3 top tips from Kison Patel

1. Adopt discipline

2. Establish a learning pattern

3. Learn to have empathy

Visit Kison’s website: https://www.mascience.com/

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

business, challenges, learning, values, evolve, build, problem, developing, stage, organization, books, goals, company, create, team, year, m&a, understand, helping, podcast

SPEAKERS

Kison Patel, Debra Chantry-Taylor

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:12

Welcome to another episode of Better Business Better Life. I’m your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor. I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs and their leadership teams get what they want out of business and life. On the show, I invite successful business owners and expert speakers to share their successes. They are open and honest about the highs and lows of business and also life as a business owner. We want to share those learnings with you to inspire you, but also to help you avoid some of the common mistakes. My hope is that you take something from each of these short episodes that you can put into action to help you get what you want, not only out of your business, but also your life. Good morning, and welcome to another episode of Better Business better life. Today, I am joined by Keystone Patel, who is an m&a expert and the CEO of the deal room. Welcome Kison. Thanks for having me. No pleasure. Now I understand that you’re over in Denver, and you very kindly joined us while you’re traveling around the world. So appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about your story case, give us a little bit of history about you know where you’ve got to and where you came from.

Kison Patel  01:16

Sure. I started my career as an m&a advisor for about a decade pretty typical founder story and working with that industry, I became familiar with the common pain points and challenges of managing an m&a transaction. From there, I got involved in a tech startup focused and marketing technology that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. But it did expose me to the way software engineers would utilize these project management tools to manage developing software much more efficiently, which led to the inspiration for starting dealroom as a project management product for managing mergers and acquisitions in 2012. And it was a pretty to be frank and honest, rough journey, I would say especially the first five years, a lot of hard lessons in learning how to assemble an engineering team that could productively build quality software, how to validate that you’re actually building a product that solves the right problem. How do you go to market with that product, and build your marketing and sales functions to be able to distribute it efficiently. When doing this, one of the things that we became good at was creating a feedback loop to become experts at the customer’s problem and developing solutions with this really tight feedback loop. Over time, our product evolved from an original solution for managing the due diligence phase of buying a company to then managing the integration phase, then the pipeline management has really evolved into a full lifecycle management solution and the end that we sell to larger corporates typically a billion plus market cap that are doing three or more acquisitions a year. Over time, we also identified a very massive underpinning problem in our industry, Debra, that was that the industry itself was siloed. In lacked Best Practices standardization. With that we took the opportunity of starting a podcast as a platform to enable practitioners to be able to share lessons learned from their experience, so that we can, again, take that same feedback approach, identify patterns, identify the proven techniques, which over time, we ended up publishing as a framework called Agile m&a. That was also anchored by case studies with Google and Atlassian. Specifically, how they use agile techniques stemming from the engineering culture, and applied it to m&a with great success. That podcasts continue to evolve into a full digital media business, where we produce quite a bit of content, host events, run an online academy program, and continue to identify and launch new business lines. But that’s our business today. It’s a hybrid of a series of business lines themed around education and technology for m&a.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:32

That’s fantastic. And I understand you’ve got a team of 35 now so you always had a couple of very tough years, like you said, but you’re coming coming round now and things are ticking along quite nicely. Is that right?

Kison Patel  04:42

Absolutely. We’re on growth stage right now are 35 with eight open roles I think we’re hiring for so you get a lot of fun changes, management and new exciting challenges every day.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:55

Perfect. Hey look, I always ask our guests to share a passion So under professional best, and I know that we’ve already talked about this before, so love to hear your personal best, and then your professional best, which I think will lead into what we’re gonna talk about today.

