Biz Bites

Technology, learning and leadership, an expert panel on thriving in the digital age. It’s a very special edition of Biz Bites where we have three visionary experts sharing their insights on navigating what is today’s very complex technological landscape. We have a learning specialist in Jd. We have also a spiritual coach in Cheryl, and we also have tech leader Dave, joining us to reveal powerful strategies for continuous growth.

Authentic leadership and leveraging technology for success. You’re gonna discover some practical approaches to daily learning, the secrets of intrinsic motivation, and how to balance digital tools with human connection. Whether you’re an established thought leader or aspiring to be one, this conversation is one that is gonna transform how you approach growth and innovation in our rapidly evolving world.

Welcome to Biz Bites. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the People Behind Podcast done for you because we are all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and Check Out Podcast done for you as well in the show notes.

Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and we have another panel discussion today from a group of thought leaders. And I say thought leaders because we are coming from all different areas. We’re gonna get everyone to introduce themselves in just a moment, and also to give you a little bit of an insight as to where they’re coming from, how they see.

The market at the moment, the climate that is out there. It’s a very interesting time in the world right now. So I’m gonna throw to each of our panelists, we’re gonna start off with Jd. Welcome to the program. Thanks Anthony. Greatly appreciate you having me here today. It’s a pleasure to be on. My name is Jd Walter.

I’m the president of tric. We are a small learning and development company. We focus on human skills developments and organizations looking to achieve peak performance. A couple words to describe the market today. Crazy. I think it’s high volatility, constant change. I. Yeah, I can see that it is crazy is a good word at the moment, isn’t it?

Cheryl, what about you? Do you wanna introduce yourself first of all? Yes. Thank you. It really is an honor and a privilege to be here. Thank you so much for that. I am Cheryl Stet and I’m a spiritual coach, a master healer, a three time author, and I help people who are feeling stuck in their lives lost.

They know they’re meant for more and they just. They really lack clarity. So I help them discover that clarity within themselves and step into who they truly are. And yes, crazy. And what I see and what my clients see and I just see this more and more every day actually is people who can really make a difference.

All those change makers are really being called. To step up and move to a whole new level to do what we can do. Yeah, I can absolutely see that. And I think that’s a really important point, and we’re gonna come back to that in a moment. But first of all, Dave, why don’t you give us your words in a bit of an introduction as well, Anthony, thanks for having me on.

Really appreciate being here. Honored to be among these other thought leaders. I’m Dave Alton. I’m the CTO of a managed service provider here. In the United States we help businesses protect themselves from cybersecurity threats and do it for a lot of small companies. And I would say how I would describe the market right now is, it’s just wild. It’s so all over the place. It’s really hard to keep up and keep track of everything that’s going on. And I echo a lot of what Jd and Cheryl have said. I think it’s an interesting starting point and I think it’s interesting too for me, I mean I’m based in Australia, as listeners will know, but the three of you clearly based in the United States where crazy is probably the word that Australians might subscribe to when they, where they’ve been watching the news in the last few months. But I don’t think it’s just about the politics. I think the politics is not something we need to get too much into, but rather it’s about everything else that’s going on, isn’t it? Dave just coming back to you for a moment.

Technology is a big player in the crazy and wild that’s going on at the moment, isn’t it? Because it’s moving so quickly. Yeah. Not only is it moving quickly but we have seen such a transformative time with AI and, augmenting humans’ abilities to do what they do day in, day out. That I think, I’ve always been in the IT industry for way longer than I care to admit, and it’s always moved fast.

But these last four years have just, they’ve been. Cyclonic right to just, everything is like rotating around and moving and moving and it’s, there’s, it doesn’t ever feel like there’s a break and then you add the global, trade everything else on top of it. It just makes everything a lot more chaotic.

Yeah, chaos is an interesting one and we’ve discussed that on the Biz Bites program in the past. But I think there’s some chaos being deliberately created at the moment in and in many ways. And I think, she coming back to you. How do people, I. Navigate through that. It’s such a difficult such a difficult time when things are not happening as where you would hope that it would happen at a steady, slow space pace, I should say.

