Josh John (Creative Business Council)

Josh John is the owner of Creative Business Council, an organization that consults companies in the trades and manufacturing. 

For starters, Josh hails from Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, Oregon.

“It’s like the Burnsville of the Twin Cities,” he says, dryly.

I think Portland sucks, and I’m forming this opinion despite never having set foot in that city.

“Portland is advocating really hard for humanity. It’s really trying to protect human life,” Josh says. 

“It is wrestling with the economic challenges of trying to support every human life possible, without enough resources to do it, and that’s why it’s getting criticized really hard.”

I’m told city leadership is retracting some of the benefits that were once afforded to its denizens, a decision that predictably has received backlash.

“People are losing benefits that they once thought that they could get,” Josh says, before getting analogous. 

“Eventually, they [the city] run out of peanut butter. They have too much toast for the peanut butter they do have.”

When Josh says this, I laugh harder than I have in the last month because his delivery is so direct, unblemished by emotion, yet his tone still carries traces of sympathy, perhaps because trying to solve systemic issues is impossible, regardless of how much goodwill one possesses. 

But I didn’t interview Josh to lament the current state of Portland. 

Instead, we are on this Zoom because after one phone call and a shared fried bread appetizer at an Eagan restaurant, I’ve deduced that Josh is a sharp intellectual whose investigative talents have made many business owners richer, both in dollars and in spirit. 

For the record, Josh didn’t grow up wanting to own CBC, nor did he want to come to Minnesota, because growing up as a West Coast resident, he didn’t even know where The Land of 10,000 Lakes was located.

A talented musician, Josh ended up in the Midwest because St. Olaf wanted him to come and study music performance. 

Once on campus, Josh continued playing the bassoon, which allegedly is the clown of the orchestra because of its expressive and humorous sounds. 

After graduating, Josh didn’t go back to California and try to make it in the music biz.

Like, no one outside of Bono and Dua Lipa actually makes money on account of their artistry. 

“That, and I met an entrepreneur on a plane who gave me great advice,” Josh says.

“He said, take advice from people who are living the way that you want to live.”

Not wanting to be perpetually broke and clamoring for his one shot at glory, Josh eventually ascended into a nice role at a tech company. 

Inquisitive and a net positive for nearly anyone he encounters, Josh was notorious for asking business owners really good questions, to the extent that they wanted his consulting advice.

While developing a reputation for having extremely insightful observations, Josh also was making a very good living working at that tech company, but when the opportunity to own CBC arrived, he took it, and now he spends his days running an organization that is constantly elevating companies in the trades and manufacturing by improving their systems and processes. 

“Many business owners are wearing too many hats, they are spinning too many plates, and they just can’t keep all the plates spinning,” Josh acknowledges. 

“For these business owners, their teams feel that too, and so a lot of the work that my company does is helping teams figure out how to support a founder so that the owner doesn’t have to keep wearing all of those hats.”

Diligently, and in a calculated manner, CBC helps facilitate the implementation of new strategies for companies who are fledgling or mired in a state of neutrality.

Routinely, the end result of CBC’s advice is that a business owner becomes less needed, and the company continues to be profitable as the founder fades into the background of daily operations. 

Making money is a good reason to start a business, but doing so is stressful, and success is far from guaranteed, so I ask Josh why most people delve into entrepreneurship. 

“Most of the people that we work with are accidental business owners,” he says, adding that many get into business ownership because they look at their current employer and believe they can offer the marketplace something better.

“Fifteen years later, those business owners wind up with 20 employees and they don’t really know how they got there, or how to get out.”

Of note: 

Josh bought CBC a couple years ago, but the business is over 30 years old, and what makes Josh’s services so desired among companies is not just his ability to observe and diagnose complex problems, but to also integrate effective strategies to remedy whatever is ailing a business.

“I noticed that there is a gap between business owners getting great insights, them getting fired up, but then they couldn’t go deliver,” Josh notes.

To bridge the gap between information and implementation, Josh brilliantly began to synchronize owners and their operators, ensuring insights were communicated and then collaboratively utilized. 

“That allowed us to triangulate the one or two things that would make a difference for that specific company,” Josh mentions. 

“By getting the owner and the team more actively involved, that’s when some really cool things started to happen for our clients.”

In my experience, most consulting firms can offer either keen insights or the ability to implement new strategies, but rarely can they offer both.

“The business model of CEO peer groups is not unique. There are dozens of options out there,” Josh readily admits.

The reason business owners opt to invest in a peer group is for one a several reasons:

They are looking to be heard.

They are looking to pass and receive referrals.

Some are just looking for a hobby and good friends with a similar lifestyle.

That being said, not a lot of peer groups are led by a visionary like Josh who is unapologetic about holding business owners accountable in order to propel his clients forward.

To be fair, Josh says that when he bought CBC, it was more of a social group for business owners than a firm that was devoted to elevating its clients to the next echelon of success.

“With that, what happened was a lot of our best clients would leave because they didn’t want to listen to our worst clients complain about their businesses, and not do anything month-to-month,” Josh cites as a big reason for the pivot CBC took awhile back.

In the last two years, I assume Josh has lost some clients who didn’t appreciate his candor, but that is irrelevant because CBC has established an identity as being the group where businesses go to find that elusive next step in their evolution. 

“Your bottom line must grow,” Josh insists. 

“We started building structures and systems that gave our clients the tools to move the needle forward every single month, to the point that, again, the business owner is not needed on a day-to-day basis.”

Looking ahead, Josh predicts there will be a segment of people from the baby boomer generation whose businesses will close because they don’t have a succession plan in place, and this is where CBC is well-positioned to assist.

Explains Josh:

“My goal is to get a lot of those people into our organization so that over 2-4 years we are doing the final work of building them a suitable team, and getting them ready to pass the business off or sell with an extremely functional system already in place.” QS

**

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