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Escaping Micromanagement: Real Leadership Lessons with Blaine Little · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  In today's episode, we welcome Blaine Little, founder of Momentum Seminars, to discuss his journey from military service to successful entrepreneur, corporate trainer and author.
• 0:13
  Blaine shares how his path was shaped by a series of lessons learned from challenging environments and mentors, which eventually led him to a career in real estate and then into training and coaching.
• 0:26
  He reflects on his early struggles with unhelpful leadership, which inspired his commitment to helping others avoid those same pitfalls by providing meaningful training and support.
• 0:38
  Blaine details his transition from working with large seminar companies to establishing his own business.
• 0:45
  He highlights his niche in working with small and medium sized businesses, helping them address common managerial challenges.
• 0:53
  Blaine also emphasizes the importance of investing in people, diagnosing organizational needs before prescribing solutions, and the dangers of micromanagement, which he refers to as training for failure.
• 1:08
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:14
  Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment Podcast.
• 1:19
  I'm your host, Dave Goulis, and this week my guest is the founder of Momentum Seminars, training and coaching, Blaine Little.
• 1:28
  Welcome, Blaine.
• 1:29
  Dave, thank you so much for having me.
• 1:31
  I really appreciate being on the show.
• 1:34
  Yeah, we appreciate you taking the time.
• 1:37
  So, Blaine, you've.
• 1:38
  You've been an entrepreneur for quite a while.
• 1:41
  Can you give us your.
• 1:42
  Your backstory and how you got started?
• 1:46
  Wow.
• 1:46
  You know, it's just.
• 1:48
  Where I am now is just a culmination of a series of different lessons I had learned by.
• 1:53
  By somewhat being in the wrong places throughout my life and just kind of found the right niche for me, which is public speaking as a corporate trainer and an author.
• 2:04
  But I started out when I left high school and went into the army because I really didn't know what I wanted to do.
• 2:11
  But after the army, I had a series of bad sergeants, so I knew that I wanted to do something maybe in business management.
• 2:18
  And so I went to Middle Tennessee State University, got the degree there, and I started doing some stuff in sales.
• 2:25
  But then I got into personal finance, which was insurance, annuities, mutual funds, investments, and I did enjoy that.
• 2:34
  But my father got an early retirement and he started doing real estate.
• 2:38
  And he said, hey, Blaine, I think you might like this.
• 2:40
  And it's something to where I wasn't in the office all the day, all day, but I wasn't out of the office all day.
• 2:46
  It was a nice variety of scenery.
• 2:51
  And so I've actually had my real estate license for about 25 years.
• 2:55
  And unfortunately I had a.
• 2:58
  My first boss was just horrible.
• 3:01
  You would go in to ask a question and they would say just kind of belittle you for not knowing the answer.
• 3:08
  Well, 25 years later and now I have my broker's license, I realized that individual never knew what the answers were.
• 3:15
  And so rather than just say, hey, I don't know what the solution is, but I can help you solve the problem like a good leader would.
• 3:24
  I just, I just found some great mentors and started learning some things and I started training other realtors and I still do.
• 3:32
  And people said hey, you're really pretty good at that.
• 3:35
  Why don't you do more than just real estate?
• 3:37
  And so I have and 2017 alone, I was about 100 all day seminars, workshops on better communication skills, leadership team building and, and it's something that I really enjoyed.
• 3:52
  I was with another service at that time and there's some things like with any employee you agree with, you don't agree with.
• 4:01
  And so I just kind of decided to go out on my own.
• 4:05
  And so that's what I've done.
• 4:07
  And now I work with small to medium sized businesses and help them grow their production by investing in their people.
• 4:20
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• 5:00
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• 5:04
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• 5:12
  All right, so quite, quite an interesting journey you've had up until now.
• 5:17
  So you, you started the entrepreneurial stuff I guess with doing, doing the, you know, real estate.
• 5:26
  Right.
• 5:26
  In terms of being a realtor.
• 5:28
  And then you started training other like other realtors and then that, that led to people asking you to train other other types of positions.
• 5:38
  Yeah, yeah.
• 5:40
  And, and the thing for me was I think I knew early on, especially after the army, I mean I'm proud of my service.
