Biz Bites

[00:00:00] Navigating career reinvention shifts strategies and entrepreneurship. This is a compelling conversation with reinvention specialist, Tony Pisanelli. He’s worked with executives and senior professionals at critical career junctures and the discussion, we explore the themes of career transition, job loss, and the impact of AI on employment.
He’s got a very unique approach to career coaching, focusing on the importance of proactively managing one’s career and the difference between those who fall into crisis, losing their job and those who thrive by having a plan B. We also talk about not just losing your job, but what if you want to change your business?
There are lots of personal anecdotes and practical advice. on how individuals can navigate career upheavals and find new paths aligned with passions. There’s also some bonus content you don’t want to miss on the role of entrepreneurship and leadership in career development. [00:01:00] Let’s get into Biz Bites.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And this time, I think we’re going to explore something a little bit different to what we’ve explored on Biz Bites in the past. And I think it’s a really important area to be thinking about careers and changes that happen as a result of all of that and entrepreneurship all of those things.
We’ve got our guest, Tony, who we’ve got to know each other a little bit over the last maybe year or so. So Tony, welcome to the program. Thank you, Anthony. Delighted to join you. And I think the best thing to do is we always do on the program is get you to introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you’re about.
Alright, I’m a career reinvention specialist working with executives and senior professionals predominantly, whose careers hit a, whose careers have arrived [00:02:00] at a critical juncture if you like. The path they’ve been on to date. Is not the path that’s going to be going forward. They’ve either potentially lost their job, are anxious that it could happen to them sooner rather than later, or they’ve just become tired and burnt out from the accumulated years of really a hard slog at operating at the executive levels in an organization.
So we look at what the future could look like for them as they, uh, look at making some sort of transition if that is not already happened, unless someone’s already made that decision for them. Yeah that’s the interesting thing, isn’t it? That someone may have made that decision for them.
And I think this is the reason I wanted to bring this topic to our audience, particularly as well, is that there is the idea that people are losing their jobs is Interesting enough in a market where unemployment is quite low, [00:03:00] but there is this concept at the moment, particularly because we’ve got AI coming in.
So there’s fears of jobs being lost or changing at least as a result of it. But also what’s astounded me when I’ve looked into it is that there’s something like 300, 000, more than 300, 000 businesses that will shut down in Australia alone each year. And for those listening in other parts of the world, I’m sure it’s not that bad.
Different where you are as well. It’s quite staggering how many of those things happen. And so part of that process is where do you go from here? True. To answer that sort of question, my time in the corporate trenches revealed to me something really important. A lot of people work their jobs, Anthony, they don’t actually proactively manage their careers.
In a business context, it’s the same as what [00:04:00] Michael Gerber said. People work in their business. They don’t work on it, same principle. And therefore the failure situation could be quite a crisis scenario for people. Now, I saw a certain type of individual when I was in the corporate trenches that sort of managed to separate themselves out from the crowd.
They weren’t necessarily the high flying corporate executive who was so invested in and committed to their career. When the day arrived that they lost their job. They fell into crisis because they hadn’t foreseen that event. They’d seen it happen to others but didn’t think it was going to happen to them.
Somehow maybe they thought they were a little bit more special. Okay, and they lost their identity, they lost their daily structure, they lost their sense of purpose. They lost all the status and power that goes with having a senior role. Then [00:05:00] there was another sort of person who I call the entrepreneurial minded type person.
They were developing alternate career paths for themselves beyond the corporate landscape. And therefore, if that day arrived where the company said, see you later, it wasn’t a big deal. They would just activate their plan B. Okay, which is the path I followed. I decided to leave corporate life in 2015 and start a career coaching business because I knew there was a problem in the employment world where people didn’t manage their careers.
One. And two, I observed that the solution that was being offered wasn’t complete. So what was the solution? These companies, these employers would send their people to our placement firms [00:06:00] to update their resume, polish their interview skills, give them the latest job search strategies. But these people are bleeding, Anthony.
They’re hurting. Some people are going on drinking binges and engaging in other abusive behaviours. Some are in a very dark place. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites 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?
We’ll 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.
Come talk to us, podcastdoneforyou. com. au, details in the show notes below. Now, back to Biz Bites. Some [00:07:00] people are going on drinking binges and engaging in other abusive behaviours. Some are in a very dark place. The last thing they need is an updated resume. They’re trying to get their head around what happened, why it happened to them and where did they go from here.
Do I still actually want to be in the corporate landscape? And that’s why I’ve differentiated myself in providing this sort of career service rather than the traditional employment advisor that is helping you for the next job. I think what’s really fascinating to me, Tony, and I’m is that if we’d have had this conversation two weeks ago, I would have been thinking, Oh, I’m wondering if I know anyone who’s in this.
space or not. But we didn’t have the conversation two weeks ago. We’re having it now. And in the past three days prior to this, and even though we hadn’t, we planned this ages ago, in the last three days, I’ve had two conversations with two different [00:08:00] people who are exactly in exactly this situation.
One who has been in his particular position for a long time And has now took an opportunity to move out of there, but lots of other things have happened around him and has created a deal of anxiety and things around it. And he’s really at a career crossroads. He’s in his fifties, doesn’t know what he wants to do.
The other person was caught completely unawares. The investors pulled out of the business and. All of those people, the entire team, I think, was have lost their jobs. And it was interesting in the difference between the two people. One, as I explained, really at a bit of a crossroads. The other person was like if their business has pulled, if the investors have pulled out of that, doesn’t mean the clients aren’t still there.
Let’s maybe we’ll get together and let’s go and service those clients without those investors and [00:09:00] do our own thing. And it’s a bit like there being, even though they were caught unawares, there’s a backup plan that is not too difficult to activate. So it was interesting. It’s interesting to me that those two extremes of what you’re talking about came out purely by accident in the last few days.
Yes, obviously they’ve enhanced this interview by a few little stories and nuggets that add to the situation. Yeah, and I’ve saw a lot of that in my time in corporate. People caught, exactly as you said, caught unawares. When we know, it’s a natural dynamic of the corporate, the employment landscape.
It’s, yeah, it isn’t it? It’s, and it, and, but it is interesting. That and I think we’re seeing it even more, particularly after, after COVID, what happened during COVID was a lot of people became consultants and, but they really just created another [00:10:00] job for themselves. Some of those have gone back into the bit absorbed back into the corporate landscape, but all of these people are still doing a job.
They haven’t really worked out if it’s a. career path and if it’s where they really want to be, if they’re actually, if it’s something they’re actually passionate about. And it’s something you and I touched on just briefly before we turned the microphone on about the fact that, look, I’m incredibly passionate about podcasting and it’s something that’s taken me back full circle.
