Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

From hospital to 34% profit will waitress on EOS success. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Pearl, and today we’re sitting down with Will an EOS implementer who learned about the entrepreneurial operating system the hard way. He had a stress induced health crisis that landed him in hospital that led him to learning about how EOS.

Can make a major impact on a business. He took his marketing company from chaotic and overwhelming to a high performing team that increased its profit from six to 34% and now functions without him. So he just focuses on EOS implementing. In a business there are 136 simultaneous issues that are happening, and six components that actually solve them all.

That is some of the gold that you’re gonna learn from Will in today’s episode. It’s one that if you are running a business that has a couple of million dollar profit to a hundred plus profit, then this is perfect for you because you no doubt have teams and you no doubt have issues and blind spots that you don’t even know about yet.

So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And once again, we are traveling to the other side of the world and I’m delighted to say we have Wheel Tres joining us today where it’s well as we are recording this, it’s evening your time. It’s middle of the day my time. Welcome to the program.

Thanks Anthony. Great to be here with you today. So we’ve got a lot of topics we’re going to cover today, I just know, but why don’t we start by asking you just to introduce yourself to everyone. Sure. So currently I am an EOS implementer. That’s the Entrepreneurial Operating System. There’s a book out there called Traction, which is pretty well known in the business community, but how I got here is an.

A whole nother story. It’s very interesting. I own a company. I started it about 15 years ago and it grew rapidly to the extent that I had some health issues come up. The stress of that chaos and so many moving parts just really took a toll on me and the leadership team, in fact, and I found myself in the hospital and they thought it was pretty scary actually.

They thought I was having a stroke, and so they did all these tests. Ultimately, they determined that it was all stress induced. And after that incident, I set out on a mission to create a healthier business and a healthier life, and I came across that book Traction. Reddit made a lot of sense to me, so I hired an EOS implementer and worked with him for a couple of years, and it was transformational.

The business continued to grow, but morale improved. We used to feel like we were herding cats every day. We turned into this high performance, healthy functioning team, and net profit went from 6% to 34%. And needless to say, I fell in love with this whole EOS thing. And along the way it also created a lot of freedom for me as the owner of the company.

So about three and a half years ago, I stepped away. I still own the company passively now. I meet with the CEO once a month. Run through financials and support him as I can. But all I do now is help other business leadership teams implement EOS in their companies, help them gain traction in their companies, create companies that are aligned and healthy and moving toward their clearly defined vision.

Super thankful to be where I’m at today doing what I’m doing. And and you’re part of that story now too, just spreading the good word, that there is hope, that there is a way to wrangle this crazy thing we call business. Yeah. There is so much that goes on in a business and you are absolutely right that it’s hard with so many different things coming at you from multiple different angles.

And it’s sad in a sense that you know the story of. A health crisis is often what we see as what. Is the determiner of making a significant change in a business. And I was actually just leading a forum just before we spoke, and one of the big things that we were talking about in that forum was around the ability to break habits and the fear that’s attached to making change that really comes to the fore.

And I think that’s the one thing when you have a health crisis like you did, it makes you, it forces you to stop. But I’m just interested as well as how often when you encounter businesses, are they really ready to make that significant change? That’s a great point, Anthony, because the reality is that we’re all on our own journey and business leaders, entrepreneurs we’re all on our own individual path toward.

Success or fulfillment or whatever it is. And what I, my experience has been that some people are very goal oriented. They’re very driven. They have a clear picture of where they’re trying to go, and that drives them forward to making whatever changes are necessary. And I would also say this, that I think we all function at times in that manner.

However, there’s also. Times where there is so much pain, there is so much pressure and stress that we know that we come to this place of, let’s call it disgust. We just realize that something is going to change. I’ve had it and I am going to make a decision. And so that pain inst insti, instigates, if you will, or inspires or initiates a change or a willingness to make change.

And so in, in my instance, it was the pain that drove me to make significant changes in the business and the way I was running the business. But you’re right that so often I think that’s the reality for a lot of people. It’s just they get to a place where they’ve said, I’ve had it and I’ve gotta do something different.

And I’ll say this too, that until people reach that point, it’s really hard to help ’em. They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And if someone’s just determined to just keep trying, to figuring it out on their own and just keep hitting their head against the wall or trying different things, I get it.

There’s power and persistence and perseverance. That’s real. That’s important. But when something is not working and you’ve tried everything, to do. At some point, you have to be willing and open to look at things in a different way. And until you’re ready to do that, I don’t, I’m not sure that there’s much hope.

Yeah. And, but it is, as I said it’s sad that sometimes it’s something outside that crashes, outside of your control, at least that crashes that causes that. And so how many of the people that you are dealing with that, that have become clients or that you’ve helped along the way?

Have had some kind of external forced, we need to take a look at this. Yeah. So I’d. I would say all of them in one way or another. Not all of them, certainly not a health crisis, but there is enough pain in the organization that they’ve realized we need intervention. And that’s really, in a way, what I do.

I am intervention. I, this is someone stepping in and helping them to figure this out. Help equip them, teach them, show them a better way. All of them have come to their, to that point, or honestly, they’re not a good fit. I, I. Would not want to work with someone who feels they’ve got it figured out and they don’t want or need help.

That’s just not a win-win situation. And so I would say all of my clients in one way or another, what, whatever has happened. So I’ll give you a few examples. So one, one client he has a family. He’s got family in the business, family on the leadership team. He’s getting older and he’s in his.

Mid sixties and he’s thinking, you know what? I wanna step away and spend more time with the grandkids. But he and his wife are a little concerned about what’s gonna happen to the business. He’s the source of knowledge. He’s the one who started it, let’s say 25 years ago. He’s a little worried about what’s gonna happen to the company when he steps away, becomes less involved and hands it all over to his kids.

And so he’s wanting to institute some framework, some foundation, some structure to the organization that ensures his legacy. And so that might not be a pain in the sense that the sky is falling, but he’s recognizing that his. Priorities are shifting and he has concerns about what’s gonna happen, how do they navigate that?

So that’s one example. Another client had cash flow issues. A great company been around for a long time, but they’re working their tails off and just don’t have enough profit at the end of the day to show for all of the work that they’ve done. And so that’s a very real pain point.

And and I’ll give you one more client example. One, also another gentleman in his. Late sixties it was working just 70 hours a week. And at that stage of life, the 70 hour work weeks get old. And so he’s just wanting to create some. Space, some margin, some freedom of time and what he had been trying to do or trying to handle whatever he was trying to do to handle that wasn’t working.

And so that’s, he’s bringing in EOS to help him manage that. So those are just some examples of the, you’re talking about the pain what maybe triggers someone or inspires someone to want to use something like EOS? Those are a few examples. Suppose the important thing for people listening in now is to recognize.

When they might be in pain or that they’re heading towards it. I think that’s the thing is you don’t actually want to have to wait for that pain to come. You want to recognize that it’s coming and and try and get in front of it because it, I imagine for you it was a lot harder to react when you go, okay, I have a health issue now.

And so now I need to respond, but now you are managing the health issue and managing a significant change in a business. So two significant changes in your day-to-day living that’s hard to manage. Yeah, it compounds and the body’s keeping score, whether you realize it or not, in the background. It’s paying attention to all the stress and.

And all of the chaos, sometimes it goes into the business. So yeah, that it’s much better to see it coming and hit it off at the pass. It’s so much better. And I’ll say this I love entrepreneurs. I love the entrepreneurial spirit because they see an opportunity and they just figure it out.

They just jump in headlong and try to add value to the world. And I love that entrepreneurial spirit and. Part of the reason they’re successful is that they do just figure it out. They just grab a piece of this and a piece of that, and they’re just bringing it all together, creating this business, and that is a wonderful thing.

It’s a beautiful thing. Honestly, the issue is that as we say, what got you here won’t get you there. And so you cannot continue to grow a company in that manner. At some point, you need to have a business operating system, and I’m not talking about software. I’m talking about how do you function as a business and if you’re not intentional with that, you’ll wind up with this Frankenstein.

