Gayle Goodman Lynch, Business Life Coach, Coequal Network | The Jeff Crilley Show

Join Jeff Crilley and business life coach Gayle Goodman Lynch as she shares her journey from corporate America to entrepreneurship. Discover how to navigate the 'teenage stage' of business growth and ensure your company serves your life, not the other way around.

Show Notes

What happens when the business you built starts running you? Many founders hit a point where growth brings stress, team challenges, and the uncomfortable realization that everyone is watching how they lead.

On this episode of The Jeff Crilley Show, Gayle Goodman Lynch, Business Life Coach and founder of CoEqual Network, shares how she helps entrepreneurs navigate that turning point. A 17+ year business owner, former corporate marketing executive, and host of the Choice Wisdom podcast, Gayle works with leaders who want to grow their companies without losing themselves in the process.

In this conversation, you’ll hear:
- How Gayle turned a job loss during the Great Recession into a thriving consulting career
- Why businesses enter a “teenage stage” and what founders must change as they scale
- How a leader’s stress and behavior quietly shape company culture
- The mindset shift that helps entrepreneurs build a business that serves their life

Gayle also shares lessons from running a company with her husband and why self-regulation and forgiveness play a larger role in business success than most people realize.

Learn more about Gayle and CoEqual Network at: https://www.coequalnetwork.com

What is The Jeff Crilley Show?

Jeff Crilley is a former news reporter, who spent more than 25 years in newsrooms across the country. He’s an Emmy Award winning journalist, who decided to make the jump from news in 2008, when he founded his own PR Firm, Real News Public Relations.

Today, the firm has more than 100 clients, and Jeff continues to tell the stories of interesting people he meets along the way.

These are those stories.

