By asking questions about what’s most important, Gary helps create a motivating picture of the future and a plan for moving forward.

With over 20 years’ experience working with recycled rubber and industrial products, Gary is leading his industry to new ways of doing business with suppliers in China. Not only has he managed to eliminate the risk from using international sources, he’s shifting these imports from being perceived as “bargain goods” to being proven as reliable, quality materials that meet or exceed western standards.

But even though his background is in manufacturing and chemical engineering, Gary believes it’s important for specialists to still consider themselves entrepreneurs. “You get into it by being a technician,” he says, “but you can’t stay a technician for very long. You really have to be able to think about and direct where the business is going.”

Gary became an entrepreneur in 1989. Having left a position at DuPont, he went to work for a friend, but the friend decided to sell the company. Gary was offered another job, but, he says, “I just couldn’t take it. I had a huge desire to do something that hadn’t been done before, and to do it on my own.” He and his wife had just had a child, two of his family members were ill, and the economy was in recession. “It was a crazy time,” Gary says, but he jumped in anyway and started a company that specialized in recycling tires.

“There was no real plan,” he says. “I didn’t think about what success meant, other than the fact that I didn’t want to fail. Failure meant I would lose my money and my house. Here I am, an MBA—and I didn’t even write a business plan until five years later!”

A friend of Gary’s wife introduced him to an entrepreneur in the Strategic Coach® Program, who recommended it. “I went to one of Dan’s presentations,” Gary says, “which I found really compelling. My thoughts about the future and Dan’s were quite similar, and I hadn’t heard anyone articulate them that way before. Listening to Dan and seeing his Program, I realized that my whole life could be consumed by my business because there was no clear path forward, no support network for what I was doing—and I decided I didn’t want it to be that way. I wanted to have balance, to maintain long-term relationships with my wife and my children. That was important to me. Joining Strategic Coach meant I really could have it all.”

Gary thrived on the experience. “For me,” he says, “Strategic Coach has been so fascinating because I’ve been able to continue going to ‘school’ all this time and always stay current.” Results quickly appeared in his business too: “I could think more strategically about the work I was doing, and I could rely on the other people working with me more than I would have before.”

He credits Strategic Coach® with many positive outcomes, like multiplying his income for one, but says it helped during difficult times too. “Our ability to deal with the events that occurred and keep our heads above water when it was a pretty murky environment—I put a lot down to Strategic Coach. It kept the business together, it kept the family together, and the business still grew to the point where it could be sold.”

And in 1998, he did sell that company, which was doing more business at the time than any other of its kind in the world. “It was a great education,” says Gary. Always looking forward, he started over, setting out on a new path that would ultimately lead him to develop his current business, GCP Industrial Products Inc.

Now, as a coach for the Strategic Coach Program, Gary gets great satisfaction from seeing other entrepreneurs grow and improve. “To help somebody out for their sake,” he says, “has been awesome for me. And I learn a lot from them, too, so it’s a two-way street.” He’s able to bring all his business experience to his coaching and feels this makes the environment real and down-to-earth. But his focus is still an unbeatably positive one. “I’ve always been about the future,” says Gary. “When I coach, we draw from the past, recognizing today’s situation, but we always move forward to the future.”

As for his own future, Gary has grown his business to the point that he doesn’t need to be involved in day-to-day operations, so he’s able to keep himself out in front, doing the work he likes to do—asking what’s next and generating new ideas. With his son now in the business, he has another generation of ideas coming on board, too, and is working to package the wisdom his organization has amassed about doing business internationally into processes other companies can use.

Gary also plans to create a support network for emerging entrepreneurs. Having been through the ups and downs of business himself, he has the confidence to know he can handle it and wants to give that confidence to other entrepreneurs. “They’re so important in today’s world,” he says, “and they don’t always see that. That’s my role, to say to them, ‘You know what? Your clients need you!’”

For information about new workshops starting soon, visit our Dates & Fees page.

[Download] PDF version of Gary Mottershead‘s Coach Story.