Kison Patel  05:09

My personal best is a fun it was from an inspiration of a podcast I did. John blank on the name was last year, but I got this idea to do more of at home State of the Union. And I did this at the beginning of the year with my family to give a State of the Union about our household. What’s the what have been our goals as a family? Would Have we achieved over the past years? What are we looking forward to in the new year. And I also worked with my three kids, they’re young, my daughter’s 11, I have two boys six and eight, to help them identify where to their personal goals for the year. So I think is a fun activity where we do it in business, but why not take it in our household to start framing our goals and reflect on the success that we’ve had? So I think that was the the personal best for the year, just a little fun activity. Perfect.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:09

We actually have, we use a thing called the VTR, which is a vision traction organizer in EOS. And we actually have family version of that as well. And my husband and I did the same thing. At the end of the year, we sat down and said, right, what is actually our family plan, what’s our 10 year goal? What are our core values? What are we aiming to achieve this year? Next? Next 90 days? And yeah, it’s certainly a fun exercise.

Kison Patel  06:28

Yeah, I’m looking at expanding on it. Because I think you get caught up with so much of the day to day of managing a household with young children that you sort of lose sight of some of the broader things and the direction of the family as a whole.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:41

Yeah. Okay. And I understand just taking a little bit off track. But I when we spoke before, your daughter is a little budding entrepreneur as well. And so she’s been in business since she was six. Is that right?

Kison Patel  06:54

I remember six, she came to me and said, Daddy, I wanna start a lemonade stand. And I was a little bit a little resistant at first. You know, I said, I don’t know about this. And then I really like to just dawned on me and like, this is actually an opportunity to teach a lot of the business fundamentals. I said, Honey, I don’t know if you’ve picked the best dad to do this, but we’re gonna do it. We’re not taking any shortcuts. And it was a definitely a fun project for us to go through a whole series of iterations, where she built a fairly well known lemonade stand nearby Wrigley Stadium in Chicago, and became quite well known in the neighborhood and profited well, too.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:35

Excellent. And she’s still running a business today, right at 11 years old. She’s got a different business now though, right? Yeah, she

Kison Patel  07:41

Shifted we are COVID happens today. What am I gonna do Karen lemonade stand. So all you got to do every like everybody else in the world and figure out your digital distribution model. And I think she found her passion with jewelry, she started making handmade jewelry. So a couple 100 of her classmates, and now she’s working on her online web presence.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:59

I love it. Okay, so that’s personal. What about professional? What’s your professional? Best? Do you think?

Kison Patel  08:08

For professional for me, early years, I remember getting to a point where I had about five employees in the company and realized I was struggling with leadership, keeping a team Alliance motivated. And I, I didn’t know where to go to for help. I think back then there wasn’t such a strong ecosystem for startups and resources of that sort. I wasn’t well networked. And I remember I started reading leadership books, but it didn’t quite resonate with me. And it was when I started reading a organizational psychology books that really helped myself get a better understanding of what the ideal workplace should look like. And it’s three key pillars that I referenced today, which is creating a platform of communication, where every person in the organization can feel their voices heard. And today, we have examples of the most junior developer and speaking up about ideas for our product that lead to be one of the leading product features, to even any person on the admin team pointing out cracks cut emerging in the company so we can solve them before they blow through the floor. To be able to secondly creates a acknowledgement for achievements, because everybody wants to feel valued, that their work, what they’re contributing to creating value for a greater good. And being able to do that on a monthly basis where we take time to acknowledge achievements across the different departments and functions in our company. And think third is creating an environment where you feel you work amongst friends. You can build a good relationship that allows you to be comfortable, vulnerable, allows you to speak up and ask for help when you need it. And so we try to keep some of these even now more of a online experience. With a little personal touch, so we can spend time to talk about some of the things outside the daily business, but also do flying events, things we can spend time to really get to know each other and build those bonds. So those are the things that I’ve learned professionally that we strive for to create a positive work environment that allows us to set a stage for progress.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  10:23

Okay, I mean, that absolute fundamentals, I get it, I mean, it especially in this sort of online environment, as making sure you have a really not only smart, but healthy team that is prepared to have those discussions prepared to, to work together for the greater good is really important. Have you ever had a point where you’ve kind of hit the ceiling, and really felt like you’re just stuck and couldn’t get past that?

