Who Are You Without The Job Title?

This is a transcript from Episode 55 of The Franchise Champion Show.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Alan Regala: My guest today spent over two decades in the highest seats of corporate HR, six times as a sitting Chief Human Resources Officer, including work for former President Jimmy Carter. Now he's building something of his own as a FocalPoint Business Coaching franchisee, operating as LD Human Capital Consulting. Jim Dunn, welcome to the show.

Jim Dunn: Thank you. Just listening to that intro, I got nervous. Am I really doing this?

Alan Regala: Oh, you're doing it, and you're doing great. I'm excited to hear your story today, Jim, and what things have been like. You've got an amazing background, so let's start there. What was going on in your life before you got into franchising? What was your background?

Jim Dunn: As you mentioned, I've been a career HR exec for the last 20-plus years, actually HR as a second career. I started out as a research scientist, a chemistry undergrad with an epidemiology background. I worked at Georgia Tech, Amoco Corporation, and the CDC doing toxicology and epidemiology work. During my time at Amoco, where I was a toxicologist, I was asked to step into a six-month assignment helping the HR department write the ISO 9000 quality manual, which was a big deal at the time. They wanted researchers to come in and help. Fast forward past that six months, I never went back. I was asked to become interim HR. I told my boss I had no idea what personnel was, back then it was called personnel, we didn't have fancy titles yet. He said, "Jim, don't worry about it, people like you will learn it." I want to find that man to this day, because moving from the laboratory into the people business is the hardest thing I've ever done. But I love it, and I've been doing it ever since. As you mentioned, I started my own HR consulting practice. It'll be three years in October, and I don't want to look back. I'm enjoying it.

Alan Regala: That's quite a transition, from being in the lab to dealing with people. That's a pretty crazy transition in and of itself.

Jim Dunn: And not only was I in the lab, I wasn't in the lab with other people, I was in the lab with animals. I was testing mice and rodents, making sure everything checked out, it was just me and my animals. Then I went from that to leading 6,000 people in the southeast and dealing with all the people problems. I was like, oh my gosh, am I a hugger? I'm HR, I can't hug. I didn't know what to do.

Alan Regala: It's really interesting, people go study something in school and think, this is what I'm going to do. Then you fast forward ten, fifteen years, and a lot of people are doing something completely different than what they learned in school. So for you, did someone just ask you to try something and you said okay, or was there a pull toward it?

Jim Dunn: It wasn't a pull for me. At the time, Amoco was centralized in Chicago, and I was working at an R&D center in Atlanta. During that six-month assignment, they decentralized the corporate office, so each region had to pick up its own IT, HR, finance, and so on. The research leader was going around tapping people on the shoulder. "You're my IT lead. Jim, you're the personnel lead." I said I didn't want to do it. He said, "You'd be great at it." I said okay, and it's been the best thing ever.

Alan Regala: That's awesome. So how do you go from that, with all this HR experience, big teams, big organizations, to franchising? What caused you to go from that to working for yourself?

Jim Dunn: I've never had any entrepreneurial desires in my life. I still wake up and can't believe I'm doing what I'm doing. After doing W-2 roles for so long, I thought that's how I'd retire and ride off into the sunset. But life had other plans. In 2022, I lost my father to cancer. During most of his care I was traveling, we were doing a lot of M&A work with the health system I was at, so I was on the road about 80% of the time. I'm the youngest of three siblings, so my brother and sister did most of the caregiving for my dad. Six months after he passed, my mom was diagnosed with dementia, requiring care. Without saying a word, my brother and sister looked at each other, then looked at me, and their eyes told me, "You're up, buddy, it's your turn." I knew I needed to do something different, so in October 2023 I resigned for family reasons with no idea what I was going to do. I started working on an LLC and a website, and over those three or four months it came together, I said, well, I've done HR for 25 years, let me start an HR consulting practice. I was terrified. Was I going to have customers? How do you transition from this? I had so many fears. But fortunately, I'd been in the industry so long that a lot of my former HR colleagues started calling, "Jim, can you help me with this?" Fast forward, it'll be three years this October, and I have yet to do a single cold business development call. I've been blessed to have anchor clients who stayed with me, then referral after referral, and here I am with you.

