Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

AI in 2026. What you need to do, where you need to go. This is. Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. We have an amazing episode today with Len Ward, who is going to talk to you about what is happening in the AI world, how you need to change your business, how you need to change the way you think, and what steps you need to do to get started in it.

There is so much in this episode. It truly is one you do not want to miss. Let’s get into Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. And I truly have a thought leader with me today, very much in the AI and marketing space. Something we are going to unpack in great detail over the coming minutes. But let’s first introduce Len Ward, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

Now, Lynn, I suppose we need to start by telling everyone a little bit about you. So do you wanna go and give us a bit of an introduction?

Sure. I am the managing partner of conexus. We are an AI agency. I like to say we used to be a digital agency. Now we’re more of an AI marketing agency.

We help clients go from the search and retrieve world to the solve my problem world, and that’s by installing a bunch of AI stacks, problem solving solutions on their websites, and then help them in consulting with everyday workflows to see where we can integrate ai. So everybody’s running an AI and we’re doing it as well.

Yeah, it’s become such a big area for so many people and I want to dive into that, but I think in order to give it a little bit of context, let’s just talk about how you got there because that’s the interesting thing about ai. It’s so new in generally speaking for most people that are into that space.

So there’s a usually a history that’s behind it. And I know your history’s a little bit more interesting ’cause it was in a different kind of space. ’cause you’re on Wall Street, weren’t you at one point?

I was, I started on Wall Street during the.com era. So I literally, I like to say I grew up with the internet.

I watched the internet grow. I watch a lot of companies go public companies like Amazon, Google. I remember years ago when you were on the line, you were trying to optimize for 25 to 30 different websites opposed to just Google or search engines. I started there. Once my time on Wall Street wrapped up, I moved over to an e-comm startup, which was great.

At that point I taught myself how to do digital marketing. And the buzz you would hear over the last 20 years was at some point marketing is gonna get automated. That buzz turned into the term ai, AI’s always been out there. I think the term’s been out for something like the forties or something, but AI was science fiction.

Automation was the term we were more concerned about Then, right around 2016, 17, I think right around there. I played around with a product called IBM Watson, and I looked at IBM Watson. I paid like a licensing fee, played around with it. I thought it was horrible however, but what I always tell people is that if it can do what it says it’s gonna do, this will revolutionize everything we’ve ever thought about.

And then you were seeing all this automation going with HubSpot and companies like that, where you were seeing that they were automating things. But then when I saw the IBM Watson. That really opened up my eyes and I started really doing a lot of research on AI and trying to pay attention. And to be honest with you, quite selfishly I was researching it ’cause I was investing in the stocks.

That’s what I was doing. I was, because I really knew that this is something to look at. Next thing you know, about three and a half years ago after chat, GPT started count coming out and AI really started hitting the forefront. As an agency owner, I looked around to my team marketing team and I was like, if we don’t make this pivot now there will be no agency to think of.

And it, it’s a shame because I still know of a lot of agencies that really even made this full pivot over to ai. So from Wall Street in a.com era now to this era that’s how I arrived. And here I am.

And it’s fascinating what you say there about agencies needing to pivot. So do you truly see that traditional marketing is almost gone?

I.

I I don’t think the human creative element’s ever gonna be gone. I believe the great artistic directors creative directors, great copywriters, I still think the great concepts are gonna come from the human mind. I, as much as I thoroughly believe in ai, and I really believe it’s the future, I just have a hard time believing that.

The rational thought and how humans really come up with something creative. I think that’s always gonna be there. With that being said, if you were to go walk into a Madison AAV agency right now in New York, you know you’re gonna walk into a floor, it looks like a Wall Street trading floor.

You’re gonna see hundreds of people up and down. Copywriters, designers, coders, artistic directors, that’s all gonna come to an end. So where you maybe had two, 200 people working at your shop, I think now you’re gonna have maybe 10 to 15 that are gonna be the ones that are gonna say, that are gonna talk to the AI saying, here’s my concept.

And they’re gonna kind of work with AI to create basically mass scale type items. So that’s where I think it is. So I don’t think it’s gonna end. But I don’t think there’s gonna be nearly as many people are gonna quote unquote say they’re in marketing in the next two, three years. ’cause you’re just not.

Yeah, it’s been a really interesting journey in marketing because marketing started off as this, probably. A long time ago, but 30, 40 years ago, marketing was still this idea that you could cover a whole lot of things under the marketing umbrella, and there was even, I think up until 20 years ago, there was a lot of confusion between marketing, pr, and advertising marketing.

Then in the last 20 years has developed into so many subsets with. Not just social media marketing, but I’m the specialist in Facebook versus LinkedIn. And so it’s become very specialized in lots of different areas. But I think it’s evolving again, isn’t it? Because how people think about marketing and the implementation of it particularly with AI is completely changing that focus.

Yeah, I think one of the things that happened in marketing over the last, I’d say 10 years, that in my opinion really ruined a lot of creative creative work and a lot of really great strategy is the rise of lead gen. And I, as much as you need leads for your company to go, I think lead gen has literally poisoned the well when it comes to marketing because companies.

Took this point where they were so concerned about generating leads coming in the into the front door, that they forgot all about their brand. They forgot that you have to build some sort of brand because when you go to sell your company, your brand, and most people wanna sell their company, your brand is worth something.

It’s an asset. So over the last 10 years, we’ve been so focused on lead gen, especially digital marketing. And not focusing on brands so much that it’s been the search and retrieve world. And so it’s search for my, I have a problem. I’m searching for something. I’m retrieving all the links, and I’m researching all the information blogs.

I’m looking at videos. Maybe I’m going on social, I’m reading your post, and then I’m gonna formulate a. Decision and say, okay, this is how I’m gonna solve my problem. AI is flipping that on its head. AI is, you’re going directly to one spot and you’re saying, solve my problem. And AI is coming right back with a solution.

And the solutions that are typically coming back are the ones that are giving the right answers and the ones that have built a brand, not the ones that have been going in there and just doing. Gobs and gobs of lead gen. So we’re in a really tedious world right now where the companies that actually invested in their brand still do lead gen.

But understand the world of AI opposed to just lead gen companies. There’s gonna be a moat that are gonna come around these that are gonna build around these companies and the classic lead gen type companies are gonna find themselves in a little bit of trouble in this new world ’cause it’s a very different world.

Yeah, it is very different. And I and I wonder as well whether there’s this move, particularly in marketing, where traditionally you’ve got this very low response rate to anything, whether you’ve done, in the old days doing the letterbox drops to the mass emails, out to the phone calls. It’s all typically got a 1% kind of response rate, sometimes a lot less than that.

The question is whether AI. Is going to improve that because efficiency wise, yes, AI can definitely do things a lot faster. And and that’s where the great thing about AI is, but is it going to improve response rate, particularly when you’re starting to look in areas like lead generation.

I think that’s a kind of, that’s a good question ’cause it leads to a larger question or like I we’ll call it a bit of a, AI futurism, and I’m not the only one saying this futurist, there’s a few people saying it.

Marketing’s moving in the agent to agent, within the next 18 months, as much as you walk around with your phone, you’re gonna have some sort of wearable apparatus on you, whether that’s from Google, whether it’s from open ai, who, apple, whoever it may be. And that Apparat ATUs is gonna see and hear and interact with everything you’re doing.

It’s gonna be, you’re gonna be used to seeing people with meta glasses, you’re gonna be used to people with ear pods that are actually have little cameras on them. It’s one of those things where when you walk outside, you’re just gonna know that you’re, you like everything’s wide open. But what’s happening is that this is gonna start.

Harvesting all the information about you, and then they’re gonna be intertwined with, they’re gonna understand your credit cards, they’re gonna understand the points, they’re gonna understand things you like, don’t like, and so forth. And that agent, when you want something, you’ll look up and be like, you know what?

That’s a show I want to go to. Or, you know what? I gotta take my car to the shop agent. Go do this for me. Go find me tickets, where I like to sit or go book me an appointment to get my car fixed. That agent is going to then negotiate with the company’s agent. So it’s gonna basically go in and that’s how the marketing’s gonna happen.

You’re gonna look at your calendar and be like, oh, okay, I got a Saturday, I’m open. I gotta bring my car in. Or Hey, you tell your wife or your husband, Hey, I have great, I have tickets for the show. We’re gonna go see it. I think that’s where it’s going. When it comes to.

Lead gen, like that’s the type of stuff that’s not being thought about and not being looked at. So when you go to 1% open rate or 2% of brand, you are right. We’re to the point now where the, any type of impact is at best 1% on a great campaign. We’re not even gonna have those conversations anymore.

Like those conversations of those types of metrics are not. Gonna be discussed. It’s gonna be discussed. How can we better do something with our agent? What are we doing? I’ll be completely transparent. I don’t even know what that looks like. It’s, I think we’re all trying to figure that out right now, but, so it’s almost like the metrics we’ve been living, buying, living and breathing, buying and making business and marketing decisions, are, these are metrics that we’re gonna look at the same metrics as.

How many people got my yellow pages or how many people read that ad in the paper? Like that stuff we wouldn’t even have a conversation about right now. You’d be laughed out of a room, you’re gonna be laughed out of a room on bounce rate and stuff like that going forward and hard to believe, but it’s gonna be here sooner than later.

It’s such a fast changing landscape in that respect. And it’s interesting too, because of the efficiency of ai. People are said, not really focused on those numbers and saying, oh, it doesn’t matter if it’s 1% because the AI can send out a million things over the next, day. So what does it matter that’s gonna give us more than enough?

Which I think is problematic as well because it means that the, and I’ve already hearing it regularly about the amount of spam that people are seeing and trying to cut through all of that, and people’s ability to recognize what is real and what is. Generated by an ai. I think we’re tuning into that AI radar, if you like a whole lot more.

I agree. And here I actually think AI is gonna distill the noise from us. You are right, right now. The noise is, even the noise on AI is deafening and I’m living, breathing, wallowing in it 24 7. ’cause I just truly like it. But there are times I step up, I’m like, oh my God, this is just insanity. What’s coming at me?

And I even gotta, I, as a digital marketer, I truly unplug as much as I can. I just try to put it down ’cause I see the noise. I think. Your message is not gonna resonate that way. You’re not gonna be able to start screaming in the wind like we do right now. I think AI’s gonna filter that out back to that agent type thing.

It’s gonna really screen out what type of emails you’re gonna read. It’s gonna screen out what type of texts are coming in. And I’m not gonna say it’s gonna stop the ads from being shown. Like I, I just, it’s funny ’cause I actually think the rise of billboards and digital ads, I think that’s good because you’re looking around there’s a future there.

