On this episode of the Massimo Show

Rod sits down with a Top15 Business Growth Expert, a Top 41 motivational sales speaker, and a Top 10 sales and leadership trainer, Meridith Elliott Powell. 

Sales strategist, leadership expert, Certified Speaking Professional, and award-winning author, Meridith Elliott Powell wants today’s businesses to stop viewing uncertainty as something that prevents them from being successful. This is why her virtual programs, leadership coaching, online courses, and keynote presentations leverage her 9 step formula for making uncertainty your company’s strategic advantage™.

A Rocky Road to Real Results 

Meridith grew up in a little town called Uniontown, Pennsylvania – in coal mining country. While she didn’t really know what she wanted to do when she grew up she was not afraid of hard work. In fact, she feels she got the majority of her education by working. “I got through college by the skin of my teeth, from Penn State University to the University of South Carolina but I learned sales and leadership far more from waiting tables,” Meredith tells Rod.  Her very first job was in public relations for a chamber of commerce and from there she went into banking and healthcare and ultimately launched out on her own. 

Meredith has honed her ability to flourish in times of turmoil. She had worked in travel and tourism in the midst of a hurricane, in healthcare when they’d gone through a cutback from the government. When she went into banking and financial services was when regulation was really coming into place. Her passion became a desire to help businesses navigate how they not only go through change but motivate their teams to go through change and actually see changes as an opportunity, rather than an obstacle. 

To sum up all of her time working with businesses, Meredith has written an incredible book called Thrive. 

The Creation of the 9 Steps 

“How lucky am I that my passion is helping organizations navigate changes successfully, and we just keep getting changed on another level of steroids,” Meridith tells Rod. 

“A couple of years ago, and I can imagine everybody listening to this podcast can relate if you go back to 2018, 2019. I mean, do you remember how good the economy was? You just basically opened your doors and business rolled in? Well, I was asking my clients just like everybody does tell me how businesses are going. And everybody responded the same businesses, good businesses, great. In fact, we are having our best year on record. But oh, this uncertainty, as if we were all relishing how good the economy was, but we were waiting for the ball to drop for the bottom to fall out. And that just got me thinking like, Why does uncertainty always have to be a bad thing? Why does it have to be a negative? What would happen if your business, if you started to see it as an opportunity if you actually believed that uncertainty was the disruption you needed to take your business to the next level. 

And that put me on a mission to try to find companies that had done that. And let me tell you, there aren’t many.” 

Meredith discovered just nine companies (ironically enough) that had been in business since the late 1700s, early 1900s. And they’re still in business thriving today. These businesses had come through economic depression, they’d come through World Wars, they’d even survived previous pandemics. 

From there, Meredith built a nine-step formula of what it takes to navigate change at any level and see uncertainty catapult your company, and your business, to another level. 

The difference between Netflix and Blockbuster

Even the experts, the change gurus, tell us that we need to navigate change, we need to be good at change, we need to react to change. But in an uncertain marketplace, if you are reacting to change, even if you’re acting to it flawlessly you’re already behind you already lost. So strategy number two is that you need to condition yourself for change. 

“Change can be your greatest opportunity if you see it coming. If you wait for change to happen in an uncertain marketplace, it will bury you.” Meredith explains.  

And change is like a muscle. The more you work it the more you think about it, the more you talk about it, the better conditioned you are going to be for change. So you have to start to anticipate the changes coming in the marketplace. 

Meredith gives us step two in her 9 step process and it’s actually an entire exercise or tool. The tool is called a S.C.E.P.T.I.C. (pronounced skeptic)  

Meredith recommends that every quarter, you take 30 minutes to look outside of your business to see what is happening externally that’s going to impact your success in an uncertain marketplace. 

• Society 
• Competition  
• Economics
• Politics 
• Technology
• Industry 
• Customers

Brainstorm: What do you see happening outside of your business as it relates to those words? This will help you anticipate the changes that are coming in the marketplace. The goal is to create a team that feels empowered by change, rather than disempowered by it.

“This is the difference between Netflix and Blockbuster.” Meredith recounts. “Blockbuster believed that the only change they had to pay attention to was inside the company. Netflix is a company that keeps looking outside and is changing before they have to condition themselves for change. Start controlling change rather than change control.”

Rod and Meridith round out the podcast by discussing the 5 Ps 

• Productivity 
• Prospecting (very interesting approach from Meridith on this one!) 
• Presence 
• Partners 
• Platforms

Listen in for the full story!