Mastering Sales & Growth, from small business to big wins in conversation w/ Chris Carey

Anyone in business, you don’t want to miss this mastering sales and growth from small business to very big wins. Chris Carrey delivers a whole lot in this episode of Biz Bites, check out some of the excerpts before we get into the show.

I found it really interesting that people don’t spend the time checking what their own things are online. I had a meeting yesterday with a company and they actually sent me a link to view something. And there was one comment under this video, which basically said, they’re like scammers.

These things just didn’t exist, right? So you need to be shifting your mindset from. The 20 years ago where your profile was, the interactions you had with people were how people thought of you in business or in personal life. Today, it’s everywhere. And that’s where I say to my kids who are. 18 and 20 like this, be really careful what you’re posting up there because that’s going to live with you forever, right?

It’s in the cloud somewhere and it’s not going anywhere. Welcome to Biz Bites brought to you by CommTogether, helping businesses like yours build their brand through telling amazing stories to engage and grow audiences on multiple platforms. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites.

And today we’re going to talk all things about making businesses grow a very different perspective on how that happens. A much more all rounded perspective with a view to how you do things in small business as well with some big business ideas and the man that’s going to help us Guide us through some of these ideas and give us a little bit about his background as well is Chris and welcome from growth team advisory.

Appreciate you being here. Yeah. Morning, Anthony. It’s great to be here. Chris, I’ve given a little bit of an introduction there, but I think it’s always better for our guests to tell us a little bit more about the business from their perspective. How do you see it? What do you actually focus on?

Okay. So the growth team advisory. is an advisory firm by the sound of the name which I set up approximately 12 months ago. The idea of it is that we really want to help small to medium sized businesses grow. So my background and some of the guys in the team that work with me, our backgrounds are all in, in growing businesses.

So I’ve worked for very large multinational companies. I’ve worked for pre-IPO companies. I’ve worked for private equity. I’ve done a lot of different things. And in all of those, I’ve always had that lens of growth and sales and ensuring that organisations can grow in the right manner, but also be able to scale without driving that cost through the roof.

And for smaller businesses, that’s so important for them. So utilising modern tools. From today to enable whoever is doing the selling to actually go out into the market and be able to do that faster and more efficiently and build really strong pipelines. And when I talk to executive leaders today, whether they be in bigger firms or smaller organisations, the pipeline is the big concern for everybody at the moment.

It’s so difficult to get that top in there. And once I get it in there, like you always talk to salespeople, they can close deals. They know how to do them. It’s getting the first conversation happening. And then moving it through the right stages to get that close. I think it’s a really interesting time.

There’s so many things I want to unpack with all of that. But I let’s start from the principle of the business itself, because I love the idea of the advisory style, because from what, you and I have spoken about previously before we started this recording and in a previous conversation is it’s really, it’s About the advisory is a bit more accessible than people would think, isn’t it?

Because it’s not the traditional sort of consulting model in the same way, is it? No, it’s not. It really is coming in as a trusted advisor to the organisation and having you along the way to deliver and reach those goals that you want to. So that’s very different from consulting. Consulting is another word that people use, but consultants tend to go.

Here’s a project. Here’s a fee. We’ll get to the end of it. And away we go. I’m myself and the people within my firm are about joining that journey with you and actually saying look, today it looks like this, but we know that things happen in the market. Look at COVID. Everyone had to pivot completely four years ago to a different business model of engaging with people.

You need to be able to cope with things like that. And if you’ve just got a real square box that says here’s all the scope of work I’m going to do for you. And here’s the cost of it. that. That is not partnering with somebody where its advisory advisories come in and saying, look, I’ve had a lot of experience.

I’ve been in organisations that have had situations similar to the ones you’re in today. I want to help you get through that. Yeah, I think it’s such an important differentiation because you’re absolutely right. And I think consulting gets a bad name at the best of times anyway, but there is the idea of collaborating and being in there.

And I think as well, as I understand it you’re a lot more accessible in terms of that advisory idea than perhaps what people think, because normally people would expect that’s a big business idea that they bring advisors in at some hefty fee often in boards and all those kinds of things as well.

And this is. Much more accessible, isn’t it? For small business. Yeah, a hundred percent, Anthony it’s much more easy because rather than saying, if you want to get people that have got the experience that I’ve got on the people in my team, you’re paying a lot of money if you’re going to employ them full time, whereas what we’re able to do from an advisory point of view is come in and do.

A small amount of time with you at a cost that you can actually bear within your business, but giving you, and let’s just say if it was one day a week every week for a month, right? The cost of that, what we can deliver in that one day of our eight hours of time is far more than if you’re going to put on somebody that’s a sales leader that, I don’t know, let’s pick a number that you’re paying a hundred thousand dollars to, our one day will probably deliver you more than their five to 10 days.

