What if the thing standing between you and the next level of your business isn't a marketing strategy, a sales tactic, or a system you haven't found yet, but the story you tell yourself every time things get hard? I sat down with Mike Irving, founder of Advanced Business Abilities, and he didn't just give me tactics. He walked me through the internal resistance that quietly sabotages leaders long before it shows up as a business problem. The buttons that get pressed, the masks we wear, and the radical honesty it takes to actually change. If you've ever hit a wall in your business and couldn't figure out why, this conversation is for you.
0:00 — Meet Matt and Mike
3:37 — Human First Question
4:38 — Childhood Dreams
6:35 — What ABA Does
9:02 — Self-Acknowledgement
11:04 — Australia Sales Hustle
14:41 — Hitting the Wall
16:42 — Reality Creation Mentors
22:49 — Implementation Blocks
26:14 — Three Pillars to Success
29:31 — Creating Safe Space
35:17 — Diagnosing Root Causes
37:26 — Scaling Challenges Ahead
38:17 — Evolving Business Problems
39:10 — Buttons and Resistance
39:53 — Trait Profile Wakeup Call
44:22 — Mentors as Research Team
47:02 — Why Leaders Need Coaches
49:38 — Brand Story and Client Journey
54:45 — Sales as a System
57:18 — Delivering Value and Trust
1:02:37 — Behind the Brand Questions
1:09:32 — Purpose and Next Steps
There's a tension every leader of a B2B service has to navigate: How do you scale without compromising the quality of your services - or the values that drive them? The CEO's Heart for Service is where accomplished B2B leaders share hard-won insights on walking that tightrope.
The CEO’s Heart for Service is a production of Brand3. If you’re a B2B service provider who delivers exceptional service but struggles to get your marketing to connect with the right people, find us at brand3.net. And sign up for our Brand3 Newsletter that only sends marketing insights worthy of your inbox - genuinely helpful stuff for the road ahead.
The CEO’s Heart for Service is also supported by Forge Podcast Company, a turnkey production solution for using podcasts to reach a wider audience, win new clients, and grow. Find them at forgepodcast.co
Matt Wolfe: Hi everybody. Welcome back to The CEO's Heart for Service. If it is your first time here, my name is Matt Wolfe. I am a partner and brand strategist at Brand3. Normally we have a co-host, but I am flying solo today. And honestly, I am a little glad, because it meant I got to spend all the time with our guest, Mike Irving.
Mike is the founder of Advanced Business Abilities. They do performance coaching and work with leadership and sales teams. But this is not your ordinary conversation with a leadership and sales coach. We have spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about external strategies and things that help businesses scale with heart, purpose, and intention. Mike is going to help us get to something deeper today. This is really a conversation about the internal blocks, the things we put in front of ourselves, and how we move past them as leaders.
I am so grateful he took us there. Mike is someone who just makes you feel better after you have spent time with him, whether in a room or on a podcast. I think you are going to feel that. You are going to be glad you spent this time with Mike Irving.
Hi Mike. Welcome to the podcast. I have been looking forward to this all week.
Mike Irving: Matt, me too. Thank you so much for having me. I know how much work goes into running a podcast, so I am genuinely grateful to be here and looking forward to providing as much value as I can to the conversation.
Matt Wolfe: I have no doubt about that. I was reflecting on our last conversation, and by way of compliment, there are different kinds of coaches and different feels that people walk away with in the space you are in. I can see why people want to work with you. Spend a little time with you, as people will today, and you just walk away feeling better about life. That is a real gift. I can see why people want to come back to their next appointment every week. You give people a quiet confidence, a sense of groundedness and hope, along with everything else that comes with your work. It is a rare thing, and I had just a taste of it. I am looking forward to more today.
Mike Irving: Thank you. I will graciously accept that compliment. And I will also say I have not always been that way. That is something very intentional and developed over time. You would not have had that impression of me 25 years ago.
Matt Wolfe: Well, we will come back to that and explore it a little.
Mike Irving: Sounds good.
Matt Wolfe: The only other thing I will mention is that I am sorry we did not end up on the same boat. We had a fun coincidence the other day, both on boats at the same time. We could have done a dual boat podcast, but we will just have to get you back for that one.
Mike Irving: There is a real idea there. We could make that happen.
Matt Wolfe: That is not a bad title at all.
Matt Wolfe: So the first thing we like to do, and in a moment we will get into your background and what you are doing at Advanced Business Abilities. But I was sharing with you the other day about a new program we are rolling out called Scale Beyond Referrals. It is for B2B service providers in high-trust, high-relationship spaces who are relying on referrals and warm introductions to get by. They have largely given up on marketing because it just was not working. We help them understand why, and a big part of that answer is that the strategies they were being given were not built for building relationships. They were not built to create moments of genuine human connection.
Because ultimately, for someone to trust you to guide them forward as a leader, to take on their marketing strategy, to take over their finances, those are significant asks. We have to know the human behind the brand. So we always start with a human question, and here it is.
Matt Wolfe: Growing up as a kid, you probably did not imagine yourself leading a highly effective business leadership organization. So what did you think you would be doing? Where did you think life was taking you?
