Full Transcript – Greg Fisher – Wild Business Growth Podcast #320

This is the full transcript for Episode #320 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Greg Fisher – Kelley Entrepreneurship Professor, The Principles of Entrepreneurial Progress. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Greg Fisher 0:00
You as the entrepreneur need to bring the energy that there’s something that needs to be done here.

Max Branstetter 0:19
Hoosier, hello. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This will be replaced here from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 320 and today’s guest is Greg Fisher. Greg is one of my all time favorite entrepreneurship professors at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Greg is just awesome, as you’ll hear in this episode. In this episode, we talk his journey from South Africa to becoming Professor of Entrepreneurship at Kelley and IU lessons from his brand new book, The Principles of Entrepreneurial Progress. Full title, how to create and sustain momentum when launching a startup, and some hidden gems in Bloomington, it is Professor Fisher. Enjoyyyyyy the showwwwwwww! Alllllrightyyyyyyy we are here with Greg Fisher, one of my favorite all-time professors of entrepreneurship from the Kelley School of Business. This is really, really cool coming full circle. You’ve actually been mentioned on this podcast before, Greg, with Blake Sorensen from Blake’s Seed Based back in episode 146 I know you’re close with him and advisor to his business, but Greg, so excited to finally have you on. Thank you so much for joining. How you doing today? Well, it’s

Greg Fisher 1:57
great to be here. I’m a fan of the podcast, and it’s so interesting to be on the other side of the of the equation,

Max Branstetter 2:04
yeah, hopefully interesting for the better, not interesting for the worse. You don’t have to answer that.

Greg Fisher 2:11
It would be the same if you saw how the sausage was made behind the curtain of a professor’s life. Exactly.

Max Branstetter 2:18
Well, we’re definitely going to going to going to get into that. And we’re going to get into your new book, The principles of entrepreneurial progress, which, right at the time is of recording is hot off the press. So congrats on that. You’re, I’m sure, crazy busy for the launch, and you’re making time with us here today, so I really appreciate that. But before we get into the book, and some of these, like, you know, key principles of entrepreneurial progress. If I were to make up a term your own entrepreneurial experience before you got into teaching entrepreneurship, I know, you know, back in South Africa, you had the Business Learning Lab, and you grew that, you exited that. Can you share, like, what type of business was and what was the main thing you learned from that experience? Yeah,

Greg Fisher 3:01
so this was a business born out of my MBA. I was an MBA student, and sort of had been working at Deloitte while in the program, sort of learnt about the concept of entrepreneurship and started to question whether that might work for me and and the original conceiving of the idea was to sort of say, Could we do something that would create more interesting learning opportunities for people in corporations I had been in the sort of learning and development division of of Deloitte, Partly to get away from auditing and accounting, and I saw sort of some of the challenges we had there, and saw that if you applied something of a design thinking lens, or a sort of more innovative lens to what was happening in corporate education and corporate training and development, it could generate some interesting results. So we started off along that line, but over time, pivoted towards more online delivery, because it was sort of at the time that the internet was proliferating, becoming more accessible to a lot of people. Bandwidth was increasing so you could do more. And so we sort of got on the early wave of that, and started developing or transitioning a lot of our programs into e learning programs. And so the thing that allowed us to scale was to develop a series of eLearning Modules, effectively that banks, insurance companies and auditing firms could white label or license and use and then pay us a fee for those. And they were mostly orientated towards finances, budgeting, accounting, understanding, sort of analyzing financial statements and stuff, because that was the background that I had come from, and often a piece of sort of training in large corporations that for entry level or mid level managers tends to be pretty. Challenging and can be somewhat boring, and so we try to bring life into it. So the whole notion was to sort of create these modules that could, for the most part, be branded by the organization, and we would just provide the technology and the content and allow them to run these training modules. So the

Max Branstetter 5:19
word that jumped out at me was e learning, because there’s something about that experience that clearly foreshadowed you being a professor. And now you you know, at the time of this recording, you’re a professor for grad students, as well as through, you know, Kelly direct the online MBA. So you know you’ve taken e learning to the next level. And I know that’s, you know, like the top ranked online MBA, like, just an incredible program. So what actually got you to, you know, like wanting to become a college professor?

