The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Kim Daly

**Kim Daly** (0:03)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host, Mike Liwski, and our special guest today. So research from Harvard Business Review shows that 90% of top performers possess high emotional value.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Hello, I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Mike Liwski and our special guest today. So research from Harvard Business Review shows that 90% of top performers possess high emotional intelligence, yet many organizations will prioritize technical skills over emotional skills when hiring and developing leaders. Emotional intelligence is not just a personal asset, it's a business advantage. Today, we explore how leaders can use emotional intelligence to strengthen relationships, drive franchise growth and create meaningful success. That last, Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:54)
Really looking forward to the discussion today, and that's a key topic, Steve. Yeah. So our guest today is Kim Daly. She's the founder and CEO of Zee, The Zee Suite. Kim is nationally recognized as a franchise consultant, a business coach, and a creator as well of a performance platform that is designed to help franchisees and brand leaders improve profitability through mindset mastery, which we're going to discuss a lot today and we know is really important to our audience. Now, with over two decades of experience and nearly a thousand franchisees created through her consulting work, Kim is one of the top producing advisors at FranChoice and a trusted voice on entrepreneurship, leadership culture, as well as franchise development strategy. As a former fitness entrepreneur and.com founder, Kim can blend really her background in business, biochemistry and performance coaching to help create wealth, very much needed resilience and long-term success with the individuals that she works with. So Kim, thank you so much for joining our show. Welcome.

**Kim Daly** (2:08)
Thank you, Michael. Thanks for that introduction.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:11)
So Kim, you've spent over two decades helping entrepreneurs build their futures. From your perspective, how does emotional intelligence play a role in identifying and supporting successful franchise owners?

**Kim Daly** (2:26)
Okay. So it's the key to everything. It's the whole reason I started this company, The Zee Suite, because I spent eight years as an average performer.
And in my ninth year, I started to ask better questions, emotional intelligence, and be willing to try to answer those questions from thought versus strategy. And then I found sort of an inspired idea, took action on the inspired idea, used my will, my tenacity and my focus to stay true to that inspired idea for one year. And I quantum leaped my financial result. So I grew by 350% in my ninth year of business. Same industry, same franchise system, same crappy economy from 2010 to 2011, when all this was going down. Nothing external to me changed. And yet everything changed, including history. But mostly Kim Daly changed. And I've never looked back. So I would say from my own personal experience, that emotional intelligence is the difference between in franchising, average performing and history making. But I suspect that that's true across the board in all businesses.

**Mike Liwski** (3:41)
Ooh, this is definitely a key point here, Kim. So I want to dig a little bit deeper into, I guess, that mindset, right? Like mindset rather than mechanics. And maybe you can give our listeners some practical advice. So it's often been said, right? That business ownership is more about that mindset than the mechanics or the operation. And so how do you specifically help entrepreneurs recognize and manage those emotions when it comes particularly to, say, uncertainty or risk?

**Kim Daly** (4:14)
So good, so good. That's like right to the heart of the matter. Well, so inside the Zee Suite, so what happened is after I made history in my business, right, if you're like human, you're like, oh my gosh, that was like a miracle. Like, what the heck did I just do? Like I knew what I did, but I didn't understand it back then. Like I understand it now. So I started diving into some of the best personal development books. And really, as I was reading these books, I was like, oh my God, that's what I did. So I was learning about the science of getting rich, literally from the book, The Science of Getting Rich. And I was like, yes, that's what that inspired intuitive idea led me to. I started aligning to the natural laws that govern success. And so that's how I shortened the length of time that it took to grow my business by 350%.
So once I did that, you can't, once you see it, you can't unsee it. I never went back to average performing. So those business owners, maybe you're a salesperson or you're a business owner, you create the same level of business year over year. So you're like, I want this bigger goal, but you keep calling in the same level of activity. It's because the result doesn't come from what you're efforting to do. The result comes from your thoughts, which change your vibration and what you believe to be true deep inside of you. So to get to your question about theory and certainty. So our physical body was designed to survive in the wild. So we're not in the wild anymore, but that's how our physical body was designed. So anything that's unfamiliar is a threat to your survival, to your body's survival. So that's why anytime you think a new thought, you try to step out and change your life, join the gym, create a new habit. Every cell in your body fights back by screaming at you. Not because it's real, but because for survival, unfamiliar territory is threatening. And so it's really, I teach my students how to think, how to understand what their body is doing. So like I say, you got to put your arm around that fear and be like, I see you, I hear you, thank you, but go away, because I'm not here to survive. I'm trying to thrive as a business owner and I can't be led astray by my instincts that are here to survive. In order to grow, I have to step into the unknown. And the more times you do it, the more comfortable you get, especially as all hell breaks loose in your life. Yeah.