And it took me a while to realize that I’ve done a whole lot of things in terms of under the marketing umbrella that I enjoy doing. But I’m probably not as passionate about as doing this particular role. And I think it’s important, isn’t it, to at any point in your career, no matter where you are, to try and work out what is actually your passion.
What do you want to be doing? What is the and. To have a backup plan because you just don’t know. And typically you mentioned the person in their fifties, [00:11:00] there tends to be a natural sort of evolution that occurs during a person’s career, Anthony. So I look at the, there’s five sort of stages that a typical career goes through.
So there’s the. Initial phase where you are getting the hell of the ropes. You start a new job in a large organization and you’re the new kid in town and you’re a learner. Okay, and then you progress through and you grow and you’re In a development stage and then you’ll reach a maturity level if you like, so that’s your third level and then if you follow it, there’s starts to be a bit of a decline.
Okay, so we hit a bit of a dissension point where some of these executives, not all start bathing in the glory, if you like, of past successes. Okay, I’ve done it all. I’m now have deserved to put [00:12:00] my feet up a bit and then there’s, so that’s the decline. And the final stage is it comes to an end.
The entrepreneur tends to bypass that decline phase and the end phase because they’re always learning and growing. They don’t stop. There’s always the next challenge and that’s the key today. You mentioned, AI coming along and taking jobs. AI is just a form of technology. I remember I started working in the early 80s and I remember because I was on a graduate program on the time, at the time, Anthony, and we would rotate through the different departments in the company.
And the, my employer had 90, 000 people. And every time there was a CPI increase, there was people on the floor, there was 90 of them. They would have to update each person’s pay on a card, [00:13:00] okay? And then the next quarter, so they would take a quarter to do that, and then the next quarter there would be the next CPI increase and they just, it would just come along.
Then the computer came along. And someone at a corporate level could just press one button and everyone’s pay is updated. So 90 jobs or thereabouts went out the door. So whether it’s basic, the basic computer or AI, it doesn’t matter. You could be wiped out. What’s your plan? It’s a really interesting one.
I, it’s one good example. I went to a event just recently where a particular business demonstrated that they had a big team of salespeople. That’s now down to two because they’re using a eyes. To receive the phone calls and to engage with people and much more effective for them, much more cost effective, but [00:14:00] also much better conversion rate, interestingly enough, as well.
And so does that mean that all salespeople are gone? No, definitely not. This is a lower ticket item in a monthly subscription. So it’s not someone selling, services and things that are going to be worth thousands, but it’s a good example of where there will be roles and positions that will disappear.
But there are plenty of new roles that are being created as a result of some of these things. And whether that’s, that’s the interesting thing. Even using your example of payroll is that it’s allowed more of a focus on some of the human elements. So areas that were people didn’t have time for in the business that do help the performance of teams.
Now can be focused on because the stuff that was taking a lot of time now doesn’t take the time and so I think it’s also about perspective and that’s great for a business going. We can take our energy out of this and put it into this. So we [00:15:00] both we were more efficient and we work better. But what does it do to the individuals?
Because That’s the interesting example of what you pointed to there is saying, okay, the person that was doing the pay slips, do they want to go into an area that might be more an HR style role than a typical payroll position as an example. So it’s having that idea of where you want to be and what the other.
Opportunity might be is so important, isn’t it? Exactly. Some people who lost their jobs from that payroll function grew themselves into other roles within the company. And those who weren’t prepared to adapt, innovate and grow were rushed out the door. So that’s the secret really is, it’s not the, AI is not the problem.
Technology is not the problem. It’s a person’s ability to foresee these events, plan for them, adapt [00:16:00] and utilise them to their advantage. That’s the key. How do you engage with someone and get to the point where they understand or Can drill down to where they want to go, what actually is the right move for them, whether it’s a preemptive strike or whether it’s a or whether it’s something that’s being forced in a particular situation.
One gentleman that I was recently working with. High Flying Executive. One day he was being promised to have his leadership training in America paid for. So he’s based in Australia. And then circumstances all of a sudden changed. Which that can happen in a large organisation. And found himself out the door.
So here you go from one minute sort of being, Um, the rising star and then all of a sudden you’re on the scrapheap and two complete polarities if you like. [00:17:00] How do you handle that situation? He was devastated, as he to use his own words felt like running a hot bath and getting the razor blades out.
So he wasn’t in a good shape. So in working with him, I went back and said, okay, forget Let’s cast aside your executive role. Who are you as a person? So my answer to your question is, I try and connect this individual back to themselves. Because one of the problems that happens when you’re in corporate for so long, and it happened to me, you become so identified, and many in particular, with the role, the title, the job.
You forget, you lose yourself. On this interview, Anthony is being Anthony and Tony is being Tony. You’re not playing a role, I’m not playing another role. We’re being ourselves. But that sort of gets lost when we play titles and roles and formalities. So I reconnect my clients back to who they are. And we discovered with this gentleman [00:18:00] that he was a teacher.
What he really loved most about the whole, his career journey and what he really, the common themes was he loved teaching people. And passing that on. So we identified that he’d been in corporate, had a lot of business knowledge, sales knowledge, marketing knowledge, operation knowledge, strategic planning knowledge.
It made sense that he could fashion out of that, take all those learning and become a business coach to small business owners or medium business owners. So yes, he lost his job. But he didn’t lose all the core skills, his areas of excellence. So it just became a question of reinventing all those elements into something else.
And he also knew a lot of small businesses go out of business. They need this. foresight that he brought to the table. So I like to quote the [00:19:00] Persian philosopher Rumi, who said, what’s lost is the oyster shell, but not the pearl. When you lose a job, you’ve lost the shell, but the pearl, all your skills, capabilities, wisdom, knowledge, experience, It’s still with you.
You haven’t lost that. We’re just going to repackage it somewhere else. Once they see that they haven’t lost everything. They’ve just lost a bit of a package. They can move on. That’s going to make a terrific promo for a show given my surname. Or just Pearl. Yes. I actually, that wasn’t even deliberate.
No, I love that. I love that quote. The interesting thing I think about it is that people define themselves often when you go out and you meet them, who are you? You say, who are you? And they define themselves by their [00:20:00] name and their job and then occasionally that there might be a, that they might be a parent or a, partner, etc.
But. It’s usually things that don’t, that they’ve fallen into quite often. Many people have fallen into a career path and ticking a box and they’ve almost convinced themselves that they like doing it, but when you really scratch the surface, the passion isn’t there. And I was, it’s interesting for me because I think I was lucky enough to work in an industry where you had to be passionate to be in it.
