Biz Bites

The virtual CFO Revolution, how to Transform Your Business finances for the AI age. Today we’re exploring game changing insights about modern financial leadership with the co-founders of Grow CFO, Debra and Jeremy Harris, who also happen to be married, and I’ve known them for many years. And I can tell you they’re genuine thought leaders who consistently give back.

To the broader and business community, you’ll discover why traditional accounting isn’t enough anymore in this day and age, and how virtual CFOs are driving business growth and the essential steps to prepare your finances for the AI revolution. If you are ready to move beyond managing the bank balance and want to dramatically increase your business value, this is an episode packed with practical strategies you can implement today.

So let’s dive in with my friends, Deb and Jeremy.

Hello everyone and welcome to a really exciting episode of Biz Bites. And I say that because I’ve had the privilege of knowing Deb and Jeremy for many years now, and we always have fun talk, talking together, and they’ve got an extraordinary business. And I wanted to share ev with the audience all about their business.

First of all, welcome to both of you. And why don’t we kick off with you, Jeremy, why don’t you introduce both of you and and what the business does. Sure. Thank you very much Elene. Thanks for having us. My name is Jeremy and I’m here with Deborah. We are co-founders and co-directors in a business.

We also happened to be, have been married for 33 years. And actually we did that first before we went into business together. So our business is we do virtual CFO as in chief financial officer, and we have a bookkeeping team to back that up as well. For me personally, I was around 25 years as a tax accountant.

Took me that long to figure out that tax accounting was not my thing. The kind of accounting that we do is more of about forward facing. More about what’s in the future for a business and how do we help a business to grow and improve. Deborah’s background is from a quantification point of view is hr and has had a lot of years in dealing with people, including our five children.

And and she really leads the people and the systems side of our business. There’s so much that we are going to explore in this, but I actually wanna start with, and I know it was a bit of a throwaway line about the fact that you started the business after you, you came together, but there aren’t I suppose there are a lot of people that go into business together in partnership.

It’s even more difficult to do it when you are married to that person and to make that decision even after you’ve been married for a little while, and to then do it. How do you, how did that impact the relationship in being able to pull that off? ’cause I, it’s not easy. I wanna take that one first, and I’m sure we’ve both got fruits on this.

I it’s really easy on a topic like this to make jokes about it. But there’s obviously like a real intentional and serious side to it as well. For me, being in a partnership in business with somebody else initially or with other people. Debra then came in and started working in our business over those years.

It became really clear to me that I wanted for us to be doing something together and that was a way to actually parallel our goals and our aspirations of what we wanted to do in business and the impact that we wanna make with our relationship and having fun doing it at the same time, and being able to do those things together instead of just every day.

Going apart and coming back together again and not having that common purpose. There’s there’s certainly times when it is a we need to be very present to the impact that business has on our relationship or the other way around as well. And and actually we’re probably both really of the same.

We, we approach it in a similar way where. We sometimes there’s no boundaries, but we actually know that we need to put boundaries in. But it, it hasn’t caused any disruption from my point of view. Are you to say the same thing, Jeff? It became very evident when Jeremy was coming home very he, he wasn’t loving his business and it was because he had a partner that didn’t necessarily agree.

With the same vision that he had for the business. And it’s typical in an accounting firm that a senior partner brings in junior partners, and then the senior partner leaves and the junior partners are stuck with each other. And while the other partner had his own thoughts and ideas, it wasn’t the same set of thoughts and ideas as what Jeremy had and what Jeremy wanted to run with.

That and the fact that I already knew that my husband was struggling with the fact that tax accounting is about as interesting as stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork. And he really didn’t wanna do that anymore. And we had this belief that our, the accounting fraternity were letting down business owners, and by that they.

They would come to their tax accountant. And you’d get the financials for the year end often. After the end of the year. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

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So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au. Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. So that, and the fact that I already knew that my husband was struggling with the fact that tax accounting is about as interesting as stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork. And he really didn’t wanna do that anymore.

And we, we had this belief that our, the accounting fraternity were letting down business owners. And by that I mean they, they would come to their tax accountant and you’d get the financials for the year end, often, after the end of the year. And a great big tax bill and a great big invoice. And see you next year and you are left with thinking if I’ve made such a profit, where’s the money?

And so that was a driving factor for us about switching it up and trying to start something new. So we started the CFO engagements within that business, but it became clear that the type of people we needed to do those engagements was completely different. So people who are trained to report on the past.

Not necessarily trained to forecast the future. So that was the big difference between the types of people we then had to engage in our new business. So we started it as a side hustle and rolled it out to its own business in June or July, 2019. And then and we also did what most people find completely strange is that even though Jeremy had been the main.

Partner in the accounting firm. We flipped it so that I was running as CEO across this business because I had the broader business experience and broader business skillset having done human resource development, but really it was part of a management degree. So I had more of a taste of those other things.

So whenever we do find ourselves. In that situation where you haven’t quite broken off for the day and you take that home with you. And for us, we work from home. So home is where everything happens. I’ll sometimes find myself walking out my office door and going, hi honey, I’m home. And it’s just it just breaks the energy, right?

And there might be no one else in the house, and I will still do that if I need to break the tension and break the energy and then move on to other things. I’m sure Jeremy’s got the recordings of you doing that while you’re at home alone, doesn’t want us being I hear what you’re saying too because I, I do that as well where I work from home and there has to be that break. And particularly for me, Fridays is the even bigger one where, my kids know when it’s Friday because they say dad’s in silly mode. But it’s a deliberate. Attempt to break that energy and to get out of work mode. ’cause it’s, and I think that’s the thing that, that’s also the interesting dynamic that you’ve got here is that you’re working from home as well.

So that is even tougher when it comes to, relationship and building and having those boundaries. Yeah. Can be, doesn’t have to be, it’s about how you set it up really. I think. I think we’re good at. Catching each other and catching ourselves. When we can feel that that something is starting to impact on our evening or on our personal relationship, we just, we can pause it and park it and pick it up at the right time.

I, just before we move on from all of this topic, I wanted to bring up something else that I know you guys do, because I remember you’ve told me about it before and I think is really fascinating is that because you’ve got this kind of reporting scenario you actually have your own kind of mini board meeting, don’t you?

Between the two of you? Yeah, we do. And sometimes that gets a little bit impacted and lately it’s we’ve struggled a bit to keep that rhythm up because the business is growing, but it’s just a matter of. Leaning in on checking in on each part of the business. So being mindful of the fact that you have to do it as though you are, if you go from that perspective, it’s as though you are on a board and you’re looking down from a height at what’s happening.

So you, I believe in, in, on and above. So in your business, you’re working as a worker on your business. You’re working as a manager. But above your business, you’re working as an investor and you’re looking at your business from an investment perspective. What does this investment need to make it progress further?

What does this investment need me to do in three to five years time? How much capital value there be in it? So it’s a different conversation, so it may, it needs its own space. And Anthony, to bring in a point that you’ve already highlighted about working from home. When we have that board meeting, we’ll go offsite as well.

’cause we think it’s important to do that in a different environment. I think what’s fascinating too, by what you just said, and Jerry, I want your perspective, is that what you are really doing with your business is what you’re doing with other people’s businesses, isn’t it? It’s, you’re taking that high level approach to really see where things are going and where they should be going.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. It’s, uh. Coming back to the core of what we do with virtual CFO and bookkeeping one of the things that we talk about is that tax accounting, which is what I used to do, is looking backwards, looking in the rear view mirror about the past. And that’s important.

Somebody has to do it. There’s compliance obligations to be met. And and actually one of the really liberating things for us in the last couple of years. Is to actually have our own tax accountant now. I feel like a real business owner because I’ve got a tax accountant, so I’m not doing it anymore myself.

So that is about the past. The virtual CFO is about the future. It is understanding what are the numbers telling us about a business and how does that help us to map the path forward. To help business owners to connect that into their goals and aspirations. What we found is that there was a missing piece, which is quite often before we could do our CFO work our analysis and our dashboards and our forecasting, we were held up by data that was out of date or just not correct.

So we added a bookkeeping element. And on that continuum where tax is about the past, CFO is about the future. Bookkeeping is about the present and that so our bookkeeping team is able to make sure that the numbers are right for our CFO team to then do their magic. And our CFOs don’t need to be doing bookkeeping work first before they can get into the CFO work.

So how closely do you then work with accountants then, who are. Jumping in I, I imagine as well, with a lot of these businesses. Yeah. Much more closely actually, than what we anticipated. From my time in as a tax accountant in that part of the industry, I had experienced a lot of, um, a lot of a trend towards doing more.

The commenter was business advisory work. And to be wanting to do more of that with clients. But meantime, there’s this competing increased pressure on compliance work because regulations keep on changing and also keep on increasing. The amount of regulation keeps on increasing and it’s challenging to fine team to be doing that.

So I think tax accountants are are probably as much short of time as they’ve ever been. So they haven’t been able to get to that CFO work. I have some ca the tax accountants that say, where we have a mutual client and they say, I’m glad that they’re finally getting somebody to help them with this because I’ve known that they need to, that somebody needs to.

For the most part we have really cooperative relationships with tax accountants and which is important because we need to be doing our different parts of it for the better for the client. That kind of managing collaboration relationships, that is difficult. And there’s lots of, there’s lots of things for people to navigate in business as well, particularly when you might encounter businesses that are going to come into a relationship like this, thinking that you are competing or trying to steal something from them when that’s not the case at all.

So Deb, how much is it education process, how much is a relationship building process? How open do they have to be? When you start finding those collaborations through clients? I always start from the client first and say, what is your expectation of what do you wanna see? What do you see as your ideal team?

So they can very clearly articulate to us who they wanna have in the picture. And if they say, I want this person to do the bookkeeping and that person to do the accounting, and you guys just come in and do the CFO, then that’s what we do. They know that we have the bookkeeping arm and we can help them, but we don’t poach.

And so we will then go I had a situation just yesterday where I make notes and explain to the other person, the other professional in this space what needed to happen. So they, I was actually literally just going in for a pitching engagement to help them pitch to a corporate. And that was the extent of our engagement.

And yet they have a tax accountant, they have bookkeepers and they have other business coaches there. And so I left notes for them to say, look, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is how I’m doing it. I’ve adjusted this. I hope that’s okay. It shouldn’t impact any of your reporting. I checked on that.

So it’s just a professional courtesy more than anything to say, this is the space that we’re holding for this client and this is the reason why. And if people get upset about the fact that they think that we’re taking something from them, my response to that would be, why didn’t you offer it? Because I can only take a piece that no one else is doing.

If someone else was doing it and doing it well, the client would never come to me. They would go to the person who is their trusted advisor. So there’s some, there’s a disconnect there. It’s not me taking, it’s them not offering if there’s a disconnect at all. We do find sometimes that the reason they’re coming to us in the first place is because they’re not happy with the service they’ve been getting and that they’re planning to change and they just wanna know what the implications are going to be.

That can happen too. So it is a big challenge. Sometimes we find, especially in the bookkeeping space, we’ll sometimes find that the client’s file isn’t particularly, well done. Let’s just leave it that way. It’s a bit messy. Yeah. And problem is because of the clients wouldn’t necessarily know, would they?

Because you, they tend to hand over everything to the bookkeeper and assume that they know what they’re doing and live with what they’re doing because they, you don’t know any better until someone comes along and says, yeah. And I think you see that in lots of, I know personally, I’ve seen that in the marketing space where I had a client recently that came to me and showed me a.

A new branding that they’d had done. And I went, did you go to Upwork and get that? Like where did that come from? What was the, why did, what was the brief for that? Because that does not seem to make any sense for your brand at all. And that’s, it’s a difficult thing to navigate that, right?

To make people aware of, to aware that there is a problem. But there’s no need for it to be confrontational. It’s just training your own team. We can’t, there’s something like 350 small to medium sized bus, micro, smaller and medium sized businesses, 350 million on the face of the earth.

We can’t serve that many people. Come on, there’s plenty of real estate. There’s enough for everybody. We don’t need to be treading on all each other’s toes. I think what we find is that sometimes there’s a real gem out there doing work in a client’s file. If we need a new contractor to help us out and to, to white label to us that, that’s who we can ask.

