We recently connected with Amir Ghannad and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Amir, thanks for joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

I can trace just about every bit of success and fulfillment I have had in my adult life to an action or decision that felt like a risk at the moment. I left my home country of Iran at age 16 to come to the US on my own in 1978. My parents felt it would be wise for me to leave so that my education wouldn’t be interrupted as a result of the political unrest, which eventually led to a revolution, followed by many years of devastation due to the war with Iraq. Although I had taken a few years of English in school, I had no conversational skills and a very limited vocabulary. I knew literally no one in America and the only thing I had was the address to a high school in Boston, MA.

I had led a fairly sheltered life and although my family was not rich by any means, my parents and extended family had created a comfortable life for me and my two younger brothers. My move to Boston was the first experience I had, being on my own as I found myself in a foreign land with virtually no support system.

This was a risky move for my entire family. I was scared but trusted that my parents had made the right decision. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for them to make it happen as they sent their 16-year old away to pursue a better life in the midst of all the uncertainty and at a time when our only means of communication was to write letters that took over two weeks to be delivered and 3-minute phone calls every couple of weeks that were made, using a roll of quarters at a payphone.

What followed was a series of unfortunate events, which were not pleasant at the time but in retrospect served a great purpose in my life as they helped me grow and develop resilience. Just two weeks after my arrival, the college dorm that the high school was using for students discontinued their contract with them and we were told we had to find a place to stay. I ended up finding an apartment and 3 roommates and learned a lot in the process. then, 25 days into my stay in the US, I was attacked and beat up by a gang of local boys one evening.

I ended up getting a job as a dishwasher and working late nights while going to school so I could make enough money to pay for my medical bills. I felt responsible for those bills and I didn’t tell my parents what had happened until I saw them when I went back home for a visit for the first time 13 years later.

Looking back on the risk that my parents and I took back in 1978, I can see that it not only changed the trajectory of my life but so many others’ lives as well. In retrospect, although the details of my experiences make the average person cringe and wonder how I managed to pull it off, I always say “nothing bad has ever happened to me because even though it seemed like a bad thing at the time, it all served a purpose in my life.”

Since those early days, I have taken many other risks, and every time they led to something great. I left my restaurant, which is how I supported myself through school, for a job that paid much less but gave me the experience I needed to get a job after I graduated. I moved to a new country 3 more times, including the recent move my family and I have made to live in Portugal. I left a successful and secure corporate career to start our family business, The Ghannad Group. All of these risks have led to my family and me designing and living a life we love.

Amir, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

At The Ghannad Group, we partner with our clients and guide them in creating extraordinary cultures that deliver breakthrough results and unprecedented fulfillment. We offer highly customized services including speaking, private and public leadership workshops, consulting, and coaching. We also have digital offerings that make it possible for our clients to go through our most popular workshops in the comfort of their own workspace at their own pace. Additionally, we have a membership community that makes hundreds of original articles and videos and other learning opportunities, as well as access to me, available on the computer or our app.

Clients generally come to us when they are dealing with significant change or when they want to significantly increase the level of engagement and leadership capability on their teams.

We are proud to say that we don’t come to our clients with one-size-fits-all solutions. Although I have 40 years of leadership experience under my belt and have developed a variety of tools and methodologies, we always start with seeking to understand what is working and wat is not, and we guide our clients in a collaborative process of designing and implementing their engagements.

We also realize that every client has employees who are capable and perhaps many of them are frustrated because their voices have not been heard. That is why I consider one of my most valuable contributions to the clients is to amplify the voices of the current team members and train and develop them so that they don’t have to rely on us long term.

My goal in every engagement is to bring unprecedented value while I am working with the client AND not be missed when I’m gone, because they are capable of sustaining the gains and continuing to make great things happen.

