Show Notes
Dan Sullivan told Scott that in fifty years of working with entrepreneurs, he'd never seen someone with the wrong business. What he saw over and over was someone in the wrong seat, doing the wrong job.
What if being stuck isn't a business problem?
Scott took two assessments — Kolbe and Working Genius. Neither is a sponsor. He's just a customer.
Kolbe (Scott is 7-3-7-3): High Fact Finder. Low Follow Thru. High Quick Start. Low Implementor. Translation: wired to research and start things, then hand them off. Not wired to finish them.
The reframe: When you don't know this about yourself, you beat yourself up for being who you are. When you do know it, you stop trying to rewire yourself and start filling the gaps — with people, or with AI.
Working Genius (Scott is Invention + Discernment): Shows where you fit in a workflow. Six geniuses. Two are your strong suit. Scott's missing piece: Tenacity. Which is exactly what Kolbe said too.
The team application: Scott ran assessments across his team. Suddenly he could see who was in the right spot and who was underutilized. (Callback to Episode 75 — talented people in the wrong positions.)
The Training Council: Scott's IT training department is run by two people. Their assessments showed they were missing Wonder and Discernment. So Scott built a five-person training council to cover every genius area — pulling in his head of IT for Wonder and himself for Discernment.
The swap: Scott found someone in marketing with the same profile as him. Now when Scott travels or speaks, that person covers Discernment. The business doesn't stop.
The warning: Assessments aren't a personality horoscope and they aren't an excuse. "I don't do paperwork because it's my weakness" doesn't cut it. These are diagnostics for workflow design.
The cost: About $80 per person for both. Start with Working Genius (~$25) — it gives you a visual map of where people fit.
Coming soon: Scott's team is building their own assessment. Still in R&D. Listeners get a gift when it's ready.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:15.457)
Business coach Dan Sullivan told me that in his fifty years of working with entrepreneurs, he had never seen a case where a business owner had the wrong business. What he found time and time again is that the business owner was in the wrong seat doing the wrong job. They had the wrong job. And so what if the reason that you're stuck isn't because of your business?
It's because of what you're doing inside of your business could be the wrong job for you. Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you design and build a business that you love. I'm your host, Scott Todd, and I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my Fortune 300 VP job about 10 years ago, a decade ago. It's unbelievable. And I want you to really think about what
I'm saying here at the beginning, because too often in the times that I work with entrepreneurs, I find that they're stuck, they're working hard, they're not getting the traction that they want. And oftentimes we assume that it's a problem within the business. There's something wrong with the business. I need more leads. I need more systems. I need to do more. And look, those things are true. You can always use more leads every probably
80% of more all businesses need more leads. But what if you were actually not cut out to do the work that you were doing within the business? What if there was someone better at doing that? And what if you took some assessments to kind of help you? And I want to just share with you what happened to me and my business after I took some assessments and saw my business and the work that I do in a completely different way. First of all,
This podcast, this episode is not sponsored by any of the companies that I'm gonna mention. I'm gonna mention two of them. I'm just a customer and I want to tell you what I've done with these two products, not just for me, but for my team. Okay. So the first assessment that I looked at or used was Colby. That's K-L-O-L-B-E. Colby. And what Colby does is it basically helps you understand how you work with
Scott Todd (02:40.744)
within your business, like how how you function, what's your DNA, what's your what's the way in which you operate. And then the second one that I took was working genius. And again, I gave this to my entire team, both of them. And what working genius does is it really kind of shows you where in the workflow you fit into your business or your employees fit into the business.
So let's look at what happened. For me, my Colby score is a seven three seven three. Now what does that mean? Well, when you go through the Colby system, it looks at different things like fact finder. Do you dig in on facts or do you just like wing it? Okay, so I'm a high fact finder. That's what that first seven number is. My next number is whether you're a quick start or a a slower start. For me, I'm a quick start. So
I get the enough facts, I get the facts, and then I just jump. Okay, I jump. And then what happens is my my next number. I'm sorry, I got that out of wrong. I'm a the seven is a high fact finder. Then I come to follow through, which is a three. My follow through, not so strong. So I get the facts, I jump into it really fast, and then I turn around.
And I have to toss it over to somebody else who can finish the job. If you're wanting me to finish the job, I can do it, but somebody else can do it better than me. And then what happens is the last one is your implementer score. And so ultimately at the end of the day, my implementer score is basically saying that, you know what? I'm just gonna wing it. I'm gonna put in the prototypes, I'm gonna figure out how to get this thing done. We're gonna wire this thing up. So what this is telling you about me is that I why I'm wired properly.