Mike Irving: You are making an assumption that I feel grown up.
Matt Wolfe: You do not have to.
Mike Irving: Good. As a kid, I wanted to play baseball. I grew up in Boston; I loved the Red Sox. Roger Clemens was my guy. I spent every summer watching games, and I genuinely wanted to be a baseball player. Eventually, confronting the reality that maybe I did not quite have the talent for it led me in a different direction. There was also a stretch where I wanted to be a fighter jet pilot. Beyond that, I did not really think much about what my career was going to be. I just went about life, played baseball, studied, did well at school, and let things unfold.
Matt Wolfe: So you were content to let the direction emerge rather than forcing it?
Mike Irving: I am not sure I felt that way at the time, but looking back now, that is what I see. I went to university and studied biology. What did I think I was going to do with a biology degree? Honestly, I had no idea. Science made sense to me, and so I did that. There was not a lot of deliberate intention behind my decisions at that point.
Matt Wolfe: It is funny how these things work. Once I hit high school, I was completely focused on theater. I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I did that for about 25 years before making a late pivot into full-time marketing. Different kind of storytelling, but you just never know where life is going to take you.
Matt Wolfe: Let's capture a little bit of where you are today and what Advanced Business Abilities is doing for people. Just an overview.
Mike Irving: Absolutely. We have been operating for 20 years, and today we have clients on every major continent. We are still a relatively small team of five. What we do is help the members of our community identify and remove the emotional, mental, and energetic resistance that stops them from being able to achieve what they want or do what they know they should do.
I talk about it this way: I am sure you know people who know exactly what the best things for them to do would be. A lot of business owners know what would move the needle. But knowing that does not mean they can go out and do it effortlessly. Great plans get laid and then go unexecuted. And the reason they do not get executed is the resistance a person feels when they go to start, or when they are in the middle of something, or when they are close to the finish. That is what we help with.
Matt Wolfe: That is exactly what I picked up on from you. You are clearly aware of the full picture, the very humanness of what we do. This is never just about business strategy. When we are doing marketing strategy, we are running right up against people's fears about the future the moment we sit down in discovery and start talking about what is possible.
Niching down is a perfect example. Identifying your ideal client, not being all things to all people, that genuinely terrifies people. And yet the truth is that it is liberating and expansive. It makes you grow even though it feels like a paradox.
We also talked the other day about how so many people are not giving themselves enough credit. They are not celebrating what they have actually accomplished, which is a big part of building the confidence to move forward and take on new things.
Mike Irving: I agree completely.
Mike Irving: And there is another layer to this. It is one thing to celebrate what you have accomplished. It is something different entirely to acknowledge yourself for doing what you said you would do, regardless of whether the outcome turned out the way you wanted. That is actually a major source of resistance for a lot of people. If they skip over that step of acknowledging themselves for keeping the agreements they made, they end up waiting for someone outside of them to do it. And that is a way of giving away all of your own power.
Matt Wolfe: That is so powerful. And when we talked the other day, you offered me a really helpful correction on this. I jumped in and said I love encouraging people, I love telling them they have done great things. And you gently pushed back. You said: make sure they acknowledge themselves. That they give themselves that gift. That is going to stay with me for a long time.
Mike Irving: I am glad, because that is something I learned 20 years ago that changed my life.
Matt Wolfe: Let's talk about that. I do not always do this, but I think in your case it is worth it. Sometimes we talk to people who have been running a business their whole lives, and sometimes we talk to people who were in the business world and pivoted into a consulting or coaching role, which is where you sit. I would love to hear the background that got you to the place of starting Advanced Business Abilities. You mentioned earlier that the person you were 25 years ago was not in this space and could not do this work. How did we get here?
Mike Irving: It is a story I will share as much of as I can in a short and succinct way.
Mike Irving: When I was 21, I landed in Australia. I was originally only supposed to be there for six months before heading back to the United States to finish my degree and do the normal thing. But I fell in love with Australia and decided I wanted to stay. That meant getting a visa and finding a way to earn money. I managed both. The way I earned money was by getting a job going door to door in sales, commission only. Residential first, then business-to-business. Learning how to deal with rejection, learning how to sell. If I did not sell, I did not eat. That became a very important skill to develop.
About 18 months later, I started a business recruiting people, teaching them how to sell, and running direct sales campaigns on behalf of large corporate clients. Phone companies, energy companies. Customers thought they were dealing directly with those corporations, but in reality we were all independent. At one point I had a team of 300 sales reps across three cities in Australia. I learned how to sell and thought, okay, this is how it works. Let's go.
I ran that business for close to nine years. I started it at 22. Do not ask me how that happened. I thought I knew everything at 22, and by the time I was 24 or 25, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. But I did it.
When I started to see the gaps in what I knew, I decided to hire coaches. I wanted to get better at business, and I was starting to feel the stress of the rollercoaster. I had done really well, but I was young and did not save any of that money. Then things dipped, and I had to dig myself out of a hole. I hired a coach, things got moving again, then they went down again. I got up, dusted myself off, pushed through, hired a different coach, and then things went down again. I am not saying that happened because of those coaches, but I started to notice a pattern.
