Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

Holistic financial advice, why your business might be your best investment. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, where we deliver actionable insights to help you grow your business and influence. I’m your host Anthony Perl, and today I’m joined by Duncan Perkins, who is the owner of Tax Time Account.

And home loan essentials. And he brings a rare combination of expertise across banking, finance, broking accounting, and financial planning. And in this episode, Duncan reveals his innovative hub and spoke approach to financial services. Challenges the traditional investment mindsets and explains why your own business might be your best investment opportunity.

You’re going to discover why fitter financially could transform your wealth journey. So as we dive into this episode with Duncan, I want you to understand that here is a man. That owns multiple businesses is challenging the norm and is gonna make you think not just about his business and in terms of the financial side of things, but also the way you think about your business and your business model.

So get ready for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I have. A wonderful guest with me today, Duncan, who is gonna introduce himself in just a moment. But we are going to cover a whole range of topics here today from really from someone who has built multiple businesses and joined them in a unique way.

I’m gonna let Duncan reveal also Duncan, firstly, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. As we’d like to do, why don’t you start off by introducing yourself to everyone. Hello everyone. My name’s Duncan Perkins. I’m the owner of Tax Time Accountants and Home Loan Essentials and part owner of Bit of Financial Services.

And I suppose, how far back do we want to go? I started in this game back in 1984 when I left school and joined the bank and followed in my father’s footsteps. I stayed. A loyal bank officer all the way up until about 2000 when I escaped and was poached into the world of finance broking which I truly loved.

And I ran and set up my own company called Home Loan Essentials. And oh, I suppose one of the early forebearers of financial finance broking. It was fairly new to the industry in 2000, and then I rolled into, being convinced to buy an accounting practice by a mate of mine who was a financial planner.

And we set up an accounting practice. I, we didn’t set up an accounting, we bought an accounting practice and then I thought accounting can’t be that hard. So I then went off to university and turned that into a double degree in accounting and financial planning. And then I went into financial planning.

‘Cause I found finance and doing home loans. Not so challenging. Before the 2008 one of the requirements to get a home loan was you had to spell mortgage. And I think you could basically get yourself a home loan low dock loans and reverse mortgages and other things. I grew a little bit disillusioned and I went more into the financial planning and and the accounting and that’s where it’s leading me today.

So I. I’m one of those rare, I don’t know, rare accountants that have many hats and many degrees. And the, when a client sees me, they, from a simple tax return to a SME client they get the whole, they get the whole pitch. So they get lending, they get financial planning, they get they get taxation advice.

And I’ll probably even give them the future. Horse tips for the weekend as well which probably don’t get them anywhere. So anyway, so yeah that’s how I roll. I’ve got a staff of about four or five, and I’ve got I’ve outsourced some teams overseas. And yeah, just looking for my new challenge now, which is what I call getting fitter financially.

So I’m trying to write a book set up an app and trying to drag a few people along on the way and yeah. Just keep helping people, I that’s the bit I like, so I do everything. So anything to do with I love that. Yeah. I love that. It’s I guess that’s what I wanna ask you about from the start is that you’ve just pointed out a career path that.

Has multiple disciplines to it, because it’s not that common that people sit in. What is three different camps? The the mortgage, the financial management and the accounting side of things. There are three quite different disciplines in many respects. So how does that actually work in terms of keeping that under one umbrella?

Legally. Legally it doesn’t. There’s quite a conflict of interest. So if, and this I believe is one of the big problems with the profession in accounting in financial planning, and also in, in mortgage broking. The rats seem to scurry over to where they can find their most money.

And it seems to be at the moment in the, giving professional advice around property investment because you don’t need a financial planning license to give advice so much in regards to property. And so when I sit down with clients, I try and help them out from a holistic perspective. I’ve got a bit of a saying in that there’s skills, knowledge, and attitude.

Everyone’s got skills. So one plus one equals two. As a financial planner, they will sit there and they’ll try and build the client’s knowledge to understand what they. Feel is best for them to invest in. And so once they’ve got enough knowledge, then they understand that maybe one plus one equals three.

But it doesn’t matter. I find how much knowledge a person has. It’s the attitude that they have that doesn’t take them over the precipice to invest. And that was my great frustration from a financial planning perspective, is that I would sit there and work with clients to try and build their knowledge.

But if they had the attitude that property was the best investment, then it was very hard for them to consider anything else, like building up their superannuation or trying to reduce their tax or minimize tax and other things like that. So the frustration that I see at the moment is that financial planners wanna do financial planning.

Mortgage brokers, finance, financial finance brokers, they want to do property and get people in as much debt as they possibly can or arrange their debts and get the clients the best debt deal that they can. And then from an accounting perspective, from the tax agent’s perspective we tend to be, and this is no offense to any account out there, we tend to be very proactive in our.

Efforts and not oh, sorry. Very reactive in our efforts and not so proactive. And unfortunately the the way I see the industry going is that it’s very sec it’s very individualized. So if you want to know about property or lending or debt reduction or debt recycling or any of that type of thing, you’d need to talk to a mortgage broker.

’cause the financial planner. Connor says we don’t do, we don’t do lending, we don’t do finance. And then if you wanna know about I don’t know, negative gearing through, through property, the accountant will tell you how negative gearing works and capital gains tax works, but they won’t then broach the subject of finance.

And and then from finance planning perspective, how do you protect that? How do you ensure that? The financial planner would love to talk to you about all of those things, but then tends not to as well. So it’s, so where I look after the client is I try and help them out in all of those areas.

And then when the specific need arises I then bring in the financial planner or I bring in the accountant, or I bring in someone from my accounting team, or I bring in someone from the mortgage broking team. And a lot of the time I bring in lawyers as well. When you have a situation where you have a, we, we had a situation the other day where we had a gorgeous lady. She’s a client of ours. I’ve actually never met her before because we only ever dealt with her husband, but they’re going through a divorce and he’s 74 and she’s 73 years of age and. When you deal with a client that has multiple investment properties and residential property and superannuation and pension and kids and wills and estates and multi, different marriages and they’re going through a divorce.

So you have to bring in an accountant in regards to the investment properties you have to bring in. Finance a lot of the time. ’cause she wants to help the kids out in regards so when the divorce comes through, there’s a lot of money coming her way. So you gotta bring in finance broking, then you gotta bring in a lawyer, obviously because there’s a divorce there.

And then you’ve got probably two lawyers. One in regards to one in regards to the divorce, and then you’ve got another or family lawyer, and then you’ve got another lawyer a lot of the time involved in regards to the property sale. And then you’ve got a financial planner involved in there because at 73 years of age you’re talking pensions and superannuation and investments.

It really does get very messy and there’s no. Individual person that can rally the troops to to do all that, which that’s the bit I really enjoy. I don’t like getting down, doing singular things. I like to expand out and do it. And I think the industry is really calling out that.

I think one of the big spaces that the a big growth area is anything to do with the the baby boomer age. Anyone over 65 is a huge market. For financial planning, accountants, finance brokers, believe it or not. ‘Cause the bank of mom and dad and lawyers yeah, granny flats and all sorts of arrangements like that.

So it’s a massive space and a lot of people have concern over ai and I do as well. One of my staff, she’s a receptionist, she’s not a, she’s not an accountant, and I said to her, just type into ai, what is my capital gains tax. And AI actually worked out what capital gain tax would be on a, a fake sale of a purchase of a home, et cetera, et cetera.

So AI is a concern to me in the future. If you are a business that concentrates in one of the spokes of what I call the wheel, so if you look at a business like a hub and spoke, and you are the hub. You are the person of influence in the middle, and you’ve got all of your spokes to the side, which is accounting, financial planning fund.

If you concentrate on just that one thing, I think you’re in a bit of trouble from an AI perspective because it’s amazing what you can find out there in ai. So yeah, so I’m trying to change the way that the business operates into more of a holistic approach. So when someone comes in.

They, they have the option to get everything all types of help in regards to finance thrown at them. And I think a lot of practices are or should be looking at that type of model from here on in. Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack there. And I want to get into the shifting mindsets part of it, because you’ve touched on that in a few different areas, but I just wanna ask from the beginning bit, because it’s where we started the conversation.

How do you. Because of those, because those things traditionally and in, in some respects legally, you can’t pass from one to the other. That straightforward. How do you manage that process of having those different areas under, working together? Yeah I mentioned it before of a hub and spoke and it’s a concept that I’m trying to bring into the office.

So like a wheel of a push bike you, the center part is the hub and then you’ve got all of your spokes that push out from the side of it. And so the hub and spoke model that we would have at our office is normally kind of me in the middle. And then I’ll talk to a client, find out what their situation is.

So I’ll find out their their income, their alco, their equity in their home, their, how many kids they’ve got, how long they’ve been in the job. And then I’ll find out problems that they have that they don’t even know that they have, and I’ll work out solutions for those problems. Before they even knew that they had those problems.

So for example, I was talking to someone the other day and they don’t have wills, but they’re on their second marriage now and they’ve got two kids to their first marriage and the second marriage that he has, he’s got two kids, but he doesn’t have a will. But he’s got. He’s got a property business worth half a million dollars and he is got a home worth two and a half million and he doesn’t have a will.

So that’s where I then will move along that spoke and pass them on to a lawyer. But then I’ll also move along to the financial planner where that will need to speak to them. Yeah, so I work very much. As the hub and I may do, I’ll, I’ll do nothing to do with the will. I’ll do nothing to do with the financial cleaning, but I’ll direct the traffic.

So the client, I’m tending to find people want to tell their story once, and if there’s one person that they can talk to, that’s great. And then that one person can be the conductor of traffic or the ring master or whatever you wanna call ’em, the puppet master, or. And the shepherd and then they can then control what’s going on.

So we are doing a, we are doing a, we’re looking after a client at the moment. They came in and saw me about setting up a business, but we’ve found out that he’s got a property in joint names and his brother’s got a property in joint names, but one property is supposed to be in his name only, and the other property is supposed to be in his name.

The brothers his name only, and it was absolute mess. So we’re talking about capital gain tax. May actually have to happen. We’ve gotta do a private ruling in regards to tax. We’ve gotta line up a lawyer that sets up transfers to transfer both properties across. And that just came from a simple business conversation in regards to him setting up his business.

And so there’s no one individual that can look after all of that. You need to bring in a team and and AI is not gonna give you the answers for it. I think that there’s great opportunity, great potential out there in the accounting and finance space and financial cleaning and law, but not as, I don’t think as individuals.

So there’ll be some real changes coming in the case and that, so trying to get on, on, on front of it at the start and see where comes from. Yeah. And I think it’s such an interesting approach because building that relationship and then being able to, as you say, coordinate conduct the whole bit, bunch of different services and bring them all in through there, it does make a lot of sense for people and it’s interesting that’s not been a model that traditionally people have.

Built before it was a model. It was a model. It was a model for a very long time. And it was called your bank manager. Yes, of course. So back in the day when you had flowing hair down to your shoulders you had to, when you had to go for a loan, you had to walk into the bank and you saw the bank manager and you may had to make sure you had a shirt and tie on.

Brew cream in the Yeah I remember my dad talking to, talking about, I’m having, lunch with the bank manager, and that was a big deal that you were the one actually going to lunch with the bank manager, this mysterious person that could, make or break you in some respects.

Yeah. And so they they approved the loan. They had their own lending authority. They didn’t have to push it into a computer to get a result. They might have known your dad, and they said we know your dad and you’re a good character, so we’ll write the home loan for you.

And we know your employer and Mary out the front, she’s gonna look after you. She’s gonna prepare all the loan documents for you and John the solicitor down the road, he’s gonna look after the law the settlement software, and there’s an accountant next door. We’re going to introduce you to him.