So it, it can actually be a great way of finding new team too. I was gonna say, Jeremy, that’s an interesting approach as well that you guys have in that you start looking at. Where there are new opportunities, building from relationships, and even going to the point of acquiring other businesses that is correct.

Yes. And you’re almost giving me a segue there to talk about ai. But I think we’ll get to that. That, when I said before that we, we saw that the we, I talked about the continuum of the past and the future. The gap in the middle was the present. We identified a couple of years ago that one of our strategic opportunities would be to to acquire a business and that could be in the bookkeeping space.

So we had been doing some bookkeeping for our existing business owner clients before that, but it was really just to fill a gap. It was it was a much more. Strategic decision to actually have a whole bookkeeping team. And so we did that by acquiring an existing business, which then also gave us another group of business owners to talk to about the opportunities that that we can offer in the CFO services that we do as well, and the ways that we can help them to grow their business.

And for quite a few of those, it’s the first time that someone had that kind of discussion with them. It’s been really interesting to. To define the boundaries, but also just to play with like I, I’ll call it bookkeeping plus. So beyond just keeping things reconciled and keeping it all in order, what are the little things that we can add that a bookkeeper can do because they’ve got the skills and the knowledge to do it, but that are really just super supercharging?

The information that the business owner gets. So that even if they’re not fully availing themselves of our CFO services, they’re starting to get better decision making information. Why us just going that little extra 1% or 5% in what we do in keeping, Deb, when you start acquiring businesses as well.

Then there’s the people issue and navigating that balance, right? And bringing new people into the business and familiarizing yourself with systems, them and you and finding that, how does that all work? That’s a, that’s in itself is quite a piece to navigate. Absolutely. That’s, it was a really big challenge too, because we run from a virtual headquarters, and so the, when you acquire a business, not everybody understands how to work remotely.

Not everybody wants to work remotely. We had to navigate that whole situation and it, we had we had attrition, we had all sorts of things happen. But we were able to stabilize it, settle it all down, and then just start to, to make sure that we had everything integrated well. We’re still we’re still looking at how we do our systems and processes.

I think we probably would never ever say that everything was all the systems and processes would all put to bed because with AI changing everything so rapidly, and particularly in our industry. We see this as a great opportunity for us and a great opportunity actually for AI to start doing some of the records management and that type of approach that knits everything in.

And I can see in the future that there will actually be. A level of AI that you can plug into a business and say, this is the golden record. This is how we want things to happen, and that it just goes out and grabs it from other places and brings the new acquisitions seamlessly into the fold. I think that would be an amazing development, and I’m sure that it’s something, I know I’ve been speaking to people already about that in that space, so it, there’s a lot that happens when you.

Bring on a new business and you learn sometimes from mistakes more than you learn from successes. And I think we had a few mistakes when we did it, but we definitely learned a lot about what we would do in the future if we did the same thing. We also learned about just, the types of business to bring in and what to look for and how to look for that.

We’d been doing mergers and acquisitions with some of our clients, so we were fairly much across what needed to happen, but some of the nuances of it were different with our industry, and so we just learned that quite grid of factions in the fire. One thing I’d add just on, on systems and processes, and I’ve seen this over many years of working with a lot of businesses, buying and selling businesses, as well as our own experience, is that, like it’s a common premise that the more systemized a business is, the more valuable it is because it will be giving a consistent output. Within that. There can be a system or a series of the system can be the actual piece of software that’s used, but it can also just be what is our approach and what is the way that we do things.

But within that, there can be subsystems. That are not that obvious initially without really digging deep, if there’s 10 team members, there might be 10 subsystems as in 10 different ways of doing the same thing within the overall system. And that, so that’s a real challenge to look for but is worth taking the time to look for because it makes a huge difference to the integration and to taking on that business.

And the other thing I’d add just on, ’cause we’re talking systems and people. Is so Deb, what is that quote that one of our mentors uses? Culture is the team. What product is to customer? So your client, if your client either loves or hates your product or somewhere near in between, your team either loves or hates the culture or they’re meh, somewhere in between.

And if you want to have a really great team, you need to have a really great culture.

That’s so important. And I think as well, I know that particularly and we’ve talked about it before outside of this podcast, but about remote teams as well, which are increasingly a thing for people. And that’s still, you still need to create that culture, even if people are.

Split all over the world, it doesn’t really matter. That’s still an important part of the business. Yeah, absolutely. And ours are distributed across we have a, someone dashboarding for us in Sri Lanka. We have team in India. We have team in the Philippines. We have team scattered across Australia.

So we bring them together in a virtual headquarters. They see each other every day. They can see. Who’s in the office, they can just go and knock on their other person’s office door. We try to bring that sense that it is just like you’re just knocking on some, knocking on a physical door because it just gives people that sense that they’re there and they belong, they’re inside the building.

That also gives them a sense of completion when they finish for the day that they exit the building so that they’ve. They can create that separation and it just runs in the background as a platform. But within that, we’ve been able to start using all of the AI that comes with that particular platform and developing our own AI and helping our team understand how to use AI assistance and AI agents.

So it’s been a real part of the progress for us. We were determined. I know myself as a leader. My role is to actually lead the way with ai because there’s a lot of fear around bookkeeping in particular. There’s AI agents out there now, AI overlays that you can put over it and see if it’s true and accurate.

It still needs training. It’s not, you couldn’t just set and forget, but the thing about it is that. I don’t employ bookkeepers. I employ people who at the moment do bookkeeping. And there’s a distinction in that at some point they might not do bookkeeping, but if they’re really good people, I wanna keep them and I need to make sure they’re ready to do the next thing.

And that thing lights them up so that they don’t ever have to feel like they’re going to be redundant. So that’s part of leadership, as far as I’m concerned, is driving that, that space. And it’s a tough one, but I, it is an important one. It is an important distinction as well because, and sometimes of course, of the people that come to you and are working in a particular space don’t even realize that there’s opportunities that could be open to them to go somewhere else until they start experiencing it.

So I think it’s all part of a growth process. Yeah, definitely. Jeremy just coming back to the AI thing and seeing how much of that influence is going to be it’s, people would immediately think, oh, counting and, numbers and areas are probably not a great space for ai, but in fact.

Really a lot of automation. If we extend AI to being into that automation space has been happening in this space, almost leading what’s been happening in other areas. And so where is it going to go? That’s the question. And how much do people need to be doing in their business? It’s a very exciting space at the moment.

Very exciting. It’s so if we look at bookkeeping. There was a real revolution 15 years ago when zero came out QuickBooks Online and others similar to that. So cloud accounting, that’s all under the terminology of cloud accounting, but it’s been feeling like it hasn’t really advanced in that 15 years and more and more over the last few years I’ve been thinking.

And especially since we bought the bookkeeping business, I’ve been realizing how much human intervention is still required to get it right. It’s the automation is, the bank data comes into the system. There’s some suggestions, but it’s not that, it’s not smart in that sense of making sure that everything’s right.

I’ve shifted in the last couple of months from thinking, yeah, AI is on the horizon in our industry. To thinking it is here. There’s a couple of programs in particular that are really making a difference. They’re probably not quite there, but I think somewhere between, in the Australian market, somewhere between two months and six months from now, we will see what I would call robotic bookkeeping, where it is actually making the matches in the system, checking itself, getting it right, and continually learning as well as it goes.

And we’ll still lead the training. I. But that training will make it more and more reliable instead of it just being rules that can be subject to to, to human error or to change. So that’s one thing in, in the bookkeeping, in the CFO side of what we do one of the reasons that I sold my tax accounting firm eight years ago now, is that I had said to my team a couple of years before that Zero has changed what we do it, it’s.

What we do as accountants, as tax accountants is totally different now to what it was 10 years ago. Similar to the data is in the system for us. We’re not spending our time just data entering into the system. We’ve, and we’ve got live information. Let’s not kid ourselves that, that term I used before.

But business advisory can’t be automated in the future as well. There’s a code behind it. If I look at a set of financial statements and I say, oh, that Pat, there’s something wrong between those two numbers or those two crews of time, or, oh, I can see what’s wrong with the cash flow. Here’s what should happen next.

There’s a code behind that. There’s an algorithm that can be codified. When I said that 10 years ago, my team freaked out. So that was probably one of the things that under me to realize that I didn’t fit my team anymore and to sell the matter. I was sitting there, but. I was sitting around that table and it was the funniest moment around the board table and just watching everybody’s faces go white, just looking at, they just went that, no, that’s, that can’t happen.

What about our jobs? And it was interesting to see that beer back then, and I, it does make me wonder how they’re feeling now, but I think there’s two reasons why AI in this space is, the accounting is in the front runner. The first is because it comes with a discreet set of data, right?

There’s a right and a wrong. It’s easy to see the right and the wrong, the, so that can help train the majority of it. And then it’s just the nuances of personal preferences. So that’s the first thing. But what most people wouldn’t be aware of is the second thing, which is the bookkeepers probably touch more pieces of software.

Than just about any other profession with maybe the exception and maybe not even the exception of it providers. And the reason I say that is that, if you have a client load of 20, 30, 40 bookkeeping clients, you’ll have access to all sorts of things like PayPal and totally different CRMs from one thing to the other.

And that data usually has to be used for some purpose. Bookkeepers are actually in an ideal situation to take that forward. When I look at the CFO space, I think a lot of that is actually coaching in that hope, dreams, and aspirations and matching the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the business owner to the data that’s coming out of the business.

So that you can move them towards that. That’s still a little way off, but I think that to a certain extent it will be able to be codified or a set of questions can be asked that would get you in those positions. To get to where you needed to know, please excuse my, I didn’t turn off my calendar setting.

Sorry, my ding dong, Mel. Yeah. What I was going to ask Jeremy as well is how much do people need to be on top of it themselves versus needing to rely, or having people like yourselves that are gonna come into a business and take care of it for them. Because I think that’s the hardest part about AI at the moment.

Lots of people have dabbled in, chat. GPT has got the name, but there are versions there, all that have dabbled with it as far as particularly content is concerned. But actually making it work for your business and doing things, it’s hard because you also need to be on top of some of these areas.

So is it gonna take someone like yourself coming in and doing that, or do you think it’s going to be things that people will just sign up for? I think there’s a short, medium and long term answer to that. And I’ll deal with long term. First we dunno what it looks like in the long term. So who knows where it could go in the short term.

There is, there somebody with the right skills needs to be training the ai and we view it that these AI tools will be another team member for us. And we’ll spend the time just helping it to learn. And just like in, in the way that probably lots of us use chat GPT, now it gets better the more it learn, the more that you teach it.

So it’ll be the same same approach there. For both bookkeeping and CFO services that we do. In the medium term, I think it is about the opportunities for accountants and bookkeepers to transform their role into much more of a people connection business. Which for some accountants and bookkeepers will actually be against their natural energy.

So maybe a challenge, but, the, I go back to something that, that one of my mentors highlighted many years ago, really forecasting what we’re seeing now when he said that and we’ve both quoted this in different ways in on this call already, that the role of the accountant in the future is to connect to under someone who understands the numbers and to connect those numbers to the goals and aspirations of business owner.

It becomes a a a personal connection, a personal understanding of what that business owner wants to achieve, and then to partner with them in taking the data that’s being automated to, to use that to make decisions. I think there’ll be a blend of the technology and the human. That’s what I call the medium term there, and that’s the opportunity to evolve.

Yeah, I can see there being two roles in businesses. Quite commonly there’ll be the role of someone that is looking out for what is the latest AI and reviewing things because the, it’s moving so quickly. So what you choose today, in six months time, you may need a different choice. And then there’s the person that’s going to be implementing and making sure that.

Whatever is happening in the business is doing that. But the, I think I wanna bring it back to you. Just to finish off this part of the discussion is just to bring it back to the systems that you talked about in the beginning. Of course, the important thing is you’ve gotta get the systems right.