These coaches would come in with great systems and frameworks. Fifty ways to do this, a hundred ways to do that. We would meet; they would say: Here are three systems to implement in the next seven days. I would go out and attack the week; fires would break out, business would happen, and seven days later they would come back and ask how the systems implementation went. And I would say: I did not get to it. I had this and then this and then this and then this; I worked a hundred hours, and I still did not get there. What is wrong with me?
Mike Irving: In 2005 and early 2006, I was not in a good place mentally or emotionally. I went to the doctor because I was not feeling well, and they prescribed medication for depression. I remember sitting there looking at that prescription and thinking: hold on.
It has been my job for almost nine years to maintain my own attitude and to teach other people how to do the same. To help people set goals and stay motivated. How did I end up here? Something is wrong. Somehow I went left when I should have gone right, and I do not understand how I got here.
I made a personal decision, and I would never recommend this for anyone else, but I decided not to fill that prescription. Looking back at that day, I can see that it was a turning point. I had been driven for a long time by one question: how do I create my own reality? I had read all the books.
They all told me I create my own reality. But none of them actually laid out the system. None of them gave me the full equation. None of them said: if you have this reality right now, here is what you are doing to create it. And if you want this reality instead, stop doing these three things, start doing these five others, and over time you will get there.
No book I had read could tell me that. So I looked at that prescription, put it down, and said: no. Something is wrong at the source. I am not going to mask it. I am going to find out where I went wrong.
Mike Irving: Within a month of that day, I met the group of people I now refer to as my research team. I was turning 30 at the time. Their ages were around 64. I was introduced to them, and over a six-month period, they helped me understand exactly how I had gone left when it would have been better to go right. They also helped me begin to understand the answer to that question I had been carrying for years: how do you actually create your own reality?
That initial six-month period with them was the seed that is now Advanced Business Abilities. I ended up asking them to mentor me. I shut down the business I had been running for almost nine years and made a decision that I wanted to learn everything about how they did what they did for me.
I believed I could combine my eight years of experience in sales and building teams with what they were teaching me, and that if I could do that, I would be able to help a lot of people over the next 30 or 40 years of my life.
Matt Wolfe: Wow. That is incredible. I cannot imagine bearing that much responsibility at such a young age. Although I say that and then realize I had a similar experience. I was 22 or 23 when I was asked to be the worship leader at a large church, around 1,200 people a week. That was my version of what you went through. I was not ready for it in terms of maturity or any of that.
And when things were not going well, my response was to hide. Whatever that looked like. Literal hiding: I had a little spot tucked away in the back corner of the church. Emotional hiding, masking, whatever it was. I found every way to make sure people could not see that I was scared and had no idea what I was doing. There were people who could have mentored me at that time, and I did not reach out to them. I wish I had. But sometimes you have to hit the wall before you are ready to make that choice.
Mike Irving: I want to make sure you are not giving me too much credit here. When I started that company at 22, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was the managing director, and I did not even know what that meant. I had no understanding of fiduciary responsibility or governance. I just had a group of people around me all doing something similar, and we said, let's have a go.
And the closer I got to 30, the more I found myself hiding. I did not know what I was feeling, I did not know how to explain it, and I did not know what was wrong. I remember going in one morning to run my daily meeting with the sales team. The kind of meeting designed to get everyone focused and energized before heading out for the day. I ran the meeting, they all left, and instead of going to the front of the office to start my admin work, I went and hid in the back parking lot and cried my eyes out. I had absolutely no idea why.
I had spent nine years wearing a mask. I know what I am doing; I am setting goals; this is where we are going. The mask of being in control, being the leader, knowing it all. And underneath that, I did not understand what I was feeling; I had no plan for dealing with it, and I had no one I felt I could talk to about it. I genuinely did not know what to do or where to turn.
Matt Wolfe: What stands out to me in your story, and it is not uncommon, is that you were set up to feel like a failure because of the paradigms we all assume to be true. As leaders, we feel like we have to figure everything out on our own, and that is actually an incomplete picture of what leadership is. It is meant to work with coaches, outside perspectives, and mentors. It is supposed to be collaborative.
And then there is the other piece. You were given a system, something someone said works for everybody. And when it did not work for you, the only conclusion available was that something must be wrong with you.
Mike Irving: There is something wrong with me.
Matt Wolfe: Exactly. And I think the systems we read about in books and learn at conferences are incomplete, not because they are bad, but because they have not yet met the reality of the specific humans involved. They need someone on the outside to come in and help implement them.
But I have seen versions of that where the person coming in is really just trying to make you do it the same way everyone else has done it, rather than truly asking: how does this system unpack in your specific environment? How do you get buy-in here? How do you adapt this for your team and your context? Am I onto something there?
Mike Irving: I do not disagree, and I will take it one step further based on what I learned first for myself, and then the thinking I applied when creating Advanced Business Abilities.
Here is how I look at it, and this is more true today than it has ever been. Twenty years ago, coaches would come in with 50 ways to improve this and 100 ways to get better at that. But the how-to for running any business has always been available, and today it is more accessible than ever. Have a conversation with Claude, and you can get an answer to how to do almost anything, including things you have absolutely no background in.
