The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Angela Coté

**Stephen Sakach** (0:00)
It's pretty loud today, too, though.

**SPEAKER_2** (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 with my co-host, Tullio Siragusa. And we have a special guest today who we'll introduce in a second.
So according to Talent Smart, 90 percent of top performers score high in emotional intelligence, highlighting its impact on leadership, decision-making, and results. And in industries like franchising, where leaders must balance systems, people, and performance, emotional intelligence becomes essential. So it shapes how leaders communicate, how they respond under pressure, and how they support others. And so today, we're exploring how emotional intelligence drives. Clarity, accountability, and growth in business. Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:03)
Yes, it'll be my pleasure. Our guest today is Angela Coté. She's the founder and CEO of AC Inc. Angela is a franchise industry thought leader with a unique 360-degree perspective, having grown up in a brand that scaled to nearly 500 locations, operated as a multi-unit franchisee for 18 years, and worked as a field coach within a franchise system. She is the creator of the franchise industry's first certification program for field support teams, and is known for helping franchisees move from overwhelm to action through her coaching, keynote speaking and fire it up programs.
With deep real world experience across every level of franchising, Angela brings practical insights into how leaders can build momentum, improve performance and lead with clarity. We have a very large franchise community on this show, so I think you'd be very valuable to most of them. Angela, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Angela Coté** (2:07)
Thank you. It sounds like no pressure then, right?

**Stephen Sakach** (2:10)
No pressure at all.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:12)
We're very low pressure.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:14)
Yeah, we're definitely low pressure. Angela, so emotional intelligence, it's often discussed in leadership, thankfully more now than say 15 years ago, but it's not always maybe connected to results for people. From your experience, how does emotional intelligence translate into action and performance for franchises?

**Angela Coté** (2:38)
Yeah. Well, when you ask me this question, I always have to go back to who in the franchise company is responsible for building the relationship with the franchisees. That's the person we call the field coach. We use that term, it's a generic term. We're talking about the franchise business coach or the area manager, in case anybody's listening. What do they mean by that? The person that's directly supporting franchisees, whether actually out in the field or over Zoom.
What we have seen is, this is something we're talking a lot about at AC Inc, is that the traditional way that franchisees are being supported by these field teams, not their fault, the field teams aren't trained any differently, but it's a very reactive and consulting approach. When we say consulting, it's like they're telling franchisees what to do. They're defaulting to authority and trying to hold franchisees compliant.
That's not an emotionally intelligent way to try to drive action and performance for franchisees. What we're working really hard at AC Inc to do is shift brands from that consulting, I'm the expert, I've got all the answers approach, and you need me because you don't have the answers until you do have the answers and you don't need me, unfortunately, and now you disengage. Shifting from that to a coaching approach, which is losing emotional intelligence with franchisees who invested maybe their life savings and trying to understand more about why did you get into this business? What's your why? Not just franchisees, but humans in general, we're all more motivated when the person that's working with us, maybe helping us, is helping us connect to our why, we're thinking about our why, what's driving us, and that the person on the other side of that relationship is showing that they care. They're not here just what we see in a lot of traditional, the traditional support model is here's your market. As a franchisee, you should be hitting this amount because of the size of your market and the demographic, and so here's your goals, and so go do this and this will help you be successful. That's not working. We're seeing that not work. We're shifting and incorporating that caring about the franchisees, why, and like I said, driving them through their actions based on what they're trying to achieve.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:07)
Yeah. I think we're seeing, I was going to say Tullio, I think we're seeing that it's such an important shift to make for any business leader, emotional intelligence wise, to not feed them like that top-down hierarchy approach, but more like bottom-up, how can I help you service oriented approach that coaching role. It's really this shift when you see how business is mature. It's really when they mature, they're making that one, that's one of the first steps they really have to make, that kind of switch in perspective on their role.