As a coach and a packager of intellectual capital, Ross Slater is a great source of possibilities and solutions.

Ross Slater helps people get their ideas out of their heads and into the world—providing the strategies, packages, and processes to make it possible. He has a particular knack for helping entrepreneurs see the opportunities for growth and change in their situation by giving them analogies and real-world examples from a broad range of industries.

“I don’t let go until they get the ‘aha,’” he says. “The more somebody throws at me, the more I can flip it around and use it—not only to get their aha moment, but to deepen the rest of the group’s aha moments too.” This talent has earned him a reputation as an excellent coach and speaker.

He’s also a firm believer in the power of teamwork to make an entrepreneurial business succeed—first by balancing the entrepreneur’s time, then by leveraging the entrepreneur so the company is capable of operating on a bigger scale. From this belief, he contributed to the creation of the Strategic Coach® Team Programs and coached hundreds of entrepreneurs and their team members on ways to prosper together.

Entrepreneurship has always been in Ross’s nature, but it wasn’t part of his upbringing. He grew up in the mining town of Sudbury, Ontario, with parents who both worked in large bureaucracies and encouraged him to provide for himself the best way they knew how: “Get a good job.”

“For my first summer job,” he says, “I hand-drew flyers, photocopied them, and distributed them around the neighborhood. I started a little business mowing lawns and doing odd jobs. It was dirty, sweaty work, but I liked doing things on my own and working directly with people.”

When he reached university age, Ross studied economics. He was interested in business, but still determined never to be just a number at a large organization. On graduation, he took consulting jobs with small firms in Toronto. “I enjoyed working in an entrepreneurial business,” he says, “but it took me a while to realize that I had to be the entrepreneur.” Spurred on by his employer going bankrupt, Ross started his own consulting and project management service.

It was in this capacity that he met Strategic Coach®, coming on board to help create the company’s Knowledge Products division—which publishes Strategic Coach books and audios. “Working with them was awesome. Then they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” So he continued working in the Coach environment, building structures within the company and eventually coaching entrepreneurs and their team members on the Strategic Coach principles he’d come to know so well.

After more than a decade of helping transform others’ businesses and lives, Ross came to a turning point: He looked at the entrepreneurs around him and thought, “The only thing that divides us is that they’re willing to take the risk. Why not take the risk?”

So he did. He started several entrepreneurial businesses, the most prominent being Highspot Inc., which offers a repeatable process for taking ideas out of clients’ heads and turning them into books, audios, and seminars. This expertise becomes a tangible, saleable product, and the client gains the opportunity to be seen as a thought leader in their field—yet they’re spared the steep learning curve of trying to package and publish themselves. “We take on complexity other people would probably avoid, but we know our clients are going to face that, and we don’t want them to have to do that.”

Having a comprehensive, in-depth knowledge of the Program’s concepts and tools from the start has given Ross and Highspot a tremendous advantage. “We’ve got a model that makes this work where nobody else can. Without this, we would have been driven into commoditization very quickly. Instead, we were able to structure the business so we’re appropriately compensated for our intelligence up front, but it’s so transparent that clients can easily see the value of what we offer and can choose to be a part of it.”

Ross thrives on the energy of working in an industry that changes daily, but he wouldn’t trade the time he spends at Strategic Coach. “A lot of really smart clients and staff flow through that place,” he says. “I love having a connection to this material that can transform my life and my business. I wouldn’t be where I am without Strategic Coach. I think that’s part of what I can offer: I really try and live this stuff as much as possible. I believe in it.”

He prides himself today on being a self-made man “who’s had a lot of help along the way.” He adds, “Sometimes it’s hard to accept that help when you’re self-sufficient, but the life I’m living now is of my own creation, and I’m proud of the fact that I took risks, and continue to take risks and make appropriate changes. The reward is that I’m much happier and have a life I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise.”

Sitting on both sides of the workshop table, as coach and entrepreneur, has given him a new compassion: “Doing the things Strategic Coach recommends isn’t always easy. When you’re inside the system, it just seems natural and everyone supports it. Before becoming an entrepreneur, I was coaching from the point of view of ‘just go do it!’ Now I coach from the point of view of ‘I feel your pain!’ I know it can be hard. But it’ll be better. The return on this work is great.”

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[Download] PDF version of Ross Slater’s Coach Story.