So the real problem is not the how-to. The real problem is in the implementation of the how-to. And the block that stops implementation always happens between your ears first. It always lives in your thinking. We can call it negative thinking, resistant thinking, restrictive thinking. Whatever you name it, it is the thinking that shows up when you go to implement something, and that thinking creates the block.
We do not work with the members of our community to tell them how to run their business more efficiently. They already know far more about running their business than we ever will, because they are the ones running it. What we do is ask enough questions to help them see the way they are thinking that is no longer serving them. That is what is getting in the way of implementation.
And that is what I learned for myself. The problem was me. The problem was the way I was thinking and the way I was communicating, first with myself and then with the people around me, including my team. I was creating resistance in myself and in them. No wonder we could not get past a certain point. I was the problem.
Matt Wolfe: This is exactly what this podcast needs to talk about more. The theme here is B2B service providers with a heart for service. They care about their clients, they care about the results, and the question when it comes to scaling is: how do I continue to serve people well as I grow? How do I stay true to my core values? How do I maintain integrity through all of it?
We have talked a lot on this podcast about external obstacles. We have not talked nearly enough about the internal blocks that hold people back. So this is great. What are some of the biggest blocks you see people putting on themselves when it comes to scaling successfully, serving people well, and growing?
Mike Irving: That is a great question.
Mike Irving: There are a lot of answers to that question, and every person is a unique individual, so it is not always the same two or three things. But I can answer it by talking about what I call the three pillars of success.
The reason I want to frame it this way is that the real source of most problems is when people are not following these three pillars. So the first pillar is what I call radical awareness. That means making sure you are completely honest with yourself and truly confronting the reality of your own strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, attitudinal issues, competency issues, and aptitude issues.
Here is an indicator I watch for. When I ask someone about a problem, and they start describing all the external things stopping them, that tells me there is probably not a lot of radical awareness there. I find it extremely valuable to take an approach to every part of your life where you operate as if you create your own reality.
What that approach does is serve you in both directions. When things go great, you ask: what did I do or not do? What did I say or not say? What were the successful actions that produced that result? And when things do not go great, you ask the same questions. What did I do or not do? What actions did I take or avoid that contributed to this outcome? Because it happened, which means I played some part in creating it.
I am not saying you take that stance literally with every single thing in life. But I find it a genuinely useful lens. When something great happens, figure out what you did. When something goes wrong, ask how you contributed to creating that problem or that negative outcome.
The second pillar is total accountability, which connects directly to radical awareness. And the third pillar is conscious creation. You get closer to conscious creation by practicing total accountability and radical awareness, because you start identifying what works and what does not, what attitudes serve you and what attitudes hold you back.
Matt Wolfe: How do you help people through this? I mentioned earlier that I am back in therapy. I do not think I have talked about that on the podcast yet, but the catalyst was that we just adopted our son, who is almost three now. I wanted to make sure I was showing up as the best father I could be. Then the business piece came up, becoming a partner at Brand3 and being responsible for more people. The stakes just felt raised in every direction.
What came up for me in therapy was this fear of being seen as having done something wrong. A fear of making mistakes. There are patterns in my life where I am really hard on myself, and that is getting better, thankfully. But how do you get people past the fear of seeing themselves honestly? Of living in radical awareness and genuinely facing the fact that some things went well and some things did not?
Mike Irving: That is a great question, because it takes real bravery to be open and honest with yourself. It takes even more bravery to be open and honest with another person about how you truly feel, what really bothers you, what buttons get pressed. And we all have buttons that get pressed, in different circumstances and by different people.
But here is my honest answer to your question: I do not get people past that fear.
Matt Wolfe: Oh.
Mike Irving: That is not my role. My role is to be present, ask questions, be with them, and observe whether or not they go there themselves. If they do not, that is okay. It might just not be the right time. This goes to the question of how you choose your clients. I am never going to force someone to go there, or nudge them there, or convince them to go there. I am going to be with them and see if they choose to go there. If they do, I will offer support. If they do not, that is okay too.
If you are going to go on that journey with somebody, it is vital that they are choosing it freely, not being corralled or convinced into it. Create the space where they can feel safe enough to say yes if they want to. And allow them to choose.
Matt Wolfe: Good coaching, and I suppose good counseling too, is so much about creating space. Useful, curated, guided space, but space where people can make their own choices. I would call those spaces fairly sacred, because we just do not have them much in our lives.
I think about the brand and marketing discovery sessions we run the same way. Those are times for our clients to reflect on where they have been and where they want to go, and to make some genuinely important choices that they simply do not have the bandwidth to think about on their own.
I was talking yesterday to a coach working on a marketing project, and they shared a story about a new client who came in very much in go-go mode. Ambitious, career-focused, clear about their goals and trajectory. Three sessions later, because of the space that had been created, the conversation shifted entirely.
Instead of talking about their career track, they said: I think I have lost my spark. I think I have lost my compass. She went from knowing exactly where she wanted to go to having a much more useful conversation about the fact that she had lost her sense of direction and needed to find it again. And all of that happened in about three hours of space being made.