But. If you’re doing email marketing, if you’re doing top of the funnel, tough stuff online, it’s, I wouldn’t say stop it, but I’m gonna tell you that the AI apparatus, whatever we’re wearing, whatever this is gonna look like, that’s gonna screen it out. And how are you gonna be known from there? Solving problems.

If you’re a company that’s solving a problem, AI agents are gonna find you because they know you’re solving problems and your answer is correct and they’re gonna keep coming back to you. So it’s very weird world we’re entering into right now, and I don’t think a lot of people have a blueprint.

We’re starting to, the path is lighting up a little bit for us, but by no means am I saying, Hey, this is the direction we have to go in, because I don’t care who you are. Nobody knows the answer to that right now. No, I don’t even think Sam Altman knows where, where this is all going in the next two years.

It’s quite amazing. I know my first real experiences with what we’re seeing and have seen around like chat, GPT and the like was a few years ago prior to all of this stuff, was working in a, with a legal entity that works for the legal profession and had put all of the legal documents and things and various rulings.

Into a effectively what we now know as an ai. And it, you had this ability to ask it questions and it was there purely to guide lawyers who were not connected. They to, into the cities, for example. So they might be in more rural areas being, needing to deal with problems that are perhaps larger and out of their normal area of expertise.

So it would give them enough to build some information to then pass on to the next. Lawyer who was the more specialist. Really great concept. And as far as I know, it’s still operating, but it’s interesting how we’ve come from that really very specific problem solving to now this kind of broader expectation that AI will answer anything and everything.

Yeah, it’s, if you get really good on an LLM chat, large language model chat, CPT, Claude Gemini, Geminis, by the way, the no one out is tremendous 3.0. But you realize how smart these things are. You realize the answers. I know from a. From a business process standpoint, from a sales and marketing standpoint, two years ago, three years ago, our team was cleaning up nonstop.

The hallucinations and everything coming through, it’s getting less and less. It’s getting to the point now where you still need to screen it because God forbid you start putting stuff out there without screening it. That’s a problem, but it’s learning and it’s getting smarter and smarter.

And I know there’s this fine line of, is it really just if you look because it’s a tokenized process, is it just. Make, making sure that the next word is the most accurate word. After that word or that word, or is it really using some sort of intelligence to really generate the answer and nobody quite knows?

I’m sure they know, but I don’t really know the answer to that. But it’s getting smarter and the best case scenario I can give you is we put AI chat bots on a website and we actually had an AI chat bot on one of our client’s website that does a high volume e-commerce. So they sell lots of small parts for trailers and trucks and things like that.

Lot of tiny problems, a lot of crazy nuanced questions come in to the AI chatbot. So for the better part of the first four or five weeks, we kept sending over the questions what was right, what was wrong, and the owner of this company knows the parts so well that he would go in and be like, this is the answer, this is the answer.

We would then take the answer, retrain the chat bot. We have not sent over a question and answer to our client in two months. That chat bot now has learned every single thing, and it almost hits on a 98% accuracy every single time a question comes through. So that’s how smart these things are getting. So with me just telling you that on a chat bot that’s built on top of open ai, I can’t even imagine how smart the AI is getting.

So to answer your question, a long-winded answer, they’re getting smarter and it’s getting to the point where, yeah, they can almost answer anything.

I guess what’s also interesting is our willingness to engage with the AI because it’s gone from novelty value to now. Okay. Are we accepting it? And I liken a little bit to, it wasn’t that long ago that we were all reticent to put our credit cards onto the internet.

No, we won’t do that. There’s no way we’ll ever put that there. Now our credit cards are everywhere, right? They’re, we’re saving them on here, there, and everywhere, and people don’t seem to question it that much. So the engagement with ai, do you see that as becoming just completely normalized for everyone and everyone’s prepared to accept it?

Or do you think there’s going to be this? We need to define very clearly when you’re engaging with an AI versus when you’re engaging with a human.

I think it’s gonna be both. That’s actually a good question. I think it’s gonna be both. I think you’re going to, people are gonna quickly realize that.

If they engage with AI and they get the answers and then they say, Hey, I’m not gonna engage with it anymore. They’re gonna realize how quick they come back. It’s the same thing I tell people. Imagine pulling the internet away from you right now, or pulling text away from you right now, how ingrained it is and or ingrained it is.

And I know it took you time to get to that point. If you think about it, digital marketing from when it started, or the digital exception of it, really took from 98. So I’d like to tell the story of time to COVID. There’s a lot of companies that didn’t have websites in COVID. They, a lot of people like, ah, just send me an email.

They didn’t have a web, websites, which used to blow me away. Now we’re moving so rapidly, so fast that you’re not gonna have 25 years, you’re gonna have 18 months to maybe two years. And I do think there’s gonna be a large portion of people because of the job loss and people being afraid of job loss, they’re gonna push back on it and they’re gonna say, we don’t want this technology.

If you’ve taken any history class in your life, let me, I can, the minute I’m gonna go through every, not on this call, but I can go through 1,000,001 times how ev the dawn of a new technology or some sort of revolution, that man would push back and that would always get wiped away and this will get wiped away as well.

So I think it’s gonna be back. I. Back and forth. I think some people are gonna accept it, some aren’t. There’ll be a bit of a rebellion because of the job loss. Much like the internet, much like the car, much like the plow, we can go on and on. And that’s gonna quickly subside when you realize the absolute intelligence of this thing coming out.

Now it’s not foolproof or fail proof, and I do think humans have to be involved, but I think that’s what I’m predicting is gonna happen on the acceptance of AI over the next year or so.

It’s definitely changing the landscape and there are undoubtedly going to be jobs that are going to disappear, but it’s the jobs that are going to be created, which I think people are overlooking.

For example, in your agency you’ve made this shift. So when you look at numbers of people that are involved in your agency that were, five years ago to where they are now, there might be different roles, but has it vastly changed

the numbers? I will be completely honest. I don’t see my agency hiring any more people.

If we do it would be, they would be considered AI pilots, meaning because we work, we have a lot of AI stacks that we build for clients. Not as complicated as people think. It just, it’s just a, it’s just a lot of work to put ’em together. So I need people to pilot those things. So a lot of. My internal team, like my SEO manager, she’s now literally, we call her my data engineer, managers ’cause she’s making sure that all the data’s being fed into our custom gpt, making sure Zapier hookups are working and things like that.

My lead designer is actually our, my business partner bill designer, developer coder, he’s now to the point making sure that he’s trying to start building AI agents for people. So what is his title? It’s not really coder anymore. More, he’s an agent builder. Yeah, I, I think. The, your names are gonna change, but am I gonna go hire a bunch of copywriters?

No. Am I gonna hire a bunch of designers like I was doing right before COVID? No. Am I a bunch of salespeople? No. I’m not gonna be hiring that. So I think the people that are at their jobs now, if you’re working at a smaller company, I think you’re gonna be okay as long as you’ve embraced AI and you take on that, Hey, I’m gonna be a pilot type thing for this.

But if you work at a larger company and if AI is easily doing your job. Copywriting, certain types of design, a million different things. Lawyers, accountants. That’s concerning too. Unfortunately, if you’re not embracing AI and if you’re doing a repetitive task that an LLM can do really quickly, unfortunately, I think you’re gone on the flip side of that I tell this to everybody.

I think the rise of entrepreneurialism throughout this world is gonna to be unlike anybody, anything anybody’s ever seen. It’s gonna be very common to say, I work for myself. Oh how big’s your company? Two people. How much revenue do you do? 5 million a year. It’s gonna be very common for you to hear that.

So we’re moving into a world where you should feel really good because you’re gonna have a lot of time on your hands. You’re going to make money, you’re going to do well. The blood bath to get there, though, there’s a war coming with this, and we’re going to lose some stuff. But once we get over the hump, it’s gonna look really good.

It’s so fascinating all of that, because to me what I also see is the areas that you spoke about, the pilots and the like, that’s gonna become normal for businesses to have. So where there might be some jobs that get lost in, like copywriting or those kinds of areas that might happen in larger companies, it’s going to be replaced by an, an AI department because there has to be people that are looking at new software that are testing the new software, showing people how to implement it.

All of those things. There’ll be an AI department that will sit somewhere between marketing and it. Yeah. But that will be the norm.

Oh, I agree. And if you’re a copywriter I’ve given this advice. Wow, that’s gonna be it for me. ’cause AI writes all this stuff and I’m like, first off, you gotta train a GPT on what it to what to write.

Then you gotta build the brand voice within there. Then you have to test it, then you have to make sure you’re coming up with the right topics. ’cause you can’t just say, write me five blogs. It’s gotta be relevant topics that are going towards your goal. So I tell copywriters. Why don’t you engage with it?

Why don’t you become the head editor that rather than you having to be stressed out and writing 55 blogs for a law firm, which is what law firms, they just want vast amounts of content and now more than ever with the LLMs, you really gotta create content and it’s gotta be created the right way. Why don’t you become the head editor and understand how to start pumping this stuff out and interacting with it and say, maybe it comes up with the 10 ideas, but you tweak it a little bit, become that, that copywriter pilot, be the first one to do that at your company.

And then your, your boss is gonna look at you and she’ll look over you and say, you know what? We’re gonna keep Mike. Mike’s doing a kick ass job. He’s adapted this and this is good. And Mike’s gonna look around and be like, we have all these clients. I’d like to keep five pilots with me. And you may never have to hire a copywriter again.

Do that stuff now. Too many people are like running in fear or what do I do? Be that person. Because if the company doesn’t have AI pilots and they’re not offering AI services to their clients, don’t worry about them firing you ’cause they’re gonna be outta business. That’s the type of stuff you want to try to jump in now.

So if you’re afraid, don’t be because AI is the great equalizer. It, it’s levels, the playing field for every industry, everywhere. You just gotta be the first to stake your claim.

That is and I think that’s the interesting thing, right? Is that what you’ve demonstrated there is creative thinking, which is what you said in the beginning is going to see more of a rise in that.

And I think that’s the important element here, isn’t it? That creativity has been pushed aside in many respects over the last few decades. We’ve been, catching up with various bits of technology and creativity hasn’t really flourished in the same way. But I think now. AI being able to do a lot of these tasks that are more repetitive and do it more efficiently, it enables that space to be more creative.

Oh, yeah. I look forward to the great creative minds that have so much on their mind. They may wanna come back and sketch the great ones, still sketch it out by hand. They’ll sit down and start sketching, draw, they’ll come up with a concept. But they always knew that the bottleneck was I gotta get it to my designer.