It’s all over the shop. So how do you cope? How do you cope? It’s such a great question. And number one, don’t get bogged down in Warrior fear. Because so much of what’s going on stirs up fear in individuals, and that’s a low vibration. We’re not gonna be living our lives well, we are not helping ourselves evolve and grow and expand into, human, into humans, into what we all have the potential to really.

Become so noticing when you’re in fear and seeing how you can really move into a higher vibration of feeling empowered what can you do? And so that can mean, going to a yoga class, if that feels right or riding your bike or connecting with a loved one, looking into someone’s eyes. It’s also looking at yourself looking inward and saying, what is it that I can do?

Because we are all made of energy and we are all radiating what and who we are and where we’re at all the time. So talk about chaos in a mix of things. We have all these humans and everything is energy. And so how do you really want to be in the world and what is your contribution? Big or small, we can all make a difference.

And so taking that place of empowerment and making decisions for yourself in a positive way, yeah it’s a tough one, isn’t it? Because on one hand you wanna be making decisions for yourself. On the other hand, if you’re a leader, you need to be making decisions for other people as well. And finding that balance at the moment that’s challenging.

Yes and no. It’s really making that. Commitment. I, I just got off a call a little while ago with a woman and another woman this morning that I did a session with and I just see how, specifically how they’re being called. So I do chakra readings, I do readings on people.

I can see their energy and even when we’re doing something for ourself. For ourselves, it affects the greater whole. It affects those around us. So I can see where people are blocked and I can let them know what they can do about that and how they can move into their superpowers. And the superpowers are the light, are the energetics.

So I’m not talking so much at the level of the mind or what we can do. Physically, but helping ourselves evolves, it sorta evolve. It’s like putting the oxygen mask on yourself first before you go to help someone else. So it’s up to me to do my personal work every day so that I can best serve my clients to help them do their work with their clients, and that ripples out in the world.

And when I get bogged down in fear and trust me. It happens, I’ll sink and and I’ll, and I have lots of skills to get myself out of that. But then to reflect and look at a situation, what is this? Reflecting back to me to understand what I can do and don’t we all feel better when we believe we’re making a difference, that it builds confidence.

It, we encourage ourselves then to do more, especially when we start to see results. Absolutely. Jd, it’s a good opportunity to bring you in here because making a difference to other people is essentially what learning and delivering of learning is about, right? Yeah. I think I. So I think there’s two things that both Dave and Cheryl said, as a segue into what does learning really do for us, right?

There’s the world outside of us and there’s all the things that are going on. There’s in, in each of our little ecosystems, there’s our job, there’s our personal, our home life. There’s all the things that we’re involved in socially, and each of those have their own dynamics and interpretations of these externalities.

So I, I think, I don’t wanna, I talk about learning and development from an organizational perspective, but I’m really interested in learning from an individual human perspective, right? Like, how do we help individuals find, Cheryl’s talking about, find that center right? Find that ideal vision for themselves, and then chart a course to that.

Then how do we align all of these things in our lives so that we’re being purposeful and intentional as we go forward? The organizational return on investment for learning is enfold, right? Fill in the blank. It’s huge. Employee engagement, which is just an employee’s emotional connection to this thing that they’re doing, is, at all time lows, stress is an all time high.

Extreme stress is skyrocketing. Managers are the, probably the one group that are under the most amount of duress in the workforce. And learning and development isn’t just about training a skill set so we can perform our job. It’s really about how do we optimize ourselves as human beings so we can achieve peak performance.

I talk about it very specifically in an organizational context. When I’m talking to an organization, a potential customer, we’re talking about how do we meet business objectives? How do we overcome a dip in the market? How do we overcome competition in a market space? And that has to do with productivity and performance.

But you can’t just throw more people at it and deference to Dave, you can’t just throw technology at it either. And I don’t think, Dave, that’s probably what you would argue. But you can’t just throw these things that we’ve been throwing at this challenge traditionally and expect that the, they’re going to net any kind of a result.

We live in a world right now where volatility. Is the norm there? I talked to a state trooper in New Jersey one day and he said There’s no such thing as a routine traffic stop. And I ruminated on this idea of routine, and I realized that there’s no routine anywhere. It’s not just for tactical athletes, those first responders or trauma ward surgeons.