Mike Irving: Yes. And the people who engage with us, the members of our community, they tend to share a few things in common. One of them is that they genuinely want to understand themselves. Sure, they want to grow their business, generate more revenue, expand, take on more clients.
That is true. But there is something deeper. They want to understand what makes them tick. They want to understand why they react to certain things in certain ways, and sometimes they are not happy with how they react. They want to change those things. That is where radical awareness and total accountability become genuinely meaningful.
Mike Irving: We have a tool we use where, if someone sits with me and the space is created and they say they want help with A, B, and C, the first thing I notice is that A, B, and C are what we call non-ideal conditions in their personal or professional life. And here is the key thing: they are creating those non-ideal conditions somehow.
If we just try to change the non-ideal conditions directly, we are working with an outcome, not a cause. So our first task is to figure out what it is about this person that is creating them. Is it an attitude? An incompetency in a particular area? An aptitude issue? A belief system? A button that exists in them that keeps getting pressed in those circumstances? Until we establish what is actually generating those conditions, we are only working with the result rather than the true source of it.
We have a diagnostic tool to help us get there. It takes a couple of hours to complete, so it is not a quick 15-minute personality test. It is thorough. And it reveals the underlying attitudes, belief systems, and decision-making patterns that tend to contribute to the non-ideal conditions someone keeps creating in their life.
So there are a few layers. First, create the space where people can choose to go there. Then genuinely diagnose the source of the problem. And then let them choose again whether they agree with what they are seeing and whether they actually want to do something about it.
Matt Wolfe: What a gift to have that kind of space and that kind of experience available to you.
Matt Wolfe: I want to turn it back to you for a moment. As you think about your own journey of growing and scaling Advanced Business Abilities, where have you gotten stuck? What challenges came up along the way in terms of continuing to serve people the way you wanted to serve them? You have 20 years under your belt now.
Mike Irving: I do. Which also means I have a lot of mistakes under my belt. A lot of errors and things I tried that did not work and learned from.
I think one of the most challenging parts of life and business is continuing to be willing to honestly examine the ways that you create your own problems.
Mike Irving: As we grow a business, we start with a certain set of problems we are working to solve. And as we solve those, a new set of problems shows up that we did not expect. We work on those, solve them, and a whole new set appears that we also did not anticipate. This happens over a long period of time.
And this will sound funny, but there are people who eventually deal with the problem of what to do with all the money they have made. That sounds like a strange thing to call a problem, but I only mention it to illustrate the point. We start a business with one set of problems. As we grow and expand, we move into completely different sets of problems.
Mike Irving: One of the challenges I found, particularly early on, was that I still had more work to do to remove my own resistance and address the buttons that were getting pressed in me. And when those buttons get pressed, you react in unintended ways. An unintended response to a set of circumstances tends not to be a positive one.
Matt Wolfe: If you are willing to share, what were your buttons? Or what were some of them?
Mike Irving: I will tell this story. When I first completed what I call the predictor profiles, our diagnostic tool measures 49 factors of success. A couple of the results stood out for me.
The first was my critical trait. Critical is defined as your tendency to be judgmental, your tendency to see faults and problems in others. On a scale of zero to a hundred, the further below 30, the better. If any of the attitude traits land at 30 or above, that trait is going to be a way you create problems for yourself and for others. My critical trait was 60. Double where the problem starts.
Combine that with a competitive trait of 100. We do not know how far above 100 it actually was because we only measure to 100, and healthy is around 80 or below.
Then combine that with a patience trait of zero. Again, we do not know how far below zero it actually was. Healthy starts at around 39.
And then add an attention to detail score of zero. Healthy starts at 39 there as well.
So: highly critical, competitive to the point of wanting to win at all costs, zero patience, and zero attention to detail. I was a nightmare. Anyone who worked in my sales training organization 25 years ago, I genuinely apologize. It was not always bad, but that combination of traits, when I saw it laid out in front of me, I thought: I am really creating some problems for myself.
And when those buttons get pressed, you go to defend yourself in whatever way you have learned to defend. You might go on the attack. You might raise your voice. I had challenges in those areas.
Even after my first six-month transformation, which did an enormous amount to change things, I still found a year later, two years later, even two and a half to three years into coaching other people, that there were circumstances where those buttons could still get pressed and damage relationships.
That was not what I wanted. When it happened, I learned from it, and I went back to my research team and said: I made an error here, and it was because of my own resistance. Let us figure out how to solve this. And then I kept going.
That research team had three members. Two of them have now passed away. I learned an enormous amount from them. One of them, Bernie, was still working on himself and being coached by my team and me at 81 years old, the week before he passed away. Sharp as a tack mentally, even as his body was failing. Still allowing us to coach him, still working to remove resistance that was limiting him. At 81.
Matt Wolfe: I want to understand the name you use for them. You call them your research team, the people who helped you figure out how to move forward and get past your blocks. But that sounds like a lot more than research. It almost sounds like an understatement. They were clearly mentoring you, helping you live in radical awareness, all of that. How did they come to be called the research team?
