Frank Spevak
Welcome to my website! My name is Frank Spevak. I am a business, branding, and marketing strategist, coach, speaker, trainer, author, and consultant.
My mission: to help small businesses like trades contractors, distributors, manufacturers, to improve productivity, increase profit, and provide peace of mind.
Helping entrepreneurs transform -
- From frustrated to delighted
- From losses to gains
- From disengaged to involved
- From a group of individuals to a team
My Top Articles
If you are new to my website or want to learn more about business development coaching, start here. These are the top posts in the categories I write about.
- It's Time to Require CEUs for Business Owners and Leaders
- When you become more knowledgeable, you can become less profitable
- More Sales Is NOT Going To Save Your Business
- How Are You Retaining Your Employees?
- The Ugly Truth About Successfully Scaling Your Business
- How much does culture, growth-mindset, and continuous learning have to do with success? Almost all!
Principles for Sustainable Success
Free download to help you
be successful year after year after year
Through the Principles of Sustainable Success, you learn the skills you need now to double or triple your business and help you gain control of your time, money and work, eliminate distraction, improve alignment with your goals and achieve success year after year after year. The Principles establish within you a growth mindset along with the strategies that ensures success for you, your employees and your customers.
Principles for Sustainable Success is filled with 40 pages of examples and stories demonstrating the Principles in action at a variety of companies.
The book also gives you exercises that you can do on your own or with an accountability partner to quickly shift from struggling to success.
If you want to double or triple your business starting today, this book is the place to start.
It's free and it's yours.
My Story
It all started when I realized that street smarts and luck can carry you only so far.
And that a formal education doesn't necessarily mean that you learn the lessons of running a successful business.
During my life and career, I have realized that street smarts and luck can only get you so far. Adding a formal education can carry you further but it will be obsolete in 5 years. For me, as well as with the truly successful, there is a drive to continue to learn each and every day and to encourage that same discipline to those they lead.
I have from time to time stopped learning or took my learning for granted.
And I have paid for it. You can see the same thing in companies that all of a sudden stop growing or seem to fall off.
After graduating from high school, my priority was to go out and make a living.
What good is college if you don’t know what you want to do? To be a self-made man was my direction. Growing up in a family with a single mom and hardworking grandparents, we weren’t rich, but had ample examples that you could make a good living by applying yourself and taking some initiative.
And it worked for a while. Good jobs with good pay helped support my family. Working with technical products and being able to explain them to customers was enjoyable.
But something was missing. Mediocre had crept in. My learning had stopped and it made me uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to make a change.
After 8 ½ years of night school, retaking high school algebra, taking textbooks on international business trips, and extra visits to the instructor’s office for more learning time, I graduated from Loyola University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in business and receiving cum laude honors.
Along the way, I worked to ensure that each class added something to the work I was doing while working my way up the sales and marketing ladder.
The learning bug had bitten, and it felt great.
When that company was sold off to another corporation, the opportunity to advance more, as well as learn more, presented itself. Working for a public corporation with greater resources was beneficial, but it showed that there was more to learn. Following the traditional learning path, my next sights were set on an executive oriented MBA.
This was learning on steroids. Other professionals in class, each trying to improve themselves and their companies, provided the boost I needed.
The small company I joined after receiving my MBA was started by an engineer/physicist turned business owner. He was steeped in energy technology and was considered an icon in the industry. The company was synonymous with his name. I became the chief sales and marketing officer and a member of the management team.
My early work transformed the company reputation from that of a sleepy little company to something dramatically bigger and an innovation leader.
Offering the entire staff as experts, not just the owner. It paid off. Sales and profits increased steadily.
But then you can be too satisfied.
Your sustainable success hits a road block. You stop learning and you stop growing. You take it easy for a while then it passes by in an instant and you find yourself sitting fat and happy but dumb. You find that the competition has awakened and threatened not only your sales but also your position and reputation. The management team struggled because of outdated learning and an acceptance of what was, rather than the potential to be.