Greg Fisher 5:51
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I come from a family of teachers, essentially, or on my mom’s side of the family, a lot of people have been teachers. I when I was graduating high school, had this inclination of wanting to potentially do some kind of teaching. And all through college, I had coached sports to elementary school level students, and had always sort of had this notion that I’ve got a sort of teaching desire within me, but because of sort of the career path I’d taken and paying for university and so on, I ended up becoming an auditor or an accountant, the equivalent of a CPA in South Africa. It’s called the CA, and I just discovered that wasn’t for me. And so I was always looking for ways of getting out of that and back towards what I considered sort of my true calling or identity. And one of the ways to do it was to move into the sort of corporate training space I could still be within Deloitte, still sort of serving my time as in order to train and develop as an accountant in auditor and get the eventual ca or CPA license, and so drifted towards that, and then, because I built up that base of experience, moving into something that was aligned with that made sense from a business standpoint, but there was always still this calling out there to do something that was teaching orientated at this stage, I’d sort of gotten a little bit of the golden handcuffs where I had started earning relatively well by South African standards, and living the life and sort of being somewhat ambitious. And teachers are not paid very well back in South Africa. So if I was to go back to teaching, it would have been sort of like, Oh, I’m sort of declaring poverty compared to what I was used to. In the process of doing an MBA, I discovered, oh, there’s this array of teachers that are very engaged in sort of higher level issues and interact with smart students, and they operate in business schools. Because I’d always be I’d been in a traditional university prior to that, and which didn’t really have a business school at a commerce department. And so through the MBA, I spent a large portion of my MBA questioning whether I could be one of the people who was teaching in the class. Even though I started learning lab, I always had this ambition of sort of moving on from that to try and become a professor. It’s happened over time. It’s one of the best decisions I ever made. I absolutely love it. It’s a great career on many fronts, and just sort of I had always been looking so for sort of the seven or eight years of my career up to that point in time, as to what really fit me, my identity, my desire to teach, my desire to sort of interact in the business world. And it just landed up being the sort of perfect recipe. Yeah,

Max Branstetter 8:50
we were trying to put together, you know, if you could be that person in front of the classroom, and I think now it’s pretty clear that you can be and you’re an awesome professor, you turn that dream into reality. But real quick before we move on, I’m biased. I’ll say you’re biased as well. We’re huge fans of the Kelley School of Business. We’re huge fans at Indiana University. But I would imagine growing up in South Africa when you were like, three years old, it wasn’t like, I always want to be a Kelley professor. Like, what was it about Kelley and Indiana University that made it a really appealing place and got you to move to probably, seemingly middle of nowhere Indiana. When

Greg Fisher 9:28
I first moved to the US, I went to do my PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. And the reason I landed up there was the Dean of the Business School where I had done my MBA, had gotten his PhD from there. And as a result of that, I think two of the professors in our MBA came from the uni, from the Foster School, the University of Washington. I had met them. They knew me. I had some kind of connection there. And obviously, coming from South Africa, everyone knows Seattle. They’ve watched. Grey’s Anatomy, and whatever

Max Branstetter 10:02
else is, Grey’s Anatomy huge in South Africa or

Greg Fisher 10:05
Sleepless in Seattle. And so it’s sort of, you know, we’re a physician, so So I knew, yeah, exactly. So I knew where I was going, and I had just gotten married, so my wife, who’s also South African, we both moved there, and it was sort of a really interesting time of our lives, because we went there and we really didn’t know much about the rest of the US. But I’ve always had this inclination of, or been intrigued by the concept of a college town, because in South Africa, you don’t really get college towns. All the universities are in the big cities. But I had sort of heard about it, try to understand the dynamics of what it would be like to be in a town where the central sort of institution is a university, and almost everything centers around that. And I’ve always quite liked smaller places, places where it’s easy to get around. You can get into the outdoors quite easily. It’s maybe a little less expensive to live. I grew up in Johannesburg, where to go anywhere is an hour. So you get in the car, you drive for an hour to get absolutely anywhere. And I was sort of trying to get away from that kind of lifestyle. And so as I moved through my PhD program, which takes four or five years, I started to imagine what life could be, not just from a institution standpoint, but also from a lifestyle standpoint. And try to combine the idea of being able to live this lifestyle, of being able to get into nature quite quickly, being able to get to sports games and interact and in an interesting environments, a sort of intellectual environment, but also be in a relatively small town. And my, one of my priorities in looking for positions post PhD was I would prefer to be in a college town, if such a thing came about. And obviously Bloomington, where Indiana University is, absolutely ticks all those boxes. And then fortunately for me, IU has a really good entrepreneurship program or scholarship. So in the area I’m in, it’s seen as one of the sort of elite institutions in terms of producing research, in terms of having programs that students can do. And so it just landed up being a perfect fit. And in essence, when I went on the job market, it was sort of like a dream job that I didn’t know whether I could get or not. And I just took a took a shot at it, and it’s worked out really, really well.