’cause if the systems are wrong, all the AI is gonna do is ex is exaggerate the problems. That’s right. And you, in the previous question you were saying. Will we see business owners trying to do it themselves basically versus what would our role be? So there will be for sure business owners who identify AI tools and then just try to implement it themselves in the same way that there’s business owners who now do their own bookkeeping.

Some will do it well and some won’t. I think the outcome will be very similar. The, and the opportunity is to. To just get it right with that little bit of help, extra help from someone who understands both the fundamental principles and the technology. I think there’s a real reason why you wouldn’t want to leave.

Leave it for too long before you explore this as a, an opportunity though, and it comes back to the capital value of your business because. Within the next three to five years, there’ll be those that have and those that have it. And if you’re looking to explore maybe an exit in that time, and you are one of the ones that has, suddenly your capital value will be greatly appreciated in the marketplace compared to the capital value of a business that doesn’t have that.

In an industry where you might get three times the revenue of your clients, you might get 10 times the revenue if you’ve got. AI overlay and integrated throughout your whole business. Because people will look to come in and go, someone else has worked all this out for me. I’ll jump on that.

So if it’s in your inclination to explore it, that would be what I would say is a really key fundamental thing to reason why you might wanna do it sooner rather than later so that you’re not one of the. Later adopters and that you’re in that space, that you can actually get a really good market value for your business if you’re looking to exit.

And I think that there’s a lot of different approaches to AI at what I would say is AI makes you ask a better question because if you’re not getting the right answer, it’s likely that it’s because you’ve asked a question that was too broad without context. If you, if that’s what’s happening with your ai, it’s probably also happening with your team.

You’re probably still not doing it there either. And what’s even interesting is a comparison to that. So I’ve got an AI tool that I’m using that is, I guess an aggregator maybe is the right way to, to describe it, where you can actually choose from multiples. And which one you want to do. And what I’ve found as well is it’s not only whether you’ve asked the right question, but whether you’ve asked the right AI the question.

So sometimes it’s, and it’s a bit like people where you could ask a question to two different people. I. Exactly the same way and get two completely different responses. And I think you, you have to understand that the ais are also wired differently for different reasons. And so sometimes, I had one yesterday where I was asking a question and I asked it three or four different ways and I was still getting exactly the same response.

I then changed it to a different, AI got exactly the response I wanted. It was just the wrong ai. Yeah. And I think that’s part of the learning curve. Yeah. We spent a lot of time, I’ve spent. Nearly two years now, training a digital twin. So that it’s been preloaded with all of our 10 year goals, 5, 3, 2, 1, and an understanding of our complete organization chart and understanding of our complete every part of the business and what it needs to do and how it feeds into the next thing.

And so by spending that time, it’s got a very strong context of what I wanna get out. So if I need to go and get. Bio written, I can tell it what the bio is for, and then we go backwards and forwards and asks me a few questions to see what do I need next? Like why is it important? What is the context of that thing that you need the bio for?

And it gives it to me well crafted for that. So it’s actually speeding things up a lot now, but it was a matter of really training it. So having five kids. If you want them to be able to tie their shoelaces, you have to just keep going. They have to keep I was gonna say, were you want, were you wondering where the AI was a few years ago when you had five kids at home?

I was too busy to wonder.

I’ll just wanted to ask you as well in the last pub, but a couple of things I wanted to ask you about to finish things up, but. One is just in terms of recognizing who needs the services that you guys off offer, because it’s, whereas accounting, bookkeeping, yeah. We know we need taxes done, we need our regular stuff.

Being done from the bookkeeper kind of makes sense to most people, but often the term CFO has been something that has generally been associated with larger companies. So when you’re in a smaller business, you. What do I need this kind of service for? So tell me who can benefit from services like yours?

Common things that we see are businesses that are managing by the cash balance in the bank. That is their key key decision making metric or their key indicator at least, of how they’re going. And then often the driver of action. The cash balance goes down. So they chase up their accounts receivable.

If they have a cash receivable, the cash balance goes up. They spend some money on marketing or decide to get a new hire. So that’s one thing. Another thing is business owners who look at their profit loss, see a profit at the bottom of the page and don’t see that in the bank account and wonder why there’s a difference and just never understand why there’s a difference.

’cause no one’s ever told it. The third one is we often hear business owners talk about they feel like they’re flying blind. They just don’t have the data that they know they need and should have to be making the right decisions. A lot of what we do is actually starts with education and and one of the things that really lights us up is to have a session with a business owner where we explain those things the.

The how to pull and push the levers of cash flow to really make a difference and how to understand why is there a difference between profit and cash flow. When we have a business owner that says, I’ve been in business for 10 years, nobody’s ever told me that. Now I finally get it. That’s one of the things that we really love to do.

Which it’s gonna jump me to the last question I’m gonna ask. I’m gonna come back to it ’cause it needs to be the last question of you. We asked about a heart moment, but I did just want to bring in one other, one other topic here that’s dear to all of our hearts is the idea of being a business for good.

And I’ve interviewed Paul Dunn, who we know and love on the program in the past, but I wanted to talk to you about how that’s made a difference for you just because of how you feel about it the difference that it makes in the way you go about things, because it’s such a. It’s easy to talk about the idea of a business for good, but actually doing something and demonstrating you’re doing it and bringing that to people.

It’s such a buzz, isn’t it? Yeah, there’s it. It’s so powerful that it should be through everything that you do, and I think the reason why I was talking about how many small businesses there are on the face of the earth speaks to our why. It’s because half of those businesses will employ other families as well as that, the business owner has a family, but they’ll, half of those will employ other people as well.

And when you unpack the statistics of that one in five of those bus, so that 60% of them in the next five years will go out of business, which is a terrible statistic, right? It’s that’s about 2 billion people. Impacted by small businesses, small, medium, and micro businesses closing in the next five years, 2 billion people.

And so when you’ve put that in the context of someone’s family livelihood it’s scary, right? It’s scary for those families that they don’t know how they’re gonna feed their kids and sometimes it is spouses working together and that’s everything they own gone. And one of the top five reasons is poor cash flow.

It’s stupid ’cause it’s something we can do something about. And so I find it really powerful to have that conversation with people, to say that this is why we do what we do. We are passionate about fixing this problem and we’re passionate about fixing it for the other people who are out there that the heroes in our community there they might be a tradie, but they take on an apprentice.

That’s someone’s kid. That’s someone’s kid who needs a job. They’re the allied health professionals that get people able to work. Again. They’re the it might be some it might be a guy in marketing, but he’s also coaching the local footy team. And we can have this amazing impact if we just stop and think about who the, who’s are in our life.

Who are the people that are our customers, and how can we better influence them? Then I like to think too, I’m a global citizen first, so this isn’t just happening in my country. This is happening in every country around the world that there’s these businesses going out of business, and it’s really sad.

And so it’s something that I really wanted to do something about. So we aligned with B one G one Business for Good, and we, it was actually deliberately the very, very first expense of this business. Because that was how important it was for us. And we have had our children on different study tours with B one G one.

We’ve taken them over to Cambodia. One of our children actually decided she wanted to go to one in Kenya by herself, and she went and did that so she could meet other business owners with this philanthropic mind frame that it wasn’t just all about them and how much they could get. Actually, if you spend some time giving, you actually receive so much more yourself.

And it’s just a really lovely expression of who we are. And it’s probably what, it’s just as much an expression of our business as it is us personally. I love that it’s such a great way to encapsulate the importance of all of that. And I feel the same way as well, and it’s, and.

B one, G one is such an important part of my business, but of many of the businesses, that you and I both know and we’ll include in the show notes as we always do, we link to B one G one, so people want to know a little bit more. They can check that out. But just before we wrap up, the final question that I have.

And I’d be interested to know whether it’s different for both of you or whether it’s the same. So I’ll ask you Jeremy first, ’cause you started alluding to it, what is the at heart moment that businesses have when they start working with you that you wish more people will realize they were going to have and so they would come flocking to you in the future?

It’s so I, I gave that example before of. Somebody who has been in business going through those sort of struggles that I described, and they’ve been on a session with us where they actually get it and they don’t feel dumb as a business owner they don’t feel dumb for not understanding why the cash in the bank is not there when it shows they’re making a profit and they feel empowered because they have the.

The understanding of how to make that different going forward. It’s it’s, there’s moments almost every day when a business owner has been holding onto a problem that they’ve got for a long time. And it might be that their bookkeeping is behind and there are a couple of basses behind, or that they just don’t get how to get the information outta the system.

When they hand that over and have someone working with them to solve that problem and to get that understanding, they feel like the weight is lifted off their shoulders. And they actually say that to us which is very rewarding to, to hear. And and then at a higher level, as a business grows and expands, it’s the ahas they have around, how they work together with their team. And ’cause some of what we do is almost like a mentoring role for the finance team, but for the broader team as well. And and just helping them to understand if I choose that example, how the finance team works with the rest of the team.

Sometimes they’re a bit of a silo, but through some mentoring and some of the strategies that, that we have. They actually feel a part of the bigger team and feel like they can make an impact. I love that. So what about you, Deb? Any difference? Slightly Yes. I, but I love that too. I think that it’s very true.

I think for me it’s the calm. So by that sometimes business owners are like those circus acrobats that have the sticks and the plates up on top, and they’re so busy spinning every stick because they’ve been told. You’ve gotta go on Instagram, you’ve gotta have your Facebook leads, you’ve gotta have Google ads.

Where’s your Google This search rankings? Where’s where’s the customers? You’ve gotta have a good customer journey. You’ve gotta have all of your service and your delivery and they’re trying to make the money go round. All these different things. All these things. And it’s frantic, it feels frantic even as I say it, but when you can actually hone them in on the three things they need to do next and to focus down.

To that, it just takes, suddenly, it just takes the crazy out. And I think that’s the nicest aha moment. And when they start to get the pattern of that, and you see the results from the pattern of that, and we’ve had some clients where they were turning over maybe 20,000 in a month, and they actually accelerated up to, I think, 2 million a month.

In that period of time they just learnt the pattern and it’s so satisfying and it’s really satisfying to, we graduate clients by graduating. There’s a point where they become too big for us and it’s amazing. That just lights me up. To graduated client means that they’ve accelerated through all the services that we can offer.

We’ve helped them train their new. Finance team, they have a new CFO in store. Everything’s set up for them to succeed. The CFO knows how to communicate to the business owner in a way that the business owner can understand, or that’s a really powerful thing to actually bring about, and it starts at the smallest place, which is just understanding the numbers.

So powerful, so good. I love all of that. We could talk for hours. We’ve already talked for hours before in the past, and it’s been an absolute joy to talk to both of you on Biz Bytes. Thank you so much for being part of the program. Thank you Anthony and Blake. Great to meet with you. Of course we will include all the details, how to get in touch with you both.

Fire the show notes so people pay attention to that. There are lots of great things in there and for everyone listening in, don’t forget to subscribe and get ready for the next episode of the Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bytes.

Did you know that the hidden key to boosting team performance and profits is psychological safety? Welcome to this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today we are diving deep into the science behind workplace performance with Karren Jensen, the CEO of Conductor software. Discover how measuring psychological safety.

In of itself can unlock untapped revenue. We are going to learn some practical strategies on how to create an environment where teams thrive. Innovation flourishes, and productivity absolutely soars. This is a conversation that is going to transform the way you think about leadership and team dynamics.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and I have a very interesting guest with me today because I think we’re going to get into a whole lot of different areas that we haven’t discussed on Biz Bites before and getting into psychological territories and more information about teams. I think this is gonna be of great value to everyone listing in.

So Karren. First of all, welcome to the program. Thank you very much. It’s so exciting to be here and yeah, really looking forward to getting in a bit deeper. It’ll be a lot of fun. Karren, why don’t we start off by you telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do. So I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Conductor software.

We are a Brisbane based company proudly female led. And we’re obviously we’re looking at psychological safety. And we’ve been in that field for quite some time, way before it became the buzzword that we know it to be now. But. The reason for that is it is so fundamentally important to the success of leaders, of teams, of humans.

So for us as humans, to thrive into the future of work, we really have to start understanding. What psychological safety really is. You know what talking psychology here. But we have to understand that and we have to be able to monitor and measure that and work. Towards always trying to balance that within the workplace.