Mike Irving: When I met them, they had been working in the field of developing people for 40 years. I was 30 years old. They were semi-retired. I showed up and said: you know things I want to know. Teach me.
When I asked them to mentor me, I honestly did not understand what I was asking them to do. I believe they understood it very well. I did not.
They had spent the previous nine or ten years researching something specific. Their organization had hit a wall twice, and it had come crumbling down both times. After the second time, they got together and asked: do we want to try again?
And they all agreed the answer was no, because they did not yet understand what the real problem was that had stopped them both times. So they decided they were not going to rebuild until they figured out what had actually gone wrong. They kept working and researching and trying to understand it. And they solved the problem.
By the time they had solved it, they were in their sixties and not sure they wanted to go back out and work that hard. And then I came along.
That is why I call them the research team. I also want to clarify that there is a distinction between the research team and the team I have been building. It is not just me delivering the service we offer. There is a whole team behind it.
Matt Wolfe: The reason I wanted to stay on that for a moment is that I love this simple idea, one I was only really introduced to a few years ago, that every leader should have their own team. Their own people support them. I do not think everyone has heard that yet.
And just like we were saying earlier, it is not that you need a coach because something is terribly wrong with you. It is that you should have one. There is a natural way of things that we have somehow cut ourselves off from. The idea of having your community, your tribe, your mentors, the people around you, someone who sees you in a way you cannot see yourself and can speak into your life in a way no one else can. These are good and necessary things.
Mike Irving: I could not agree more. I find them essential. Truly essential, if you want to keep developing yourself, your thinking, your decision-making, your skill set.
Michael Jordan had a coach until the day he retired. If the best athletes in the world engage coaches to spot blind spots, identify weaknesses, capitalize on strengths, and provide an objective viewpoint, then that should tell us something.
Because that is really all a coach is. A coach takes an objective viewpoint, with your permission, and directs your attention to things that are worth paying attention to. Including your own reactions, your responses, and ways of communicating that are either ineffective or that you are simply not aware of.
Everything we do communicates. Everything. We are either communicating intentionally, which tends to produce intended outcomes, or we are communicating unintentionally, which produces unintended outcomes. And those are rarely positive.
Matt Wolfe: I am just going to say that again, for the audience and for myself. Everything we do communicates. Everything. I feel like I have heard versions of that before, and I cannot fully explain why, but it is landing differently this time. Like a ton of bricks. It is just so true.
Matt Wolfe: I would like to explore briefly how a business has learned to both talk about and live into the client journey. If you have a B2B service, any kind of relationship-based service, you are going to have a very hard time starting that relationship until you have a clear story about who you are and the people you serve.
The story between the business and the ideal client is the story of that relationship. That is what brand strategy actually is, not colors and logos, but the story of who you are, who you serve, and what that relationship really looks like.
When you understand that story, your marketing improves. Your sales process accelerates. And the benefits keep cascading from there, into client experience, where you have a chance to live up to the promises on your website and make them real. Even into culture. We like to think of it as a flywheel, with the brand at the center touching every part of the client journey.
So how has your understanding of how you tell the story of what you do changed over 20 years? How has the way you talk about who you serve and the difference you make for them evolved?
Mike Irving: It has changed a lot, and at the same time the changes have been subtle. Which is actually what makes it feel like a lot over time. It has not changed 180 degrees. It has changed about 0.1 of a degree at a time over 20 years.
And each of those changes has come from a real experience with a member of our community. As we keep learning from them, and from the impact our work has on their personal and professional lives, we are able to keep narrowing down how we describe what we do and how we explain it.
One of the challenges I had was this: if you sit me down with someone and I can have a conversation, I will communicate with them based on what they say, what I observe, and what they share. I can help them genuinely understand what we are about and how we support people with their problems. But trying to create a website that does that? That was really difficult.
I demonstrated something to myself over about a six- or seven-year period. I have no business building a website. Not just the technical side of actually building one, but the messaging and the wording and the way you translate a living conversation into something that sits on a page.
Put me in front of 10 different people, and I can have 10 different conversations that help each one understand what we are about. Ask me to create a website that communicates the core message to everyone? I failed at that. I was genuinely bad at it.
Matt Wolfe: The marketer's version of what you just described is that everyone is too close to their own story. The same thing you help people do in their own lives, reflecting on the actions they are taking, applies to the story of a business. We are all too close to it and too deep inside it.
You have just articulated the core struggle of every B2B service provider. If I get them in the room, great. There is an 80 to 90 percent chance we move forward together. The challenge is getting them in the room in the first place.
And that is exactly the benefit of clear storytelling on a website and everywhere else your presence exists in the world. When the story is clear, you are building trust before they ever get in the room. You are building the relationship before the first conversation. All of that is being strengthened and accelerated in advance.
The website is now the first place that story lives. That is why there is so much anxiety around it.
But you are doing something really important that I want to highlight. A lot of businesses hit a point where they feel like the message is not landing and is not connecting with people, and they go internal. They get around a table and ask what else they could say, rather than listening to the people already in front of them and letting that guide the story forward. What you are doing is the opposite of that. And that matters enormously.