I worked for a number of years with a company that’s now called Invocare, that owns a large percentage of the funeral industry in Australia, and spent a lot of time talking to funeral directors. That’s a profession you don’t go into just to tick a box. You might go and pick up a job at at a retail outlet to tick a box and earn some money for a period of time.
And there’s a bunch of different jobs that you might do like that, but you [00:21:00] don’t tend to pick up a job in the funeral home unless that’s something you’re passionate about. And I love the fact that those people that work in there are that passionate about what they do. And I think it’s a good example of.
how you get a level of service. And I think most people have a, a particularly under what are trying and not great circumstances more often than not have a a positive experience as far as the interaction with the funeral home staff is concerned. And it’s because those people are passionate about what they do.
I don’t think I’ve met too many that I would say that would fall into a category where they. Not that I’d say 99 percent 99 percent of them are there because of that, that they’re passionate about it. And it’s interesting to me that so many people fall into careers, and they don’t even realize that they’re just doing it because.
And it’s not, and some go through an entire career [00:22:00] like that, don’t they? They just, it’s not till after they retire where they almost reflect upon the fact going, yeah, my, my parents told me I had to go and study and do this. So I did this and that’s what I was for my entire career. But actually I really wanted to be a, whatever that might be.
Yes, as part of my coaching sort of philosophy, I see it that there’s three levels to a career. They’re not necessarily an organizational level, they’re just a a level of maturity if you like, or from a bigger life perspective. So the first level is a job, it’s a job for an income. You’re not going to do that if you’re working for a funeral parlor.
If you’re just turning up each day To clock on and clock off. You’re not doing that in that industry. So that’s the first level. And some people do that. That a lot of junior people are doing casual jobs. It’s fine in that way, but you’ve still got to provide a level of customer service.
Obviously you just don’t just turn up. So that’s the job level. The [00:23:00] second level I call it is more the career level, where it’s also about growth, advancement, and taking on greater responsibility. Okay. And being a service to the, your employer. And then there’s the third level again, which is called the calling level, Anthony, which is what you’re doing now.
Okay. With this podcast, it’s what’s your contribution to humanity or to people or to society. So that’s another level again. And cause one of the things that has been found with executives, they get to the top of the hill and they ask themselves the question, is this all there is? There’s still something missing.
And my answer is no, there is something else and it’s, what’s your purpose? What’s your contribution? What’s your reason for being? So can I just give you an example? I was working with a gentleman [00:24:00] who was a builder, owned his own building business, and in good times, made lucrative profits and was therefore very reluctant to walk away from the building game.
But as he got to his mid 40s and into the late 40s, his body began to give up on him. He could not, no longer carry those big lumps of timber. And he did his knee in, whatever, on the big window panels and all that sort of stuff. So his body was telling him, look, it’s really time to get out. So the question became having to accept a lower income and doing something else.
So what was that something else? We had a conversation and what he identified, Anthony, was during the course of the day, the thing that he most enjoyed wasn’t so much handing the keys over to the homeowner when it was, the [00:25:00] job was completed. Some builders have told me that’s what their most satisfaction is, creating a new home for someone.
For him, it was actually interacting with his apprentices. The young men in their twenties, mid twenties, who were, At the early stages of their life and having significant challenges with finances, relationships and whatever else, right? And he loved mentoring them, okay? So then it became a question, okay, if this is what you’re passionate about, how can we make sure that in your next phase of your career, that component is there?
So that led to him getting TAFE qualifications, where he became a teacher in a TAFE college. Teaching young apprentices about the building game and carpentry, but along the way mentoring them, and he got the opportunity to work with a young [00:26:00] New Zealand young man who came from a broken family where his father had been injured.
In jail and his brothers got into motorist bike gangs and all that, but he was able to take this young man aside and create a straight line for him, become responsible, save money got married, has now got three children. And he was telling me recently, and now this young man is mentoring.
Young teenage New Zealand children. So can you see how this builder is now operating at a calling level? He’s had to sacrifice some income, but he’s now making a contribution. And that’s giving him a sense of satisfaction and joy. Hey, I’m actually impacting someone’s life. That could have quite easily gone off the rails given his family’s dynamics and actually created a future path for him.
And a safe home for his partner and stuff. [00:27:00] Yes. I’m going to repeat a quote that I think is my most repeated quote on the podcast series. So listeners, forgive me for this one. But it’s a guest that appeared on our program some time back Paul Dunn, who’s been a mentor to me for a long time.
And the first time I heard him speak, His quote was, your career is nothing more than a collection of selected pivotal moments, and it’s amazed me how many times that has come up over my over the course of talking to people, and it seems so appropriate again in this conversation here to bring that up because you can look at something where there is There’s an end point that’s either being forced upon you or you’ve had a realization, but it is a connection to whatever the next step is.
And often, if you look back and reflect on what other pivotal moments there have been in your career, you actually can connect the [00:28:00] dots to something that is quite different. To what you might have thought it’s just another step along the same ladder. It could be to something quite different when you reflect back on it.
And often those moments are not, I got the job. Or I got a promotion, it’s usually something that happened within the context of that. And I’ve, that I’m, I won’t bore listeners with my set of ones, but there is certainly one moment in working in the funeral home company that has got nothing to do with the normal day to day of what I did.
It was some, it was a story about something that happened that I helped out and it was just At the time, it didn’t even register as something, but it’s interesting how I look back on nearly seven years at that business, and that’s a moment that continues to stand out for me amongst, many others that you would argue were more important as far as a career advancement was concerned, but certainly as far as the career path is concerned, went, Oh, [00:29:00] that makes sense why that moment stood out.
Exactly. I call them defining moments. And I had my own defining moments to lead to where I am today. Yeah, please share that because I’m interested in the story because this is such a fascinating path. Okay, so my defining moments, my, so I worked for in a finance role, a certain part of my career, and my manager, who was an executive, had to go on four weeks leave.
So that left me. To report to the company’s deputy chief finance officer, which was a bit stressful because he was a very demanding individual. So anyway, we’re a couple, we’re in a couple of days into this sort of exercise and one evening it was 6 30 PM. I walked out of my office. down a narrow little hallway to make my way to the lifts to go home that evening.
And over my shoulder, I heard a voice. And the voice said, [00:30:00] where do you think you’re going? I haven’t finished with you yet. Okay. At which point I obviously knew who it was because everyone else had left for the day. I had to turn back and do another round. It was, One of the longest hours because I was, it was my own personal time that was now being encroached and I realized I wasn’t just working for my employer.
I was working for someone else’s ambitions because he wanted to become the CFO and I realized in that sort of reflective time that we’re really. As a corporate employee, I was caught in the predator, what I call the predator what’s known as a predator prey cycle, where people prey on you. They either bully you or they make unrealistic time, demands on your time and whatever.
