Dr. John McGill 

During my time as a business coach & strategist, I've had the privilege of helping coaches, consultants, and solopreneurs elevate their businesses to new heights. 

My mission? To help them craft irresistible offers and effortlessly fill their client books—without any stress or salesy vibes.

Here's how I approach each client engagement:

Brand Boost: We start by transforming their brand into a client magnet. Through strategic positioning and messaging, we ensure that their brand stands out in a crowded market, attracting their ideal clients like bees to honey.

Client Connection: Next, we focus on converting interests into bookings through genuine conversations. By fostering authentic connections and building trust, we turn potential clients into loyal customers who can't wait to work with them.

Streamlined Systems: To streamline operations and eliminate unnecessary complexity, we implement efficient systems and processes. This allows them to focus their time and energy on what they do best—serving their clients and growing their business.

Peak Performance: Finally, we prioritize their wellbeing and work-life harmony. By helping them achieve fulfilling workdays with optimal health, focus, and energy, we ensure they can sustain their success in the long run.

I'm passionate about making their journey to success as smooth and enjoyable as possible. 

Whether it's making their business more profitable, healthier, or simply more enjoyable, I'm here to help.

If you're ready to welcome more clients with ease and take your business to the next level, let's chat. 

Send me a DM, and let's start crafting your path to success together.

Business Coach & Strategist

The College of Law Australia

You know the job, the one job where you get to use all the best parts of yourself?

Well, this was that job for me.

In the start of my legal career I had an experience where I was told I would never succeed in the legal world because of the colour of my skin.

A partner in a law firm said those words.  He said it because he liked me and thought he was doing me a favour preparing me for reality.

Imagine then the irony of finding myself running a law school in a country on the other side of the world?

Not just running it, changing it.

When I took over as the Executive Director, I inherited a program that hadn’t made any profit.  

What it did have was an incredible team of passionate people committed to giving students everything they could.

All my years of teaching, curriculum development, business coaching, sales training, business development and product development came together.

I tore the entire program apart and had everything rebuilt.

The efforts bent us all.  No one broke.

We went from the 5th largest post-graduate program for lawyers in Australia to the 2nd largest.

We doubled enrolments.  We doubled revenue.

We became profitable after my 3rd year of leadership and stayed profitable.

Was it hard?  The hardest thing I’ve ever been a part of.

Were there battles?  I still bear the scars.

Was it worth it?

Our completion rate went from 30% to 80%.

Our representation of women graduates went from 50% to 70%.

Yeah, it was worth every bit of blood, sweat and tears.

Best. Job. Ever.

(Ok, except for the one now where I work for me ;-)

Executive Director, Practitioner Education

Prime Practice

Fun fact: I’m terrified of dentists and they used to be my clients.

Well, I should say, I was terrified of dentists until I started working with them.

Here’s what most people don’t realise–dentists are some of the hardest working professionals alive.

Most dentists have their own practice.  Their practice is a million dollar plus business with staff and a relatively flat structure.

Dentists find themselves having to be responsible for:
- The delivery of services
- The human resource manager
- The marketing manager
- The sales manager
- The business development manager
- The client services manager

Oh, and like lawyers with their own practices, dentists didn’t learn business management in dental school.

That’s where we came in.  As business coaches we helped to fill the business gaps.

We trained everyone up in systems management and client services.  

Taught the dentists new sales techniques.

And then coached the dentists on business performance and ways to grow the practice.

I loved getting to know the dentists and their teams.  

Without a drill in their hands, they weren’t scary at all.

Then an interesting thing happened.

I came to this role after I had been working as a sales coach, living and breathing sales.

I observed one of our information sessions for practice owners and realised we could improve what we said and how we communicated our value to prospective clients.

Problem was, how do I share this with the executives and the CEO who started the company and who had run things for years and I was relatively still new?

I did what anyone in my shoes would do of course: I created a presentation diagnosing the problem and presenting a solution and invited the executives to a meeting none of them had been expecting.

How did it go?

The next week I was promoted to a new role as the Business Development Manager with a 50% raise.  

So, yeah, I’d say it went ok.

Business Development and Marketing Manager, Business Coach and Trainer

BOC Gases

Have you ever taken a job completely outside your comfort zone?