Kison Patel  10:45

You know, that’s my biggest fear. That’s probably the biggest thing I fear of. I’ve had that in prior businesses. This was the first venture I’ve done. Yep. And that’s always been the biggest fear is that we fall flat, because after falling flat comes decline. And decline leads to cease.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  11:07

Yes. I was stressed along the way as well.

Kison Patel  11:11

Yeah. And so that that was the thing, it’s always been the concern is that he flatlining so that we always have proactive measures to ensure that doesn’t happen. And since starting this business 10 years ago, every time towards the end of the year, things slow down for us, less than less so every year. And we take that time to retool, rebuild our business, Matt reimagining, rebuilding our business. And looking at it with some external eyes, looking at it from the customer’s eyes and thinking through how can we revamp this business? How can we remodel our organization to be prepared for growth going into the next year? That’s a lot. In every year, we review the whole business model. We review our pricing strategy, we review the markets, we’re going after we review our marketing, you know, all these things are full go to market gets completely revamped. And just looked at with a fresh pair of eyes and we retool it, we do that every year. And we might not be able to get all of it every year. But we do a good amount of that rethinking retooling remodeling approach that allows us to go into this new year with a lot of initiatives with the full intention of bringing change to the organization for greater good. So I think that’s one of the things that we just built into the company that every year we’re gonna have to retool and really hit this market with something completely different. Yeah.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:57

Okay. And that’s great. A great way to approach business is reviewing it every year. What do you do along the way to make sure that you’re sticking to that plan that you’re making changes as needed? How do you and you, you talked about, you know, the acknowledgement of achievements and success? And so how do you know when you’ve achieved that success?

Kison Patel  13:18

That’s actually evolved quite a bit, I think early years, it’s very much about product roadmap, what are we building? Are we getting the functionality that we want out there? Are we getting some initial traction with users? So we might have basic goals? I think, as businesses evolve, now we’re utilizing OKRs that define what are the goals in the broader organization, and how each department rolls up into the broader organization goals and how each individual’s goals can roll up to the department goals. So I think there is a lot more definition around what are these individual goals for every contributor that’s gonna roll up to what the broader goals is for the organization, which is very much focused on growth that we want to benchmark and continue. I always like to build it to x, you know, we want to double in size every year. So we really need to be proactive about that. And that’s where it’s important for us to look at the big picture and then come back and really figure out what do we need to achieve incrementally across the different teams and individuals to be able to achieve that target?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:40

We talked about this before we came on to the podcast. Yeah, that sort of being really clear about what you are building and what that future looks like. It’s something that a lot of businesses that I work with, have probably got somewhere in the back of their mind, but they haven’t taken the time to really define it and articulate it. And once they get there and they do that it everything else can then start to fall in place because you Got that. So how do you? What do you do with your team around that bigger picture that longer term goal? And where does it come from?