Because of the experience. So that actually, when you think about that, having access to people with over 30 years, sales experience, right? Getting access to that and people in my team have got 20, 15, all at high levels, right? Getting access to that at a price point that’s acceptable for your business.

Your ROI, your return on investment is massive. It truly is. And part of the things that we do as well, as we talk about what ROI do you need to get to, to make this a worthwhile exercise or, Oh here’s what we need to do. But in partnership with us, there’s things you’re going to need to do to deliver that ROI as well.

And I think the important thing about that is not just the ROI, but the fact that it’s, it is a collaboration, as you said before. And I think that’s an important differentiation because definitely, I’m sure you’ve done it. I’ve done it in the past where you do that sort of consulting style gig where you’re going in for a project and someone’s come and said, we want X, and this is what you need to do to be able to deliver that.

And Yeah. That’s where if you’re in a different situation where you’re advising them and you and it’s much more of a longer term relationship, isn’t it? It changes, I gather as the relationship builds. Yeah, it does. And I think so as you. The organisations we work with change as well.

They grow through our help and through their own actions. But as they grow, their requirements are different as well. So you might be a very small company that’s turning over, I don’t know, two, 3 million. We help you to get to five. Your organisational structure needs to be different. So maybe you need some advice in that, in the human resources area, we’ve got people we can bring in to help with that.

So it truly is that partnership. And the key to it, Anthony, is it’s like a tap, right? If you want to need a small amount. You can turn it on for a small amount, but if suddenly you go, wow, this is actually producing really good returns for me, I need to actually accelerate this, we’re available to do more time with you to do that.

Whereas a lot of the time you’ll end up with a scope of work from a consultant that says it’s. It’s eight hours a week. Here’s the outcome. Anything outside that scope. I’m going to charge you more money for it. Yes. And there’s a lot of grey areas when that comes into play as well.

And so changing the way you approach that I think is huge as well. And I guess that’s the next question: What sort of small businesses are you working with them? Is there a particular area that you’re focused on or is this something that can work for a variety of businesses?

I can really work for a variety of businesses. Myself and my team have got deep experience in. financial service, professional services finance accounting tech. I worked for HP, I worked for Dell, I worked for Canon. So there’s a lot of deep experience we’ve got in different industries. But what you find is that the problem normally is the same problem, just with a different way of putting it together.

And the solution to that problem is applicable across different industries. Sure. If you’re dealing, B2C as opposed to B2B, it’s probably a different way to go to market, but your solutions end up being very similar in the way you’re going to go and execute those because sales is just a conversation, right?

Like you and I are having right now. We have a conversation, we build up a rapport, there’s a bit of trust that’s built up, and once that trust is built up, you then can move to that next session of, you’ve got awareness, I’m now going to consider what you’re offering, you’re putting forward, and then if I trust you and I think the offering is right for me, I’ll actually move to engaging you for that offering.

And that’s really the simple, that’s a simple sales process, awareness, consideration, acceptance. That’s, it’s that simple and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, everybody does it that way. Yeah. And I think that’s an important thing as well as, is that bringing that big business idea to small business, it’s it, I’ve heard it spoken about and I’m sure everyone out there listening in small business has heard it spoken about, but the difference is actually making it real and actually making it work.

And I think that’s an important differentiation. Having that. Having access to that sort of level of expertise in that particular way is, I think, a bit of a game changer to the way businesses can think about how they actually want to grow. Rather than chugging along and doing the same thing and hoping they’re going to learn as they go.

Yeah, there’s a bit of a saying that I certainly didn’t invent this, but one that I’ve heard over my career many times, skill and will. And a lot of the times when you’re dealing with entrepreneurs and small businesses, they’ve got the biggest will in the world, right? They want to get this thing done.

They’ll work as hard as they possibly can, but it’s that skill element that they might be lacking in not through their own fault, just because they haven’t had that experience that we can really come in and identify the skill gap and then help them to cover that either through us teaching them what they need to do.

Or alternatively, it might be that they just need to hire somebody who’s a little bit different to come in with that skill set. And help them through that and we will assist them with that as well. So that skill and will thing is really important. I think also too, you yeah, you think about the difficulties that small businesses face today.

It’s no different than a large business that’s trying to grow at 10, 15%, which is quite difficult for a large business to do because there’s a lot more money they’re going to bring in. But those smaller businesses have the same issues there. So for us to be able to stand in and go, here’s our experience, here’s the skills you’re going to need.

Let’s go and help you. Cause they’ve all got the will or most of them anyway. Yes. Yes. And, but I suppose that the flip side is also, it can also be true kind of that, that the small business, it’s not about the wheel, as you say, it can sometimes be a lack of. Experience and lack of knowledge, but is there, is there sometimes a gap?