And then internally we’ve got a financial planner, so he’s gonna look after and make sure that you’ve got insurances and other things like, and it was just like one thing after the other. And so that model was there. And I think everything old is new, so I think it’s actually gonna come back again.

The segregation of roles, but someone needs to take a slack. The bank doesn’t want take up financial business.

Just got a funny feeling that I think that the hub in most of the situation will be the finance person. So it’s the person that wrote your home loan for you or helped you out with your lending. They’re that person throughout the journey of your life. And I’ve got a funny feeling that the person of influence, the main person that people will go to for trust and advice will be the finance person.

If they. And the terminology that you’re using there, which is really interesting, is advice. And it’s, that comes because you can build a relationship with people and offer that. And we had a recent episode of Biz Bites for thought Leaders where we talked about the whole sort of advisory.

Arm, particularly for accountants in being, in, being built up. But what you’re talking about is a bit even more holistic than that because it’s across different disciplines. But it is that advisory thing, which is that human connection, which is completely the opposite of the AI approach, right?

That it is that human element of understanding and being able to manage where people should go because of an understanding of who they are and their situation. Great. Yeah. I said before, one of the big spaces is that 67-year-old and over throughout Australia, there has to be a lot of people in this situation where you have a single lady, 70 years of age, husband died 10 years ago $1.5 million home, 800 square meter property house built in 1975.

It’s now falling down around her. She’s got a full age pension, no money in the bank three kids in different parts of the state or even different parts of Australia. And she’s all alone and all she has is the local bowls club or her bridge club or the next door neighbor, but there’s no one else to help her.

So what, what hap what? How does that help come to that person? Is it a financial planner that helps that 60, 70-year-old lady? Is it the finance broker that helps her? Is it the accountant that helps her? Is it the lawyer that helps her? Or is it a builder that says, I can build a granny flat out the back of your property, but how are you gonna afford it?

Then that’s the finance person. But then the financial planner gets involved and says you can’t do that. So it just it’s a great market and it’s a great area to, to build in. And so yes, there’s no person that, no one person that can really give the advice and give the help there.

But, so if there’s any, if there’s any brokers out there that are listening to this or any accountants out there listening to this, you tell me the answer of who is the best person to look after old barrel that’s sitting in the house. As soon as something bad happens to her, there’s no one there to really help her.

And the kids dunno. Kids dunno how to talk. Yeah. And it’s interesting too because I’ve looked at this in terms of the marketing space. It’s not dissimilar to that sort of concept where you’ve got so many different disciplines and you’re trying to work out which is the right one for a business.

But it’s very similar, I think, in principle to the idea of, oh, medical support. You go to, you build a relationship with your local gp. They’re the people that. Understand your situation, your family history and your history and all of those things, but they’ll refer you to the knee surgeon or to the ear, nose and throat person or to whoever else it needs to be.

And they’ll still be there as a bit of a linchpin, but they’re not the person that’s going to do the surgery on your knee, but. They’ll help you understand perhaps what the implications of it are as part of it. So I think it’s a natural gravitation towards what you’re thinking about, and I think part of it is because of the specialties have grown, even more niched than perhaps they were in the past.

Yeah. So with all of this said and done, I’m gonna come back to this idea of mindset shift because you’ve talked about needing to shift mindsets of firstly. Clients and people that are coming out there to, to what might be possible because you, lots of people have a bias towards a certain thing, depending on how they’ve grown up.

So I’ve gotta invest all my money in property. I’ve or I’ve gotta put all my money in shares. It tends to be coming in, in that way. You’ve gotta a mindset shift in, in in the industry as well, in this whole idea of being able to work together. So how do you actually go about that?

Concept of changing people’s mindsets. Yeah. So it it comes back to skills, knowledge, and attitude. As I said before, one plus one equals two, and then you build your knowledge and then you find out that one plus one equals actually three. But again, if you don’t have the confidence or the skills to then take you to that next step, which is that leap of faith Zig Ziglar, I can’t remember his exact quote, but it, if you build your, there’s no point having attitude if you don’t have the aptitude, but once you have the attitude your income will create altitude or something like that. So too many big words there for me, but I’ve really seen it over the years is that and so what I try and do with people is there’s.

There’s a question that I say to people if I gave you a hundred thousand dollars today, so great Aunt Lords passed away and you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars coming your way, would you invest that based on an informed decision, or would you simply invest it on an educated guess?

Yeah. You know what that’s an interesting thing of even defining what the difference is Yeah. Between those two. So most people say an informed decision. They go an informed decision is that you don’t want to make an educated guess on something because that’s gambling, that’s punting.

Yeah. And my, my, my advice to clients is you’re best off spending that money or using that a hundred thousand dollars from an educated guess. So my my, my frustration, is that an informed decision, you take that a hundred thousand dollars. Think about property. So you go, okay we’ll talk to buyer’s agents from the real estate agents.

We’ll have a look at REIQ. We’ll find out what’s going on in the market. We’ll have a look at the local sales. We’ll go to a few options, we’ll see what’s going on. You’ll speak to a real estate agent, you’ll speak to a finance broker, and what they’ll do is they will give you a heap of information for you to make a decision.

So there’s your informed decision there, and that decision or the information that they give you is for them. A lot of the time for them. So they’re not going you go to real estate and they’re gonna tell you about equity markets. They’re not gonna tell you about dollar cost averaging into ETFs.

They’re not gonna tell you any of that. Then you go, I got a hundred thousand here. Now I’m gonna go and talk to a financial planner. They’re not gonna tell you about real estate. They’re not gonna tell you about negative gearing into property and other things like that. Investing in mining towns or self-managed super fund invest, they’re not gonna tell you any of that, right?

They’re going to give you information for you to make a decision based on what they think is best for you, but what’s best for you. Go out and build your own education. So there’s a lot of people that are self-employed that I’ve dealt with over the years, and they wanna buy investment properties.

And I say, you put a hundred thousand dollars down as a deposit into an investment property, but what for? You’ve got a great business here, but it’s struggling. You don’t have a tax problem, so you don’t need negative viewing. You don’t need an investment. You’ve still got a home loan and you want to go and take equity outta your home loan and put it in.

Why? Fomo, probably fear of missing out. So I say to them, if you put $50,000 into your business. What would that return for you? So a big question is that it’s return on investment. People don’t understand a return on investment. So once you can start getting them thinking differently it’s changing that mindset.

It’s getting the, to look at things differently and it’s then they can make an educated guess on what they can do with them. And there’s so many, look, there’s so many small business people. It was the young fellow I spoke to the other day. He came in and he said, what do I need to do? Do I need to do a business plan?

How much money should I put into the business? And I said, stop. He said, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to tell me what you need to live off on a monthly basis. I need you to tell me how much you need to take outta your business on a monthly basis. Then we can work on how much money your business needs to earn until we do that.

And so many people. They go into their bank, they go into their lenders. They go for a loan and they all talk about what your business earns, but they never ask you what do you need to earn? And so we keep doing things as a society as a whole based on people tell us that we should do, and a lot of the times that they need to look at things differently.

So there’s a saying in the. In the buyer’s agent world, I suppose you might call it, or the real estate world positive gearing. You’ve heard of that saying, obviously that property is positively geared. It’s actually not even a, it’s not even an investment term. It’s not something that we use in the accounting world.

It’s in financial management, we use the term, what’s the return on investment. We don’t care if it’s positive geared or negative geared. If it’s negative geared fantastic, we still wanna know what the return on the investment is. And you know that most of the return on investment in property investment is 5% gross per rent.

It’s no better. And it’s a lot of people might be sitting there saying, oh no, mate, you’re an idiot Duncan. I bought a property for a hundred thousand dollars and it’s giving me $10,000 a year rent now. So that’s a 10% returnable money. That’s not true. You’re actually only getting a 5% return on your investment because the value of that asset has increased so much that if you sold it today, you would get enough money to basically say, oh, it’s giving me a 5% return on investment.

And so this positive and negative and avoiding tax, it’s it’s like I wanna change the mindset of people. And it’s so damn, remember the saying years ago about, there’s a guy walking along the beach and there’s all of these starfish laying there dying because the tide cat went out so fast.

Remember that one and the guy’s walking along? Yes. Yes. And he’s picking up these starfish and he’s throwing ’em back into the water and someone goes, said, you’re an idiot mate. He said, why are you doing what? There’s so many, there’s millions of starfish here. What are you doing? He said it made a difference to that one.

And all I’m trying to do is get the message out there to people, to, stop making your investments based on an informed decision and start making an educated guess. And then that changes your attitude as well. Yeah, once you build enough confidence in yourself, you can actually go out there and do a few things, but yeah look at things differently.

And that’s what I’m trying to do. And, I’ve got that saying fitter. Because getting fitter financially is the same as getting fitter. Physically I think I might’ve mentioned that to you once before, is that fitter stands for Finance, insurance, taxation, trusts, estate and Retirement Planning.

A bit of an acronym in there, but that’s all of the things that we have in our life and we are not very fitting financially. One of these days I’ll get a book out and that’s what it’s gonna be called, getting Fitter Financially. But it talks about all of those things in it.

Yeah, I’ll try and get that out there. One, one of these days. We look forward to that. And but I think that there’s so much in what you are saying and there’s this difference between, informed and educated guests. And a part of that is a bias that we all have because of the way we’ve been brought up.

It’s, we are influenced by the people around us. And some people, as I said before, some people will be saying property is the way to go. And they’ve got that bias built into them, and so getting them to actually shift and go, is there another opportunity here?

Because part of the interesting thing about the loan stuff that you talked about as well is that the questions you get asked are about what’s happening historically, but they don’t really look at what are the possibilities and the possibilities of what can drive a business is where the game changing stuff happens and being able to invest, as you say, potentially in your own business because of the possibilities is a different way of thinking.

Yeah. So one of, one of the things that frustrates me is, and it’s a great sales tip, so if you hear it out there, it’ll be around about self-managed super funds. So the easiest way to sell a self-managed super fund is easiest way to sell anything is sell on fear. So if you are trying to sell a car to someone and you wanna sell the more expensive car you sell on fear.

If you wanna sell insurance, you sell on fear. If you want to set up a very complex accounting structure, now a company is trustee for a trust and beneficiaries and you’re rolling back to a corporate, if you wanna sell that, you sell on fear, which is sad, but. That’s a sales tip 1 0 1 for all you people out there.

It’s taught by so many business coaches, by the way. There’s this, the fear of missing out of that. If you wait to in to do this, whatever it is that is being sold to you, then you are going to be further behind. Yeah. Fear of missing out in six months time. So again, so you still on fear?

Yeah. So the, one of the, one of the big ones that I’ve seen is in the superannuation. So you go along to a SP Bruker seminar. They tell you about your superannuation and they say you’ve got your superannuation. It’s in a dirty old industry fund. It’s not doing any good for you. And again, you’ve got no control.

Now control is an awesome word, right? So once you are told that you have no control over your money, you then go right. And they go, you shouldn’t have you. You want control over your money, you now need a self-managed super fund. Do you know how complex it is to look after a self-managed super fund and to be the trustee of a self-managed super fund?

It’s flaming hard. And but what they do is they say to you, now you’ve got control over your money. Now you can take it out of there, which was earning you 8% or doing quite well for you, and now you’re gonna put it in a self-manage super fund and you’re gonna put it in property. You’re gonna get a loan against that.

So you’ve gotta set up a bear trust and it’s very complex. And it doesn’t ever work out very well. And now you’ve gone down to a 5% return and there’s all sorts of arguments for and against it, but you’ve now got 100% of your money and you’ve got control over it. Congratulations. The problem is you don’t have control over the market that money is in.