Max Branstetter 12:36
It certainly has. And that’s there’s so many great points on Bloomington or B Town, whatever you want to call it. I always say, like, it’s like the perfect college town. Like, when you think of a college town, like, I think, and again, biased, but I think of Bloomington, because, like, when you show up there, you’re right, it’s kind of like, you know, like, it’s not like a tiny city, but it’s not a big city, and it’s like a good in between. And, you know, if you drive five minutes anyway, it’s like farmland. So it’s kind of like you feel kind of remote, and the university is such a big part of it, and the campus is just so beautiful. And also, just like the town square and Bloomington Kirkwood Avenue, there’s so many wonderful parts about it. And there’s like, two high school, you know, that’s like, there’s there’s families, as you know, there’s families that live there as well, in addition to college students and the faculty. So it’s just a beautiful place to be, not to mention a fantastic entrepreneurship program. Yeah. So speaking of entrepreneurship, let’s get to the principles of entrepreneurial progress. And so again, hot off the press, brand new book. You know, I always think back to the class I took, and I was a student of yours back, you know, the rare time now that you were teaching undergrad. So I got lucky, but always so many amazing examples in case studies and fun projects and presentations in your class. And so, like, I’m a sucker for anything that you’re sharing out any of your insight, any of your wisdom, but I think this book is super, super exciting, and as part of it, there’s 12 principles of entrepreneurial progress. We’re not going to go through all of them in order, but I do want to start off by like, high level. What is it about, like, this kernel or like section of entrepreneurship that got you compelled to write a book on this subject matter? It’s

Greg Fisher 14:19
this idea that getting started and making sort of meaningful progress in the early stages of getting started is actually really tough, and part of the reason I see that is because, you know, we got a lot of students, whether it’s MBAs or undergrads, who have entrepreneurial ambition while they’re here, come up with an idea, and really can land up spinning their wheels quite a lot during that time, and so I’ve seen it time and time again. It’s like a cycle. Someone arrives at your office, they think they’ve got a something that they want to do, an idea for an app, a notion for a new retail concept. To whatever it might be. It’s sort of like, what advice, concrete advice, can I give them that would really move the needle and make a difference? And what, from our research standpoint, can we point to that might really help, what pragmatically is simple enough to sort of act on that I could offer that would be valuable or useful. And I’ve always sort of been somewhat frustrated by entrepreneurship, because it’s sort of put out there as this complex, difficult thing to achieve, and no one’s, I don’t think, tried to distill it down to sort of its fundamentals, or I think there’s some sort of recipes for entrepreneurship that are very useful, but they’re sort of directed towards a type of business or a particular setting. But I wanted to go even more fundamental than that, to sort of say, what are the core kernels of advice or input that can really make a difference when someone’s trying to get started with a business idea and trying to move it from the point of having the idea, or having a notion that they want to do something, to having something that’s somewhat fundable, or that external investors might be Interested in, if that’s the direction they want to go, if it’s not the direction they want to go, then something that’s starting to really get momentum and be sustainable. So it’s that early phase of the business that I think having concrete things that you can act on can make a real difference. And then the second piece of that is part of my role as a professor is we do a lot of research. We and the field as a whole does a lot of research, but a lot of that’s getting stuck back in academic journals, and it might reach a few people through class sessions or other things, but it’s not being translated into things that are really accessible to the general public who want to start a business, um, sometimes it comes through in in maybe a magazine article or something, but trying to take what we’ve understood from a research standpoint and make it, translate it so that it’s really useful to others, I think, is an important endeavor. And so it’s a combination of those things that sort of prompted me to to want to put this book together. Well,

