Andy Seeley, CEO of Creatively Disruptive and Ashworth Strategy, is on a mission to become the “8:00 AM call” for small business owners—the trusted partner they can turn to after those sleepless 3:00 AM nights filled with uncertainty. Having experienced the stress and isolation of entrepreneurship firsthand, Andy now helps technician-turned-business-owners (plumbers, gym owners, bakers, and more) build scalable, sustainable businesses with the right systems, strategy, and support.

We explore Andy’s perspective on success—not as a shortcut, but as a combination of fundamentals: embracing failure, never giving up, and most importantly, building the right team. He shares how most small business owners get stuck because they try to do everything themselves, and why true growth comes from surrounding yourself with smart, hardworking people of strong character. Andy also dives into a critical operational insight: sequencing—doing the right things in the right order—to avoid overwhelming clients (and yourself) while still driving meaningful results.

—

Help Your Clients Sleep Soundly with Andy Seeley 

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Andy Seeley, the CEO of Creatively Disruptive, an agency supporting local, community-based small businesses, and Ashworth Strategy, an e-commerce, multi-channel marketing agency that is creating sustainable growth for beauty, apparel, pets, and kids industry businesses. Andy, welcome to the show. 

Thank you. I’m very happy to be here. Nice to see you, Steve. 

Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you. It’s a very interesting combination that you have going here, but I’d like to start with my favorite question: what is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in your businesses?

I think the personal “why” kind of straddles all the businesses that we deal with. We typically don’t work with large corporate brands. We don’t typically deal with, not that we wouldn’t want to, but we typically don’t, and we don’t actually even try to focus on them. Because the main  why”, the founding of our business came from when my partner and I were talking—we weren’t very happy with the two different businesses we were operating. We were both working on one project together, but he had his own thing, and I had another thing. We were both there, we’d both gone through some really tough times ourselves and had experiences of feeling very alone, trying to figure things out—sometimes successfully, sometimes very unsuccessfully.

And we both talking about our troubles and tribulations, and all of those kind of things. And we were like, wouldn’t it have been nice, wouldn’t it have been good if there was someone there to help us? That “staring at the ceiling at 3:00 AM” in the morning. And the morning is a thing that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners are very familiar with, right? You wake up at 3:00 AM, staring at the ceiling, thinking, “I’ve got all these things to do.” Or if it’s tough times—how do I make payroll? If there’s a legal issue—what am I going to do about that? Whatever it is, there’s always something. Even in good times, there’s often something. What we thought to ourselves was we are oftentimes, when we were in that situation, we didn’t really have anybody to go to. That 3:00 AM turns into 4:00 AM, then 5:00 AM, and sometimes we were just like, well, I’m just going to get up.

And then there are sleepless nights. And

we thought if we come from the standpoint, it's a real thing. It's something we’re passionate about is that most small business owners are technicians.
Share on X

Most small business owners are very good at a thing, like they’re a plumber and they start a plumbing company, or a baker who starts a bakery. The E-Myth. 

This is the E-Myth concept. 

Right. They’re a gymnastics coach, so they start a gymnastics gym. Most business owners are technicians, which means they’re very good at a very specific thing, not so good at many other things that you have to be. And we wanted to be that 8:00 AM. We wanted to be their 8:00 AM. And what that means is—staring at the ceiling at 3:00 AM, maybe their mind racing for 30 minutes or so—but then they can say, “You know what, we’ll reach out to Andy and Russ at Creatively Disruptive at 8:00 AM. I’ll get some sleep. We’ll get to the bottom of this idea. We’ll get to the bottom of this problem. We’ll get to the bottom of it.

And that was really important to us. And it really was a guiding light. That’s why, from a marketing standpoint—you could call us a marketing agency—but I don’t think it really is what we are. Because we do consultancy work. We work through exit strategies. We work through financial goals. We work through a whole bunch of stuff that does not include putting an ad up on Facebook, Instagram, or Google, or building websites.