Matt Wolfe: How do you sell what you do? Has that changed over the years?
Mike Irving: That one is funny, because it actually has not changed.
Matt Wolfe: Okay.
Mike Irving: Well, hold on. How we sell has not changed. The packaging has shifted here and there, sure. But one of the things we help members of our community understand is that sales is not magic. It is not a gift-of-the-gab skill that you are either born with, or you are not.
When I was 21 and started doing door-to-door commission-only sales, I saw pretty quickly that sales was a process. A system. It was not about being funny or telling jokes or having a clever script. There were things you paid attention to, and once you understood the system, you could sell anything as long as you genuinely believed in it.
What I learned after meeting the people I call the research team is that I did not really understand sales back then. I could see it was a system, but I did not fully grasp the principles underneath it. What I learned from them 20 years ago was a set of principles, models, and processes that govern the system of selling. And that has not changed. It has not changed in 60 years. The same fundamentals that applied then still apply now.
What has changed is the packaging. What do we call or label the thing we are offering? That has evolved. But the core of what we sell and how we sell it is the same as it was 20 years ago. We have developed more processes behind it, but the concepts and the approach are consistent.
Matt Wolfe: I think that gets undervalued. Over time, culture shifts, and people's savvy around how things are being sold to them shifts too. But how we shape what we offer is usually less about what is convenient and more about what is relational. What is going to help someone feel a genuine sense of trust and move into it in a way that actually works for them.
Matt Wolfe: What about client experience? You serve something unique, and I think people undervalue how hard it can be to deliver coaching and the kind of relationship you offer really well. What have you learned about that over the years?
Mike Irving: It actually ties into sales quite a lot. If you think about the way someone makes a decision to take an action, whether we are talking about a sales conversation or a conversation between a leader and a member of their team, leadership and sales and managing a client relationship all use the same skills. They are based on the same principles, just applied with different intent.
The main thing I have learned, and this might sound simple when I say it: whatever commitments you make to whoever you are talking to, whether that is a client you have sold something to or a commitment you made to your partner at home, if you have been involved in someone making a commitment to take an action because it is aligned with something they genuinely want, then you have also made specific commitments in that process.
The most important thing you can do is follow through on what you said you would do, make sure they know you did it, and then keep the relationship going. Keep asking questions. Find out how things are going. I do not care what service you are offering. That process is the same.
Matt Wolfe: The only thing I would add is the importance of communicating that you have met those commitments. In your space, it is a bit more obvious because you are in the room with people and delivering the service live. But there are many services where businesses miss this entirely. When it comes to client experience, I think there are three things people consistently miss.
They miss the opportunity to help clients understand the ongoing value of what is being delivered. They miss the opportunity to keep educating people and reminding them of the things they were excited about when the relationship started. I tell my team: clients forget everything. Not as an insult, just as a reality. They have a lot going on. It is our job to remind them why we set the strategy the way we did, why we went down a certain road, and what we talked about a month ago that led to where we are today.
Mike Irving: What you are describing is the management of the perception of value. Throughout the client experience, every salesperson, every business owner, every team in the business has the task of managing the perception of value. And I want to be clear: I am not saying manipulate it or spin it. I am saying be willing to ask directly whether they are seeing value, and be willing to hear them say no. Be willing to hear that they are not happy. Take that information, ask more questions, and figure out what you can do to make sure they are actually getting value.
Matt Wolfe: Yes. And the other thing I was going to add is that we forget to celebrate the things clients have accomplished along the way, the milestones. And now, thanks to you, I know I also need to make sure they are celebrating for themselves, not just waiting for me to acknowledge it.
In terms of what you bring to people, I think we have only skimmed the surface today of the value you offer your clients. But you have brought tremendous value just in this conversation. We have stayed focused on the internal side, the things that hold people back from within. And I think we have spent a meaningful amount of time today validating the goodness and the rightness of not being alone in this, of having support and outside perspective. Thank you for reminding us of all of that.
Matt Wolfe: I know we have been at this for a while, and we are almost out of time. The last thing we always do is what we call the Behind the Brand Questionnaire. It comes back to this simple idea: if you are in a B2B service space built on relationships and trust, to market and sell those things, people need an encounter with you as a human being. Not just the good information and thought leadership you put out into the world, but who is the person behind the thoughts. So we try to dig a little deeper into who you are. For anyone thinking they might want to work with Mike, this will give you a few more insights.
Seven questions. Ready to go?
Mike Irving: Let's do it.
Matt Wolfe: What is your go-to karaoke song? Or if karaoke is not your thing, what do you wish you could sing?
Mike Irving: Anyone who knows me and is listening right now is going to giggle. My go-to karaoke song is Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton. I love it. I have spent many a night on the back of a boat with a group of friends from around the world singing that song. It has been a good time.
Matt Wolfe: Mine is anything eighties glam rock. I was in music theater; I was a high tenor, and karaoke is a chance to really go for it. Though I do it better with whiskey.
Mike Irving: Give me a few glasses of wine, and I will be a very convincing Chris Stapleton.