So Conductor was built for that purpose because we knew it was so important. We knew it would be important into the future. Didn’t realize Covid was coming around the corner that’s not, just not that ball into the park way faster than we had expected. But now watching what’s playing out on the global stage with the US you can start to see just how fundamentally.

Important it is to us as human beings to be able to flourish in this modern age of work.

I think we need to start with defining that psychological area because as you say, it’s become a bit of a buzzword but in many respects, when things become buzzwords, they actually lose their meaning a fair bit to people. And you’ve, as you said, you’ve, this came about prior to. It becoming something that lots of people were talking about.

So take me back to the beginning. What did it actually mean and what does it come to mean as far as progress has been concerned over the last few years? Wow. That’s it. Look, it actually, it was first termed in 1965, so it has been around for quite a lot of, for quite a long time.

And it has morphed in some respects, but basically, whoever’s been working with psychological safety and there’s been a number of players along the way, but, what we’re essentially talking about is that as human beings, we feel safe enough to participate. So Amy Edson talks about being safe enough to speak up, speak out.

So that’s part of it. Shine and Benni back in 65 though, it was an environment in which you could learn. It’s an environment that you, your brain is able to learn because it’s not in this state of fear and holding itself back. And am I gonna be embarrassed? Am I gonna be ridiculed? Is someone gonna laugh and think I’m stupid?

So when you, we’ve always known that, we’ve known that through school, through education, all of our lives, how important that is. We just haven’t really had the tools or the insights into our human biology enough to understand why that was so important. And that’s been the real game changer. Over the past, 30, 40 years is that we now have tools through neuroscience to be able to understand what’s really going on in the brain, what’s really going on with our neurobiology, and why this has become so critical for us to understand.

The issue is none of this is getting down to leaders who need this information. So that’s what Conductor has really set out to do is we want to democratize that this information should be first and format with every person in an organization because it really takes us away from looking at behaviors.

Everyone’s behaviors or what’s their personality type to this is actually a human need. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world? Come talk to us at podcasts, done for You.

That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you, so all you have to do is show up for a conversation. But don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you from the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it.

So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites, everyone’s behaviors or what’s their personality type to This is actually a human need. This is what humans need to thrive, and as we move further and further into AI coming on board, we really do need to understand this because we are driving people at such intense rates at the moment.

That cognitively, we’re all burning out, we’re exhausted all the time, so we’re, we don’t do that to our cars. We protect our vehicles. They’re precious to us and we service them and we make sure that we’ve got all the fuel and the necessary things within them to be able to ensure that they run at peak performance.

Why do we not do this in the workplace? Why do we insist on pushing people to the level that we’re burning out and we actually can’t? We can no longer cognitively process and make decisions when, at a time when that’s really what humanity has to do. There are so many things to unpack in what you just said there, and I’m trying to work out the best starting point, but I think.

What I wanna ask about initially is really this bridge between the idea of what psychological safety is and the reality of what it means even to, to leaders in itself. Because therein lies the biggest problem, doesn’t it? That is the first and foremost, is understanding what it actually means and what the impact is before you start getting into the tools that you’ve got.

And we definitely want to go through that. At Conductor we, we look at it. A little bit differently because what we are doing is we’re actually measuring the drivers of threat and rewards. So those human drivers in which we feel motivated to lean in and participate into something, or where we’re actually feeling a threat response and, protecting ourselves, we’re actually measuring those drivers.

So it’s a little bit different to what a lot of regular psych safety tools are using. Not to disparage any of them because I wanted to go a little, we wanted to go a bit deeper into understanding what are the triggers? Not whether it’s actually people who actually feel psychologically safe or not, because that doesn’t help leaders.

I can tell you, your staff don’t feel particularly safe with you as a leader. What does that mean? That gives them nothing. And I, for. For the founders at Conductor, we really understood the pressure that leaders are under the demands for them to be the solution to everything. And I think that’s a really big expectation for us to hold on any human being, let alone leaders themselves.

So that’s number one is so when we’re able to measure that, what we can see is what is the willingness capacity. For leaders to, and people within the organization to be able to contribute at their best. And what are the practices that we are doing in business that aren’t supporting that?

And so many of the traditional leader practices, the way that we’ve learned to be leaders and the demands and the drivers that we have to be leaders, they’re actually counterproductive to creating that space where people. Can maintain peak energy and continue to con continue to contribute at their very best.

So we’ve got this disconnect between what we as humans need to be able to perform really well, but the demands of business of what they want us to do, and it’s actually counterproductive to being able to achieve that. So we really wanted to get into that and understand what that was. So yes, it’s about, where can people speak up, whether they, where can they contribute?

Where are their energy levels? Where are we draining that? Who, where are the teams that are most at risk of stress and burnout? Risky behaviors, toxic behaviors, competitive behaviors. Where are we? Where are we rewarding the wrong behaviors? I. A lot of the time unaware that we’re actually creating the toxic behaviors that we want to change.

So I think that’s really important for everyone to understand. As I said, we’re not looking at people’s, we’re not, it’s not a psychology assessment by any stretch of the imagination. We are looking at where cognitively do we feel safe, which draws onto our emotions to contribute or not to contribute.

And then between that’s the real gap in business performance and productivity. So what we see is businesses are nowhere near. Operating as well as they could. Most of them are mediocre at best, yet they have no awareness of that because we’ve become so indoctrinated into these human behaviors and how difficult it’s to deal with humans, that we accept all of these behaviors and these actions where it’s actually really easy to circumvent that and change the outcome of those things.

There is, I. One thing that I wanted to ask you before we get into how businesses can better understand that, because clearly there is a lot to discuss there, but the whole idea of safety and. I’m wondering, is that a term that workers relate to? Is that what they’re looking for? Or is this a, some, is this a kind of a, an anchor tool that’s been provided around that?

Like when you speak to different businesses as you do and you speak to the teams within it, is safety what they are looking for or is it made up of a whole lot of different things? That’s a really interesting question actually. I. I think there are aspects of the workforce who are, who consciously are thinking of safety, and I think it depends on your role as well.

In construction, in mining, in any of those really high risk industries, you are very aware of safety and its impact on not only you, but on your colleagues and the whole thinking of everybody deserves to go home at the end of the day. But I think subconsciously, I believe we are all looking for safety.

Like it’s, you don’t want to, you don’t ever feel comfortable walking into a meeting knowing that you are going to be the target that’s going, that all the blames going to be put onto, or you are at the pointy end of having to respond to that makes you so fearful. And yes, it can be intoxicating to come through that successfully, but for every human being we can all stop you.

You and I can stop now and you can think of an experience that you had to hold your breath, where your stomach felt sick. Where you were sweating, where you had no idea what the outcome was going to be, where you did not feel safe, you did not feel like people were there to support you, protect you, to help you to learn.

So what happens there is that, yes, we might all be looking for it. We might not all get it, and you, we get a lot of leaders who go, that’s not my job to make it a safe space, but I argue it is because. It’s impacting your bottom line. That is the whole focus of conductor. You can choose not to help make a an environment that allows people to make mistakes and learn from it as a team.

But it’s your productivity. It’s you hitting your goals at the end of the day, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, that is impacted. You are not hitting your goals. So when you have an organization. That isn’t interested in making sure that people feel safe enough to learn. They don’t have a learning environment, and we have enough research globally around this.

Now, to understand how important that is, what happens is your teams don’t align. So either the individuals in your team don’t align, so they’ll be competitive. They’ll hide information because that’s how you are rewarded. You get a promotion. So we’re hiding information from each other. Instead of actually sharing that information, which drives new opportunities.

So those behaviors are actually impacting the business over a longer term. So yes, I believe subconsciously we all want to feel safe and that there’s a balance because we can feel too safe that we don’t want to perform or that we’re comfortable not performing, and that’s no good for an organization either or we can feel so fearful.

That we are too afraid to make a mistake. We are too afraid to offer a customer, an a solution that’s not part of our product line that could be really unique and valuable. So it, it has consequences at either end. And I think for me, the issue for so long, and the reason I was so excited about being able to start conductor was because.

Because how people are feeling in an organization and how they’re performing are so disconnected. That’s all siloed. We don’t know what really works. Leaders don’t know what works. Organizations don’t know what work, so they don’t know what is the right decision to make. It’s, and as you were talking there, I was thinking as well that, the most immediate examples that are, that even I can think of as someone who’s run my own business for a long time is actually, that knife’s edge that you have sometimes when you don’t know which way a client’s going to go, and they may have been the client for a while and you, they’ve called for a meeting and suddenly you’ve worked yourself up into a tears thinking that it’s all going to.

For some reason, and they could be on completely the opposite page. But it’s that anxiety that leads up to that. And and I think there wouldn’t be a business owner that hasn’t been through that to some degree. And I. So that’s, if you think about that’s what your staff are going through as well, and it’s interesting to know where their thinking is at various times.

I’ve had team members where you are worried that they may be thinking exactly that kind of scenario, thinking the worst. And you are trying to push them into a different place. So how do you go about. First of all, being aware, and second of all, making a at a safe place.

So what are the key factors? I think that’s, part of the core of what we’re doing at Conductor is it can feel very overwhelming. Like you’re trying to put all of these pieces together going, oh my God, like this isn’t easier for leaders. This is more complicated for leaders because as you’re right, depending on your previous experiences.

You are creating scenarios in your head about what could be happening. Every employee’s doing that, every leader’s doing that. So what our reason and our reasoning for being able to measure these threatened reward triggers, these motivators is so leaders don’t have to try and guess. So we measure at the team level and we’re actually able to create.

A roadmap for every individual leader about what it is their team is needing from them so they don’t have to guess anymore. So it can be a really targeted approach to them being able to give the leader the understanding of what those drivers are and why that’s important for their team. So the reason that works so well is because you don’t need to be offline.

You don’t need four hours on end doing training. It’s. Targeted to what’s going on in your team. So it’s meaningful. It has application for you as a leader, and it’s actually providing you with skills and habits that you are able to embed because you are conscious, consciously using them on a day-to-day basis.

So we never go in with, 30 different. Issues that a leader would have to address it. It’s always one, two, or three things at the most that you would ever look at addressing because the moment you’d start to make changes in those areas, you can start to see the rest of the things fall into line or become a little bit misaligned that a leader needs to focus on.

So things I’m talking about, and we all know how important certainty is in an organization. Like we know we have to have values, we need to have a mission, we need to have, goals, KPIs. We also need to know what our role is. But you can start when you start to see that certainty breaking down within a team, because leaders are struggling in being able to provide that communication, that certainty, but also to support their team and make sure that they’ve, got what they need.

You can start to see that. Pull at the edges. I’m gonna say sometimes just really pull at the edges and you can, that starts to create some manifestations in actions not being taken or people not really fully collaborating or contributing into the team, simply because it might be a trigger for them that they’re not really sure about what to do and they’re too scared to.

To just make a guess in case there’s ramifications to them making the wrong move. So we’re able to just see that in a heat map really easily, really effectively, really quickly. And then the leader can actually target in those particular areas that come across in the factors. And it, as I said it, it’s one or two of those factors that would be driving that issue, and then it’s just.

Leaders being able to understand what can they do each day in able to support and address that and, support the team to feel, not feel so confused or unaligned with what the team’s trying to achieve. So it needs to be very simple. It needs to be fast and it needs to be something leaders can look at periodically and just.

Start to tweak the things that they’re doing within their team. Because teams change all the time. Psychological safety is not a place you get to ever. You have different team members coming in. You have different external environmental things coming in and impacting people’s everyday lives. You have different products being released.

You have, all, a whole range of different things happening in any organization on any given day. And so, it’s not a say, it’s not for us to get to this. Oh, you are psychologically safe now. Good luck. And you’ve got everything you need. It’s really about building skills that help you to pay attention to what’s going on in the people around you.

And the more you learn those habits, the quicker you’re able to actually see those things in real time. So you don’t, you. What my experience is, I can walk into an organization most times. I don’t need to see the results of what conductor’s doing. I can already see what’s happening in the organization because you become so finely attuned to the micro cues.