Do you have to change the way you think because of those bigger business ideas to bring them to make them more accessible in terms of small business? Because it’s, obviously in a big business, there’s lots of people you can turn to, and you can do some, you can do some things a lot quicker and a lot more easily.

So if you’re a small business and you might only have a handful of people, even bringing in an advisor isn’t necessarily always going to give you that. Big business way of doing things that may not be relevant to them. So do you have to, do you find you have to adjust your thinking a little bit? Yeah, you’ve got to adjust your thinking and you’ve got to adjust that execution plan.

Cause everyone, I look at some fantastic business plans, right? And it always, they look fantastic, but it’s that execution piece that always lets them down. And just an example, the other day I was working with a company that’s put in a particular CRM system. Now, if I was in a big business, I would go and hire somebody that knows that CRM system backwards and can change everything I need.

within their change to the way that we want it to look, but this is not a big business. And they can’t afford to bring in a programmer or whoever it might be, you’ve got to pay them a couple hundred grand to do that. We actually outsource that, but the beauty of it was we were able to outsource it to a different country.

So in this case, it was the Philippines and it was at a really good price point, but because we were here to advise on. These are the changes that need to happen. And this is the way it needs to look at the end of those changes. And these are the reporting reports that need to come out. We’re actually able to give it to a person in the Philippines who had no knowledge of that business and they could execute what they needed to do because we gave them a very strict brief around what needed to be done.

The thinking for us is we need to think about what are the other resources we can pull in at a cost point that’s going to be acceptable for that business. And then the business is still a process. I don’t need to hire everybody. To get these things done, I can actually outsource pieces provided that I’ve got a really strong scope and a strong plan that someone then in another country that might be in a different time zone can actually execute for me and get the outcome that I need.

I want to talk about something else. That’s what you raised before about the most common issue about bringing enough effectively to bring enough leads in, right? That’s the big thing. And I hear that talked about all the time and I’m as guilty as the next small business in talking about those things.

How just challenging you on that. How real is that, is it that they’ve got that lead process wrong or not enough coming in? Or is it that. The delivery system and helping get more out of existing clients is where some of the obstacles might be. I think it’s actually both Anthony and it depends on the organisation.

Sometimes it’s the quality, we talk about marketing qualified leads, MQLs, sometimes it’s, I had an organisation last week that their qualifying process was zero from marketing. So MQL went across unqualified into the sales pool and sales actually had to go through and do the qualification.

And that was just simply that the way they did their online form was very basic. Give me your name and your phone number. We’ll have a chat with you. So we redesigned all of that for them and said, no, you need to be asking a few more questions. Around the suitability of your product or service to that particular person or organisation that’s coming in and then you can qualify that in marketing.

So your sales professionals aren’t out there bringing up people who actually didn’t want the product at all. They just got confused and filled out an online form. So I find that really interesting because. A lot of small businesses, even medium sized businesses, just don’t have that skill set to understand what is an MQL, what’s an SQL and how do you move it through that process.

But there’s also another piece around what I call the growth equation or the sales equation. And that is, quality versus activity, sorry, quality times activity equals growth. Now, what do we mean by that? So the two things there are in every activity you’re doing needs to be quality.

If it’s not a quality activity, that’s driving to that outcome that you’re after, then you’re actually wasting your time. So what we do is we look at the centre of the organisation and say, how do we improve the quality of. Whether it’s the simple campaigns that we’re pushing out there, how we engage with clients, what’s our value proposition, what’s our ideal customer profile.

What does that look like? Are there different demographics we need to be looking at to push that through? Once you get that quality then it just comes down to activity. And if the person in that particular sales role is doing that activity that we need them to do with a quality. set of tools, then they’re going to grow.

They’re going to get the outcome. So I find that’s really, that’s the key to the, if you like the sales or growth equation. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose it’s hard to bend on the size of the business, of course, because often it’s the owner slash CEO slash director is the. Slash salesperson as, as well as the marketing person.

And the support they may have in the business may be more functional in terms of operations and EAs and the like. And so that’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Because you’ve got someone who’s wearing multiple hats and may not be, that may not necessarily be their skill in those particular areas, but they’re forced to do it.

How easy is it to. Even advise those people, let alone get some practical change that happens. Yeah, they’re going to be willing for it, Anthony. That’s the key, right? If you’re a growth individual and you’re willing to grow your skill set and change things that you might’ve been doing for 15 years to get a better result then you’re going to work well with us.

If you are really fixed in your mindset and fixed in your ways it’s going to be difficult. And we’d probably say upfront, look, if you’re not prepared to change the following things. I’m not sure we can deliver a lot of value to you because if I don’t deliver value to you, I don’t want to charge you any money for something that you’re not getting value out of.