We ask—why are you doing all that stuff? I love your first question, because what’s the point of it all, right? I had a conversation with a frustrated client yesterday, and at the end of the frustration that the client had, they were not frustrated. And I said to them, “Look, we’re talking about a lot of different things, and the reality is what’s going on with you when working with us is there’s some amazing things happening, which you agree with.” But the reality is, you are not talking to us about running a Facebook ad. You didn’t come to us because you desperately want a Facebook ad run, or come to us because you would love your company on Google.

That’s not the reason why you came to us. The reason why you came to us is something that those things will change in your life for the better. That’s why you’re talking to us. There’s a reason why you bought this business.

So our “why” is really to help those small business owners—who are often technicians, very specialized people—develop a broader skill set and a team that can help them through their challenges.
Share on X

The beauty of what we do is—we have 120 clients, all dealing with different issues and different situations. Because we engage with them at a consultative level, we hear it all. We hear, many times many subjects, here’s what not to do—and on those same subjects, here’s what to do. And we actually collate that stuff.

As you saw on our Zoom, there was a Zoom link we used—you saw my Read.ai. that read.ai As much as it’s for us to make sure that we have our ducks in order when we’re talking to somebody, it’s also an archive for us to make sure that some things that we spoke about, we learned about that now we can put that in our database to help other clients. And it’s not that we show other clients what we’ve spoken about and give state secrets and so forth. 

It’s a repository of company knowledge that you have developed. 

Absolutely. Me and you having a conversation like this, Steve, is all well and good. The fact that we are recording it is going to allow loads of other people to understand it. For us internally, it allows my team and us to look at stuff and go, okay, well this is a really good thing, let’s actually turn that into a process. Yeah. Love it. So a very long-winded, long thing. The “why” is, we want to be that 8:00 AM call after you’ve had a 3:00 AM wake up.

Love it. I mean, that is the definition of trust. If you are the person that they call at 8:00 AM, then they know that they can sleep well because you’re there. 

And the big, burning part of that “why” is that we didn’t have it—and it was tough. It was emotionally tough to be so concerned. I had a lot of 3:00 AM wake-up calls during the Great Recession in 2008–2009. It was a very worrying time. There was a market crash. Our house went from being worth $400,000 to being worth $100,000. We owed $300,000 on that house. We had a business that income went from about $500,000 a month. It was a gymnastics gym that my wife ran to making about $200,000 in a two month period, because so many layoffs were happening. My job, which was working for a TV station, we had loads of clients calling in, asking to cancel, trying to figure out how, so there was so much going on. Those 3:00 AMs were very regular thoughts that came up, and I would just sit there not knowing what to do and having no one to talk to. I desperately want to at least be someone that someone can think of, “You know what, we can call Andy. We can call the CD team, and we’ll figure this out.” So anyway, there you go. 

Okay, so this is a great segue, because you mentioned Read.ai and how you’re thinking about about processes—and how to use the 120 clients you have and the challenges you solve. How do you turn that into a process so other clients can easily access to it? So this podcast is really about this kind of stuff. It’s called Management Blueprint, and I’m always looking for shortcuts—business shortcuts, frameworks that entrepreneurs have discovered along the way and that they could share with the listeners and could help other people listening to have a better process. It could be anything—three to five steps—looking at something, seeing something in a different light. So what do you have in mind for us? 

So a shortcut to success—I’m always a little bit leery of statements like that. “Shortcuts to success”. It always feels a little bit like a 2:00 AM infomercial—blah, blah, blah—and you get steak knives with it. Because the reality is, oftentimes there’s no shortcut. I’m sure you’ve asked this question a million times, and a lot of people say, “Here are the shortcuts.” But my experience is—the real truth is—there are a couple of fundamentals to success. One is being okay with not having it right? That’s a “shortcut,” if you want to call it that. Failure is actually the journey to success. Being okay with failure. There’s a reason why 95% of humanity doesn’t run a business, and it’s because they find failure difficult, and we’ve been trained as humans to not embrace failure. 

Failure is the journey to success. It's where you learn. The other part—which is linked to failure—is never giving up.
Share on X

I don’t know if that’s a shortcut, but you only lose when you give up. Now, some people might say—sunk costs and things like that—at some point, you’ve got to stop putting into something that’s not working. But the reality is, if you believe in what you’re doing, there are going to be troubles, there’s going to be failures, there’s going to be difficulties. And as long as you don’t give up, and you learn from each mistake in each thing that happens, you will have success. You only won’t have success if you decide to give up. I really, truly believe that. I live that. 