This was that type of job for me.

Not for the work we did.  The work was well within my skill sets. 

The environment was something new.

Gas? Products so dangerous every employee was required to take defensive driving classes?

I never imagined I’d be working in the sciences, let alone in something like natural gas.

It was a blast though (pun fully intended).

I started out with the training team associated with safety, health, environment and quality.

We designed rapid fire training programs, capturing the subjective matter knowledge of people working in the field.  

This was a role filled with characters and I enjoyed every moment.

An internal role popped up to work with the sales team as a sales coach and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

I became immersed in the world of sales at a product level, and supporting a sales team.  

Pure salespeople have an infectious energy.  They’re a hungry bunch.  Never a dull moment around them.

My favourite part was working on the sales coaching program.  

We introduced neuroscience coaching programs with the sales techniques.  

You should have seen the transformations as people learned more about how their brains impacted their behaviours.

This role gave me so many practical skills I still use to this day.

Sales Coach and Trainer

University of Sydney

Have you ever been a one-person show in a team?

I feel your pain, and your triumph.

As always, the best part of this role was the team I worked with and my students, the tutors.

The challenge was the team I worked with each had their own unique program and we were all forced to do everything ourselves for our own programs.

Meaning:
- Creating and delivering the training
- All the event management
- Designing the workshop, marketing and communication materials
- Managing the registrations, bookings and catering
- Designing pilot initiatives
- Coordinating peer observation and review programs
- Implementing a mentoring program
- Creating a reward and recognition program for tutors

My program was responsible for teaching and training over 120 casual tutors at the Business School.  

Most were students themselves and had never taught before.

I had my work cut out for me to try and make the program inviting enough to attract as many tutors as possible.

I created and delivered over 30 individual train-the-teacher seminars.  All in person.  Before Zoom took over the world.

Loved every minute of it.

Clearly, this job prepared me well to eventually run my own business.


P.S.

I was also juggling my own PhD, and teaching my own classes in Organisational Development.

My fondest memory will always be my last day of teaching so I could focus on finishing my PhD and my students, the tutors, had a surprise for me leaving me speechless for the first time ever.

Still brings a tear to the eye.

University Tutor & Teaching Development Manager

Increase peak executive performance with strategic mental sharpness habits in 90 days | Founder & Director: 90Well & 90Well@Work

I help coaches, consultants, and solopreneurs craft irresistible offers and book more clients—no stress, no salesy vibes. 

Here’s my straightforward approach:

1/ Brand Boost: make your brand a client magnet.

2/ Client Connection: turn followers into clients with genuine conversations.

3/ Streamlined Systems: simplify your operations to focus on your passion.

4/ Peak Performance: achieve fulfilling work days, with health, focus & energy, consistently.

I’m here to help you book more clients the easy way. 

Let’s chat about making your business profitable, healthy and enjoyable.

Book more clients (& stress less) to enjoy the job you love.

DM me for more.

Dr. John McGill 🧠

Rooney Holdings

I develop and deploy RLS-enabled semantic models and strategic reporting for multiple companies under a single holdings company responsible for over $15B worth of construction contracts.

Business Intelligence Developer

The EdUp Experience

I love being entrenched in conversations about education, and one way is to listen to a podcast that features those stakeholders—a better way is to be the one to ask the questions. As a podcast host, I get to ask the questions that spike my own curiosity, which drives the conversation towards something more meaningful. That open curiosity helps me understand others on a deeper level.

Podcast Guest Co-Host

Educators.Network

Engineered a job seeker database of 560+ academics seeking a combined minimum annual salary of $40M

Prototyped a searchable database of the dozens of original TikTok videos, reviewing users’ LinkedIn profiles

Created a website that generated 6.2K views with 3.6k unique visitors, with a 73% bounce rate, spending an average time of 2:03 over a period of 4 months

Collaborated with dozens of professional coaches, upskilling programs, recruiters, volunteers, & c-level company leaders to create high-quality content

Founder | Sole Proprietor & Operator

Builders + Backers

I'm collecting 5,000 essays to build an AI-powered teaching assistant, and I'm giving away $5,000 to get them. One essay is one entry to win $500! Fore more: www dot ProjectRhizome dot com.