Personally, to start things and to let them go off to somebody else. That's what the Colby tells me about me. And what happens is when you don't know this about yourself as an entrepreneur, you can find that you're beating yourself up for basically being the person that you are. And that's a an important distinction because when you know more about who you are and how you operate, all of a sudden it
Scott Todd (04:59.673)
Transforms the way that you interact with the people on your team. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's really a good thing. And this also extends to the world of AI because if you know that you love to find facts and to research and to start things quickly, but then you need some follow through, well, guess what? That's where the AI can help you. You can literally create the AI to fill in your weaknesses once you know your strengths. Okay?
So you don't have to worry about, you know, rewiring yourself. You don't have to really think about beating yourself up over this. Really, what the whole goal of this assessment is to do is to find the seat that you belong in, the job that you belong in as well. Now, the second score that I talked about, which is the working genius. The thing about working genius is it shows you, if you imagine like a workflow, it basically shows you where you fit into the workflow.
For me, I'm strong at ideating and I'm strong at discernment. Those two things alone allow me to come up with ideas very, very quickly and also at the same time tell you why or why why it will work or why it won't work. Okay? Invention and discernment. So if you know me, if you've been around me, you know you can give me a question. I will answer the question like that, and I'm able to think through it, but that's the way I'm wired. That's the way that that's the way that I am. Not everybody is like me.
In fact, there's six working geniuses and two of them are your strong suit. And when you know those two strong suits about how you work within the operation, guess what? Or the workflow, guess what? If you stay in your own lane and you add people to your team who fill in the gaps where you don't, for example, tenacity is one of the things, meaning get it done is one of the things that guess what is not in my working genius.
Guess what? See how that supports the the Colby? The two of them supported each other. So if I'm going to make massive moves within my my world, what I need to do is I need to fill in the gaps. I need to make sure that I have people that have the tenacity. I have to make sure that I have people who are able to galvanize people around enablement. I need people who can do all of those things because if it falls on me and me alone.
Scott Todd (07:29.261)
We're not getting anywhere. We're not getting anywhere. So the business application for me was once I knew where I fit into the business, then I could look at my entire team and I could see where the team fit in. So I did that. I ran assessments on the team. And in fact, I was telling my team, like, I want you to take this assessment, I want you to take this assessment. And guess what? They thought I was crazy. They're like, Man, this guy must love assessments. He must be an assessment junkie.
But what happened was when I took when I had my team take these assessments, all of a sudden we could see who was in the right spot and who was being underutilized. How we could leverage people in different ways. In episode 75 here, I talked about the football analogy and I talked about having imagine if your quarterback should not be a quarterback but should be a running back, you're in trouble. Or what if your kicker should actually be your quarterback? You're in trouble. So
When we understand that we're not just necessarily recruiting for a specific job, that we're recruiting for people who can do certain things, all of a sudden our our talent, our team, our people, they get more engaged because when they get to stay in their lane and you get to stay in your lane, man man, does the world change around you?
So, you know, assessments, this is kind of the warning, but assessments are not for like a a personality hor yeah, horoscope. It's not it's not a way that I can use it to make an excuse so that I don't get paperwork done or to get things done. But what it allows you to do is it allows you to kind of see, hey, this might explain why I work better doing this type of work and not this type.
It's easy to go back and say, well, I got all these great ideas because that's what I do. I invent and I discern. That's what I do. I just sit in my office and come up with these ideas, and I don't have to get anything done because, well, that's my weakness. No, that's that's an excuse, and that doesn't that doesn't cut it. I still have obligations that I'm responsible for, right? Like I still have deliverables that I'm responsible for within my organization. But so does everybody else.
Scott Todd (09:54.642)
I still need people that are looking at at decisions or looking at opportunities and making decisions about it. And they can't say, well, I'm not good at discernment. No. No, no, no, no. You still have to make good decisions, right? So this is not not a way of giving us excuses. What it's a way of doing those, these assessments give us a way to diagnose workflow design. Okay? It gives us a way of looking at the workflow that we're doing and then
Basically understanding how this fits into our world. Now, the two assessments together, I think one of them was fifty-five dollars and one of them was twenty-five dollars. So I invested about eighty dollars per person into these assessments for my team. And you know, if if you were to ask me where you start, I would tell you that probably the one that I was the most excited about because it I could see it v visually is the working genius.
