Rod McDermott is the CEO + Co-Founder of Activate 180, which provides expert insights and best practices to achieve ultimate job satisfaction and career success; the CEO + Co-Founder of McDermott + Bull, one of the fastest-growing executive search firms in North America with offices domestically and internationally; the President + CEO of M+B Interim Leaders, which he founded along with Angela Anderson in 2011 to address an increased client need for time-sensitive solutions to important leadership challenges; and the Founder of the M+B Executive Network, a community of in-transition senior-level executives seeking guidance to land their next role, serving over 10,000 members since inception.
Rod has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, growing companies from the ground up and challenging industry norms. His ultimate goal is to meaningfully contribute to the greater good, which is showcased through his passion for hard work, fostering relationships, and conceptualizing solutions for professional development.
Rod resides in Laguna Niguel, California, with his wife Laura, their four children, and three dogs. He is a multi-thousand-hour turbine aircraft pilot and flies his CJ2 Jet for business and for his other passions, which include philanthropy, skiing, and traveling. Rod received a bachelor’s degree in economics and business from the University of California, Los Angeles.
What is Activate 180 all about?
Activate 180 is about creating opportunities for people to live great lives. It has been my purpose all along and I believe that companies need to have a shared purpose around the lives they’re providing for their employees if they want to be an employer of choice.
I’ve always leaned on this Zig Ziglar line, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” If you think this way, it removes self-interest. You stop thinking about your fears and desires, and instead you focus on how you can help others live their best lives. Our Activate 180 coaches help companies become role models in this way of thought, allowing their employees to live their best lives, and in turn, rewarding the company back tenfold.
Companies are waking up to the concept that the ways we’ve done business in the past, in relation to employee engagement and development, no longer solve today’s problems. Annual or semiannual ad-hoc trainings and annual reviews don’t help employees feel like there’s a true opportunity for advancement or help create a connection to the company’s overall vision.
Leading an executive search firm has granted me access to plenty of interviews. We always ask this question, “Why are you looking to leave your current company?” Oftentimes, the interviewee expresses that there is little-to-no advancement opportunity, regardless of the employer’s significant revenue stature. The truth is though, it’s not that the advancement opportunity doesn’t exist, the opportunity has just never been communicated effectively.
Success happens when companies put in the necessary work for their employees to understand the organization’s vision, the roles they play in its success, and opportunities for growth throughout their careers. This is where Activate 180 comes in — we support organizations in building this foundation, which leads to increased employee engagement, satisfaction, retention, and performance rates.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
The idea for Activate 180 goes back to the Great Recession when a lot of people were out of work and were desperate to find a job. After speaking with many people, I realized that before the recession, many of them were doing the wrong job at the wrong company and were about to embark on the same failed journey. From these conversations, my philosophy evolved into supporting others to pursue career opportunities that would allow them to live their best lives.
Activate 180 embodies this philosophy: utilize our coaches to help those employed find more engagement in their jobs and achieve their goals across multiple pillars in their lives.
I believe that the best employers care about the full human experience — not just their employees’ identities at work — and that they truly want to help their employees live their best lives. This is our purpose and mission at Activate 180 — to be the catalyst in making that possible for both the employer and their employees.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- These have probably changed a little over time. The one that resonates with me the most and has been instrumental to my success in the last five years is focusing on building the right leadership team and bringing in the right leaders that report to me. My focus is to make sure our teams are aligned on the kind of company that we want to be, what our vision is, what success looks like, and the kind of culture we want to develop. Then, I get out of their way to let them do their jobs. When we first launched our company, I didn’t do that as much. I was more “command and control” and I had more of an “I should know everything” attitude about the nuances of our business. I have now surrendered that approach. I believe it made us successful early on, but I think it also slowed our ability to scale because one person can only know so much. Being a driven leader who had to be in the weeds and know all the details kept me away from the bigger picture, which I recognize today is much more important. To me, the leadership trait is to know and trust your strengths and those of your people. Hire really well, hire great leaders, align on a vision, and then get out of their way.
- The second is to keep the main thing the main thing. You’ll have a lot of demands on your time, so anything that someone else can do besides you, let them do it. Then you can focus on what is critical to growing the business.
- The third is allowing my people to fail. In the past, I wanted to save them from failure. I’ve come to realize that very few failures are fatal, and for the ones that could be fatal, we all come together as a team. We have multiple people involved in strategizing a plan of attack to mitigate the risk of the failure impacting our company. If it’s one person and they want to try something on their own, instead of telling them no and that they are wrong, I have to let them try it and learn on their own. By telling them they are wrong, I rob them of the opportunity to learn. Failure is the best teacher and I actually tell my leadership team to let their people fail because that is going to teach them. Then they can come in to help them out and they’ll learn a lot from the experience.
What are your plans for the future, and how do you plan to grow this company?
We have proven the coaching model with a number of tier-one clients that have successfully deployed our service through their organizations. Now, we need to scale. We’ll focus on continuing client acquisition and focus on coach recruitment, training, and deployment.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
When we started Activate 180, we identified three phases of the company. Our Corporate Coaching Program was phase two. The first phase of Activate 180, and one of the core components of our business model, was helping individuals identify and land their dream job through the Dream Job Program. When we launched phase one, we had initial success, but then COVID hit and we had to pivot. We hit many challenges when we had to move from in-person sessions to a fully virtual platform.
