Grant Gooding, The Curious CEO - Why Following Your Passion is Shitty Advice, How Emotional Data is Transforming Business Strategy, and Finding Your A+

Join me as I sit down with Grant Gooding (see his bio below), founder and CEO of Proof Positioning, to discuss how emotional data is transforming market research and business strategy. With a background in mergers and acquisitions, Grant saw firsthand why so many deals fail—leading him to pioneer a groundbreaking way to measure what truly drives customer decisions.

We cover:

- The surprising reason 70% of business acquisitions fail.
- Why traditional market research methods don’t work—and how to fix them.
- The neuroscience behind how people really make decisions.
- The power of finding your “A+” skill and building a team around strengths instead of weaknesses.
- Lessons learned from pivoting a business and navigating industry resistance.

Grant’s journey from aspiring lawyer to M&A expert (it was like getting an MBA every day) to neuroscience-driven entrepreneur is filled with insights, humor, and actionable takeaways for leaders, business owners, and anyone looking to understand decision-making on a deeper level.

Listen in for a fascinating conversation that challenges conventional wisdom and offers a fresh perspective on leadership, business strategy, and the future of market research.

 

Today's episode is brought to you by ExecHQ (Website), a C-suite fractional firm providing elite executives for your business. If you’re having challenges taking your business to the next level, want to augment your leadership team, or prepare your company for increased growth, profitability, and an eventual successful exit, ExecHQ has seasoned executives from every C-suite position, ensuring a perfect fit for your needs and industry dynamics. To learn more about ExecHQ, email Jeff Pelaccio at jeff.pelaccio@exechq.com.   

 

Grant's bio: Grant ​Gooding (LinkedIn) got his professional start in the mergers and acquisitions world working first on the legal side then buy-side analysis, valuations, and eventually transition management.  After roughly a decade of analyzing, valuing, and transitioning hundreds of small and mid-market businesses, Grant naturally gravitated towards understanding the 70% failure rates of acquisitions.​ After years of analyzing acquisition failures, he discovered the leading cause of transaction failures was a lack of understanding and measurement as to why customers do business with organizations.​With his MBA emphasis in qualitative marketing, Grant spent the next several years experimenting with methodologies and measurement techniques that could be used to quantify qualitative data.  After working with a nationally renowned brand analyst, Grant discovered a quant method that could be used to assess brand preferences.  With that as a starting point, he and his team utilized some principles of neuroscience and created a new methodology that accurately quantifies emotional resonance.​ After several hundred iterations, the PROOF method stands alone as one of the most compelling and accurate ways to quantify human emotion.  Today, Grant speaks all over the country in the areas of Emotional Data, an emerging field that PROOF is helping pioneer.