Bill Gilliland has provided advice and strategies to help owners grow their businesses and achieve personal goals for almost two decades.

Gilliland, a Montreat resident, has owned five businesses over the years, is the author of “The Coach Approach,” and is a globally ranked ActionCOACH.

ActionCOACH is a Las Vegas-based company that has served thousands of businesses and their owners around the world since 1993. Its coaches teach business owners, according to its website, “how to get more time, better teams in their companies and more money on their bottom-line.”

To gear up for 2026 he seemed like a logical choice to ask about new strategies for local business owners. 

Here are three questions with Gilliland:

As we approach the new year, what are the areas where business owners can shift or grow to make the most impact? 

It always comes back to the basics. If you don't have the basics worked out, then you can't really shift or grow. The first step is to review your foundation. Do you have your money mastery items in place? Do you have your financial statements? Do you know what to do with them once you get them?  Do you have metrics in place that are going to actually mean something? Do you have a cash flow forecast? It's just basic money mastery concepts. Then you've got time mastery things as well, like, what are the basics of that? What does your calendar look like? Is it forward thinking or reactive? Then you've got your  destination mastery. What's your vision for the business? Do you have a vision that's clear and somewhere to hear towards? The fourth thing is, do you have the basics in place so that your customers or clients or patients, or whatever you call them, are well taken care of? Those are the first steps. You take care of the basics first. A lot of businesses are people oriented. In other words, if you don't have the systems in place for the people to run the business, then you need to get the systems in place. I guess the first step is to create enough cash flow to buy systems and then put the systems in place, and then employ the right people to run the systems.

What are some of the most surprising suggestions you make to business owners who are looking for new growth strategies? As in, what practices do you swear by that your clients tend to find surprising? 

There's a couple of things that are very powerful that I think business owners can do. One is the power of actually drawing out a future, organizational chart. So, what do you want the business to look like in three to five years and then draw it out. From there, you'll see where the gaps are. It's very powerful to sit down and put it on a piece of paper and then look at where you are and then also figure out what you're going to need. It's not a rocket science strategy. Another thing that I think a lot of business owners get surprised by is being asked to flowchart their business. I think that that's an underutilized strategy and people are surprised by what they see. The other exercise that is really useful for existing business, even a business that is very successful, is to actually sit down with your employees and have them write out what they think their job is, then have the  manager or the owner, whoever it is that they report to, write out what they think their job is. That's going to be surprising, because they rarely match. Everyone has their own idea of what they're supposed to be doing and there's nothing wrong with that. Somebody is hired to do a job and then you find out their strengths may be a little different. If they're a great employee, they kind of morph the job to fit their strengths, and it's good for the business, but it's not exactly what the manager thinks. It's a very surprising outcome almost every time.

Why is it important to keep strategy fresh for any business? If you have a system that works, is it still important to change and grow and try new things? If so, why?  

The laws of physics say that you're either growing or dying. I do think sometimes we give up on a strategy while it's still working, because we get bored. I think it's always - what's the next best thing to do? So if you can make it better, you should always be making it better, and if it stops working, then you need to find a strategy that will. A lot of people think that, at least in my experience, there's one grand strategy and usually it doesn't work that way. Things are broken down into little things, so getting a percent better here and two percent better there. If you get two percent better in closing sales, that is going to make a difference. Then if you can get some added sales, and you get another two or three percent, it just all adds up. Something that we always have to look at is complacency. When you get complacent, you get smacked in the face, or you go the wrong way, and you start shrinking, and once you start shrinking, it's pretty hard to turn the ship around. 

Learn more about Gilliland by checking out his website: https://billgilliland.biz