Alan Regala: That's incredible. With that background, it made perfect sense to do what you're doing now on your own. But that's something some people would just do independently. I'm curious what made you go the franchise route.

Jim Dunn: It was just serendipitous timing. About three years ago, my brother and I decided we should buy something together, and I was really hot on owning a Subway, I don't know why, I'd read an article somewhere. I kept telling my brother, let's buy a Subway. We were considering it, but once we realized we both had corporate jobs and would have to be owner-operators, we said it's not a good time. Then that same Subway franchisee reached out to me a month after I'd resigned to start my own practice. He didn't know anything about that, he just said, "Hey, checking to see if you and your brother changed your mind." I said, "No, we're not interested in a Subway, but let me tell you about my transition." He scheduled time and walked me through different opportunities. Childcare, I said absolutely not. Jiffy Lube, absolutely not. Finally he said, "Let me save the best for last," and it was FocalPoint International. He said, as business coaching and executive coaching, it fit my background as an HR executive, I was kind of doing a similar thing already. That's how the conversation started. I'd already built a website and set up the LLC, but I didn't know how to actually get started. So I started the conversation with FocalPoint, and one thing led to another. In April 2024, about six months after I started my practice, I joined FocalPoint. It's been the most amazing thing, because I'm not by myself, I have three or four hundred other operators, we share best practices, we hire each other. It's like having a family, like that corporate big family I was used to.

Alan Regala: That's amazing. So let's fast forward to today. What do you do as a business coach, and who do you help?

Jim Dunn: My background has largely been the last 15, 20 years in large health care, so it was natural that when I started, most of my calls were health care, because that's how most people know me, as the HR guy in health care. About 40% of my clients today are health care, both global and US. The rest is large for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, and the full scope of HR consulting, from executive search to executive coaching, total rewards, benefits and compensation structures, learning and leadership development, performance management, succession planning, you name it. I hire other consultants to come in, we're at about 20 to 25 consultants right now, working across multiple states and in the UK as well.

Alan Regala: That's amazing. I want to focus on this for a second, because most people don't think about this when they think about going into business coaching or consulting, it's like, oh, this is a solo effort, I'm going to be working individually with clients. But you're talking about a pretty sizable team. How does that work?

Jim Dunn: It's somewhat easy in this climate, honestly, a lot of people are in transition, a lot of friends are taking early retirements. They'd say, "Jim, I'm just done, if you ever need me, let me know." So I had a pretty sizable network I could reach out to, people who were experts in areas where I wasn't. I've been able to bring them on, others like me who started their own practice but whose scope might have been exclusively recruitment or exclusively leadership development. I offer the comprehensive functions across most HR platforms, so it's worked really well. We work together, I go work with them, it's fun, we give each other tips. I bring expertise from people with different backgrounds than mine, so while I might lead in health care, I bring in people who've come out of manufacturing, academia, unionized environments, places I haven't worked. It's a fun thing to do, and it's fun for us because we have a little small family, since all of us are used to the big corporate jobs and big teams we used to have.

Alan Regala: That's cool. So it sounds like some of these people have their own businesses outside the FocalPoint franchise, and some are people you work with directly. It's kind of a mix.

Jim Dunn: I'm glad you brought that up, because that's another thing that's so great about FocalPoint. I had one client, a large nonprofit out of Chicago, and I was brought on as executive coach and advisor to the CEO. Six months in, she said, "Jim, I want your people to come coach my leadership team." At that point, "your people" was just me, so I had to go find my people. I ended up hiring about 8 to 10 FocalPoint colleagues to come in and coach the leadership team, because it was a conflict of interest, nobody's going to trust their boss's coach if they know I'm coaching their boss too. I had to bring in other folks, and that's worked out well. Since then, the cycle has started, we come in and lean on each other.