And I knew one day I needed to set up a [00:31:00] situation where I would leave to break that cycle. William Blake who lived many years ago, who was a poet, said, unless I create my own system. I’ll be a slave to someone else’s. And that’s why I wanted to, it was my defining moment to one day create my own employment situation where I can earn an income where I wasn’t having someone look over my shoulder and say, I haven’t finished with you yet.
Now as much as that was a difficult moment, there was a gift in that. Where I realized I’m operating in a predator prey cycle. So here I was predator, prey to the predator who was the executive. The executive is predator to the organization. They could, get rid of him at any time. The organization is prey to the employment landscape, the economy, technology changes, industry dynamics, government decisions.
So we, [00:32:00] your working life is really operating within a predator prey cycle. And if you understand that, then you’ll manage your career differently, which is what I point out to a lot of my clients. And that’s just the reality of life.
And I love that you talk about entrepreneurship as well in the context of all of this as well, because that’s obviously what you’ve done. You’ve gone out of working for someone and seeing that you were working for someone else’s career advancement to eventually getting out and doing your own thing, which is an entrepreneurial.
Thinking aspect and as well, it’s about leadership that’s People often shy away from, don’t they? Because there’s many people that you just go through their entire career and go, I don’t want to be a leader, I just want to just do my thing, which is there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But there is this idea, isn’t there as well, that out of some [00:33:00] of this adversity for many people is this idea that they can become a leader within their own right and it might be,
Yes, if you’re running your own business, you’re a leader because there’s the actual delivery of the coaching service, then there’s a marketing and the selling and the promotion. Building relationships is a key part of it. So you’re really operating at a more leader level. Level than just a technician who’s delivering a service.
Now we’re going to go a little bit more into the entrepreneurial thinking and the philosophy behind that as part of some bonus content that we’re going to put up after the, after this particular episode. So I’m going to encourage everyone to look in the show notes and they’ll be able to find access to that little bit of extra discussion that we will have later on.
But for now, I just want to continue on. And and talk about this idea [00:34:00] of exploring new careers and how that struggle particularly when the whole idea is quite daunting of saying, I know I don’t want to do what I’m doing, how do I find what I’m going to do next? That is such a difficult space to be in.
How daunting is it for people when it’s something completely new, as you alluded to before? It’s not always a straightforward leap, is it? No, it it does require Anthony a lot of self reflection, what they call knowing yourself. So I had a situation recently where I was speaking to a lady who’d worked, had recently joined an organization, a business, and six, eight weeks in, she started asking the question, I’m not sure that I’m going to be here another six or eight weeks.
And I said what’s going on? She goes, um. There’s a lot of issues with the owner of the [00:35:00] business unless we do things his way, he’s never happy. It’s my, his way or the highway, there’s no latitude for her to be creative or innovative. It’s always his way. And it’s almost like a bit of a tyrannical loop that she found herself.
And the question I asked her to help her make a decision whether she would work her way through that challenge with her business owner or leave was the question and it’s the passion question if you like, Anthony is your heart in it? Okay, you talked about the funeral partner business.
If you’re working in that business, your heart’s either in it and you’re invested in someone else’s journey where they’re seeing off their loved ones or. You’re not invested and you’re doing yourself a disservice by being there and the people you’re trying to serve. So the question is your heart in it or not in it?[00:36:00]
So if you’re deciding between two career choices, I get them to stand up and say, okay, step into this one, this choice. How strongly connected are you at the heart level with this choice? That might give me a seven out step out of that one, shake it off and step into. The next option that you’re considering, how strongly do you feel heart connected?
8, 9, 10. And then you move into that strongest one where your heart is great, has the greatest pull to it. Okay. So it’s really about the heart aspect. And the other aspect is I would say is, what is your natural core gift? Where are you naturally inclined that it doesn’t actually feel
like work? It’s so interesting that you’re saying all of this as well. We talked about my two examples that I gave you. There’s actually a third [00:37:00] that’s happened in this past week as well, because he’s moved into that stage. So he’s. Had the time of reflection, actually did what was really interesting and I wanted to get your take on this.
He actually decided that he needed a mental break and took a job. In this particular case that was driving and it wasn’t an Uber service, but he was driving around and having a reasonable, reasonably good time and then set himself a deadline as to when to move out of that when he felt ready to move and is now in a passionate area.
And I’ve seen, having spoken to him originally a few years ago when he was still in that, that, we’re just getting in getting out of that bad space in terms of, okay, I need to get out of this job and I need to move to now where he is. And he’s passionate about what he’s doing. It’s such a huge shift.
And I wanted to ask about that transition period as well. Is it sometimes that you need that space to be able to go [00:38:00] and do something different? For a little while because it’s not the you need to give yourself some mental space to, to think about it. Yes that’s so true. There is a, there’s a space in between one world finishing Anthony and another world beginning.
I think it’s called liminality or something of that effect, where it’s this in between phase, where you almost got to chill out a bit, okay? You’re releasing, in my case, I spent almost 12 months, letting go of the corporate uniform, the corporate persona, the way I spoke as a corporate robot, before I could step into and just be So there is that, release and then re engagement period.
So yes, it’s the, and that is a valid one. Some people get lost in that, not sure in what to make of it, but I think it’s a valid part of the transition, yes. As we [00:39:00] wrap things up, I’m just going to remind everyone there’s two we’re going to have a, an extra bonus bit of content. We’re going to talk about leadership, entrepreneurship and they’re really important aspects as far as a career philosophy is concerned.
So we’re going to continue that in the bonus content. So you’re going to have to click on the link below in the show notes to be able to access that. In the meantime, I just wanted to wrap things up for the main part of the podcast, Tony, by asking you to Question that I like to ask all of my guests on the program.
What is the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you, that you wish more people knew they were going to have when that happens? The aha moment is that job loss is not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of the next one. Okay. I love that. It’s. It’s simple, but it’s a big idea for people to get their heads around, and I think as we finish this up and saying that I [00:40:00] wanted to have this discussion because this is important for people that whether they’re, whether you’re someone that’s employed.
Whether you have got people that are employed by you, because sometimes you recognize this in the team that you’ve got working for you, that they are terrific people, but they’re in the wrong job and and sometimes it’s because you own the business and you want to transition out of it. And I think all of these things are really important things to consider.
And there’s so much that I got out of this discussion and I hope a lot of people got the same out of it. So thank you so much for being so generous with your time and sharing. Some amazing stories, not just about about some of the people you’ve worked with, but your own story as well. Thanks, Anthony.