You’ve got multiple operating systems all trying to work together and communicate different languages. Different approaches, different words that mean different things. And so having a single business operating system is what really allows you to create simplicity, because prior to that, you’re just at piling on complexity.

As the business grows, as you add people, as you add services, whatever the business becomes more and more complex. So simplicity is. Is very valuable. It’s a very important thing. And so having a single business operating system that’s simplified allows you to grow and create the freedoms that you’re seeking in the business.

I wanna delve into that in a moment, but I do wanna ask you just first, how important do you think it is for you to have gone on your own journey and discovered not only EOS, but. Discovered how to implement it in your own business and the impact that it makes, how different is that approach to someone going, oh, here’s a great tool I’ve never actually implemented on my own business, but I’m gonna.

Implemented on lots of others, which without denigrating a lot of coaches, a lot of coaches have, the only business they’ve ever known is a coaching business. So they’ve not actually had an opportunity to build something for themselves and show how it’s being delivered. And you’ve done that, so how important do you think that has been in the success of what you’ve had?

Yeah, so for me it was the price of admission. Meaning that that was my path. And I’ll say this, I would never want to knock someone who did it, the whole that’s a wonderful story to tell is that I saw other people’s mistakes. I learned from other people’s mistakes, and I decided to do it the right way from the beginning.

And that’s a wonderful story. And an example, although I’ll say there is also a lot of value and just. Empathy. I think people feel when they see that, okay, someone has learned the hard way and they’ve paid some prices of admission and learned some lessons that I can now benefit from and learn from.

And so to answer your question, I’d say it’s very important. It’s been very important to me. I think it’s relatable. Most business owners and leaders have made mistakes, have, done some things that have been. Really painful, and they can relate to that and they understand that. And it’s been a big important part of my story.

With that in mind, let’s give everyone a little bit of a background to the business that you had, that you were involved in on. Say you, you’re still involved with it to, to a lesser extent today. Give us a paint, a little bit of a picture about that business at and at the time, what it was looking like.

Yeah, so it’s a marketing company that specializes in emerging franchise brands, so multi-location businesses throughout the US and Canada. And at the time I have had a wonderful, I’d call him a right hand man a real executive, like a operations executive. His name is Bruce. And he is just been a wonderful aid and a help in managing the company.

The problem though was that he and I were often not on the same page. And in retrospect, I see now that I’m more of a visionary type leader. I have great I come up with the ideas and I chase shiny objects and one month I love this, and the next month I love that I’m making all the promises.

He’s finding himself having to fulfill all the promises that I’m making. And so there was a lot of just stress around not being on the same page with basic things like the organizational. We call the accountability chart. In other words, who ex who is doing what in the organization? What’s the right structure for our company?

What’s the simplest and best way to arrange all of these people? Who is responsible for which area? You would think that would be obvious? But at the time it was not clear. And so balls were getting dropped. And deadlines were getting missed, and I would continue to try to sell, and he’s trying to do, create efficiency and processes and account profitability.

And so it was not great. And the staff could feel that tension as well, because they weren’t really, I would say one thing and he would might say another thing because the, I would have a great vision of something, but he would have the more realistic version of that. And so there was not a lot of alignment across the organization.

So that’s what it, that’s what I was dealing with at the time prior to us embarking on our EOS journey. So you discover EOS, how do you go about implementing? What did that journey look like? So as any entrepreneurial spirit would probably do. I read the book and tried to do it all myself. I just, nobody’s ever done that before.

Surely not. Yeah. Yeah. It’s I like tos, a couple of YouTube videos. And then it’s all fine. Exactly. Exactly. I, it’s like learning how to play golf by watching YouTube videos and then picking up a golf club and expecting to go out there and hit the ball just perfectly straight after you’ve watched a dozen videos.

Doesn’t quite work like that, sadly. And so I realized, sadly, I wish it worked. So I, I realized that. There was a lot of value in having someone walk us through the process, and so we, we worked with an US implementer at the time and he walked us through the exercises and coached us and trained us and.

Watched what we were doing, gave us feedback and really helped us hone and lean into the EOS process, adopt the tools. And the further that we went, the more clarity that there was, the more alignment there was. We’re all on the same page at a clear picture of success. Looks like. We knew who exactly was accountable for what we were using.

The scorecard at a leadership team level, paying attention to the handful of key numbers that the leadership team needed to be looking at every single week to know what was going on in the business. Just as a few small examples. So that was a, it was a great process for us, a great learning. And I realized, this is funny.

I was actually talking with someone earlier today about this. As a marketing company, some of our clients were in the medical industry and so talking with doctors, very smart, very intelligent people, and at the same time, while they were brilliant in their field, they were. Maybe sometimes very ignorant as it came to marketing.

We would be just surprised, wow you’re really good at what you do, but you’d really have no clue how this marketing thing works. And so the point is that we had blind spots. Everyone has blind spots. Business owners as well. So what I’ve found is that even great entrepreneurial leaders and leadership teams have blind spots.

They’re in the weeds, they’re in the forest. There’s so much going on in the day to day, and they don’t have enough perspective. They don’t have just a simple tool set, some very simple things that can help them and they don’t realize that they’re missing these very simple things. And yeah, that, that’s been very funny to watch.

It’s I’ll sometimes I’ll work with a leadership team. And this is what’s interesting. I actually don’t need to know a ton about their specific business because what I’m working on them is how they run their business as a business operating system. So they might be talking for 10 or 15 minutes and all this jargon.

That’s internal language of these, but I’m not paying attention to that. I’m paying attention to how they’re talking together, how they’re working together as a team. I’m paying attention to some simple mechanics that are really. Foundational, they sit below their area of expertise. So anyways, it’s just interesting how all of us have blind spots.

It’s interesting how a simple set of tools that help you run your business better can be so obvious but many teams are just unaware that take an external person to recognize the blind spots. Yes. Yes. That was my point. Thank you. I had kinda lost track of what, where I was going with that, but yes.

An external perspective that can look on, look in and say, Hey guys, what about this? And what about that? And go, oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Why didn’t we think of that? Yeah. It’s a big thing for business to actually realize the, where the, that they have a blind spot and where that actually is and.

That they may not also be the best people qualified to fix it either. I think that’s the important bit. It’s all very well to, I’m sure you experienced as a marketing company to point out that hey, you don’t have a clue around marketing, but you can’t just give it to them and expect that they will then be able to implement it themselves.

You actually, you actually have to get in and get your hands dirty. Yes. And with EOS there’s a lot of what we say put in the reps. In other words, it’s using the tools. You’ve got to get your hands dirty. You’ve got to use the tools, get the practice using those tools for you to really understand.

And even once you start using the tools, you need some feedback. Ev. Every great athlete has a coach, sometimes multiple coaches, and I would say high, all of the high performers of the world have some coach in their life that’s giving, offering them an objective perspective, helping them see things that they can’t see when they’re in the game.

And and so that’s a big part of EOS is getting some feedback are we doing this right? The, and it feels messy. It feels awkward to them. It’s a new tool set. It’s a new language they’re adopting. Within their organization and it feels awkward. And so to have someone say, yep, that’s right here, watch this, watch out for that is, is really valuable to them.

Tell me at a high level, someone’s going, okay, what is the CEOS thing at a very high level? What am I going to get out of it? Yeah, so EOS is a simple. Tool set. It’s a complete system and it helps people get what they want from their business, which could be different things. But the three main things that I like to say are vision, traction, and healthy.

So number one, it helps them get on the same page with where is this company going and how do we plan to get there? So a clear vision. Traction means instilling discipline and accountability first in the leadership team level so that they’re executing really well on every part of your vision. And then healthy means helping the team to become a more healthy, functional, cohesive leadership team.

Because leaders often don’t function well as a team. And what we found is as goes the leadership team, so goes the rest of the organization. So we get to the point where everyone in the company is crystal clear, all aligned with where we’re trying to go. They’re gaining consistent traction. Everywhere you look in the company, people are making progress toward that vision and they’re doing it as a group of people who enjoy the work they do and the people that they’re around.

And so vision, traction, healthy is really what EOS delivers. The way it delivers it is just with a complete set of really simple, practical tools. So let’s talk about then going into a business in the first instance. What are you looking for to start things off, to know where you’ve gotta go?