• 5:46
  I was honorably discharged and everything but for me I just, I just knew that that was, you know, not the road I wanted to go.
• 5:57
  I really wanted to just be my own boss and There's a lot of freedom that comes with being your own boss.
• 6:04
  But then some days, your, Your own boss can be a real jerk and just not, not, you know.
• 6:11
  You know, some days are rough.
• 6:13
  Some days are rough, and that's just kind of the way it is.
• 6:15
  But you take the good with the bad and you just keep moving forward.
• 6:21
  All right, so that.
• 6:23
  With the seminars.
• 6:24
  So you got like, how, how did that develop when you, you got, I guess, recruited to be with the seminar company?
• 6:31
  Is that what it was?
• 6:33
  Yeah, yeah.
• 6:34
  I was with them for about two and a half, three years.
• 6:37
  And.
• 6:37
  And it's a good company.
• 6:39
  It's called Skill Path.
• 6:40
  A lot of people have heard of them, and they also own another company as well, so you would be under either of those flagships.
• 6:49
  But after a few years of teaching that information, some people started asking me certain quote, well, what about this, what about that?
• 6:57
  And so I just kind of started giving my own experience or expertise.
• 7:02
  And after a while, I started putting together my own.
• 7:05
  My own curriculum.
• 7:07
  And so I would write all these.
• 7:08
  I would just write, Write things down, any ideas that I had that could have been more beneficial to the workshop that I was conducting.
• 7:16
  And that was the thing that gave me the flexibility.
• 7:18
  They said you have to teach all of these, you know, 21 or however many topics, aspects, but you can add on to it.
• 7:25
  And so sometimes I would be adding a lot.
• 7:29
  Maybe about a third of the workshop would be stuff that was beneficial for the attendees.
• 7:35
  But I just, I just started creating my own.
• 7:37
  My own curriculum.
• 7:39
  Okay.
• 7:40
  And then, so you, you get asked questions, you're creating the curriculum, you realize that you have a lot more to share than kind of the box you're in with, you know, with the corporate company.
• 7:52
  And then what, like, what, what made you finally decide to go out on your own?
• 8:00
  Like I say, great company.
• 8:01
  And there's, there's about half a dozen of those types of companies, but they all seem to run pretty much on the same model.
• 8:08
  Fred Pryor is another one that was kind of, kind of the original one.
• 8:14
  And everybody else is copying them.
• 8:16
  They don't pay.
• 8:16
  Well, they do pay your, Your expenses, all your travel.
• 8:23
  And so I would go out on the road and I would be.
• 8:26
  They would fly me into an area and then I would rent a car, and for the whole week I would be in four or five different cities day after day, and then they'd fly me back home.
• 8:36
  But you really did not make that much money at it.
• 8:40
  And so I just, I just thought, you know, look, I Enjoy.
• 8:44
  I enjoy travel and I enjoy training.
• 8:49
  I love to see those little light bulbs come on.
• 8:51
  But I just thought I could do a better job with my, some of my own material and, and, and just kind of focus instead of just inviting the public.
• 9:03
  And I have done some public workshops but really my niche now is try to, for corporate clients.
• 9:10
  And so I've got, I've got some clients who will bring me back each year to do a couple of hours of managerial training for their management.
• 9:22
  And that's really, really very important because about three or four years ago Forbes wrote an article and they had actually linked up with career builders to do the study and they found that I think it's about 80, it's
• 9:39
  over 80%.
• 9:39
  I want to say it's 82% of all first time managers have received not just a little bit of management training.
• 9:47
  None, zero, nothing at all.
• 9:51
  And so I have something for different tiers of management.
• 9:55
  I have done billion dollar corporations and, and help facilitate their strategic planning for the year.
• 10:03
  But then I've also done where if this is your first time as a manager, here we go.
• 10:08
  And I wrote a book that is essentially the, the eight Managerial challenges.
• 10:15
  And there's eight things in there that I talk about that seem to be constant, repetitive mistakes that managers make and how to overcome those and break that cycle.
• 10:28
  Okay, all right.
• 10:29
  So you found a niche there within training, training managers specifically.
• 10:34
  Even wrote a book.
• 10:36
  Let me just ask you, so when you made the decision to go out on your own like what was it, what was it like getting started in terms of, did things take off like you expected?