There’s no routine for anybody anymore. And I, that’s the hardest thing. How do we build habits in a world where there is no routine? We have to become the routine. And Cheryl, I think you’re driving, I don’t wanna put words in anybody’s mouth, but I really felt like we were going down this path where we’re just about to hit this part where this is about creating the normalcy for ourselves and not trying to adapt ourselves to whatever the world’s norm is at the particular moment.

So social norms are something that we want to, div abide potentially, or, ignore, but do so deliberately in either regard. But the normalcy will come from ourselves. And that is that kind of alignment between what is the ideal vision that we have for ourselves and what are we realizing in our day-to-day right now?

Dave, I’m gonna come back to you in a minute about the technology side of things, but Cheryl, just to pick up on that point, how easy is it for people to find that sense of self amongst the chaos and the crazy at the moment and to, to, to work out? Particularly even in terms of, learning new things.

It’s, that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to accept that they need to and to actually. Find their space about what is right for them to learn and how to learn, and I think it’s such a crucial point because I believe it’s a human need. Learning and development is a human need. It’s, and so many of us, so many people get to a place of stagnation and historically that’s what retirement was all about.

Become stagnant. You’re done, you hit the age of 65 is what it used to be, and you’re gonna retire and get your social security. I’m actually Canadian, so your Canadian pension, whatever it is. But to recognize the need to learn, no matter what happens in learning and development, you’re gonna grow.

You’re, and we are all meant to evolve. There’s no plant out there. Think of the plant, anything in the natural world, the trees, even crystals, everything grows. Everything grows. The plant doesn’t go. Yeah. Okay. I’m done. I’m just gonna sit here and if it does, if it’s not getting nourished. It’s going to die.

So we must nourish ourselves, whether that’s through books, listening to podcasts, going inward and finding our own truth. So it, your learning can be multifaceted, but the number one thing is. To make sure you’re learning. And yes, there’s time to integrate What we learned, that’s part of the developmental stage is the integration.

And in our culture today, I think way too much emphasis is placed on a external learning. If we go back to the truth or at least the truth for me, that all the answers are inside me. So I don’t tell my clients what’s true for them. It’s just if I’m going to learn, like you’re saying, Jd you want to empower your students, those that are coming to you.

And even in it, everything is, you want to empower them to find the answers. That’s the empowerment of learning. It’s not, I traveled in many countries and in Africa, all those kids, they only learn through memorization. Just see how much you can stick in there and hold. And that’s the learning, it’s teaching to think for the self, but it’s we all have the opportunity in this lifetime and it’s intentional and it is required that we continue to learn.

My grandmother used to say that, and I’m no spring chicken here, folks. She used to say, Cheryl, you’re always learning. Don’t stop. If you stop, you might as well be dead. And so I think it’s something that has been forgotten in many ways, and that it’s, I think of it as a human need.

It’s required. Yeah, I think Dave bringing you in here, I think that picking up on that point, I think we don’t have much choice sometimes when it, particularly when it comes to technology and business, there’s a lot of pressure to learn new things. And I was sitting yesterday afternoon learning new things about a CRM that I’ve had for a little while and didn’t realize all of these things that it could do that I’d like it to be able to do.

And it’s. You don’t sit and think about it as learning often, but the truth is, it is. And we are, but there is a lot of pressure to do that, particularly on the technology side. Yeah. I mean we as a technologist and sometimes I call myself a solutionist ’cause I’m always out solving problems. Sometimes I think we overcomplicate things too.

I have had many a client come to me and say, Hey. Find me the magic bullet that does this, and the answer is it’s that pen and paper that you have sitting there like I, I can build this really cool tech thing that will. Do all that stuff you said, but it’s gonna cost you a million dollars and then it’s gonna take me two and a half years to get it done.

That pen and paper that’ll take care of it right now. You don’t have to wait, you don’t have to wait and pay for it. And Cheryl, I love what you’re saying about learning. ’cause it, I actually I try and set aside. Just 15 minutes a day to learn something new. And it doesn’t really matter what it is.

Like I, sometimes it’s silliness sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s how to listen better. It’s so important to my routine to have that little tiny bit of. I get to learn something new. And I think when we dedicate ourselves to that, when we dedicate to, Hey, we’re always learning and we’re really always committed to that.