Do you mean in, in terms of a perspective eeo, so is someone ready for EOS or Yeah. Someone you as an EOS consultant going into a business, how do you, what are you observing? What are you looking for that is knowing what are the directions you want to go? Because I understand that someone, can look at their business and go, we have some pain points here.

We potentially have some blind spots. We have things that are not working as well as they would like. I understand that an, this system can deliver for us, but they probably don’t know where to go. So how do you know where to go? Gotcha. So I’ll come at this from a couple of different angles.

First of all, at the very beginning, I’m looking for a leadership team that’s growth oriented, that is more afraid of the status quo than they are of change. They do want to grow and change, and they’re willing to be open and honest and vulner vulnerable with themselves and the people that are around them because it takes a leadership team being open and honest with one another to really grow and go where get where they want, where they’re trying to grow to go.

So with that said, EOS, the process is very prescriptive, it’s very defined. There is a set of meetings and agendas and the, it’s, there’s, I don’t know how many, there’s, I think 34,000 companies working with an EOS implementer now around the world. So it’s, there’s actually I think a couple hundred thousand companies using the tools.

So it’s. It’s proven. My point is that it’s a very proven process. The results have been seen over and over again. And over time they’ve, EOS worldwide has been very intentional and careful to curate and find the best way to implement EOS inside of a company. So with that, we have a really clear process.

There’s a journey mapped out. Here’s what we do. The first step is a 90 minute meeting. I have a very clear agenda what happens on the 90 minute meeting, and then there’s focus day, and then there’s vision building day one, and then vision building day two, and then there’s quarterlys. All of these meetings have very clear agendas, very, we introduce a tool at, in a certain meeting in a certain way and assign certain homework after and so all that to say.

What we found is there’s a foundation that has to be built regardless of what the pain points are right now today. There’s a path to get there that requires a foundation to be laid and so that you can solve that problem. So us. What Gino Wickman, when he started creating Geo Us, he saw that these entrepreneurial leadership teams tend to struggle with 136 issues simultaneously, but to the degree you can strengthen the six key components of your business.

All of those 136 issues tend to fall into place because they’re actually symptoms of a true root cause rooted in one of those six key areas. And so the EOS journey is a journey to strengthen those six key components of your business. That’s what gets you everything that you want from the business. You want to focus on all of the noise and putting out all the fires, and that’s fine.

You’ve gotta do some of that. But what has to happen is we must go to the root. We must lay a real foundation so that you stop having the fires to begin with. So going to, from fire, fighting to fire prevention take some time and due diligence. And so the journey you asked. How do I know where to start?

We started the same spot with every single client and get them a firm foundation built upon which they can then build the rest of their business and solve all of those pain points that they’ve been working through. Imagine for many businesses. The dilemma here is that we’re working on some foundations, but yet.

We want to be running at the other end of things. We want more business. We want it to be growing at a faster rate, and this potentially slows it down because you’re reexamining the base, which can lead to other things. I’m sure as a, from a marketing perspective, branding can be a an outcome of all of this.

Because if fundamentally the vision and many of the. Those base components have changed. It may change how you market the business. And branding could be an impact of that, which is inevitably gonna slow down what they want to be doing and running at the other end. So how do you balance those two?

Because it’s not a, this is not a, you’re not talking about something that is a, couple of weeks process here. It is not a quick fix. It, I, most of my clients work with me for about two years. So it’s about a two year journey. To get those six key components strong. So it is not a quick fix, and that’s hard for some entrepreneurs that are fast paced and to live in this microwave world that we live in.

We want it right now. We want everything right now. But I’ll tell you that while it takes a couple of years and while it is a bunch of work, the payoffs are worth it. It is amazing to have a company that’s healthy, clear vision, strong team, energized team, healthy culture. It’s worth the weight.

All, some recipes you throw it in the microwave and it comes out. Two minutes later, other recipes, you cook all weekend. And I guarantee the meal that’s been cooked all weekend is much higher quality, much more enjoyable than the one that came out from the Wake av. Great analogy, isn’t it?

And it’s funny too because you often look for, you watch any of the cooking shows always fascinates me. The amount of preparation and thing that goes into this meal and people consume it in. A minute or two when you go, it just took three, four hours, sometimes longer to prepare this thing.

And that’s by someone who is an expert. So if you’re not an expert, it probably took you a day or two you say to get there. But the feeling that you have at the end of it is significantly more joyous. And the and in part that’s because of the quality of what you’ve turned out as well. Yes. And they say big shirt, big ships turn slowly.

Sometimes companies have a lot of bad habits, and when you’re changing culture, when you’re changing who the company is at the fabric, the core of who they really are, that’s not something that happens overnight. That’s, that takes a process. Yeah. And so what’s it like for the businesses that are dealing with you over that period of time?

Do they, do they fall into that routine and respect the fact that it is a two year process? Or is there that tension of can we go faster? There’s so two years is the average. Some do it faster, some do it slower. And that’s fine there. Each one is at their own pace. It’s funny, I’ll say within a leadership team, typically the founder of the visionary is saying, oh, can we just speed this up?

Can we just move faster? Why are we still talking about this? They wanna move on. And there’s other key leaders on the team who are going, whoa, wait, we just made a decision. Hold on. We need to talk and do all this due diligence and research. And so there’s tension even within the team. Some feel we’re moving too fast, some moving feel, we’re moving too slowly, and my encouragement to them is trust the process.

Tens of thousands of companies have gone through this exact same process, stick with me, and it doesn’t take long for them to see, by the. By the second session they’re realizing, oh, okay. There’s a lot more going on here than I might have realized. And so it takes time to practice. It takes time to put in the reps to make fundamental shifts in the organization.

And I think they respect that. And I do have to encourage them to trust the process along the way, but it’s not a, usually a big battle. I think more of the tension happens maybe within the team. Some as I said, feeling we’re going too slow, some too fast. Let’s maybe look at some of these six different areas that you go through.

What are some tips across each of those that people might be more or less to look out for? Because we say we are not telling people that they can do this themselves, but what are some things that they might be looking out for to recognize if they’ve got problems in those six key areas?

Yeah, so there’s actually a fantastic tool. It’s called the organizational checkup, and if you were to just Google it and just do a search for EOS organizational checkup, it’s 20 questions and you just, and those, there’s those are designed and that’ll reveal to you how well you’re doing in each one of those six key areas.

That would be a great. Just exercise or tool for really any leader to go through. The six key areas are the vision component. Is everyone crystal clear on where we’re going and how we’re trying to get there? The second one is the people component. Do we have the right people in the right seats?

Right People or people who fit the culture like a glove. You love having them around. Having them in the right seats means they excel at their work. They have the. Excuse me. The God-given talent, the drive, the desire, the capacity to do the job well. That’s the second one, the people component. The third component is the data component that’s running the business on facts and figures, making so sure that we’re using objective information to make our decisions versus in most entrepreneurial companies make decisions based on hunches and egos and subjective feelings.

The fourth key component is the issues component, and that’s just making sure that your people are really good at solving problems as they arise. You can’t really grow a great company if your people aren’t great at identifying issues and then knocking ’em down, making ’em go away for good. The fifth key component is the process component, which is.

Making sure that all the important stuff in the business is getting done the right and best way every single time. That’s what creates scalability, profitability, makes the business a lot more fun to run and manage when everything’s being done the right and best way. And then the last, the sixth. Key area is what we call traction, and that’s bringing the vision down to the ground and executing on it day in and day out.

And within each one of those six key areas, we’ve got a couple of tools or disciplines that we use that helps strengthen those areas in the business. But the starting point that the assessment I would say or the. Best way to understand how you’re doing is to start with that organizational checkup and it’s free, it’s online.

It would take probably less than five minutes for any leader to, to fill that out. Typically, what kind of businesses are you working with? They are privately held, typically two to $50 million US dollars in annual revenue. Typically 10 to 250 employees. And as I said their leaders are growth oriented.

They are willing to be open and honest and vulnerable with themselves and the people around them. And they want to grow. They are seeking change. They know that there’s a better way to run their business. We start to wrap things up a little bit. I wanted to get some insights on a couple of different levels from you.