Kison Patel  15:10

Yeah, that’s a big thing. It’s like the thing you constantly have to articulate. Is this sort of where are we going to go? Defining the reason why, you know that this, this always got to have a great purpose, a reason why I think we forget that sometimes, yeah, we sort of get a little too tactical about it. But people need meaning, you know, when we one of the toughest things about our job as a company isn’t so much driving the internal change, I think we’ve established a change oriented culture in our company, that that’s really shaped and settled. And it’s a big part of our culture, I think it’s working with our clients, because you have a varying degree of adaptiveness, from these customers that we work with. And that’s where they really test our skills. Because if you’re looking to drive change for a company that’s been very stagnant in change over the past decades, now you’re faced with a very difficult challenge. And that’s a part of our core ability to create value is to initiate change. That’s where we really have to do some work and dig into being able to do that. And it always starts with a deep understanding, can we spend the time to understand this organization? What does their process look like in our context of mergers and acquisitions? What does that workflow look like when they go through the process of buying a company? Who are those stakeholders involved? Can we open up conversations, qualitative interviews, to understand each stakeholders, pain points, and challenges that they encounter from their perspective? I think one client I worked with that was a fortune 500 manufacturer, one of the, I guess, Pivotal change to realization on what it really takes to drive change, was going through this and trying to put the overall effort to really make sure this was successful, because it was one of the first big opportunities we had. And I went through the series of interviews to understand as much as I could about their process and where the problems were. Minute part of this was not knowing better, or just trying to get the dialogue within the teams or across the teams. Since it seemed that there wasn’t a clear linkage between the problems in this stage and the problem in this stage. So with that, we got these seven stakeholders, all to pile in a conference room. And I said, Hey, the only activity I want to do today is prioritize with the problems we’re looking to solve for your team. I have a list of things that I’ve gathered from conversations with most of the folks here in this room. And I’m going to mention, it doesn’t matter who said, what, that part’s irrelevant, I just want to go through and prioritize this, just to know that we’re spending your time, which is pretty rational thing to do. Yeah, we’re gonna spend money, resources, let’s make sure we’re solving the most important thing for the organizations that fair answer requests. And so they agreed and we went through. But that exercise just could feel how much value it created. Some of the things that we talked through, gave a lot of transparency, a created a lot of understanding, and even empathy for across these team members, to really identify what issues and where they’re stemming from and getting more of that clarity. And some of this stuff that lead to very obvious changes that can be made with very minimal effort. And it became clear in the clear on why make that change, that it was easy to get that across and make that commitment right there on the spot. And then once he got this exercise completed, it lended to a very obvious roadmap on what we could do to make some immediate changes that would add an immense amount of value. And then allowed me to really understand what areas that we could focus on and identify other areas, whether it be practice oriented, or technology oriented, to allow solutions to be applied, and continue adding value to overcome these challenges. So I think there’s a great deal of effort when it comes to driving that change when you’re working with a team that isn’t used to it. And it’s very, very driven off of communication, but much so listening first. And taking this mindset that you can put aside your agenda of whatever products you want to sell or whatever ideas you want to push and pitch your subject matter expertise and level down to this mindset that you know nothing or whatever you do know is wrong. And intently Listen, with a full Focus, an objective of understanding the other person’s thinking, how they feel, why they feel that way, understanding their goals, their challenges, allowing you to embrace how you could be better aligned to help them achieve those goals and challenges. And that’s what ultimately led to a lot of the ability to drive change by clarifying what the compelling reason is to change across this organization.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  20:35

And so is that same principle applied inside your organization as well? Because that’s a very good way to look at things, as you know, what are the issues, the opportunities, get them all out on the table? Have the open discussions, prioritize them, make sure that you’re dealing with them in the right order? Is that the way you run inside the business as well?

Kison Patel  20:53

You can be absolutely you can’t be a hypocrite. So there’s sometimes you got to remind yourself that, hey, we we preach, and we talk about our values and things, but we have to share, ensure that we’re living by those those same values. So it’s important to even keep that very surface conversation internally, I think it gets a little easier to keep that align when it’s part of the culture. And when you see it slipping in different areas, you got to be proactive about reminding your team members of these values, I think the area that we’re moving into, is we’ve we’ve been very clear about it in the recent years, which has enabled us to do better hiring, because now we look for specific values. I think it’s the stage you’re at now is how do you regulate your team on those values that they can identify when team members are not living by those values? How do we sort of create a acknowledgement for those that are doing it well, and acknowledgement for those that aren’t doing it? Well. And so I think that’s kind of where we’re moving towards now is sort of how do you get the team to self regulate it? So it’s not, you know, a top down responsibility?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:12

Absolutely. And so, do you mind sharing with me the values in your organization, or just give me sort of a sense of, you know, what they are and how you help to keep those alive in the organization?