I gotta get it to my coder. Or okay, this is a great concept, but how long is it gonna take to do a video? Or how long is it gonna take to do like a photo shoot? Now you don’t have to do that anymore. You’re opening up soa. You’re opening up chat, GPT or whatever it may be. So think of these great creative minds and.

This stuff that they’re gonna put out there. Like how many times did I sit in a room and a great artistic director would be like, this would be great if we could do this, but it wasn’t physically possible. We can’t do that. Years ago, I remember if we had an angle shot and years ago you’d be like you gotta hire a helicopter if we’re gonna do that, now you do drones.

And now, think about if we just had this angle and that angle and so forth and they just let it, all the creative stuff just get thrown into an LLM. Now you gotta think about what type of creative stuff they’re going to make from there. So forget what Soro and AI’s doing right now with Creative.

Go look at the great creative mind in your shop right now and where they’re gonna be in about a year. Once they embrace it, once they realize they can just brain dump on their phone and this thing’s gonna, this agent’s gonna start working for them. By the time they get back to their desk, they’re gonna be like.

That’s it. But now I want it one step higher. I think the ads, which I do think will be relevant in some weird capacity, but not the way we’re used to right now, are gonna blow people away. They’re almost gonna look like 32nd motion pictures type things. And that’s coming from the human mind, not ai. So if that makes sense.

That’s I, I. Look forward to where creative’s gonna be, but I, my caveat is this, if there was a thousand great creatives in a room with ai, there’ll be five left and those five will be Martin Scorsese. They will be the absolute best you’ve ever seen in your world. But unfortunately, no, there won’t be a, the mill anymore where you see hundreds of creative.

I think that’s coming to an end.

Lots of I, I think lots of changes coming through. And one thing that I wanted to speak to you about as well, and you touched on a little bit earlier is around SEO. Because SE o’s been this thing that’s been around for a number of years now. And I think depending on who you talk to, there’ve been varying degrees of how important it is and how well it works.

But that’s all been based on the premise that you’re going to be found in a Google search engine. Now the question is, what are you going to be found by an ai? Is it the same? Because before it was restricted to just what your website might say. Now it’s a lot broader, and I find it really fascinating when you do a search for someone and ask an AI to come back with a summary of it.

How different that can be in terms of the high level things that it’s picking out compared to what perhaps you might see visually if you just went and looked at a website.

Yeah, I’m, I, so I started years ago when I got into digital marketing. My I planted my flag on the SEO world. So I was search engine optimization.

I literally, my company, I had the term SEO in it before we morphed and bought a couple of small agencies. I was a thorough believer of it. I was one of the first people in my area even doing it. I remember getting calls on SEO and people didn’t call it SEO 15, 20 years ago. They called a co, like not even SEO, they didn’t even know how to pronounce it, but I’m gonna tell you that everyone’s oh, SE is dead.

It is dead. Because you’re going from a search and retrieve world to a solve my problem world. It doesn’t mean that SEO people are going to, that’s it. SE o’s done. No, it means before you were writing content because you were trying to manipulate the search engine of Google and trying to rank high.

And then once you got there, it was a shell game and bait and switch to try to get a, somebody to fill out a form. Let’s c the way it is. That was your job and people did the job really well. Now you gotta create content based upon people’s actual. Problems. And you have to start. And those problems have to all be connected together.

And then you have to identify the content, whether that’s text, image, video, whatever it may be, audio, whatever. And you gotta try to figure out and organize in a data room, how does this solve problems? Because before Google would go in and start pulling all your information up, like in a vacuum and organizing, you start clicking.

Now Google’s gonna start pulling up all the information, blending it together, and saying, and in a conversational tone saying. This is the answer to your problem. What does SEO, how does SEO live in that world? You live in that world by getting rid of the term search engine optimization. ’cause you’re not doing search engine optimization anymore.

You’re solving problems. What does that look like from a content standpoint and get rid of the term ranking? ’cause it’s funny, I just saw somebody on X today, they’re like, here’s the quickest way to get to have the LLM pull you in and get ranked. I’m like, you gotta just get rid of the term there.

It’s the same thing as driving a car or riding your horse. You’re not the horse’s. SEO and the car is LLLM. I know I’m getting a little wonky in my explanation, but I just think that the term SEO, we have to, and I don’t think the a EO and all these other terms I think that stuff’s gonna fade away.

It’s just another way to repackage SEO Unfortunately, again, because we do SEO, it’s still matters right now. You still get leads from it and you still have to do it, but I think now you have to start thinking about is this piece of content that I’m putting out there? The first thing you used to think about before is.

Will it rank? Will people stay on the page? Now you’re over to, is this solving the core problem that somebody may have? So it’s a very different way. So I think the SEO’s job’s gonna move more towards working very closely with copywriters, making sure, let or, and even video and so forth, making sure that yes, this solves the problem.

Let’s put it here, label here in our data room, and hopefully the LMS are gonna start picking it up. Long-winded, but hopefully you get what I’m saying.

No, absolutely. And I think this whole focus on problem solving, it goes back down to businesses and branding and things that you talked about earlier on, people missing the why.

The why are they, why do they exist? What problem are they solving? And I think that needs a lot closer attention on that for businesses in order for them to survive. Because I think that’s the interesting thing, right? If a, if you’re asking AI to solve a problem, it’s going to look. For things that are going to solve that problem.

And you want to be quoted in that you want you, you want to be one of those sources so that people then will come to you for that information in the future, right? Yeah.

No, correct. That’s it. You, that’s exactly what you want. You really want to just make sure that you are, your website, your products on there, your salespeople are that just solve problems.

You gotta remember. As AI grows, people showing up to your front door are gonna be the most educated customers you’ve ever seen in your life. They’re gonna, if, if they have a problem with their roof right, or a problem with their car. Typically you’d wait for the salesperson or the mechanic come out and say, here’s what’s wrong.

That’s not gonna happen in another year. That’s not happening right now. They’re, they take a picture, they literally have interact audio video with AI and they, if it goes down. And it’s funny ’cause it was something as funny as my son’s car broke down and his Jeep broke down and I knew it was a battery.

We all knew it was a battery, but for some reason I’m like, could this be the starter? And I’m not a mechanical guy, but I’ve had a lot of cars enough where things broke down, where I, paid enough money where I’m like, all right, I know what this is. Just by the sound of it, I know it’s gonna cost me, but I’m sitting here listening.

I was like, okay, it’s the first time we ever had a problem with a Jeep. It’s fairly new. And I put on chat g pt, I turned on the video and I started interacting with it. And I told my son to turn it on, and right away it goes, battery. I was like, a hundred percent not the starter. And they’re like, a hundred percent not, they’re like, it’s a battery, it’s gonna cost you this much.

And then I said, okay, great. I didn’t say. Give, tell me where to go. But the next step would’ve been, book me an appointment for my local mechanic. Get me in nearby tomorrow. And I’m also gonna need a TRO tuck, for a quick jump. Makes sense? That’s where your customer’s gonna be.

Not oh, my car’s making a funny sound. I dunno what to do. That customer’s gonna know what they want. They’re gonna, and by the way, they’re gonna know exactly what battery they want too. Think about the jobs that eliminate sales, customer service. Like where are we headed? So hopefully it makes sense, but that’s where we’re heading right now.

That’s the path we’re heading down.

What’s interesting too, about sales is there are now a lot of sales bots that are taking calls.

Yeah.

And that’s. That’s an interesting one. I spoke to an agency not that long ago where they had cut their sales staff down, I think it was from eight down to two.

The rest were sales bots and that the sales the sales bots were making were, their conversion rate was much greater ’cause they were sticking to the script and that the app, according to them, 90% of people didn’t even ask or care. That they were talking to an ai, that the AI doesn’t hide from the fact that it’s an ai.

If you ask and say, am I talking to an ai, it will tell you that. But most people don’t ask and don’t care. I suppose that depends on the nature of what you’re selling, because if you’re selling bigger ticket items I can’t imagine that’s going to be taken over by an AI anytime soon. But certainly if you are selling lower ticket items.

The efficiency there, the ability for an AI to take over from sales, that’s a big area.

Yeah. I don’t see, I think people are implementing it way too much right now in the states, we’re having a really bad problem. I don’t know if you guys are seeing it now. The spam calls are outta control and the spam calls are all AI bots that are talking, and they sound tremendous, like they sound real.

That’s annoying. But I think you’re right. I don’t think that’s gonna be accepted. You’re not gonna care about. Interacting with a, an AI bot for a quick question, or you’re looking to buy a hundred dollars product, or you have to return a product, you’ll interact with that.

You’re not gonna think twice about that. Again, it comes back to if you would’ve told somebody 15 years ago, you’re gonna be able to go on your phone and text somebody a quick message. You’d be like, that’s insanity. I don’t trust that at all. Where’s that text specifically going? You’re amazed how much or we’re amazed how much humans improvise, adapt, and overcome and adjust to that. And I think that stuff, that’ll be, that’s if it’s not already common, that’s gonna get real common. And yes, that’s gonna ding the salespeople. It is.

Let’s talk about your average business and that’s thinking about, okay, I’ve got no AI being used at the moment, maybe.

Excuse me. Maybe the odd time that you’ve got a chat, GPT where you’re asking for a bit of content, but they don’t really know what they’re doing. What do you see as being the basics for a business? And let’s talk a professional services business that tends to be the core of the audience that are listening in here.

What are the core things that they should be looking at to starting point for an ai, and where can it go for that sort of

business? The easiest way we tell, ’cause we deal with a lot of B2B service businesses, B2B manufacturing and so forth. The fastest way to do it, especially in services, especially when you offer a lot of products or a lot of services, even if it gets a little complex and your client base is like complex the first thing to do in 2026 in the first half by, by the quarter, the end of quarter two in 2026, you should have all of your standard operating procedures, manuals, brochures.

Sales processes, customer profiles, Tam, ICPs, you name it. Everywhere. Should be digitized. ’cause you’d be surprised how many companies you walk into and stuff is in a filing cabinet still, which blows me away. But true, everything’s digitized and everything’s in a data room. Data room is fancy. Talk for Google Drive, Dropbox.

If you have a large enough company, you can move to a company like Snowflake, which is very interesting, but have everything. Organizing that data room and label it right. The procedure to for X, Y, Z the manual for X, y, Z product. Don’t just throw it in there and so have somebody organize that properly.

Have meetings weekly and say, this is the data that I put in a room so far. Here’s my marketing data. Here’s my sales data. This is how we have it listed. Everybody agrees. Oh, what about that? What about that? So going out a quarter. Two, you’re now to the point where you’re ready for next year. By the end of next year, you’re gonna start seeing all of these products coming onto the market, and the products are going to all types of AI products, and they’re gonna wanna plug into your data, and they’re gonna either solve problems, they’re gonna be the people talking on the phone.

