James Perly grew up in a family business. At 22, his father died and he was handed the keys to a company that owed more than it made. What followed was seven years of restructuring, then a new business, then growth to $5 million, then 95% of his revenue disappearing in a single government policy change. Then a physical breakdown so severe he almost didn’t come back. The next chapter became one of rebuilding across body, mind and business.
In this conversation, James talks about what he learned going through all of it. Why the negative voice inside your head isn’t a character trait, and why the tools that heal you and the tools that upgrade you are the same thing. Also, we hear what the thing that broke him is now worth. James spent 35 years and roughly $2 million on personal development. He contributed to the book Scaling Up. He was the earliest mentor to Jayson Gaignard, founder of MastermindTalks.
This is Episode 74 of RadEO, the podcast by EO entrepreneurs, for EO entrepreneurs.
Key Takeaways
- The negative voice is not permanent and it is not yours. Someone installed it. It can be healed.
- The breakdown is a door. The tools that heal you are the same tools that take you further than you went before.
- Growing too fast can kill a business. Structure the accountability before you scale the speed.
- Mental infrastructure is not a luxury. The emotional state of your team is the floor.
- Belief is a practical business tool. Half of what a great coach does is believe in someone before they believe in themselves.
More About James Perly
James Perly is a Canadian entrepreneur with 25 years of experience advising founders and executives. He took over his family’s map-making company at 22 when his father died, restructured it from crisis to profitability, then sold it to Rand McNally.
He built Perly Consulting, a government advisory practice in Toronto, scaling it to $5 million before watching a policy change remove 95% of its revenue overnight. A physical crisis followed, then years of deep rebuilding. He trained at MIT and West Point, contributed to the book Scaling Up, and was the earliest mentor to Jayson Gaignard, founder of MastermindTalks.
Today he runs Perly Consulting and coaches highly successful founders on the thing nobody taught them: actually living well.
Guest Links
Full Transcript
Ross: Hello and welcome to RadEO, a podcast by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. I’m your host, Ross Drakes. In this podcast, we share the stories of EO entrepreneurs, their personal path, experiences, and stories of what they’ve learned building their businesses and what drives them to keep going. This is the fourth in the EO Grit series of people that I met at the EO Grit UnConference. Today I’m speaking to James Perly. James helps people be better, faster, and stronger. He’s currently in an EO rogue group, specialised around a theme of reinvention for the year. And if you look in the first few pages of the book Scaling Up, he is one of the people who helped write that seminal text. Welcome to the podcast, James.
James: Thanks, Ross. Happy to be here. Excited to share some wisdom and knowledge, hopefully a bit of practical advice that people can use.
Ross: My first question is the same for everyone. Give me your elevator pitch, James.
James: In Ontario, we help technology companies and other companies get government grants or government stimulus. We’re a form of lobbyists. We’re doing a booming business in tariff relief subsidies. Related to that, our government likes to subsidise corporate training. So we do a lot of corporate training programmes for executives, for line workers, and for owners. The owner work is what I like the most. I do a lot of one-on-one coaching, mostly around how to keep your cool in a crazy world and how to continue to make really good decisions under pressure in an environment that changes on a daily basis. My passion is mentoring and growing other people.
Ross: Let’s go back to the beginning. When young James was discovering his entrepreneurial path, was he sitting there going, government grants — that’s my thing?
James: I’ve been doing this business since 2001, so 25 years now. I’m going to rewind and give you a bit more of my whole journey. I was born in an entrepreneurial family. I’ve studied the genetic factors to being an entrepreneur. You look at EO and the rates of ADD in EO is probably 70 or 80 per cent. There are genetic markers for being an entrepreneur. I grew up never knowing parents who worked for anyone else. My mother had a book publishing company. My father was second generation and I became the third generation of a family business where we made maps. For those old enough to remember days before Waze, we made map books, folded maps, wall maps. We were eventually bought out by Rand McNally. We were the number one map for Ontario and Quebec. Police, fire, ambulance, taxi drivers all used our maps. If you wanted a taxi licence, one of our map books was an actual textbook you had to buy. My first job was putting price tags on folded maps at the age of 12. I got a dollar a box. My father passed away suddenly when I was 22. I was handed the family business over a 30-day period.
