Carl Gould
Business Growth Advisor and Author, 7 Stage Advisors
His father fished offshore out of New Jersey and had him steering the boat at seven, running the Ambrose Channel water and the canyons sixty to a hundred miles out for stripers, bluefish, and tuna. He still fishes, his son is a freshwater guy, and a dove hunt in Texas with a dozen people a couple of years ago went down well enough that Sam spent the last few minutes of the episode trying to get him on a helicopter over a pig population.
- Business Growth Coaching
- Business Development
- Owner Blind Spots
- Real Estate Development
- Building And Selling Companies
About Carl Gould
Carl Gould is the founder of 7 Stage Advisors, a business growth advisor, author, and coach who has worked with entrepreneurs since 1990. After building and selling companies in landscaping, construction, and real estate development, he developed a seven-stage framework that helps owners identify blind spots and plan what comes next.
What Carl built
Carl Gould was two years into an accounting and finance degree, paying his own way, when he broke his leg badly enough that he had to leave school. At eighteen and a half he took the landscaping work he had been doing through high school and turned it into a design build firm, enrolling for a horticulture degree alongside it, which is why his plant Latin still holds up in a garden center. He grew that company and sold it, then built a custom home building and real estate development business doing log homes, post and beam, modular, and stick frame work on both the residential and commercial side, and sold that as well. Along the way he collected the licenses, real estate, insurance, building inspection, on the theory that continuing education was part of the job. He began coaching in 1990, before coaching was an industry, through certifications with Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, and Dale Carnegie, and founded 7 Stage Advisors in 2002.
Carl in the field
The field for Gould is other people's companies, and he works it the way his father worked water. His firm has been running interviews and assessments on clients since 1990 and holds more than three hundred thousand data points on them, most now seven and eight figure operators sitting in the top four percent of businesses. The statistical answer to what holds them back is not talent or effort, since they are usually conscientious and their clients are usually happy. It is that they have no plan for what comes next, having outgrown whatever motivation started the thing. He wrote The Seven Stages of Business Success around the developmental stages a company moves through, each with its own goals and its own work, and Biz Dev Done Right around the feast and famine loop that catches early and mid stage owners. His method for finding where to push is deliberately narrow: locate the owner's blind spot, then go work the part of the business hiding behind it.
Why this conversation matters
The useful tension here is between how simple Gould's diagnostic is and how uncomfortable it is to sit for. He is telling owners that the ceiling on their business is a feature of their own personality, that the department running badly is running badly because they do not naturally look at it, and that no amount of general effort will fix a specific blind spot. Paired with that is his refusal to offer the thing veteran owners actually want, which is a date on which it gets easy. There is not one, because merit has to be re-earned every quarter, and the only variable available is whether you get better. What keeps the conversation from being grim is the fishing. Sam keeps noticing that the way Gould describes reading tide, depth, and bait is the same speech he gives about pricing and ideal clients, and Gould agrees without making it a metaphor. Change a variable and you will still catch something. It just will not be the fish you came for.
“Nobody knows it's your first day except for you.”
Carl Gould on The Hunt for Success
Sam McGough's full conversation with Carl, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Key takeaways from Carl Gould
The ideas Carl left on the table in episode 18.
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The business has the owner's personality.
He noticed it running DISC assessments on two very different clients at once, a small business owner and a Fortune 500 executive, and then hearing them describe companies that matched their own profiles line for line. So he built an assessment for the business as if it were a person, mapping the four behavioral quadrants onto strategy, business development, operations, and finance. Where the owner is strong, the business is strong. Where the owner has a blind spot, the business is quietly underperforming, and it has been that way for years without anyone naming it.
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Nobody knows it's your first day except you.
The most common early mistake he sees is discounting to buy market share. Your customers only know you are new because you told them, and there is no reason to advertise it. His instruction is to advertise like it is year five, not year one. The business may be new, but you are not new at what you do, and pricing is the first place that either gets communicated or thrown away.
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A concert crowd forgives, a festival crowd leaves.
If your favorite artist opens with a song you did not want, you stay, buy a beer, and enjoy the night, because you share something with the room. Walk into a festival full of bands you have no attachment to and the first song you dislike sends you out the door. That is the difference loyalty makes, and loyalty only exists where a business has decided who it is speaking to. You are not turning people away so much as being clear about whose rules you are running, the way the US Open will happily take anyone who follows theirs.
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In winter, the middle is invisible.
Working from The Fourth Turning, he lays out four generational seasons of roughly twenty to twenty five years each and places 2005 to about 2029 in winter. In a fall economy, buyers want speed and convenience and mid range pricing works fine. In a volatile winter they get one shot with their money, so they defer to experts and will pay more for that expertise. That means you want to be the lowest price in the category or the recognized expert at the top, and anything in between disappears.
Carl's ideas in The Pursuit
Where the weekly newsletter picked up this conversation.