So to give you an example, if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares and you don’t like what Commonwealth Bank are doing in China, good luck. What’s the point of your a hundred thousand dollars? Where is your power to make change? You’ve got no control over the market that your money is in.

Whereas a large super industry super fund that has, I don’t know, a billion dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares, they actually do have a little bit of control over the market. They have a little bit of control over what Commonwealth Bank does in China. So don’t be fooled that you have control over your money.

It’s the control over the market that you invest in. And so if you’re self-employed, Anthony, how much. Control do you have over the money that’s invested in your own business? A hell of a lot. Yeah so if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares, ideally having that through a big industry fund is simpler and easier to do.

If you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in the property market, it’s an investment. How much control do you have over the property market? Little to none. But how much control do you have over what you do with your property that you live in? Probably a fair bit. So and how much control do you have over your own business?

Oh a lot. You make the decisions of how many staff you’ve put on, which, what more capital that you need to inject into it and other things like that. Yeah, changing that mindset is very important. But people don’t, and people don’t do it because. Where’s the money in it for the accountant to tell you that?

Where’s the money in it for a financial planner to tell you to invest in your own business? Where’s the money in it? For a finance broker to tell you to not buy an investment property, but to invest money into your own business? There is no money in it for those businesses to tell you to invest in yourself.

Where’s the money? Where’s the money in it? For a financial planner to tell you to go out and educate yourself or spend, I don’t know, educate yourself more so that you can get that promotion within the job that you’re doing at work. There’s no money in it for the financial planner to tell you that.

So these advisors and these trusted advisors that are out there. Including myself, you’ve gotta remember there’s no money in it for them to tell you the right thing that might be right for you. A lot of the time they’re telling you the right thing. That’s probably right. More so for them. So ask any financial planner what their largest investment is.

Ask any accountant what their LA owner of a business, what their largest investment is, and I guarantee. It won’t be in the share market, it won’t be in property. If it’s a real estate agent, it won’t be in property. If it’s a finance broker, it will be in their own businesses every time. And you can’t invest in your own business without investing in your own education.

So there’s my tip. Boy the Beast. The best investment you can ever make is in your own business. And you can’t invest, or you shouldn’t invest in your own business without investing in your own education. So we come back to that full circle, educated guess and just keep building your education in whatever you’re doing.

If you wanna be, if you wanna be a great landscaper, that’s great, but keep educating yourself and some of the best education you’ll ever have to invest in yourself. And you would be agreeing with this. I would say a hundred percent is invest in understanding how to sell, because I think 80% of what I do is having to sell to, to move them from that knowledge point to the attitude and changing the attitude.

And that’s a lot of that is selling. It’s getting them to take the lead. Absolutely. And yeah, and it starts with, as you say, starts with the education side of things and and building the relationship with people over a period of time as well. And that. That period of time might be, days, it might be months, it might be years in some cases.

But being able to invest in that and keep educating your audience on a consistent basis is such an intrinsic part of business and indeed why you stand out as well. Why they should come to you versus. Why they should go to the next person. All of those things Yeah. Are so important. And it is, as you say, it’s a, it’s the, it’s part of a marketing, sales environment that you need to create for your business, regardless of what industry you’re in.

Yeah. And look, every industry that you’re in, doesn’t matter if you you’re a landscaper or you’re a lawyer you, you have to sell it. You have to understand your client and, yeah, marketing, selling it’s very important. But to do that, you have to keep educating yourself as well.

One of the some some of the best lessons that I’ve learned in life are from failure. One of the, one of the things that I learned years ago from a mate of mine, and I didn’t end up writing a loan for him, but he did ring me and he said, don’t. A tip for you all, every person that ever wants to talk to you, all they want to hear is yes.

They don’t wanna hear no, they don’t wanna hear about all of the different products out there. They just wanna hear. Yes. And once you say yes to them then it’s on, right? Then they’ll listen to you. So that was, even though I never wrote the business for him, I’ve written a lot of business just from that one little tip.

And that was a great piece of education. I never got that outta a textbook or anything. I got that from him. I put lending and taxation and anything to do with finance. I put it down to that good looking girl at school that you want to have a dance with or you want to take to the school formal.

Why don’t, or why didn’t you ask that girl to dance with you, Anthony? Why didn’t you, why didn’t you? Yeah. It’s because the fear of no, the fear of rejection, the fear of being made with the fool. Yeah. And so the same thing happens in regards to taxation and finance and financial planning. People don’t like to be made to look silly.

They don’t like rejection. So the first thing you’ve gotta do if you are in this space or any business really is understand that the person that you are talking to doesn’t know what you know. And if you make them feel inferior or uneducated you’ve lost them. And so if.

Don’t feel that a no is the best thing to say to a person. It’s never the best thing. It’s maybe not now, maybe one day, but yes is always the first. That’s yes, is what people want to hear. Take me to the dance. Yeah. I’ve enjoyed this dance that’s for sure, Duncan. And it’s been a lot. It’s been very revealing and there’s so many great takeaways from all of this, but I, we need to wrap things up and I want to ask you, the question that I do ask all of my guests on the podcast is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

It’s when they, the aha moment for me is not when I know that they’re listening and they’re going to take to the next step is when they they stop having, they stop. They start off sitting there with their arms folded and it’s when they unfold their arms and they lean forward, that’s when I know the aha moment for them.

We’re gonna take this further and yeah. And I just tell ’em what the journey is and then I just stay on the journey with them, so whichever, which way that goes. Yeah, keep them on the path. For people that are listening into this podcast, I’ve been leaning in the majority of this time, that’s for sure.

But. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Duncan, thank you so much for being a part of the Biz Bytes for thought leaders program. I really appreciate you coming onto the show. No problems. Happy to be here. Happy to be here. And of course, we will include all the information on how to get in contact with Duncan in the show notes.

Thank you everyone for listening in. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave your comments 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.

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Military leadership secrets how fighter pilots build high performance business teams. Welcome to this episode of Biz Bites, where we are bringing in Mike and Sam from On Target, who bring military precision and psychological safety principles to the business world, sharing how they use briefing and debriefing techniques used in combat scenarios.

To create aligned, high performing teams in any organization. These two former fighter pilots are going to dazzle you. They’re going to bring you information that you can implement right now. It is a truly engrossing episode with lots of amazing stories. Get ready for biz bites for thought leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. We don’t normally have two guests on the program, but today we do. We have Mike and Sam both joining us from the one company and both with incredible backgrounds and a relatively new business that I think is gonna dazzle a few people.

So firstly, guys, welcome to the program.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Absolute pleasure. Now, what we like to do at the start of the program is allow you to introduce yourselves a little bit and tell people a little bit about what it is you do. So I’m gonna kick things off with you, Mike. Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you.

Okay, sounds good. My name’s Mike and I am the co-founder of On Target. My background is military aviation. I spent 20 years in the Royal Air Force Flying Fighters, and I’ve now spent the last five years in the Australian Air Force teaching the next. Generation of fighter pilots, how to learn their craft.

I’ve always had a real passion for the human performance side of what we do. I attended a human factors workshop back in 2003 and I really found it fascinating. There was all this science behind the way that we behaved, the way that we make decisions, the way that we interact and communicate, and how we can get more out of it.

I really found that really quite fascinating and ever since then I’ve wanted to try and pursue that angle more and more see what I can do with it. Few years ago, Sam and I ca came across each other and realized. We both shared this passion to a certain extent and decided that, you know what, we can actually probably take what we’ve learned from flying airplanes in combat scenarios, and it’s certainly some quite dynamic and exciting peacetime scenarios as well.

And take those lessons, bring these concepts to life, and help the corporate world learn some of the things that we’ve learned. So we came together, we formed on Target, and we’re now trying to do precisely that, use our experience in the military. To bring these stories and these concepts to life and help the corporate world develop and build high performance leadership, teamwork and culture in their teams.

It is certainly an incredible background, but let’s Sam introduce himself before we get into some of this, because there is a lot to explore here.

Yeah, sure. Thanks Anthony. So my background is quite similar to Mike’s really. So I spent. 15 years in the Royal Australian Air Force Operating Fast Jets as well.

The F 18 Super Hornet which you listed as May or may not be familiar with those in Brisbane, will be from River Fire. I moved through my career there instructing and then, training as Mike does, not only the the students coming through, but then teaching the more experienced pilots and s or weapons systems officers, excuse me, to become instructors themselves, which was probably one of my most rewarding jobs.

After that, I too had throughout my career discovered this passion for, the human in the system. Especially how do humans interact with each other and how does that break down essentially when things are not going quite as planned or not entirely on the rails, which they’re frequently not in our careers.

And that interest and passion led to some university study in the field. And then finally I became a air crash investigator in the military for my final two years in the military there before I left the Air Force about two years ago. I now work in un crewed aviation. Drones, and you might think that doesn’t involve humans, but it’s still inherently a big part of.

The humans are still in the system essentially. And Mike and I co-founded on Target after a mutual friend, said, you guys both have, very similar backgrounds and are annoyingly passionate about all this human and non-technical skills stuff. So you should, guys should get together. And I think my little trigger, I go, I guess where I thought, hey, maybe there’s a market for this outside of.

The military and the safety critical context that we had applied. It was doing some consulting for one of the big three banks and they wanted me to rewrite some of their procedures, like an aircraft checklist. And I was like, no, this is, doesn’t everyone know that’s how you write a procedure? And that was when I went, okay.

Maybe other industries, aren’t quite so embedded in this Creating error tolerance systems, both in terms of procedures, but also people.

I think that’s the unique background that you guys have is that level of precision is another level. Business tends to be, oh, if we can do this.

And it’s a bit like there’s precision to the, we’ll get it done today. To hang on. If we don’t take this left turn at this exact point in time, we’re gonna end up colliding with something else. There’s, you guys come from something on a completely different level. And so take me back to how that started embedding itself from the beginning.

Perhaps Sam, just to continue that, was there a point where you early on realized that level of precision. Made a huge difference in that. You were in control of that.

Yeah. It’s interesting, you’re aligning tangentially with something. I met with someone today who works in the resources industry and he was saying that.

What impresses him about the military is the ability to basically expect people to deviate from the plan and to expect that the plan that you start with at the beginning will not be the same as that at the end, essentially. And we’re given enormous flexibility, which is somewhat it’s not at odds, but it’s an interesting, maybe juxtaposition with the accuracy that you mentioned.

In answer to your question, I’m not entirely sure to be honest if there was a moment where it clicked. But if I look back now, 16, 17 years ago, and you can see what’s felt so pointless and silly when you are making hospital corners on your beds and making sure the wrap clothes in your initial training are, folded and lined up.

A perfect inch from each other in the wardrobe feels ridiculous at the time, but you look back now and see why they do that. And much as I, I’m loath to admit it, that it, it starts to instill that real culture of precision from day one. Which maybe doesn’t answer your question, but

Yeah.

No. I it does. And Mike, it’s funny I, I saw you nodding, saying it’s this, it’s, obviously something similar for you. And it was funny, I dunno what I was watching the other day, but I happened to see something that was from the military and it was just a single person that was doing something, but he was clearly.

Marching and moving to how he’s been trained to move, and he the civilian in me just goes why didn’t you just walk? You’re on your own. Yeah, what, you know clearly there was a camera, but I don’t know whether he knew there was a camera. That was capturing this particular moment, and it’s and that’s where, perhaps someone who’s not in the military and there, there’d be plenty of those people listening to this now don’t quite understand that and that, that need is obviously drilled in from day one.

There’s a concept that I’ve just had this spark off in my brain that I think is worth highlighting to do with what we call social conformance. And it’s how. If you want to, let’s call it feel good, almost subconsciously in your brain, you have to do what other people are doing. You have to fit in with the way other people are behaving.