I’d love to do it again one day if the opportunity arises. Absolutely. And we’re about to do it. For those that are going to click on the bonus content, we’re going to go and do that right now. For now Tony, thank you for being part of the main Bizbytes program. And we thank everyone and ask them to subscribe.
Click on the bonus bit of content link. And of course, stay tuned for the next episode of Biz [00:41:00] 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 Podcasts Done For You. The service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.
Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on BizBytes.

for transcription only
[00:00:00] Essential direct marketing insights for professional services in the age of AI. This is a podcast episode. You don’t want to miss with the unbelievable John Dwyer, JD from the Institute of Wow. He has incredible insights to give you. Whether your business is a small business, medium business, or a large business, these are the tips and tricks you don’t want to miss.
They are going to get you real impact really quickly in many cases. We also talk about AI and the role it’s playing and the incredible things JD is doing with AI at the moment. So sit back and enjoy this one with pen and paper in hand. The Institute of Wow. Here we go.
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And my guest today is going to introduce himself, but all I can say is wow. So John, over to you. Oh, you started the whole show with a dad joke. That’s terrible. You can’t do [00:01:00] that. Come on. It’s gotta be, it can only go up then from there, isn’t it?
Yeah. Oh goodness. Mate. Look, the reason that he has graciously said, wow, is because my business is called the Institute of Wow. And we’re a marketing company, a direct response marketing company. And so we tend to provide the businesses things that, They will get an instant result from and we can’t guarantee 100 percent that it’s going to be a good result, but they’ll get a result most of the time it is, but they’ll get a result like within a day.
And so direct response marketing is very different from brand marketing where you might be sponsoring the Olympics or you might have your face on the side of a bus or back of a taxi. Direct response marketing is all about putting on Facebook campaigns or Instagram campaigns today or newspaper or brochure, whatever it might be, and knowing tomorrow if it’s working for you.
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because we’ve had these titles like social media, right? It’s a really obvious title, but sometimes people just don’t think about what it actually means. And direct response is exactly as you’ve just said, right? It’s just a direct response. [00:02:00] I find it interesting though, social media, how many people in social media completely forget that the term social media exists.
That’s the foundation of it in the first place. But talk to me about a direct marketing because it’s changed a lot. You’ve been doing this for a while. So talk to me about changes for starters. What have you seen that’s changed in over your time doing this? Yeah I’ve been doing this marketing stuff since 1842.
So therefore I remember my, yeah, my, my first, form of transport was the horse and cart, which is the, this is the silly dad jokes that my millennials, I’ve got six millennial children and they back out the baby boomers just My baby boomer generation bags out the millennial, so they’ve heard it all.
Yeah, we could. There’s been huge changes, of course. And the latest one, as Anthony’s a I we’re getting robots now to basically answer the phone for our clients and then also to schedule appointments and to do sales and all sorts of stuff. So therefore, when it’s got to the stage where robots are playing a big role in direct response marketing, you just wonder where else can it go?
[00:03:00] You think you saw it can’t get much better. But I remember, Back in the day, when fax machines came out, my father in law said to me at the time yeah, this is this won’t get any better than this. Fax machine. Joe, it makes us both feel old when you start talking about that. Cause I remember the fax machine.
I remember, I think I’ve said before on the podcast when my first, Yeah, paid job was at channel 10 and we still had a typing pool at that stage. You give the scripts to, to the typing pool to type for the news and the, in the evening. If there was, it was different, I’m sure I speak for you and for a whole lot of other people that might be watching or listening to this, and that is, is that we scream if something takes 10 seconds to download now. But to answer your questions in terms of the changes, yeah, look, they’ve been massive. The mainstream media, as has been proven in the recent US elections, doesn’t play the role that it used to for anyone, whether it be a politician or whether it be someone, selling goods or services.
And I am not sure how the TV [00:04:00] networks are going to stay alive because look at what happened with Trump. If he’d been on the Jimmy Fallon tonight show, then he would have had 4 million viewers. He went with Joe Rogan’s podcast, had 54 million viewers. There’s not even a close contest anymore.
And yeah, it has changed in that respect. It’s Facebook TikTok and all those platforms, of course, delivered to you now, like laser targeted audiences in the day that you would spend money on radio or TV and newspaper, the wastage factor was massive because if you are only after. women who were, and you’re selling a wrinkle cream for argument’s sake, and you’re after women who are the age of, 45 upwards and you had an expensive wrinkle cream, so therefore you wanted them to live in an upmarket suburb, then you can laser target that on social media, as but you couldn’t do that on newspaper or TV.
There was massive wastage. Yeah, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That it’s we’ve got more and more targeted. I think the interesting thing I’ve always found is that media has actually led the way and where we’re going. I look back and say that [00:05:00] the old days where we had, three television stations and that expanded, but eventually we got it.
Yeah. Pay TV and people started understanding, okay, you could choose a bit more specifically about your audience. Then it got more specific because those channels went from just, for example, a lifestyle channel to just to also having a cooking channel and a building channel and et cetera. And it’s got more and more specific.
And. Podcasting is a great example of that as that it gets more and more specific all the time as well. There are podcasts out there that are just for very particular audiences that might be just skewed towards, females in their twenties, for example, and if that’s the audience that you want, you can find that audience quite easily.
Look, I wanna set up a network for a DHD people. I reckon I’ve got it. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish. And so I figured for people like me who cannot concentrate, if someone gave me a choice of doing a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle or five years in jail, I’d take the five years in [00:06:00] jail.
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Look, I want to set up a network for ADHD people. I reckon I’ve got it. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish. And so I figured for people like me who cannot concentrate, if someone gave a choice of doing a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Or five years in jail. I’d take the five years in jail because I’ve got, there’s no way I’m going to put a [00:07:00] jigsaw puzzle together.
So I reckon if we sit and maybe you can go house with me, Anthony, we’ll set one up for people like me who’ve got a low attention span. You only have to make one or two shows cause I’ll never watch the whole end of it anyway. Just loop the shows. I’m with you there. It’s like, when you think about it though, how many people sit there?
I get frustrated when I watch my, when I watch my kids watching TV. If I’ve decided to put my phone down, cause I don’t want work coming through anymore. And then all of a sudden, you’re sitting there and going, are you actually watching this? If I actually changed the channel, would you even notice?
Because they’re on their phones and doing 600 other things. It’s it’s crazy. It is. And we’re having six Millennials and I know you’ve got, you’ve got two or three, two? Two. Two. Yeah. They’re just not like us real humans, are they? They can multitask where they’ve got a laptop, a phone and the TV in front of them.