And I think, what happens in leadership, particularly today, is there is leaders don’t have time to look for the micro cues. Those that can. They have really good people skills. But those that are so busy doing business as usual and trying to cope with all of the demands that are being placed on them, they often miss the micro cues and because of our technology that we’re on all the time.

So it’s a very simple process. We benchmark leaders see their results and they work together to be able to. Understand those results and how they will be impacting them, achieving the goals for the organization. And we like to do that with leaders together as a cohort because leaders are feeling really vulnerable at the moment.

They don’t feel safe enough to often acknowledge that they might be struggling. And so I think. As they’re building psychological safety down into their teams, creating leaders who have psychological safety and actually can collab, collaborate more effectively together is really important because then they start as a team to function together to hit the goals so you don’t have siloed functions and teams and leaders trying to achieve their own goals.

It’s what’s the goal of the organization that we’re all trying to achieve? And that’s where the power comes in of building the psych safety. I imagine that one of the hardest things is as well, that you talk about triggers. It’s particularly as a leader, if you’re aware of what some of the triggers are in, in trying to.

Allow for that. You also have to try and be not specific to the person because you don’t want everyone else to necessarily know that’s a trigger for them as well. Is that so there is that, it’s not it’s finessing this all the time and there are gonna be new triggers all the time because of external factors that will come into the equation.

So it is a difficult navigation path for leaders, isn’t it? I.

I think if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is that an individual’s personal triggers. Maybe I’m having, maybe I’m struggling to find a new place to live. I need to, maybe I can’t find, I’ve gotta change residence and I’ve got all of this home struggle. So you bring that personal.

Pain with you? We do, because it’s a bit of a it can create tension, it can create exhaustion, it can create but I don’t think it’s, what am I trying to say? There’s a level of understanding as a leader that we can appreciate the personal things that our people are going through, so we can, we know that somebody might be struggling with something in their day to day life.

We can allow space for that, we can allow them time to be able to deal with those things. That’s one scenario. But I think a lot of the triggers I’m talking about are the to do with the, those threat and reward triggers that happen every day in the workplace. So for us, we use the CARES model our CARES model, we talk about certainty.

Autonomy, relatedness, equity and significance. So these drivers are what drive us as human beings. So if you are a leader, and most leaders often are, a lot of leaders have really high significant needs, like I’m important, I’m recognized as being important because you’re a leader, you need to have that authority.

So that can be understanding. Or they have very strong needs for autonomy. Okay? So they don’t, they’re very autonomous. They make decisions every day. But very often what will happen is leaders will then start to treat their teams in the same way. So they will expect them to operate with autonomy.

But you might have a team who, yes, they don’t want to be micromanaged, but they might need high degree of certainty about what are the rules? Maybe there’s no tolerance for mistakes. Or maybe they’ve learned that people who make mistakes or don’t hit their numbers get fired the next month.

So you might have these practices that create this outcome that everyone’s fearful of, because it’s meant to motivate you to be a really high. Performing worker, but the person at the bottom gets, let go. So you have this duality happening of you have a leader going, just go and do your job.

I trust you. But then you have staff just going, yeah, but if what am I gonna get fired? I need this job. I have home commitments. I’m trying to find a house. So you can see that those triggers like pulling at each other, they’re not a there’s no support mechanism around them. And there’s no clarity around what they need to do.

And so the leader just wants you to get on to do it. And they’re just looking for some clarity about what’s going on now, if that’s happening, what you have. Is a team that really drains the leader because they’re always looking for clarification. They’re always looking for someone to be the final decision maker.

They don’t make decisions on their own. So that can end up draining a leader because they’re always, they can’t strategize. They’re always having to help fix their team’s issues. So these are the types of triggers that happen every day in the workplace. Leaders have become really accustomed to them. They talk to us about how frustrating it is.

But then when you just start to see what’s causing those, then you can start to change the whole dynamics around that. So as the leader becomes much more efficient in their communication, much more clear in what’s expected of them, then you have, you can create team members who feel really comfortable making decisions.

Day to day with regards to their work because they know now know what the outcome’s going to be. So it seems complex, but it’s not. It’s actually incredibly simple because we don’t have the foundations, right? What we see is most leaders don’t have an understanding of the foundations. They don’t have insight into what’s happening at that ground level.

They’ve got all of this leadership knowledge and expectation. But not the foundations built. So if we can give them clarity and insight into that, that creates a very strong base from which to build a team. Because it builds trust, it makes the team more resilient. You have a leader who’s not constantly stressing on the edge of burnout, taking on more and more responsibility to cover for their teams.

We’re seeing that happen so much at the moment. And then you have a team that can actually flourish because they know the rules, they know what to expect, and it’s consistently delivered so they can start to trust and relax. Once they start to trust and relax, that means their prefrontal cortex starts to do all the work, not their emotional side, just stopping them and pulling back and not allowing them to actually engage.

So two questions that came out of what you were saying there. One part is how often do you need to check the temperature of your team in order to be able to making these results consistently valid and for people to check in on. And then the other side of that as well is.

What do we need to do then as a result to take them to trust? I, with organizations we work with, I recommend around two times a year that you would, particularly if you haven’t been looking at psychological safety and that you have, the results most organizations are sitting at around in the seventies at the moment.

There’s a few in the sixties, but most that, so the scores between zero and 100. So most organizations are sitting in seventies. So for us, that’s what we see is these are organizations where people, they’re accustomed to working in teams but not as teams. That makes sense. So scores much lower than that.

People are very individualized, very self-protective. But at this 70 range. We’re accustomed to working in teams, that means we can collaborate. But we don’t know how to work as a team and we need to be able to get teams to work as teams because then you can have robust conversations and idea exchange.

So twice a year in order to to start off. So that might be for the first year or two. To so that leaders start to understand where their teams sit and to start working through some of these factors. So it really depends on the speed of the leaders in how and how much knowledge they have.

And as they understand the neuroscience and the neurobiology that sits behind each of these factors, then they start to understand. The opportunities that are ahead of them and how to capitalize upon those and how to. You’re moving away from the carrot and stick manipulation approach of leadership, like trying to get people just to do what they need to do to actually being an influencer.

You become a key influencer. You become a leader that people, because they trust you, because they know your expectations, because you are predictable. They know what to expect. And it allows them to follow through. So I definitely would say two, two times a year for the first couple of years so that they’re learning and understanding those skills.

And then after that, you may go to once a year depending on what’s happening, but it depends what go, what’s going on in organization. We have organizations who use it before going through an m and a merger and acquisition. Or change project so that they can understand what’s the capacity, what’s the resilience level of the organization to be able to support this.

So the usual ways, particularly in a change project, let’s identify who the change champions are because we’re gonna get them to do the work. That’s a whole lot of additional work that you are putting on a few people. As opposed to ensuring you’ve got everybody understanding that why the change is important and actually the majority supporting the change project because you’ve got so much better communication coming through that it leads that change very simply instead of pulling you, this anchor behind you trying to get everyone to change.

So that, that would be my recommendation. And it ranges from depending on what’s coming through in the results. So that’s always the tricky piece. It could be that there are. Policies and practices that need to be looked at. So they might need support or working groups in order to be able to do that.

They could do that themselves. They can hire consultants in to help them do that. We do a lot of coaching and workshops just to get that neuroscience and neurobiology information. The why. Behind these things, why they’re important to us as human beings. That’s the piece I wanna get to the leaders because that what, that’s, it transforms the way you look at life, transforms your relationship with your families.

It transforms the relationship you have with stakeholders, with clients. You use every part of this with every interaction that you have. ’cause you start to understand people in a very different way. So it could be coaching, could be cohort coaching. Could be workshops, depending on the extent and the level of what’s going on in the organization and what it is they want to achieve.

Is your utilization or efficiency rates not high enough? Is it sales conversion rates? Is it work health and safety metrics? So what’s not working? And that’s always the target for us. So whatever changes we are doing is always. To lift that bottom line piece. And once you do that, leaders start.

And do you see that? I was gonna say, do you, yes. Is that once you’ve been working with the business for a while you start to see those, the impact of what you’re doing. Yeah. It’s not even a while. It’s not even a while. It’s. Oh my gosh, that can happen so quickly. We’ve had a retailer, they increased their sales conversion rates by 14.3% within 60 days by folk, by improving the psychological safety, helping the leaders understand what it was and what their teams needed.

We’ve had we’ve had dev teams improve lines of code by 50% within 30 days. We currently have a, one of our partners who works in the services sector call centers not-for-profits, anyone that delivers services. So what we’re seeing is for every 1% improvement in efficiency or utilization, they’re seeing a 12% increase in bottom line revenue.

So 1%. It’s huge. It’s absolutely huge, particularly if you’re talking not-for-profits because they have such little margin. Anyway, so this is what psychological safety goes to the heart of you actually, because your teams can’t align. How can you be efficient? You can’t make that efficiency because you are all disconnected, focusing on different things.

But when you focus on. When you actually can connect it to the bottom line, you’re keeping the leaders focused on what’s important, but you are giving them the skillset and the habits to make sure that they can bring the people along with them. And that’s the game changer, and that’s what we haven’t had.

So, give me a few tips for business owners that are sitting out there at the moment going, what is it that we can do immediately to try and understand a, I was gonna say if we have a problem, but as you say, pretty much everyone is gonna have something that they can improve and problem may be too strong a word, but.

What are the things that they can be immediately attuning into and starting to shift that will make a bit of a difference. One of the big things I see consistently in organizations that I think they, to really start with organizations, have they create their values, okay. Which are really important.

It’s really important to understand what the values of an organization are. But then those values aren’t lived by leaders or teams further down, particularly in large organizations where they spend so much money developing their mission, their values and their objectives. So that lack of cons. This comes back to consistency.

’cause the brain is a prediction machine. We need to predict. That’s why Covid was so difficult. It’s why things are so difficult now. We can’t predict what’s gonna happen into the future. We’ve got all this catastrophizing going on. None of us have been through a world war. We’ve never been through this much turmoil.

We’ve never been through what the United States is going through right now. The United States have always been this major partner for a lot of the countries, Western countries, we are seeing all this play out, but we’ve got no map to go, oh, this is how we deal with it. And that’s what the brain needs.

It absolutely. That’s how it functions. Oh, this happened. I know what to do with that. I’m going to make this decision. So the, when you have organizations that don’t, whilst these are your values, but then everybody’s not aligned to those values or they’re not actually. Living those values. There’s certain individuals who get to do it differently, who have, different rules that they can live by.

That is the biggest odor of trust. So if there is anything for any executive team, CEO is to understand that because I guarantee you there are leaders further down who might who circumvent those. And that creates, if you feel like there is a lack of trust in your organization that’s potentially where it will be coming from.

The other big thing is we’re just one big happy family, which a lot of organizations talk about. Sorry about that. That’s often, it can be true. It can be true, but often what I see is. Big, happy families just mean people are too scared to speak up. So you are going to struggle to innovate. You’re going to struggle to understand what it is your clients really need.

’cause it means you either have staff who really don’t care, they don’t they feel like they don’t belong or nobody listens to them anyway, so they’re not gonna raise things ’cause they know it doesn’t go anywhere. I think as an organization you are missing a lot of opportunities when your people don’t want to com don’t want to sit down and have a chat with you and go, Hey, I was.

I was with Joe, our client this week, and he said this if your cl, if your staff aren’t coming back and sharing that stuff, you are missing gold. And that’s a big red flag. Ai, there’s a lot happening with ai. There’s a lot that’s going to happen with ai. There’s a lot of opportunities for people with ai, so I think a lot of people, particularly at the moment are seeing this as.

A launchpad to go and do something different because they’re not finding satisfaction in their roles. So I think if you, if that’s happening in your organization as well, if you feel like people aren’t satisfied, you don’t just have to put up with it. It’s not just people. There’s a reason for it.

There is stuff happening inside your organization as to why they’re not satisfied, and it is so easily rectified. But you have to just understand what those triggers are, that the barriers that are getting in the way from people going, this is a company that I really believe in and trust. I don’t think they’re lofty goals at all, so we should all be aiming for them.