And what made the working genius so visualizing to me is all of a sudden I could see where my team fit in on a team design. I could see how they fit into the workflow. And what that allowed me to do is it allowed me to go back in and to create different organizations or supporting groups within my company. Let me give an example. I have an IT training company and the IT training company it is
two people that lead the training department. There's lots of subcontractor trainers, but there's two people within the training department. And when we looked at their working genius, we realized, hey, they are lacking, they are missing wonder, meaning like the big asking the big what if questions, and they were lacking discernment. That's me, right? They were lacking in those areas and probably another one. So what that allowed us to do is it allowed us to understand that hey the the training team
there they probably need some support so we created a training council and what the training council does is it's made up of five people to make sure that all of the working genius areas are covered even though it may not be in someone else's world. So for example on the training council I have I have a person who's in charge of RIT. Okay. So he sits in on the training council. Why? Because he brings the wonder
Scott Todd (12:22.157)
I bring the discernment. Now I let the team run that meeting, but where I'm needed for the discernment to help them understand this is this is a good strategy or not a good strategy, I'm on fire there. Now guess what else happened? In taking the working genius, I also found another person on my team who works in marketing who happens to be just like me, invention and discernment. So why is that important? Because now I know that this particular person is able to
decide or make decisions very, very similar to me in terms of coming up with ideas and then determining whether they're good or bad. Now that doesn't mean that they're going to have the exact same ideas as me. They're not my twin. They're not my clone. But if I understand that somebody can fill in and say, yeah, that's a good idea because X, Y, and Z, or I'm not sure about that because X, Y, and Z, I can swap me for them. And that's what we do is we take that person and say, hey,
You're going to fill into the role of the discernment today because, well, Scott's traveling or Scott's doing a speaking gig this week or whatever. However that works, it doesn't stop us from moving forward because we're not reliant on one person anymore. So what am I asking you? What am I suggesting? Well, I'm not really asking you anything, other than the fact that what I would suggest that you do is I would suggest that you think about taking an assessment. And if I were to start with one, I'd probably
probably going to start with Working Genius because again, I think it gives you this visual map of how you and your people fit into the organization. So that's where I'm going to start or suggest that you start, but pick one. Okay, pick one, take it. Working genius, I think it's working genius.com. It's like $25. And what you're looking to do is you're looking to see where within the workflow you belong. Okay.
And then what happens is it now gives you this ability to design work ab around your strengths, but it's also given you the ability to design work around other people's strengths, away from their weaknesses. And that is one of the things that you can do today to help get your company jump started and to get you unstuck so that you're not feeling like you're in the muddy mile where the wheels are just spinning, spinning.
Scott Todd (14:45.709)
And you're not getting the traction that you want because that's what it's about. It's about getting you in the right spot. Now, my organization, we have created our own assessment. It's not available for prime time yet. It's still in our research and design element. But stay tuned because, well, if you're a listener of this, we're gonna we're gonna give you a little gift when it's ready. So we have our assessment coming. Stay tuned because that might help you.
but do something. Do something that's different that shocks your system a little bit and watch what happens to your business. If you have a business question, head over to Scott Todd dot net forward slash ask. And I will see you in our next episode.
Business coach Dan Sullivan told me that in his fifty years of working with entrepreneurs, he had never seen a case where a business owner had the wrong business. What he found time and time again is that the business owner was in the wrong seat doing the wrong job. They had the wrong job. And so what if the reason that you're stuck isn't because of your business?
It's because of what you're doing inside of your business could be the wrong job for you. Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you design and build a business that you love. I'm your host, Scott Todd, and I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my Fortune 300 VP job about 10 years ago, a decade ago. It's unbelievable. And I want you to really think about what
I'm saying here at the beginning, because too often in the times that I work with entrepreneurs, I find that they're stuck, they're working hard, they're not getting the traction that they want. And oftentimes we assume that it's a problem within the business. There's something wrong with the business. I need more leads. I need more systems. I need to do more. And look, those things are true. You can always use more leads every probably
80% of more all businesses need more leads. But what if you were actually not cut out to do the work that you were doing within the business? What if there was someone better at doing that? And what if you took some assessments to kind of help you? And I want to just share with you what happened to me and my business after I took some assessments and saw my business and the work that I do in a completely different way. First of all,
This podcast, this episode is not sponsored by any of the companies that I'm gonna mention. I'm gonna mention two of them. I'm just a customer and I want to tell you what I've done with these two products, not just for me, but for my team. Okay. So the first assessment that I looked at or used was Colby. That's K-L-O-L-B-E. Colby. And what Colby does is it basically helps you understand how you work with
Scott Todd (02:40.744)
within your business, like how how you function, what's your DNA, what's your what's the way in which you operate. And then the second one that I took was working genius. And again, I gave this to my entire team, both of them. And what working genius does is it really kind of shows you where in the workflow you fit into your business or your employees fit into the business.