How do you do that? I don’t know, I really don’t know, I’m like you, I get easily distracted on one thing to the next. It amazes me too, that their ability to binge watch stuff at the same time, [00:08:00] that’s almost counterintuitive with the fact that they’re doing 500 other things at the same time.
Yeah, no, you’re dead wrong. The thing that I probably should have answered when you said, look, what do you see in terms of changes with direct responsibility just marketing. When people ask me what direct response is, aside from saying it is what the name says. But the other thing is that most advertising agencies will tell you get people to fall in love with your brand so that they will taste your product.
And what we do is if we flip that, we get them to taste your product so they’ll fall in love with your brand. And I just think that’s a very significant difference because if the seafood shop has a host or hostess outside at lunchtime and dinnertime, handing out calamari samples, that’s a very smart move because they are getting people to taste test their product with calamari.
And presumably, it’s nice. So therefore, there’s a percentage of those will come in and buy the barramundi, which is much more expensive. So we flip that model of getting people to fall in love with your brand. So they’ll taste your product to get them to taste your product. So they’ll fall in love with your brand.
I think that’s the easiest way to explain it. It’s a great analogy. [00:09:00] But I wonder how you know, you talked about AI, how is AI going to change that? Because, AI is almost In the way at times for that, does it create more opportunities for those that are willing to go the traditional routes or is it that you have to adapt?
Look, the example I just gave you was bricks and mortar, of course, being a super chop, if you’ve got an online business and, or an online component for your business. The wonderful thing with with, robots on, we’re down the path quite considerably with that is that they can do the taste testing for you.
So therefore, they can ring 1000 people. And in America, Robo calls are not able to be made unless it’s to your database. And so you can’t randomly make robo calls in America. That’s what they call them robo calls. But in Australia is still the wild west. So if you want the robot during 1000 random people, you can still do that until someone comes in and decides that put a government rule in place.
But yeah, so we’ve got that happening whereby, we’ve got clients who could have only ever wrong, maybe, 20 or [00:10:00] 30 people in an hour to now being able to bring a thousand people in an hour. And that robot who sounds like a human, so very few people would even detect that it’s a robot, is actually asking questions and delivering taste testing and whatever that service or product is in that phone call.
So talk about being able to Like, expand your reach and it’s absolutely crazy. And it’s if anyone’s not using it at the moment, and there’s plenty of people not, not you and I do because we’re in the marketing advisory field, but for an everyday business owner who’s not using it, either, learn it yourself or get someone like you will need to.
Teach you how to use it because it is just the future. There’s no question about that. How do you think you kind of, battle that difference between, particularly a lot of my audience of professional services based business. So they’re providing some level of service and service by nature is Generally done by human beings.
And I think there’s a lot of these services will still be, although assisted by I perhaps in the [00:11:00] background. So how do you balance between where the I should begin and end, particularly in that human facing? Role. Like reaching out to people. Is there a benefit in still having the human facing or it’s just not economically viable to do it?
If you’re in the service industry, they want to talk to you. There’s no question about that. So therefore, if you build up a reputation for yourself, Anthony, and and you have and so have I, mine is bad, but yours is good. So that someone said to me the other day, we use Cheeky as a child. I said, let’s put it this way.
I’d only have to walk out. I went to a Catholic De La Salle school and the brothers were pretty strict and we got the strap and all that stuff back in the day. It went a bit like now of course. Can you imagine anyone giving someone a leather strap these days? Not a chance. They would just go to jail.
I copped that every day. But I got to a stage where the teacher, the De La Salle brother, when I walked into the class, he’d just say, do I get out? I haven’t done anything. So I know that you’re going to do something. So just get out, I spent most of the time [00:12:00] outside the classroom. So if you’re doing stuff like you and I, where you’re providing people with advice, there’s no question, of course, that people want to talk to you, not a robot.
However, What the robot can do, which is what we’re doing at the moment. We’ve got great results from it. Is it and I’m sure you’ve heard the name, a guy called Frank Kern in America. Okay. So he’s quite a well known direct response marketer and he has a phrase that he uses quite often. And that is, if you want to help people then, Just help them.
In other words, if you want to demonstrate to people that you’ve got the answers to their problems, then just give them an example. Give them a sample like the calamari outside the fish shop. So what we’ve done is we’ve put together a model whereby instead of doing a gazillion dollars on Facebook and getting bad leads, what we do is that we actually choose to business types that we know I can help in particular because there’s some that stand out.
And what we do is we actually invite them to come to a free one hour group session with me on Zoom. And so what happens then is that they actually get a call from the robot [00:13:00] once we get the details, and they get text messages as well. But nonetheless, the robot rings and explains to them, look, I’m Susie from the Institute of Wow.
I just wanted to know if you’d like to have a free Zoom call, a brainstorm on Zoom. With this guy who understands marketing, his name is JD, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the hit rate that we’re getting from that is surprisingly good. And we’ve only had, let’s say out of 500, every 500 calls, you only get about 5 percent of people who detect that it’s a robot.
That’s it’s amazing, isn’t it? Because I think in, in, in the phone call state and it, look, it will change as people get more used to it, but we’re so bombarded with, call centers that call us whether they’re legit or scams. We all get a number of them every day and it’s actually almost refreshing to get something then that is sounds human and just gets to the point and he’s clearly not clearly not a call [00:14:00] center.
Yeah. Look, if you’re flogging something. Then I would be a little more hesitant, but we’re not. We’re giving something away for free. So the script goes something like, look hi, it’s Lisa here from the Institute of Wow. We’re a direct response marketing company. We’ve noticed your business has ABC products or services, and you probably Would love some of the direct response ideas that we have.
And as it turns out, we have a free group zoom session, which has no more than 10 participants. So we make sure they know it’s not a thousand people on board. And this guy who’s worked with Jerry Seinfeld and looked after marketing for 7 Eleven and Westfield and Walt Disney and so forth, he’s actually providing 60 minutes of his time for free, where you can ask any questions you like, would you like a free ticket?
And that’s different from trying to fog something. Yes, absolutely. And I think it is the key, isn’t it? Because so many of those things that call those people that call you, they feel like they’re trying to give you something. They’re [00:15:00] not really, straight away they’re onto it.
And they just don’t take you off the list either, which is absolutely frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. We make sure that she hasn’t got an Indian accent. Okay. It’s on that though. When you say that there are 5 percent that might detect it because you’re getting what the scripts afterwards and seeing the responses of what people are saying and if people are asking that question, if they do are have you got it trained to be up front and say, yes, AI?
Oh, yeah. No. If they ask, then it says yes. Okay. A little bit like when you were at a conference with me last week, you would have seen the sample. And if the person who says, look, am I talking to a robot? You can’t tell a fib. No you, the girl who’s, we’ve just named Lisa, but you can call her whatever you like says yes, I am.