No. There are so many great tips in there, and it says one of these things that we could keep unpacking for many hours. But just before we wrap up, I think there’s two things. One, one firstly was just to lay the groundwork for all of this. There’s a fair amount of neuroscience and training and stuff behind it.

This is not just something that you’ve just magically pulled out of the clouds to come up with. This is. Based on a fair amount of work. And I think it’s important that people do understand that, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my background is I used to work with Linda Ray at Neuro Capability.

Neuro capability delivers neuroscience of leadership training to leaders all over the globe. I also. Studied policy at uni. So looking at the cause and if I was always interested in the cause and effects of things, so looking at government policy and programs. Have this background in the social sciences of always looking at the environment and what were we trying to do and what was the outcome.

And that’s just fed this crazy view and desire I have in the world of. Why? Why do we just accept what we’re doing even though we’re not getting the results that we want to be getting? So yes, we can change that. And neuroscience just opened me up to all of that. It was like, oh my gosh this is the why behind everything.

And it’s so powerful and you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to understand that at all. It’s there. There’s so many things that we do on in an everyday practice. That come from that understanding. It’s, we use it in economics, we use it in marketing, we use it in education. So much of what neuroscience is showing about human beings is just giving us the evidence that, so instead of us just, psychology was often just about trying to get research, testing animals and humans, unfortunately at times for both of them to try and understand why we do things.

Thanks to neuroscience, we’ve actually realized that the brain isn’t fixed. The brain continues to learn and grow otherwise, before that we just assumed whatever you, your temperament, your personality, your behavior, your intellect, it was fixed and it couldn’t be changed. And actually it can dramatically.

Neuroscience has really just opened up a window. I think there’s many doors to come as we continue to explore the human condition. And we should always be trying to learn more and better ways. And I always knew it was important. I just didn’t real, like I had no idea. A, I was coming down the pipeline and.

This capability is something AI will not be able to replicate. So leaders, if you want to be a leader through AI learning, this is going to be one of the best things you can do for yourself because it gives you higher order thinking and understanding.

I, I think just to wrap things up, there’s a question that I ask. All of my guests and I was just gonna say that I think you’ve already given us a whole bunch of different answers to this, but I’m interested in your one main response to it, which is, what is the at heart moment that many of your clients have when they start to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

Wow. I think I’m trying to put it into words. ’cause I’ve, yes, I’ve had those big aha moments. I’ve had doors closed. No one’s allowed to leave the room. We are, I wanna hear more about this. I think for me it’s the fact the conductor, particularly for A CEO or CFO or COO, these executives who are making decisions every day, they often don’t get to see the full picture.

They get bits and pieces of analysis from different groups and they’re trying to understand and do the best that they can with that and for them. So when we show them our bubble chart that plots, the psych safety of each of their teams against a particular KPI and how they’re performing, the big aha moment that we see is that then when they see that they’re not performing as well as they could be like.

The enormous opportunity that they have to lift performance even higher that they had no awareness of. And to realize that it’s just so simple to achieve. There’s work, but it’s not complicated. It’s not years and years of work and investment. I think that’s the biggest one when you can quantify that.

Yeah, it’s, our first client. We were able to show them $88 million in untapped revenue opportunity. Now, we weren’t going to get all of that. Wow. But when we could look at their KPIs and how much they were leaving on the table in an environment where they were losing money and they were considering having to close some areas, it completely blew their mind.

And that’s why when I refer to it with what’s going on in the US at the moment, you’ve got Musk in this march for efficiency that we’ve got to cull everybody and cut departments. And yes, some of that might need to happen, but what we’re showing is you can actually increase even more of that.

By focusing on the people and creating an environment that just allows them to be able to contribute at a much higher level, and that has much greater gains because you’re also looking at the community services and all the downstream effects that you will not see at the back end of what the US is doing.

They’re not recording that, so.

There’s just another opportunity and another way to do this that’s so much better for businesses, communities, humanity in general. I. So often businesses jump to the conclusion that to create efficiencies you have to cut. When in fact, if you drive more out of the what you already have, then that can be a much better result than trying to cut back.

And I, this is such a worthwhile argument. I’ve seen that many times myself, and I’ve seen it in the not-for-profit sector as much as I’ve seen it in the for-profit sector. And it is about an attitude of how you go about things. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve given us today. It was amazing amount of of insights and information for everyone to, to take on board and look.

We will obviously include all of the information about how to get in contact with you and your, and to have a look at the company and how your actual software works and ’cause it is a very visual tool as well. So it is something that I encourage everyone to. Ta to check out through the show notes afterwards.

But for now, thank you so much for being part of Biz Bites. Oh, thank you. It’s been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed being able to have this chat. Thank you so much, and thank you everyone. Don’t forget to subscribe and never miss an episode, and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites.

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We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.

The power of storytelling, how to transform your business and your life with Amanda Johnson. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amanda. We traded so many stories about why stories are so powerful, getting into the why and making sure that you understand how that’s gonna impact your business. And impact the audience that you’re trying to engage.

There is so much to unpack in this episode and so many great tips and insights. You don’t wanna miss this. Let’s get into Biz Bites.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and this is going to be a bit of a journey, I think today because we’re gonna be talking a lot about story and the power of story. And Amanda, thank you so much for being a part of this program. Thanks for inviting me. I’m excited. So Amanda, do you wanna start by telling us a little bit about what you do so we can give everyone some context?

Sure. So most of my career has been spent helping aspiring messengers become authors and speakers and coaches. So I am normally trying to help them figure out how to alchemize their story and their expertise into something that is really exciting and memorable for their audience. Get it on pages and stages really powerfully.

And along the way, very early on, I realized that. It was gonna be a little bit more than just giving them really good organisation and and a little bit of accountability. I figured out that a lot of the people, at least the ones who were landing in MySpace, were suffering writer’s block that was associated with their story.

There were parts of. Their message that they felt like they needed to share and their big why was in a story that they weren’t really excited to share or weren’t sure how to. So there’s a, I’m a partner in the writing and then I’m also a partner in the transformational process. And then the Save by Story is a publishing house.

So we take people from inspiration and impact. It is such a powerful thing to be able to share your story, but I wanna start with why people share their story. Why do you think it’s, it is so important for people to do it I think that you can answer that question from two angles.

For people who wanna be speakers or authors or coaches. Our goal is really to go into the world and help other people, right? We’re trying to share a message, and the question that everyone is asking when you’re sharing your message is, I wonder why this person cares about this. And the why is in the story.

Usually the solutions that we’re bringing to the world, the insights, the paradigm changes, those are all associated with everything that we’ve learned along our journey. And so telling that story is a really. Powerful way to connect with the audience, help them to understand, not only understand the message more intuitively, let’s say, but it’s really a powerful way to connect with them, to create that level of attunement and trust that we all need if we’re gonna take people on a journey.

And then from the personal angle, I think that, I’ve had some people come through. With really big visions of what they would do on the other side of the book. I’m gonna be a speaker, I’m gonna hit all these big stages, and they had their list of conferences they wanted to speak at, and then they got into the writing and that personal transformation that happened.

They realized that was actually what made them want to tell their story, that there was something that. They weren’t remembering correctly or some sort of insight that they needed to take back or some part of their story that needed what we say it’s saving. Go back and save your story.

There’s all of these parts of us that get left back in these, hard times and also in the good times. And so going back and just seeing that whole narrative. I think it adds a huge amount of confidence when we’re sharing our messages with people. We know, like we know that what we’re saying is coming from an A 100% authentic integrated space.

Yeah, it’s I having worked in that space as well in terms of asking people about their, why it’s such a powerful thing. And you are almost border on being a therapist feeling like that, don’t you, when you start getting into and prodding people? I have been called such, yes. Yes. In fact, I had one client who.

We wrote a book co-wrote a book with a bunch of my clients called, you can’t make this story up, because the things that would happen inside of the creative process were just so synchronistic magical, fill the blank. It was just hard to believe you couldn’t make these things up. And so I asked them to write their stories about what happened while they were working with me.

And then I got the opportunity to write why they came into my life. ’cause each client has driven my own personal and professional story forward in a really important way. So I had one client who wrote her chapter for this and shared it with one of her therapist friends. She’s also a social worker, and he said he sent her an email back and said, does Amanda know that she’s a therapist?

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We will do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it. So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. So I had one client who wrote her chapter for this and shared it with one of her therapist friends.

She’s also a. Social worker and he said he sent her an email back and said, does Amanda know that she’s a therapist?

Yes, it’s happened. Yeah. It’s I think one of, a couple of my favorite stories of doing something similar. One was with, actually with a friend and I was prodding him about his why I. And it led him back to a memory that he hadn’t thought about since he was, he was in his early teens, I think when this, when it happened.

And it, it involved a going to a markets with his father and that going into the whole story. The interesting thing about it was that. It had set him up for his entire career and he didn’t know why he loved what he did. And where since finding that out, it’s changed his perspective completely.

And ma, as you say, it made him a lot more confident as a result of it. And also that willingness to be able to share it and give people that perspective. ’cause we are a product of our upbringing. Yeah. And it affects, it shapes the way that we deliver everything into the world too. I had, when you were sharing that, I was thinking about one of my clients who I worked with, oh, a decade ago or so, and same thing.

Got her all of the organisation, we figured it out which stories are gonna go where and how she was gonna help these young professionals figure out how to be successful. And she came to me knowing that her, the wisdom that her mother shared with her when she was very young was extremely important. She knew that would be a hallmark throughout the book because she knew that’s what set her apart when she was a young professional, like she had all that wisdom.

She didn’t have to go searching for it or developing it. Her mom really imbued her with it at a young age. But this woman cannot write this book. She just sit down and get absolutely stuck. And so I said, you know what? Why don’t you just let’s rent a cabin in the mountains. I was living in Oregon at the time, and we’ll just hang out and get the writing done.

Just, I just need you to like, get into the momentum of it. First day, no writing. No writing. Stuck stuck. Second day. I’m making breakfast this little cabin, and this woman is asking me a hundred million questions about what I’m making. What are the ingredients? Where did I get the recipe? Why do I do it like this?

How does this deal with my, she’s asking me and I thought, are you like a foodie? Is this part of your story that I don’t know? She said, oh, yeah, I’m a trained chef. Okay. So I thought maybe there’s a way to integrate her love of food, because this was something that was really important.

Do you use food when you’re working with young professionals? Oh yeah. I invite them into my kitchen all the time. I bring them stuff at work, coffee croissants. This is how, this is the then environment in which these little bits of wisdom are being transferred. And so I thought that’s interesting.

I wonder. When did your mom share these little tidbits of wisdom with you? And she said, while she was cooking our dinners, bingo. This love of food was deeply connected to all of her expertise, all of her wisdom and everything that she wanted to share. And it was so hard for her to be able to deliver that without.

The ingredients that mattered. And so once we infu infused food and this idea of ingredients for success into the process, the book was written so quickly, it would make your head spin. I was gonna say, you didn’t end up, did you end up turning over the kitchen and eating lots while you wrote the book?

We did we eat, excuse me, we eat a lot when we’re on retreat together. It’s it’s good fuel, it’s good connection time. It’s good. Currency for story, what do you do when you break bread with other people? How was your day working on it? It, and it is and I think if people that are listening or watching in now, don’t believe us.

Just go and look at, pick your TV channel these days. Whether it’s Lifestyle Channel or SBS or any of those. I, one of my favorite shows that I watched in recent times was the Stanley Tucci series where he goes in Italy and it’s really him eating food. And telling stories with people. And it’s just fascinating and it’s just, you feel like you’re there and a part of it. And I think it’s so powerful that mix of those two things. And it actually doesn’t really matter what’s being eaten. It’s just the sharing of it and it’s, and food is quite personal. It’s when you’re sharing it.

It is, it’s absolutely personal and it’s one of those personal, and I’ve heard one of the thought leaders that I love to follow talks about. How primal it is that very primal social connective tissue of our families, sitting around a table and what happens to a culture when we stop doing that and when we stop doing it, around the water cooler at work or in these different places where we go and connect with each other.