As we were pivoting, we started launching our Corporate Coaching Program, which took off incredibly fast. The pandemic created so much demand for talent that companies are now fighting a war like they’ve never fought before. They are fighting to retain their own people and are realizing that in order to attract and retain talent, they have to be more than just a paycheck. Companies have to help people live their best lives. It is no longer just about the compensation package, it is about the entire package, and our role in that is helping people show up as their best selves.
Through the launch of our Corporate Coaching Program, we saw great outcomes and results from the people we were coaching as well as great demand from companies. The success of the program made us put all of our resources into this service, rather than splitting our resources between the two sides of the business.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
We focus on people — we’re a people company. We have some great competitors emerging in our industry that are helping educate the market on the value of coaching for everybody. Many of them are using technology and AI in many parts of their businesses, so they come across as a technology company that happens to provide coaching. We are a high-touch, human interaction coaching company that leverages different technologies to enhance those human interactions, but not replace them. In essence, we’re a coaching company that leverages technology. For instance, a lot of our competitors talk about using AI to match coaches. We think that’s a human job, so we spend significant resources on in-house talent to assess which coaches would match best with which clients.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- Number 1: We thought we could put people on a path to finding their dream job after a three-day course. Ultimately, we realized it’s more like a four-week process. Pivoting to online courses versus in-person workshops enabled us to elongate the program and give our clients a chance to comprehend and understand what they learned and then know which direction to take.
- Number 2: Trusting ad agencies who seemed very confident in helping us identify our customers and reach them. The reality is, it’s more of a trial and error game. Our current agency has been totally honest about that from day one and are working hard with us on a multitude of strategies to see which is the best.
- Number 3: Individuals, though they want to connect their passion with their job and land their dream job, aren’t always willing to invest a reasonable amount to get there. People will go out and spend $1,100 on an iPhone, but they won’t spend $1,000 to go through a process that will help them land their dream job. That was very eye-opening. It helped me see that corporations are more likely to invest money on behalf of their individuals, because they are used to investing and measuring a return on investment. While we are still a people-focused company, we’re now focused on helping those people through their companies as opposed to direct.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
We have been able to land a number of clients through internal referrals, who we have been marketing internally and arming our salespeople with the right collateral to help them fill up the pipeline.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Customer acquisition. We have been leveraging a sister company for internal referrals. The employees at this company have benefited from Activate 180 coaching over the last two years or so and can sing the praises from a first-hand experience to their clients, which opens doors for us.
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
Where I grew up, people had acreage and there weren’t a lot of gardeners like we have now. At 12, I started a weeding service business for my neighborhood. When my neighbors were on vacation, I would mow their lawns and take care of things. When they got back, they liked the work and hired me on a retainer, and then I started hiring my friends to help me.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
I’m learning patience, to let people work against an agreed upon strategy, and that sales cycles are always longer than you think they are going to be. Even though a company knows they really need our service, the question of deployment always bogs them down and lengthens the process.
We have clients that are fast-growing and cutting edge — they don’t wait, they just do. When we are talking to more traditional companies that are used to growing at 15% – 20% a year, they are more reluctant to roll something out without trying it.
Companies who are pioneers in their own space are also pioneers in using services to make their own companies even better. They’re willing to invest to make sure their people have what they need to be their best self and perform at the highest level.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
With the benefit of hindsight, I probably would have started the Corporate Coaching Program before the Dream Job Program. Then, I would use the success of that to create resources to launch the Dream Job Program as phase 2, not the other way around. We would probably be a year farther down in the market and a million dollars richer.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Outsource everything you can so you can focus only on the things that you must do. I make a list of things I need to do every day and I work through that. My day is really spent in meetings with my leaders. I spend about 80% – 90% of my time leading and 10% – 20% of my time doing.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs?
Book: Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell. It shows entrepreneurs the value of having a dedicated accountability partner in your corner to help you achieve your success.
Podcast: How Leaders Lead with David Novak. I learn so much from this podcast. He interviews leaders from a variety of different companies, like the former CEO of Yum Brands, coaches, and every once in a while, individuals that have achieved great success but aren’t necessarily company CEOs. I always come away with a nugget from every episode.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
I get a kick out of seeing people achieve their personal dreams and goals. My purpose for the last 15 years has been to create opportunities for people to live great lives. That motivates me every day, whether times are great or times are tough. In great times, it becomes a fuel and a motivator. In tough times, it becomes a shock absorber to know that I can still handle major challenges when I’m living on purpose.
What is your favorite quote?
“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
– Zig Ziglar
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
Hire better, more qualified people sooner. Inspire them, align them to your vision, and get them enrolled in what you want to do to change the world. Give them the resources to do their job and then get out of their way. My life changed when I hired amazing people for my company. If you can remove impediments by bringing in talented folks, it can be the best thing you’ve ever done for your organization. An old narrative that held me back was that we weren’t ready to scale due to the belief that we couldn’t afford to. However, I’ve realized that you have to invest in both yourself and your company to win. Invest in the best and you’ll get the best results.
Who should we interview next and why?
Randy Barth, Founder and CEO of THINK Together, which is an after school nonprofit based in Santa Ana, CA that serves hundreds of thousands of kids every day and generates hundreds of millions a year in funding. Randy is probably the best entrepreneur I’ve ever seen, from both the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.
What is your definition of success?
Happiness.
How do you personally overcome fear?
I ask myself, does it help? When the answer is no, I create an action plan to mitigate whatever is creating fear in my life.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can connect with our team through our website, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as Instagram. You can also connect with me personally on LinkedIn, as well as our Business Development Director, Amanda Garrett, on LinkedIn.
Founder Interview: Arun Sardana – How to Overcome Fear & The Definition of Success