And we’re gonna get to another product I’ll talk about in a minute everything. So be prepared. Don’t be the one where you’re, haphazardly organizing content because you just engage in a two year contract on an AI product. You should have all your data together in a room. Test these things out, plug them in and see what works and what doesn’t work.

That’s the number one thing you have to do. The second thing you wanna do, and you can do this. Fairly affordably, although it’s a little bit of work. So watch who you work with. We actually do this for clients and there’s a lot of work behind it ’cause there’s a lot of training. It’s an AI chatbot on your website.

It’s giving your website an actual real voice, like literally you can talk to visitors, but it can also take every single thing in your website or one of those data rooms and now talk to all the web visitors on your site. It solves problems, it answers questions. It can do whatever you want it to do. And it works 24 7.

It can handle thousands of inquiries, a minute. And it’s probably the best thing to do. And the reason I say that is this is the magic of ai. ’cause when we put that on a client’s website or prospective client’s website, I have never yet once heard the term, oh my God, we never thought about that.

Or that, that is the most craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know customers were asking for that because right then and there. This is your customer’s real problem. And the reason you may not have market share is because in the last five years, you’ve never once addressed this problem. So now the customer’s telling you their problem where AI and the company that’s gonna win is, what am I gonna do to fix that problem?

What am I gonna do to address it? What else can we put on the website? What new product can we create, if that makes sense. So those are the two easiest things you can do. The one manually. Hire, get one person internally to put all your data together. Number two, look for a company that can get an AI chat bot on your site.

Make sure that they’re training it on a monthly basis and sit down as a team and review all of those chats coming through. And then you’re off to the races. Here’s the content we have to do. Here’s X, Y, Z all the way down. And that’s the magic of ai. So if you’re B2B services, that’s the easiest, fastest way to get involved.

And the data you get out of it is worth this price and gold.

Does that mean a website’s still important? Because I know a lot of people have questioned whether, what do we still need a website? Is, how important do you think that is moving forward?

I think a website’s gonna turn into a repository.

I, I, ’cause we do we’ve made, Conexus has probably rolled off about, oh my God, by the time it’s all said and done, over a thousand websites, maybe more than that. We pride ourselves on websites. We’ve, I’ve won awards for websites if you could see me behind me. But I am the first to say. In 2026, I don’t think I would engage in building a brand new website.

I would maybe do an overhaul of a website, but the number one thing you wanna do is make sure that your website is answering questions. Make sure you have all the right tools on there, whether it’s a calculator, a product finder, or whatever. I think people are gonna come to your website and that’s what they’re thinking about doing, and there’s gonna be a series of tools that they can go into and start answering questions and so forth.

The days of the beautiful navigation, the images, getting the video on the website. That’s, you’re not gonna have that conversation. Do you still need the content? Do you still need the video? Yeah, but what’s gonna happen are the LLMs are gonna be on your website and they’re gonna pull that data directly up where that’s gonna interact on your AI chat bot or whatever problem it’s solving.

But websites will exist, but there’ll be more known as data repositories for the company. And those data repositories will be linked out to your social media and so forth. So I do think the websites that we’re used to now. We’ll go by the Yellow Pages probably in the next couple years. I do believe that.

But you’re still gonna need a domain because people are still gonna know, I need content on Mike’s service. They’re gonna go right there to know that they can go in and get a problem solved. I dunno if that makes any sense, but I just think the beautiful pretty websites you’re looking at, they’re not gonna have the importance they used to.

I think that brings up then the question of the content itself that’s being written. How important is that content to. BI guess I, I was gonna say purely written by human ’cause I don’t think that’s a reality anymore. I think most people are getting some assistance from an ai to write it. But there’s talk that, Google may be trying to detect it and penalize it if it is being written by an ai.

So how do you find that balance of what the content should be that’s there? Because you talk about yes, you’ve gotta right content to pro about problems that you are solving. It may come from it. I’ve used myself as a great example where what we do is we, here we are, we’ve got a great conversation on between the two of us as a part of the podcast.

We’ll use that transcript to help create some content for the blog that goes on the website. The question is. How important is it to try and make that as authentic as possible? And do we have to try and trick Google to not knowing it’s a, there’s any use of an AI in being involved in that? Where is all of that going?

That

blend. So you do have to write the content a specific way if you want to be in the LLMs. So that’s gotta be written a certain way. There’s a certain, finess, you have to write for it. And it’s basically it’s all centered around FAQs is what they’re, again, facts solve my problem. So I’m of the belief that.

I think 75% of businesses right now are using chat GPT to create content for the entire website and their entire marketing efforts, and they’re putting it out there. The smart companies are actually, they’re great CMOs. We have a couple clients where they’re brilliant marketers. They read every piece of content that goes out.

They know that the LLMs are creating content and they’re not fighting that tide anymore. They may tweak things. They may. Say, let’s add this line in, or that’s wrong. I think it’s essential that you do have an editor on staff or hire an editor. So there’s one job that’s absolutely is gonna be more needed.

May, maybe you don’t need 10 copywriters, but you’re sure Sec gonna need two or three editors to make sure this stuff’s looking right. So you have to make sure. That a human eye has put eyes on it and you feel good about it going out. Now you could go down the road of, one of the things we do, we have a marketing stack where we call it a marketing brain, which knows everything about Drip, and we have 250 sub stacks underneath it that it can pull in and start talking to.

One of the things that it pulls in is it’s a brand guide and we make sure that when it’s writing the content, it’s truly writing in the voice of. Our client, however, we then send it over to our editor who takes a look and is yeah, approved. This is good. So that’s what’s gonna happen. I don’t think we can fight that tide anymore.

I think the days of worrying about what Google is gonna penalize and not penalize anymore, if we’re getting away from the search and retrieve, nobody’s worried about being penalized anymore. And Chachi BT is already up to a billion users a week that’s now really rivaling Google, which is amazing.

So I think the penalization, not there, but. The AI slop, and I didn’t invent this, somebody else did is out there. There’s a lot of slop out there and it’s really bad content. So I would really pay attention to what you are writing out there. But to not think that the LMS aren’t writing, 75% of the content out there is wrong.

The real good content is the one where you definitely know A CMO or an editor put their eyes on it and you’re like, wow, that looks really good. So that’s, yeah. Unfortunately, we’re at that stage now.

I’d have to say to people listening as well, that the trick is, and this is why I love the podcasting medium, is you’ve gotta base it on authentic content when you’re sending a chat bot out there to try and create some content, and it might be based on a few things that you’ve said in the past, but it’s out there just picking up stuff from here, there, and everywhere.

It’s not the same as saying, here we have a transcript of. In this case, we’ve got a, a longish podcast recording. Lots of detail that are in there. If we’re going to create something that’s just utilizing the content from this episode, but maybe focused in a particular area that we’ve discussed, that’s completely different to just create something.

Yeah, and I think that’s the point, isn’t it? You have to include the quotes. It has to be based on that authentic voice.

Yeah, I think that’s still gonna be needed. I, I think that’s inherent, human behavior where people are like every, everything you’re gonna do is ai.

I don’t know about that. If you have a great writer, who writes tremendous novels you’re, no, we’re not getting rid of that because. AI might be able to really read, write in their voice and might be able to, maybe create a book that you would think that this writer wrote.

But, the writer didn’t write it. Now they, she may use AI to help her out, but there is something about being authentic that still is gonna matter, that when. When you, when the great writers come out, they’re just tremendous. They know how to rationalize something and I’m, I’ve been steadfast when people ask me about why do you think AI will never, it’s gonna surpass human intelligence, but why do it already has, but why do you think it won’t be a human?

Because it can’t rationalize. That’s a human element. And I can’t wrap my head around and I’m not, I’m. Dumb. I can’t wrap my hand around these. These other guys are so much smarter than me in ai. I can’t wrap my head around how you can create something that can actually rationalize a situation, then put pen to paper and create a story and kind of go from there.

Sure, AI may be able to do it, but I think you’re gonna be able to point out that’s human and that’s ai. I think just because we’re human and we know what we do but the kind of. Diverge a little bit from that. The thing that you’re gonna see rise though, is this term called synthetic content, if you haven’t heard that before.

So you are running outta content for these LLMs to digest, and that is the oil that keeps these things going, right? So people are putting out this AI slot. So some of the answers that are coming back, when you’re looking at it, you’re like, it’s not that it’s hallucinating, you’re like. They’re relying on the, because you go look at, sometimes they’ll put links and you go click that link and read it, and you’re be like, oh God that’s not good at all.

So they’re talking about the LLMs that are gonna have like the mini GPTs underneath, or whatever term may be, and it’s gonna tell it what content to write. In what voice and it’s actually gonna instruct these agents to create this synthetic content. I’m gonna be interested to see how good that content is.

That’s coming sooner rather than later because it knows for it to live, it needs more and more content to digest. It’s already ripped through all of YouTube. It’s ripped through all of Google. It’s ripped through every single thing man’s created. Where are we at now? So now it’s gotta create the synthetic content, but I don’t know if that synthetic content is gonna create, is gonna be meant for human digestion opposed to more meant, almost like a coding type content that it needs, if that makes sense.

So just something to put on your radar. That term synthetic content’s gonna really start rising in the next year or two where you’re gonna hear of it and it’s gonna be, it could be a bit of a problem. Just to wrap

things up, I’ve got two couple of questions just to finish things up.

So one is just give me some predictions. 2026. I know it’s probably a bit hard to forecast, much further into the future, but what do you think for businesses out there at the moment, 2026, what is the thing that they should be focusing on and where do you see us advancing over that 12 months?

The thing I think business people have to pay attention to in 2026 is I know a lot of business people who invest money in marketing definitely pay attention to when Google comes out with their earnings because you are seeing that Google, whether they had $70 billion or something like that this quarter for advertising.

By the end of 2026, you are gonna start seeing that their advertising dollars are pulling back and that they’re not making the money they used to make. They may be making money in different areas, but they’re not gonna be hitting that number anymore. And why is that important? That’s important because you’re realizing less and less people are using Google to find your product.

And it’s not your marketer, it’s not your ad spend, it’s just it’s a capitulation point where more and more people are moving over to some sort of LLM. Now, I’m sure that there’ll be advertising. In there in some capacity. ’cause advertising, we find our way to worm in anything, but really pay attention to that.

