Nick Scarabosio spent 18 years in real estate and property management, and then 10 more years in the fitness and gym industry before co-founding Culture to Cash. The firm specializes in helping business owners work on their company's productivity while increasing the company’s value. Nick works with solopreneurs to C-suite execs to create a culture-focused strategy to overcome their obstacles while supporting them with resources.
Parker City Lifestyle wanted to understand the concept behind Culture to Cash, so we sat down with Nick to hear all about it.
Q. Can you tell me about some of the business essentials that your company provides?
A. There are three mechanisms all business owners need at any given time inside of business. There's mentorship, there's coaching and then there's consulting. I think, unfortunately, the majority probably get grouped all together.
Q. From your business’ perspective, what is the difference between these three mechanisms—mentorship, coaching and consulting?
A. A mentor is your guide who you can go to. You can pick up any story, movie or book through the age of time and see that the hero always had their guide. They’re there to celebrate them through the good times, and then during the bad say, “Hey, the world’s not on fire. We can continue to move forward.”
And then we look at coaches as the next level. A coach is a key component to a winning team. That’s someone to just be on the outside and say, “Just keep doing that,” or “Have you considered moving the other way?”
And the last would be a consultant. I like to call us comprehensive consultants. We have backgrounds in all of the different areas.
Q. How do you approach the more cultural aspect of your Culture to Cash?
A. One of the things we work on with all of our CEOs and leadership teams as a whole is called the “one-page life plan.” We ask, what it is you want personally, and that lets us start mapping out our one-year, two-year and ten-year plan.
Q. What kinds of problems does that plan solve?
A.If you're just working and you don't know what the plan is, that’s often when we hit burnout or don't make the right decisions, because we don't have that long term vision. Without that clear understanding of what the end game should be, they don’t know the steps they should be taking to increase enterprise value, improve the team and align on what everyone is working towards.
Q. What are some common barriers for people as they seek advice from a consultant?
A. It’s an extremely simple action but it’s terribly difficult for people to get a mentor, consultant or coach. It's the action of raising your hand and saying “I don't know.”
Q. In your experience, why is that difficult for so many people?
A. Because we’re human beings. We’ve got egos. We’ve got passion. We’ve got all these drives, but if you pick any uber-successful business in the world, they will always refer to someone as being their mentor, coach or consultant.
Because as business owners, because we’re the managers, we have this expectation that everyone assumes we have all the answers.