Max Branstetter 17:24
I think that’s a sign of a great professor and a great teacher in general. Is like simplifying things. Like, you hear about people talking about, you know, trying to get their marketing message across. And it’s like people always use the example of like, like, how would you explain this to like, a second grader? For example, shout out my wife, Dana. Who teaches 2nd grade. But I think it’s a really good principle. Pardon my use of your word to focus around and yeah, that early phase of entrepreneurship is just so fascinating. And that’s part of like, why I became entre, why I became interested in entrepreneurship and started this podcast in the first place. Is like that journey from idea to real business in itself, like not even thinking about, like growing the business yet, but just like starting it and turning into a real, like, stable business is just so fascinating. And that’s, you know, like the lifeblood of how this industry, you know, the industry of entrepreneurs, if you call it, flourishes on that note of like that early phase, what’s something that you see with like your students or businesses you’re advising that many new entrepreneurs run into in like those early days of starting a business that they really didn’t expect, kind of caught them off guard. One

Greg Fisher 18:33
of the things just very explicitly building on what you’ve just said, is they try and over complicate things too early. Principle number one is the problem. Principle identify a problem that’s really worth solving. And many people get that right. Some people make a mistake of just sort of saying it would be nice to have this, or I thought I want this, but really getting down to the problem that you’re trying to solve is the foundational starting point. So who’s got that problem? Why have they got that problem? How often do they experience it? What the emotions or the frustrations that they that they endure when they experience it, that can quite easily be met and solved. But then, as you start to think about solutions to that problem and how you might build a business out of them. People want to, typically, over complicate things very, very quickly, so they think of a super app with a whole lot of features, and it’s going to change the world. And

Max Branstetter 19:35
I don’t know a Super App sounds pretty cool.

Greg Fisher 19:39
It does sound cool, but it’s very hard to act on. And So principle number three, so is the simplicity principle is get it down to its absolute core of what you’re doing like in order to solve that problem, what’s the simplest way that you can solve that problem in a way that’s going to be meaningful to others? And. It’s often leveraging existing technology, utilizing resources that you’ve got, conveying the idea as you’ve just described, in the simplest way possible. So one of the big mistakes I see people make is in order to try and impress the outside world or impress their rich uncle or their their professor or their friends is they over complicate what they’re trying to do instead of trying to keep it as simple as possible, because keeping it simple allows you to take action, allows you to make progress, allows you to test out whether the core of the idea can actually work. So that’s certainly one of the things that I see simplicity.

Max Branstetter 20:43
How does it work for an entrepreneur, like, how do you apply that to your business? Simplicity number

Greg Fisher 20:49
one, what is the problem we’re trying to solve, and how can we solve that as simply as possible? And when I say simply, I mean strip out anything that’s just nice to have and say, What’s core to solving this problem? I use the simple acronym, the word simple as an acronym, in order to convey the simplicity principle. And the S stands for subtracting anything that’s not necessary to solve the problem. The I stands for imitating what others have done, because often people have solved pieces of the problem, or there’s a technology that you can just plug in to do something. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel in what you’re doing. And then I keep going through that like the L stands for leveraging resources that are under your control because you’ve already got access to them, and you can can take action. The E stands for explaining this thing in as simple terms as possible, or getting I use that as a means to convey what are the things you need to work on in your business in order to simplify it. The P stands for eradicating or taking out any extraneous pieces of your portfolio, of your product portfolio. So those are the concrete things that I’m suggesting around simplicity. And there’s actually really good empirical research to support this idea of subtracting, of eliminating, of taking things away to make things better. And I build on that research to make the arguments around simplicity, to convey this as a core tenant of making progress as you build go forward with the business.

Max Branstetter 22:30
That’s an incredible acronym. And also you made this very challenging on yourself to remember all the acronyms and all the principles.