You’ve talked about some of those six different areas. Is there a a note for people that are listening in now saying. I think I should, you know that says that they should look at EOS as something they should be doing. Is there a trigger point aside from the ones that we talked about at the beginning, which are the crisis points?

Is there something where you can say, you need to get in advance of this. It’s better to move now rather than wait a year or two when something might happen. Yeah, so a lot of the issues we see are people issues. So whether that’s turnover, a lot of turnover sometimes it’s drama, just a lot of tension on the leadership team.

Sometimes it’s accountability when it comes to people. You feel like you come together, you make a decision, but then it just never gets executed on fully. You don’t see things being finished out completely. And so people. Is one area profit. I mentioned earlier, sometimes you’re working really hard, but there’s just not enough profit at the end of the day to show for all of your hard work.

Other times there’s a lot of stress or chaos because things are not being done the right way consistently. So I mentioned that process component. It’s funny when. When I was running my marketing company, I read a book, I forget the name of it, but I got really excited about processes.

I thought, man, if we just created a process for every single area of the business, everything would be done the right way, and all these problems would go away. And I had the right idea, but my way of executing on that was very poor. I. I wound up creating hundreds of pages along with a team, hundreds of pages of processes, and by the time we were finished, the first ones were outdated and nobody was using them to begin with, and they were in a Google Drive folder.

So within EEO s we’ve got a really effective way, an entrepreneurial approach to systemizing a company. And so anyway if you feel like there’s not consistency in the organization, the customers are not getting the same consistent experience or product or you just know internally, there’s a lot of inefficiency in the way things are getting done that’s another symptom or pain point or a tip that someone might realize, okay, we might need to adopt something like EOS to help us become more consistent.

I wanted to ask you, and this is a probably a significant topic that we can only scratch the surface on, but I’m intrigued about the role of technology. There’s a lot of chatter about ai of course, but that’s not the sole piece of technology. How much of a role is technology playing both in the, building up to a crisis point of needing to change and also EEO S’S intersection with that in terms of how is it using technology to help improve the business?

Yeah so what’s so interesting about US is that it’s industry agnostic, first of all. So it doesn’t really matter what the business does, it sits below your area of expertise. We all mentioned, we mentioned earlier we have these blind spots in these areas where unaware of. But secondly, I would say that technology is.

Neither good nor bad. It is how you use it. It is what’s done with it that matters. And so AI is great. I use AI every day. The marketing company, every role within that marketing company uses AI as a tool every day. But within EOS, it’s what I would say EOS is a people management system. And so AI can help, technology can help with that, but at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of people working together to accomplish a goal.

Technology will change, but how people work together, having a clear aligned vision, having clear accountabilities, having discussions to solve issues together as a team, those things aren’t so dependent on technology, and so I encourage my clients to use ai. We in the session room when I’m meeting with them, we don’t use technology at all.

In fact, we’re using paper and pen because of the distraction that it tends to be. We put the cell phones away, they’ll close the laptops, and we’re just fully present, fully engaged with one another. And that’s important. It’s been interesting to watch AI unfold. AI can help you create processes in your company, for example.

That’s a great tool, but AI is not going to call John out when he shifts in his chair a little bit. When Sarah says something, that’s my job as an EOS implement. John, I saw the look what’s with the look. Sarah said such and such and now we’re getting some, now we’re getting to the root of some real things.

That’s a team health issue perhaps, and that’s what us really helps teams do is get clear aligned, open and honest and measuring progress, those types of things that technology’s a merely a tool that can enhance that. So much stuff in everything that you’ve talked about there. I wanna ask you the question that I ask all of my guests on the program, what is the aha moment that clients have when they come to work with you that you wish more people would know They’re going to have?

I wish leaders realize, realized that. Regardless of what their business does, they’re ultimately in the people business, and especially as leaders, your job is to get work done vicariously through your team. You’re less a technician now and more a people person. Your job is the people business and. When you realize that you’re in the people business, you see your job differently, you realize how important it is that we clearly communicate that we have an aligned vision, that we’re aligned with the vision, that we hold one another accountable, and that we have open, honest conversations.

How we work and function together as a team is so important because most companies. Focus on strategy. They focus on how we can deliver the product better. They don’t often work on the health of the company. They focus on the performance, but not on the health. And so if leaders realized how important and how simple that can be, it’s.

It doesn’t have to be complex, doesn’t have to be complicated, but it has to be a priority. They have to be very intentional as to designing a culture and a team that is healthy. And Patrick Lencioni, in his book, the Five Dysfunctions of Teams, and he’s written several other books that are wonderful, is a great read.

I would recommend that to anyone. But that at the end of the day, what I think most of these teams realize is the power of being open and honest with one another and being a healthy team and how that gives them a tremendous advantage in the marketplace. Thank you so much. Will there is so many great insights that people will gain from listening to this conversation.

I know I certainly have. It’s a process I think is the most important thing that people need to understand and that EOS is something that you should jump on. Sooner rather than later for your business. ’cause if you see any of those warning signs at all, it’s never too early to get on board and do those things.

So thank you for enlightening everyone about EOS and about sharing your story as well. And I really appreciate you being part of the program. I know it’s been a privilege to talk with you and just have a great conversation. I learned as I talk sometimes just, fleshing things out. So I really appreciate your questions and the way that you phrase to those.

And it was a great to have great to have a good conversation with you today. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being part of the program. And of course, we will include in the show notes all the information on how to get in contact with Will, and we remind everyone, of course to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for thought leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bytes.

The time to shine is now. Do not wait. Please indulge me because I’ll bring you to why now matters. This has been one of the most difficult weeks of my life and for all my non-Jewish connections. I wanna give you a sense of what’s been happening. Let me give you a snapshot of my history so you may get a glimpse into what heartbreak I like.

All my community have felt I’m the grandchild of Holocaust survivors who came to Australia to get away and as far away as possible from the evil that destroyed their family and friends. I was very close to my grandfather in particular, and I carry his spirit with me always. I grew up proud to be Jewish and live a life that is centered around my beliefs.

Personally, I’ve been on a journey always learning more about my Judaism so I can be a better person and lead my family and let it guide the way I operate my business. A few years back that led me to be part of an Israel program that moved me in ways I never thought possible, truly life changing.

Meanwhile, my children who are in their twenties attended Jewish schools, and even when they were young, it was normalized to expect armed security to be present at all times for fear of an attack. I’ve worked with many Jewish organizations, helping them in whatever capacity I was able. But the rise of antisemitism has been there for a while.

Like the day I woke up to the for sale sign outside of my house, covered in anti-Semitic graffiti. Just prior to October 7th, 2023, I returned from an amazing holiday with my family that took us to Israel, where this tiny country just delivers so much. Being Jewish and being in Israel is hard to explain except to say you are on a spiritual high.

Then October seven came just days after we returned, and the world only seemed to care for a brief moment about the horrific attack on innocent Jewish lives. That moment in Australia was just over 24 hours before the Opera House became a no-go zone for Jews as mobs spewed hatred onto the streets.

These past two years have seen antisemitic slurs fill the streets quite literally. Do you know what it’s like to have to wake up each day to make sure your family and friends are all okay and there’s not been another attack? Protestors outside our places of worship, chanting death to Jews in university, students could not escape it and reprehensible bias in parts of the media.

The A BC to this day continues to quote an organization that they have been told countless times does not only not represent the Jewish community, it goes against everything 99% of us believe. If you found yourself in pro-Palestinian marches. You fell for the false narratives being fed to the media by a terrorist group.

I’ll not rant further about this except to ask if you know how it feels to have the world turn against you when you know you are the innocent party. Well, that’s how we all felt. I will hold back on the politics. But needless to say, I’ve never felt more betrayed by this Prime Minister than any other before.

And the foreign minister appalling, ignoring the warning sides, recognizing a state that is still run by terrorists and dismissing my community far too quickly. In November, I became president of Maruba Synagogue, a community that was the center of antisemitic attacks earlier this year. It’s not easy to switch off the news and get on with business when you are not only the news, but the emotional strain is at times overwhelming.