I think things open up to us that, wouldn’t have before. And I know I, I mentioned AI when we started talking and I know that’s the buzzword and everybody’s it’s all over the place, but. It really has been something that I’ve used as a tool to point me in the right direction of things, because I don’t know everything about tech.

I don’t know everything about life and I surely don’t know everything about myself. But AI has given me inroads into things I would’ve never looked at before. Is just a tool, just like the. A pen and a piece of paper is you can use it to get better at stuff and learn new things and really capitalize on the world of information that is out there that there’s no way humanly possible to go and learn all of that, right?

You have to find some way to filter it and. I have found that AI is a good way to do that but there’s a lot of other cool new tools to do that with as well. And some of it is just like what we’re doing here, right? Having conversations with people. I love getting on these panel discussions and I’ll jot little notes down other panels will say, man, I’ve never heard that before.

I gotta go check that out. And connecting with people. So it’s, I don’t think there’s any one way to do this and there’s definitely not a right way to do it. I think there’s a right way for you. I think the one thing that we’re missing is that accountability of taking that on, right?

I think too often we put a lot of blame out there. Oh, the world’s terrible because so and so did this, or so and so did that, and. I take the attitude of it’s all my fault. Everything in the world is my fault. Because if I do, then I have some power to do something with that. If I say, oh, it’s somebody else’s fault, then it’s all on them and I and they have all the power to, to fix and change and do whatever.

But if I say, Hey, that’s on me. I can do something to make that better. I get all that power back and then I do, I get into a learning mode or I find new balance in my life and things like that. I’m Cheryl, I love what you’re saying about learning. It’s awesome.

And I think it’s a good cue also to bring back Jd into this discussion because I’m intrigued as well about. The different ways people are learning and it, Dave talked about being deliberate in doing something every day. And I don’t know if everyone puts a label on it and does that every day, but I think it’s hard pressed to find a day when you’re not learning these at this time with so much going on.

But I. I’m interested as well in terms of the kind of learning that you are delivering. How many different ways do you have to deliver the same thing? Because not everyone learns in the same way. And in this day and age, there’s so many opportunities to learn in different ways. So is that something that businesses have to accommodate as well?

Yeah, I think there’s, so two things I would, I kind of wanna jump on here. The first is this idea of continuous learning, right? The individual drive to grow. I. That shows up in organizations. I see it time and time again. We, I have a lot of conversations about rewards and recognition in organizations.

Unfortunately the organizations wanna default to the easy, right? So they grab something off the shelf and they say, here’s our wellness group, or, which has value but isn’t. The development that people are necessarily looking for. What they really want are opportunities to expand, stretch themselves inside of this job that they’re doing to demonstrate that they have value beyond their particular job description at this point in time and showcase what they can do for an organization in the future.

So more times than not, this is interesting because I think to Cheryl and Dave’s point. Everybody does wanna learn. Everybody does want to grow. That’s a natural instinct inside of us as human beings, propagation of species. The only way we continue to evolve as a species is if each one of us individually does our part to.

Push that foot forward. So I think inside of organizations, what you’re seeing is people are starting to step up and say, my growth is not just training. It’s not just this class that you wanna put me in. It’s give me that project, give me that high profile, quick turnaround project that everybody’s gonna be looking on.

I wanna see if I can do it. I want stretch myself. That, that feeds into something that Dave said and it strikes me. Is autonomy. What people want on the job more and more is they’re looking for this technology to relieve them of the mundane so that they become more, more critical thinkers, more strategists, more of the leadership stuff, more about the human element of working together in an organization.

Productivity is productivity and we’ll always get the work done, but we’re looking for is ways to bring more to the table. I don’t wanna just come in and stamp out widgets all day long. I want to think about the assembly line and I wanna make a contribution. To refining it. I wanna say something about this process that I’m involved in, and that I think is a growing trend across all workforces, that workers are looking for more opportunities to be.

Autonomous to be able to take risks, to be able to make decisions, and then to be celebrated when those things fail as much as they are when they succeed. So the challenge to organizations is really structural and maybe policy driven. Are our employees being given those opportunities, our managers allowed to make those kind of decisions.