When we miss out on that, the sharing that happens over food and stories. It’s, and it’s funny you say that is while you were talking, I was thinking. Thinking back on a few of the business conferences that I’ve attended over the last couple of years, and the most memorable parts of all of them were the sitting down and for want of a better term, breaking bread with people.

Yes. And it was just the casual conversations that you have while you’re sitting down and you’re. Having, eating something, drinking something, and it didn’t matter what it was. And I’ve had some incredibly memorable moments and discussions around those things, which is not to say that the conference themselves wasn’t incredibly powerful, it was, but the more memorable parts that stick with me were the stories that came out of it.

Definitely. And, I tried for the first year of my work working with these. High achieving overperforming, helping professionals who were just, out there changing the world like crazy, trying to get them to sit down and find some time in their lives to write a chapter or even a paragraph was hard.

And so it really is very early that I needed to. I kidnap them with consent, get them away to a place. And so I developed a retreat model, and that’s what I found very quickly was that here I had all of these, well-crafted exercises and all of these experiences that were designed to really pull the deep stories and the content out of them.

When I got the best content over the meals. Late at night when we were eating popcorn or dark chocolate together and this, all of those, all of the defenses and those perceived, needs to have a certain sort of persona associated with the expertise that they were bringing into the space.

With all of that gone. Over a good story of, and a piece of dark chocolate. All of a sudden I had a whole bunch of content that I needed like what happened with that client, over a meal. All of a sudden, boom, there’s that little bit of information that makes the message so much more memorable and powerful for the reader.

And it’s, and it is a good tip for people that are listening in and wondering how to get to some of this content that they’re trying to unlock for different reasons. Sometimes it is just walking away from the office, going and sitting down, and whether it’s with someone or on your own, but going and having a meal that’s.

Taking you away and taking you to and I think often it’s something that whether you are put yourself in a situation where you’ve gone to a nice restaurant and it’s a beautiful view, or whether you’re at home and cooked something for yourself that has meaning for you. If it’s something that, your mom used to make or any of those kinds of things, it’s often a great way of doing that.

And I mentioned before I had a another client that I was very memorable. And it was interesting because we’d done this whole. Exercise around trying to get to her why? And she really gave me nothing. Like we were just, we got bare bone stories, but I was getting yes, no responses. And it was a really tough session in that respect.

And I left it with her. And then as it turned out, that night around dinnertime, I had to go out with my wife and we were in a, we were in a shop and so it was like 7 30, 8 o’clock at night. And the phone rings and it’s this woman. And I’m like, why is she calling me now at this time? I wouldn’t normally, clients don’t call me at that time of night.

So I picked up the phone and she said, oh my God, I’ve got it. I’ve got it. And she was just so excited because it had suddenly clicked for her. I got more words out of her in a, two minute phone conversation than I did for the sort of one hour session that we were together. And it was just that, that she was, she had been sitting down at home having a meal and suddenly it clicked.

And I think that is a, it is a powerful thing to take yourself away. It is. And to do things. If you think about food, it’s so sensory. It’s the smells and the tastes and the textures and the, like a whole experience. It’s a different setting, and so it is a story in and of itself.

And those are the. Those are the elements that make a story re, memorable inside of someone’s mind, right? Like we, when we look back, we don’t remember the everyday mundane things. We remember the moments that have a lot of sensory experience, how we felt, what we smelled, what we saw when we were in that moment.

And so I think when. That is one of those secrets of, a little bit more immersive of an experience that’s touching on all of those senses, activating all those neural pathways. And if you do that with the intention of calling something up, who knows what’s possible. I. It’s funny, isn’t it?

’cause I think we can all do this exercise and just go, what are some of our favorite memories as a child? And and I was thinking about it then as you were speaking that I remember when I was probably about four I. My grandparents used to come and come over on a Saturday and they always brought like a gingerbread man or something like that.

And I’ve got a memory of that and that, you know what? You know that they used to take we little bikes and things, whatever. My sister and I, whatever you had at that age, and they used to pretend that we could. Cycle up a tree or something where they just lift us up. We were little obviously at that point, and that’s, that is a full sensory kind of memory, because I can, it’s the smell of the gingerbread man.

It’s the, them arriving, it’s, they’re pushing us along and whatever bike we had, it’s, that whole experience is very memorable. And I think that’s something that’s. The reason we are talking about this is because it’s so important in a business sense as well to be able to deliver that to people.

Because if you just rely on, and you, we see it all the time on LinkedIn, for example, people just telling very flat. Stories. And and it’s just yeah, it just it drives you mad, doesn’t it? It’s and it must be for you, be frustrating for you as well as a as someone who is trying to bring out stories from people to read these things and going, what are you doing?

Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I mean if we want people to come along on any journey, any sort of growth journey, personal, professional, if we want them to learn anything, we have to establish a connection with them. And that connection, if you keep it a completely mental connection, here are my great ideas.

That’s as far as the learning can go. Oh, there’s a good idea. I. But if you start to, to your point, start to include some of the other senses, and you start to ask questions that evoke emotion, and you start to connect that emotion with the physical senses that are happening in their body, all of a sudden, all of that person is listening to you.

All of that person is totally engaged. And so whatever you deliver after that, it’s being soaked in at a completely different level. And that sort of idea of that immersive experience is so incredibly powerful. It’s, and if most people in business think about it, when people get to touch, feel, experience, whether it’s a product or a service that you have, then it’s completely different to just, here’s what we’re going to do in a lovely PowerPoint presentation.

It’s not the same. It’s not and you have to and the power of story is that whilst that may not always be practical and possible to give that, you can try and bring people into that by a great story. And I think that’s the power of it, isn’t it? Yeah. And it doesn’t even have to be your own story.

I think it’s more powerful when it’s your own story, but making that initial connection through story. If you can make it meaningful and authentic and from your own particular journey, fantastic. But if you’re in a professional setting where the culture isn’t one that’s, completely open and authentic and vulnerable, then why not use story itself to begin to make those connections?

What are you watching right now? Whatcha reading right now? Yeah. What are you, what story has you like gripped? Like we’re here in this meeting and you’re thinking about what’s gonna happen when you turn that next episode on, what is that? And all of a sudden you get this little window into someone’s soul and what their.

Interested in and what they’re what type of medicine they’re looking for in the world. Because I, I think that all of our story addictions are attempts to, get some medicine out of what we’re watching, some sort of hero’s journey that we’re trying to. Figure out on our own.

And if no one tells us, Hey, there’s medicine in there, then we’re just watching it. We’re just consumed by it for, a good 10 episode run. And then we’re onto the next one because we didn’t get the medicine. Yeah, it’s interesting about that, isn’t it? Is it? And I always find those discussions are quite fascinating when you have, with people, when they say, what are you watching at the moment?

What’s good? And sometimes you listen to and you go yeah, that that’s not my thing. And you wonder if they’re thinking exactly the same thing when you’re telling them, oh, you’ve gotta watch this. And then it’s of course if they do watch it, then you go, did they get the same thing out of it?

Did they enjoy it as much as you did when when you were watching it? So it’s but you’re right, it is, there’s something that’s in there. We, yes, it’s not just entertainment for entertainment’s sake, because otherwise we would literally all be watching the same thing if we were, if we all had the same interests.

I know even in my household, we’re not all watching the same thing. It’s quite rare when we all just, there’s only one or two TV shows where we sit down and we are all watching it. The rest of the time it’s, I’m usually off in another room watching the sport while they’re watching something, some documentary that I’m, that I don’t wanna follow.

So it’s, but it is it is those windows in which allow. People to want to engage with you. And whilst that works on a friendship level, it works on a level of business as well. Because when you allow people into the stories that are making you tick, that are driving your business forward, that are experiences that you are willing to share, brings people in who are interested in those, or interested in those experience or find them relatable.

Yeah, we’re all wrestling with universal themes and I think that anytime you show real curiosity in another human being, I. Unfortunately in our culture, that’s a refreshing thing. You know it when someone says, oh, how are you doing? I’m fine. What if they really meant it?

Like, how are you doing? And they followed it up with I, what are what are you interested in? What are you working on right now? What are you watching? Any sort of. Additional attempt at curiosity and connection. It matters in our co and it matters in our world right now, where we’re all pulling up information on our phones in two seconds and, we’re so highly connected in some ways and so disconnected from each other in other way.

Absolutely. Your story. Yeah. And I think that’s so important that you. Have those engagements. I think, we talked about LinkedIn before and I’m sure when there’ll be people that’ll be seeing little clips on LinkedIn for this as well, and hopefully diving into the full episode.

But the real value in LinkedIn is actually connecting with people individually because the post, they’re great. They go out and more people might see you, but you’re at the mercy of the algorithms. You’re not at the mercy of an algorithm when you reach out individually to people. And just taking a moment to en engage with them in whatever level that might be, whether it’s.

Because it’s a special occasion, or whether it’s just because you’ve got something they might be interested in or you just wanted to touch base with them. All of those things are so incredibly powerful because the more that you build a relationship with people, the more opportunity you have to engage with them and their networks.

Yeah, absolutely. And I also think it’s really fun to think in terms of. Sharing client stories and sharing and asking clients to share their story of working with you. To me that’s one of the fun things that I love to see happening. It’s one thing for me to share the story of, this incredible event that happened with this client, this big transformation or book launch or something.

But it’s another for them to then talk about their experience in the process of creating that in our company and then go out and share that with the world. It’s just, the reciprocity of stories and what’s possible and the networking. I’m fascinated with that and I am, I’m really, I was just sharing with one of my clients this morning.

I. I wanna, I want a new model for that. No. One of my, one of my favorite things to do very early on I had this, my very first client, I. As this dynamic connector, she’s a sales coach, powerful human being, walked into a room and just knew how to connect with everybody. And I marveled because I was very introverted, had just spent, years at home with a toddler.

Can I talk to another adult again? What would I about adults talk about these days? The same thing they said five years ago. But that was one of our favorite things to do in networking was to tell our stories of working with each other because I was her coach helping her with all of her books, and she was my coach helping me to grow my business.

And so when we walked into spaces, we were listening for opportunities to tell our stories about the other person, and we just drove so much business to each other. It was crazy. It was so much more fun than going in and constantly introducing myself to people and telling my own story over and over again.

Yeah, it’s and it’s funny isn’t how the networking in those ki in, in those, when you go to those functions. Can be so hard because people go with the wrong attitude, I find most of the time, but also they’re not really listening. Yeah. And so if you take the time to just be listening and to respond to what they’re saying, it’s again, we go back to the story and I think you, it.

You relate to people so much more when you’re trading stories with one another as we’ve been doing. We’ve been trading stories for this during this podcast and that. Makes us more relatable to one another. Hopefully makes us more relatable to all of the people that are interested in what we do.

And I love the fact that, what you are trying to do is bring people into writing their books and writing their writing stories in that way. I’m doing it through the art of podcasting, but it’s the same. We’re driving for the same purpose, ultimately to make them more relatable.

Absolutely relatable and memorable because when you find that story, like the one of this, this client who had these incredible moments with her mom when she was a youngster, these very memorable, I remember the moments with her mom almost more than I remember. The moments that she had as a, young professional because they, they were so sweet.

And every time I think about her, that’s what I think about, and so they just make it easy for people to recognize you and I. Also to continue sharing stories about you after they’ve met you. Oh, I just, met this other person who told me this great story. What is it that she does again?

Oh yeah. She would be a great connection for you, yeah. It’s, and so let me ask you this. You’ve talked about one or two of your stories. So what have you got some favorites of people that you’ve worked with over the years and what made them favorite? Are you asking favorite stories of the writing process or favorite stories that they’ve told?

Favorite stories of the of the writing process first. Yeah. So the writing process, there’s always, I always love telling this one because it surprised both of us so oftentimes, many years I would work with someone and it would be pretty clear we’d be connecting their expertise and their story in a very important way throughout the book.