• 10:48
  No, no, I, I think I really did not calculate and I had done things in sales but didn't really calculate the amount of time and effort that would be put into business development.
• 11:05
  And it's just the sales calls and I'm fine with rejection.
• 11:12
  But you know, you have to understand as an entrepreneur, if you're, if you're a one trick pony and you, and, and that's what I am, I may ring on some more trainers eventually.
• 11:23
  But everything that I do is, is from me.
• 11:27
  And you just really have to go out and kind of hit the bricks and so to speak, call people and call on corporations and you know, if they're.
• 11:39
  What I found is that my sweet spot is a company that will have between 12 and 200 employees.
• 11:47
  Because if you get to a company that has three or 400 employees, they probably have their, their in house trainer.
• 11:55
  And even if that trainer is doing more of the technical side of things, they may say, well, we'll just task this person to do some of the profess development like managerial training.
• 12:07
  And that may not necessarily be their, their skill set, but it's, it's hard to get in when they have a, someone's name on a door and it says trainer.
• 12:17
  So a lot of the smaller companies are really just kind of struggling to get their people on board with what makes for good leadership.
• 12:28
  Okay.
• 12:28
  And so you, you encountered some early resistance.
• 12:31
  Like how, how did you overcome that?
• 12:36
  Well, I have a pretty good support system of other trainers, other corporate facilitators, and you would think that we would all be sort of at odds with one another, but most professional speakers are actually pretty giving of their
• 12:55
  experience and their wisdom.
• 12:58
  And so I have some very good people that I would call on and just kind of ask, you know, what do you think of this marketing idea?
• 13:06
  Or you know, what do I need to do in terms of, you know, just getting in front of more, more people and one bit of, and, and that's where you have to have enough of your own experience to
• 13:21
  understand when you are getting really good information.
• 13:25
  And most of the time I, I do, but then when something is just not going to fit for your, your corporate culture for what you do.
• 13:36
  And I've had several people who are great public speakers, you know, they're making 30, $40,000 a speech.
• 13:47
  One speech will tell me that, you know, well, you need to pick your lane.
• 13:52
  I can't tell you how many times I've heard that, a thousand times you got to pick your lane.
• 13:57
  And basically you develop one speech, maybe two, that's kind of a derivative of the first one, and you just stick with that and you just present that over and over and over again and no doubt they make a
• 14:11
  lot of money at it.
• 14:12
  But I don't know, Dave, maybe I have ADHD or something.
• 14:15
  I can't, I can't just do the one thing for the rest of my life.
• 14:19
  So what's different is that I really am a, a school, if you will, and I can teach all of those, those things as it comes to professional development, like better communication skills.
• 14:31
  I don't teach accounting, bookkeeping, you know, how to clean machinery or anything like that.
• 14:38
  But, but yeah, yeah, and that's just, that's just, that's it.
• 14:43
  You know, if you can find a number of good people and, and there's a guy, Terry, really good friend of mine, who was really instrumental and helping me out and just kind of shedding light on a lot of
• 14:54
  things and pointing me in the right direction.
• 14:58
  So you just, you just take that from, you got to build your support group so you have to go out and you have to meet some of these people.
• 15:05
  And, and I've actually heard that Dave, from a lot of people in various industries that the so called competitors are actually very, very helpful and getting others started.
• 15:19
  Okay, interesting.
• 15:21
  All right, so you're dealing with this niche of small businesses like you said, 12 to 200 employees typically.
• 15:29
  And you're focusing on managerial and leadership training and those types of skills.
• 15:34
  When you're working with these companies, what do you find are some of the biggest challenges that they're having?
• 15:42
  Well, the nice thing about the managerial, if they want me to, if they want to bring me in for first time managers sort of workshop or new to management.
• 15:52
  Workshop is that's, that's pretty much the case.
• 15:56
  And I can just outline and go through the information there.
• 15:59
  But sometimes I'll talk to an owner or someone in the C suite and you know, they'll say that, well, you know, here's a challenge and I try to, I try to diagnose before I, before I prescribe to find
• 16:14
  out what is it that they want to see accomplished at the end of the workshop, what's their result that they are looking for rather than just what I think they need.