And I don’t want you to say to somebody in the street, it was, those guys didn’t deliver us anything, right? We’ve got to be able to do that upfront. So having someone that’s willing to change. And also it’s that capacity thing to what you find with a lot of small business owners, CEOs of medium sized companies, they want to take everything on themselves, right?

And they’re doing so many different activities. The hats you mentioned, they’re wearing all those things. When you actually then strip back their day and go, and this is more of a mentoring type of discussion that we start having then rather than a sales discussion, it’s would you be better off moving that to this person here?

Like you’ve got resources over here. What does that person do? Okay, let’s allocate that so we can free up 20 percent of your time so you can then effectively go and speak to the large clients that you’ve already got or the ones you want to get and have a really good quality conversation. Then we take them through what that conversation looks like to have it with me right now.

The points that resonate there to that particular person may not be what their client wants to hear. And that’s what we help them in crafting the right value proposition to be able to present that in a manner that the client goes, okay, I’m now aware of what you’re doing. I’m writing this into consideration now.

I really understand. And having that also on your website. So that people can research that. I don’t know if a lot of these statistics Anthony, but most sales today, 70 percent of people’s awareness. So finding out which person they want to go to, which organisation they want to go to, excuse me, 70 percent of that is done before they even engage a sales person.

So when you go back 20 years, the internet was really quite small. People would have to make phone calls. I’d have to get 10 sales people to come in and have a chat with them. Not today. Today, you’ve got 70 percent of that journey, that customer sales journey, has already happened before they engage you.

So if your content that’s in the public domain is not right then they’re not going to go 70 percent with you, I’ll do that research and I’ll move on to somebody else very quickly. So that’s where those changes are quite important. It’s interesting because that’s, it’s been a long time being one of my favourite expressions is you never know what you’re missing by having poor communication and that’s effective.

What you’re talking about there is that and I mean it’s a big reason why I do the podcast thing with a lot of people because, and a lot of clients because at the end of the day, that’s going to provide authenticity. Content for you. And on a consistent basis to educate both your existing audience and your potential audience.

And if people aren’t regularly hearing from you, then, it’s a, you’re not in the conversation, but B, as you said, people are looking at it and they’re seeing stuff that’s old and they’re going there’s not, they’re not up with it. They’re not, there’s no attention to detail. And I think that’s those psychological messages that are through.

I found it really interesting. Don’t spend the time checking what their own things are online. I had a meeting yesterday with a company and they actually sent me a link to view something. And there was one comment under this video, which basically said they’re like scammers.

And I was like I already had some doubts, but that confirmed it. And so you’ve got to be aware of what’s being said online, both of what you’re saying and what other people might be saying as well, because that can completely transform the ability of your business to succeed.

Oh, a hundred percent. And you think about even what we’re doing today, Anthony, a podcast that’s come from an iPod. Which iPod was brought out probably, I don’t know, 25 years ago maybe less. These things just didn’t exist, right? So you need to be shifting your mindset from the 20 years ago where your profile was, the interactions you had with people were how people thought of you in business or in personal life.

Today, it’s everywhere. And that’s where I say to my kids who are 18 and 20 just be really careful what you’re posting up there because that’s going to live with you forever. Forever, right? It’s in the cloud somewhere and it’s not going anywhere. I think the same as with business today too.

There’s a record of your engagement with people in the cloud somewhere. There’s a record of what your website looked like 10 years ago. You need to have things up to date. And if you think about selling, let’s use that dirty word selling instead of growth. If you think about selling, 20 years ago, you’d send emails to people, right?

And you’d pick up the phone and ring people. Now, an example, how many phone calls do you get a day from unknown numbers, right? That you don’t answer? I get probably 10 and I just let them go through to my voicemail and normally it’s an app developer wanting to build something for me. And then emails are another really interesting one.

A lot of people don’t know that you actually can’t send, if I don’t have express or implied permission from you, I can’t send you an email. It’s actually illegal in Australia. How many emails do we get every day to our business address or our personal emails? I get 10, 20 emails a day. That stuff just goes into the junk file, it gets deleted straight away.

So to engage with prospects now, you really need to be engaging where they’re looking every day from a business point of view, and that’s places like LinkedIn. That’s, that really is today’s prospecting paradise, right? It’s like walking into a, remember when you used to have those old drink sessions, you’d walk in, you’d invite all your clients and prospects in, you’d have a drink, have a chat.

It’s exactly like that today, but you didn’t in those sessions where you’re having a face to face coffee chat, you didn’t immediately pitch and go, Oh, I’m Chris from growth team advisory. I do all this stuff. I’d love to work with you, right? You never did that. You just chatted with them and you say, have you got a boat?

