Emotional Intelligence for Durable Growth with Brad Poulos

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa. And we've got a special guest who we'll introduce in a moment.
So, entrepreneurship is often described through those exciting milestones, you know, the launch, maybe a funding round, a growth curve, an acquisition or an exit. But most of business happens in that long middle area. And that's where owners wrestle with cash flow, hiring, pricing debt, market shifts. Those are paying customer pressure. And, you know, the emotional weight of being responsible for all of this in the company's future. And in that middle stage, emotional intelligence becomes more than a leadership skill. It kind of becomes a survival skill. So today, we are exploring emotional intelligence for durable growth. And Tullio introduce our guest today.

**Brad Poulos** (1:22)
I don't hear Tullio, do you?

**Stephen Sakach** (1:24)
No, I can't hear him.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:26)
I should try to unmute myself. There we go. Okay, it'll be my pleasure. Today's guest is Brad Poulos. He's a business professor, entrepreneur, advisor, and author. Brad has more than 30 years of experience building, scaling, fixing, and sometimes shutting down companies. He has grown businesses from startup to more than 75 million in revenue, led publicly traded firms, negotiated major financing and contracts, and guided companies through restructuring, turnarounds, and acquisitions. Alongside his operating career, Brad has taught entrepreneurship and finance at Toronto Metropolitan University for more than 15 years, working with founders who are beyond the idea stage and facing the reality of running a business. He is also the author of The Small Business Operator's Manual and Most Problems Solve Themselves, where his work focuses on clarity, durability, growth, cash flow, decision making, and building businesses that do not consume their owners.
Welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast, Brad. Good to have you.

**Brad Poulos** (2:27)
Thanks for having me.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:30)
Brad, I can't wait to getting into the conversation on the Most Problems Solve Themselves book. But really first from your perspective, why does emotional intelligence matter so much once a company moves beyond that initial startup buzz and into the realities of operating?

**Brad Poulos** (2:49)
Well, first of all, I'm going to take a little bit of issue with the premise of the question, because I think emotional intelligence helps at every stage. It certainly helps a lot at the startup stage where I, you know, most of my teaching is built around that. Although most of my private practices with companies that are a little bit more established.
There's a handful of models that we talk about in the program, the Entrepreneurship Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. So one of the things we teach early on is this notion of adversity quotient. And it's exactly what it sounds like. If you're familiar with the Big Five Personality Profile Tool, it kind of maps, it's negatively correlated with the negative emotion element of that, which is one of the things that you do not want to see in a business entrepreneur or business operator. That's the ability to deal with when things go wrong, to not get fussed by it and all of that sort of stuff. The other thing is the notion of internal locus of control. So believing that you are the pilot in the plane of your own life, right? You're not a passenger, you're driving your life, you're in charge of it. You have a high amount of control over where your life is going. That doesn't mean that every single day there are a few things that come at you that you didn't anticipate and you certainly couldn't control, but it's more about how you deal with it.
The best entrepreneurs and the people who are the most successful are ones that are able to deal with that without derailing their day too much.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:34)
Brad, continuing on this theme, you've built, you've scaled, you've fixed and occasionally even shut down companies. So what does Emotional Intelligence look like when a leader has to make those kind of hard calls?

**Brad Poulos** (4:48)
It's toughness, I think, combined with some level of compassion usually, because when we're making these, the kind of decisions you're talking about, they're almost always going to affect other people as well.
That may be, if you're closing a business, there's going to be employees that are probably going to lose their job.
Or if you're taking a business in another direction, there may be suppliers and often they're small business people. These are going to be decisions that are going to affect them, you know, in fairly significant way. But you have to have the intestinal fortitude to make the right decision, because carrying on with a business that's not working isn't really doing anybody any favour. You're just delaying the inevitable anyway. So probably better to deal with it right away. But like I say, having some compassion. Actually, there's a really great book. Have you guys heard of Radical Candor?