In this episode, I interview Chris Gwinn, the Founder and CEO of Great Lakes Advisory, a consulting company based in Chicago, USA, helping small to medium businesses with systems, processes, and training. The company’s mission is to improve overall efficiency to lower operational costs, improve competitive advantage, and increase profitability. Great Lakes Advisory was founded in 2017 by Chris Gwinn after realizing the incredible impact that a solution like systems and processes and documented procedures could have on a business. He started by himself to now around 8 FTEs, growing revenue from $50,000 in the first year to last year’s $400,000. The consulting has been available for over four years now. Chris says that the hardest thing in growing a small business is overcoming obscurity. However, if you surround yourself with the right people, have the right strategy in place, and have a team that shares the same vision, you can certainly overcome any circumstances.  This Cast Covers: Building systems, processes, and training for small to medium businesses. Making businesses easier to manage by documenting their processes & building world-class training experiences. Helping business owners train new hires faster, serve more customers, and scale business. Improving overall efficiency to lower operational costs, improve competitive advantage, and increase profitability. Talking about the benefits of implementing process improvement. Optimizing business processes through training solutions. Sharing a passion for operations, processes, finance, investments, and working with people. Realizing the incredible impact that a solution like systems and processes and documented procedures could have on a business. Learning of true success of what business services can do to their clients. Additional Resources: Great Lakes Advisory The E-Myth By Michael E. Gerber Good To Great By Jim Collins The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People By Stephen R. Covey _________________________ Quotes:  “If you own a business, you need to have that business running on systems and processes and repeatable operations so that you can really scale through.” —Chris Gwinn “Success to me is that I have the ability to control my own destiny and my true success in this business is what our solution can do for our clients.” —Chris Gwinn “Understand your target audience, collect as much data as possible so you can kind of understand your client’s behavioral characteristics to effectively introduce your product or service.” —Chris Gwinn “Figure out what you do best and what your customers value the most, be an expert of something so you’ll become a dominant market player within your industry.” —Chris Gwinn “Make sure that everyone else around you is serving customers the way that you want them to be served.” —Chris Gwinn _________________________ Music from https://filmmusic.io “Cold Funk” by Kevin MacLeod https://incompetech.com. License: CC by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0