How many kids have you got? Dah. And then eventually, you’d swap business cards and you might follow up a couple of weeks later and go, maybe we should have a chat. Yeah, great. Fantastic. LinkedIn is no different to that. If you immediately connect with somebody and then Pitch to them.

You can look this up on the web, right? Connecting pitch is a terrible thing to do because people immediately just go. Oh, no thanks. And they delete it. Whereas if you built a rapport with someone, and we did the same thing, Anthony, when we met on LinkedIn and we built up a bit of a rapport on that.

And then we had a bit of a chat, found some common ground, and now we’re doing a podcast. That’s where it is today for you. The biggest prospecting field. There’s 1 billion people on LinkedIn and in Australia, there’s 14 million people on LinkedIn. That’s more than half the population.

So it’s a huge area. It’s a massive area and I think but it is a, it is an interesting space as well because there are two things that are making it difficult in that space. And one is the one that you just talked about the amount of people that contact you and pitch, hello, here’s buy my services.

I’ve, I, I’ll get several of those a week and there’s it’s almost like a cut and paste as well. And that people are doing it. So I don’t know whether it works for them or not, but it certainly doesn’t work. It certainly works for me. And the other part that I think is a really interesting trend is AI.

Again, you and I met through LinkedIn because we had real interactions, but that’s the, and that’s the point where you actually, you, can benefit by getting some cut through by demonstrating that you’re a real person. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true because the volume of AI generated not only content, but comments on LinkedIn is huge.

And so that gives you the option of standing. It’s a bit like it’s a bit like customer service, right? There are so many. fully automated processes these days that you actually, if you actually offer customer service, you stand out. And I think that the important thing is authenticity against the reason why I love the podcasting platform is because there’s no denying the authenticity and the realness of the conversation.

Yeah. Look, we’re not artificially generated, which is good. So I agree, the podcasts are fantastic and it really is. I think I told this one to you last time we caught up, but I love these app developers that send you something on LinkedIn saying we’re an app developer, can I build you an app?

And I respond back to them, yeah, can you build me an app to stop app developers contacting me on LinkedIn? And they came back, some of them, two of them came back and said, yes, I can. And I’m like, Can you look up irony in the dictionary, like seriously? But that’s probably, that was probably AI generated all of that, right?

So it doesn’t have the ability to work it out. And that’s another topic, and this is probably a topic for another conversation, is AI in sales. There’s all this talk about, there’s these great products we’re bringing out now that we can click onto your LinkedIn and we can click on all of this and it’ll generate all this content for you and stuff.

But at the end of the day, what you said, so right, it’s about being honest Real and present. That’s what makes a difference in the relationship. It’s not just a really fancy AI email that goes out to someone every month reminding them of where you are. It’s that reality of being here, whether it’s on the screen or in person, and engaging and forming a relationship.

Yeah, and I think that’s the key, isn’t it? It’s the relationships that we build that makes such a difference and that willingness to be there and to spend some time with it. I think, as you said, in the old days it was rocking up at something and having a whole lot of people together and having a drink together or whatever it might be.

And people have lost sight of that and it’s putting the time in. And as I said I find it alarming the way a lot of people behave on LinkedIn. And I’ve called out a few people that I know because the responses that they’ve given to me to post not only don’t make sense, but they can be a negative for their business because of what’s happening.

And the thing is that if you’re not monitoring it, then. You’re allowing whether it’s an AI or someone else that’s acting on your behalf to put messages out there that aren’t helping your brand. And in fact, potentially having a negative impact on them. And I think that’s an important part of getting that right.

Isn’t it? Oh, absolutely. You’ve got to, yeah, you want to craft your own messages and things like these podcasts are brilliant because you can actually convey so much. 20, 25 minutes of a podcast than you could in a written article. And no one will read three pages of an article on LinkedIn, that is, unless it’s somebody that’s got an airline called Virgin writing that, you might read it, but otherwise you probably won’t, right?

But yeah, I think you gotta be so careful about that. But also too, I think with LinkedIn, it doesn’t always have to be a hundred percent business either. I do, every couple of weeks I’ll do a warning Sunday post, Sunday social post, and I’ll put up something like that. An old car that I happen to own right in my garage and I’ve driven it with my son on the weekend.

It was a blast. So I’ll put that up or I’ll put that I went fishing with one of my mates and caught five flatheads. Part of that’s about being real and being a person. And when people see that content, they normally, I get so much more reaction on their social and I did it on the other week of just a bottle of wine that I’d found downstairs that I had didn’t even know I had, and it was 20 something years old, drank it with my wife and a friend and it was superb, right?