Kison Patel  22:23

Yeah, it was we have broader values for the company, we have leadership values, the broader values, our responsiveness, empathetic listening, change oriented. Attention to detail, and resilience. Nice. Yeah. And then for the leadership values is discipline learning, pattern, empathy. And then we expand on those because obviously, those words are broad, and could have unique meanings teach organization.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:53

And, and so yeah, that’s great that you’d be obviously, you know, them, you’re living by the how do you make sure the team is actually living by that? And what do you do two questions here is, how do you ensure the team is living by them? And what do you do when there’s somebody perhaps isn’t the right fit?

Kison Patel  23:08

Talking about it, we talked about it, we put it in our job posts and our interviews internally, we’ll read, bring them up, even when we have meetings, just to remind everybody, these are core things, or we do get those points when you see it lacking in specific areas. I had a sales rep that was late to respond to one of the relationships I had I sent over to him. And I said, Look, you know, this is our first values, responsiveness. You know, if we’re, if we’re not going to take ownership of this, we can get together and talk about it. And maybe we got to reevaluate what our values are. That’s, you know, that’s something, we figure if we’re not going to do that, then we need to change it because we put this publicly on our website, and we’re not going to own it and live by it internally. That’s a problem. And then you sort of get this realization like, oh, no, you’re right, I’m gonna change that behavior and get that commitment on it. So I think that’s one thing we’re learning now is sort of, how do you get the team even self regulate around that which I, I think it’s kind of a part of evolving your organization, because you can’t always you got to let go of a lot of the top down, especially when you reach around 20 to 30. Team members, you start standing a function, you really depend more on the leadership of each functional group.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  24:25

Absolutely. So have you ever had a real challenge in growing the organization? What were the biggest challenge you’ve had?

Kison Patel  24:35

There’s always been a challenge in every stage. Yeah, early stage is just getting the right engineering team together. Once you got the right engineering team together, we built the wrong product. And I think the thing that a lot of entrepreneurs skip is validating the problem you’re solving. If you can go through a series of discovery interviews to articulate the problem first. Because the more better understanding you have of the problem, the better solution you can develop. Yeah, we tend to skip that, because we have our idea, we’re excited, we’re gonna go build a product, we got our idea in the mind, a lot of assumptions, we’re gonna build it, then you find out the hard way that the customer has a very different view. And if you were to spend the time to understand, how do they look at that problem, how do they envision what a solution would look like, and just at least have that feedback. Now, there are a few, you know, wonders of Steve Job type of entrepreneurs out there. But in reality, most aren’t most, you’d keep a tight feedback loop, really understand the problem, do maybe 40 of these interviews to look for patterns, you may stumble across a bigger problem that’s actually worth solving, you may find out your problem wasn’t worth solving, you may twist it a little bit and understand it in a way that allows you to think of a different solution than you originally had in mind. And then you bring this network of people you’re developing in a journey with you as you iterate and start evolving and developing solutions. That was a big pain point and challenge in as you create the solution. Having it in that early mock up stage makes it a lot easier to make modifications and changes when you build a product, it’s a lot harder. Learning how to do that make these iterations when it’s a mock up stage, was another thing we learned in product development, then came go to market, which we didn’t validate our go to market, we copied what the incumbents were doing, which is a huge, costly mistake for us. It didn’t let it allow us to get the results we wanted. And we wasted a lot of time, money and resources. It was until we took time to take that same approach. Talk to the customers understand how do they learn about products, where were the channels that we could access to them. And we found that our corporate clients we’re targeting are hungry for knowledge. They’re interested in evolving their practice and getting better at what they do, though, in turn, we should provide the these resources that this industry lacked the resources they need to do equip them to do really well. That problem I mentioned prior of the silos and lack of standardization, we were able to fill that gap by doing a series of interviews of subject matter experts extracting what are some of these key takeaways, lessons and techniques, being able to provide that as a resource allowed us to build trust, build our brand, get recognized as subject matter experts. And then that allowed us to start fostering those relationships by providing value upfront for free. That in turn, turned us our business into this inbound business model, which is very unique in our industry, most other competitors are doing purely outbound. They have a lot of overhead, they have to pay field reps to give them expense cards, travel expenses, etc. And now we’ve been able to challenge that model with this inbound inside sales model that was as effective or if not more effective, as we sold into multinational companies. And then things evolve. Now we’re starting to build the outbound function. But at that time in stage, that wasn’t the right approach for us, now that we’re grading, gaining momentum, have validation with some very recognized logos. Now we can start changing our go to market. So that’s another challenge that over time, we had to change our whole go to market, because you can only count on these inbound leads to a certain level, our focus shifted from the smaller SMBs to large enterprise. And then when you change your focus to large enterprise, your your whole go to market motion needs to change as well. Yeah, so there’s always been a series of challenges and even now, keeping up with our hiring needs, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we have eight open roles for a team of 35. It gets challenging for each of my functional letter leaders to take ownership of hiring, that now we need to develop a central HR function to support hiring across the functions. So that it’s the current challenge and never ends. So it’s always you’re looking at it as exciting opportunity for yourself as a leader to learn. Yeah, and keep growing.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  29:25