Alan Regala: That's very cool. I didn't even realize that was a thing.

Jim Dunn: Me neither, three years ago.

Alan Regala: So how does this work exactly? Obviously FocalPoint is the franchisor, does everyone basically have their own unique brand and identity? It seems important to have that, especially if you have a specific area you're coaching within. Is it true that everyone has their own brand, with FocalPoint more in the background once they're up and running?

Jim Dunn: All of the above. One of the things I really enjoy about FocalPoint, especially when we get together, is that everyone's doing their own thing. Some folks are 100% small business owners. Others, like me, are mostly 80 or 90% large corporate. Some are primarily doing government contracts, two- and three-year RFPs, rinse and repeat. It depends on how you join FocalPoint. Some people have said, "Jim, I've been to your website, I see your consulting practice." LD Human Capital, by the way, stands for my mom's initials [transcribed as "Lily and done" — flag: likely "Lily and Don," confirm exact wording], in honor of her, since that's the reason I'm doing this. All of that was in place before I met FocalPoint, and they were fine with it, they said, do your own brand. There are things we have to agree on around branding, but since I offer a comprehensive HR consulting practice, it's only the coaching part that's powered by FocalPoint's principles, frameworks, and tools. In terms of background, we come from everywhere, people who built and sold ten companies before, this is their next generation of entrepreneurship, to people like me who never sold a Girl Scout cookie before and are doing it now. FocalPoint gives you a pretty broad range of how you want to set up shop. Some of us have our own email addresses, others have something like Jim Dunn at FocalPoint Atlanta. It's all over the place.

Alan Regala: Got it, I love that, flexibility is great.

Jim Dunn: Yeah, I love that flexibility too. It really caters to whatever the person wants to do and what they're focusing on.

Alan Regala: That's really cool, because I imagine people getting into coaching or consulting each have their own specific areas they want to focus on, based on their background and passions. Being able to cater that to their clients seems really cool.

Jim Dunn: When you go through the certification process, you learn the basics, the discovery conversation, closing the ask, pricing, marketing, all the things you wouldn't think about if you'd never had your own practice. You have access to all the tools and frameworks too, so I didn't have to create anything relative to my business and executive coaching practice. I just go to the FocalPoint library, and it's all there.

Alan Regala: That's amazing, that's the reason right there. Could it be less expensive to start a practice like this on your own?

Jim Dunn: Maybe. But the speed at which you can open a practice with a franchise like FocalPoint is pretty unbelievable, with all the resources and processes at your disposal. I've talked to prospects who say, "Well, I think I've done this myself, I've built this, I've created this." I say, okay, go do it. I didn't have that, I needed something more. Some of them come back and say it's kind of hard to get started on your own. I say, yeah, I thought so. So you have to balance the royalties, what you're paying, against what you're getting, and what works for you.

Alan Regala: (Mid-roll ad, recorded separately) If you're looking for a change but don't consider yourself an entrepreneur, like Jim three years ago, I might be able to help. I'm a former franchise owner, 14 years, multi-million dollar exit. Now I help corporate professionals find the right franchise and get into it the right way. I learn about you first, your goals, your skills, your investment level. Then I match you with a handful of opportunities filtered from over 600 brands. I support you all the way through, including validation calls with existing owners, and it's completely free. I'm only paid by franchisors after you find the right fit and move forward. If any part of today's conversation has you thinking, "I wonder if this could work for me," take the Franchise Readiness Assessment at athletetoowner.com/fit. Now, back to Jim.

Alan Regala: So you mentioned your biggest fear going into this was not having what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. A lot of people have that exact same fear, maybe they're thinking about leaving a corporate role, or they've been laid off and are considering owning their own business. Did that fear come true for you? How did it go?