And all these people go, Oh, I’ve drunk that wine. That’s fantastic. And you just get this stack of engagement on it. So it’s not always about that. Business piece. It’s about being real and being personal that people engage with as well. Yeah. And I found that really interesting as well, but Facebook particularly gets a lot more reaction for those kinds of places.

Still, you still can have business conversations, but if I post something about my dogs, I’m going to get a much greater response than anything else I could possibly post. And fair enough to their great talks. But yeah. Look, I wanted to just go back to the, to that, that principle of the, the lead generation, because outside of LinkedIn, what is it that businesses need to be doing at the moment?

Because it is a problem, isn’t it? That, that knowing where to go for leads, there’s always, people are always looking for that golden ticket which I don’t believe actually exists. From a marketing perspective, the truth is that. All of the activities that you do, whether it’s the old fashioned letterbox drop right through to LinkedIn, the response rate is not grossly dissimilar.

Yeah, look, if you have LinkedIn in particular, if you have a methodology that you’re using in a process that you follow, you will get much better results. So one of the things that my firm does is we do a LinkedIn, social selling course. It uses LinkedIn, it uses X, which used to be Twitter and it teaches people how to engage on that.

And it’s very interesting that once we put people through that program, which is a 12 week program, They come out and they normally get 10, 10 calls like this, 10 calls on zoom or whatever per week from certain activities that they do that don’t result in sales, right? You never get a sale first up or very rarely, but what it does is that actually you’re just building your network.

The whole idea of it is to build your network with people that are like minded, want to be successful in business and want to engage if you can do that. You mightn’t get any business from that person for 12 months, two years, three years, but at some point in time they’re following you, they know what you do, and they go, oh hey, Chris does that, I might give him a call and they contact you and away you go.

And so for me it’s just about having, and those 10 meetings are really about when I do them, I just want to find out what the person does. And then what you’re hoping, and it’s a bit like that cocktail party again, right? You ask, what do you do, Anthony? You take me through, I do podcasts. And then at some point in time, you’ll go, what do you do, Chris?

Oh, this is what I do. And that sticks in the mind. And then you go, Oh, I might be able to use that service down the track. And then eventually something will come of it. If it doesn’t, you’ve got a great network. That’s actually. Liking your posts, following you and getting you more and more exposure across LinkedIn.

Yeah. And it’s why it’s so much more important to have those real conversations than just your standard networking style pitch, because it’s the, what you remember. Are the stories that go around it, not necessarily the detail of what you do? And I think that’s an important thing, right?

You want to be memorable and you want to be memorable because you feel an emotional attachment of some description to the other person. And. That’s what, the amount of times where you meet someone and go, yeah, I’m an accountant. Okay. That’s not memorable at all. That’s the, and that’s the challenge is freeing yourself up to be able to have those meaningful conversations and trade a few stories and find that commonality because.

That’s also where you’re going to be memorable because you have some common some common threads, whether it’s, as you say, whether it’s about, we talked about when we, when you and I met the first time, we traded a few stories about kids and kids of similar ages, and, has built a bit of a link between us as a starting point for where future conversations go.

And I think that’s what’s important is establishing that with individuals, which you can’t do by giving a 30 second elevator pitch. Yeah, a hundred percent. I was doing a little bit of work with Western Sydney university. No, it’s not paid or anything, but I did a mentor program with some of the students that were getting close to graduation from marketing and sales and business courses.

And, You sit down, they go through some presentations and things, and then you sit down with a group of five or six of them and you do that two or three times during the afternoon with different groups and you just let them ask you questions, right? And the five, the second group, I had this five group and this one person said to me, ah, I’m not doing too well in job interviews.

I’m struggling to get people to want to employ me. What do I need to do? And I said to this person, I said, mate, you’ve just got to become an epic storyteller. I said, what do you mean? I said, you’ve got to just be able to tell really good stories that capture people, their attention, but also their emotion.

And I said, just tell me a bit about what you’ve done in your life. They don’t know anyway. So they rattled off all this stuff that they’d been doing and they coached soccer teams and they played a high level soccer right through school and through university as well. And I said, that’s fantastic. So you’ve got a really good story around teamwork.

Tell me something like that. If you’ve been in a couple of grand finals, yeah, tell me what happened to one of those grand finals. Anyway, long story short, this person had this fabulous story about, they’re at halftime. They’re down by two goals. They don’t look like they’re ever going to win. And he just came out with that almost Ron Barassi conversation about just doing something.

But when you’re on the field, just go and do something like, don’t just run around, have a goal, go for the goal, do something. Anyway, I had this great talk with them, they ended up winning 3 1. It might’ve been a penalty shootout. I’m not sure. But they ended up winning 3 1, so the story was Oh Christ, don’t answer that.

