How To Grow A Leadership Development Business – with Ed Brzychcy of Lead From The Front

In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Ed Brzychcy, talk about the unique challenges organizations face as they scale. They discuss the critical role of organizational structure and communication, as well as the leadership shifts necessary to guide teams through change.

Ed Brzychcy, founder of Lead From The Front, is a Boston-based consultant, executive coach, and speaker specializing in organizational design, leadership development, and scalable strategic solutions for middle market enterprises. An ex-military leader and Forbes Coaches Council member, Ed is known for helping companies navigate plateaus and build sustainable growth.

Ed also shares insights from his ongoing research and conversations with high-growth leaders, highlighting key lessons on leadership legacy and strategies for sustainable business growth through meaningful relationships and proactive networking. Additionally, Ed reflects on his experiences with the Forbes Coaches Council and offers takeaways from his recent TEDx talk.

You’ll hear practical strategies for client acquisition, running a workplace consulting business, and business growth strategies for consultants.

Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

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What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How Ed identifies and attracts leadership consulting clients in the middle market.
• The stages and internal growth challenges that organizations face as they scale.
• Ed’s top lessons on persistence, referrals, and growing a sustainable consulting business.

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Lead from the Front website: www.leadfromthefront.net
• Ed’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ebrzychcy
• Ed’s e-book: “People, Process, & Culture”

Scroll down for the audio version and transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

Audio Version – Episode 293: How To Grow A Leadership Development Business – with Ed Brzychcy of Lead From The Front

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You can find the podcast on all the main podcast players.

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

Remember to subscribe to our mailing list to get notified of new episodes.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

Episode 293 – How to Develop Leaders and Organizational Culture in High-Growth Firms – with Ed Brzychcy from Lead from the Front

Ben [00:28]:
Hello. Welcome back to the show. Great to have you along. And I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Ed Brzychcy. Ed is an amazing person. He’s a seasoned consultant, executive coach and speaker, widely recognized for his expertise in organizational design, leadership development and implementing scalable strategic solutions for middle market enterprises. And we’re going to dive into that, how he does it and the kinds of companies he helps. But firstly, Ed, thank you very much for joining me today.

Ed Brzychcy [00:53]:
Oh, Ben, thank you so much. I really appreciate being on.

Ben [00:56]:
Yeah, good to have you. And for our listeners, whereabouts are you based?

Ed Brzychcy [00:59]:
I’m here in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ben [01:01]:
Lovely, beautiful part of the world. I want to start with your business itself and then I’d love to sort of get a little bit of background as to what led you into the formation of that. But yeah, tell us from the start what organizations you help and then the types of challenges that you help them resolve.

Ed Brzychcy [01:15]:
So my favorite types of clients that I work with are those middle market organizations that have hit that plateau. They’ve scaled in their markets, they’ve scaled in their industry and they’ve hit that point where if we want to continue to grow, we need to grow internally. So coming in, helping them build out the organization, build out the lines of communication, areas of responsibility so that they can continue to grow in a much more sustainable fashion.

Ben [01:38]:
And by middle market, is that by revenue or headcount?

Ed Brzychcy [01:43]:
By revenue, middle market, post entrepreneurial organization. So as they kind of outgrow that early phase is where I like to come.

Ben [01:51]:
So do you work with the organization, with individual leaders within that in the coaching capacity? How do you structure your consulting work?

Ed Brzychcy [01:58]:
Very much client to client. It’s pretty bespoke for everyone I work with. Majority is working with the C-suite and helping them to build out the organization and then some executive coaching on what it takes to make that transition from a high growth organization into leading a more enterprise focused.

Ben [02:17]:
Fascinating. Early in my career I started in a company that was, you know, well, the company wasn’t in a great state. It was big, lots of profit and so on, but it was in dying industries, let’s say, or just underperforming and new CEO, new team in place and wow, change, but good change. And it took on a whole new life. So I’ve seen personally the impact it can have just from a room full of people. It’s amazing, right?

Ed Brzychcy [02:40]:
It really is. It’s a lot of fun watching organizations. It’s one of those where they just can’t get out of their own way. But helping them to realize that that’s the issue and then okay, how do we grow past that? Because we’re here, we want to continue to build up but it’s sometimes you just outgrow yourself almost.