So let's look at what happened. For me, my Colby score is a seven three seven three. Now what does that mean? Well, when you go through the Colby system, it looks at different things like fact finder. Do you dig in on facts or do you just like wing it? Okay, so I'm a high fact finder. That's what that first seven number is. My next number is whether you're a quick start or a a slower start. For me, I'm a quick start. So
I get the enough facts, I get the facts, and then I just jump. Okay, I jump. And then what happens is my my next number. I'm sorry, I got that out of wrong. I'm a the seven is a high fact finder. Then I come to follow through, which is a three. My follow through, not so strong. So I get the facts, I jump into it really fast, and then I turn around.
And I have to toss it over to somebody else who can finish the job. If you're wanting me to finish the job, I can do it, but somebody else can do it better than me. And then what happens is the last one is your implementer score. And so ultimately at the end of the day, my implementer score is basically saying that, you know what? I'm just gonna wing it. I'm gonna put in the prototypes, I'm gonna figure out how to get this thing done. We're gonna wire this thing up. So what this is telling you about me is that I why I'm wired properly.
Personally, to start things and to let them go off to somebody else. That's what the Colby tells me about me. And what happens is when you don't know this about yourself as an entrepreneur, you can find that you're beating yourself up for basically being the person that you are. And that's a an important distinction because when you know more about who you are and how you operate, all of a sudden it
Scott Todd (04:59.673)
Transforms the way that you interact with the people on your team. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's really a good thing. And this also extends to the world of AI because if you know that you love to find facts and to research and to start things quickly, but then you need some follow through, well, guess what? That's where the AI can help you. You can literally create the AI to fill in your weaknesses once you know your strengths. Okay?
So you don't have to worry about, you know, rewiring yourself. You don't have to really think about beating yourself up over this. Really, what the whole goal of this assessment is to do is to find the seat that you belong in, the job that you belong in as well. Now, the second score that I talked about, which is the working genius. The thing about working genius is it shows you, if you imagine like a workflow, it basically shows you where you fit into the workflow.
For me, I'm strong at ideating and I'm strong at discernment. Those two things alone allow me to come up with ideas very, very quickly and also at the same time tell you why or why why it will work or why it won't work. Okay? Invention and discernment. So if you know me, if you've been around me, you know you can give me a question. I will answer the question like that, and I'm able to think through it, but that's the way I'm wired. That's the way that that's the way that I am. Not everybody is like me.
In fact, there's six working geniuses and two of them are your strong suit. And when you know those two strong suits about how you work within the operation, guess what? Or the workflow, guess what? If you stay in your own lane and you add people to your team who fill in the gaps where you don't, for example, tenacity is one of the things, meaning get it done is one of the things that guess what is not in my working genius.
Guess what? See how that supports the the Colby? The two of them supported each other. So if I'm going to make massive moves within my my world, what I need to do is I need to fill in the gaps. I need to make sure that I have people that have the tenacity. I have to make sure that I have people who are able to galvanize people around enablement. I need people who can do all of those things because if it falls on me and me alone.
Scott Todd (07:29.261)
We're not getting anywhere. We're not getting anywhere. So the business application for me was once I knew where I fit into the business, then I could look at my entire team and I could see where the team fit in. So I did that. I ran assessments on the team. And in fact, I was telling my team, like, I want you to take this assessment, I want you to take this assessment. And guess what? They thought I was crazy. They're like, Man, this guy must love assessments. He must be an assessment junkie.
But what happened was when I took when I had my team take these assessments, all of a sudden we could see who was in the right spot and who was being underutilized. How we could leverage people in different ways. In episode 75 here, I talked about the football analogy and I talked about having imagine if your quarterback should not be a quarterback but should be a running back, you're in trouble. Or what if your kicker should actually be your quarterback? You're in trouble. So
When we understand that we're not just necessarily recruiting for a specific job, that we're recruiting for people who can do certain things, all of a sudden our our talent, our team, our people, they get more engaged because when they get to stay in their lane and you get to stay in your lane, man man, does the world change around you?