So I think that’s what organizations are probably wrestling with more. Than the learning itself. When it comes to the learning itself, the one thing I would say is that it’s not styles of learning. There’s a lot of research out now that suggests, there really isn’t any style of learning that we are.

That’s necessarily baked in. What we take away from that is that the best, and this has always been the philosophy, the best learning opportunity mixes everything, right? You’re bringing in all the different pieces. So when I build a pro a learning opportunity, I focus on human skills, so I focus on human interaction.

I don’t do e-learning, I don’t like self-paced because of the subject matter. If you’re asking somebody to change human behavior, they have to be in an environment where somebody is modeling that. So a workshop for us is typically, we do some kind of an assessment at the front end, right? We have a little bit of an interaction.

So there’s this baseline understanding of where we’re showing up on a particular scale of behaviors, leader, leadership, emotional intelligence, et cetera. Our workshops have some lecture, of course, with lots of small group discussions. We want peer-to-peer interaction. They, we want everyone in our workshops to get comfortable collaborating.

So it’s a skillset. I don’t have to teach it, but we can implement it in every one of our workshops. We do a lot of scenario based role playing so that there is an opportunity to practice. So we try and identify right behaviors. We define those right behaviors, we give them some ness of their own, and then we talk about ’em and we talk about how we experience ’em.

We talk about how they show up. We start to model them. We start pointing at each other and saying, I think that’s mostly it. Nope, that missed it. That kind of interaction is what takes all of our learners to this collective point where we now we understand what the desired behavior is. Fill in the blank of what it is.

And they’re able to move forward with it. They have a language now, they can talk to each other about it. They’ve got some coaching on the backside, so whether it’s one-on-one or small group, we can come back and we can continue to help them individually or collectively develop along those action plans.

So to your question, I think I don’t think, I don’t put a lot of stock on learning styles. I do understand everybody has a preference for how they want to intake information and how much time they need to digest that information, contextualize it, and then get ready to have the conversation. So that’s the part of the train the scenario.

I like small groups too. I don’t, too many people in the room. You really can’t give that kind of attention to folks. So it’s really about letting them express themselves and show up in their authentic way, and then accommodating that. And so somebody needs a pause and needs to take longer to think through stuff.

I’m very adept at like reading the room. I drag my heels when I’m necessary ’cause I want somebody to catch up or I want to give them. I can see somebody when they’re ready to jump in. They’re just trying to get their thoughts together. I wanna make sure we don’t miss that opportunity. So the learning environment, I think the facilitator led interactive sessions, performance-based stuff that we do.

It’s much more accommodating to preferences, whether we call ’em styles or preferences, but it’s much more accommodating. To the individual learner. An online course is an online course. All four of us could take it. We’re all gonna experience it differently. The level of knowledge that we take away from it is gonna be different in our acumen, in performing whatever the thing is that we’re supposed to perform at the end will be varied.

Not that anybody will better or worse, it’s just we all have a different experience with it, and so we really want to get the most out of the learning experience. I always advocate for. Put more time and energy into the interaction, into a, experiential learning and see the dividends pay off. I think too many companies is a closing thought.

Too many organizations run out. They buy an LMS, there’s a bunch of content in there, and then they throw it out there and say, take whatever you want, but just don’t do it during working hours. First of all, this is part of the job, so pay me for it. It should training, learning and development should always be done within work hours.

If you want ’em to do it, you better pay ’em for it. But it’s in context too, and that gets lost when I have to go do something after hours. It’s not in the context of work anymore. So it loses that sort of gravitas that it should have. Yeah. I’ll pause there. No, look I love you made some really amazing points there and I wanna pick up on, on three particular words that you talked about in the course of that was collaboration, relationships, and also experiences.

And I think they all talk together and I think that’s such an important aspect of. What we need to do to be able to learn and to improve ourselves. And ultimately, if we want to be thought leaders in our spaces, then we need to constantly be working on those things. Dave, that, particularly in the technology space, people focus so much on the actual tech, but those other elements are really what’s critical to making that work.

Yeah, and I, the whole idea of. Learning is so interesting to me because I, I think about, how I learned this and it wasn’t like I didn’t read a book. It was like 1984 and there was no such thing as internets and things like that. I just, you fiddled around with stuff and you found something that worked and you did it, and then you did it again, and then it didn’t work that time and it was.