And there’s loads of experiments out there where people are made to do quite silly things from a fly on the wall, camera point of view. But they’re, they feel good and they feel normal, and they feel accepted because it’s what everybody else is doing. And I think in the military you are, Sam’s talking about the hospital corners and the clothes being exactly the same, and you march in step with everybody else because if you are the odd one out, it feels weird.

And if you are in a group of people that you are training with, that you’re living with, that you’re working with, and you’re all behaving in the same way, it feels normal. It feels good. You can then. Do other things, which perhaps a bit different and you can dedicate more brainpower to that. And I think that’s more, that kind of social conformance is quite common in the military and you don’t even realize it’s happening.

That’s the interesting thing about it. It’s completely subconscious, taken for granted, and it’s only when something becomes abnormal. You and you are forced to not conform ’cause it’s alien. ’cause it’s different. ’cause it’s unusual that you just think, oh this is weird. I dunno this, it doesn’t feel good, therefore I’m gonna go back to what I normally do.

’cause that feels normal. And the civilian world, by almost, by nature is, people are different and they come together in a particular situation. Civilian teams, I think are generally more cognitively diverse, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but it does mean that you have these issues getting the team together at a basic level because they’re just not used to conforming and working together because they have different norms.

Yeah, it’s, it is interesting in a work environment that most people will feel there’s a degree of, rope that people can have to do their own thing. And often, some, often a business will be doing thing one way they’ll, someone will leave, someone new will come in and they’ll do it in a different way just because, and so there’s that almost lack of conformity and that need to push the boundaries a lot as, as well, which I think is also an interesting extension of that. So how do I know it’s early days for the business, but how have you found that when you’ve been talking to businesses about that difference in that, standard for what is an acceptable conformity and what is allowable to push the boundaries?

That’s I’ll jump in, Mike. Sorry. Interestingly, one of the key areas that has got the most traction, I would say, with what we’re offering and to the point where we’ve pivoted our product a little bit towards that. And what it’s, what we call briefing. And so in the aviation world or in our backgrounds, we would go and do, if we were going up and doing a transit, like taking off from point A to get the jets to point B, something quite benign and straightforward.

We briefed for about an hour. To get everyone on the same page, to have a shared mental model about expectations and who’s gonna do what when, et cetera. And the more we started talking about that in some of our marketing material, the more it was resonating. And we’re now spending a lot of time with clients saying here are the structures that we use to, to achieve that.

Unity, or that shared mental model and how can you bring that into your workplace, both at the micro and the macro level.

And I think, the question there becomes as well, going back to what you were saying before about building this sort of conformity base to start from, because there’s an expectation when you’re in those briefings to how they’ll actually operate and the kinds of communication that you’ll have in it, and who’s got the opportunity to speak.

When and about what, which is not what would happen in most business meetings, I would dare say, except for, possibly if it’s a, CEO or someone who’s head of a department might lead a discussion, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will automatically conform to a base and that everyone will take a, an order to things.

And let me ask you, Mike, is that a shock when you go in and see that compared to your background?

I don’t think it’s a shock in my background, but that’s arguably, ’cause my background has been quite diverse over the years and you do see some really extreme examples.

Either way, most Western military cultures are. Quite open and we try and what we call level the authority gradient. So yes, you might have a formation of let’s say, four airplanes and you might have the squadron commander who’s flying one airplane and then the brand new junior pilot flying, another airplane.

But the whole idea of the culture that we try and establish is that you. Reduce that authority gradient such that in a brief or a debrief, everybody is empowered to speak and say their piece and be heard. And that’s generally quite successful. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite successful. However I’ve witnessed cultures generally from Southeast Asia where the authority gradient is much more naturally ingrained in their psyche.

And that’s just the way it is. And you can’t just undo that. That’s just a fact of life. But you’ll witness a group of say, 10. People from a certain culture and there’ll be the senior person in the room and everybody else will be doing the talking, but as soon as the senior person speaks, everybody else just shuts up and is completely subservient to what that person says, which, for what Sam and I are trying to teach and encourage and help the corporate teams to embrace, to, to grow and succeed.

I would argue that culture is not ideal, but it certainly does happen in. In life. And you’ve mentioned that CEOs may well speak and other people have to conform. I think that environment is more prevalent in the business world than we would like. It’s certainly something Sam and I are trying to encourage discussion on and trying to change.

And one of the phrases that I’ll, that I often use is, none of us are as smart as all of us. It doesn’t matter who has got. Who’s in charge, who’s been around the longest. If you’ve been around the longest, it’s very likely that your biases are gonna massively restrict your thinking. You’ll be very straight and narrow.

’cause that’s the way you’ve always done it. And it might just be that somebody comes in, the new intern, the new pilot, the new whatever, and they’re just like, oh, how about doing it this way? That’s something I’ve seen before. Or I just had this epiphany and all of a sudden you just go on this complete different tangent and the team will succeed much more as a result.

I think Toyota is an interesting example. I read somewhere in a book that when they have, when they employ somebody new, they’re specifically told go and have a look on the shop floor and come up with something we can improve. They spec, they task, they tell somebody to actually, give us something we can actually change to improve how we’re doing in business.

Which is great. ’cause that really promotes what the concept that Sam, I teach called psychological safety, which is a big part of what we’re all about.

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When they employ somebody new, they’re specifically told go and have a look on the shop floor and come up with something we can improve. They spec, they task, they tell somebody to actually, give us something we can actually change to improve how we’re doing business, which is great because that really promotes what the concept that Sam and I teach called psychological safety, which is a big part of what we’re all about. But it’s it’s many. There’s lots of backgrounds out there.

Lots of the way that teams work the better or for worse, the more you can promote everybody or make everybody feel comfortable contributing, sharing their ideas, using that cognitive diversity, the more inherent success your team has, the potential of achieving.

And it’s funny you say that because I’m reflecting on a conversation that I had with A CEO when I was working for them and I’m, I’m gonna say it, it’s over 25 years ago now, at least.

And I remember day one saying to me look, if you ever need to. Come into the office, shut the door and say, I need to have a conversation with you. And I can only reflect on doing it a couple of times. But I remember one time very specifically coming into going into his office and saying exactly that.

And it was to tell him something that I had witnessed that was happening out in it was a rather large company. So it was happening out in in a different area of the country to where we were. And I gave him. Some advice and he was me, fairly young at the time, giving a very experienced CEO, some advice.

And he actually took it and it made a massive difference to the company. And it was just because I was able to be the eyes and ears, but he gave me that ability to say that and to, it wasn’t something that I abused and I don’t believe anyone else. Did either it wasn’t meant to go and wasn’t meant to go into his office and whinge about, John out the back was being, a pain in the neck.

To me it was about being constructive for the company and being able to have you say, and I recall as well that same CEOA few years later, and he invited me into a high level meeting and he told me just. I just want you to be quite and observe and whatever else. And we had some conversations afterwards, but actually during the meeting they end and everyone ended up turning to me at one point and saying what do you think?

And but it was great to actually have the power to do that and to be able to have that. And I think that isn’t, full credit to him. He was one of my favorite CEOs that I worked with from that perspective. And are many CEOs that tend to have a very closed door policy, and it’s their way or the highway.

And so how do you go about Unteaching that?

Sharing stories like the story you’ve just told us is how I would start by trying to get other people to realize the power of that. And I’ve just used the word power picking up on it from what you said, Anthony, you felt empowered to. Contribute your ideas to want to follow your CEO to help with the success of the company because of you being empowered to offer your suggestions for improvement.

And they were listened to. Like those are all key ingredients, fantastic examples of behavior from the leadership to other people to do the same thing. So that’s precisely how I would start Storytelling is an incredibly powerful way of making people. Realize what this is all about. And that’s exactly what a lot of what Sam and I are all about.

We will use stories from combat to try and show why these things are important and why they matter, and how you can actually not necessarily apply them real life, but how they can be implied into real life in, life or death scenarios to, to improve team performance for the better. Storytelling is for me how I would start it.

Most definitely.

I love the power of story. And so Sam, I’m gonna, I’m going to invite you then. Tell me what, is there a favorite story that you’ve found that, that has actually had an impact that you’ve been telling a little bit in recent times since you’ve started this?

Yeah. As in using it in the sessions that, that’s resonating in the sessions.

Yeah.

So we have two stories that we use quite frequently that dovetail off each other, and Mike talks about the importance of trust, and I’ll let him tell his own story. But that then dovetails into something I talk about. And that’s again, talking about how do you align a team? And it introduces, once you’ve got trust there, then you need to assume that everyone can trust each other.

And that comes through, basic qualifications, their experience, resume, job title, whatever. That gives you an element of trust. So then I tell a story about being in the aircraft in the middle of the night over Iraq during the fight against isis. So I was deployed with one week’s notice to as the first lot of combat aircraft to go over to Iraq in the fight against ISIS in 2014.

So it was a lot of unknowns relatively hairy compared to, flying and training back in Australia and. Yeah so middle of the night, and we were there to support some troops in contact. So a ground fight on the ground between some Iraqi soldiers and ISIS fighters. There’s pitch black, there’s explosions going off everywhere.

You can see the trace of fire and it’s bizarrely quiet in the cockpit, which feels like an amazing kind of juxtaposition to the chaos that you’re watching on the ground. We were the only ones available, our formation of two aircraft to support the troops at that point. And we were running outta fuel, so we were imminently going to have to leave.

And typically you would have to fly to a specific area to go and refuel with one of the area airborne refuel tankers, the aircraft. In this case, the pilot of the aircraft arranged for the the tanker to come overhead, US overhead, the battle, and we then basically climbed up. To meet them and get fuel.

And what this allowed the beauty of our aircraft being a two seat aircraft was that we, what we called split the cockpits. So I turned the radio down that he was using to talk to the aerial refuelers and he turned the radio down that I was using to talk to the troops on the ground. And so inherently straight away we’re not on the same page.

We’ve got two very important jobs that have the same objective, but two very important jobs to play in that same. That same mission as it were. So while he’s doing the fairly physically and cognitively demanding task of refueling in the middle of the night on night vision goggles, and I’ve got some images in our presentations that show just how limited the cues are for that.

I’m in the backseat of the jet using our infrared pod and talking to the troops on the ground to identify where the bad guys are essentially, and coordinate employing weapons to, to support the good guys at the time that the pilot determines that we’ve got enough fuel to do it, we need to do here comes off and we turn each other, we turn the radios up and listen and make sure that each other are not talking, so that we’re not going to step on each other.

And then we have what we call the huddle. So he would say, Hey, Sam. Or in that case, he would’ve called me. Whip it. Are you are you ready to chat? Ready for a huddle? I might say, standby, working on something. Yes, I’m good to go. In this particular case it worked out quite nice and efficiently.

I said, yes, turn left, heading 2 7 0 accelerate mark 0.85 yada, yada. And gave him basically a briefing on what was coming to set the aircraft up to employee weapons. So we had our huddle. We spoke about the primary things we needed to do. So I told him about here’s where we need to go and what we’re about to do to drop weapons, to help the good guys.

And he then told me, great, this is how much fuel we just took on board. We’ve got this long, much endurance based on that fuel, and the tanker is hanging nearby for us if we need. So we’ve come back onto the same page. And then in the story, the next thing we talk about is we trust that each other has done their job sufficiently and to the best of their ability.

And then if we determine that we have time and capacity, essentially we’ll then verify and crosscheck each other. So we align and then we trust each other, but then we verify. For example, he would go and look at the check that the coordinates that are in the bomb match the coordinates on the pod.