I resonate with that, and I wouldn’t even say that the 3:00 AM wake-up is a bad thing. It’s really a forcing function. It’s forcing you, as the entrepreneur, not to give up—to put the energy in and figure the problem out so that you can move forward. Because if you sleep until 7:00 AM, then 8:00 AM the day starts, and you still haven’t solved the problem. You’re just snowballing it. 

But I would say—and those are more operational, ongoing things—so they don’t really fit your question of a shortcut to success. To me, that’s more the ingredients or material of success, right? But one of the things I would say would be a pattern of success that I’ve seen across hundreds of businesses that I’ve worked with—and that we currently work with—is building a team around you. Almost all of the successful people that I know—and when I say successful, I mean way more successful than I am, with multimillions of income and so forth—and I know a few of these guys… all of them have teams. All of them have people who are experts in certain areas. And almost all of them, to a T, are pretty good at building teams—finding people and putting them together. 

And what I would suggest, any business owner, if you are going to think that you are going to become wealthy and do well by doing everything yourself—one, I think you’ll fail. I don’t know anyone with no team who has achieved strong success. And two, your life’s going to suck. I would say, it’s going to be tough, right? So if I had to choose something—even though I don’t like the word “shortcut,” if I’m honest with you, and I know that was a question that was coming up and I did think hard about it, and I kind of feel like I could give you a cheesy one-liner, but that kind of is like nahh.

But the reality is, I think our success with our companies is probably my ability to actually find good people. And my philosophy is: hire smart, hardworking people of good character—and then train them.
Share on X

And if I can find somebody who is smart, hardworking, and of good character, and also has a skill set—that’s a bonus. What I’m really looking for are those first three. A smart, hardworking person of character—you can train them, if they have an interest in what they’re learning. 

So how do you do it? So maybe that’s the framework. “Shortcut” is actually—I agree—the wrong word. I meant a business framework. 

Okay. 

Maybe I shortcutted the expression. So how do you find that smart, hardworking person of character? Do you have specific questions you ask to figure that out? 

A lot of what we do is—I’ll ask questions around what they’ve done in past jobs, even past personal lives. I’m not looking for something too narrow—more broad, like: tell me about a situation where you saw something bad happening. What did you do? It’s kind of open-ended, and it’s not telling them the answer. But you know, something bad was happening. Tell me what the bad thing was. And they might say, “Well, it was this kid, and they were drowning in a pool.” Okay—what did you do? Did you run to get someone to help?

Did you turn away and walk off? Did you pull out your phone and film it? Or did you jump in and save the kid? What did you do? That gives you an understanding of what kind of person they might be. And then part of it, for me, is I feel I have a decent gauge of whether people are lying to me. Sometimes I don’t get it right, but I feel I have a decent gauge when they’re saying it.

In my mind, I’m noting—does this sound like a real story? Does it feel real? Does their face look like they’re revisiting that moment that what they’re doing and what they’re telling me? Or does it feel like a story being made up? And then I put that down. And if it’s like, the person said that they jumped into the pool and saved the kid, and I could see the emotion in them and it feels like they revisited, this feels real to me. Check. There would be multiple questions along those lines. It would tell me about a time when maybe you’re ending the day and some things are missing or some things haven’t happened, or blah, blah, blah. What is your thought and what is your plan to address that? And are they going to go back and spend more time working?

That might be a good answer—or not. Are they going to note it and handle it first thing in the morning? Or do they say, “Ah, someone else will take care of it”? Getting those kind of answers of how their mind thinks about real world things that they’ve done in the past. Trying to keep it open so it’s not so specific that they say, oh, I’ve never had that experience before gives you an idea of what their character is, right? It also gives you a sense of how hard they work. And I’d say a hard worker should also be balanced with being an organized worker.