Jim Dunn: No. As I shared, when you've been a W-2 employee your entire career, your personal or professional brand is usually your title, the organization you work for, the person you work for. "Oh, that's Jim, he's the executive vice president for blank, who worked for whoever." When you take all of that away, I was sitting there thinking, now I'm Jim Dunn, and who is he? I don't know this guy. Is anybody else going to know this guy? It's imposter syndrome, you've always had that framework, and suddenly you have to do things differently. For example, I'd maybe post on LinkedIn three times a year. Once I started my own practice, I thought, they need to see me more than three times a year to know I exist. Things I used to do privately, I was writing for Newsweek and Forbes and other outlets, but I wasn't posting about it, I just did it because I enjoyed it. Now I post it on LinkedIn, because maybe the article takes someone to my website, and the two connect to something else. I'm learning, I'm still not great at it, but I'm trying to get there.

Alan Regala: That's great. I was the same way, when I had my franchise business, I didn't really need to be on LinkedIn or social media, or I paid other people to do it for me. But LinkedIn is a more professional world, so once I started this business, I figured I should post more than once or twice.

Jim Dunn: Good idea. And you have other networks you may not have tapped into fully.

Alan Regala: I have my Stanford background, and you did your MBA at MIT. You come out and you're part of an alumni association, but you kind of check out of the ecosystem because you're busy working.

Jim Dunn: Now I have so much support within Kendall Square [transcribed as "Kindle Square" — flag] and Cambridge, between MIT and Harvard connections. It's a whole new entrepreneurial world sitting there that I would have never tapped into.

Alan Regala: That's really cool. That leads into my next question. I've had other clients looking at business coaching as an opportunity in the franchise world, and one question that always comes up is getting leads. You mentioned it sounded like they were just coming to you.

Jim Dunn: That was short-lived, in the beginning.

Alan Regala: I'd love to hear, once you get past that initial low-hanging fruit, how do you keep letting people know you exist and generate the funnel that keeps your business going?

Jim Dunn: I'm glad you asked, because I was surprised. In 2024 I thought, I can't believe it's going so well. In 2025, I can't believe it's still going well. Clients kept adding on, "Can you do this? Can you stay on this? Let me give you a referral." But during certification at FocalPoint, they told me, that's the honeymoon, it'll dry up, you'll have to take action eventually. So I'm starting to do that now. Last week I talked with a firm that helps promote you through government contracts, something I hadn't thought about that some people within FocalPoint do as an exclusive part of their business. I'm starting to invest in that. I'm leaving in a few weeks for Amsterdam to do a week-long group team coaching certification, something I haven't done before, but clients are asking for group coaching, not just one-on-one business and exit coaching, but coming in with a group of 20 or 30, maybe high-potential employees. So I'm getting certified in that to bring back to clients. I also have a program manager who's doing things like attending vendor fairs, getting materials out there, things I would have never done myself. I'm still not great at the cold call. It hit me about a month ago, I'm one of those guys who gets on a plane, puts on his big Mickey Mouse ears, and listens to music or watches a movie. I'm not a big talker, I just want to relax, sleep, or watch a movie. I remember, before I put my headphones on, the guy sitting next to me, I'd been upgraded to first class, asked, "So what do you do?" I said, "Oh, I run a consulting practice." He said, "Oh, okay," and I put my headphones on, ready to start the movie. Then something said, you idiot, what are you doing, the guy's asking you a question. I took the headphones off and said, "Hey, how about you?" I'm getting more comfortable having those small-talk conversations. I've gotten a couple of clients on planes, and a couple during a layover at a bar at O'Hare. I'm learning to come out of my shell a little.

Alan Regala: Good for you. It's not easy, that's a big transition, from being an employee to owning your own business, the line between work and personal life gets very blurry. There are opportunities everywhere, especially sitting next to someone who looks like they're in business, some executive in a suit.