I’ve sat in on meetings about security that would feel out of place to the rest of Australia, but have proven necessary. The Jewish community has been on alert of a likely attack, but the authorities chose not to act. While I was not at Bondi when the events unfolded so many of my community were. I’ve heard stories of bravery, support, and survival.

From those too young to fully comprehend what’s going on, but now too scared to be around balloons that might pop to those comforting friends who lay dying next to them. I’ve heard stories of those running into harm’s way to save lives. Friends have lost friends and family. I, along with many of my friends, have shed many tears privately and in public.

Okay. The Jewish community has not just survived centuries and so many attempts to destroy us, but each time we come back stronger. What I witnessed at Bondi a week on from the massacre that forever change the Jewish community in Australia was inspiring, peaceful. Coming together, inviting the broader community and using the memories of those we have lost to drive forward with positivity.

It’s been a draining week and a couple of years, and every person impacted is dealing with it in a different way. I’m prouder than ever to be Jewish, to do what I can to be a light unto others. I encourage you to reach out to anyone you know who is Jewish. Show your support and ask if they’re okay. My business is built on the idea that the best way to change the world is to do it one person at a time by showcasing other people’s brilliance through the act of pos of podcasting, and it’s never been more important.

Make a difference. Be a voice of brilliance because the world needs more light. Don’t wait. Not even another day.

Market research secrets, what customers really need versus what they want. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Pearl, and today I am sitting down with someone I’ve known and worked with for 25 years. David Donnelley is the founder of Instinct and Reason, a market research consultancy that’s worked in 45 countries with everyone from Fortune 500 companies.

To federal governments. David’s about to reveal why businesses fail when they listen to the wrong audience. The difference between transactional and resilient trust and why customers don’t want to lose weight. They want to look good. We will explore how language can make or break your business and why climate change became toxic terminology for farmers and how tourism Australia’s controversial campaign succeeded globally, but failed spectacularly at one point in Japan.

So this is an episode packed with information for small and medium businesses, right through to large businesses. David has so many amazing insights, including stuff about his PhD that he’s done that’s gonna fascinate you about the Boomers. This is an episode not to miss. Let’s get into biz bites for thought leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I am truly excited to have my guest here today. We have known each other, I think we worked out for about 25 years, and we’ve done lots of work together over the years, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to speak on the podcast.

So David Donnelly, welcome to the program. Thank you Anthony. Would you like me to do a little intro? I’d love you to introduce yourself to the audience because while I know you, everybody else doesn’t. So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you? Great. Just a snapshot I’m a career market researcher.

I I came from South Australia where I did my business degree at the Elton Mayo School of Management. I was a graduate into the Commonwealth government and I worked with ministerial committee looking after government communications. Was poached into a big consulting firm. Worked for a decade with a great company where I learned my craft as a market researcher, a great Australian company that had a massive network across Asia.

So we did a lot of international work as well as local work. And I loved that until that business was acquired by a big global company, at which time I decided to start my own consultancy called Instinct and Reason, and for 20. Three years now. We’ve operated in Australia and around the world. We work with big multinationals on pricing research brand research and communications research.

Mainly for new products that have been launched in different countries. We’ve worked in about 45 around the world. And in Australia we have a lot of work in the agri sector, the tourism sector, and the public sector for. Services Australia on customer set. But yeah, I’ve got a 30, 30 year career in market research and I understand Anthony will be talking market research today.

Absolutely. And I think it’s such a fascinating area. And it’s interesting to me as well. We were talking just a little bit before we started recording and I’m wondering. How much research people are doing now or if they’re just relying on AI and Google and how that compares to what actual research looks like.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting. Question. Anthony and I look, because I’ve been around for so long, I think it’s worth just putting it into context. So yes, I joined in the early nineties, the market research industry. A lot of our work then was just a lot of brand tracking, a lot of customer satisfaction tracking, so people monitored how the world was evolving.

We also did strategic work, so it could be a new product, it could be a new audience. The question was how do we market into that audience really? That strategic work is still ongoing. I’m not really sensing any reduction in that. Certainly there are downturns in in times like we experienced over the last couple of years where the economy’s been running pretty well at break even not really growing.

Research is one of those. One of those spends that you can put on hold is discretionary. So we did notice a little bit through 23, 24. It’s been quite challenging. But yeah, that strategic work around a new product, a new service, what do we price this at? Who do we go after? What do we say to them?

That kind of strategic work is ongoing. Things do change. So the advent originally say around, the middle of the first 2000 tens that we moved to big data. So a lot of businesses thought we don’t need to track or monitor anymore. We’ve got big data, we can see what’s going on in real time.

Isn’t that great? Yeah. But that doesn’t, that tells you about your customers. It doesn’t tell you about the rest of the world. So you become a bit myopic and, and you miss out on what’s going on. So yeah, research has been quite resilient because the world keeps changing. Anthony, as I think you probably realize and all of your listeners probably do too, every day there’s a new bit of gardening to do.

I think, generally speaking, a lot of business in my mind, don’t value the research as much, and the big business definitely does because they know they have to do it. But I think there’s this gulf in a lot of small to medium businesses that often go out there and create new products and services and sometimes new businesses.

Because they feel it’s the right thing without actually doing the market research on what the market actually wants and needs. Is that something that you’re seeing perhaps more of, that people are being more opportunistic in the current environment? I think that’s always been the same, Anthony Entrepreneurs.

Have a go. And they sometimes trip over and fall in their face and they get hurt and, there’s a big cost in doing market research. It’s been quite expensive. All of our clients of Blue chip, massive multinationals, federal governments, state governments, they try to do the research to get things right.

‘Cause they can afford to, and they can build it into their whole business models. It’s really hard for SMEs. To find that money to throw at a market research problem. So entrepreneurs are very reliant on their own gut instinct. And it’s interesting, our company name is Instinct and Reason, the reason being the research.

But we acknowledge, even, if you if you’re thinking about the future it’s a, it’s an instinct as well. And a lot of entrepreneurs have that and some of them don’t. But it’s a risk. You’re taking a risk relying on your own perceptions of the way the world works. But I would to say, you can still do your homework.

You can still do your homework, and I guess there are some emerging technologies that are really worth knowing. So market research is about talking to potential customers and finding out what they need. So even small and medium enterprises, they can spend time. Talking to their target audience about what they need.

And you should focus on what they need. Not what they want, but what they need. And if you’re making something that if someone needs, you’re gonna be pretty close to the right thing. So talking to people is the way to go about it. And we’re still doing, by the way, a lot of that Anthony third of our work is.

Focus group discussions, online forums, one-on-one interviews. We’re still talking to people to learn about what they’re, what they need. I think that’s such an important and fascinating area. And I recall a project that, that we worked on together some years ago now, where the case was that the.

Management, were listening to the wrong audience and got the right audience into a focus group. They said, let me at them, let me tell them what they really need to be doing. And it was quite fascinating how that. That transpired. And I see that in a lot of, I, I guess a lot of not-for-profit organizations, which this one was, that they were, they tend to listen to the bureaucracy, to government, and often to people who are not necessarily in high profile positions saying, oh, we like this, and suddenly that’s taken as gospel.

Where instead of listening to the research groups and the people that actually are in the core area of who you’re delivering to, and that’s a I see that as a temptation for a lot of businesses as well, that you listen to, you might listen to your peers or you might listen to your family, but are they actually the core audience of who you should be doing your research with?

Yeah. That’s really marketing 1 0 1, isn’t it? That the first question you ask is who is my audience? For this idea I’ve got and like all of us, we tend to rely on history to inform the future, but not necessarily is that always the case to be true. So finding out, segmenting the market and finding out who your potential customers are is the first step.

And then talking to them. I can tell you a little story that, that, affected me a lot. I went to the Global Market Research Conference once in Berlin and a gentleman spoke and he had made the movie, the Life, the Lives of Others. One Can in 2007 or oh eight or something. But he he made this beautiful movie, this amazing movie and nobody would distribute it.

They said there’s no audience for it. And they said, we’ve tested it. So they brought into their audience testing a random group of the US market, and that stuck them in the audience and people didn’t like it. But then somebody in the marketing research team said, oh, we should we should expose this film to people who have a degree.