• 16:25
  But sometimes that might come at odds they'll be describing something.
• 16:30
  And, and I'm thinking, okay, well so you know, do you need some leadership training for management or for even the C suite maybe?
• 16:41
  And like, no, they're just not doing what it is that we want them to do.
• 16:45
  Well, okay, you know, communication is the foundation of good leadership.
• 16:50
  And so sometimes it might be that the people are, you know, they're a good group of people.
• 16:57
  But maybe leadership is, is, is the people who need to hear, hear the message.
• 17:04
  And so you gotta kind of be delicate about that and still provide what it is that they bring you in for.
• 17:10
  But then you know, you have to kind of tell them, you know, look, you know, yeah, you're, you're kind of micromanaging everyone.
• 17:19
  And I call micromanagement training for failure.
• 17:23
  Because when you micromanage people then what you're telling them is that their work doesn't matter and that you were going to come around the next day and change up everything anyway.
• 17:37
  So they just shrug and say, well, why should I even try?
• 17:40
  And so I, I've, I've had that conversation, you know, like, you know, I think your level of guidance, they always call it guidance is a little overbearing and if you just give them some free rein, let them.
• 17:56
  But what if they make a mistake?
• 17:58
  And I always assure them they will make mistakes, but let them make the $10 mistakes versus the $10,000 mistakes and just let them sort of grow into the position that you hired them for in the first place.
• 18:12
  Yeah, I love that.
• 18:13
  Micromanaging is training for failure.
• 18:16
  That's.
• 18:17
  I haven't heard it put that way, but that.
• 18:19
  That makes perfect sense.
• 18:22
  Well, it's in my book.
• 18:24
  All right.
• 18:25
  And so speaking of your book, you've written three books, is that right?
• 18:29
  I have.
• 18:29
  The first one was Managerial Misunderstandings, Missteps, and Miscommunications.
• 18:35
  I think I named it there just to trip up podcast hosts so they can't repeat it.
• 18:40
  So I'm actually going to be rebranding that hopefully next month as the eight Managerial Challenges.
• 18:47
  And that's the first one that I wrote, and then the second one that came out a little over a year ago is the Individual Team, How Fairness Wrecked the Workplace.
• 18:59
  And, I mean, it's.
• 19:03
  It pretty much goes to that.
• 19:04
  It's not a political book, but in today's culture, Dave, you really kind of have to hit some of the.
• 19:14
  The.
• 19:14
  The nonsense that's just going on.
• 19:16
  And so I've had owners and leaders and managers say, you know, Blaine, I know my people love me because I'm.
• 19:23
  I'm fair with them.
• 19:24
  I treat them all the same.
• 19:27
  You're making your people mad and resent you because people are not the same.
• 19:32
  And if they're on your direct team, you really have to get to know them and their personality, and that's just a.
• 19:39
  A really big part of it.
• 19:41
  But this.
• 19:41
  This issue of sameness is a farce.
• 19:46
  It doesn't work.
• 19:46
  People resent that, and you'll get the most out of them by pushing them towards their excellence, their personal best.
• 19:55
  Okay.
• 19:57
  All right.
• 19:58
  And, you know, you launched your professional speaking career.
• 20:03
  I think you said you went on your own 2017.
• 20:05
  Is.
• 20:06
  Is that right?
• 20:08
  Yeah, yeah, I was actually doing training.
• 20:10
  I've been.
• 20:11
  I've been doing training for about 20 years, but, yeah, to go with momentum seminars, training and coaching.
• 20:16
  Yeah, about.
• 20:16
  About 2017.
• 20:17
  2018.
• 20:18
  Okay.
• 20:20
  And then as.
• 20:21
  As we progressed a few years in.
• 20:24
  One of the things, the events that was very tough on the live event in the speaking space was.
• 20:28
  Was the pandemic.
• 20:30
  So what was that process like, you know, navigating the change in the world when no one really knew what was going on at first?
• 20:40
  Yeah, a few things.
• 20:41
  I learned a lot, which is great.
• 20:43
  I'm still here.
• 20:45
  You know, I was, I was, I had been writing my first book, the eight managerial change challenges for about two and a half, three years when Covet hit in 2021.
• 20:58
  And so a lot of people will ask me, hey, how do you, what does it take to write a book?