It was very incremental and I’m sure people of know of, agile kind of methodology around project management and things like that and it’s, I think it’s a really good, just way to think about life is that everything we do is incremental. All of it. It’s all incremental learning because everything builds on everything else.

I’m sure Cheryl could talk about how, once you understand your kind of spiritual journey and how connect with your energies and things like that. Once you understand that, then you can go to the next level and you can take it further and I think all learning is.

Is based around that. And we see that in, in tech. We see that in, life, in being a thought leader. Like I, I see a lot of people trying to be a thought leader. Like you don’t, there is, that doesn’t exist that you’re, you just are, you aren’t, and you aren’t, Andre, not, you’re not a thought leader because you’re.

Trying to be like, all you have to do is say you’re a thought leader, like that that, the minute you recognize that I am that. You are that, and you get to start doing that stuff now. Are you perfect at it? Are you always going to be the, the smartest guy in the room? I would argue if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

You should never be the smartest guy or person in the room. You should always want to look at another person and go, what can I learn from them? How and how can I make a difference? That person’s life. And I think if we did more of that just in general for the world would be a far better place than it is maybe at this very moment in time.

So I think continuing to learn how to interact, collaborate, be part of. This thing called life instead of worried about what label we give it or how we’re perceived or what other people think about it, or any of that kind of nonsense that, that get, that feeds into that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right?

Let that stuff go because it really isn’t going to make a difference day in, day out at the end of all this. I don’t want to be remembered as a guy that was scared of everything. I wanna be remembered as this guy that, made a difference in somebody else’s life. And whether that’s just my son who’s 14 and playing baseball and is having the time of his life, or, my staff that works with me or my clients.

I, I am here to make a difference. In whatever way I can. And a lot of times that’s technology ’cause I’m really good at that. But a lot of times it’s just listening. Just be paying attention and being present is such a lost art. Like I have to keep talking to my 14-year-old son. Look, put the phone down.

I know you think that is your world right now. And to some degree he’s not wrong, but. Put the phone down like it, you don’t need to doom scroll for four hours and pretend like you’re having a conversation with your wife. It doesn’t really work out all that well, tr trust me, I’ve done it.

Yes, I, and it is, it’s that, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we were all brought up with this idea. Multitasking just doesn’t work. You’re not really doing this a whole bunch of things at once. You’re only doing one thing and not really paying attention to the others.

And yet we have a generation that are focused on, even the simple act of watching tv. When was the last time someone sat down in front of the TV and didn’t have their phone in their hand and were, looking, scrolling through emails or looking at things on social media. As well as what’s on the show.

And did you see that scene? Yes, I saw it. No, you didn’t really see that. And was it critical? It’s, it’s just nobody is sitting there and just paying attention anymore. It’s not something that we are teaching people. And I think having that, coming back to you Cheryl, and having that stillness and that ability to reach inside and then to you, you look at the impact that you can make on other people, that’s a learning skill within itself these days that seems to get neglected.

And what we’re doing with all our learning. I’m listening to you and Jd and everything that you’re doing and what you’re helping your people with. Everyone that comes to your trainings that you are personally involved with, you have developed. The neuropathways in your brain. That’s all energy moving certain ways, and you’re helping people learn how to collaborate at high levels and receive the information and all of that to help them develop the neuropathways.

And Dave, how long have you been learning something for 15 minutes a day? You’ve got that neuro pathway nailed, right? And you’re, um. You’re doing so much in the world with it, or maybe you’ve really strongly developed that neuro pathway of figuring things out as a way of learning, whatever it is.

I believe that everything is here for our learning relationships. We don’t get married with the how to map and there are how to maps, but we don’t, there’s no. Cookie cutter, how to map really for anything, whether it’s friendships, marriages father, daughter, son, relationship. All of those relationships and the relationship with the self.

So it used to be, psychology used to really believe that there were in our early development, that there were certain things that were permanent. Our brains that were developed in certain ways, and we have dec, we have discovered that is no longer true, that because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, we can learn anything.