Ben [02:58]:
And organizations at every different level or every different stage, there are different issues that crop up. So the small businesses have their startup, the teething issues, all that kind of stuff. But what are the kinds of main problems you see within that broad spectrum of communication and leadership?

Ed Brzychcy [03:14]:
The key thing is that we start to see it stretch out, where early on a lot of people are wearing many different hats. It’s easy to say we’re all responsible for these different areas. And now when you start out growing, that is where you start to see the redundancies, the overlap, the efficiency of small, quick decision making is suddenly taking a lot longer than it used to and they’re just not able to react as readily as they used to be.

Ben [03:41]:
And your work has a crossover, I suspect between coaching and consulting. How do you define that and how do you explain that for new organizations?

Ed Brzychcy [03:50]:
Well, certainly for the organization it’s taken an organization-wide focus. But working with, I very much believe in sort of the top-down efforts. So working with those executives to say, hey, here’s where we want to go with the organization and here are some of the changes that we need to make if we want to get there. And so generally at first it’s a little bit more consultive and helping them to understand root issues, long term problems, better goal setting. And then from there as we continue on the work, it turns much more into a coaching practice and helping them to adjust and stay on track.

Ben [04:23]:
You’ve had a fascinating career. What brought you to this place where you are now, the skills you’ve got, the kind of work you’re doing. What led you to this point?

Ed Brzychcy [04:31]:
Oh, certainly very, very non-traditional. My ancient history, past life was within the military and after coming out of the service, went back, got my education and was like I want to go into consulting, I got the MBA, I just don’t want to go work for somebody else. And so I hung my shingle up on the wall, started asking where right away, hey, I trained, led and developed people for 12 years. And in 10 years, what started out as a lot of just management focus, a lot of leadership development has grown into a much more strategic focus consultancy, which has been a lot of fun watching that change and watching those trends.

Ben [05:04]:
That’s really interesting. So for people who don’t necessarily come from a pure, let’s call it HR in essence, an HR background to then go into HR consulting, maybe they’re an engineering manager in a past life, as you say, or even leading people, what’s your advice to them? Because it’s a big hurdle in their mind, I suspect.

Ed Brzychcy [05:22]:
It’s a big hurdle in the mind. For me, a lot of it was just translation of understanding. Okay, here’s the skill sets that I developed over time. Here’s how I’ve worked with people. Of course military is… There’s no push ups in business, people are people. And so understanding and going a little bit deeper onto. For me, a lot of it has been the organizational behavior studies, a lot of applied psychology and understanding. Here’s where I came from, here’s what I was actually doing and here’s how we can implement that in organizations. Just a lot of tying those threads together.

Ben [05:52]:
And then across your career, what have you learned about leadership so that you can then apply it to the work you’re doing for your clients?

Ed Brzychcy [05:59]:
Tons. For me, a lot of it is being willing to be the change maker isn’t so much being at the front of the change, it’s espousing the change and really taking it to heart and saying, here’s what we want to do and being the exemplar of showcasing. Here’s the new way of operating, here’s the way we’re going forward, forward, and here’s why. Turns into very much of an internal process. And the more that people can internalize, the more people can adopt it, then the more everyone else is going to see that positive pressure coming from in order to make that change happen.

Ben [06:30]:
And I know you’ve been having a lot of interesting conversations with leaders and you sort of try to collate that into some, I don’t know, form that you can share with people. Can you tell me a bit about those discussions? What are you talking about and how do you plan to share that with people?

Ed Brzychcy [06:44]:
Certainly. So a little while ago I was looking around and I was like, you know what? I’m working with a lot of organizations that need help. What about the organizations that don’t need me? And so about almost two years ago now, I started reaching out to those high growth organizations that were leading their verticals. And my first inquiry was, let’s talk about the culture of your organization. What cultural artifacts, what pieces of your organization have actually gotten you to that point. And as I started talking with all these various CEOs and everybody, it was not so much those artifacts were so unique and different for every one of them. That was absolutely their own little piece, their own little competitive advantage just can’t be replicated because it’s them.
And it’s them because it’s the way those leaders have grown, the way those leaders have developed. What I found though was when you look at high growth, high impact leaders, they do go through a couple key stages.