Idea Accelerator Builder

The Persimmon Group

Created a new workflow and standardization of documentation using SharePoint and Scribe. Created change management documents meant to inspire the adoption of the new data lake as the internal source of truth using SharePoint and Canva.

Consultant

Freelance

Designed a complete guide for AGILE frameworks for accountants in local municipalities 

Lead a remote team of 7 geographically dispersed freelancers: 1 editor and 6 writers

Generated over $50,000 in annual revenue during peak (2014)

Freelance Writing & Content Development

Gaggle

Spearheaded and performed an analysis of 400+ suicide notes written by K12 students

Coordinated with IT during cloud migration, reducing the amount of data to be moved by 38%

Generated new, company-wide metric for marketing and sales, providing unparalleled insights: number of incidents per user

Independently created dashboard for leadership teams’ state government strategy, splicing customer data by voting districts

Connected internal data to external datasets like national educational statistics & voting districts

Business Data Analyst

Central Washington University

Constructed & piloted new developmental writing program, including 5 other instructors and a $100K budget

Developed a vision for new services offered, lead a team of 12-14 student-employees using work breakdown structure (WBS)

Managed the translation of all student-facing content into Spanish as well as several student-led UX research projects

Coordinator of Research and Innovation for Academic Success

Clemson University

Completed the PhD from start to finish in 2.7 years (national average is 8.2 years) with award-winning research & teaching

Designed & implemented grant writing workshop for other graduate students, helping 15 others earn more than $17k in funding

Advocated to program leadership to include an extra seat on the advisory board representing the needs of online students

Collaborated with industry data scientists on a natural language processing study of 300+ handbooks from America’s prisons

PhD Researcher | Writing Instructor

Utah State University

Constructed a study involving observations, surveys, and interviews; presented key findings at international conference

Collaborated to organize an undergraduate conference; mentored a panel of 4 students presenting key findings

Served on university strategic committee to select a common book to be read by the entire university

MA Researcher | Writing Instructor

When I was in fourth grade, I soaked toothpicks in cinnamon oil and sold them at school for 10 cents. My teacher couldn't have a bunch of kids running around with toothpicks, so they banned them during the morning announcements.

I saw opportunity: free brand awareness.

I broke the toothpicks in two, making them less conspicuous, and charged 25 cents for each half. I used the profits to buy a bucket of green army men.

That's what I do—I create solutions.

When I was in sales, I made an Excel spreadsheet to estimate my commissions. I showed it to the CEO after I found an error on my paycheck. Rather than get annoyed, he saw what I built, and soon most of the reps were using it too.

When I was a grad student, I knew how to write a grant to get funding. Others in my program weren't having the same success, so I built a workshop. The next round, we had 23 of 24 grants approved for more than $15,000.

When I was a teacher, I was spending far too much time per essay on grading. I developed a rubric that cut my grading from 40+ minutes down to 5 minutes while providing actionable feedback to students. Within six months, I was giving trainings to multiple faculty from multiple disciplines about how to use the rubric for their classes too.

When I was a data analyst, I learned that the CEO was planning on speaking to members of a state congress about his product. I combined external datasets with internal datasets to build a Tableau dashboard. It broke down the company data based on congressional voting districts.

I also built dashboards that allowed users to investigate 400+ suicide notes written by K12 students. 

I also built an interactive dashboard showing the total market value of the entire US market based on sales territories and pricing schemes. 

I also built an interactive dashboard that generated over 20,000,000 unique data points—all in full sentence format so they couldn't be misinterpreted. 

When I left my job as a data analyst, I used my new skills to build a new solution: databases that support job seekers. I create content on TikTok, so I built an interactive database of that content. People ask me if I know anyone for a job, so I built a database of job seekers with over 550+ academics. 

I love to create. I love creating content, and I love working with people. 

I know what to do with a product, & I know how to work with the experts who know it better than I do.

Now I get to use everything that I have become to leverage data and AI to answer questions about more than $2B worth of construction contracts.

#TranslateAcademia
#HireHigherEd

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The Battle

Dr. John McGill 🧠

Eric James Stephens, PhD

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