had the Queen of Cold Calling®, Wendy Weiss. Today we have as our guest, Shawn Johal. Shawn co-founded DALS Lighting, which is an LED lighting business in 2009. He implemented the Scale Up Growth System, and that led to the company to triple its revenues well into the eight figures. Shawn went on to found Elevation, a business growth, and coaching, and consulting firm working with entrepreneurs and their teams to help accelerate their growth, while helping them find personal balance and happiness. And he's a certified Scaling Up Growth Systems Coach. And Shawn first, welcome to the podcast.
Shawn Johal 01:25
Thanks for having me, Rennie. I really appreciate it.
Rennie Gabriel 01:27
You're welcome. And the first question is, out of your work in scaling the lighting company, is that what led you to becoming a Scaling Up Growth Systems Coach?
Shawn Johal 01:38
Yes, absolutely. There's a lot of business coaches out there. There's a lot of amazing coaches. I think there's something very special about having done it in your own business. It's very different experience, right? As an entrepreneur, you take a system, we hired a coach, when we hit a wall, our business was a disaster at that point, we had the wrong people in the wrong seats, no innovation, no cash flow. And so we said, "What the heck are we going to do?" We found the coach, and I'll be honest with you, Rennie, we hired a coach solely based on the fact that she could speak French, and we were her first clients. And she was the first coach in our region that could speak French. And we said, "You know what, we just got to give this a try, because our team is very French." And so based out of Montreal, Quebec - so we hired her. We grew with her along the way but implementing it yourself teaches you the highs and lows of the system. It's very different than just being taught academically.
Rennie Gabriel 02:27
Absolutely right. It's so funny, because I learned about how pension and profit-sharing plans worked. And, then I got into the business and found out that book-learning meant nothing.
Shawn Johal 02:43
I totally agree with you. You can read all you want. And you can get on the Harvard Business Review and read then Scaling Up book - which is amazing - but until you've tried it and seen what really works well and live it in a real-world experience, it's not the same.
Rennie Gabriel 02:56
Makes all the difference in the world. So, I got a good idea of what you do based on what we've just talked about. But why? Besides that you have the ability to do it, because you put it into your own business, why are you helping other entrepreneurs?
Shawn Johal 03:11
There's a couple of different reasons why. I have this LED lighting business. It's a really wonderful business, I have this amazing business partner. It's going incredibly well. At the same time, we had taken it to a certain level. I felt like the business was running on its own, with my partner, with a couple of VPs. The team is really strong there. And I've always had a real passion for helping other companies, other entrepreneurs, do this, and I was seeing so many of them struggling. I spent a couple of years volunteering my time throughout the entrepreneur’s organization, helping businesses just on my own time try to scale and grow. And I could see that the need is there. You know there's really not one company in the world that couldn't use strategic planning and some type of a scaling up methodology. So I really felt that taking my passion there, and I also do a lot of leadership speaking in conferences at the same time, why not follow my passion? I'm young and have a lot of years ahead of me, and I know what I'm doing. So, I just took the leap.
Rennie Gabriel 04:03
That makes perfect sense. We ought to be doing what we're passionate about. As you probably know, I donate 100% of the profits from the work I do to charity.
Shawn Johal 04:13
Incredible.
Rennie Gabriel 04:13
Because I learned what it takes to create wealth. And if the objective is to become philanthropic, I need to lead by example. And more importantly, it was a passion. Is there a particular charity that you support?
Shawn Johal 04:29
I am the chairman of a charity. So our charity is called Champions for Life. And what we do in that charity is we help children learn about physical literacy. We really realize that underprivileged children between the ages of 5 and 8, often don't understand how to move actively. They don't have the same opportunities as children in better environments. And so our goal is to go to all the schools - we're mostly based in Canada - and going to the 1000s of schools across the country and putting in an after-school program that's completely subsidized by us and the government, and helping these children get way more active along the way. So I spend quite a bit of time and effort into that charity.