On the infrared camera, sorry. And I would check that, how much fuel he took in, matches these calculations on how long we could stay airborn for, and so on and so forth. And so the reason we use stories like that in our training and in our sessions is because in, in the business world, I think it’s fair to say that, for example, over a project lifecycle, the time and feedback between action and reaction can be quite intangible and quite hard to see. But in our context, it’s matters of minutes and seconds between your action and your reaction. And so it becomes much more tangible. And so our general model is to start with a bit of theory, which is, a good place to baseline, but we’ll very quickly contextualize it through stories like that.

A, because it’s. Interest, and it keeps people engaged, but it actually does really contextualize the theory. And we then move into the next stage of the training which we can cover off on shortly, on how we get the get the trainees to actually experience it for themselves because these skills that we’re talking about that we focus on, we call them non-technical skills, otherwise known as soft skills synonymous with each other.

Communication, leadership, decision making, and so on.

Just like driving a car and no one learns to drive a car by a PowerPoint presentation. You have to get in and do it yourself to really experience it. We can talk about cognitive dissonance and taking yourself from unconsciously incompetent.

I was gonna say, I hope they didn’t do that with the with the fighter.

With the fighter planes. They didn’t just show you in the first and say you go and learn from, hope you That’s right. Yes.

You’ll be pleased to hear that they didn’t no. Good. But anyway, sorry I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but that’s one of the stories and how we use them.

Yeah,

no, I appreciate that. And just to pick that up, what’s the, where do you take that Mike, in terms of, piggybacking in the story?

It depends on what happens with the teams. So I’ll start off with a story about trust. So I tend to, Sam’s story tends to piggyback off mine.

And I talk about going back to a story in Afghanistan where I was launched, excuse me. I was launched in what we call alert to support troops on the ground. And normally when you’re talking to somebody on the radio, like Sam was talking about, they are qualified and experienced and trained to talk to air crew because it’s a relatively specialized skill to essentially speak the same language, understand the capabilities, and just organize the airspace and the weapons and so on.

It’s quite an intensive course and there aren’t that many people proportionally that do it, and occasionally you might get tasked to talk to some friendlies on the ground that are again shot at, and the person on the radio. Is not trained to talk to airplanes. He could be, or he or she could just be a soldier with a rifle.

They’re probably pretty scared and you are there to help them and save their lives. And that happened to me once in Afghanistan or happened to me several times. But the story in question in Afghanistan was precisely that. You are sent to a an area of airspace. You are given a frequency, you are given a call sign and you talk to this person and they need your help and you have to trust them.

To give you the basic information you need, right? Where are you? And you establish that so you don’t attack that position. Brilliant. Where are the enemy in relation to you or have you got accurate coordinates? They’re then gonna trust you as the experts in air power to deliver weapons or weapon effects onto that target, such that the friendlies can either successfully prosecute and attack or disengage safely and fight.

The chances are I’m never gonna meet that person in real life. I’m gonna talk to ’em on the radio in a really intense life or death scenario. We will do our jobs, we will trust each other to do our jobs and achieve the mission aim, and then we’ll go our separate ways and hopefully live happily ever after.

But that’s how we. We piggyback the stories. I tend to start on the foundation of trust, which is quite important. And then Sam takes it into a more applied, close knit scenario. And then how you build on that trust and use it to actually engage in, in the huddle that Sam talked about.

And trust is something in this day and age that we probably, quite frankly, give away too easily. That’s the interesting thing. We, cybersecurity people will tell you we do that all the time, right? We give away information without ever, considering where it’s going and what it’s being done.

But even in, in real life situations, we often we will hire someone, we will bring someone into, to do something in her personal life and the what they need to earn that trust. Can often be reasonably limited. And but when you’re in a bus and I think we carry that attitude into business, but in business it is it’s not quite life and death in the same scenario that you guys have painted, but it’s certainly in terms of the lifeblood of the business can be.

And I don’t think people understand that because that difference between the trust that we give away very easily. Oh, John said you’re a good bloke, so you know. It’s fine with me. It’s a bit like I, I always take references from people as with a grain of salt as much as I do testimonials, because particularly with a reference, are you really going to offer someone to be a referee for you if they’re going to say bad things about you?

Yeah. Not probably not, right?

No.

And yet you take that as being a level of trust. So how do you take that from that? That basic giveaway of trust to really properly needing that trust because the scenarios that you’ve painted are, absolutely life and death.

I think that comes back to me to it’s like layers of trust and it’s probably iterative where, I mentioned before a baseline of trust and we have a baseline of trust based on, let’s say in the business world.

Oh, this is our new hire. He’s got an MBA, so I’m gonna trust him to go and deal with the p and l or something. But then he’s new, so I don’t know him. So I’m gonna verify his work and I’m gonna check that it aligns with us and therefore my threshold of trust has now increased. If it is in line with my expectations, I would say.

And I think that can then iterate as you give someone a new, you trust ’em with a new element, you then verify and your trust is increased. Does that answer your question?

It does. It’s a difficult thing. And I suppose this gets into the area that you raised earlier. Psychological safety. It’s a term that I’ve heard a little bit in recent times, so it’s a fairly I would argue a fairly newish term in the business sense, but what does that, I’m interested in what that means to you in terms of. From a military point of view to what that actually means in a business point of view and how you actually draw those two things together.

The beauty of psychological safety is that it’s actually quite domain transparent.

So the concepts and how you develop it, how you build it, how you maintain it, are actually almost, they’re not particularly. The specifics of how you might do it maybe can be applicable to a certain context, but the general behavior and the communication techniques to establish it, I would actually, you can apply to anybody which makes it quite useful because we can try and we’ll talk about what it means to us, but it means the same thing in business and the way that you build it as a leader.

Whether you’re in the military or you’re in the business world, is exactly the same thing. The simple definition for me that I try and use to explain what psychological safety is in a psychologically safe environment, everybody feels comfortable putting their hand up and saying, I’ve got a question, I don’t know or I don’t understand.

If you. Don’t have psychological safety. People won’t feel okay putting their hand up and asking questions. They won’t say they don’t understand it, even if they don’t, and they certainly won’t ask somebody to explain something again, et cetera, et cetera. How you build it. So there’s kind of four basic levels.

The first level is what you call what rather what we call inclusion safety, which is where people feel included and they’re part of the team. And that’s simple steps like when you get a new member on the team. You ask them what their name is, you ask them about their family, and you actively listen to the answers you get back.

So if you find out where they’re living and you say, oh, what made you choose to live there? Where do your kids go to school? What do they like about that school? What sports do they do, et cetera, et cetera. And you keep the conversation going by showing that you are interested Then. You move beyond inclusion, safety to what we call learner safety, where you’re in an environment where people know that it’s okay to learn by making mistakes and knowing that those mistakes won’t be punished.

And a really simple way of developing learner safety is when you’re coming to a new project, or in fact I’ll use the military experience if I’m gonna particular sort that we’re gonna talks.

The same kind of style. And that way people that are now doing it for the first time will know that it’s okay to make mistakes and talk about them, because Mike, who’s the leader of this formation, talked about mistakes that he’s made. And you can say exactly the same thing in the business world. You’re gonna go and do a project, and the people who have done something similar in the past will say this, when I did this.

Something similar. Previously, the timeline blew out or the budget went wrong because of X, Y, Z. This is what I learned. This is what we can put in place in future. Then we talk about what we call contribute safety. And the example you gave earlier, Anthony, of where your CEO asked you for your input. He wants you to contribute for the better or the greater good of the organization.

And you said yourself, you felt empowered by that happening. To, yourself and for the benefit of the company. That’s a great example of contributor safety and the final example, the fourth stage, what we call challenger safety. And that’s where people feel fine putting their hand up and saying, I don’t agree with what you’re doing.

I think it’s gonna go wrong. Of this it’s like the sort of emergency level of things going wrong, but it takes the levels below it. Inclusion learner contributor to enable challenger. You can’t do the top layers without the bottom ones being present and the behaviors that you use. And I’ve just given some simple examples there.

You can do that. Which in whichever organization you’re in, whether it’s a military formation of fighters or whether it’s a boardroom or any kind of business organization, you can frame questions, you can have conversations in the same kind of way to build those levels of psychological safety and the team performance will accelerate beyond belief.

I think it’s a tough one. I was gonna say, I was just gonna ask you to please add to it because it, this is a tough space because we live in a world where everybody thinks they can do everything themselves anyway so having that level of respect and trust is almost fighting with that mentality these days of, Hey, I can learn how to do it.

I just watch a YouTube video.

Yeah. Yeah. And you’re right that psychologic safety is a relatively new term. It’s also a hugely misunderstood term and I think is sometimes misunderstood with and thrown in the same bucket of terms of, in terms of like diversity and whatnot, which are their own, incredibly important concepts, but it’s importantly distinct from that as well.

And it’s not about ensuring that everyone in the room speaks up and is heard, and we have to implement a bit from everyone’s idea sort of thing. But as Mike said, it’s ensuring that everyone in the room can spot an error and talk about it. For example, and if you think about, let’s not talk about fighter aviation, but you sitting as a passenger, Anthony, on a virgin flight to Melbourne or something.

You would like to think presumably, that if the very junior copilot who just got the job with Virgin is sitting next to the 30 year veteran and spots him make a mistake, that he has no hesitation of saying, Hey, you missed that check. And then that he doesn’t get slapped on the wrist for it or belittled in any way.

And that’s foundational to psych safety. Now obviously that has very tangible safety outcomes. Like you said, business is often not life and death, but it’s livelihoods is how we phrase it. And same, you want that room where the CEO doesn’t, again, doesn’t need to get input from every single person in the company ’cause it’s wildly inefficient, amongst other reasons.

But you want them sitting in that room where they’re about to go and brief, pitch the client or whatever the context is where someone goes, oh shit, boss. I realized I made an error in that number is actually wrong. Because if they feel comfortable to speak up there and then it’s better for everyone.

You, you stop the errors before they get further down the line and become bigger essentially. Now not only is it good, we’re talking a lot about capturing errors and things that go wrong, but psych safety is, it’s foundational for high performance and high performing teams because it’s the bread and butter of diversity, you can have the most.

Divergent or rather neuro diverse, culturally diverse team with this amazing kind of mixing pot of ideas. And if the leader in that room is not creating a space for anyone to raise their hand and offer conjecture opinions or highlight errors, then you’ve wasted all your resources, essentially.

Yeah. And that’s that, that must be a.

A difficult it’s an easy concept to deliver over as you are doing, but how do you actually get people to realize that and to make real change? Because it’s one thing sitting there and going, and I imagine there are people that you get in front of and they’re going, yeah, crap, that’s us. And they may not say it to you, but they’re probably thinking of and the question is how do you actually implement change at that kind of level?

It’s I’ll jump in quickly Mike and then throw to you, but Sure. There’s two. The people who go, oh, that’s me. They’re the easy ones. ’cause they’ve identified what needs to change. And again, this is a topic where we’ve found heaps of resonance in our training and people go, can we just pull that thread and go down that rabbit warren for a few minutes?

Which we didn’t necessarily expect, but I think the real challenges are the ones who go, no, it’s not us. I’m good. And I think if you’re familiar with the concepts of Johari’s window and the unknown unknowns, or it ties into that rather, but unconscious incompetence, I would say are those people who go, no, I don’t have any way to improve.

I’m psychologically safe. My team always nod and say, yes, I must be nailing it. The only way to get from there to the next rung up of conscious incompetence, IE knowing just how incompetent you are at this specific skill. Is through experience. Experience. You can tell someone all day that they need to improve, but they’ll have all manner of excuses and justifications for why they don’t until they experience it.