I’m an AI robot that’s working on behalf of the company. Yeah. And look, in terms of knowing the statistics because all the calls are recorded and transcribed if we wanted them to be, but they’re recorded, then we can tell how many people are asking, are you a robot? And it’s less than 5%. [00:16:00] Now whether some of the others detect that it’s a robot and they just don’t ask, but less than 5 percent of people ask, are you a robot?
Tell me how much programming is there in terms of the car, being able to adapt to the different questions that might get asked. Is it constantly evolving? And how much did you have to start with to train it? Yeah, constantly evolving. But what we get the AI agent robot, call them what you like, to do is to scale through the website, through Facebook pages, through anything we possibly can about the business.
So that if it’s answering a call, for example let’s just say we’ve got one at the moment on board, which is a trade business. It’s an electrical services business with air conditioning and ceiling fans and putting power points in and so forth. It’s a 5 million turnover business and they got 10 trucks on the road.
And so therefore, when you ring that now the robot will say to you, look, how can I help you? It’s ABC electrical services. And you say, look, I’d like a quote on three ceiling fans and an air [00:17:00] conditioner in my lounge room. It will have a conversation with you with regards to, okay where do you live?
And it’ll make sure that it responds by repeating that address back to you. And then it will say, okay, when are you available? And if you don’t say, at particular time, it’ll say how’s Thursday at 10 o’clock. sound. And then if the person says, Oh, look, can I just ask a question?
Although I’m asked after ceiling fans and an air conditioner, is there a chance that you might be able to put PowerPoints in for me? So it’s a left field question from where the conversation started. The robot will then be able to answer that because it’s already learned from the website and from the Facebook page, all the facilities that business offers.
It’s just incredible. It’s crazy. It’s amazing. Isn’t it? I know following from that event, we went to the other day and I posted about this where I fed. A whole lot of content from a number of my podcasts into the AI and it produced a three and a half minute. audio review of [00:18:00] the podcast itself and the value of the podcast.
And it was a conversation between a male and a female talking about it completely unscripted. I, it didn’t take very long for this to be generated. I was completely blown away and people who are listening and now you check out my LinkedIn posts and you’ll find it, but it’s a very interesting.
That information can be taken and used and does it sound like an AI? I think it still does, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think there’s always going to be a degree of an AI that’s going to feel different to what the human experience is. And I think that’s the difference. Like we’ve bumped around here and I think we, we talked just before we started recording the podcast where I said, look, we’re just going to see where this goes.
And that’s where, that’s human nature to be able to feed off stories and we’ll tell different stories or even different versions of stories, depending on how people respond and the the time you’ve got and the feedback you’ve got an AI can’t [00:19:00] really do that. It hasn’t got that human nature to it.
And I don’t think it ever will have that ability to suck in all of your stories and then to utilize in your content. in a conversation way. I certainly hope not, but what we try to do Anthony to make it as real as possible. Not that we are fibbing, we’re not lying to anyone. It’s just for them to determine if they think it’s a human or robot or whether they even care.
But when somebody asks a question, because there might be a half a second or one second lag for the robot to be able to find the information to answer that question, we have a noise effect of tapping a keyboard. With a call center in the background. And that’s one of the facility, that’s one of the options you can choose when you go down this path.
And so therefore, it does really infer that there’s someone from a call center answering because you can hear tap on the keyboard. So so that really does disarm if you’re like a person thinking that it might be a robot because they, sometimes it takes a second for it to answer. So let’s talk about a few other things because the AI part, I think this is the important thing just to finish on the [00:20:00] AI thing is that there is, it is at this level now where you can experiment with it and do it.
And you can turn to people like yourself who are, who have got that set up to be able to offer it to people. But that’s at a certain level of business, right? There are certain some of the smaller businesses may struggle to be able to do that, to afford someone else to come in. But it is the kind of thing where you can still play with it.
But yeah. Talk to me about some of the other options that you’ve got going on, because I know you’ve, and we won’t dwell too much on it. But if for those that have not heard of JD, and we’ll include all the links to all the stuff in the in their most famous, is it what I would I say most famous for bringing Seinfeld up and probably the big thing that’s That’s that everyone talks about.
No, I’m famous for a lot of stupid things. It was just that one, I’ve milked the daylights out of. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you? And I think that’s, those sorts of things are great things to really wow at a bigger scale on a bigger audience. But when you’re talking about businesses that are, not quite at that level, what are the wow things that, [00:21:00] can be done to start making impact in a direct response?
Yeah, no, good question, man. Just so that at least the Seinfeld thing gets out of the way because we’ve teased everyone by mentioning that name but didn’t tell them what happened. I had a client some years ago called the Greater Building Society. It’s now a bank, but it was a building society at the time.
And I came up with an idea for them to take on the big banks by simply giving away an incentive. So we actually stopped the honeymoon rate, which every bank has. And we just gave that money to a travel company that was a wholesaler. And we came on TV and social media, and we just said, look, get a home loan, get a free holiday.
And the thing went nuts. They took an extra 15 billion worth of home loans in the first few years, and this idiot who you’re talking to didn’t do a door deal. I did a consultancy for you, right? What a moron. And so therefore, about four years into what was a 10 year promotion like people ask me, how long should you run a promotion?
I said, McDonald’s have been doing Happy Meal toys for 45 years. Just rinse and repeat if it’s successful. And that’s what happened with this one. I get a home loan, get a free holiday. It just went nuts. We stole that much business from the Commonwealth Bank and [00:22:00] Westpac and so forth. It just wasn’t funny.
And about four years in, I got Seinfeld to do their ads. And so that’s where that. And so for three years, I went backwards and forwards to New York and we got Jerry Seinfeld to get on TV saying, get a home loan, get a free holiday. And of course, if it wasn’t already successful, it just went through the stratosphere when you’ve got someone like him involved.
And as a result of being able to pull off, which, if I do say somewhat it’s, pretty big deal. Then I’ve milked the crap out of it for the last 10 years. And why wouldn’t you? And why wouldn’t you? Yeah. Yeah, with regards to other things, what we say to businesses whether they’re advisory or whether they, bricks and mortar retailers, or whether they happen to be doing an e commerce business, if you’re in a me too industry.
And that means your solar panels look like the other guys or your refrigerator looks like the other guys, or your lawn mowing service is pretty much the same as all your competitors, then you probably need the likes of what, we preach, and that is wow factor marketing. You’ve got to come up with a wow factor that distinguishes you from your competitors.