Pay attention to Google’s earnings as it starts getting, pulling back and pulling back. That’s gonna be a problem because you’re gonna look at your marketers and say, what’s next? What’s next? So if I’m predicting that out to the end of 2026 that Google is no longer gonna make the money in advertising that they used to.

Where do we go to go solve that problem? That’s when it comes back to build a data room, start solving problems, start preparing for this because it’s coming. So that’s number one. I think by the end of 2026, I do believe that the first wearable device will be out. I think it’s gonna be by chat, GPT. I can’t remember the John Ives.

I think his name is John Ives. He was the lead designer. I’m saying I’m butchering his name. He was the lead designer for Apple. I dunno if you know that now he works with Chad T and I believe that they’re gonna come out with that first product. Somebody showed me a blueprint. It looks like a little disc that you’re gonna just pin on, you almost look like a, like a little button or something.

They said that’s what it’s gonna be. But I think the that, and that’ll be the very first thing where people step back and they’ve actually cracked into the armor of Apple because they have said. They’re coming after the iPhone. A lot of people miss that term when they say it, but they’re coming for the iPhone.

So I think that by that end, by the end of next year, business owners are gonna say, what do we need to start doing with our marketing dollars? Because Google is clearly becoming an issue. And the second thing is, your kids, your wife, your husband may be, you’re gonna see them walk in the front door and they’re gonna have this device on ’em.

And now we’re off to the races on ai and I think that’s gonna happen all within the next 12 months.

I think it’s huge. I think I know what you mean about the iPhone because I look at my phone and it’s cluttered with that many. Apps and things that are on there, half of which I haven’t looked at in two years probably.

Yeah. Photographs that are in their thousands now and not enough energy to sort them out. Having something that’s gonna be able to come in and do all of those things and just be able to focus on what I need is going to be huge. So it’ll be a question of whether it interplays and reconfigures the iPhone to suit a much more considered.

Version for an individual that will be the interesting thing of where that takes us. So some great predictions there for next year. One final question to ask you. What’s the aha moment that businesses have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were gonna have?

I think it comes back to that chat bot and it comes back to how that is the big aha moment. Like when we go through that and they see what the customer’s asking, or when they ask the chat bot a question and the website comes back, chatbot goes back and gives them the answer, that’s the aha moment.

And that’s when they’re like. Oh my God. They’re like this. This changes everything. I’m like, and I say all the time, I’m like, yeah. To me, if it’s literally telling you what to do, it’s it’s like you say which, which path should we take in ai? Listen to what your website is telling, or listen to what your consumer is asking.

Your website that will literally light the path right in front of you. Follow that all the way down and you’re gonna be fine. So that is the real aha moment. We put that right on a client’s website. We don’t sell ourselves too hard, we only take. Maybe 10 clients a year if we can, new.

Not even that next year it’ll be five and we put that on our website. I, we won’t, it’s not me being cocky or condescending ’cause I didn’t invent ai. But put on your website, we’ll send you the chat log and never fails. Within one minute later, let’s have a phone call. It’s ’cause it’s just it’s magic.

Amazing. So many tips in there for business owners. I love all of this space around ai. I think it’s that’s great. Less about overwhelm and being scary and more about excitement and opportunities and changes that you can make to really take your business to the next level. So thank you so much for sharing all of that information.

I know we probably could have talked for another few hours Quite Yeah. Quite frankly, on all of this stuff, and I hope we get the opportunity again. Thank you. Appreciate it. And we’ll, of course we’ll include all the information on how to get in touch with Len in the show notes. And we look forward to your company next time.

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

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

From Top Gun Dreams to Ignited leadership, Leon Purton on Unlocking Potential in people and teams. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host Anthony Pearl, and today we’re sitting down with Leon Purton. He’s a former Royal Australian Air Force engineer turned award-winning leadership expert and author of The Ignited Leader, which just won the Gold Medal for Leadership and Management in the Axiom Book Awards 2025.

Leon’s about to share some valuable information about why leading yourself is the foundation of all great leadership and how to see the shape of potential and fit them to problems and why we are not logical beings influenced by emotion, where emotional beings influenced by logic. We’ll explore all three dimensions of leadership, the power of creating vacuums for growth, and how one book read over a weekend in Canberra changed his entire career trajectory.

So looking forward to unpacking this and so much more. It’s gonna shift your mindset. It’s going to give you some one percenters that will guarantee to change the way you think and the way you do business and the way you lead. So let’s get into it.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bytes and I am delighted to have joining me today ’cause we’re gonna talk all things leadership, but firstly, welcome to the program. Thanks so much Anthony. Looking forward to it. I think firstly the thing I like to do with all my guests is allow them to introduce themselves.

Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you. Fantastic, Anthony. Yeah, I I grew up in a small town on the northwest coast of Tasmania. We had about 10 cows, 20 sheep and 40 chickens with my two younger brothers. And we lived a pretty low drag life down there. But one thing I recognized about Tasmania is it’s, it is quite a relaxed community and I didn’t think that was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

In year nine I had a sleepover at a friend’s house and we watched the movie Top Gun Together and become. He became inspired. He goes, all right, I’m gonna be maverick and you can be Goose and we’re gonna go flying around in the skies together. Now, that never actually played out in year 11. He dropped outta high school and joined the Navy and I left a bit listless, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have an interest in electronics.

And this idea of being in the Air Force was still somewhat appealing to me. So I joined the Air Force at 18 as an avionics technician, so I worked on the electronics on. On the aircraft in the Air Force. I did that for a few years, but I knew I wanted a little bit more. So I ended up going to university and getting electronic engineering degree.

And then after that sort of did, 20 years in this Royal Australian Air Force mostly on fighter aircraft and strike aircraft. I moved around a over the place. But over that time I learned a lot, got exposed to a lot of different leaders and teams and saw a lot of different things that, that really inspired me and some things that didn’t.

And during that period I started to think a bit more deeply about what gave me energy at work, and I realized it was seeing a potential in people and helping them reach that. So in 2015 I started writing a leadership blog. And over the last. Five to 10 years of continued writing and culminating in release of a book in May this year called The Ignited Leader, which tries to summarize that handbook that I wish I could go back to 2015 and give to myself and go, here’s some really important information that, that should help you out.

Now live on the Gold Coast. Got two teenage kids. An ex-wife and a new wife. And so there was some trials and tribulations that I had to go through as part of my own personal journey there as well. Still like to stay fit, but I generally get a lot of energy and enthusiasm about that, seeing the potential of people and try to help them unlock it.

So that’s that’s the area I try and focus on now. Wow. That’s a lot. I love that. It’s such a great story. Now, before we get into your details, I’ve gotta ask a question that I don’t think I’ve asked anyone before, but you mentioned your mate who went into the Navy. Yeah. You are in the Air Force, you’re in the Navy.

What’s the relationship between the Air Force and the Navy? And have you still caught up with him since those days? Yeah we try and keep in contact, although the last couple of years it’s been a little bit more challenging. But it weirdly might. My two best friends from high school, one joined the Navy and one joined the Army and I joined the Air Force.

So it’s I grew up in a household where I was the oldest of two younger brothers. It’s like having brothers. There’s this rivalry that exists between you and you’re always trying to one up each other. But at the end of the day, you’ve always got a lot of love and appreciation for each other, and that’s what the Air Force and the Army and the Navy are like.

Together. There’s this. The Air Force is better, know the Army’s better, know the Navy’s better. But at the end of the day, we’re all trying to do it and achieve the same things. And so there’s just a genuine love and appreciation for each of the services. But it’s a funny little place to live.

And what a crazy situation that you’ve I don’t know how many people would end up in that situation where. Where you’ve got three mates and all take a different course in the military that’s, I think that’d be fairly unusual. You mean I, I suspect there’s a number where they’ve gone to the same, but to go to three different ones that’s a little bit different.

It was all, it was unusual. I think one thing I did hear though, when I was going through my recruitment process, I mentioned I grew up on the northwest coast of Tasmania. Very small. Part of Australia. But what I’ve discovered through the recruitment process is that the recruitment population into the Australian Defense Force, the northwest coast of Tasmania, so a tiny little bit and a tiny little island made up 6% of the Australian defense force.

So there was a lot of people that ended up joining the military from outta that little, I dunno if their recruitment was really good or something in the water down there. But it was a little bit unusual that three, three friends all joined the military. But like you say, that. That, that we hit all three arms is a little bit unusual.

I hear the water’s good for the whiskey as well down there. So yeah. Whiskey and wine and apples. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Look let’s fast forward from all of that journey because you’ve definitely been through a fair amount and how do you transform from working in the military, in the electronics area to leadership?

How does that process come about for you? Yeah, it’s one, it’s a really good question, Anthony. The a lot of people who are, heavily technical in their backgrounds and their roles at work really take that on as part of their identity. You don’t. Say you’re a project manager or something, you don’t take on project manager as a core part of your identity.

It’s a job that you do. But engineers and technicians tend to take that on as part of a core part of their identity. And what’s often hard to let go of is that core, ability to reach down and touch and influence the technical solution as you start to move through the different levels within the organization.

And what I learned was that the military itself doesn’t do a fantastic job at preparing people for those different levels. So I started to get into those positions of influence inside the military. And realize that the people behind me weren’t perhaps being exposed to the same information and the same, mindset shifts that are really important as you transition through those levels in the military.

So for me whilst I’m a, I’m an engineer I feel like I’m a bit of a different flavor and engineer where I’m heavily people focused, not technical and solution focused, which is often a distinguisher. With the really hardcore engineers and technical people versus those that, that make their way through into leadership.

Now, both paths three are valuable, but what I realized was that we weren’t doing a very good job of supporting people as they move from one role to the next. I wanted to try and unlock that. It was a moment vividly remember it, I was on a promotion course in the military, so they take. All of the people, all the high achievers that are promoted, and they put them on a course together for two weeks in Canberra.

And we learn about military MA management and the historical military campaigns and the administrative processes that you need to understand within the military. But it didn’t, I didn’t feel like it prepared me for the next role. But a fellow attendee on that course, an air traffic controller.

Gave me a book. He goes, I hear you Leon speaking about leadership, and you’re like, really passionate about it. I’ve been reading this book and I think you really like it. And he gave me that book. And on the Thursday afternoon and all my spare time on Friday, my Saturday and Sunday in military accommodation down in Canberra was spent just reading this book across the whole weekend.

And I gave it back to him on Monday. And I said, I think that’s the most succinct. Message that’s ever reached me about what we need to change for leadership, and it was a book called turn the Ship Around by David Marque, who was a US Navy submarine commander. And still influential to me to this day, so much so that when I wrote my book, I reached out to David Marque and asked him to write the forward to my book to which he agreed, which is a fantastic privilege.