And experience is something that I’ll come back to. But the analogy that I’ve heard that’s effective on this is you think of telling your, 15-year-old kid that. They’re gonna go and drive the car and they’ll be like, yeah, I can do that. My old man does that and he’s an idiot or whatever.

As most 15-year-old kids think about their parents. But then if you give them the keys and put them in the seat and they’re, okay, take me to the shopping mall. Then all of a sudden through experience, they appreciate now, okay, gee, this really a lot involved in this. And that they’re not gonna get by telling them.

And I was gonna come back to something, but I’ve lost my train of thought.

No I’m just sitting there thinking, I don’t wanna be I’ve been on the road with some of those teenagers and yes, the freeways are lited with them who think that’s the problem, isn’t it?

That they often think they know everything. The teenage years are littered with that. They think they know everything in the twenties. They’re con, they’re sure they know everything. And by the time they get to 30, they realize they know nothing.

That’s right. Yeah. And sorry, that’s what I was gonna come back to was just to, plug out training model.

Again, we’ve spoken about the theory and then context through the stories. And the final piece is the experience, and that’s where we use something called interpersonal skills lab to actually put people into this very, funnily enough, a psychologically safe or a simulation that I’ll let Mike talk more about to experience it for themselves because then they actually.

Have these light bulb moments and we’ve seen numerous examples where even the director of a company in a recent one with his kind of senior leadership team went,

oh gee,

I do that a lot in the day to day business, don’t I? And the team were like, yeah, boss, you do. And he went, yeah, it was a real aha moment for him.

But I’ve been talking enough.

Mike, please pick up. Yeah,

I’ll take over. I’ll let’s pick up on the experience thing. So we, a real key difference for us that we try and get across to our, or, potential clients, I guess more than than the people who have actually experienced it. Is that we give you experience.

We don’t just do death by PowerPoint. We don’t just do the stories. Yes, the stories are a start, but if we want you to learn, we’ve talked about you don’t learn to drive a car by watching a PowerPoint presentation. You certainly don’t learn to fly an airplane by watching a PowerPoint presentation. You don’t learn how to communicate.

You don’t learn how to generate psychologically safe environments. By watching a PowerPoint presentation. You can try, but you will inherently fail because you just don’t get to practice those skills. So what we do is use, as Sam’s mentioned, the inter lab or the interpersonal skills lab is its kind of full title, which is a software simulation program.

It’s quite simple to use technically in terms of mouse clicks. And the idea is that you are in a, you’re in a spaceship, but it’s a very simple to, to fly spaceship, you just have to click buttons and move things around. But the idea is that the vast majority of our clients have never flown a spaceship before.

So they’re all on a level playing field. If we were to use any kind of environment that was contextually relevant to the teams we were working with, any kind of authority gradient would naturally come out straight away. And the people who had experience would take the leadership roles. They would do all the talking.

The newbies would take all the novice roles and be subordinate and not say anything, and it wouldn’t fix any problems. So by having a level playing field. In a spaceship, nobody knows what it’s all about. Everybody is just starting from ground zero. They watch a video to see how it works, and then they get to have a go at a mission where they have to communicate, they have to prioritize, they have to make decisions based on limited information under quite some, quite pressure scenarios to actually achieve the outcomes and the results that we’ve given them.

Now, invariably, they don’t do very well the first time, which is the point because it allows us to draw out lessons. Based on their actual experience, and they will give us the lessons themselves. We just, draw the discussions along. Then they get to have another go. They will debrief that first mission, or we will, we’ll run them through a debrief.

Then they get to brief a mission, which again, we help guide them through as well. And they go and do something similar a second time and they take those lessons forward and they use it, their actual experience to have another go and they improve and they get. Better at communicating. They get better at teamwork.

They develop more psychologically safe environments amongst the team and their overall performance accelerates and their levels of success in the actual Intel lab will increase and develop and improve. And the idea is that because it’s all these generic non-technical skills, communication, leadership, teamwork, situation awareness, decision making, et cetera, et cetera, those skills are.

Generic to any environment. So they can take specific lessons from Inter Lab and they can put them into their own business environment and use lessons from what we’ve taught them, but in their own context to enable their own success in business. So it’s the actual experience that we give them where they can take something the way that actually sticks, that they can use to improve.

And it’s really quite, it’s the evidence is there. It works, it’s successful, it’s, and it’s good fun at the same time.

I love what you’ve both given me there in the end, and it a, I’m looking at the time and I’m wishing we could talk for hours still, because there’s so much to explore here.

Not the least of which is your incredibly fascinating backgrounds, which I would dare say are very different to the majority of people that are listening in here at the moment. What I normally do to wrap things up is ask people about ask the guests about their aha moments that clients.

Tend to have when they’re working with you, and you’ve both kind of alluded to those in the last little bit. So I perhaps wanted to extend that a little bit further and ask each of you to give me the the one tip that tends to make a difference that that you know for. Different people that you’ve seen them come in, I guess it is their a heart moment, but what is the one thing that each of you see that sort of clicks with people and starts to sh make a shift in a mind, in their mindset?

Sam, can I kick off with you?

Yeah, sure. I’ll jump in front of that bus first. So I think for me. I alluded to, yeah, the aha moment before. But the thing that seems to, resonate most widely is this concept of debriefing. And people often think that they, and there’s varying degrees to this, a spectrum, but they debrief or do after action reports or, wash ups after an event, whatever you want to call it, at a point where your team comes together and talks about.

What can we learn? How can we improve and develop this learning culture is so often done with the best intentions, but poor execution, is what I’d say. And a big part of what we focus on is how to bring structure, but a debrief, sorry, how to bring structure to your debrief to get the most out of it, but it’s also the perfect kind of.

Pinnacle of the end of the training session because an effective debrief relies on the foundations of everything we’ve taught up to that point and everything we’ve spoken about today. You need trust, you need psychological safety, and so on and so forth. Effective communication to get in a room and have people honestly talk about.

Boss, you stuffed up X, Y, ZI did this, or, next time I think we can improve X by doing Y. And we talk about a lot of the techniques to do that. And that, I think is one of the biggest tangible takeaways that we leave people with and what we get a lot of really positive feedback about.

Fantastic. I love that. And I think, again, we could talk for ages about that whole debriefing process, which I and the briefing process. On both ends of it that I think are so critical that are often overlooked. But we might have to save that for another time. So let me ask you, Mike, you’ve had a bit of, you’ve had a couple of minutes to think.

So what’s the other moment or tip that you might give people listening into today?

I’ll give a, perhaps a specific one. Sam’s highlighted really quite nicely how important structure is in debriefing, especially, which you don’t see very often. Briefing planning people are, they’ve got an idea about debriefing, not so much, and that’s certainly where most of the learning comes in.

So I think structure and consistently applies, structure is absolutely critical. We ran a session in Melbourne using Inter Lab about three weeks ago now, and one of the participants there, the thing that he really. Kept on picking up himself, which is the whole point. It’s not, we’re not there to tell them what the lessons are.

They get the lessons themselves. This chap Steph was really almost blown away by how important it was to what we call close the communication loop. So inherently as humans, what we’ll do is we’ll transmit an instruction to somebody and we’ll assume that instruction’s being heard and it’s gonna get acted on in the way that we intended.

Often that’s not the case, and especially when you are doing something like Inter Lab, which is novel, dynamic, different, you don’t understand everything about it, you have to. Close the communication loop so that the person you are dealing with has under, has confirmed that they’ve understood the message that you’re trying to get across.

And quite consistently, the software will have traps and pitfalls that if you don’t close the communication loop, you will fall into those traps. And Steph fell into them several times, which is fine ’cause it’s designed to bring these lessons out so that you can learn from them. And he really took away.

The importance of when you’re in an environment that’s different, that’s novel, that’s unusual, where you definitely haven’t all got the right idea what’s going on. You need to close the communication loop, otherwise, things can start to go wrong pretty quickly.

So many valuable lessons. Much more that we could talk about.

But I wanna thank you both for being a part of the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders Program. And I definitely want to have you guys back in the future because there’s so many amazing stories to tell and so much more for people to learn. But for now, thank you both for being a part of it.

Thanks.

Thanks, Natalie. Yeah, our pleasure. Cheers.

And of course we’ll include all the details of how to get in touch with Mike and Sam in the show notes. So don’t miss that. And to everyone listening in don’t forget to subscribe and we look forward to your company on the next edition of Biz Bites for thought leaders.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites 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.

Architectural Thought Leadership Business Lessons from Design Excellence. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m Anthony Perl. In this episode, you’re gonna discover how the principles of world class architecture can transform your business approach and leadership style. Kevin Kennon is an amazing expert in what he does.

While he’s currently also the CEO of Beyond zero dedicated development consultants who are building zero carbon luxury eco resorts worldwide, he’s won many awards for projects like Barclays North American headquarters. The Rodin Museum in Seoul. He’s working all around the world. He’s got some invaluable insights on team communication, vision, execution, and blending technology with creativity as well as the value of relationships, particularly with clients.

This is an episode of Biz Bites. You don’t want to miss some really surprising insights from someone. Who has done some amazing things around the world? Sit back and enjoy this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Welcome everyone to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I have a different kind of thought leader joining me today. I don’t think we’ve actually had someone in the architect space on the program before, but there’s a very good reason we are gonna be exploring all of this today. So bear with us.

But first of all, Kevin, welcome to the program. Thank you,

Anthony. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I enjoy talking to people all over the world and the great thing about these podcasts is it brings you close to home. And infinite number of miles has become inches. And so it’s perfect to be here, even though we’re at completely different places.

It is and it’s funny, isn’t it? Because we’re going to I’m gonna get you to actually, I’ll really get you to introduce yourself properly first, and then I’ve got a, I’ve got something I wanna pick up on, on just what you were saying then. Great.

Terrific. I’m, I am, as you said, I’m an architect.

I’ve been an architects for quite a while now. And I’ve had a, I’d a pretty amazing career up until this point. You never know where it could go, but you, I, I’ve been blessed and having designed many buildings all over the world. I’ve traveled quite a great deal.

And the reason the thing that’s getting me going these days is my latest business, which is actually in real estate primarily. And I have a background in that as well. It’s specifically in the area of luxury hospitality.

We are going to get into that in a moment, but the thing that I wanted to alluded to when you’re coming back was you just casually dropped there about how nice it is with podcasting and being able to go all over the world.

And what’s really interesting is, and I hadn’t thought about it till you said it, is that, the great thing about podcasting is that people can be in a space together, but not together. You can create. An illusion in some respects, and you can create a closeness in other respects. And I think that’s something that’s really, I guess hadn’t thought about it till then very akin to what you try and do in architecture, isn’t it?

Absolutely. In a very physical way.

Absolutely. What a lot of people and just to be clarify that even more, I’m a design architect and that means we’re the kind of point of the tip of the spear of any project. And most of my projects are. Large, complex, involving hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and thousands of people.

So usually just starts just as we’re doing right now with the conversation or with a client about what it is they’re looking for or, what kind of ideas they have, what their goals are. And I like to do a deep dive in that. So telling and hearing people’s story. And being able to amplify that story and turn that into physical reality from nothing really.

Just the conversation like we’re having right now is what I’ve been doing my whole career.

Isn’t that interesting? Because we have. We do very different things. Podcasting is what I do, architecture is what you do, but yet there’s a very common ground. It’s that listening and extracting stories and trying to amplify as you say, those stories and you do it in a very physical way.

The time period of course that from you getting from. First meeting and extracting stories to actually implementing and being completed, I imagine is can be years in some

cases. Almost always, even for the smallest of projects. You’d be surprised at how long they take. You do them right.