Generally there’s an inciting incident or a crucible at first that they have developed their skills as a leader, learning how to develop other leaders, which was usually the hardest part for them. And then the last aspect, they reach more seniority in their careers or they’re looking for those next steps is how do I leave behind the legacy? And working through those four stages, I saw there’s just sort of little commonalities between the way that they all went. This has morphed into an ongoing, what I call my HR roadshow here across the US and is now a little bit of an ebook that I’ve put together with some of the ideas and best practices on how to help build and grow and almost support these leaders as they go through these different phases.

Ben [08:17]:
I don’t know why I got an image of that series Seven Up! or whatever where they keep interviewing people after every seven years. Maybe you could be doing that with these leaders.

Ed Brzychcy [08:24]:
We are kicking off round two now, so starting to go out for the next round of interviews that I hope to conduct in Q4. So looking forward to keeping those conversations going because they’ve been utterly fascinating.

Ben [08:36]:
Yeah, they would be. Any surprises or things you weren’t expecting?

Ed Brzychcy [08:40]:
The big surprise was phase three was learning how to build other leaders, especially for the ones that were very entrepreneurial, that built their own organizations, letting go of the reins, letting them experience the hardship and a little bit of that challenging decision making. You could see on so many of their faces just how much it strained them and how big of a learning curve that was. It was really difficult to learn to let go and challenge others or allow others to be challenged rather.

Ben [09:05]:
And then if I look at how you’re growing your own business itself. It’s one thing to say that I help middle market companies, but how do you actually get in to find the ones that need your help?

Ed Brzychcy [09:15]:
A lot of referrals. Most of my work is done on a referral basis from one client to the next. For me, my outreach is like I do a lot of direct outreach for the research and what have you. And that often leads to other conversations which people are interested in. Like hey, no, we had a great conversation, maybe you can help some of my team. So yeah, and a fantastic sort of go around journey. A lot of just direct getting to people having great conversations. And for me it’s, you know, business is all about relationships. So the more that I work with people, get to know them, then we just sort of build that bond that naturally transitions to me finding ways to help them out.

Ben [09:50]:
Nice. And for someone listening to this and thinking I would like to get more referrals or to make it a bit more steady, predictable, what would your advice to them be? How would they make that happen?

Ed Brzychcy [09:58]:
It’s all about communication. You know, once you get people like in your network, maintaining contact and it’s the small things, it really is, it’s that little message on the birthday, it’s the holiday notes that go out. It’s those things that just show, hey, I’m still listening, I care, celebrating my milestones if they make any changes. That’s what I found just to be the most effective way to sort of keep people collegial and you know, just having a good relationship within your network and within the job, within the industry.

Ben [10:28]:
Some people might think, oh wow, he’s lucky. And then I’m also thinking on the other side, well, you’re making your own luck there. And you make it sound simple but there’s a bit of proactiveness or if that’s the word, and just taking action and just being active about it. Is that right?

Ed Brzychcy [10:42]:
Well, certainly, I mean luck is just being in the right place at the right time. And the more you make sure you’re in various places at various times, the more eventually, by the law of averages, you’ll be one of those who will be in the right place at the right time. So it’s all about persistence. It’s sort of when you back off and stop engaging, that’s when you miss the opportunities.

Ben [11:01]:
Great advice. With the referrals. Do you formally ask, hey, do you know of anyone? Or you just let it come to you? How do you handle that specific aspect?

Ed Brzychcy [11:09]:
It’s mixed — it really depends on the relationship. With people I’ve worked with and know, it usually comes up more naturally through our conversations. It’s very rarely a hard ask

Ben [11:20]:
And then the other thing you mentioned was doing the interviews. And that’s one of the reasons why I love starting or running podcasts. It’s a great way to have conversations with people. And so for people listening to this, if you think you want to connect with people, either podcast or research can be a wonderful way to connect with people. And then that can either maybe get you some referrals, can get you direct new work from that. That’s been your experience, hasn’t it?

Ed Brzychcy [11:45]:
You know, these are just nice little feathers to have in the hat. Little great conversations to have and just additional people to, you know, have conversations with and reach and, you know, hear your story.