Even when you have a Ph.D. on staff, if it was from 20 and 30 years ago, it doesn’t help you now.
I had to get the learning back for my own peace of mind as well as for the survival of the company. But, as the adage goes, “you can’t make a horse drink.” We struggled with developing plans. The owner wanted to work on the products rather than on the business. Other members of the management team were divided about the direction forward and planning was made harder because we had been mired in mediocre for far too long and couldn't break free. My wife saw the frustration in me every day coming home from work.
Fortunately, that’s when I discovered coaching and rediscovered learning and the tools and techniques to transform from struggling to Sustainable Success.
Coaching was relatively new to me, but my background taught me how valuable another person’s insights could be. I enlisted the help of a great coach figuring there was nothing to lose. It turned out that I had everything to gain.
The results were completely transformational. I gained clarity and became aware of my calling at a much deeper level. I recognized patterns in my past successes (and failures) that helped me hone in on my unique abilities
Turns out coaching and training was a natural fit.
While I hold a B.B.A. and M.B.A. I decided to pursue coaching certification to help others experience the same kind of breakthrough. I was trained by the Team of John Maxwell, the leading leadership coach and trainer in the business, along with Paul Martinelli, Roddy Galbraith, and Christian Simpson and earned my coaching certification. The virtues of continuous learning and coaching have touched every aspect of my life.
Winston Churchill said, “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” This is the essence of coaching and casting off everyday struggles in favor of Sustainable Success.
There should be a requirement for continuing education units (CEUs) for business owners and leaders.
Professions in the trades like heating and ventilating, electricians, plumbers as well as therapists, teachers, dentists, doctors, and lawyers usually require CEUs to maintain their licensing.
I realized that there are a lot of owners and managers of small businesses that want to keep doing what they have been doing hoping it will carry them to new levels of success. Henry Ford said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” But it is deeper than that.
If you always do what you did before, you’ll never have the opportunity to get to where you really want to be.
Owners and managers can get so entrenched IN the business that they can’t effectively or productively look at new or different approaches to reach success. For your success and those of your employees you need to spend time ON the business. We think as individuals that we can make it on our own but sometimes you need someone as a guide. Having a coach to help you work through issues can provide new insights about you and your business.
Education is different than learning and each of us needs to learn in our own way.
But if we are not learning, we are dying. Learning is personal. Learning is not linear. Learning is multi-dimensional. Learning and success comes from trying, failing, and getting back up to try again. Learning is the only sure fire way of breaking from the Mediocre.
The intersection of learning and experience is Wisdom, a superpower that anyone can add.
Integrity is vital as a leader in any company, environment, situation. It is integrity and character that make a good leader.
Not a fan of buzzwords. They can hide real meaning to those not attuned to the jargon of business school. Or can confuse those to whom you are trying to communicate.
If this has been of interest and you have questions about coaching, feel free to visit my Work With Me page. You’ll find helpful resources that can help you immediately, and also find out how you can work with me.
Principles for Sustainable Success
Through the Principles of Sustainable Success, you learn the skills you need now to double or triple your business and help you gain control of your time, money and work, eliminate distraction, improve alignment with your goals and achieve success year after year after year. The Principles establish within you a growth mindset along with the strategies that ensures success for you, your employees and your customers.
Principles for Sustainable Success is filled with 40 pages of examples and stories demonstrating the Principles in action at a variety of companies.
The book also gives you exercises that you can do on your own or with an accountability partner to quickly shift from struggling to success.
If you want to double or triple your business starting today, this book is the place to start.
It's free and it's yours.
Borrow My Brain
Take advantage of an opportunity to Borrow My Brain to discover the hidden gems within you and your company that will lead to better sales, better profits, and a company that is better managed.
My goal is to provide you with real value that you can use today and in the future. If we are able to work together - Great! Otherwise we have each expanded our networks with valuable connections.
Frank Spevak
Spevak Associates
9967 Starlight Drive
Woodbury, MN 55125
651-214-3673
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