Rennie Gabriel 05:07
That's fabulous. And it's funny because you're talking about underprivileged children, maybe not moving and being as active. I really think that could be across the board. I don't care what the financial situation is of parents. There are plenty of children who are in affluent families who are probably spending too much time on the couch or the computer with video games. So I don't think it's limited to underprivileged kids. That's just my opinion,
Shawn Johal 05:36
I agree with you. And it's not just limited to that age group. My kids are 15 and 12. And I see it all the time. I feel like they're not active enough and they're spending way too much time on their electronics. So I have to encourage them. And we've really realized from more of a developmental point of view that that 5-8 age gap, which when you and I were younger, Rennie, honestly, we were just out there running around. That's all we did.
Rennie Gabriel 05:57
Yeah.
Shawn Johal 05:57
Nowadays, that's not what happens. Nowadays, like you said, they're just on screens or on video games. As parents, I think we have a responsibility to - we do have a tendency to be overprotective. You don't want to let the kids kind of get out there either. I know it's become a little more dangerous. But I think we have to have an opportunity to give our kids that chance that we had when we were younger,
Rennie Gabriel 06:15
I feel very healthy, because I've been active my whole life. I still go jogging at my age. My dog gets exercise and so do I.
Shawn Johal 06:24
There you go, I can tell you look in great shape.
Rennie Gabriel 06:26
So, tell me what your target market would be? What's the target company size?
Shawn Johal 06:34
Yeah, it's a very specific target. We look at companies that are between 5 million and 100 million, I always look at it as the egg yolk versus the egg white. I mean, you can be outside of that.
Rennie Gabriel 06:43
Say that again. I missed that.
Shawn Johal 06:45
So companies will be between 5 million and 100 million. But I always like to say that it's the egg yolk versus the egg white. So you could do as a company, if you're a little bit smaller. So I'll give you an example, I have about 20 businesses that I work with right now, I was going to say North America, but with COVID it's become International. I have a couple of clients in Europe and a client in South Africa. But at this point, what I'm realizing is that there are some companies that are smaller, maybe more in the million-dollar range, that are on such a fast growth trajectory, that they can all afford to make the investment and jump into it. But typically, what's really key is that the company needs to have a strategic team. It's very difficult to implement the scaling methodology if you're just a one-woman show or a one-man show, because who's going to do all the work that we're putting together, in strategic planning. So yeah - that's why it usually helps to have a few team members participate.
Rennie Gabriel 07:33
Got it. And I hadn't heard the egg yolk versus the egg white analogy before. So that's why I needed you to repeat it.
Shawn Johal 07:41
Yeah, that can be a little confusing. And you know what? I think we use that a lot in our french community, there's a way we talk about the eggs. And I don't know if that's a cultural thing, but I like to look at it that way. You have your core business - those are really the core people you're going to work with - but there will always be some business on the outside, that you'll end up still taking on if it makes sense.
Rennie Gabriel 07:58
Got it. Well, like I said, first time I've heard about that, and I've been around the block a few times.
Shawn Johal 08:04
There you go.
Rennie Gabriel 08:05
So you've done well, but I remember you saying the struggles the business was having before you hired a coach, but what would you say was your biggest failure, whether it was personal or business?
Shawn Johal 08:17
Biggest failure . . . there's many. I come from a family business that went through a massive bankruptcy. I was part of a business that had explosive growth. My in-laws, they were... basically my father in-law took this company public with my mother in-law and my brother in-law, and they took a bankrupt company - they put it on the TSX stock exchange in Toronto, and they were able to grow the business from zero to 50 million. I joined that business when they were at about 15 million. I was the National Sales Manager. I was in charge of most of the sales, but I wasn't part of the strategic team. And explosive growth up until 2006. There was a company that was bought in the US that shouldn't have been bought. And most of us will know about the recession that started in 2007-2008. The combination of buying a really bad company that was too large, combined with a recession, those two things made the company collapse. Within one year 50 million to nothing. Literally. It was a disastrous moment. Spectacular crash. But, like a phoenix that rises from the ashes - my brother in-law and I had the chance to buy three companies, three of the divisions. We bought the assets and inventory and brought back the staff. We weren't really buying the brands.