It’s interesting, I actually worked, I don’t if you’re aware of him, I talked to Rob Adams, who is a market validation expert in the US. I actually worked with him and trained under him. And he was saying that, you know, market validation is an ongoing thing. Sure, you need it right at the beginning, but it’s something you should be doing all the time. And you’ve just articulated it beautifully, almost as if you were reading from his book in terms of we don’t spend enough time actually understanding what people really want and testing whether ideas are great because, you know, we’re having those conversations with customers, you uncover things you perhaps never thought of, or you realize that what you thought they were prepared to pay for. They actually aren’t so Yeah, that’s great to hear. You’re putting that stuff into into practice. As we’re coming to the end of the podcast, it goes so quickly, it’s almost a sort of our time. But I always want to share sort of three things that people can actually take away with them. So three top tips or tools, or books or things that changed your world. What would you share with the listeners?

Kison Patel  30:21

I always say it’s very, very sad. I think of values and the values I mentioned earlier around leadership, where it’s discipline, learning pattern and empathy. I think having that well defined. And also allowing that to guide you in how you want to develop yourself professionally, is the one thing I would really leave that extends into three different things. Because you want to build this into a pattern where I have it as a calendar reminder every morning, that these are the specific skills I’m working on to overcome. To me, a lot of people don’t know this, I used to mumble all the time and really work with will remember that they would add new people, they had trouble understanding me, because I mumbled. And that was something I had to overcome. And I had to have a reminder, I took voice lessons, even taking an alphabet tutorial on YouTube to pronounce each letter clearly. It I had to challenge myself, but it was something like I kept that in that morning reminder to remind myself in the very beginning, what are these areas that I’m working on. And I think that I think that value of discipline, that’s one of the key things is you got to build that in yourself as a objective pattern from the very beginning of the day, that it’s time to play the game, that it’s a skill to get comfortable doing the things that you’re otherwise uncomfortable doing. And it’s something you need to push yourself as this internal muscle that you can flex to get out of body, and do those things are uncomfortable doing until you get comfortable doing them. And that’s something that you just have to be consciously conscious about from the beginning, as your ritual to be disciplined and get better at being disciplined. We talk about a learning pattern is one I’ve been talking to my daughter in law about recently, that as you evolve professionally, you also have to exercise that ability to learn that you actually need to get more efficient about learning. Because when you grow a business, you constantly need to learn about different things, different areas, we talked about these different challenges, I need to learn how to overcome a series of challenges. And a lot of times we get comfortable in a certain pattern of learning. Where we may be used to channels like our blog posts that we follow Wikipedia articles, we don’t have a strong habit of reading books, while reading books is a good challenge in a lot of ways because it requires a lot of focus that can help be a form of meditation and exercise your your concentration capabilities. But you’re learning from a different format, where a lot of times people condense a whole lifetime experience into a book. So being able to expand on that and saying, hey, now I’m going to include specific books as part of my learning pattern. And now what I’m working with my daughter, Shayla on is subject matter experts, that you’re building this business. And you can learn from these online resources. But you need to be able to create a network of professionals in your industry and field where you can leverage and learn from their experience, and leverage that network as you come across challenges and be able to have that peer group, or mentorship group that you can rely on for the advice, the guidance, the ideas that will allow you to navigate those challenges and make better decisions. So that that’s like a really important part, I’m a big advocate of podcasting, and often gives you access to people