But instrumental to my journey was that choice from an air traffic controller. At a room in Canberra just going here. I think you’d like this book. And it really, it just un unlock this spark in my mind about how to think about things differently. I’m like, if I can think differently about leadership in this way, then perhaps I can help other people also start to think about things differently.

It felt like a really long-winded answer, but I feel no. And I think, but I think it’s a really fascinating combination of the engineering and the military that, on the face of it would think that, okay, it’s gotta be about precision and getting things done. And there is an element of that.

But it’s at the end of the day, you’re dealing with people and I think that’s the interesting, cross section that you have there, that pillar. People are so intrinsic to what happens in the military because they’re the variable, right? Yeah. And and understanding them is really important.

And I can see how that has been a huge influence on where you’ve taken things. Yeah, since I I was in the military for, I took over 20 years, which is a long period of life. All your formative years and in the last six years since I’ve left the military, but I’m still near it in the work that I do.

I’ve noticed even more that the, the people are the capability. People talk about the military for the hardware and the things that it can do, but the people really are the capability, the thinking, feeling doing humans, that, that make up and comprise the armed forces. And in fact, any of your workforces out there, they’re the real capability.

And if you can reach. Each individual person and unlock just an extra small percentage of their potential, then your ability to achieve more, do more and be more happy and productive at the end of the day is magnified. I noticed that in the military, and it’s still true for the work that I do now with organizations and how frustrating.

Did you get, or do you still get perhaps in the comparison between where you’ve got elec in the electronic engineering space, you’ve got things that you can find a solution for, right? If it’s at, if the solution will either exist or you can in. Develop something that can exist, but that’s not so easy in people you can see potentially.

Okay, there are the, this is where the issues are, but change is a difficult thing to implement in people. So there’s a, there is, on the other hand to what we were saying before, there is a vast difference between those 200%. Anthony, you’ve nailed it. The, a couple of threads that I’ll pull on there.

The first is that oftentimes technical minded people or solution focused people always try and step into the, to the gap, right? There’s a problem and there’s a gap of understanding to get to the resolution and the solution focused people always try and fill that gap. And it helps you move from problem to resolution.

So it streamlines the process, but in that gap, that, that gap that exists between problem and resolution is the growth opportunity for the people around you. And often to times those technical focus people can rush to fill that gap and not leave space for the other people around them to potentially grow and evolve and work out what needs to be done to fill that gap themselves.

So that there is the magic, in leadership is that transition from technical or tactical expert to, to growing people who can be technical or tactical experts is allowing other people to work out how they might fill that gap themselves. The second thing Anthony, you may have heard this before, is that, I forget who said it, but we.

Believe that we are logical beings influenced by emotion. The truth of the matter is that we are emotional beings influenced by logic. And so too often engineers think we are the former. We are logical. Everyone’s logical, everyone believes and sees the same things. Emotions sometimes get in the way, but that’s not the truth.

So if you can make that pivot from understanding that you don’t need to be the answer to every problem and. That emotions are real and people are influenced by them, and you need to acknowledge them and work out where they are and where they need to move to. Then you can be a little bit more successful in growing teams that can achieve outcomes or changing things that were in one way and need to be in another.

I’m interested as well that, having come from a military background means that you are effectively employed. You are, and you’re following orders as you do even in business. How does that transition to then becoming business owner and then in a, in what you do day to day in overseeing people who in themselves own businesses?

How do you build that? Space of understanding and relatability. I think the thought that goes through my mind, Anthony, when you start to talk about that, is what I call the, I guess the cornerstone or the foundation of the if you get this right, then you can achieve in whatever. Area that you try and set out to achieve in and too often what happens in the, in parts of the military or certain parts of the workforce is that you’re often always, like you mentioned, told what to do.

You need to. Do this thing by this time, and you go and do the thing and then you come back to them and they go, okay, now you gotta do this thing by this time. And that keeps going on and on again. And that, you achieve outcomes, you’re productive. But the pivot comes when you start to acknowledge that you are leading yourself, so you’re not taking.

You’re not just taking the information and the guidance and doing the thing you’re thinking about, why am I doing the thing? Why is it important? Why is this timeline important? How does my contribution assist the other people in the organization? You start to scale your thinking from doing to leading in achieving your own personal outcomes.

And if you can get that foundation right, you can lead yourself. That’s like the you throw a rock into a pond. And there’s a big impact point in the pond, but then everything ripples out from there. But if you get that leading yourself done, you can learn how to get stuff done by yourself under your own motivation without being told.

And you can identify why it’s important and how it fits into the bigger picture. You start to lead yourself. Then you can start to lead teams, and you can start to lead organizations, and then you can start to lead business outcomes. And so that shift from, extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation is essential in unlocking that ability to lead yourself.

So don’t just be carrot or stick somebody telling you to do something or you get punished or do something well and you get rewarded. If you can shift to that intrinsic mo motivation that I’m doing this because this is important and I want to do a good job that’s the foundational pit, that’s the rock as it hits the pond.

It’s an interesting visual. Yeah. And which, which also brings me to that idea as well. Is that, how much of an influence is the visual in teaching people for you? Because I imagine particularly it from an engineering background that is very visual. Yeah. I have a lot of, the people I work with have started calling them Leon Iss Anthony. They’re little anana analogies or metaphors that I try and use all the time to try and make a point. And people have picked up on the fact that I use them a lot. And I think you’re a hundred percent right, Anthony. Words don’t often connect with ideas.

In fact, let me just step back a little bit. The most important skill I think you can have in today’s workforce, Anthony, is the ability to quickly take new data. Turn it into information and turn it into knowledge, and then turn it into wisdom. And the quicker you can get new data through to wisdom, the more effective you can be in the workplace.

Because the work is changing so much, there’s so much rapid change in the world. Every new data point is an opportunity for you to work out how it impacts you and what you are trying to achieve, or how it impacts the people you care about and what they’re trying to achieve. So that transition from data to information to knowledge to wisdom is the most important part to get through.

And what I found is if you can couple data and information with a visual, it makes it easier for people connected into their own knowledge and wisdom databases in their heads. So one of the reasons I always try and use those visual metaphors. Even in spoken word, if you’re not drawing it on a board or whatever it might be, but even in, just in spoken word is because it helps people better connect this new information with the wisdom they already know and understand, because it gives them a foundation to couple it onto.

Again, I’ve used another little metaphor in my explanation of metaphors, Anthony, that might be a bit meta, but the I think it’s really important to acknowledge that humans, store information in a very structured and coherent way, and everything couples to something else.

That’s how it’s stored in there. And so if you can help paint the picture of why it’s important and how it fits together, it helps them store it away. I agree. I think it’s often that people get caught up in their own way of learning and forget that others may be different. And here we are largely on a on a mostly audio.

Medium. Yeah. And most people listening to most people will be listening to the podcast. Those of you that are watching on YouTube, fantastic. ’cause you are watching. Yeah. And, there’s also then we produce other materials out of it in the written format, et cetera, because people learn and take things in a different way.

But is there a commonality in terms of leadership where you find that there’s a particular way that works better than others? Or is it really just different for different people? I think it’s one of those, it depends answers, Anthony, which isn’t exceptionally useful, but let me give a small piece of information that might help you.

I think the call it the art of leadership is that, in fact, my own personal leadership philosophy, Anthony, is to try and see the shape of people and the space in problems and then fit the people to the problems. And if the space you leave is too big. That, that person has got too much of a gap, too much of a stretch to fill that space then you fail them.

And if the gap is too small, then you’ve also failed them. And so what I found, Anthony, is that if you get better at recognizing the shape of people, so what are their competence, character, attitude, aptitudes, all those different things, elements that make up the human. Sometimes you need to reach each individual person in a slightly different way so you can help them understand what they need to sh how they need to grow.

To answer your question it, that, it depends. Answer is really around. You need to know your people, and you need to know what, what motivates them, what their aspirations are why are they working in your team? What, how do they like to get shown appreciation? What are all these different facets of the human that you’re interacting with?

And then from that, you can start to better understand, okay, things or facets are part of a leader’s role in starting to learn about the people in their team and starting to unlock the individual brilliance that each of those people have and how to best access it. So you talk about. Different strikes for different folks for want of a, for want of a better term.

Perfect. And but I’m interested then in terms of leadership, right? Because I imagine this is a bit of a double barreled thing where on one hand, do people have to be ready and say, and put their hands up to say, I want to step into leadership, or, I am a leader, but I need to get better. And then on the other side of things is how willing are they to.

From corporate burnout to seven Figure Business re’s journey. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Perl, and today we are sitting down with Srimoyee who just launched Lumen, an employee branding and talent strategy firm that’s only a few months old, but already making waves.

She’s about to share why companies spend millions marketing their products, but. Get about the important product their people. We’ll explore how talent marketing isn’t just about hiring. It’s about building trust, retention, reputation, and so many more things to make sure it aligns with your values, your ethics.

So much detail in this episode. Have pen and paper ready for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. And hey, don’t forget to subscribe while you are there.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I’m delighted to have SRI joining me today, and I know we’re gonna have an amazing discussion about all things marketing and the fact that her business is very new, which is a little bit different for biz bites for thought leaders.

But I thought this was a great journey to take people on. So welcome to the program. Thank you so much Anthony. It’s great to be here. Lumen is an employer branding and talent strategy firm that I just started. It’s just been three months for me. And yes, it’s not a recruitment agency like most think it to be.

We try to help organizations attract, engage, and convert the right people by communicating what makes them a great place to work. And so happy to be here with you today. No, look and it’s great and there’s so much there to unpack as a starting point before we even get into your journey is to taking you there because, we hear a lot of people talking about cultural fits and things these days, but it’s it, there’s a difference between using the words and it actually meaning something. And I think that’s the key here, isn’t it? Because it’s the difference between marketing that is just made up terms because we think that’s the right thing and authentic based content. And that’s really what you are talking about here.

Absolutely. You know what we spend like millions marketing our products, right? But too often I feel, and many of us feel that we forget the most important product we have, which is our people. And talent is the engine of every business. You can have the best product, but if it’s your people.

Who make it real, authentic. And most companies I think invest heavily in marketing their products, ex and experience working in So your employer brand, it’s just not a campaign, it’s like one of campaign. It’s actually the foundation of trust, the retention, and the reputation as well. Yeah. And it’s something that is.

Underestimated, I think is probably the best way of describing in value. And I think part of that is business, has been very cautious previously about marketing team because they’re worried that they might move on. They’re worried what happens if they do move on. And so it’s just been kept very, close to their heart and not including other people.