Rennie Gabriel 09:28
Yes.
Shawn Johal 09:29
And it was such a mess that we were the only people that could really revive it. And we restarted our journey in 2009 with these three broken divisions and brought all the company employees back. We wanted to save jobs - so we had about 25 people that we were able to re-employ right away. And we just launched again, and it was tough. It was really tough. You talk a lot about money, and well, we had no money. We had no money. We were so poor that no bank would give us a loan. They wouldn't even support the new business venture. We had to go through a process called 'factoring'. I don't know if you've heard of that. Yes. It's not pretty.
Rennie Gabriel 10:03
You leverage your accounts receivable. Yes.
Shawn Johal 10:06
Accounts receivable and inventory and you're paying about 10% interest, which is absurd - but it helped us bridge the gap to a bank, so.
Rennie Gabriel 10:13
So what I'm hearing is that being a part of a bankruptcy and then turning it around, buying the assets, as opposed to - it was a lot cheaper from that standpoint - reminded me of something I did. Where I had a partner in an art gallery business, and he wanted out, and he asked an absurd price. I said, "No, you know what. I've been running the business, even though you're the partner. And so I'll just pay for the inventory. How's that work?" And that's how I bought an art gallery business.
Shawn Johal 10:43
I love it. Yeah, there's a lot of ways you could do it. I've come to learn in my 25 years in business, that you can do a lot of different things. There are no rules, really. If you put your creativity to it - buying businesses, selling businesses, making partnership agreements - as long as you're creative, you can do pretty much anything you want.
Rennie Gabriel 11:00
Exactly. So tell me, what would be the typical feelings your prospects face when they're having these struggles?
Shawn Johal 11:09
There's a lot of them. Coming from the entrepreneur's organization, I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs. And most entrepreneurs, we start with this little game called, the one word open, when we meet on a monthly basis. And let me tell you, Rennie, the majority of the time this one word open, are words such as stressed, overwhelmed, panic, not sleeping. It's all these negative words. So I've really got to notice that entrepreneurs in general carry a lot of stress and weight on their backs. And so when I meet companies, typically they've hit a wall. The wall is for many different reasons, either cash flow is a disaster, they don't have any more money in the bank, or people are causing all kinds of problems, the culture is suffering. Sometimes its execution. They're not able to ship the products or services that they want to ship. It's very unique to every different kind of business. But I would say that the emotions that they are usually feeling are those words that I mentioned. Really kind of that sense that I'm not succeeding. I'm not doing the right things and feeling really down on themselves.
Rennie Gabriel 12:03
That makes a lot of sense. What's the outcome that people achieve who work with you, and do you have a specific case study? I mean, besides your own businesses.
Shawn Johal 12:12
Yeah, of course. The case studies are key in all of this - right? So, the way we look at it, and I truly believe this, and it's going to sound like a big number, Rennie. This is what I go in, and this is my goal, because I go in as a partner. I explain to my clients, I'm not a coach, I'm not a moderator, not a consultant, I'm your business partner in this journey that we're going to go into and do this together to get you success. Our goal, ultimately, is to 10x the business valuation. So if the business today is worth $2 million, when we leave, and we're our work is done together in the next couple of years, it needs to be worth 20. That's absolutely what we're aiming for and what we're going to do. I want that to happen in our business. It happened in our business. And that's what our goal is for you. Another wonderful case study that we have, from very recent is this beautiful company called the Dialogue Health, one of the leading telemedicine companies in Canada. They just IPO'd about a month ago. A wonderful success story, explosive growth, following the methodology. So they have a great team. They're really a beautiful company. I suggest all your listeners check it out. They're very, very fast moving, fast growing company right now. So they have quite the story.