Ross: So you weren’t actively a member of the company, your dad passes, and suddenly it’s your baby to run. What was that baptism of fire?
James: My father had more debt than he had revenue, which is not a good place to be in a business with about a 10 per cent margin. I had to do a hard restructure. He had hired a restructuring specialist and was undergoing that when I took over. There was litigation ongoing from many suppliers who hadn’t been paid, as well as governments who were owed money. So not only was I handed this family business, but I found myself in court while my dad was on his deathbed representing him. Over the next seven years, with the help of the restructuring specialist, we made the place profitable again. That was an incredible baptism by fire. Insanely stressful. But I learned the foundation for where I am today. It was a small business by most standards but very complex. Our own warehouses. Our own distribution. We drew all the maps. And once you do your print run, you’re stuck. You’re doing changes right up until the last moment, praying you don’t screw anything up.
Ross: How did you get from taking it over and restructuring to the sale?
James: I took on investors to grow faster. I sold them half the business. The lead investor, Doug, came in as head of sales. He’s master level at it. They were building the business up to either make it a cash cow or sell it. Then one day Rand McNally showed up. They’d been bought out by a VC and were looking to consolidate. From the day they contacted us to the sale was a whole year. After the sale I spent about a year figuring out my next step. The government money business was something a friend had done for us. Through osmosis it ended up being the winner. Number one, I could work from home. I’ve been a work-from-home person since way before it was cool. We’ve never had an office since 2001.
Ross: How did you get from the government business to contributing to Scaling Up?
James: That’s part of my EO story. For a long time I was very active in EO. I loved the events and the mentoring. The government money business requires you to understand each client’s entire technology roadmap. So for 25 years, I’ve been educated by every form of high-tech about exactly what they’re doing. I love that. I did the EMP, the entrepreneurial master programme at MIT. That was transformative. It’s related to how we ended up in Scaling Up: we hired one of the top Scaling Up coaches, Les Rubenovich. He was instrumental at a time when we were scaling way too fast. One of the craziest lessons I had as an entrepreneur is you can go bankrupt from growing too quickly. When you’re growing way too quickly, it’s like a rocket ship taking off and the screws start unscrewing and popping out and parts fall off and you can just supernova. We used Les intensively for almost two years. When Vern was rewriting the book, Les said you need to talk to these guys. That’s basically how it came about.
Ross: What did Scaling Up give you that helped you not supernova while you were scaling?
James: Really good framework. One of my favourite exercises: you sit down with all your people around a table and you list out the top eight or nine roles. Marketing, sales, accounting, all the major things. Everyone writes down one name of whoever is accountable for each role. Then you merge them all. What’s interesting is for a lot of the roles, you’ll get three or four different names. And then it’s like, there can only be one. So then ensue discussions and you learn about something called accountable versus responsible. Responsible means you own the work under a function. Accountable means you own that line item. At the end of the quarter, if that department has hit its numbers, it’s your ass either on the line or celebrated. You make one person crystal clear. That was incredibly powerful. We rebuilt our hiring process, every area of the business. Most entrepreneurs are running on duct tape and chewing gum to keep things together. We brought in proper systems and renovated each one.
Ross: I want to segue to when we met. At the EO Grit UnConference, you were doing a session on how to deal with your negative voice, how to take pain and convert it.
James: Really what I was talking about was 2013 was sort of my peak. The government in one fell swoop killed our biggest programme. That was 80 per cent of our revenue. And they cut our second biggest one, which was 15 per cent, in half. So we got punted into a new dimension. We still had reasonable sales after that, but instead of leaping, which we were about to do, the business dropped and ground down. We had to lay most people off. We went into a reinvention period. We went into blockchain investing and were at the highest levels of all that. We did reasonably well there and had a lot of fun. Then I found myself in early 2021 with some money in the bank and a few amazing business ideas. But the other big vein we haven’t talked about is my deep dedication to personal development. I’ve been doing personal development of every sort since the age of 17. That’s roughly 35 years of it. And I’ve added it all up. I’m up to $2 million spent. The two million dollar man.
Ross: So this is the best version of you that money can buy.