Matt Wolfe: What is the last thing that made you laugh out loud?
Mike Irving: Picturing you doing eighties glam rock.
Matt Wolfe: We have to make that happen someday.
Mike Irving: On the back of a boat. Perfect.
Matt Wolfe: What is your favorite way to get away from it all?
Mike Irving: Boating. And I love traveling, love camping. I spent 20 years four-wheel driving all across Australia, and more recently the last ten years have been about boating. Drop an anchor, get away from everyone, and spend time with the people I really care about. A couple of glasses of wine, good food. That is perfect for me.
Matt Wolfe: I can relate to that. You are further along the boating journey than I am, but I have had hints of what it can mean. What smell reminds you of a specific place or time?
Mike Irving: Have you been to Africa?
Matt Wolfe: Only to Morocco. I have been to Casablanca.
Mike Irving: I have been to Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, and South Africa. Africa has a smell. And there is a particular smell in Botswana that transports me there instantly. There is a business run by a couple of friends of mine called Lataka Safaris. If you ever want to go to Botswana, they are the people to do it with. Absolutely spectacular. Takes me back there in a moment.
Matt Wolfe: What is one day in your life you would like to relive?
Mike Irving: Am I reliving it because it was fantastic, or am I taking a mulligan?
Matt Wolfe: Player's choice. And it is funny you said that, because we did another interview this week where someone took a mulligan for the first time.
Mike Irving: I am going for the mulligan. September 14th, 2025. My wife and I were taking the boat around the northeast corner of Newfoundland, cruising underneath Fogo Island. We found a provincial park called the Dildo Run Provincial Park, a protected waterway. We dropped anchor, had a fantastic night, and woke up the next morning with a plan to have a relaxed morning, drink coffee, have breakfast, and then head into Lewisporte on the slack tide.
I went down to the engine room to do my morning checks and get the generator started. I would like a mulligan on that morning because the end result is that I am now missing part of a finger. I would very much like to do that one over and make sure I do not put my finger anywhere near the belt on the generator.
We actually went back less than a month ago and dropped anchor at the exact same spot. I got my do-over. I had the morning I wanted to have last year. So we went through a healing process, and we are good.
Matt Wolfe: That is so important. One of the captains who taught me when we first got our boat said, you are going to have some emotional events. I thought that was a very understated way to put it. But things happen on a boat where you suddenly realize you are in trouble and you are very vulnerable. And then you want to go back and recapture the calm. I am glad you had that moment of going back.
Mike Irving: I am also glad it was not worse than it was, because it easily could have been. I could be missing three or four fingers instead of just part of one. So I am counting my blessings.
Matt Wolfe: Absolutely. What three words would your loved ones use to describe you?
Mike Irving: Intentional. Fun. And a deep thinker.
Matt Wolfe: That is great. And this is the last one.
Matt Wolfe: What would it mean to have truly succeeded in your work? Not the company and its mission, but you personally, in your own quest?
Mike Irving: It would mean that I have fulfilled my life's purpose. That I have done what I chose to do and achieved the outcome I am aiming for.
Matt Wolfe: Do you have a name for that purpose, or is it still taking shape?
Mike Irving: I can talk about it in a few ways. One of them is this: I have an intent to make the world a better place. And the approach I am taking is one person at a time.
Help one person at a time become more able to intentionally create and achieve what they want, to consciously choose how they communicate with any person about any subject in any moment, and to choose how they respond. If we can do that with one person at a time over 30 or 40 years, it is going to mushroom out. We will have a better version of the world than the one we live in today. That is what I like to think about.
Matt Wolfe: That is powerful. And it further illustrates why you were exactly the right person for us to talk to on a podcast called The CEO's Heart for Service. We love talking to people like you, the difference makers, the helpers, the people with genuine heart. I cannot thank you enough for being here. I feel like I could keep going for hours, but who has the time?
What is the best way for people to engage with you or reach out if they feel compelled to after today?
Mike Irving: Happy to share. Two things. You can find me on LinkedIn, or go to advancedbusinessabilities.com.
We have also created a free executive effectiveness benchmark tool. If you are willing to spend 10 or 15 minutes responding to some simple questions, it will give you a 90-day plan and a benchmark report showing how your thinking compares to your peers.
You can access that at execbenchmark.com. It is completely free, takes 10 to 15 minutes at most, and if you get value out of it, I would love to have a conversation about how we can help you implement some changes.
Matt Wolfe: Amazing. execbenchmark.com. For our side of things, we have Scale Beyond Referrals, which I mentioned earlier. It is for B2B service providers who gave up on marketing, got frustrated, and are trying to get by on referrals and warm introductions. We will help you understand why it never clicked and introduce you to a framework for relational marketing. We do that through an initial workshop. You can find information at scalebeyondreferrals.com or at brand3.net.
Thank you again, Mike. I genuinely hope lots of people reach out to you.
Mike Irving: Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Wolfe: This has been Matt Wolfe from Brand3. We will see you next time.
MAILING
201 Market Street S
Suite 201
Havre de Grace, MD 21078
OFFICE LOCATIONS
Havre de Grace, MD
Lake Stevens, WA