Rennie Gabriel 13:20
And I heard that... so I'm guessing, prior to an initial public offering, they were just whatever they were, they were in their starting phases.
Shawn Johal 13:30
Exactly. Yeah, they went through the startup phase. I usually don't join right into the startup phase. I join when they have a little bit of critical mass. They had a good number of employees at that point and we got the processes going together. A lot of deep work, obviously to look into the strategic planning and all the different elements - changing the way they hire, changing the way they execute on their SaaS product, which is as you know, Software as a Service business. So there are so many things that we look at and we would have to be here for many, many hours to talk about all the details, but it was really kind of - just out of startup phase, they're realizing now they're going to start building a strategic team, the C-levels. They started bringing key members there, which we ended up helping with. And then at one point that explosive growth happened. Let's be honest, telemedicine, COVID, as you know, they do go hand-in-hand. So for them, they were fortunate to be in the right industry at the right time as well.
Rennie Gabriel 14:20
Yeah. There's the expression that luck is nothing more than preparation meets timing or something. The point is they had the right product at the right time. And well, is there a resource that you can direct people to that will further help solve their concerns or upsets, their stress, their frustration?
Shawn Johal 14:43
Absolutely. I'd highly recommend looking into two books. The first one would be the Scaling Up book. Even if you don't want to do the methodology, read the book. You can see my little background here, the little purple books, that's what it looks like, Scaling Up by Vern Harnish. Really well-written, easy to read, you go through it. Parts of it can be overwhelming, of course, because they really handle the big four pillars that we always talk about in scaling up. Which are People, Execution, Strategy and Cash, obviously. But I think that's one really, really good book that people could look at and get a lot of learning from. And not to do too much of a self-plug, but it will be. I launched my book last week called, The Happy Leader. And I would say, this is more of a book that if you want to learn about how to manage your stress, and kind of get on that path to happiness today, as opposed to in the future, which most people do - right? Most people I speak to say, "I'll be happy when something happens. This event is going to happen. This moment is going to come." I like to bring it back to the present moment. What are you going to do to be happy today? You could probably go through that book and learn a couple things from the the Four Laws of Happiness that I talk about in there.
Rennie Gabriel 15:44
Terrific. Well, I'm going to put your website which is, shawnjohal.com, in the show notes, so people can follow up with you that way. Would that be a good idea?
Shawn Johal 15:54
Yeah, absolutely.
Rennie Gabriel 15:55
Okay. So my comment is, if you've got a business that operates between $5 and $100 million a year, and you're feeling frustration, or upset, or overwhelm, or stress, Shawn is someone that you want to have a conversation with.
Shawn Johal 16:12
It's funny, you know, Rennie, there's like three levels that I always find when you're going into this kind of strategic planning. Either you've hit a wall and things are just going really badly, or things are status quo. It's okay, you're not in a bad place but you're also stagnant. There's just nothing happening. And then you have the third phase, which is really companies that they know the growth is coming, and they don't know how to handle it. It's kind of like if you're in any one of those three pockets, probably worth having a conversation.
Rennie Gabriel 16:39
Terrific. Thank you, Shawn. And is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't ask?
Shawn Johal 16:48
Well, I will say that for those that aren't aware that my Indian name - which actually Shawn is my second name - my Indian name is actually Sukhraj. And that actually means in Punjabi, the happy leader, and that's why I named the book that way. That's where it comes from.
Rennie Gabriel 17:04
How fascinating. All right. Thank you, Shawn, for being on the show. And to my listeners, thank you for tuning in. You can listen to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast on your favorite platform. And please rate, review, and subscribe. If you'd like to know how books, movies and society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx. You'll hear my TEDx talk and can request a free 27-page roadmap to Complete Financial Choice™ and receive a weekly email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or money. Again, that's wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx. Until next week, be prosperous. Bye bye for now.