We can change how we think, we can change how we look at the world. And so when we look at, learning is a need. Learning is fundamental. And if we look at life in that way, look at the relationship, we can have the neuro pathway of, oh, it’s his fault, it’s her fault. I did nothing wrong. And that’s the easy road, but to neuro pathway of, oh, it’s his fault.

Oh, what do we always like, like Dave modeled for us. For what? It’s Greg. Braden gave a wonderful talk on, AI and said that science has now proven that we can duplicate anything. We’re making lamb wounds, we’re giving birth to lambs out of artificial wounds, and we’re practicing on the humans.

The lamb wounds are legal. And we could put chips in our brains to make us learn better, learn faster, that actually adjust. But the one we cannot duplicate is source energy, chi the vital force, God, what, whatever you wanna call it, that will never happen. It’s impossible. And science has proven that we can’t do that.

And so the learning is so much more complex. Than what we see as everything that’s available and that every bit that we learn and grow in the way we think we’re growing. Sometimes we grow a certain way and we look back 10 years later and go, oh, what was I thinking that was, it’s still learning.

It’s still learning. And like you said, Dave, we can make mistakes. It’s all okay and keep going with it. But I think it’s just the idea of living from a place of learning helps me grow and evolve and develop myself and helps others indirectly and directly, and that’s what’s gonna make our world different.

It’s not, yes, we can look at what I had a spiritual teacher once say, whenever we see that something is really outta place and it just eats away at us. It’s ours to do. It’s ours to do. Like Dave’s nodding his head, he is owning that one. Oh yeah, I hear you. It’s ours to do. So take action. Even if you mess up, even if you mess up, you’re learning in that way.

Anthony, can I jump in here for a second? I just wanna kind of foot stomp something here, and I think Dave’s bringing it up and Cheryl’s bringing it up and probably both did a better job, but I think there’s this there. And Cheryl, I love where you’re going with this, right? And I think Dave you’ve hit on this without saying it right.

What drives us has to be internal, right? There’s a misuse of the word motivation. How do I motivate them? Sorry. You can’t, don’t even try. Motivation’s intrinsic. I got, that’s mine. You can in, you can try and influence my behaviors potentially, or my thought processes, but you can’t motivate me. Only I can do that.

And I think, part of the challenge of the world today is there’s so much noise, there’s so much competition for our attention. There’s so much information being thrown at us. Every day. I turn around and AI is going to fill in the blank of the new greatest thing and we’re going to Mars.

And it’s just all these crazy way out there things. And I think they’re all abstractions. And I don’t spend, personally, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about moon travel. ’cause I just don’t care. I don’t even care about Mo Mars travel. I wanna travel to the beach, right? I want something that’s like tactile and within the realm of mine.

Because I think that’s where we start to see what Cheryl just said. That’s where we have those moments. We can only live in the, we say this from a government perspective, right? Citizens can only experience government at the local level because it’s the only place that it’s actually physical, right?

We drive on the roads, we see the water come through the faucet, we watch the sheriff drive down the street. Anything beyond that is an abstraction and it’s hard to get our heads around it. So I think there’s all this demand for our time and our attention these days and the things that we’re supposed to learn.

I wanna go back to Cheryl’s point though, but if you find that internal driver. That motivator to Dave’s point to learn and grow and to be the best version of you that you can be, then the opportunity to make those significant contributions become available to you. ’cause if you’re distracted by everything that’s out there, that’s all you’re ever doing is you’re looking down the road, you’re trying to find this place to fit in.

And it’s I live in southwest Florida, and so for anybody in the US you know what driving in Florida is like on the interstate. It’s like trying to merge onto 75 the interstate during rush hour. You better be doing 90 or you’re gonna get run off the road, right? Because everybody’s moving so quickly and that’s what feels like it.

It feels like every time somebody says we should, and they point off there in the distance. I can’t get my head around it. It’s a abstraction. It’s too far removed from me. I can’t do anything about that. There’s too much competition. But if I reframe my thinking, I actually can influence it. But I have to start right here.

I have to be, to Dave’s point, I need to model what I believe is right behavior, and I’m not gonna tell people I’m doing it. There’s an old zen cone riddle, right? And it’s a student in the master top of the mountain. They’re sitting there meditating. Student says to the master, master, what do we do when we achieve enlightenment?