So, you know, assessments, this is kind of the warning, but assessments are not for like a a personality hor yeah, horoscope. It's not it's not a way that I can use it to make an excuse so that I don't get paperwork done or to get things done. But what it allows you to do is it allows you to kind of see, hey, this might explain why I work better doing this type of work and not this type.
It's easy to go back and say, well, I got all these great ideas because that's what I do. I invent and I discern. That's what I do. I just sit in my office and come up with these ideas, and I don't have to get anything done because, well, that's my weakness. No, that's that's an excuse, and that doesn't that doesn't cut it. I still have obligations that I'm responsible for, right? Like I still have deliverables that I'm responsible for within my organization. But so does everybody else.
Scott Todd (09:54.642)
I still need people that are looking at at decisions or looking at opportunities and making decisions about it. And they can't say, well, I'm not good at discernment. No. No, no, no, no. You still have to make good decisions, right? So this is not not a way of giving us excuses. What it's a way of doing those, these assessments give us a way to diagnose workflow design. Okay? It gives us a way of looking at the workflow that we're doing and then
Basically understanding how this fits into our world. Now, the two assessments together, I think one of them was fifty-five dollars and one of them was twenty-five dollars. So I invested about eighty dollars per person into these assessments for my team. And you know, if if you were to ask me where you start, I would tell you that probably the one that I was the most excited about because it I could see it v visually is the working genius.
And what made the working genius so visualizing to me is all of a sudden I could see where my team fit in on a team design. I could see how they fit into the workflow. And what that allowed me to do is it allowed me to go back in and to create different organizations or supporting groups within my company. Let me give an example. I have an IT training company and the IT training company it is
two people that lead the training department. There's lots of subcontractor trainers, but there's two people within the training department. And when we looked at their working genius, we realized, hey, they are lacking, they are missing wonder, meaning like the big asking the big what if questions, and they were lacking discernment. That's me, right? They were lacking in those areas and probably another one. So what that allowed us to do is it allowed us to understand that hey the the training team
there they probably need some support so we created a training council and what the training council does is it's made up of five people to make sure that all of the working genius areas are covered even though it may not be in someone else's world. So for example on the training council I have I have a person who's in charge of RIT. Okay. So he sits in on the training council. Why? Because he brings the wonder
Scott Todd (12:22.157)
I bring the discernment. Now I let the team run that meeting, but where I'm needed for the discernment to help them understand this is this is a good strategy or not a good strategy, I'm on fire there. Now guess what else happened? In taking the working genius, I also found another person on my team who works in marketing who happens to be just like me, invention and discernment. So why is that important? Because now I know that this particular person is able to
decide or make decisions very, very similar to me in terms of coming up with ideas and then determining whether they're good or bad. Now that doesn't mean that they're going to have the exact same ideas as me. They're not my twin. They're not my clone. But if I understand that somebody can fill in and say, yeah, that's a good idea because X, Y, and Z, or I'm not sure about that because X, Y, and Z, I can swap me for them. And that's what we do is we take that person and say, hey,
You're going to fill into the role of the discernment today because, well, Scott's traveling or Scott's doing a speaking gig this week or whatever. However that works, it doesn't stop us from moving forward because we're not reliant on one person anymore. So what am I asking you? What am I suggesting? Well, I'm not really asking you anything, other than the fact that what I would suggest that you do is I would suggest that you think about taking an assessment. And if I were to start with one, I'd probably
probably going to start with Working Genius because again, I think it gives you this visual map of how you and your people fit into the organization. So that's where I'm going to start or suggest that you start, but pick one. Okay, pick one, take it. Working genius, I think it's working genius.com. It's like $25. And what you're looking to do is you're looking to see where within the workflow you belong. Okay.
And then what happens is it now gives you this ability to design work ab around your strengths, but it's also given you the ability to design work around other people's strengths, away from their weaknesses. And that is one of the things that you can do today to help get your company jump started and to get you unstuck so that you're not feeling like you're in the muddy mile where the wheels are just spinning, spinning.
Scott Todd (14:45.709)
And you're not getting the traction that you want because that's what it's about. It's about getting you in the right spot. Now, my organization, we have created our own assessment. It's not available for prime time yet. It's still in our research and design element. But stay tuned because, well, if you're a listener of this, we're gonna we're gonna give you a little gift when it's ready. So we have our assessment coming. Stay tuned because that might help you.
but do something. Do something that's different that shocks your system a little bit and watch what happens to your business. If you have a business question, head over to Scott Todd dot net forward slash ask. And I will see you in our next episode.