And then other people’s voices don’t seem to count as much and it’s and it’s this steamroll effect of really what is. Old fashioned ideas and ones that in this day and age when it’s so important to build relationships, I think more important than ever before marketing is about relationship building with your audience.

And hence the reason why we’re doing podcasting for a lot of people as well, because it’s such a fundamental thing to be doing, including internally as well as externally. Absolutely. And I think talent marketing, like we call, is, it just doesn’t help someone to hire, it shapes who stays with you, what kind of experience a candidate is experiencing with your brand.

So when I feel that when talent marketing is treated like as a business strategy, hiring stops becoming reactive. So it becomes intentional brand driven and aligned with broader business goals. So it’s so important like a product marketing. Now think of a product that you would launch, right?

When you do launch the product, it’s important for you to understand your audience, the messaging. You would do some product testing. It’s the same way when you’re trying to hire, we need to do those tests in places to understand the audience, what they’re thinking. What is the candidate going through, and why should they apply to your organization?

Yeah, and I think this is the really important thing for business to remember is that. The right talent is everything. I know we’ve spoken a little bit about this in the past on the program how, having the right people is not necessarily about having technically the best person in the, in a particular role there, because if they are not a cultural fit with the organization, it can have much more of a negative impact than the positive of the fact that they may be brilliant at what they do.

Absolutely. And here’s where the strategy portion comes in. Now, suppose, we are trying to hire a key team. You, we could just do a job post and we hope that, the right people are coming in or we do something like a talent brand study Know, which is so important, which tells you what the candidates or employees perceive about the company.

What’s real, what’s aspirational, what are the gaps? And once you do that, you could craft employee value proposition or EVP. The, that’s just not a promise in words, right? So you are living that experience that you are going to give to people when this is like, when it’s clear people join for the right reason.

Your culture becomes tangible and candidate, especially Gen Z, trust you before they even apply. And today’s candidates the Gen Zs specifically are evaluating companies through a very different lens. They’re, they are just not looking at job ads. They’re not, they’re actually looking at some values, purpose and proof, and I’ll be happy to share some stats that, I came over while doing some research as we move on.

Yeah, absolutely, definitely. Definitely interested in those. And I think just to pick up on that point though, that I think there have been this kind of, this ideal, supposed, ideal working place that was constructed by big companies like Google, for example, where there’s perception that, you go and there’s rooms where you can, I don’t play pool and you can sit in different chairs and you can have coffee and whatever else it is that, that whole perception of what a workplace should.

Be like, has changed and therefore the younger generations have grown up with that perception that it should be different. And indeed, since COVID, we’ve obviously undergone this change again, where well do I actually have to be in an office, whatever that office looks like, and do I, if I do I have to be there nine to five, Monday to Friday?

Or can it look like something different? And I think the expectation of people out there is completely different to what it was, six or seven years ago, let alone what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Absolutely. In fact, my previous workplace, we worked remotely. So I was handling the talent marketing for apac as well as Americas.

And we were all connected virtually, right? It was never an expectation, and that was something that was driven from the leadership itself that, if you could get the work done. In a small, smarter ways. It’s not necessarily we would have to come to work. So it gave us a lot of flexibility because time zones was different for me based in Australia, we are much ahead in the time zone.

So it definitely gave that space and a comfort zone as well to finish certain things that you would like to do. It could be your person’s space before you could just come in and start your day. So I think that has been amazing and candidates are looking into those flexible options as well as we speak.

Yeah. Yeah. I like to think I was probably the lucky enough to be the forerunner to some of this and I wouldn’t say I was well among the first, I definitely wasn’t because I remember many years ago hearing an interview. With someone, and I’m sure it was someone who worked in a higher level at Channel nine at the time, who was spending quite a bit of time working from home.

And I thought, oh, that’s an interesting idea. And I was employed at a particular time to work in a in an office that was 45 minutes to an hour away from where I lived, depending on traffic that could increase even further. And I went to the CEO at the time and I said, look. It’s not very efficient for me to try and be here at nine o’clock in the morning if you allow me to work from home until nine 30 in the morning when the school zones are finished.

I can get an hour and a half work in. I can work for the 45 minutes while I’m in the car by taking phone calls and. Similarly, if I leave at the end of the day a little bit earlier to avoid that peak hour traffic, you’ll get more benefit out of that. And we trialed it and it unfortunately, it worked and it was great for a while and it was.

So I think that’s an important thing as well with all of this, is that with. The mix isn’t cut and dry as it used to be. It, it used to be literally you’re in the office nine to five, Monday to Friday. That’s what we pay you for and that’s what you’ll be, and and certain offices you’ll be there till six or seven o’clock at night and certain off certain offices, you’ll be there from seven 30 in the morning.

But whatever it is, that was the expectation. But now that blend of I can go and do a few things for a couple of hours. I can come back to work and work later in the evening. That flexibility is there. But the balance with that is what the expectation of the employer is as well, because the danger is that they expect that you’re now available 24 7.

And so we haven’t quite found that really nice way of making it work for everyone and designing it differently almost for everyone. That’s exactly like a great point that you you know. You’ve taken up here. Like I was talking about the stats, there is some interesting proof points which says that the current sort of talent, which is the Gen Zs right, are completely different.

And in fact, there are 44% of this group have rejected an employer because the company did align with their ethics. Now imagine you mentioned on your career site or somewhere about this, that we are flexible and, all of those words. But when it comes to implementation, it’s not they see and it’s just not about Gen Z.

So whatever promises you give on your marketing strategy, your career site, your social media, it’s the living proof of what you’re trying to say. And the minute there is a disconnect things just fall apart. So it’s important that, how do we ensure that, okay, if we are saying, talking about flexibility, that it is there, and to what extent should that be is something that the younger generation, they are, they live by that actually.

So yes, it’s so very important. And I think it’s almost like we’re writing new rules of the game. Yes. As far as marketing is concerned, isn’t it? Because it used to be that this was the trendy word, so we’ll throw it out there. It’s like one of my biggest bugbears in, in marketing is that every other business has, we are the leading.

In whatever it might be. Who says you’re the leading in it? What actual criteria have you met to suggest that you are the leader? Some can genuinely say that I get that, but that is a very small handful that have actually been through a process that says that they are the leading, because even a, even an award, even a competition, okay, you might have been the leader of the people that entered it.

But doesn’t make you necessarily the industry leader or the leader in a particular space and in what context that people don’t usually give it. I’m the leading whatever, but yeah, I might be the leading one in this street. That’s the, that’s, that might be true, but it’s, it doesn’t wash anymore.

I think that kind of phrasing and terminology doesn’t wash because people are looking for support to see that and saying, okay, if you’re the leader, where am I seeing that? That is actually evident. And I think the same applies to all of that marketing terminology that exists in different areas. Bang on I couldn’t just, we’ll talk about this more when it comes to certain words that we keep on using repeatedly.

Things like innovation, and these are very cliched in today’s word. And if you take that to a job description, say, where would we use those words? Because the job descriptions are so heavy and it already gives and an imposter syndrome to many when they read, even if they’re confident in applying, the minute these heavy words come into flow, it just am I too good to even apply?

Am I good enough to apply for these roles? So I think it’s time to shift, make. Easy. Some things that as per the job, what the skills are required, we have them do the real talks, have those real things that you know, matters. For example, that survey with the Gen Z also said that they need 88%.

They would need a clear purpose what they would like to do in the job and feel satisfied. So it’s just not about Gen Z. I think if today, me and you would read a job description. And it should be, wow, you know what? I feel connected and I think that’s what it is. And not glorified words so to speak.

Yeah. I, and I think it, it is so important to choose the phrasing correctly that matches in, I know, and I’m sure you’ve got examples of well as well of where, if you use the wrong terminology, the expectations of the people are different. That are applying to be with you and it ends in tears. I’ve definitely seen it.

I remember an organization I was dealing with a few years ago, and they used a particular word quite heavily in a lot of their materials. And despite me having conversations with the CEO at the time saying, it’s just not the right word for your business. It’s not a criticism of your business. It’s just not the right word for it.

No. It’s the right word. And I saw over a two year period, the the turnover in staff was astronomical. And when that word changed, so too, did the trend for staff to come and go as often as they were because they were attracted by something that wasn’t really. True to the business.

And again, not a criticism of the business or the person that was in charge of it, merely just the wrong word, reflecting something that they perhaps thought they should be rather than what they actually are. I completely, agree here to that and coming from I was attending a conference and it wasn’t.

It would, it was a networking event wherein this young graduate spoke up and said, you know what? I do pretty good in my college. I get good numbers, I get everything, and she’s now applying for jobs. And she mentioned this. The minute I open the jobs to apply, I pause and think if I’m good at it because.

It’s not even matching to what my, it’s, it might be the role that you open up, but then again, those heavy words make me feel like doubt myself even to applaud. So I think it has to be, those real insight has to be those authentic messaging and. The best people are your employees. So if they are the ones who come out and they are sharing their experience, that authenticity matters a lot.

So it becomes more credible and people are able to resonate to what they are saying and they are applying to you. Yeah and so I guess that’s the thing where we maybe start looking at some of the statistics and things that you’ve got there because. Again, we wanna put some authenticity to what you’re saying here because it is a very different landscape and I think many many businesses are not hearing it because.

They’ve got a mix of staff, right? They’ve got, it’s, they’ve got people that are old and young, different generations, so they’re catering to all of those. And that in itself can be a difficult thing because there can be a huge difference between it. I just while you are bringing up some of those stats.

I certainly recall a time when I was working for an organization and I hired someone. I had was just a three person team, so it was quite small. And I had someone who was working under me that was close to my age, and then we hired someone younger and I remember we were just having a casual conversation about influencers and TV shows and music and stuff, and this poor.

A younger woman was looking at us just very blankly and completely lost. We were talking another language to her and equally she would be talking about stuff and we’d going, what are you saying? And that makes it hard when you’re trying to build a culture and you’re trying to show these different things.

But I’m interested in some of the stats that you’ve got there as well. Yep. So this survey or the study report that I was looking through, they specifically focused on Gen Z. So today’s candidates how they are evaluating pri primarily our younger generation here. So I’ll just read this through to you.

They are, most of the Gen Zs are evaluating companies through a very different lens, as I mentioned earlier to you. So it’s beyond even the job act. So 44% of Gen Zs are, je have rejected a employer because a company didn’t align with their ethics. Now, that’s a very big thing. I would have in my so many years of experience, ethics was always there, but it never played such a huge role.

Right then you would have about 86% who said that they need a clear sense of purpose in their job to feel satisfied. Yes. We always wanted to be of, have that satisfaction to the kind of job that I was looking for too, but it was not predominantly on my top list. It was maybe on the fourth fifth.