Greg Fisher 22:38
Well, I was thinking I could sort of dive into the book and try and try and find where it where it is. In fact, I think I’ve just, I might have just seen the page so, so it the S is subtract elements that aren’t needed. The I is imitate others. The M is minimize features. So the P is pruning products in your portfolio. The L is leverage resources, and the E is edit explanation. So that’s, that’s the acronym, for sure, but I would need the book

Max Branstetter 23:06
to remember it. There’s going to be a test at the end of this interview, Greg, where we go through those again. So some of the examples you talked about so far, the principles, there’s the problem, there’s, you know, basically, keep it simple, stupid. In the simple acronym, there another I guess there’s a lot of acronyms around simple that’s great. What’s another one? Maybe like one of the later principles, like, what’s another one? That’s kind of like a different area. That’s another good thing to think about as you’re starting or building a business. So just

Greg Fisher 23:33
to step back, the way I organize the principles is, as you pointed out earlier, there’s 12 of them. The first six are focused on early value creation. So I put them in a value bucket, the practical things you can do to begin to create value around a new idea or a new business. And so those are the first six. And then the value bucket, almost like stretches across the top. And then there’s three other types of principles, each with two elements to them that contribute to creating value. And so there’s a resource bucket. Or how do you think about resources? Resourcing, which might include financing. It might include getting people on board. It might include other things. There’s a action bucket. So what are some of the fundamental actions you can take. And then there’s what I call the big picture bucket, which is about tying things together. So those three buckets sort of support the value principles. For example, one of them in the action bucket is what we call the hustle principle. And some of the research that I’ve done and published is around this construct of entrepreneurial hustle, which really seems to make a difference. And now it’s it’s different from the sort of hustle culture that we often see out now,

Max Branstetter 24:50
I was gonna say that’s something that how like I feel like, over the past decade, it, you know, has become almost like a negative thing if, like, you’re hustling too hard, or that, or that, or it’s like you’re like. Hustle, bro, but it’s yeah, you’re saying it in a different light,

Greg Fisher 25:03
in the context of getting something started. The way we defined it, and where this was derived from was we did this deep dive and analysis of all of the podcast interviews with entrepreneurs from the how I built this podcast, and we we had taken the first, the very first 48 of them, and analyzed them for themes, for actions, for everything, and eventually derived this idea of entrepreneurial hustle being a necessary, but not sufficient condition for success. So if you don’t have it, it’s going to be really hard to move forward. If you do have it, it doesn’t assure you of being successful, but we defined it as sort of being dependent on two key dimensions. And the one is acting with urgency. You as the entrepreneur need to bring the energy that there’s something that needs to be done here. And often entrepreneurs or you are invoking sort of some kind of time restriction on themselves or their early employees to make sure they’re getting things done and action is happening, as opposed to just talking about it, thinking about it, creating Excel spreadsheets. And then the second piece of hustle was the that often that urgency is coupled with some kind of unorthodoxy. You’re not just doing things the way they’ve always been done. You’re willing to skirt around and make thing, do things slightly different from what they’ve been done in the past and and when you combine urgency and unorthodoxy, you get this sort of notion of hustle. And some of the examples we referred to back in the research and I bring up in the book are Sarah Blakely, when she’s founding Spanx, her prototype is literally just cutting off the feet of traditional pantyhose, and she that’s what she uses. And then when she’s trying to sell it into Neiman Marcus, she, instead of just doing the traditional sales presentation, she realizes she’s losing the buyer, and she says, Come with me to the the change room, to the fitting room, to the stalls. And sort of shows what the what what her clothes look like without this new underwear, and then what it looks like with it. And so willing to do these things with a sense of urgency and a sense of unorthodoxy that really moves the needle. And so we go quite deep into the concept of hustle and why it’s important in these early stages of a business, because it allows you to get things done, to start to show progress, and that’s what brings other people on board, and that’s what allows you to to to sort of have something to show for your efforts.

Max Branstetter 27:33
That’s a wonderful equation. There urgency plus unorthodoxy Equals Hustle. And shout out Sara Blakely. She’s out of this world. Inspiring, yeah, yeah.

Greg Fisher 27:44
And the thing we put in there, so we do literally write it up like an equation.

Max Branstetter 27:49
Get out your calculator. Yeah, I’ve got action,

Greg Fisher 27:52
but then urgency and unorthodoxy in the parentheses multiplied next to each other in the parentheses next to the action. So you need to take action. But part of turning action into hustle is to layer in some urgency and some unorthodoxy with it.

Max Branstetter 28:09
So I’m especially fascinated by that urgency piece. Is that something, in your opinion and in your research, like, is that something that’s innate for certain entrepreneurs, or is that something that can be learned.