I’m proud to say we have served dozens of clients of different sizes in various industries and have always received the highest marks. That is why we were able to grow our business to a 7-figure revenue in the second year since inception through referrals and repeat business and zero marketing spend.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

There are entrepreneurs whose stories involve taking a leap of faith. Mine is one of building a bridge and a short hop of faith! Having had a successful career in manufacturing and supply chain for 31 years, I always knew that my passion was in energizing and developing people and bringing out the best in them, but I chose to stay in my career and practice those skills in whatever role I was in rather than leave and start my own business early on.

No matter what my official job or title was, I always did my work in a way that was in line with my passion. I even went back to school and got an MBA focused on Organizational Development. I found this approach to be very fulfilling and I attribute much of my success to the fact that I genuinely cared about people, and they could sense it in the way I invested time and effort in them, personally and professionally.

Then about 20 years into my professional career, I began to moonlight as a professional Facilitator. I would take time off at work and offer my services to companies that wanted to do strategic planning and team effectiveness work. It was something that fed my soul and brought in extra cash. It also reinforced to me that I was good at doing that work because strangers who didn’t know me would hire me and then give me all kinds of positive feedback about their experience.

A couple of years later, when the plant I was managing delivered a major turnaround from the worst to the best, I was asked to speak at a manufacturing event. I had no training as a public speaker and the audience of 600 people was the largest one I had spoken to. I decided to just share the secrets of our success authentically. There were over 30 speakers at the event and to my surprise, my talk was rated by far the best one. Looking back at the video from that event, I can tell you, it wasn’t my smooth public speaking savvy that won the audience over but the content of my message and the fact that I did deliver it in an entertaining way, not necessarily as a set of instructions.

Following that event, the company that organized the event asked me if I would be willing to speak at their other events globally if they paid my expenses and I said yes. For the next several years, while I still had a full-time job, I would fly around the world and speak at their events and every single time, my talk was rated the best of the event.

This is how I developed a strong global network, which was partly responsible for the fact that my book, The Transformative Leader, published in 2015, has been shipped to over 30 countries.

The bridge building that had happened up to that point made the decision leave my corporate career in 2016 much easier for me. By that time, I had a lot of requests for paid speaking engagements. I had taken some of those while I still had a full-time job but taking vacation days to do that work was getting old.

I should mention that the greatest force behind my book getting published and us starting our family business, The Ghannad Group, was my daughter, Naseem, who is the serial entrepreneur in the family. It was her encouragement and ultimately her branding skills that set us up to reach 7-figure revenue and a great deal of demand for our work as early as our second year in business.

My wife, Connie, and my son, Naveed, joined the team shortly after we started the business, and the rest is history. It has been an absolute blast to serve our clients and do the work we love while working together as a family.

You can read more about my 14 tips for successful consulting at https://theghannadgroup.com/blog/14-tips-successful-consulting?rq=consulting.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

It is important for every business to create multiple streams of revenue. Ours is no different and we went about doing it organically. We started with speaking. Then we added books, which were sold in the back of the room after my talks and offered through our website as well as Amazon. We then began to do private workshops for clients who wanted to do deeper work with their teams. Eventually, we started holding public workshops that clients would sign up for to attend in Atlanta. In some cases, clients wanted to go beyond what the workshops offered, and they were asking us to work with them on a going basis. So, we started offering consulting services and we have had clients who have utilized our services on a short-term basis and others who engaged us for 2-3 years. As clients asked for additional 1-1 coaching, we started offering executive coaching services to a select few clients. We also created a membership site that allowed members to join for a monthly membership fee and have access to an abundance of our content at a fraction of the cost to bring me in to speak at their events. Additionally, we created courses and offered virtual sessions.

Where we stand today is that we have something for just about everyone at just about any budget. this approach also helped us not just weather the storm during the height of the pandemic but get stronger and increase our revenue.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theghannadgroup.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amiraghannad/
• Facebook: https://twitter.com/AmirGhannad
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaghannad/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmirGhannad
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdgNlyEj449zSNpHJVh9–g
• Other: The Transformative Leader Book: https://theghannadgroup.com/store/the-transformative-leader On The Court Membership community: https://www.onthecourtleadership.com/ Discover The Transformative Leader e-course: https://theghannadgroup.com/dtl-ecourse