Jim Dunn: And I didn't start the conversation, he initiated it, so that's the best thing you could hope for. I was trying to put my movie on, telling myself, Jim, relax. We ended up having a great conversation, and he introduced me to someone else who became my client. Full circle from that conversation.

Alan Regala: That's the perfect scenario, really. It's a great example of you noticing your own habit, the Mickey Mouse ears, tuning out, and realizing, wait, maybe I shouldn't do that. Putting yourself out there is, I'd say for a lot of people, especially new business owners, the hardest part, just getting out there and putting it into the world, what it is you do. It's really more about putting into the world how you help other people, and being curious about other people first is what leads you to being able to explain what you do and how you can help. Even if it's not through your business, maybe there's some other way you can help. It's like serving others, that feels like the path.

Jim Dunn: Being curious about other people and wanting to serve and help them seems like a good combination. And unlearning that you have to be the expert, because in the W-2 role, people come to me to fix things. "Jim, this isn't working, the employee satisfaction surveys are horrible, what are you going to do, how do you change the benefits?" I was always in fix-it mode. But I've had to learn in this role to say less, be curious, and ask great questions to get people going. At the end they say, "I really enjoyed talking to you," and I think, you did all the talking, but okay.

Alan Regala: That's it, that's the best conversation right there. That's a win.

Jim Dunn: Yeah, that's so funny.

Alan Regala: I'm going to pivot a little here. You wrote a book about leading with laughter. I'd love to hear about that, and understand how humor matters when it comes to leading people.

Jim Dunn: I've written for other journals before, so it's easy for me to put my ideas into a thousand words and get Newsweek or Forbes to publish it. But I'd always had a bucket list item of wanting to write a book. I probably started it about ten years ago, and stopped and started four times, because I'd get busy with work, never find time to write, or lose interest in the topic. I always knew that whatever book I wrote would represent the organization I worked for, since that's part of being on the executive team, they want to see your public persona. But once I had time, between October 2023 and getting my practice going, I realized I could write a book about anything I wanted. I didn't need corporate comm to approve it. So I wanted to write something I thought was interesting. We all have stories from across our careers that are silly or hilarious, "I can't believe this happened to me" stories. I had seven or eight of those from my own career, and I thought, what if I asked a bunch of people I don't even know to share theirs? Unbeknownst to me, the response was amazing, the feedback and the crazy, funny stories people shared. Some I would have been embarrassed to share, but people said, "No, put my story in there." The book is broken into five chapters, resilience, empathy, endurance, levity, and humility. Each chapter opens with my own personal story, then goes into maybe 20 or 30 stories from other people I have yet to meet, and I gave them the option to be anonymous or use their name. To my surprise, people said, "No, you can put my name." I'd say, are you sure, this is pretty embarrassing, and they'd say they didn't care anymore. I also use it in some workshops and speaking engagements now, though that wasn't the plan, it was just something I thought was fun to write during a pretty scary time in my life, starting a new business. I finally had the time to write it the way I couldn't before.

Alan Regala: That's really cool. What's one thing you got wrong early on that you want other owners to know not to do?

Jim Dunn: I let my fear set me back. I've done well over the last three years, but I think I could have come out of the gate even stronger without that fear. Going back to what I shared, who is Jim Dunn without the titles? Now I sit here and think, screw those titles, I'm much better on my own than those titles ever made me. That's just how you're conditioned to think in the W-2 world. But having agency over who you work with and who you partner with is great, because in a job you don't get to choose who sits next to you, it's like family, you don't pick your siblings either, they're just there and you deal with them. I like my siblings, I'm just saying, in this case you actually get to choose. So I was a little afraid, but I think I could have gotten off to a better start. I tell people all the time, manage the fear, don't let it stop you. It's scary, it's going to happen, but you have to work through it and push past it.

Alan Regala: Love it. What's the proudest moment you've had since stepping into this?