Greg Fisher 28:21
I don’t even know if it’s about learning it. I think it’s about recognizing that invoking urgency is valuable for oneself and is valuable for other people who you’re trying to bring on board. So the minute I started to study hustle, I started to say, Okay, well, let me test myself whether I can try and get more done in a day by trying to say, Okay, well, I’m giving myself a deadline of a day to write this introduction to a paper, or to prepare this set of slides, or I’m only going to give myself the morning to do this. And the minute I invoke that urgency, I start to see myself operating in a slightly different way, I can get more done. And it’s sort of like prompts me to think about the problem slightly differently. And so I think it’s not even necessarily that you need to learn it. You just need to recognize it and begin to practice it, and then you start to see the value it creates. So one of the and I know he’s a controversial figure, but one of the people who really uses urgency to the max is Elon Musk in his businesses. If you read through the book called Lift off by Eric Berger, about the founding of SpaceX, condensed time and creating a sense of urgency is like one of his superpowers. And so what he’s always doing with his team is he’s saying, NASA does this in six months. We’re going to do it in one NASA took three years to get this thing approved. We’re going to take three months. And he, like radically condenses time as his. Expectations around how much they’re going to get done within time, and that transforms the way they think about the problems, the way they tackle the problems, and the output that comes from those efforts. And so that’s just one of the really salient outlier examples of the sense of urgency. We’ve

Max Branstetter 30:17
come totally full circle now, because when I was in your class, you know, over 10 years ago, at the time of this recording, we did a project. The topic we chose for our presentation was about Elon Musk and at the time, which I’m sure they’re still doing, scaling the Tesla supercharger, you know, those charging stations, because at the time, they were like, you know, within 100 miles, maybe 50 miles of like, supposedly everywhere in the US. And now I’m sure there are even more so. But it’s funny, you brought up musk, because, yeah, we literally studied him 10 years ago. But that urgency, that hustle, I think, is so important. So there’s so so I’m not going to make you, you know, recite all of them, but there’s so many amazing principles of entrepreneurial progress in your book. You just have a knack for translating that sort of in the weeds research to something that’s digestible. And so many entrepreneurs can learn from high level if you are an entrepreneur and you’re feeling kind of stuck like you need some help getting some momentum and moving forward with your business, what’s just kind of like a good, high level philosophy, if you will, that will help you unlock things and maybe bring your business to the next level. So

Greg Fisher 31:27
one of the ways, one of the things I like to encourage entrepreneurs to think about is, what can I do in the next day, in the next week and in the next month that’s going to move me forward in a meaningful way. And think about it at those three gradients of time, what can I do today that’s actually going to be meaningful? What can I do? And I call the response to these in the book, micro bursts of progress, like you’re looking for these little injections of things you can do that are going to be somewhat meaningful. What can I do today? Who can I call? What can I build? What tests can I run? So what can I actually do today? What can I do in the next week? That’s sort of a slightly different time frame, but it’s still forcing you to think about the near term. And then what could I do over the next month and to almost, if you’re stuck, go through step back, go and get a cup of coffee or whatever you prefer, and go and brainstorm and almost write yourself down next day, next week, next month, what you can do in those times that is going to meaningfully move things forward. And then, you know, the these principles are designed to sort of be anchors for what might be meaningful actions during that time, those gradients of time, like, if you’re really stuck, go back to the problem that you’re trying to solve and say, What is this problem? Let me really try and get deeper into it, and what are some easy solutions for it, but it’s sort of like, okay, well, as I’m thinking about what I can do in those time frames, let me go back to the principles and see which of them feel right to act on or to engage with in each of those time frames. So you know, do I need to do more exploration, that’s our second principle. Or do I need to build a prototype? That’s our fourth principle. Or do I need to run a test or an experiment? That’s our fifth principle. Do I need to better tell the story of what I’m doing? That’s one of our principles. Do I need to step back and think about this thing cut, how this thing comes together in its business model. That’s one of our principles. So the principles sort of go from some very micro and very specific to to slightly bigger and more complex as you evolve through them. But the idea is that you can actually take action in response to any of these principles in those kinds of time frames.