And I. And so it became obvious which chapters held the stories that were hard for them or that they were wrestling with, maybe outside the process of writing. These are things that story loops that are continuing to show up. They figured it out in the world of their profession, but this story loop is still happening back here in this part of my personal life, right?

And it always became the opportunity to say, that reminds me of this story over here. Could you apply the same method that you used here over there? And maybe improve that situation. But one of these clients decided she wanted to put her expertise into a fiction. So she is a social worker helping.

Very hard cases. Parents in high conflict divorces who were wrestling over custody for the children and, high conflict, high emotion. They’re making decisions out of hurt or revenge or like all of these motivations that are happening. She said, I could just write a bland.

How to, here’s how to prepare for your custody evaluation and to maximize your opportunity for getting more custody for your child. But I really want people to see themselves and to see the outcomes of their choices when they don’t put their children at the center. Okay, so she opted for a, do you remember those books, the Choose Your Own Adventure books when we were younger?

You get to the end of a chapter and you get to make a choice, and then it sends you in one direction or another. She created a book like this. And so she took a family where the parents were going through high conflict divorce, and the children were, of course, immersed in the very messy process of that.

And she took these characters and she gave the mom and the dad both three different choices. And all three choices sounded really good. This is probably the choice that this, that every parent should make, but only one of those three choices. Actually ended up with their children thriving and any sort of amicable experience between the parents.

And so it was this fascinating experience of watching her, mapping this out for the first time. It was a brain bender, first of all, ’cause I’d never done anything like that before. But as she started to write. I started to see a character on the page that reminded me of a character that she was constantly complaining about, interrupting her process of writing, and I thought, uhoh, I wonder if she’s writing her own story.

She’s, she hasn’t said anything about her marriage. She hasn’t talked about any sort of high conflict custody, anything like this is her profession. But this character reminded me a lot of what she was telling me about her husband. And I thought, oh dear. And so I, as I do I’m an, I call myself an Oracle.

I’m not the person who’s gonna tell you the way things are going. I’m gonna ask questions so that when you’re ready, you can put those pieces together for yourself. And so for 18 months, Anthony I tried to make these connections while she was writing this and. She couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see it.

Couldn’t see it. But she kept showing up for the retreats and doing the story saving work, and doing some of our writing quests. And 18 months in, I got a phone call from her that said, I think I just realized I’ve been writing my own story. And I said, oh, thank God. And she said, what? You knew. And I suspected.

And why didn’t you tell me? Oh girl, I tried to tell you like at least once a month for the last 18 months, and she couldn’t believe it. And so the beauty of what had happened was that, being inside of a space where she was able to write this story that had a lot of. Dark humor to it that gave her the ability to really get clear on who this character actually was in her life before she connected the dots, that was the character in her life.

As soon as it became an awareness for her that this was her life, she knew exactly what to do. She’d already written the book about it. She knew all of the right choices to make. She knew all of the ones to stay away from, and she was able to move through that phase of her life and like completely change her.

Not just her own personal story, but the generational narrative because she went on to find out that the same dynamic that had happened for her had been happening for generations before her. And she thought, what would’ve happened if I hadn’t seen this and my kids had been raised in it? My daughter, my son might have ended up in the same.

Sort of dynamic and she just ended it by writing the story, seeing it for what it was, and then taking the pen back in her own life and changing her own personal story. I. So incredibly powerful when people can do that. And and in the meeting it has and ’cause we are a product of our upbringing.

We’re a product of all of the things that have gone on around us and what have been told as being the norms. This is what what you’re expected to do. And and. Has played out different ways in different generations. A few generations ago it wasn’t unusual for parents to very strongly dictate what their children would study.

A little bit less so these days, but doesn’t mean there aren’t expectations there are around. Things and and what you end up doing, how you end up doing it, all these things. And you’re, I was talking with someone regarding finance yesterday and how that, your upbringing is such an impact on the way you think about money.

And so all of these stories that you’ve. Being told. And the stories that you tell yourself, and then the stories that you tell other people have this ongoing impact. And that’s why unpacking these is so incredibly powerful for, pers but and I think that’s the interesting thing here is that blend that you’ve got between what’s happening at a personal level, but then what can happen at a business level as a result of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it’s, it really is amazing when people have the opportunity to really see their whole story a little bit more, honestly, because it’s the stories that we’re told and, but it’s also how the stories shape us, and not just the stories that we’re living, but the roles that we’re cast in.

You know what the identities, this is the role that you play in the story. If you’re always a supporting character, how fun is that when you’re trying to grow a business? Not so much. You have to be the main character. If you’re out there growing the business, you have to figure out where did that story come from?

Where I’m the supporting character, and how do I change that? How do I become, what do they call an A-list actor? How do I change my own story about the role that I’m playing in the bigger story and that, there’s hardly any there are hardly any places in our culture and especially our education system that have any of us thinking about that at a young age.

We have to run into the end of a painful story to look up and say, okay, this isn’t working. Is there another story available instead of having people when we’re young, my son and I wrote a book called Raised by Story, and I wrote that because when he was born, I did not have any good stories to tell him.

I was like I’m nobody, but all of my stories don’t seem to be playing out. We need to write one. And because I didn’t have the religion or the dogma or any of that to figure out how to raise. A healthy, responsible human who could survive and not just survive, but thrive in the world. All I had left was the great stories, and so I got to instead of just, sit there and consume them with him, I sat on the couch with him and I asked him really hard questions.

Not at first when he was really young. They weren’t hard questions, but, building critical thinking and asking what would you do in that circumstance, he always hated it when I paused the movie to ask the question but it started to build that pause for him inside.

He started to ask those questions by himself without me. And what ended up happening was he just figured out okay, I’ve walked millions of miles and a whole bunch of character shoes who’ve made a whole lot of mistakes. I know what not to do. And what, if we had that, what if we had the opportunity to, when we were young, to think I could write this story the way that I want to.

I don’t have to necessarily be, I can be shaped, but not defined by my early story. Have you got any tips for people in terms of how to, what is the, is there a perfect construct for a story? I don’t think so. Right now I’m working on a program I. Where we’re talking about all of the different structures, so nonfiction when someone’s trying to include their personal story.

There are all different ways that plays out. But for me, I’m always looking, like I said, for the alchemy between the story and the expertise really to, so that the story is driving. The reader forward more than the concepts. The concepts are all deeply embedded, but it’s really the story that has the person, okay, what’s the next, what’s the next chapter gonna look like?

As it relates to, fiction, I. I think that we have that blueprint inside of us. If we’ve been paying any attention at all to the great stories, that are on in great books and on big screens that completely grip the world, we have that pattern inside of us. And I have one client who’s actually a partner now who.

She had this amazing idea for this story, wrote the entire, the plot out, had a whole bunch of scene work done, but something wasn’t working. And so she started to explore all of these different structures. Oh, I’ll plug all of my content into this structure, and I think this is true for.

Fiction and nonfiction, right? I’m trying to plug it in. Here’s the conflict and here’s the this, and here’s the that. And what started to happen was her, like the essence of what she was trying to bring. It got choked out. She got to the point where she felt like she was trying to put puzzle pieces together instead of enjoy the process of writing a story.

And so when I asked her to, pull her gripped fingertips off of those structures that were choking her message out and just right. What happened was unbelievable. In fact she’s an avid reader herself, so knows the blueprint since she was four years old and started to read and what was hilarious was we get to the end of the manuscript and I said, okay, now go back and look at all of those structures, the hero’s journey, the all of these different frameworks, and see how your book lays out next to them.

And do you know that it fit most of those structures just like to a t. But not because she’d been forcing and shifting and choking and reshaping and carving pieces of her character experience out, but because she just went with it, she just knew story innately and let it come out of her. And of course there were things to do around perspective and seeing work and those types of things that made it even more powerful.

But man, I think we all have that blueprint inside of us. I agree. You know this. There’s no one that you’ve, that you meet that can’t tell you a story and. How they tell it is always going to be different depending on the situation and things. But people can tell stories innately. They’re part of who we are as human beings and being able to bring them out is again, so important.

I wanted to ask you as well, what have you seen as being the impact? You’ve once, once someone has brought out their story, particularly, not just in a personal sense, but also in a business sense, what’s been the impact of being able to do that? I have a few, I have a few stories. One of them is I worked with this all my clients were brilliant in their own ways.

This one in particular was like an Ivy League trained. Educator who had gone through a very intense personal trauma that like this type of trauma upon trauma of losing her child, blew open her nervous system. And so she went from being this. Very functional, very, left-brained human, somewhat intuitive to all of a sudden feeling and hearing everything like she could.

She knew what people, where people were hurting in their bodies. She could hear some of the thoughts that people were having. She was like, wait a minute. This isn’t, I can’t continue living. I can’t be a mother like this. And so she went on a journey of repairing her nervous system and learning how to do that.

I. And so when I met her, she was in the process of trying to get this business off the ground of helping other intuitive empaths figure out how to be more productive in the world, right? Not to be burning out and to be overwhelmed with everyone’s empathic overload all of the time. And so when I asked her, what do you wanna write about?

She said, bliss. I said that, that didn’t ding me at all. What else you got? Are there any other stories that you’ve been thinking about or messages you’ve been thinking about sharing? And she admitted that there was one story that was this story. And she said, I’ve been thinking that eventually I’ll have to write that book about feeling other people’s pain.

I. That was the connection to her audience, not bliss. Bliss is so far away from individuals who are barely making it every day because they’re so overloaded with empathy and their nervous systems are all out of whack. And so that, I feel Your Pain was this perfect way to connect with her audience. And then she thought I’m gonna grow the coaching business and the certification business out of this.

And so she had this big plan and she was working it. And then the book got into the hands of someone at a university, and the university said, we have a problem with empathic overload and neurodivergence, and we need your help. And so I remember her calling me and saying am I giving up my, my am I selling out my mission, my vision?

There are all of these opportunities available to her. More impact, stable income, all these things that new entrepreneurs struggle with. I. And I, of course I was listening to her and we talked about it. Eventually she took the job and within a very short amount of time, she was working with big districts, helping all of these helping professionals and educators figure out how to regulate their nervous systems, completely changing classrooms and districts, and now has a global audience.

And it was all because she got clear on the impact of that story that, no one wants to go back and rehash that type of loss and pain and everything that happened after, and the wrestling match. That was the journey of finding the solution. But it turns out that’s what our audiences need.

They need to know that we have been there. That we have figured it out, that we have steps that they can take. And when they see us taking those steps, it’s a whole, it’s a whole new opportunity, a portal of possibility that opens up for them. I love that. I. So much more that we could talk about. But I do have to wrap things up and I wanted to ask you, the one question that I like to ask all of my guests is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they after they’ve been working with you for a little while, that you wish more people would know about in advance?

So you’re gonna get more people coming to work with you? The aha moment that they all have is at some point. Usually around the 60 to 70% mark, which is a funny thing. If you look at the hero’s journey and all of those story structures of the 60 to 70% mark of the writing, I get a phone call very similar to that one I told you about with that client where they say, okay.

I think the thing that I have been really challenged the challenge that has been keeping me from working on this project and moving my message and my business and my life forward. I could actually solve that if I just stop saying the same stupid script over and over again. Do you notice that every time this happens, I say yes when I should say no?

Do you notice that every time I should stay there and confront that person? I turn tail and run. I. Yes, I’ve noticed that in your story. And that’s the moment where I say they, they really have the opportunity to be the co-author because until then they are absolutely driven by a story. They’re the character in a story that is happening to them.

But when they have a moment where they realize, oh, if I just change the script. If I just walked off the stage, instead of keeping the stupid show going, I can change the trajectory of everything. That’s the aha moment. I’m always excited and waiting for. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing so many great stories and what those stories have meant to people and how they’ve changed people.

I think it’s such an incredibly powerful thing to be a part of. And I can see the absolute joy that you have and what you do every day. So thank you for being a part of the program. Thank you for the invitation. And of course we will have all of the information about how to get in contact with you, including some free resources and things that you have on your website.

And a link to your podcast as well that you’ve got as well that where you get into some deep stories with with some of the people you’ve worked with. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for listening in to Biz Bites and stay tuned. Of course, for the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites.

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