And of course. People were well educated, really understood this story of the stary living in the roof, spying on people and in East Germany. And it ended up winning Kahan. It ended up being distributed, but it was only ’cause they worked out. There was a particular audience for this film and others would not appreciate it as much.

I think that’s interesting that. People delving into this whole idea of talking to the right people and finding the right differences. I think that it’s, it, movies do it quite well. Then traditionally have, and I’ll never forget, I was actually in I’ve been taken to my parents to the, we went to the US and one of the film studios and they had just done the testing for Fatal Attraction.

And there was an ending to Fatal Attraction. And the market research when they played it out meant that they no, it’s gotta change. And they went and re-shot the ending to that movie as a result of it, because I think they had it as I, I think Glenn close’s character might. Survived.

And it wasn’t necessarily the good guys don’t win. Nobody likes that in a Hollywood ending, right? They want the guys to win. And, but it’s interesting that there’s a lot of lessons in all of that for people is what to, what is the expectations? I often refer to, interestingly enough, the bit of research that we did.

Back in the early days when we were working together and it was with a funeral company for those that are are listening in. And we often did surveys of all of the various people, the various clients that that were had. And it fascinated me that cleanliness of funeral vehicles was always a huge impact if they were bad.

It just always showed to me that there was an expectation of people saying, we expect the funeral vehicles to be clean. So you got no bonus points if they were clean. However, if they were dirty. Or something was wrong with them, then it completely changed the way people felt about the entire service that was being done.

Everything else could have been perfect, but the vehicle, which there was an expectation that it would be clean, wasn’t, and therefore all the results were terrible as a result of it. And I think that’s that, that always taught me a very important lesson about what are the expectations of your audience that you have to meet.

And then what are the things that you can, that will make that difference in a positive way? Yeah, and look, that’s one of the, I know we’re talking to a lot of SMEs here, but it’s one of the important things in marketing is these are these hygiene factors they’re called, and they’re things that if they’re not there.

You’re not gonna make a sale because they’re just meant to be there, but they’re not gonna differentiate your product in any way. And it’s, they’re not gonna give you any value add to the brand. And then there are the things that will, and you need to keep an eye on both of these things to, to make sure you’re successful.

Absolutely. Look, David, I wanted to, I think one of the things that we need to get into is some of the actual research and the impact that it’s, that it has. Because even though there’s some things that are being done at a high level for bigger business, there’s a lot of things that.

Other businesses can learn and we have a range of people listening to us from all types of businesses. What are some of the lessons, particularly around branding, that you are seeing at the moment from research and the impact that it’s making? Because I personally believe that trust has never been more important a factor for brand building than it is at the moment.

And I think that’s gonna continue to build. And how people build that trust is going to make a huge difference. Yeah we see the same mistakes being made by brands every day. The what I mean, contemporary issue was yesterday Microsoft was taken to the court by the ACCC for just upgrading our to pay for copilot.

And if you didn’t go into cancel, you never got the message that said. You could you could not pay the extra $50 a year for your Microsoft subscription. That kind of duplicity really damages brands. So when we conceptualize trust, and I do agree with you, it’s a really big issue at the moment, and I’ll come back to why, but when we conceptualize trust with brands, we talk about it in two different ways.

So people to engage with a brand, have to trust the brand to do the job. So this is what we call the transactional part of trust. So in other words, do I trust you to organize a funeral? Do I trust you to look after my money? If you’re a bank, do I trust you? If you’re the federal government and you’re providing me a Centerlink service or a Medicare service, do I trust you to do the job?

But that’s not really enough. And the reason I alluded to the Microsoft. Issue is they’ve lost what we’d call the resilient part of trust. So that is not that can they do their job, they do their job fantastically most of the time. So that’s not the reason. But if I want to trust Microsoft to look after me as a customer and have my interests at heart, I now know their motivations is just to make money.

They really. Don’t care about all of those SMEs out there that had this Microsoft product and got ripped off by putting their prices up by 45% and not giving anyone an option to make a judgment on that. So when we talk about resilient trust, it’s people make a perception of your motivation as a business.

Are you looking after me, the customer, or are you looking after yourself? If you’re looking after yourself, I will never. Trust you truly. I might think you can do the job, but I’m not gonna trust you truly. And then also what goes with that? There are two other aspects, which is integrity. In other words, do you as a business, do what you say, or are you saying things in marketing just to keep me as a customer, but they’re not necessarily true? Or you don’t necessarily follow through. So motive, what’s your motivation? Do you speak with integrity? Do what you say. And then there’s this ethical element that’s entering into. This resilient trust too, is what’s your underpinning belief about humanity almost.

And what people are looking for is, you have to be able to argue that whatever decision you’ve made, ’cause not everything benefits every customer, that it’s been the greatest good for the greatest number that ethical element is in your DNA as well. So the brands. Who remember that and wanna have that resilient trust.

’cause that allows you, in the modern world to have a cocker. Things can go wrong and people will still trust you. ’cause they think your motivation is for them. They know you do what you’re saying and they think your motive your ethics are the greatest good for the greatest number. And so you see Microsoft just trash that in one day.

And if people have a choice to get away from that brand, they will. And, you don’t want to ever lose those things. So research can be around those factors and trying to understand how that’s happening. And research can be really simple sometimes, Anthony, we had a project, and I hope this this doesn’t go too far, but if we have Chatham rules here, but the Royal Australian Mint were told a few years ago.

That they had to stop using packaging that wasn’t recyclable. So this was a Department of Finance edict to the entire Commonwealth public sector. That packaging that was a one-off use could not be used. So they turned all of their beautiful packaging for their collectible coins into bamboo packaging, nice and recycling.

And of course, all the collectors hated it. They absolutely hated it because they store these coins and they, and of course a little bit of research on our behalf said they’re not really one off packages. Those, that coin will stay in that box for probably a hundred years. It’s not going into the bin when it arrives.

It’s being there for a hundred years. They didn’t know that. But the raw men did not realize that the packaging, they hadn’t done the research with their customers. They hadn’t asked them, what do you do with the packaging? Sometimes they don’t even open it. They just want it pristine. Yeah.

So anyway, sometimes just, very ba, it’s really important to keep asking good questions of your customer. That’s all I would say to people. You don’t need to do any fancy research, but you do need to keep talking to your target audience about what they need and what they do. So you need to understand their knowledge, their attitudes, and some of their behaviors.

And if you understand that you’re much better placed place to provide what they want, what they need. Yeah. I like that and it’s something that I know I’ve given that advice to many people over the years. I recall one time working many years ago massage therapist that I knew, and she was offering half hour and one hour massages.

Now what. After asking a few people that she realized she was missing out on was the lunchtime market. So people get an hour lunch and an hour massage is too long, but a 30 minute massage feels like they’re not getting enough value because they just want 15 minutes to be able to, grab a sandwich and a drink and get back to the office.

So they really wanted 45 minute massages. So after asking a few people. That’s what she did. She implemented the lunchtime, 45 minute massage and suddenly she was booked out lunchtimes every day. And it’s simply by asking the right questions. And I think that’s important as is language though too, isn’t it, David?

I think getting the right language that resonates with people can is also a valuable bit of research. Oh yeah. Tone is everything. And we do a lot of work in comms, just trying to get the right tone. That I guess demonstrates, that you are interested in your customers, that you are seeking feedback depending on how you speak.

Whether you speak adult to adult or you’re speaking adult to child. You have to be really careful about how you go about that or people people struggle. And sorry, my mind’s gone to another anecdote, but it’s quite, no please share it. It’s not quite a it is actually OnOne, it’s actually a very good illustration.

A few years ago I did the strategic work for Tourism Australia on their global tourism campaign and it led eventually to the campaign, which some might remember called, so Where the Bloody Hell Are You? Yes. And the whole idea of this was was, we’ve got the party together, we’ve got the place together, we’ve got everything together, but you’re not here.