that you would otherwise be able to have access to in a way that’s cordial, because you’re helping them out by getting their message out there. But you’re also developing yourself and your communication skills at the same time. So it’s really helpful learning pattern. And then the third one I would say is empathy. We talked a little bit about earlier, when you can really push away your own agenda and get into this absolute focus on the other person to align yourself around their goals and objectives. It really builds this in depth relationship with others that allows them to feel that they’re being felt and that your intentions are there. And then they tend to reciprocate. When somebody is helping them, they naturally want to want to help back most of the time, not always, if they’re not, they’re more self serving, then you can move on and find somebody else that is more of a better nature. So I think those are the times always think of those values as the key three in terms of some books, you know, with the empathy. Yes, just listen was one of my favorite books written by Mark Golson. I remember struggling reading with all these leadership books and I came across Ross marks book, just listen. And it taught me so much about empathy that really helped myself develop much richer, richer professional and personal relationships. So that’s what I always encourage when I’m meeting new entrepreneurs or speaking with undergrad students. You know, I like we think about learning pattern. And a good example of a book with a lot of concentration of knowledge is a book called just listen, that I believe was put together with Peter Brava. And that is a compilation of great world thinkers, I think they they listed as Darwinism to monger. And I like the theme of the book, they sort of walk you through the evolution of the human brain into why humans make misjudgment based on 20, some biases that we encounter, so that you can be conscious about it and walks you through ways to make better decisions. It’s a good bedside book, because each chapter gives you a lot to think about. Yeah, but those are a couple favorite books.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  36:06

Wow, that’s fantastic. Hey, look, thank you, you have been very, very generous in terms of sharing and helping our listeners, I just like to thank you, from bottom of my heart for that. I really appreciate it. It’s all about for me, it’s all about helping others to actually learn from other people and to live a better life. That’s what my ultimate passion is getting people living a better life through creating a better business. So really appreciate your time. If somebody wants to get in contact with you, or find out more about you or about the business. What’s the best place they can go to to do that?

Kison Patel  36:35

Sure. If anybody is interested in mergers and acquisitions, we have tons of free resources. It’s available at and mascience.com. Myself, I am on LinkedIn: Kison Patel.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  36:50

Wonderful, he said Honestly, I really appreciate thank you so much for your time. I look forward to following your journey and good luck with getting those eight new people and continue to grow it two times every year. I’m sure you’ll be there.

Kison Patel  37:04

Myself. I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Debra. enjoyed the conversation.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:10

Thanks again for joining us on better business better life with me your host Debra Chantry-Taylor. If you enjoy what you heard, then please subscribe to this podcast. And let us help you to get what you want out of business in life. Each week we release a new short episode which will give a success story and three takeouts to put into action immediately. These will help you take your business from good to great. The podcast is also supported by free resources, templates and useful tools, which you can find at Debra Chantry-Taylor dot com. I am a trained entrepreneur leadership and business coach, a professional EOS implementer and an established business owner myself. I work with established businesses to help them get what they want. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to have a chat about how I might better help you. Or if you’d like to join me as a guest on this podcast. Thanks again to NC audio editors for producing this podcast. See you on the next episode.

Debra Chantry-Taylor

Professional EOS Implementer | Entrepreneurial Leadership & Business Coach | Business Owner

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