You could certainly do ’em in a fly by nine kind of way, but that’s not who I am and that’s not who my clients is. So tell me a little bit about. The, some of the things that you’ve been doing as far as architecture is concerned. ’cause I know you’ve won many awards over the years and many of the things that you’ve been involved with are high profile the, particularly, and, I imagine not just New York, but around the country that you’ve done places that people would recognize or would be able to go past and have a look at.

So tell me a little bit about some of those things that you’ve been involved with that you’re perhaps most proud of.

It run, it runs the gamut. I’ve been involved in museums design houses skyscrapers, I like to say I’ve done everything from the tallest buildings in the world to the smallest bathrooms in the world.

And everything in between. And in New York all over Europe, middle East, south America, not Australia. Funny but just about everywhere else. In Asia I’ve done a lot. So having that kind of broad cultural perspective. Is also something that I feel is I’ve learned over the years and continue to be fascinated about is trying to understand the differences in culture and the context with where, where I put these buildings.

Yeah, I think it’s actually quite interesting, isn’t it? Because culturally there’s a difference in how we use space and how we perceive the need for space, isn’t it? It’s and that can happen based on whether you’re in the city or outside of the city, but also, the, the volume of the population in any given city and the expectations.

You walk into an apartment. In different parts of the world and they will feel quite different.

And they have different expectations depending on how they live. A lot of Asian sort of residential work involves multiple kitchens different kitchens as well as, open air kitchens and enclosed kitchens, depending on what it is they’re cooking.

Just as an example also. A difference in terms of the family structure, extended families versus nuclear family. So all of these factors, which, it’s not unlike if you’re doing any kind of strategic analysis for business understanding who your customers are.

Our customers are both the client but also the people who are gonna occupy those spaces that we want.

And that’s a really interesting concept because it’s how do you actually get out of the way? And I ask this because, it’s a common problem with a lot of businesses, right?

Because you would come in as a, firstly, as a, as an architect designer, where you can imagine certain things and there’s a vision and there’d be stuff that you have always wanted to do and to try, and you think this would be the ideal space for it mixed in with. What is the vision that the client has mixed in?

What is the end user going to have, and how do you actually balance those three very different audiences?

I’m an, first of all, I’m an avid learner and an avid traveler. And so I, a lot of our architects when they travel, they go and look at architecture. I go and look at people, I like look at how they, what?

What motivates them, how they communicate, how they interact in cities or in the country. And I like to say to my clients and anybody who wants to listen to me that I, every project I start with a blank sheet of paper. Of course I bring to it, my experiences and everything else I’ve learned, but I think it really helped brain.

Our thinking, and I say to, to my team, again, team involves hundreds of people. But I challenged the team to think, start with a blank seat of paper as if they’ve never done it before in their lives. And it yields incredible results. Because you’re right from the very beginning, you’re having to not quite make it up as you go along, but you’re challenged to start from a place of humility, first of all, which I think is important, but also one of just candor. And I encourage anybody I work with, that there’s no wrong answer. There’s no right or wrong way to do anything.

But we’ll discover ultimately what that story is. And so it tends to be. Contrary to what many people believe about my profession. It’s a very collaborative enterprise

and I think that’s something a lot of businesses can learn from because you actually alluded to something in there as well.

That’s really an important step in between those three audiences is you have team and you have a large team. So how do you actually convey a vision? Is a shared vision initially between yourself and the client to a team who can then carry it forward. Because that’s a typical problem in any business, is sharing a vision and actually carrying that vision through.

And just as there’s we start every project with a clean sheet of paper. We start every project exploring different ways in which we can. Tell that story and begin to shape that story. Sometimes it’s sitting around sketchings, sometimes it’s just sitting around and discussing.

And usually it’s a combination of multiple tools. And I’ve been an early adopter of using technology, advanced technology to realize that there are ideas. So now fortunately, we have the ability to quickly go from a sketch to almost reality. We virtually within seconds whereas it used to take us days if not weeks and months, to get anything close to being able to convey in a even semi realistic manner so that our clients can understand.

And get that feedback. So it’s, the world has changed dramatically. And now to ai even more

it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because that whole kind of adage of try before you buy scenario, which, you could take a car for a test drive, you could, there’s lots of things that you can do.

Sometimes there are samples that you can have for for people’s work if it’s a more of a service based. But when it comes to your profession where there’s, a significant investment and a significant period of time before that’s imagined. Being able to do that, allowing people to be in a virtual version of a space to fully understand it is huge.

And it, I imagine it helps narrow down some of the problem areas that people might encounter.

Yeah it’s it is a perennial challenge, let’s put it that way. And in terms of what how we are able to. Convey. And I’d say it, it’s really a trust building exercise as much as anything, sometimes it’s our profession’s bewildering to people and I’m, I am I guess I’ve really dedicated most of my career to simplifying that and speaking in plain language so that anybody can understand.

I really, avoid jargon as much as possible. And just like anything, people understand in different ways and it’s my job to help them overcome those hurdles and whatever tools I have available. Worsely, I have even more tools these days. It’s time well spent and and because of.

Because the, what we’re trying to do here, as you said, there’s a lot of risk involved and I’m in the risk mitigating business. I, I want before people pay enormous amounts of money in order to build something. I’d like to think that we have worked through most of the problems we’re likely to counter way ahead time through a kind of digital simulation or even.

Just an emotional connection. So that there’s confidence that we’re going to, we always run into problems. There’s no job I’ve ever been involved with, or there aren’t gonna be problems. What you want are the right people who can solve those problems in the right way and early enough in the process.

So instead of costing millions of dollars, it might just cost thousands of dollars.

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We’re going to, we always run into problems. There’s no job I’ve ever been involved with whether there aren’t gonna be problems. What you want are the right people who can solve those problems in the right way and early enough in the process.

So instead of costing millions of dollars, it might just cost thousands of dollars.

And I think that’s the interesting thing too, isn’t it? That the, I imagine that people that are working with you, that as your clients, there are many of them that would have zero experience as far as. A building project is concerned.

So understanding those little things. I, personally on a much smaller scale than what you build in, we’re in the process of completing a house. And here’s a fascinating little problem that we, I love houses for you. I love how, sorry.

I think houses are it, they’re really almost essential in what we do.

Because it, nothing is more. Other than your marriage or your life or nothing is more intimate if you think about it than your house. And you, everybody has their own way they wanna live, and it’s my job to help you achieve that goal.

And it’s interesting too because with the amount of tools that are available and the things that you can do, some of the little problems shouldn’t occur.

And I think that’s one of the interesting little sidelight for us. We have a walk-in pantry and we have shelves that were put into that pantry, but nobody thought about how you actually get the fridge, which is supposed to be in that pantry as well in, and now we’ve got shelves and we’ve got a space for the fridge, but no way of actually getting the fridge in there.

And. And, but these are the things that, you know, as you as and I, not asking you to solve that problem. We know how to solve it, but it’s more that, these are the little things that can happen whereby if you don’t have a, have some sort of vision for it. All we had was a flap drawing of a, rectangular space and it’d be nice to have some shelves here.

So that looked good, but nobody actually went. How do you. Navigate and utilize that space properly. And I think that’s where, technology and bringing that into into your business has a huge value.

It’s funny you should say that. It was one of the first real world problems I had as a young architect.

We designed this luxury Park Avenue penthouse apartments. And the client had wanted this particular piece of furniture. And we specified the furniture, we did all this stuff. We built the apartment, and then we realized we couldn’t get it through the front door. And you have to experience that once we ended up having a hoisted on the outside, which actually is very common in New York City, that’s how they get a lot of piano or books in apartments.

But yeah, you just have to experience that kind of thing once and you go, oh, you know what, no. You really have to swallow everything through it. It, there’s a lot of detail involved in that. And I am a very stickler for detail as most of my clients are. And we’re spending that kind of money and you’re working that hard at something.

You, you don’t wanna make a, what would I call a rookie mistake, right from the beginning.

And it’s interesting that you say that because again I, I want this to, for people listening out there that this isn’t just about architecture. This is about, business and how we operate.

And paying attention to those details can make all of the difference because it’s easy as well to, for a client to assume that you’ll be on top of something and it’s easy for you to assume that a client will know this. And that’s often how the mistakes happen, right?

Yeah. You have to as the leader, I, my job is not just to communicate to the client and understand what their needs and desires are but also I have to communicate to my team effectively and make sure that the same diligence that I am responsible for and I’m communicating, that client gets transferred to every member on the team.

So that you’re always building in sort of checks and balances and instilling in everybody a sense of quality.

Let me ask you how you do that as well. And there are other areas I wanna explore, but I’m really fascinated by that process of working with the team and conveying messages because we actually had a recent episode of Biz Bias.

We were talking to a couple of fighter pilots. And that sort of precision communication and debriefing is a huge element of what they do, and it’s what they’re trying to teach businesses. So I’m actually fascinated about how you do that. How do you actually convey not just the vision that we talked about, but then the preciseness of the detail that needs to happen to that, to a team that gets passed down the line, right?

Because. I imagine you don’t, do you talk to everybody who’s gonna be involved in One Go? Is it a step-by-step process? How do you manage that?

Yeah, because it’s not just architects that I’m involved with. I’m involved with engineers. I’m involved with in some cases with landscape architects a whole range of consultants and you have to.

It helps having worked with different teams before. So you build in that trust, it all starts with you. If you’re leading by example and you’re a conveying the accordance of being diligent at the same time, we run very tight deadlines and we have to have firm deliverables, so you can’t miss deadlines.

But at the same time, you wanna try and minimize mistakes. So that’s continues to be a challenge that will continue to be a challenge. I do think AI can help with that. I think the problem with AI is that I see in this, especially in younger architects that I work with, they, and they’re too willing to trust ai.

It’s almost. Too much of a shortcut and AI doesn’t really work unless someone is checking it. And I worry that my generation isn’t gonna be around that much longer. And so I have some concerns about, how do we instill that into our agents or AI agents and making sure that I suppose we’ll develop agents.

Who check other agents and somehow that’s gonna work itself through the system. But I would never want to take the human factor out of it for, at the end of the day there has to be judgment in that. And a good judgment doesn’t nearly tongue from knowing the right answer. It comes from understanding what the problem is.

I think, and not only that, you are very much in a creative space and an AI can only base things on what it knows and to, there’s a huge extent of where, a human being’s ability to take things that it may have seen and create something new. Imagine something completely different is uniquely human.

Yeah. I, the challenge that our profession has is that even if you, if Iactually were to show you images of architects working in, say, the 1950 on these kinds of projects that I’m involved, book tends to be large, say, hotels or around the world. You know that, and you would see a sea of.

Desks and people drafting over the desks, these sort of giant, drawings, maybe two or three people working on ’em, drawing at once. And you would think that with the advances in technology, we wouldn’t see that and image anymore, but we still do. We still have, big offices filled with people sitting at computer.

I do think the one area where AI can change that. I do believe AI offers the ability to do more with less. And that’s that kind of efficiency I think is ultimately for the good of the industry and and the good of these complex building projects that we’re gonna continue to have to do especially if we’re trying to also solve climate issues.

And, as, as well as bridging the sort of vast cultural divide that still suffers.

I wanna come back to the climate and sustainability part of things, but I just wanted to ask you as well, ’cause I’m fascinated by this view. I dunno what the psychology is, but I know certainly when I pick up a pen.

And I write something down, it has a different impact to me typing it. And particularly when I’m trying to be creative. Often it needs the pen. There’s something magic that happens with that. I don’t know if it’s the same in your profession, but how do now with the technology that you’ve got, is that, pen to, is it more now pen to track pad than it is pen to paper?

In order to get that same impact, because, I gather that’s the thing, right? If we, if, if we pick up a pen and you try and draw a straight line on your own it, it can be reasonable, but it’s not gonna be as straight as using a ruler and marking that up.