And this was very much an Aussie saying, right? So when we say we’re the bloody hell are you, if you say that to an Englishman, if it’s an Englishman, says that to an Englishman, that is a reprimand. When an Australian SE sends it to somebody, it’s not a reprimand. It’s saying, we really want you here. Why aren’t you here?

Yeah. It’s a totally different meaning. And I was doing focus groups in London talking to people and I’d got a British moderator to do the groups and I was just watching and they didn’t like the idea ’cause they were hearing it through his English. Tone and his voice. And so I jumped in and did the groups and it instantly changed, even the English knew the brand.

This is the way Australians talked to each other and talked to the world. And so that campaign actually resonated really well for people who understood Australians and understood that’s our way of being friendly. And it is one of the big brand attributes that when you come to visit Australia.

Tends to be a lot friendlier than if you go to London, for example, when no one talks to you. But on that one we had a bit of a failure in Japan, so the agency had translated. So where the bloody hell are you into Welcome. To my blood soaked hellhole, which as you can imagine, Anthony didn’t go down, even in Japan, didn’t go down very well.

No. So we had to work on that translation and get the tone and the language right. It’s so easy to make. Translation is one thing and I always find that fascinating. There are many examples online where. You translate something from one language to another and then translate it back to see how distorted it can become.

And ’cause there are some things that don’t translate, but I think also, I know an anecdote that I heard from many years ago was about someone who’d written a book. And originally it was about how to help women lose weight and it just didn’t go anywhere. And what he found out from the research and subsequently changed it was women don’t wanna lose weight.

They want to look thinner. Yeah. And so it, it completely transformed just the change in language transformed what the success of his book and subsequent things that he were. Oh, yeah, that’s a, but that’s understanding what people need. I guess that returns us back to that theme that when you’re talking to people what do they really need?

Do you need to lose weight? No I wanna look good. I want people to look at me and not think that I’m, I’m not on top of everything. I’m okay. And it’s really digging deeper and not taking things on face value. So people will give you a direct answer and when they give you an answer to this question about what do you need?

Just beware because they’re giving you an answer that, that they’ve overlaid that with, does this make sense? They don’t wanna seem. Weird, right? So they’re gonna give you an answer that makes sense. That’s partly true, but not necessarily the whole truth. And so in market research, we use a lot of techniques to get below that crust and into what’s really going on.

But the example you give is a great example of what people really wanted. We saw this in our work with over fifties. People wanted because people with older people were saying as they come into retirement, they wanna get fit, they wanna go to the gym, they start exercising, they watch their weight and they do all these things.

But when as we dug down from, oh, I just wanna be healthy. I want to get the most outta the rest of my life. No, they wanted to look good. It was exactly the same as yours. These people wanted to look good. And and when you understand that, then you can talk to them and you can create products that they want.

It’s absolutely critical. I think there’s two things that I learned out of that as well. One is the fact that. The language can also change. So that was from a few years ago in terms of, looking thinner versus losing weight. But it may be that now it’s better to look good, is what is more important than looking thinner.

And it may well be that the content or the product and service that you are delivering may not actually differ as a result, but the language around it can be also important to how that plays out. Yeah, I mean it happens in that this issue happens in almost every project we’ve ever looked at. In my view.

The language comes back. One really clear piece of work we did was around working with farmers and we were out, sent out to talk to them about, how can we help farmers mitigate the impact of climate change? We were dispatched from federal government agency to find out the first thing we found out is, don’t you dare mention.

The word climate change ’cause I don’t believe in it. So we were not going to provide them with any help to deal with climate change. ’cause they simply did not accept it. And this is going back a few years and it’s changing, but it’s still, as you can see from Barnaby Joyce, it’s still out there in, in regional Australia.

They don’t really want to take climate change. So we start to talk about, what are you seeing? And they talked about the climate’s becoming more variable, and people had come to these focus groups with, here’s the rainfall records on my property since 1828. You have the big journal every day being recorded.

He said, I know. It’s becoming more variable, but it’s not climate change, right? So we needed to change that whole communication strategy around, look, how can we help you cope with climate variability? All farmers accepted. Oh yeah. It’s getting more variable. What can you do for me? So yeah, you’re so right.

Language, language is crucial. And that’s why you need to talk to your customers. What language are they using? So you can, because that’s so important, right? That it that it, yeah, sometimes phrases that start off meaning one thing, start to carry baggage with it and you, as soon as you say climate change, it doesn’t matter who you are, whether whatever your thoughts are around climate change, there is a huge amount of baggage that comes with that term these days.

And a, I think, that little subtle variation of climate variable. Yes, that makes more sense and seems to talk more specifically to it. And right now that doesn’t have any baggage as a term. It doesn’t mean that it won’t do in the future. Yeah. And then of course you dig even deeper. ’cause you’ve gotta say why is that?

Why is that baggage there with climate change? Of course if you accept the premise of climate change, then agriculture’s contributing 20% of the CO2 to the problem. They. Didn’t know how they could fix the problem. I don’t want to be labeled as the person who’s creating climate change and my business, I don’t know what to do with it to actually prevent that.

So yeah. So we talk about climate variability, so we can avoid that. Neg all those negatives and just get on with the job about what can we do. And I think one of the other important lessons, I wanna come back to that in a second, but one of the other important lessons that I don’t want to lose from all of this as well is that to be cautious of groups.

I think one of the very the lessons that I learned very early on in watching you and your team doing market research was when you’re in a group scenario. The loudest voice can often transform what the rest of the group is going to say. So you want people to often write down if they’re in a group situation, their opinion first, so that you can see what happens, because it’s amazing how.

You can do this in any discussion where you’ve got a group of people and you say something and people start, oh, saying, start nodding their heads saying, yes, I was gonna say that, but were they really going to say that? Is that what they really thought? And I think that’s important as well to understand the difference between what actually is a, there’s variables of opinions that have versus where the group takes you.

Yeah, that’s, look that’s true. Group discussions can be can be challenging. Some people just have verbal diarrhea and the moment you say something, it comes out and then everyone is processing that. And also people in Australia particularly don’t wanna be rude to people. So if somebody takes a position they could.

Might decide, look, I don’t wanna, I’m not here for a fight, so I’m just gonna keep my position to myself. So yeah, we often would say, listen, we want you to write down your first impressions, but let’s write it down and then we’ll discuss it as a group. Is a simple technique that often works to make sure you’ve got both.

It’s also really useful, Anthony. It’s not the reality in the social worlds we live in. People do talk to other people. And they are influenced. ’cause not everyone has a strong opinion on anything. So there’s still legitimacy in understanding how that happens. But yeah, it’s also to find out what do people think themselves?

You need to understand both the social dynamics and people’s underlying. Knowledge and attitudes. And I wanna draw now back to what you were just talking about in terms of climate as well, and something you was talking about earlier in terms of trust and and as well, is that business, I think more and more has to look at the impact that it’s making and eve and try and find some counter way of making it a positive impact to make people feel good about what they’re.

Might be able to contribute as well. I’ve talked on this program previously about organizations like B one G one, where you can easily, it’s for small business to be able to make an impact and counter it with whatever they’re doing. And we’ve had Paul done on the program in the past, so shout out to Paul, how important are you seeing that impact?

But large businesses are almost being forced to do it. But. How successful is that? Look, we just finished a project for Australian Ethical Investments it is, it’s interesting how keen it’s important to find the key messaging that re resonates. So let me start, make sure I come back to Australian Ethical, but one interesting project, just to give you a flavor is.

We were looking at going into the World Trade ne negotiations, we being Australia, and we had to work out who paid the CO2 for airlines flying in from Europe and North America. Who pays for that? Who’s creating the CO2? Is it Australia who gets the tourism benefit? Or is it the citizens of Germany or whatever?

So we did a study where we said, okay, what if we had to charge you $50, 50 euros extra for your flight to Australia? As a carbon impost, so we could spend that on planting trees or whatever we’re doing to mitigate that CO2 that you’ve spent you’ve produced coming to Australia. And so we measured the impact of the 50 euro impost, but then we put in some positives.

So we said, what if we told you that 50 euros wasn’t being it wasn’t being spent on CO2, it was being spent on planning. Native forests in Australia. So all that money would go straight to native forests to compensate for the CO2 that you produced. And so we had about, I can’t remember now, an 8% drop in demand with that 50 Euro price hike.