How organized they are. Are they on top of things? Because I’m okay with you not being such a hard worker, Steve, if you’re very well organized and you get stuff done. You might not be busting your butt, working long hours and saying, Oh my God, I’m working so hard and lots of long hours, but you’re so organized and you’ve got yourself in such good order that you actually outproduce everybody else, because you’re more efficient. That, to me, would fall under the hard work category, right? Yeah. Yeah. So a good answer to something wasn’t done that needed to be done, and it’s the end of the day. 

A good answer might be, I looked at it and I was like, I can wait until about midday next day. I put it on my list of the first thing that I’m going to do in the morning. Then the next morning I came in, I got it done within 25 minutes, and everything was great. I would look at that and go, okay, that’s not a bad answer. I’m okay with that. As an employer, I care about your work-life-balance. I’m not always looking for somebody who’s prepared to work till midnight every night. That, to me, once in a while is okay. But if I have an employee that’s looking to do that all the time, that’s a problem. Because I know there’s a limitation to that. And then again, when we’re talking about we’re looking at good character, hard work, and smart. 

So yes, if they are intelligent, it’s clear.

And I’m not going to say, “Hey, here’s an algebra test—tell me the answer.” That comes through with the questions, right? 

It’s common sense. You’re looking for common sense—which is not very common. I like it, because essentially you are triggering some signs of authenticity in that person. Are they really showing up? Are they authentic, or are they trying to look like something they’re not? And it’s a really good filter. 

So a lot of times, I think interview questions are like, “Here’s a situation—what would you do?” do? Any question like that, especially when you’re selecting teammates. And I don’t always have interview with teammates, sometimes the people that I have relationships with and I go and say, I need you to work for my company. I know you well enough. I’ve experienced you enough—I’m going to bring you in. But during that journey of coming to that conclusion, I’m looking for those qualities. And when you’re in an interview and you don’t know someone, and you ask a fabricated question—that’s a fantasy. They can come back with a fabricated answer—that’s also a fantasy. 

And most of the time, that’s what happens. I’m a pretty good interviewer because my interview, when I’m looking to interview with somebody, not that I’ve done it for a very long time, but let’s say I’m interviewing with something other than work, I dunno what it might be, but maybe something like a school counselor, school for my kid or whatever. And we are interviewing, I’m analyzing what the person who’s asking me the question, I’m trying to figure out what answers they want. And I think anybody with an element of intelligence does the same thing. And you end up giving answers, not necessarily, which are 100% what the interviewer needs to know. The interviewer gets the answer what the interviewee thinks they want to know. And I think when you ask questions that are kind of open-ended, but experiential about what they’ve done in the past, you get a sense of kind of who they truly are. And then the goal is listening to see, to get those cues on. 

I always like asking, “Tell me about a time when something bad happened in your life.” Okay—what did you do? That’s something you can really work through and get a sense of—are they truthful? Are they emotional? It’s a question I think some people are uncomfortable with, and some interviewers might think, “I don’t know about that. What might come up in that interview? I’ve never had a really terrible answer—like, “I was at the scene of a murder, or blah, blah, blah. I’ve never got that answer. But I’ve definitely had things like, “I was coaching a team, and one of the players broke their leg.” Okay—what did you do? And they talk me through it, and I’m like, okay, that makes sense. That’s a good answer from a good standpoint. I’ve had stuff like that. So I’m yet to come across a real traumatic story, but what I found is that I can really tell whether or not somebody is telling the truth. And I can get a sense of kind of how they handle really difficult situations. 

Okay, Andy, I’d like to switch gears here. What I’m hearing is that you are good at building teams and empowering them. You have a good ability to hire people that have good character—smart and hardworking. What is one thing that you are actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

We’ve gotten to the point where we have so many moving parts in our business that, sometimes, with our client base, it’s overwhelming. There’s a lot going on. We’ve got an AI system with multiple components—it’s tremendously useful, a very powerful tool—but it can be overwhelming for a technician, like a baker or a gymnastics coach, who’s specialized in something else to suddenly have to take that on. We’ve got ads, we build websites, we provide consultancy—we’ve got consultancy, we’ve got all these things that, when tied together, create a really powerful machine. And what we’re trying to do right now is try to figure out how to set expectations and set out how to roll all of the stuff out. 

