Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.