Coming up next on the Jeff Crilley Show, you're gonna meet a wildly successful entrepreneur and business coach. She's also the host of a very popular podcast called Choice Wisdom. We're gonna share her journey just ahead. Many are predicting that the worst is yet to come, which is unfortunate, said one person here. Until now, they've enjoyed the reputation of being the nation's icebox. Watched a burglar in his home this morning by webcam. As a journalist of over twenty five years, stories are what make my world turn. Reporting live from The Dallas Newsroom tonight, Jeff Crilley, Fox four news. But in 2008, I took the jump from my familiar life and started a PR firm from my home. We're talking about anyone with a camcorder like the one I'm using becomes a television network. We started slowly growing the company and we now have over a 100 clients and we've branched into the world of live digital broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team. And the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. Well, there's that old saying it's lonely at the top and as a owner of a PR firm and podcast network, I can tell you that there are only a handful of people that I can tell my deepest darkest secrets to and and and so it is lonely at the top for many entrepreneurs and CEOs and that's why they bring in somebody like my next guest, Gayle Goodman Lynch is in the studio, she's a business life coach and host of a very popular podcast called the Choice Wisdom Podcast. Thanks for coming on the show. Well, thank you for having me. This is so much fun to be on someone else's show. Thank you. Likewise. Yes. You have a very popular show and talk about that in a minute. Tell us what your journey, how did you get into this? You know, it's interesting, I actually had worked in corporate America for a long time like so many people do and my job sort of naturally came to an end and I didn't realize it at the time, but I was being called to do something different with my life And so many people run into that problem and they kind of freak out a little bit and don't know what to do. And mine happened during the great recession. I lost my in house job and thought, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do next? So I wound up basically starting a business. I thought, you know, no one is going to hire anyone at the vice president level in marketing during this, you know, economic downturn, so maybe I should go out and try to make my own ring. So that's what I did, and I started out, you know, just as a marketing consultant in 2008, and I got my first client within two weeks, and I stayed busy ever since. So I have worked mainly as a corporate communications fractional c c CMO, CE or c chief communications officer fractional. There you go. Don't even know what I do, Jeff. It is a mouthful, but it was fractional. And I think successful about that, especially during the great recession is is that no one could hire anyone full time. So they were able to get, you know, that senior level load Yes. For a fraction of the cost, fraction of the time, and I was able to enjoy a lot more freedom in my life, which then I realized I love. So that was how I started my entrepreneurial journey. I love that. We're gonna pull up your website and as we scroll down the website, why don't you describe your perfect client? Who do you like to work with? You know, the person I really love to work with is actually myself to a degree right now because I started a business with my husband about two years ago, and it's reaching that teenage stage. And if you run a business, you're gonna know what I'm talking about. It's but when you've gotten past figuring out how to run the business and all the pitfalls and just, you know, unusual stuff you weren't expecting, then it starts to really grow, and it really starts to take off. And when it does that, what happens is is that it takes you along with it. Right? And it takes you over, and a lot of times you realize, oh my gosh, this business is now running my life and I'm not running it anymore. It's running me. And a lot of times when that happens too, you start bringing in more staff and you start bringing in more vendors and you've got more people you're communicating with. So using my communications background, what I try to do is help my clients, you know, figure out how do you communicate with your external audiences and your internal audiences in a way that everyone's aligned and they know what they're doing. So that's the practical side of how I work with people. But then there's an internal subject that comes up. Right? Because if you're the founder running a company, then you actually are very much a reflection of your company or your company's a reflection of you. So it really is important how well you're doing and a lot of times when people start to experience a lot of that stress, a lot of the things that don't work so well for us personally start coming up. Okay. You were telling me a story right before the show about one of your favorite success stories. Oh, I had this really great client. He was the CEO of of a company that had been wildly successful when he started it. He's one of those people that because of his you talked about energy before the show started. Right? It's like, some people have energy and they attract all the good to them. This was that type of a person. And he created a great company, and it was with a fairly small number of people that he pretty much knew, you know, he had personal relationships with. And then as it started to grow, he realized that, you know, your the business does get to that teenage stage, it gets to a larger point that for him, he needed to start acting more like a CEO rather than a contributor in the business and someone who was kinda on the ground, you know, boots on the ground kinda So as the business grew, it evolved into another couple of brands. So over a couple of year period, we were communicating with all kinds of new audiences Yes. A whole ton of people that he was hiring and helping, you know, align that external message with the internal message like I was talking about Yeah. Plus helping him figure out who am I gonna be at the head of this thing. Right. You know, because his demeanor, his personality didn't have to change because he was wonderful person. He was already just an amazing soul running this company, but his behavior had to change. Because everybody would follow what he did. You know? So, he was starting to get a little bit more, you know, I wanna say, I don't wanna say critical. That's probably not the right word, but but more aware Yes. Of the how he shows up in a room is going to inform how everybody else has to show up in the room. And I I think that was a little that's daunting sometimes Sure. When you're the leader because you're not used to all eyes being on you Right. Or the camera being on you all the time. And it's you just basically have to to kinda get comfortable with that and then Yes. It's a transition. Companies grow and change, you know, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak started Apple computing Right. You know, fifty years ago and and they were both kind of computer nerds Right. But they didn't know how to manage teams and lead teams and I'm sure at some point they probably had to turn to somebody like you and say, hey, I didn't sign up to manage all these people, like how do I do this? Right. And how do I like manage myself in managing all these people because you don't realize what people pick up on. So you're a parent, right? Yes. Your kids actually work here. Yeah. So, you realize exactly how much people reflect who you are in your children. Because all of a sudden, your kid will go do something that irritates you. And then, if you think about it, it's your habit