But, the great thing about doing that, just in simple applications, if you’ve got a electronic pen and you draw that straight line, it will straighten it for you, right? So is that process of using the technology in that way, is that the second step? Is that the, like, where do you balance that from the old fashioned, as you were saying, scribbling on a bit of paper to, utilizing the technology and bringing that in?

That, that’s a really great question and I think it’s I go back to the collaborative part of what we do. Yeah, people. And this has become let me put it this way. When I was first learning how to be an architect, even this was before computers the skills that you learn were at sitting at your drafting table, drawing by hand, a letter in by hand.

And it was very almost a social activity because people were constantly going by your desk. Stopping by looking at what you’re doing, and you’d have a conversation about that. Increasingly, as we move towards computers, you had to formalize that into essentially gathering people within needing spaces and projecting either pinning drawings up, projecting digital images on a screen.

But still, you’d have to, you would the most valuable part of it was. Essentially conversing and critiquing, and challenging each other about, what it is that you’re seeing and how you to make it better.

Yeah. It’s I love how you are blending technology into what you are doing, and I think this is a perfect example for businesses where there it is a blend.

It’s not taking over there, there won’t be. A a situation in the future where you can walk up to a, an AI and say, build me a house and it’ll design the house asking a few questions. It’s not going to be the same. That’s not something that I imagine is really a proper vision for what your profession.

I do. I, this is where I’d say I’m a big advocate on the future of the ai. Because one of the things I’ve been very concerned about within my profession is that we’ve drifted to over to specialization. It used to be that architects were kind of generalists. They basic they would look at the human condition and they would offer, a vision of the future.

And then everything would fall into place around that. Increasingly we’ve seen people overly specialize in particular areas and we’ve lost sight of the sort of generalist part of what we do. And I think ai, it flips that entire script because, and as you said, it’s not gonna ever really be good in terms of full throttle.

Creativity, it’s always gonna be a little off in some way. And it’s gonna need to be corrected, of course corrected, whether it, that’s just in, in terms of prompts. But I imagine you’ll be able to essentially work with ai. I’m using this AI a lot right now in terms of early envisioning of projects.

But what? Highly critical line that I’ve developed over years of a very successful career.

Yeah and I imagine it’s going to help problem solve when you’ve got the creativity so that if you’ve looking at and say, I want to do X and you are not quite seeing how the solution might be, the AI might be able to draw upon its knowledge to help give you a solution to it, but its solution to a creative problem.

That is the differentiator.

Yeah. It will. But I think it’s still gonna be a sort of adjunct to through human interaction. And there’s this, there’s nothing wrong. I am concerned about how we’re gonna train architects. That’s a whole nother, problem without some background in just.

Sketching and collaborating the way that I was talking about. But I do think that the ability as we’re doing right now to treat the world and AI is gonna help accelerate that, where, I can have, and I do this right now, I have people working all over the place on projects.

My main project right now, which is. These wilderness hotels and resorts. I had people working all over the world at 24 hours a day. We’re able to communicate just as you and I are communicating right now.

I wanna talk about that because you said in the beginning you started a, architecture, but now it’s pivoting a little bit more on the business.

So tell me a little bit more about that process of pivoting and what that focus is now.

I, i’ve always worked a lot in real estate. The projects I’ve done in New York City involve skyscrapers to abilities a com, very complex projects, multi-family.

Some of them are what we call adaptive reuse, taking existing older buildings and transforming them into something new. And, yeah. That process is yeah, essentially it’s it requires a certain

ability to kind, I hate to use this term, but I’ll use it here ’cause I it’s thinking outside of the box and then trying to find ways to get other people. To respond to that. And it and sometimes it happens, like that it’s highly creative sort of spark.

Sometimes you have to really go through many different steps saying many iterations before you get the right answer.

Yeah. It’s and, bringing that into. A new way of thinking as well. I think, when you start talking about sustainability and the, and climate change, there’s a degree to which, there’s a communal acceptance of these things, but there’s a whole difference in actually being, wanting to implement and and what the consequences of doing that are in terms of, it’s often more costly.

It’s often compromising a little bit on what you can and can’t do, whether it’s for financial reasons or because from a sustainability point of view, it’s better if you do this, whereas, visually you might have preferred to do that. So how do you actually balance that out for yourself and for your clients?

I’m also very practical too. And I have a history of trying to understand what our client, my client’s budget is what the, their pain points are in terms of their business and how I can accelerate that. And sometimes it means spending a little more, and sometimes it means, just we have to, adjust our thinking in order to fit the budget.

I don’t think it’s I find that the sort of conversations with about architects not caring about how much things cost. You’re not dealing with the right architects. Because if you don’t understand the business side of what we do you’re not really fully engaging all aspects.

But one is a very costly.

Yeah, I think that’s the interesting thing, isn’t it, about the space that you’re in. It is extremely costly when you start talking about larger scale buildings. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? Even when you’re building a house and it’s for a it’s, that is a relatively large expense for an individual.

So it, it’s keeping that in mind and reigning in what you might want to do and what you can do. That’s a, an interesting challenge.

Yeah, it is. I think, unfortunately there have been we’ve inherited our sort of legal process is developed over years and years. It’s almost a 19th century model of how we go about from design to construction.

And that’s another aspect that I see. Starting to change where I like to, to, and the best projects I’ve worked on is the contractor doesn’t show up in the middle of the project. They’re at the beginning. Because they, those are the guys who have their ear to the ground.

They understand the kind of minute arbitrage of prices. And better than I do. We’re the best suppliers, what the best manufacturers, what the best materials are. So having their input early on in the process is key. It’s cre key to the creativity. I, I, the one thing I don’t like having to do is to, you got everybody excited.

We’re all about this idea. We love this design. You bring the contractor in, towards the end of, after you’ve done all the hard work and they come back and they go, you’re, 25% or 50% or a hundred percent over budget, and then you have to readjust. It’s far better to say, okay, this is what we’re doing.

This is, these are our limitations. Understanding what those limits are, and then trying to be creative within those limits. To me that’s what it’s about.

Yeah, talk to me a little bit about the niche that you’ve gotten into and how that came about, because it is again, a common business idea that everyone wants you to niche a little bit further for good reason. So how did you find this niche and how is it how’s that playing out for you?

The without giving too much away I can’t. Name names, but I during I think it was actually right before the pandemic I got called in as I often do on a project. This case was in the Middle East, huge hotel and resort in the middle of a desert and a, a.

Absolutely beautiful location, pristine. If you’ve ever been to the US it’s a lot like Northern Arizona or southern Utah. These incredible sandstone formations and mountains, flat tops, meses. And one of these the most absolutely gorgeous. Mountain laptops that they, and they wanted, the client wanted to put in a huge hotel to the point where it was just gonna be dominate everything.

And I remember I, they brought me in. They wanted know what I thought. And I said I think your hotel’s too big, for the site. We’re saying not and so I needless to say, I wasn’t on that project very long, but but I did like the idea, this was a very remote location that you was incredible destination.

So beautiful. And the idea of putting, making something, that was the ultimate in luxury and luxury I define in this case. Essentially switching off the sort of everything digital and really just going to a place that was serene and peaceful and quiet that you could engage nature without necessarily having to feel like you were rough.

This but and I essentially have been working on that project now for the past three years.

And I think that’s an interesting one, isn’t it? It’s how the journey of, being in business and it takes you somewhere that fascinates you and that ability then utilize that and start to specialize in that space.

And how do you it’s one thing to have the passion for it, but how do you actually find the right buyers for it? How do you actually find the right people that this is something that is a priority

for you? You, it’s fortunately there are examples is there of these types of hotels.

I think the, what’s interesting is that having now looked at them and understanding the business models you, there are problems with many of them. And those are the precise problems that I’ve looked at that it, essentially becomes our differentiator. I wouldn’t say what that is, but needless to say you, it does help to look at what the competition there is.

Look at the landscape, understand the trends and this is frankly, since I started till today, this is only accelerated. I think that and the one thing that is most interesting to me, and you can see this. The patterns of millennials and my kids are Zoomers, gen Z in their travel habits is they travel in groups.

And they, and that’s a different kind of travel. Then we’re used to. And and based on that, I think, yeah, this is what I’m true to doing. To focus on. Remote wilderness, but you’re together with your group.

I love that. Whole concept. I, couple of questions just to wrap things up, and one is just based on that, is what’s the future?

What does it look like? How is it changing? Because when you look at. The obvious architecture is one of those obvious things when you can look at something and say that was, Victorian and that was this, and that was that. So where is it going?

I think what’s interesting to me is that, that first of all, there’s I, there, there was a period there where it seemed like we completely forgot history.

And you know that is. That is something that I think we’re gonna, as a species I do think that one of the things that’s gonna happen here is that one, when everything becomes so immediate, when you can instantly get, what attention or whatever it is that you’re looking for the enduring qualities.

Buildings that had been there and preceded you through generations and cities that have that fabric still intact. I think people’s attitude towards that is gonna change dramatically. And I do believe that we’re entering a new era where we’re we’re for lots of reasons. Climate is one of them.

Tearing buildings down does do a lot of damage to a greenhouse gas emissions. And the this adaptive reviews mentality of taking old buildings and repurposing them, whether they’re even, in New York, we’ve just opened up the plug gates here with, set buildings that were office buildings that were designed in the sixties and seventies. Were developers are rapidly turning those over into apartments. I, I believe the same thing’s happening in I, I know Sydney, it’s happening in Melbourne. We’re you’ve got this building stock already.

And what do you do with it? If nobody wants to work there anymore, turn them into what people need, which is housing.

I love that. The repurposing thing, it cast me back a little bit earlier on. The first apartment that I bought was a squash court before, and now they converted the squash courts into a.

But people thinking out there going, isn’t that small? And you go, no, actually a squash cord is a, I think it’s about 64, 65 square meters, which is, and it’s, obviously height wise they’re able to put extra extra floors in. But from a space point of view, it’s actually, it was actually quite a large apartment.

I do have to tell you that when I when I first moved in there and I had a had a party for all of my friends to come along, they all thought it was quite amusing to bring the Gatorade along and to to come dressed and squash here. Yeah. But I just to wrap things up, we could talk for a long time because it’s such a fascinating space, but the question that I like to ask all of my guests is what’s the aha moment that clients have when they start coming to.

To work with you that you wish more people knew they were gonna have in advance.

I’m a lot of fun to work with, that’s that I’ve, I’d focused on people. And I’m fascinated by people’s stories. And but you’re going to spend that kind of money and that kind of time. It’s a great deal of time.

Work with people you like work. That’s, it’s really, it really boils down to that at the end of the day. Ideally, they’re qualified to do the job, but so much is lost when you don’t have that sort of rapport, that kind of communication. It’s who wants to spend and it’s gonna be a painful experience.

I, I. I never sugar sugarcoat this. You’re probably, they experienced that on several, deer house. It always is painful, if you ever have the right people behind it takes a little bit of that pain away. At the end of the day, you look back on and say, that was a, interesting thing to do.

And hopefully it turns out even better than you and Matt.

I love that there’ve been so many valuable lessons for businesses of all type to learn from this, but as well, we glossed over it a little bit, but you have won a stack of awards. There are some amazing buildings that you’ve you’ve built I’ve, scrolled through your website and seen lots of interesting things.

We will include all the links in the show notes for anyone listening in. Who wants to check out all of those different things that you’ve done, but thank you so much for sharing those amazing insights and here’s to many more big projects to come.

Thank you, Anthony. It’s I enjoyed this conversation very much.

And I

I appreciate your insight and to everyone listening in. Of course, don’t forget to subscribe and we look forward to your company on the next episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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