And the master says, go home. Just go. Go back to your lives, citizens. And I think there’s a lot of this baked into what we’re talking about today. There is learning. There’s learning and growing because I want to be the best version of me that I can be so I can make my contribution to the species.

That’s my piece of evolution, right? That’s my piece of moving the species forward. So I just wanna foot stomp that idea that there’s, that it’s these internal drivers that we really ought to be focusing on and not the external. Manipulation to be whatever somebody else says we should do or want to be.

I love that. And I know we’ve gotta wrap things up in a moment, but I just wanna bring Cheryl and Dave back in here for, to, to finish things up. How important is it in this day and age to. Take all of those things on board that Jd was just talking about, and also have that, drive yourself to be able to stand out, particularly in an age where in many respects, technology is leveling the playing field.

So being able to stand out should be an internal motivation, shouldn’t it? Cheryl? It. It absolutely should be. And if you don’t feel that within you, you need to find it. It’s what’s getting in your way. And there’s some kind of block in your energy system. It’s as simple as that. It’s like a plugged drain, a plugged plumbing pipe.

There’s something in there. That’s what I do. I help people discover what that is, that’s getting in their way so they can learn more about the truth of their being and what they’re really here to do. So they can actually, then you’re motivated. Then you have your passion. I. That’s what motivation is.

That’s, it’s your passion. Without it, you’re just coasting and like you say Jd, about all the noise out there I just can’t be involved in that. I can easily get on the highway and do 90, that’s not a problem. I’ve learned, I’m from Canada, we don’t do that there, but I’ve learned how to do it here and I make it fun.

But it really is. Finding that within yourself. And we all came here to find that. We all came here to find our passion and what’s ours to do. And that’s high level energy. And you can’t know where it will all go. You don’t until you do it. It’s an energy flow. So if you’re feeling stagnant if you’re trying to go by what someone else says you should do you’re not gonna find it.

You’re gonna stay stuck. So it’s learning about yourself, finding out what’s in your way, and it’s all conditioning. We’ve all been conditioned and we keep conditioning each other, and it’s releasing that and discovering what’s true, learning about what’s really true for you, and then going after it.

That’s, that is a really great way to wrap things up. But Dave, I just want to give you the final say on here because I love what you’ve said because you’ve come through, we started talking off about crazy in the beginning, but really what we’ve talked about here is a way that you can motivate yourself to see through.

All of that dis, even whether it’s the technology or outside of technology it’s bringing it all together and taking control of that and being able to stand out. Yeah. I love the word balance in these discussions because it really does take, it takes all of it, right? You there isn’t, life isn’t.

Compartmentalize, like we like to think it is, right? It’s holistic, right? It’s everything. It’s all the relationships, it’s all the interactions. It’s all the experiences. It’s all of it all at the same time. And JdA, you made a great point about noise. You have to learn what’s noise and what isn’t.

When you do things start to balance out and things start to happen the way they need to happen. Until you do, you listen to the noise and you’re distracted and you’re not on your, you’re not on your right path, right Cheryl? You’re on whatever everybody else says your path is. If you really want to be on your path, you have to filter the noise, find what’s true for you.

Find that balance and then go after it and be accountable to it. Right? Be accountable to yourself. That I am doing the absolute best that I can in this situation. And sometimes it’s still not gonna be fun. It’s still gonna be awful. And we all have had those, but that’s what others in this life are for.

It’s about connections. And when it’s shared, it’s so much easier than. When you have to have the entire weight of the world on your shoulders. What a great way to wrap things up. I think there’s so much in this discussion that we’ve had. I think we all could have kept talking for a lot longer about all of this.

It’s a terrific topic of conversation and I think, going from crazy to how we can learn and motivate ourselves and the idea of collaboration and relationship building is so important. So thank you all for being a part of the panel discussion on the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders Program.

We really appreciate all of your insights. And of course we will include details on how to get in contact with each of our panelists in the show notes. But for now, thank you each of you for being part of the program. And thank you everyone for listening in. We hope to have your company next time on Leaders.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on biz.

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 Bites.

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 Bites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was too busy to wonder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re not recording that, so.

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

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

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

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

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