Next time you do an interview, don’t answer that. And someone asks you a question, try to work out how you can weave a quick version of that story in there, which just tells them you’re a good leader, you’re a good communicator, and that’s what you’re going to bring to the organisation. Yeah. And I think it’s just so powerful, isn’t it?

Clearly you remembered it because you’ve just retold it, right? And that’s and that’s, I think is the true sign of it. If you find yourself retelling stories from other people, that’s when you wanna go back to them and go, did you, like you actually left an impression on me in a positive way.

Yeah. And I’ve remembered this story. And I think that’s an important element of it. I just wanted to, before we start wrapping things up, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your background, because I always find these stories particularly fascinating, is tell me a little bit about.

When you were in high school, what was your dream of wanting to become, because I know I’ve read of where and you’re, I’m sure you’re going to tell me the story in a minute about where your first job was, but what was the dream when you started out? I actually wanted to be a musician when I started, I played in a lot of bands when I was in high school and I thought we were going to be the next sort of you too.

So we’d go out and do that. But that was, Not realistic and probably never going to happen and it didn’t happen. So I, yeah, I actually just started working in the Commonwealth Bank. That was my first job. And what I was putting, what I was doing in the Commonwealth Bank was putting checks into a machine that read the micro encoding at the bottom of them.

And then you just had to make sure that it all balanced. Little did I know that was going to lead me into working for a bank called Chase A&P Bank, which has happened around deregulation. And then I Amaro, which was a merchant bank. And I. Started off financing cars and then moved to trucks and then moved to planes and ships and things.

Then I ended up leaving there and I went to India and started a finance company in India for one of my mates, which was a bit of fun. And then came back and just did a whole bunch of other senior management roles that eventually got me to, My last role, which was, chief growth officer of Findex, which is the fifth biggest professional services organisation in Australia, New Zealand.

So you never know where your journey is going to start or you never know where it’s going to end either. So I’m not sure if that’s a story you’re after. No. I just, I’m fascinated as well that I was where entrepreneurship and the light came from and is that something that comes down from your parents in any way?

And because that’s the trajectory that you’ve gone on and obviously out on your own these days. Yeah, I think, look, yeah, my dad was a chemical engineer and he ended up being too icy of Rexona in Australia. And, so he started from a pretty humble sort of beginning. So yeah, I think I probably learned that discipline and tenaciousness from my father.

But then the gentler side of things really came from my mum because she was always just the person you could go to whenever there was a problem. She’d listen to you and she’d be very sensible and don’t get too worked up about it, Chris. But I think probably the great, the greatest thing my dad ever said to me was I was having a bit of a Not an altercation, but I was just being a bit of a smartass with my sister at a family barbecue or something.

And it was because we had a difference of something or other. And my dad just said to me, he said, Chris, he said, sometimes you’ve got to celebrate the differences in life and not be critical of them. And I sat back and went, that’s all he said to me, and I just sat back and went. Oh, I got to think about that.

And I still think about that today. I hear his voice in the back of my head saying that. And, I told my kids the same thing. Don’t be critical of things that are different in life. You’ve got to celebrate it because that’s the beauty of, us all being individuals is that we’re all different and our stories are all different.

And it’s just so great to be able to experience that different differentiation and appreciate it. Rather than going, Oh, what’s that person different from me? That doesn’t make sense. Enjoy it and enjoy the differences. I love that. And isn’t it great how we’ve got these little things that stick back in our minds and I don’t know, did you, have you talked to your father about it since that first time that he spoke about it?

Does he, did he know how memorable that was? Yeah, look, unfortunately my dad passed away about 11 years ago, but yeah it’s I did have, I did get to spend, probably six or seven hours with him the day before he did pass away. And I’m, it was the middle of the night. I got a call from the hospital saying, look, your dad’s woken up.

Can you come in and see him? Cause he, he’d been taken to hospital the evening before. So I got up at 2 a. m. and went, okay. So I went into the sound hospital at Wurundjeri and sat down with him. And he said, Oh, you’ve got to get your mother in. I need to see your mother. And I said, mate, it’s 2 a. m.

Come on. Just hang in there. You just keep yourself going to a six o’clock and then I’ll ring up my brother and I’ll ring up my sisters and I’ll ring up mom and they’ll all come up and see you. But during that period of time, I’m just sitting there and chatting with him for four or five hours, went through all that sort of stuff.

And I did get a chance to say to him all the stuff that you want to say, like you love him and all that sort of stuff. But also I got to say to him, that was, you remember that barbecue? Yeah, you said that to me that’s still in there, mate. And he’s just going, really? So I don’t even remember that.

It’s true. And it’s in there. It’s amazing. Those little gems that stick in from from people and how they formulate a difference. And, I’ve certainly got, I’m sure we all do when we sit and think about it, that we’ve got little gems from family whether it’s parents or grandparents that just stick with you.