Max Branstetter 34:02
Well, speaking of timing and time frames, it is time for the moment you’ve been dreading. I’m sure. Let’s time. Time to wrap up with some rapid fire. Q, A, you ready for it? Yeah, sure. All right, let’s get wild. What is your pitch to get anybody to become a fan of cycling or bike riding, because I know you are

Greg Fisher 34:23
an activity that you can do as long as you live. That’s going to get your heart rate up, but not break your knees.

Max Branstetter 34:33
That’s perfect, yeah, because there’s a lot of benefits of running, but yeah, it can wear on you over time, so that’s great. All right, what is the biggest difference you’ve noticed over the past decade in teaching undergrad students versus graduate students?

Greg Fisher 34:48
Undergrad students lots of energy, not a lot of experience to anchor back on. So you got to sort of bring

Max Branstetter 34:55
certainly was guilty of that.

Greg Fisher 35:00
Graduate students think they know it all. And you got to sort of bring them back back to size and very worried about getting a job.

Max Branstetter 35:08
Yeah, fun. So it’s kind of like a happy medium there that you got to bring people towards, all right? And then how about an extra wrinkle to that? You know now you’re doing a lot of online teaching as well. What’s besides the obvious, logistic wise, like, what’s the biggest change that you’ve needed to make as a professor of you know, online MBA vs. traditional MBA,

Greg Fisher 35:30
one of the things is just really understanding or distilling what’s appropriate to be delivered in an asynchronous fashion, without me needing to be there, and where’s the real value that comes from interaction with the professor. So you sort of split because there’s less face time, and you splitting your time apart. And I’ve had to really say, Where’s my value that as a person interacting with the students I can Where’s that coming from? And what can I shift into video, shift into audio format, shift into other formats that they can digest in their own time,

Max Branstetter 36:05
all right? And then, besides it taking over an hour to go anywhere, which I’m sure is up there, what’s the biggest thing you actually miss about Johannesburg?

Greg Fisher 36:14
Johannesburg, or South Africa more generally, is a place where you can just get stuff done. So if you go back to us referring to hustle,

Max Branstetter 36:22
I was going to say it sounds like a great place for entrepreneurs. Well,

Greg Fisher 36:25
it isn’t. It isn’t because there’s not a lot of funding and not a lot of it’s difficult to access external resources. But in terms of making things happen, there’s always, there’s a term in Afrikaans, which is one of the other languages in South Africa, which says N Boer maak n plan, which is a farmer makes a plan, and it’s sort of like the ethos or essence of how South Africans think is, there’s always a way to solve a problem. And so I often miss in in the South African culture, if you’re trying to do something, it’s always okay, well, we could do this, and then we do this, and then we do this in the US culture, it’s often, well, we can’t do it because there’s this rule, or there’s this problem where no one’s done it like that in the past. So it’s that kind of mentality that I sometimes miss. Oh,

Max Branstetter 37:14
that’s really interesting, all right. Well, we’re gonna make you feel at home again in the USA. What what was like the moment that, you know, you lived in the USA long enough that you were like, you know this like, this is home. Obviously, will never be original home. But still, that’s

Greg Fisher 37:29
a great question. So I’ve had a few moments. I remember the moment. I remember a moment probably around the time I was teaching you, so I’d been at I it

Max Branstetter 37:41
was, it was when I walked into the classroom, and you’re like, this kid’s awesome. No,

Greg Fisher 37:46
it was, it was, I might have been coming to your class, but it was walking across that bridge at the Kelly School of Business. So those who don’t know, the Kelly school is a it’s got a road that runs right through it, and a bridge that goes over that road, where, if you’re going to to one side, you gotta go across the bridge to get to the other side and so on. There’s often quite nice views from there. So I was walking across the bridge at the Kelly School of Business. It was probably about 7:30 or 8 in the morning. It was early. The sun was coming up, and I was carrying my briefcase, walking there, dressed up to go to class, and I was like, wow, this is the life I wanted to live when all those years when I was thinking back to being a teacher, to wanting to get into a business school, I was going off to teach, and I was like, This is it. I’ve arrived. I’ve done it. And so that was one moment, and then would have been the year before last we got citizenship. So that’s how long it takes. I’ve lived here for that’s crazy for 15 or 16 years, and eventually got citizenship and just that whole process of recognizing, ah, now I’m actually accepted. So I still hold on strong. I’ve always been accepted identity, but I still, I do value the opportunity that the US has given me that’s