When we first started doing a lot of this in one lump sum, we would almost dump it all on the client within a week of them signing and start working through all these things. And what we found is that it’s quite overwhelming and almost to the point where the client runs away and they don’t actually want to continue. It’s just too much work all at once. So one of the things that we’re working on right now to try to improve our situation is we’ve got a lot of stuff. We’ve built this machine that really helps businesses inside out. But do we have to build every part of that machine in the first three weeks? Clients want things to happen in the first three weeks.

We can have things happen in the first three weeks. Do we need everything to happen in the first three weeks? That’s why I said to you, doing everything all the time forever is tough all at once. Right now, we’re actually literally working through a process, talking with the team, working with the team of what’s the order of priority of all these things that we have from the point of view of what’s easy to implement, but maybe not as important, but we can get it implemented within minutes of a client joining. What’s really important, but it takes a long time and trying to prioritize those things. Because all of the smaller things, individually, aren’t hugely impactful—but collectively, they are. But we can get them all done in a day. And then some of the things that are singular that have a huge impact, they take a little bit longer. How do we scale this out so we can actually get results very quickly for the client without overwhelming them with all of the stuff?

And I think there’s a word you’ve probably heard a lot—sequencing is really important. I think a lot of businesses fall apart because they do things out of sequence. They don’t think about the sequence. They go for the fun, cool thing first, and sometimes that’s the worst decision they can make. Right now, we’re working through how to properly sequence our onboarding of new clients—to make sure the experience is really positive without overwhelming them. We’re actually getting into a really good place. And some of that is, I mean, most of this is because there is so many things.

We have these—like I say—technician business owners, and they come to us and they’re amazing at plumbing, but they’ve got a phone, and that’s all they have. So whenever anybody needs to call them to schedule a new job, it rings their phone—and they’re under a sink doing work. The phone’s ringing. They’re like, “Oh, hell,” and they’re under the sink. Well, sometimes they don’t answer it, or whatever. They’ve got no system. They’ve got no process to take care of things. And we’ve got to build all that out, right? And it’s so common—and it’s totally fine. They’ve been successful in what their technical part of is, but they want more than a job that they own, right?

You’ve probably heard that a lot. And they want to start scaling. They want to take vacations without losing income. They want to do all of these things. We can do all that for them—but we can’t do it like that. Even though they want it like that, if we do it like that, their brain nukes. 

Yeah. 

I don’t know if that’s a good answer for you, because that is something that we’re actually working on from a business standpoint of is how to sequence and do things in the right order that allows people to get the best bang for their buck without melting their brains down.

Indigestion. Yeah. I don’t know who said it—maybe Peter Drucker—but he said most businesses die of indigestion rather than starvation. So that’s true. So what drives your business? What is it that helps your business grow? I mean, you mentioned 120 clients. I saw your video—we were talking about 114, 115 clients—so you’ve been growing since the video. 

Yeah. 

So what drives your business? 

If I’m honest with you, philosophically, what drives us is the failures that we’ve had in the past. My business partner and I—we’ve had some pretty tough times, going back to that 3:00 AM question. We almost lost our house during the Great Recession. We didn’t lose it—we still have it to this day. It’s actually a second house now, in Lake Tahoe. We went through times that were quite stressful, difficult, and troublesome for us. I mean, not necessarily nearly as bad as other people have had, probably much tougher times that they’ve had to go through.

But I would say what drives us is the fact that we had those tough times. We understand what it’s like to struggle, and we really want to do what we can for a small business owners—mom-and-pop level businesses—avoid those situations. All of our decisions are about how we can make a difference. Again, going to that conversation with that client yesterday that I just mentioned a moment ago, I actually said to them: if you guys decide to leave because of these frustrations that you’ve had, ’cause they had a couple of frustrations, and it was mainly about what I was talking about the everything was getting dumped on them. They were like overwhelmed. There’s lots of stuff happening and they were thinking that it all needed to be happened in one month, but really it was, no, it’s okay if it takes three months for this stuff to get rolled out. And I said to them: if you leave, I’m going to be very disappointed in myself and my team, because of the massive difference we can make in your lives.