Jim Dunn: The proudest moment is being able to hire other like-minded colleagues I hadn't had the chance to work with before, because we came from different industries or organizations, and now we're on a team together for clients. It's just fun, we don't have the corporate politics, we come together because we love the work. That's been the most fun part. If I could work with a hundred consultants a year, that would be great.

Alan Regala: That's very cool. Most people think getting into coaching or consulting is a very solo effort, but the way you've built it, it doesn't have to be.

Jim Dunn: I love that, that's great.

Alan Regala: What's the biggest misconception people have about executive coaching?

Jim Dunn: That people know what it is. Those of us who've been in corporate roles know how we've used executive coaches, as a crew, I bring you in when I'm developing someone who's not quite there yet, or when someone's showing misguided behaviors we want to turn around. So it's a misconception that when you tell someone, "I'm a business coach" or "I'm an executive coach," they know what that means. Not everyone has had that experience, so you have to be ready to explain what you do, and more importantly, what you're going to do for them. Everyone says they're an executive coach, but what does that mean, are you going to fix all my problems? People don't necessarily know what a business coach is. The misconception is that people will know what you do just from the title, and they don't.

Alan Regala: Say someone asks, "I actually don't know what business coaching is, what do you do?" How do you respond?

Jim Dunn: What I do quickly is say, "I help you solve your problems." They pause and say, "All problems?" I say, not all problems, not your home problems, though it could be. That leads into a conversation about what they do, what's keeping them up at night, what the gaps are. What I didn't expect, being an HR person, is that I want to solve your professional problems and keep church and state separate, I don't want to talk about your wife and kids. But I'm learning I can't separate them, because today people are saying, "My mental health is off, I'm working twenty hours a day, my kids don't know me." As I'm coaching these C-suite leaders, it always bleeds into the personal. At that point you become more of a friend and confidant, and they start calling you for things that have nothing to do with work. I'll say, "You want to go grab a burger? We can talk there, but you just need to get out of the house." I keep it high-level and simple, because I want to engage in the conversation, and business coaching and executive coaching are going to mean what they mean to that person. It's not for me to design, it's for them to design.

Alan Regala: I can see why you'd want to keep it at a professional, business level. But at the same time, personal and business life really bleed together, even if you're an employee, because what happens in your personal life affects your performance on the business side, positively or negatively. It's hard to separate those two when you're helping someone with their mindset or whatever they're going through.

Jim Dunn: I've found that really interesting. I always thought I had great relationships with a lot of my past colleagues, but I have to realize, who's going to go to their HR lead and put all their business out there? I'm probably the last person you'd want to tell. So it's amazing to me how much people share, "I'm not 100% at work right now." They don't want their employer to know they're dealing with personal issues at home, kids, parents, whatever it is. But I get to be under the hood with them, managing through the professional and the personal both. I see that as a blessing, I've never had people be that vulnerable with me before.

Alan Regala: I think that's a testament to the trust you build with your clients, that they're willing to divulge what they do and be that vulnerable, because they trust you. That's why you're doing as well as you're doing, Jim.

Jim Dunn: I'm trying every day.

Alan Regala: For anyone considering leaving the corporate world and jumping into owning a business, maybe franchise ownership, what advice would you give them?

Jim Dunn: Ask yourself the honest question, why do you want to do it? I've seen friends and colleagues in transition run to this as a solution, but the minute a search firm calls them for another W-2 job, they say, "No, I don't want that, I'll take this job instead." So they didn't really want to do it in the first place. Why do you want to do it, what are you looking for that you don't have today? Once you're honest with yourself, is it just revenue replacement? Do you want to work differently, in a different industry? Do you want flexibility, more time with family, a less stressful life? What are you actually looking for? A lot of people considering starting their own business get stumped when you ask why, because they haven't really thought about it. It's just an option they know exists. But you have to work as hard at it as you would at your W-2 job, if not harder.

Alan Regala: Great advice. Well, Jim Dunn, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your nuggets of wisdom. Congratulations on all the success you've had, and congrats on being a Franchise Champion.

Jim Dunn: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.