But we are able to get all of that back, but simply putting it in the context of how we’re gonna spend that money. To mitigate that CO2, so that messaging. So we went into the World Trade Organization saying, we can afford to pay this because if we promote it properly, we’re not gonna have any loss of demand.

People will still come. So yeah, you can, the way you position something, the key message that you attach to an act or a service or a product makes the world of world of difference. And it was interesting with Australian ethical because everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. Every super fund is saying We do ethical investing, right?

Just click a button and 20% of your investment goes to ethical. Australian Ethical only do ethical investments and telling people vaping, doing this for 40 years, completely re. Rechange, the rechange, the context. ’cause people said, oh no, everyone’s only been doing this for 10 years. No, they’ve been doing it for 40 years.

They know what they’re doing and they make their ethical investing high return. And it’s like those couple of key messages completely reframe consideration of where you’re putting your money for ethical investing. Yeah. Key messaging is one of the important things you can get out of market research.

And it often changes the end outcome. There’s so many more things that we can talk about, but I want to bring up your PhD and we were talking a little bit before we started the podcast about it, so maybe frame it for everyone what the PhD is in, because I think this is an important area for people to understand.

’cause there’s a lot of businesses dealing with this generation that you are focused on. Yeah. My, my area of investigation was migration. And in particular I looked at the, so in migration there’s four questions. Who migrates? Where do they migrate? When do they migrate, and why do they migrate?

And we know lots about from our demography. So if we’re just thinking about Australia and migrating around Australia, it’s a very important question. A lot of our productive jobs, our great GDP is happening in the pilborough or. In South Australia, in the desert, a lot of it will be a alala.

We need people to leave the cities and go and make money for the country, right? So migration is very important. We knew a lot about where people went and when they went, and we knew a little bit about who they were from basic demography. So the data comes from the census. The data comes from the wonderful Hilda study we have going in this country.

But nobody knew why. Why do people up and move? And and I just dunno how far I go with this Anthony, but for 150 years, excluding forced migration let’s just park that, but for 150 years people say people migrate because. Benefit. I’m gonna be economically better off, better job, better work better, better quality of life.

It’s an economic reason. That’s why people go for 150 years been shown. That’s not the only reason why people migrate. So I was able to to look at this issue from those perspectives of who and why, because my company had been monitoring the baby bubble trend. And we’ve been asking baby boomers, what do you wanna do with the rest of your life?

And we had this great long list of 40 things, 30 of which were, I wanna read more. I want to plant a garden. I want to, spend time with my grandkids, all that traditional stuff. And we had 10 items that were, I wanna move to the country. I wanna move to the seaside. I wanna learn a musical instrument.

I want to design a house and build it. I want to go back to university, I wanna fall in love again. We had 10 of these young adult aspirations, right? And what we found was that people who wanna migrate, so if we look at these 40 things, we look at these 10 things, 70% of baby members didn’t wanna do any of those 10 things.

They were very happy with traditional, traditionally getting older, but 30%. I wanted to do one, two, or three of those big things. And so there was this, there’s this real divide amongst people, baby boomers of just aging traditionally or wanting to go back and relive their adult life again. And of course, it’s those people that wanna really live their adult life also wanna move.

They want a new chapter in their life. They want to go and do the things they didn’t do or do them again or whatever it takes. So anyway in my study that was, has run for 15 years, I was able to ask 4,000 people living in cities who said they wanted to move to the country. Did they?

And I went back to them six years, between six and two years after when they said it. And I found nearly 400 people who said I moved. Wow. And I said why did you move? And we were able to explore, a very contemporary framework around why people might choose to, to up and move, particularly at that stage of life.

Anyway, it’s a bit about it. No, it’s a big decision. And I think what’s interesting about it as well is the impact that has on. Businesses that are feeding that generation as well, you know that they’re that they’re working with them and whether it’s an employment situation.

There’s some still employed at that in the boomer generation, but it’s also products and services that, that generation buys also is impacted impacts businesses around. So it’s a fascinating area to understand. The psychology of all of that. And I think what interests me in that space as well is how that’s probably a newer trend in Australia, whereas I look at somewhere like the US for example, where.

Forever. Kids go to university and they don’t usually go locally, so it means that people travel and move. Interstate is a lot more acceptable and you just look at Hollywood movies all the time and the kids are away. They’re not living with you. Whereas our expectation in Australia is the kids, generally speaking, go to university within.

A traveling distance day to day of where you live, which is usually in a city. So it’s interesting that’s all changing. And I wonder as well on the back of all of that how much this kind of work from home idea as well as also going to impact future generation’s perception of moving away from the city.

Yeah. So Anthony, these are really great issues. Lemme start by saying the world. Changes. It changes a lot and you sometimes you need to take a bit of context. So if we look at Australia for example, we had a hundred years from colon colonization. We nearly everybody lived in the bush then we had a, the second hundred years post colonization where we became the most urbanized country on the planet with 70% of the population in five cities.

And now we’re moving into the third century and it’s reversing. So for between 1976 and 2016, the census shows that migration from cities to country was going down. And that trend was happening in the United States as well, and it was happening in Japan, and it was happening in Europe, and it was happening in the uk.

As we’ve gone through that digital revolution. We have become more stuck in place liking the benefits of the cities in 2016, four years before COVID, that trend started to reverse. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve emphasized that question about why did people, why do people migrate? ’cause nobody could explain this 40 year downward trend and suddenly it turned up.

Way before COVID and then it went into Hyperdrive through COVID where people left the cities and went to the country. And it has continued to grow post COVID. So something has happened, fundamentally happened now working remotely. I don’t think that caused it, but that’s certainly a massive enabler.

For sure people are very interested in that. And it’s enabling people to move and and particularly enabling couples to move. One partner might still and we talked to Anthony, perhaps I shouldn’t say, but you’ve just moved to a place where you couldn’t commute daily, where you could.

Lots of people do, but that’s tough. But commuting once a week, it’s absolutely fine. And so that’s opening up areas all around Sydney and Melbourne, allowing people to work. So my fundamental point is the world really changes and and you need to keep on top of this because you can’t always deduce why the world is changing.

So keeping some of those big macro pictures in your head is really important. David, we could talk for hours and hours. We have talked for hours and many times over the years. There’s a final question I wanna ask you, but before I do that, I’m just gonna remind everyone that we will include information on how to get in touch with David in the show notes.

I advise people who are interested in market research to definitely keep an eye on what instinct and reason are doing. They release lots of valuable information throughout the year, lots of global insights. That I know have I’ve been able to share with my clients over the years and give a huge positive impact on it.

And if you’re considering doing market research, definitely talk to instinct and reason. I know you, David, you and I have, as I said at the beginning of work together many times over the years, and we’ll continue to do but I just wanted to wrap things up by asking a question that I ask all of my guests which is, what’s the aha moment?

That businesses have when they come to work with you that maybe they didn’t expect they were gonna have in advance? I think for us it’s that multi-layered logic. Most of our work and that, and, they’re big budgets for big organizations, but you can ask a question in a group discussion or even an interview and you get a.

A response, which is true, but it’s not the whole truth. So because people are overlaying they’re overlaying, I wanna sound sensible and logical and smart. So here’s why I did that. It’s digging down gently underneath that and drawing people out to tell us why they really did it. It goes back to your point about I wanna look thin.

I don’t wanna look fat. It’s not that I want, don’t wanna lose. I like eating and I like the food and that’s not the problem. The problem is I want, I wanna look good to other people. And why? Why do they wanna look good to other people? You keep drilling down and I think the companies that love working with us love getting that extra layer of insight into why.

Fantastic. David, thank you so much. Amazing insights as always, and so many different areas, and I think there’s a lot of value that people listening in will get from the various stories and things that you’ve given us. So thank you for being a great part of the program. Pleasure, Anthony. Good luck to everyone.

Yeah. And to everyone listening in, as I said, information in the show notes and how to get in touch with David and instinct and reason, and we, of course remind you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we’ll see you next time on Biz Bites for thought leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites.

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