And they may have been offhanded comments at the time that they never thought about, necessarily verbalising before or since. I don’t think you can be too premeditated with some of those things. I’ve heard some classic quotes over the years and thought, G M. Why can’t I craft something better that I’m going to impart on my children and make it memorable?

But it doesn’t really work that way. No, I’ve always thought that your job as a parent is to create those memories. for your kids so that, yeah, they’ve got fantastic memories of their childhood. They’ve got fantastic memories of you when you’re no longer here. And that’s that’s what you’re pointing out there.

I think my parents did a great job of that and hopefully I’ve done a reasonable job with my kids in creating some good memories for them as well. I’m sure you have. Now, I want to wrap up with a question that I try to ask most of my guests in some way, shape or form because you’re talking about memorable moments.

And I think it’s, what are the memorable moments that your clients have that you wish future clients would know in advance that they’re going to have? That’s a great question. I’d say Anthony it’s that moment when they realise that if they’re actually, if they can make the changes that we’re recommending that they do. That there is light at the end of the tunnel, they are going to grow, they are going to get that success they’re looking for. When you see that lightbulb come on in somebody’s head, the metaphoric lightbulb, that’s the most enjoyable part of doing this because you just want to, we’re really here to help.

That’s the whole purpose of it. And when you see someone go, Oh man, that’s simple, but It’s really effective. I would never have thought of that. That’s the buzz I get. And then the other buzz I get too is when people, when you run into them three or four years later, and this is more about people that have worked for me in the past, probably now, you run into them in a pub or something like that and they turn around and go, you know that time that, I don’t know, it happened.

I moved on from that and I actually now I’m doing this and that’s because of you and I’m like, get out. It’s not because of me. They go, yeah, seriously. I’ve had a guy the other day on, he’s got a new job on LinkedIn again, right? And I put a little comment in going, Hey mate, congratulations. I always knew you’re going to be a superstar.

And his comment was that’s only because I worked for you 10 years ago, mate. And he just said, wow. I don’t think of that when I’m doing those things, but that’s the joy you get. And it’s the same with clients too, when you can go back to a client a couple of years later and look at the plan that you helped craft with them and look at the execution they’ve done.

And you might’ve done, a six month check in I’ll sometimes do with them and Hey, going with that, do we need to pivot a little bit? And then you say that in three years time and the business is three times the size of what it was and they’re employing all these people and they’re not having to make people redundant and things like that.

That’s just gold, absolute gold. Yeah. I love that. I love seeing that that growth and, I’ve had similar experiences and it’s just nice to see that you’ve had some kind of an impact on people. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all of those things. What we’re going to do, of course, is as you alluded to a little bit earlier on, you’ve got a 12 week program, which is probably a good way of people engaging with you early on.

You just want to tell people quickly what about that. And we’re going to include some details in the show notes, of course. course. Yeah. Sure. So look it’s a social selling program. It’s actually a certified course from the Institute of Sales Professionals from the UK. It takes you through 12 weeks, there’s six modules which help you to craft your profile better, have better engagement with people, think about the content you’re doing.

How do you connect with people? How do you create that relationship to then earn the right for them to ask you what you do? So taking them all through that. And then every second week we do a one on one where it’s a one on one coaching session with me or one of my team. And we just go through what did you do last week?

How did that work? And a lot of the times to the, ah, I sent out these invites. I never got, no one accepted them or tell me what the invite said. When they tell you, you said no, you can’t sell in that invite. You’ve got to do this. So it’s that one on one coaching that goes for six weeks as well over that 12 weeks.

And then at the end of it, if you want to continue doing coaching, we’re more than happy to come in and do that for you. But it’s look, it’s a simple course. It works for. We do courses with larger companies where we’ll have 10 of their sales people come on the course, but we also do public courses where if you’re a small, excuse me, a small business and you want to attend that, we’ll put you in a virtual room with maybe five other companies.

And that also helps you do a bit of networking cause you’re going through that course together and you might find some synergies where you can help each other. Yeah, I love that. It definitely happens. I know I know I’ve done that myself where you’ve gone for an intention of really learning from your own, for your own perspective and suddenly you end up with a couple of clients because they, you’ve shared a journey together.

It’s always a nice thing to be able to build those relationships over a period of time, which I guess is to the point of what we’ve spoken about a lot. And the conversation Chris, thank you so much for being an amazing guest. We’ve covered a lot of territory and we, as I said, we’re going to include lots of information in the show notes on how people can guess, get in touch with you and find out more about all of your programs, the advisory program, of course, the 12 week program as well.

Anthony, thanks so much. We’ve really enjoyed our time tonight. Cheers, mate.