Ben [11:54]:
And what’s the Forbes Council? Are Forbes coaching? I forget the actual title or.

Ed Brzychcy [11:59]:
The Forbes Coaches Council is an invited network of thought leaders where we, you know, ascribe and share our ideas. We have a little corner of the Forbes platform for ourselves and it’s great for us to put out some additional articles and quite a bit of just panel articles. So I think I’ve hit almost 20 this year that I’ve been on different paths through them, sharing little tidbits of information around business and HR and people.

Ben [12:24]:
And do you find that’s useful from a, you know, business branding growth perspective?

Ed Brzychcy [12:29]:
Definitely. From a branding and growth perspective, it’s been great. It’s also just nice to be in the room with other like minded experts because you start to share ideas, you share business. We have our own little forums on the back end where we can share ideas around everything from. Hey, our latest book release. Oh, I’m looking at starting a podcast or want to be on more podcasts or even how do we integrate AI or how do we see our clients integrating AI and what are we doing about it? So it’s a nice way just to keep those professional level conversations. Yeah, keep us sharp.

Ben [12:59]:
But I suspect that you would never have been invited in the first place to participate in that council, which sounds like a really powerful networking group and support group. But had you not been proactive and doing these little small things, but just kept doing them, keep putting your name out there or being in the right place at the right time, that opportunity would not have opened up. Is that right?

Ed Brzychcy [13:17]:
Absolutely. It’s, you know, being through there and just being consistent online has absolutely helped build some of those bridges. It’s nice because with the Council now talking with various publishers and looking actually as I take all of this great information about leadership and cultural development. We’re looking at actually forming into something longer and getting a good book out there.

Ben [13:35]:
And did I see you did a TED Talk or presentation on that site?

Ed Brzychcy [13:40]:
I did TEDxBabson earlier this year.

Ben [13:42]:
So how was that?

Ed Brzychcy [13:44]:
Fantastic. It’s just so much fun being with those events on that stage and just sharing, you know, cool ideas and great things.

Ben [13:51]:
And then you’re an alumni of that group if you like, and you’ve got that sort of network.

Ed Brzychcy [13:55]:
Absolutely. It’s a great network to be a part of. Actually, I’m already an alumni of Babson College, so it’s just kind of compounding how awesome that school’s been for me.

Ben [14:06]:
Fantastic. Just to wrap it up in terms of ideal clients, if people are listening to this thinking, oh wow, we need help in our company, or if I know of a firm, I don’t do these sort of services that Ed does just remind everyone of the ideal clients.

Ed Brzychcy [14:18]:
The ideal clients for me are those organizations that have plateaued, they’ve been growing and now all of a sudden their market’s a little bit saturated or they’re looking for that next opportunity and they realize just the internal workings aren’t there for us to grow effectively and efficiently.

Ben [14:33]:
Okay, good to know. And then your report or ebook, you’ve got a previous edition, you’ve got another one coming out, is that right?

Ed Brzychcy [14:41]:
We’ve got the ebook out and we’re looking at a longer form, but the ebook is on my website, www.leadfromthefront.net and it’s just a free download. Come and check it out.

Ben [14:49]:
Excellent. So leadfromthefront.net check the show notes. We’ll have the links there for you. Any final advice for people listening to those who are running a workplace HR related business in terms of marketing growth, what’s your advice on how they could continue to grow their business, keep it vital?

Ed Brzychcy [15:05]:
It’s persistence. It’s all about persistence. I think you make your own luck in that regard. And the more you can build your network, the more you can reach out and be in contact with people, the better. Business is fundamentally a people’s industry no matter where you’re at.

Ben [15:20]:
Well, Ed, you’re doing great work, but also you’re doing it for C-suites of large organizations. So that means you’re having a large effect, I bet. So I suspect you’re changing workplaces for the better. So I thank you for that and I just encourage you to keep going. And thank you very much for sharing your insights today.

Ed Brzychcy [15:35]:
All right, great. Thank you so much, Ben. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Topics covered: how to land high-value consulting projects, client acquisition, running a workplace consulting business, business growth strategies for consultants, HR consultants, workplace consultants.

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