• 21:04
  And I tell them three years plus a pandemic.
• 21:07
  Because I had nothing else to do, all my gigs canceled, we weren't having conferences anymore.
• 21:15
  And so I had no excuse to not finish that book and I did.
• 21:22
  And one of those chapters was called the Individual Team.
• 21:26
  It's exactly what I was just talking about a few, few minutes ago is this issue of sameness, treating everyone the same and how that's, that's actually disruptive.
• 21:34
  That brought about the second book that I wrote.
• 21:38
  And.
• 21:40
  But yeah, I tell everyone three and a half, about three years in a, in a pandemic.
• 21:45
  But I also had to get very good at webinars because people still needed some training and there were still conferences and they just online and they wanted a keynote speaker to do about a 45 minute motivational speech.
• 22:01
  I hate being called a motivational speaker because I just, you know, we may.
• 22:07
  It's hard to say that I'm going to motivate someone to do something, but yet I'm not in their life.
• 22:13
  So it, but anyway, just as a professional speaker, I had to get really good at webinars.
• 22:18
  And it's a different craft writing, public speaking, webinars, coaching, one on one.
• 22:26
  Those are all different crafts.
• 22:29
  The information is the same, but they have to be delivered in different ways.
• 22:34
  And so I, I think I really just learned a lot.
• 22:37
  And in fact I, you know, you remind me.
• 22:39
  I, I really haven't been pursuing a lot of webinars.
• 22:43
  They're still around.
• 22:43
  People love to get back in person again.
• 22:47
  But yes, there are some webinars still around and I need to, I need to contact and follow up on more of those.
• 22:54
  Okay, all right.
• 22:56
  And then with everything you've, you've overcome and grown your business over the, these past seven, eight years.
• 23:02
  So what is, what does it look like for you in, in 2025?
• 23:06
  What does your business look like?
• 23:08
  2025?
• 23:09
  I am, I'm not a revolutionary.
• 23:12
  I believe that if you want to develop your business or to develop you, don't wait till January 1st.
• 23:20
  That's just, that's ridiculous.
• 23:22
  Don't wait to make a New Year's revolution just, or a resolution, just wherever you are, just begin.
• 23:28
  But I did start back in late November for about a year, about 12 months.
• 23:36
  I wanted to do a number of these sort of wonderful podcasts and radio shows and TV and just have about 75 different media outlets.
• 23:48
  Also gonna just kind of hold my feet to the fire a little bit more with being conscious about my calling.
• 24:00
  I'm in business development because I'm the type of person to where I'll make a bunch of calls and I'll prospect and then I'll get, you know, three or four things lined up, and I focus on those things and
• 24:13
  want to give really great customer service.
• 24:15
  And I drop the sales calling, the prospecting, and then I gotta start all over again.
• 24:21
  So those are a couple of things that I'm going to do.
• 24:25
  But, you know, rather than saying I want to make X amount of money, it really is kind of.
• 24:32
  It's the tasks that you do that bring you to the goal.
• 24:35
  That's what's important.
• 24:37
  And so just with those couple of things, getting my name out and making good quality prospecting calls, that's gonna.
• 24:46
  That's gonna really make the difference in 2025.
• 24:50
  All right, and.
• 24:51
  And Blaine, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about your training or.
• 24:55
  Or any of the work you do, what.
• 24:56
  What's the best way people can reach out to you?
• 24:59
  Best thing to do is just as you can see my.
• 25:01
  Whoops.
• 25:02
  See my.
• 25:03
  My URL up there.
• 25:04
  Momentum seminars dot com.
• 25:06
  You can find out me.
• 25:07
  You can purchase any of my books there.
• 25:10
  I have three books.
• 25:11
  I've got another one on interpersonal communications, which should be out in February, early March at the latest.
• 25:18
  And that's the best way to contact me.
• 25:21
  All my contact information is there.
• 25:23
  All right, and we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 25:27
  All right, well, Blaine, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this wisdom with.
• 25:32
  From your journey with our audience.
• 25:33
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 25:35
  Thank you, Dave.
• 25:35
  I appreciate you having me.
• 25:37
  All right, and that's all the time we have for now.
• 25:39
  We will see you next.