that they're showing. Right. You know, and Right. Honestly, in a business, the same thing happens. Mhmm. It's not that your employees or your children, but they model their behavior on you. Yes. So, your self regulation becomes way more important. If you're the kind of person who gets like easily stressed Yes. And start sweating or, you know Yeah. And that's not this client I'm talking about, but I've had other clients that's like they they get they get stressed and they start to get they get snarky or they get snippy or Right. They make bad decisions. When you start to work on that situation, your employees just are they blossom underneath you because they're not terrified anymore. They don't they're they're not like, okay, which boss is showing up today? Right. And it's not that you're a bad person, you're just having trouble regulating your own stress. Yeah. Yeah. So important. I wanna transition to your podcast. So Choice Wisdom, let's go ahead and pull up her podcast page. I love the name and you have a co host. Tell us about the history and the kinds of people you like to profile. So, Choice Wisdom actually came out of my own coaching journey, so I had a life coach Mhmm. Who worked with me and she kept reminding me that there is a part of my soul that loves to communicate, obviously, because I do that for a living. But what she was really encouraging me to think about is that I I love to help other people tell their stories. And one of the things I believe I am here for is to help people understand and remember who they truly are at a soul level and that's why I started Choice Wisdom. And it was just I literally got Zoom, I got a microphone, I started asking people I knew to be on the podcast. In fact, my coach was one of the first ones, and I just started recording. And I found that I loved it. I'd come out of radio early in my career, and I worked in broadcast journalism as well. So I was very comfortable with doing this type of thing, but I had never done it, you know, for myself. And it was a little scary, but I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna it. And I loved it. I interviewed 17 people the first year. Had kind of a news magazine format, sort of like This American Life. And then the second season, I called it Level Up. I did more one on one interviews. And then this year, I'm really excited because Louisa Garrett, who is the kindness guru and the founder of the Make Kind Loud movement, has joined me as co host. So she and I will do, you know, interviews with ourselves, you know, just the two of us talking about a subject, and then we've also done some amazing interviews, and I just can't wait to publish all of them this year because Wow. They're just great stories. But it's all about creating the life that you want. You know, what choices do you make? That's why it's called choice wisdom. The choices people make that create the life that they want and how that comes about. Well, I encourage all my viewers to follow her on all her social media because she gives away the gold for free. She has all these wonderful tips. Let's go ahead and play one. He has a system that helps people, you know, kind of get out of their own way and simplify their business and install systems and processes that get you out of doing the day to day. Because what I do find, and I found this myself, I find this with other people that I coach, is that when you start a business, eventually it takes you over And it sneaks up on you in the middle of the night and takes over everything. And all of a sudden you do nothing but work. And you think, wow. My my business is supposed to be serving my life and not me doing all, you know, giving my life to the business. Right? So I do help people sort of like zoom out and remember why is it you got in business to begin with and where are you trying to go with life? You know, when people show up at your memorial service fifty years from now, what do you want them to say? And they can't say anything about you if you didn't actually live a life all that time. So no one ever wants to talk about the guy who worked all the time, right? So brilliant. No one wants to talk about the guy who worked all the time. Well, we should all I mean there's a lot of business and life coaches who've never run a business, but you've been in the trenches, so share that part of the journey. Yes. So, I first started that first venture during the Great Recession and never looked back honestly because it was so freeing to own my own business. I am now a self described entrepreneurial evangelist because I think everybody should run a business. Now, obviously, not everybody's going to do that, but I am I'm a big believer in owning your own business. And I really love working with other people who are growing businesses because I I see myself in them too, which is just joyful because it's like I I say, oh, I remember when my business was that small and it was, you know, going these places. And interestingly enough, my husband decided to leave his corporate career a couple of years ago and we bought a sign company. So of all random things, we are now in the sign business together, but we are a husband wife team running a company called It's a Good Sign and I can't take credit for the name. Was my husband name. But, yeah. So, it it's fun and it's exciting and it's new, so I get excited about the new. I think he might be a little less so, but, know, back to this whole self regulation thing though, if I hadn't gone on this personal journey for the last ten years, really doubling down on my own, like, you know, personal self regulation lack And of a better it's because I had a lot of we all have trauma, we all have drama. And I had to start letting a lot of that thing those things go. Mhmm. And I had to use the f word a lot, which is forgiveness. Mhmm. And learning how to forgive the things in my life that were hard. And through that journey, I realized that if you can get to a point where you're better with you and your own self love is strong enough Yes. Then you can achieve anything. Even running a business with your husband who is a hand to God. If you built him from the ground up, he couldn't be no more different from me than he is. And we're like completely different people. But yet, we work well together because what we realized is that when we have a common goal Yeah. We can achieve anything. And he brings his gifts, I bring my gifts, and we both value each other's gifts. But that's not always easy to do in a marriage because there's all the stuff. Right? There's all the drama. Wow. I'm so impressed with you. We could talk forever. I we've got about a minute left, so why don't you look into the camera on the left and talk to the viewer who might need to bring you in? Yeah. So I do I run the sign company quite a bit with my husband, but in my free time, quote unquote, I do love working with other entrepreneurs who are at that two to three years stage of business, who are really looking to level up. You know, I I'm a big picture thinker, and I like to encourage other people to do the same. So I call myself a coach, but I also call myself an advisor as well because a lot of people go, I don't know what a coach is. Right? Coaching really is someone coming alongside you to help pull out of you a lot of what you know and help you organize it and put the puzzle pieces together so that you can be more I have my own coaches and I would not give them up because they help me level up all the time and it's more of just a level of accountability. Outstanding. Thank you so much for sharing your heart and your wisdom with us. We're gonna end with her website which is coequalnetwork.com, the great Gayle Goodman Lynch. Thanks for Thank coming on you. Appreciate it. That's it for now. We'll see you next time.