And that is the driving force for our business—to make a real difference. And the fact that what we’ve done so far—we’re seeing the germination of those really good things. And they agreed. They said, “Yeah, there are some really good things happening. We really like those. We’re just frustrated with the amount of stuff going on.” And I’m like, “Well, I think we can spread it out, take the heat off, and make sure things roll out nicely.” That reminded me that the reason our business exists is to help these small businesses be all they can be—to reach for the stars. There are so many very good people who could make a lot of money and do a lot of good things—but their specialty is so focused that they’re not rounding out their overall situation. 

Especially in gymnastics—we work with a lot of gymnastics coaches. Probably about 60% of our business is kids’ activity centers. A lot of kids activity center owners tend to be, they do everything themselves. They put everything on their shoulders, and they don’t build out their team—which means they can’t scale. So they end up owning a job, not a scalable business. What drives me is: how do we help these small businesses scale, have a better life, reach more people, help more kids, and support their employees?

All of that kind of stuff. And people might say, “Oh yeah, sure, Andy—you’re like some Mother Teresa figure.” I’m like, no—because my experience is, if we do a really good job of that, the money takes care of itself. A “shortcut,” going back to your earlier question, is: stop thinking about how much money you can make from each customer. Really focus on taking care of that customer. Charge a reasonable rate, and the money will come. If you become well known—if you become a major figure in an industry—that money will come. I’m lucky enough that, in the gymnastics industry and the kids’ activity center space, I’ve become reasonably well known.

People I don’t know—and I think you become a well-known figure when people you don’t know recognize you. You walk into a conference, and people come up and say, “Hi, Andy.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay—I don’t know who you are.” I’ve been watching you on this, or I’ve been doing that, I’ve been seeing you talk or speak or blah, blah, blah. I don’t think of myself as famous at all, but in some of the niches we work in, I’ve become well known. And I think that’s happened because we care—and we let the money take care of itself. 

Andy, our time’s coming to an end, but I’d like to ask—if someone is running an activity-based business, maybe a gym, a swim team, a dance studio, or selling classes—and they want to ramp up their business because everything is on their shoulders and they’re a technician—where should they go, and how can they find you?

So, like I said, we help plumbers, home service businesses—we’ve worked with banks, rec centers, kids’ activity centers, and all sorts. Where our real specialty is, in a very real way, is pushing the needle for local brick-and-mortar businesses. Obviously, we also have Ashworth Strategy, which we didn’t get into—that’s our e-commerce brand. But my personal passion is that mom-and-pop business that opens up a storefront. The best way to reach us—regardless of whether you’re a plumber or anything else—is to go to creativelydisruptive.com. You might look at it and think, oh, this seems like a whole bunch of kids on here.

We do have another brand called highlevelthinkers.com, where we do the same kind of work for home service businesses. So go to creativelydisruptive.com and reach out there. We actually have a little chat square that you can go into and start talking to us and you’ll actually speak to our little AI up here. It knows everything—it’s basically like talking to me. It can help you set up a time to speak with one of our team members. We don’t have salespeople—we call them business development consultants, because that’s really what they do. They’ll talk with you and figure out the best way we can help.

But basically, in a nutshell, there’s lots of ways to reach out to us. But in my mind, the best and easiest way, just go to creativelydisruptive.com or highlevelthinkers.com, and reach out to us through there using the chat bot, or using the form and just reach out. And we’ll help you. 

Okay. Well, if you’re listening and you’re running a local business—whether it’s an activity-based business, a mom-and-pop business, or a contracting business—and you’d like to level up, put in systems, and sequence them properly, then reach out to creativelydisruptive.com or highlevelthinkers.com.

yep. 

And then you can connect with Andy—or the chatbot, if he’s sleeping—and it’ll get back to you. 

The chatbot’s probably a much more fun conversation. 

It could be. You can listen to the podcast and use the chat at the same time, so you get the best of both worlds. So thank you, Andy, for sharing your experiences and being very vulnerable. And if you, as our audience, enjoyed listening to this, then stay tuned—because every week I have an entrepreneur sharing, not necessarily shortcuts, but good frameworks that can help your business. So thanks for coming, Andy, and thank you for listening. 

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Important Links:

• David’s LinkedIn
• David’s website
• https://highlevelthinkers.com/