James: Right. In 2021, money in the bank and a few amazing business ideas. And I had a little voice in my head that said, you know what you should do? Put the business off for a couple of months. Go whole hog on health and personal development. It feels like you’ve got a couple of little things that if we put some focus on, we could get those out of the way, and then you could start your business. I listened to that voice. Two to three months turned into four to five years of all kinds of unpleasantness and healing. I opened Pandora’s box and there were a lot of things in that box. I actually almost died about two years ago.
Ross: What happened?
James: My top two vertebrae, my atlas vertebrae, were out of place. They should be straight up and down but they were like a little Z, stuck right at the back of your head. They do one critical function: your A1 is where your entire spinal nerve bundle leaves the vertebrae and enters the brain. It also has channels for fluid transfer in and out of your brain. That was getting pinched off because those vertebrae had been drifting from hits to the head I took when I was younger. My PSA for everyone: if you’ve ever had your bell rung, ever been hit in the head, had a concussion, get this 3D X-ray done. Here in Canada it’s about $500. A machine revolves around your head, takes about 100 X-rays, builds a 3D model of your spine. It pinched off the vagus nerve on the left side. I had sciatica of the head, which is way more painful than sciatica of the leg. At its worst I had three days of feeling like I was on fire. And I still had to run my business. I’m a single father to a daughter. I had to take care of her. I figured out how to fix it. There’s this atlas machine where you lie on your side and it does a little adjustment, creates shock waves that realign the vertebrae. In the early days I’d be messed up for three or four days after, because things were rearranging. Over a period of six months I started improving. I’m about 90 per cent good now.
Ross: Tell us what we can do about the negative voice. How you think about it so that someone can learn from it.
James: Here’s the most important thing to know about a negative voice. I used to have one. And that’s the most powerful thing you can know. I used to have one. To even have the concept that that can be healed is a revelation. It was a revelation to me. I thought it was just normal. I don’t have one today. I actually have a positive voice. Sometimes he’s a little negative. He’ll say, this is hard, and I don’t know when it will be better. But a lot of times he’ll say things like, wow, you did your best. And that’s the most anyone could ask of you. So that voice is a part of you. It’s your narrator. I call it the hall of judgement. There’s a part of your brain that judges you. And that’s fine if it’s impartial. But if it’s been trained to be overly negative, it’s just kicking your ass every day. What you will find when you do the digging is it’s not your voice. Somebody said that to you when you were young. Usually a parent, but it might be someone else, a teacher, an uncle, usually somebody that you cared about. So you were open to listening to them and they embedded the negative thoughts in you. And now you’re just looping that forever.
Ross: How do you heal it?
James: Two things. First is body work. Too much of therapy is just talking, and talking will get you somewhere but it doesn’t get you deep. Most of the negative programming is embedded in your nervous system and your musculature. So you want somatic or de-armoring work. A really good body worker who’s also working on your emotional body. The other thing is what I do more directly: I forcibly reprogram people to the positive. A brain conditioned to the negative focuses on the negative and gets negative results. We can recondition that. We can also recondition behaviours: the amount of agreeability you have, the amount of positivity, the amount of optimism, the amount of open-mindedness. Many things can be modified. We were brought up and taught that our brains are fixed, our behaviours are fixed after a certain age, and it’s not true. The brain regrows and it’s plastic. Your brain is changing every minute of every day. If you just close your eyes for three hours, the amount of real estate for your eyes will shrink and be taken over by other parts. The brain is shifting at a constant rate.
Ross: If you could go back to little James, who just inherited this business, what one piece of advice would you love that James to get to make their path a little easier?
James: I would just say to him: I’ve got you, I love you, everything’s going to work out. And I believe in you. Because at the end of the day, when I’m coaching people, half of what I do is believe in them. Because they don’t believe in themselves or they don’t believe in their goals. And if you believe in another person, they’ll grow.
Ross: On that lovely note, James, thank you very much for sharing at least an inkling of the wild journey that you’ve lived. If you enjoyed the conversation we’ve just had, please share the show with someone who you think might need to hear it. I believe that sharing actionable knowledge is one of the most generous things that a human being can do. This show is produced by me, Ross Drakes. I’m an entrepreneur, a proud member of EO. If you are an entrepreneur and you want more information, go to eonetwork.org. Thank you very much for your attention, because time is the only thing that we have. We’ll catch all of you in the next episode. Bye-bye.
James: Thank you.