Max Branstetter 39:01
I have chills and shout out, N Fee Ln, a wonderful street. But so last one, in the spirit of Bloomington, what is the most underrated restaurant in Bloomington? Like your your hidden gem, which we won’t tell anybody about, wink,

Greg Fisher 39:19
wink, well, for food, in terms of quality of food, for me, it’s Upland Brewery. So it’s a place you know, upland often get known for their beers, and in particular for their sours. But the thing that they do really well is just make the absolute, in my opinion, best burger in town. So there’s a burger they make, called the plum burger. It’s actually got like plum jam on it in somewhere in there, and a whole lot of other things, high quality meat. And it’s one of the places that’s, interestingly enough, open on a Sunday night. Bloomington sort of shuts down on a Sunday but I love going out on a Sunday night, sort of thinking about the week ahead, chatting about the weekend. That’s just been and on a good night, you can sit outside, on the balcony, on the veranda, we can take our dog. And so it’s just got a special place in my heart

Max Branstetter 40:10
that is a special place. Yeah, I spent many times there in Bloomington. I think I don’t know they still have it, but they the first time I heard about upland was my my aunt Mindy, she had a sandwich there called the Three Little Pigs. It was like three different types of pork, or ham or something like that. It was just a really, really good sandwich. But, yeah, their burgers are always amazing, too. And then I think it’s them also that created the for football this year, and I guess basketball as well. The candy stripe can. It’s like a can with candy stripes on it.

Greg Fisher 40:38
Yeah, you see that everywhere now. So I was lucky enough to go to a lot of the football games this year because, you know, IU is on the up, yeah, and that’s just become sort of part of the sort of visual of being at Memorial Stadium, as you seeing those, whatever they’ve called it Hoosier lager, or whatever it is,

Max Branstetter 40:58
yeah, it’s, it just looks like the best beer can in the world. Well, Greg, thank you so much. Really appreciate all you’re doing. And obviously, you know, inspired me over 10 years ago, and so this is really cool, coming full circle. Thank you so much for for coming on and for all you do to inspire and help out aspiring entrepreneurs out there. Where is the best place if people want to grab a copy of your book, where’s the best place for that? And then if they just want to learn more connect with you, online.

Greg Fisher 41:26
Book is available on Amazon. You know, if you just search for the principles of entrepreneurial progress, it’s it’s there now, and there’s you can buy a hard copy or soft copy or a Kindle version. Publisher is Oxford University Press o up, if you just search for that, another place to buy it. The easiest way to connect with me is I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I actually send out a daily mini newsletter on LinkedIn. I focused on entrepreneurship and strategy topics, and that’s sort of my go to place. And part of the reason is a lot of our past students are active on LinkedIn, and they use it to get jobs and then stay there. So it’s the way I stay in touch with prior students and various things. If you just search for me on LinkedIn or linkedin.com, Greg C Fisher is basically what the URL is. So either of those two things are probably the best to get the book or the best to get to stay connected with

Max Branstetter 42:25
me. Perfect. And I should say Greg is one of my favorite names in the world, because it’s also my dad’s name. So very familiar with Greg going back so you know, great entrepreneur.

Greg Fisher 42:35
If I’d had a son, I would have called him Max.

Max Branstetter 42:38
Perfect. You’re gonna bring a tear to my eye. Alright, Greg.

Last thing, Final Thoughts. It could just be a quote or like words to live by just a few, few final words of entrepreneurial advice. Send us home here.

Greg Fisher 42:54
Well, I’ve got, I’ve got a next to me in my office, a sign that says, get it done. But then in front of the it is an sh that’s sort of slightly grayed out. And I think that’s part of what entails being an entrepreneur, is getting it done, and that often means getting shit done.

Max Branstetter 43:16
Well, shit. Thank you so much, Greg, for coming on the podcast, sharing your unbelievable story, entrepreneurial lessons, Professorly lessons, and thank you, Wild Listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to Follow the Wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast app and Subscribe on YouTube for the video versions. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter You can also find us on Goodpods, where we are the #1 all-time creativity podcast. And for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That is where podcasting meets entrepreneurship meets puns that well that are not good. And you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!