But looking at the way things are changing with the new generation, it is good for employers now to look and think how their messaging should be. Now, if the report also said that, 75% of them, they actively weigh community engagement engagement and societal impact, not that heavy. We wouldn’t have thought that would play such a huge role in their mindset while applying a job.

So these are some very interesting data points for employers to consider because of the way hiring is now happening. And more we could talk about. How is the landscape of social media and content changing predominantly for this in a younger mindset as well as we speak? Absolutely.

Because the thing about anyone that’s looking for somewhere to work, they’re all a, they’re almost interviewing you as the employer rather than the other way around these days. And they’re looking at what you are talking about on social media in other places. And making some judgment calls around there because they’re seeing through what might just be the marketing terminology and what is the reality there and.

You talk about ethics and impact as well out beyond the actual job. I think that is an important thing to people as well. That there is a culture of giving in some way, shape, or form. We’ve certainly had on this program in the past, a shout out as I do every now and then to Paul Dunn from B one G one because B one G one is a great way that you can make an impact through a business and giving something to other parts of the world, but it is important.

When I talk about ethics, that it’s that it’s beyond just you are doing the right thing in the way that you work. It’s actually, you’re going beyond that. It’s not just ticking boxes. Absolutely. Most organizations, we always have a part of corporate responsibility or CSR activities that we all do.

But does it define me when I’m looking at a job, does it define that, okay how much of contribution this company is making? And it gives me then the deciding power to join a company. So I felt that it’s a big shift. Nobody would, and when they’re making a social media strategy, for example, to attract talent, then this plays a big role that you know, what CSR activities that they’re doing, they make it as part of their content strategy too.

So whoever is looking at applying, they would know, Hey, you know what this organization does. Do a lot in this space. So it is one of my decision making process of thought when I apply. Yeah and I think that when you are looking through all of those things, it’s important that they’re aligned with the business and that.

Is where I think is a lot of businesses fall apart as well. I’ve certainly, again, we’re going back into the past, but I remember working at an a fairly large organization and on the whim of the then marketing director who was. Personally very involved with a particular charity and for very valid reasons, and a very great charity at that, an international charity dragged the organization into a relationship with that charity.

And it was a failure because it had no alignment with the business itself, as wonderful an organization as it was. It just didn’t have any relevance. To the business and therefore nobody bought into it. And I think that’s an important message as well, is that if you’re going to align a business with something and a charity is one idea, but not the only idea, it whatever you are doing in marketing sense, it needs to be aligned with the business and where it’s going and the core audience and what they think as well.

Absolutely. True that because. It’s just not about the candidates. And the business impact that you’re mentioning here end of the day is the people who are making the changes as well. While we are looking at the content strategy with regards to CSR to probably attract talent, it’s also client strategy as well.

I’m sure clients would also be interested to see where we are contributing with regards to the society overall. Yeah, and I think it’s so critical. That businesses think about all of these things because it also impacts their own course of action and their success. Because we’ve been talking about it in the context of employees, but the truth is that this has an impact in the context of clients and whoever is buying from them and partners and those things as well, because you want to be in a relationship with someone.

That shares the same values as you, because the reality is you have competitors. We all have competitors. Why people choose you. Is because of you and who you are as a person, as a brand, as a business, and that filters out into the bigger world. And I believe that’s becoming more and more important. I think AI is making it more important because yes, people are looking for that, which is different.

That is true to who they are. That stands out from what is the AI driven content. Absolutely true that as well because in this aspect, specifically because you brought up the space of competitors everybody is looking into the, so your. Competition as to what they’re doing.

And specifically there is when you strategically do things with regards to keeping in mind the client perspective, the, the future candidate perspective, that’s when everything that’s what the strategy is all about. So I would again, reiterate that talent marketing is all about that.

It is a strategy with regards to keeping business in mind. And now, in one of, one of the times where there could be a lot of content strategy build with regards to the client stories that you have in a way that your future candidates get. Attracted and say, wow, you know what, they have these kind of clients and this is what the employees, so it’s, I feel it’s like a holistic approach from business from client perspective, where then your employees and your future candidates, one in a hardship.

Yeah. It’s such an area of underestimated value, and that’s where I think it’s about businesses knowing where to start from with this. Because we’ve been talking all around the idea of this, but the question is how do they actually get started on this and put, meat on the bone as it were, of what is really driving them and where that authenticity is because.

It needs to come from a place of authenticity and there needs to be, people like yourself that is going to find what that is and take them through a process. Absolutely. And it is. That’s what the beauty of talent marketing or recruitment marketing, employer branding is all about. It is about saying that as important is your product marketing or your client marketing.

So is your talent marketing. How would you shape talents to ensure that they are the right people, you are trying to attract them while you are trying to it’s even before you sit and you think about promoting those jobs outside, it’s a step much ahead of that. Like even your thinking of the job ads that you would write.

You, you keep thinking about how to ensure that this entire process comes into place. It is, it’s about everything. So if you are giving the product client marketing importance, talent marketing has an equal space completely out to your. So let’s go back a little bit because I want to give people a bit of a sense of your journey.

’cause we talked in the beginning of the fact that this is a fairly new venture for you. So talk to me a little bit about where this journey came from and how you got to the point of establishing this where you saw the gap that was in the market. So you’ve been, actually was born out of redundancy and I think I give a lot to my journey.

Of being redundant. I don’t think otherwise. Human, which means light would come into being Now after the journey of being redundant, I was like, okay, you have very less, because the space is very niche. Not all organization are heavily investing on employee branding services and.

That’s where my story is to most organizations or talent leaders are that do not treat talent marketing or employ branding as a cosmetic afterthought. It has to be something that you blend in your process just like you would advertise or do marketing with any product out there.

So I did see that, there was. Not, there was client marketing, there was product marketing, but the talent space is where it was missing. And of course there was less of roles in this EV space or employee branding space is when I thought that, I have had 15 years, 16 years of experience in this from starting employer branded services from ground up, so everything like, how should.

The EVP messaging be how should a career side be? How should the candidate experience be? And of course, engage, attract everything together. So I was like, why not do something for the talent acquisition team? So I think Lumen is a solid partner to a talent acquisition team, the strategic partners.

We try to tell you authentically how this could help you instead of that constant rush through applying chasing applications rather. Yeah, I think it’s it’s a wonderful thing that you’re doing and it’s interesting to me how you talk so openly about it coming out of redundancy, but it’s amazing how.

Often the great ideas come from there. And as, and I can’t remember who to attribute this to, so apologies out there, but I know someone who told first told me this little piece, which says that, have you noticed how when things break they open? And I think it’s so true that some of the best ideas have come out of exactly the kind of situation that you find yourself in.

So tell me businesses that are sitting out there at the moment going, okay, I hear you. What are the immediate steps that they can and should be doing? So the first thing that you know, I tell any of the talent acquisition leaders or employer employers, whoever I meet, is that you can’t fix hiring with more job ads.

You fix it with clarity. So that’s where I do a discovery session. And I try to take them through a journey of trying to understand what’s taking them or what keeps them awake the night to fill in those numbers. Because I’ve been a recruiter myself in my earlier days, so I know when, businesses give you the requisition and you have to fill in certain roles and specifically in the tech.

Space. It’s not easy. So what I do is I do a discovery session where I ask them a whole lot of questions and try to understand what is there. Do they have a EVP? They don’t have a EVP. Is it the candidate experience? Or sometimes I had a TA leader who said, Sri, I have a whole lot of applications coming in.

So I said that’s a great problem to have. But his challenge was something different. From having a whole lot of people applying, how does the candidate experience can feel broken when you have a lot of applications, right? So that clarity is where I’d like and I help TA leaders then think through coming back from the discovery sessions that I think this is what needs are fixed.

These 1, 2, 3 things could help you fix it. Now some things can be. A little longer process. Some can be a quick fix. So that’s accordingly how we shape it out for the leaders. Fantastic. We’re gonna include some links on how people can get in touch with you in the show notes and some of the, that initial discovery session I think is an important thing for businesses to be doing, like dealing with to work with you on.

So talk to me a little bit about the kind of. Ideal organizations that you are looking to work with, because of course there’s a, there’s such a range, right? I think what you’ve said today is relevant to someone who’s having their first hire to someone that’s, got hundreds of team. It’s would be for each and any organizations.

That is for my ideal customer, I would say, or a client would definitely be, I am focused very much on, the it and the tech world because that’s where I’ve done most of my my work experience is there, but then it’s just like shifting the coin if it is like an FMCG or if it’s some other clients coming and they want to fix their hiring.

So anybody who’s trying to hire in, every situation is very different. Every TA leader that I speak has a very unique challenge that they come up with. It could be from hiring, they’re having hiring problem. It could be candidate experience problem, it could be career sites. So depending on what that discovery session leads to, the solutions are given.

But mostly anybody’s trying to hire a hundred thousand, or they’re trying to set up. Probably a center offshore because we are with my ki, with my experience over across multiple countries and regions, I do have that lens of how the local experience or the local candidates would actually look at or what would help them to get them going.

Those numbers. Look, there’s so many more things that we can talk about in this space, and I think it’s a fascinating area. Again, reminded of people to check out the show notes of how to get in touch with Sri. Just one final question that I wanna ask you, and I ask this of all of my guests, and this is an interesting one to ask you because you’re so new in the journey.

So maybe it’s a little bit more about what you wish than what is actually happening at the moment. ’cause it’s so early on. But the question is. What is the at heart moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish and hope more people will know about in the future? So you’ll have more people coming to knock on your door.

I’d say this Anthony, that instead of, like treating the recruitment marketing or talent marketing, like as I mentioned as a cosmetic afterthought we need to see it as a strategic partner. And I think that wow moment is that the talent acquisition team feels, oh, she’s one of us because she knows the trenches.

There is something that I have dealt it in and out. So of course there are a lot of agencies who you can probably give your work outsource to, but unless you’ve been in that trenches of hiring or recruitment, you wouldn’t understand the pain of the talent acquisition leaders. Like what it takes them to fill those roles and everything.

A snap of a finger probably. So yes, I said that would be the aha. Wow. Movement. Fantastic. I love that. I love everything that you’ve talked about today. It’s so relevant and important. It stretches beyond just the internal employees. It also looks to outside relationships and it’s a very specific kind of marketing that is becoming more and more important to organizations.

So thank you for being an amazing guest on the program. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Anthony. It was great talking to you. Thank you so much and to everyone listen in. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Until next time, we look forward to your company then.

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