Because if you don’t, then the only marketing [00:23:00] plan that you can have is to drop your prices. And if you drop your prices, the guy down the road can do the lawnmowing, cheaper than you in five minutes. So we say to small businesses, if you think you’re going to win on price and you’re a hardware store opposite Bunnings, then you need some serious psychotherapy because you aren’t, you’re not going to beat the 40 ton gorilla, but how you can beat the 40 ton gorilla.
If that hardware store across the road from Bunnings says, look for every hundred dollars you buy from me, I’ll give you a pitch fork or I’ll give you a leaf blower or whatever the the Happy Meal Toy might be. Bunnings would have six months worth of committee meetings to try and work out how to combat that.
You would just beat them hands down. So what we do for smaller businesses, because we realize that they’re pretty good technicians, but they might not have skills in marketing, is that we provide them with exactly that. We provide them with concepts that, Will distinguish them from their competitors. So whether that’s how you can win 500, 000 if you spend money with us, and that’s an insured price promotion that they only pay a few thousand dollars for, or whether it be fuel discounts or whether it be free [00:24:00] vacations, we give the opportunity for them to give away a free vacation and we charge, 50 bucks for the vacation.
But it’s a three to seven night vacation worth 1000. We package all that stuff together for small businesses so that they can just plug and play. Because what I found coming from the corporate world of doing all this sort of stuff for bigger businesses, like the building society and obviously advertising got Woolworths and all of those sorts of things.
They’ve got a marketing team that can make it happen. But if you’re a small business, you’re a good technician, but you just want the package. So what we do is that we just give them the package. Which is amazing for people to be able to have that. And I think this is the, and I think what’s important is that businesses of any size, whether you are You know, really small or whether you’re, in the category of the, I suppose any upwards of a couple of million dollars a year turnover and start getting bigger from there, then there are things that you can be doing to make you stand out and get an immediate response.
And that’s an important thing to be doing. At any time of the year, I think there’s a lot, people get sucked [00:25:00] into, Black Friday is a good example. Often wonder why people get, thrown into that basket with everybody else and doing exactly the wrong thing is what you’re saying, which is heavily discounting, which means that we all know there are certain places we just have to wait for those one or two times a year when the prices get completely slashed, that’s when we buy.
All they’re seeing is an artificial spike at a particular time of year where they’ve lowered their prices. And that, to me, doesn’t seem like a logical way to go. There are these things where you can stand out, aren’t they, on an ongoing basis and run it at your own pace? Look, the reason I’m shuffling here is because I wanted to show you Exhibit A, and Exhibit A looks like this, okay?
It’s a holiday voucher, okay? It looks like that. And I know if you’re listening, you’re not seeing this, but it’s an A4 voucher, which allows people to have three to seven nights a week. Pretty much anywhere in Australia and around the world. Vegas, New York, Orlando, Grand Canyon, Bali, Fiji, Europe, all that.
And what it is that [00:26:00] when I did the campaign with Seinfeld, a travel company contacted me not long after, because it’s pretty hard to keep it a secret when you’ve got Seinfeld doing your ads, and they said, look, we’re a travel company. We get access to unsolved hotel rooms at four star hotels around the world.
We’re not a marketing company, but we’ve seen what you do. You look like you’ve got half a clue. Yeah. Do you want to join forces and offer this as a Happy Meal toy? My words, not theirs, but offer as a Happy Meal toy to businesses. And I said, Oh, absolutely. So what we’ve done is the last few years we’ve done that whereby businesses can buy these vacation vouchers offers for less than 50, but they’re worth up to 1, 000.
You try getting three or four nights at a hotel for less than 1, 000. So that’s why they’re valued up to that. And they give it away as a Happy Meal toy. And I always say to businesses, let’s just say you were selling something for 500 in the world of Groupon where it’s 50 percent off. Do you think if you held a 10 percent sale, anyone would care?
10 percent or 500, but who cares, but if for that same 50, which is 10%, you gave someone a thousand dollar value holiday, shut the gate. [00:27:00] So that’s where, an incentive will always be the price discount. As long as the incentive is a low cost to the business, but a high perceived value. And that’s why McDonald’s toys work because that toy gets produced in China for 20 cents, but in Kmart, that’s worth 5.
So that’s why the Happy Meal toy works. It’s a low cost to McDonald’s, but a high perceived value. Does some of it have to be scarcity as well? Because some of those toys that might be in a McDonald’s thing, for example, you can only get in a McDonald’s. And so it’s depending on what it is that there, is that because I’m looking, thinking about particularly a couple of the supermarket chains that have done these little toys and they try to create an element of scarcity with it that they’ve got them there, but you can only get them here and it’s only for a limited time.
Absolutely. My mantra to any business. Is that first of all you gotta have an offer. Okay. So if you’re doing less than a couple million dollars And you spend money on brand building then I think you’re Yeah, you need some therapy because, Coca Cola can [00:28:00] do that. McDonald’s can do that.
Nike can do that. Kellogg’s can do that because they’re a big business. But if you’re only doing less than 2 million, and many businesses are doing much, much less than that. In fact, 96 percent of Australian businesses do less than a million turnover. Then you shouldn’t be in the brand building game.
You want to build your brand, don’t get me wrong. But you want to build it and sell stuff at the same time. And so therefore I always say to people is that when you are going to be on Facebook wherever it might be, your message has to be an offer. Like I’ve got a client at the moment that just said to me, when I gave me the Copy yesterday for his Facebook campaign and it was we promise to try to beat wait, not to beat, but to try to beat any other quotation.
Why don’t you just give Mark Zuckerberg a check and say, don’t even run the ad because that’s not going to work. It’s got to be an offer. And as you said, it needs to be an offer with either a time deadline. deadline. And and so you’re spot on. You can only get those McDonald’s toys at McDonald’s.
You will never [00:29:00] find them in K Mart. Do you subscribe to the idea of the guarantees then? The, I’ve heard a lot, there’s books and plenty of things being written about, Oh you must provide some guarantee with your business. And usually it’s something to try and make you stand out or what people want.
I’ve heard it suggested to me as a, selling the podcast done for you. Oh, you’ve got a guarantee that you’ll have 10, 000 downloads in 90 days. Yeah. And you’ll double your amount of sales. And if anyone’s listening and thinking, I welcome you. I want to talk to you about doing a podcast for you.
But if you think that is going to happen, then none of that is real. It’s, that’s those kinds of guarantees tend to, I don’t understand that still works for people. They just seem so false. Yeah, most of that is BS and the people who are in the information marketing game, which is the selling programs online of, how to be a better soccer player or, how to be a better builder or how to be a better computer scientist or whatever it might be.
They do it. Because they [00:30:00] know already there’s skepticism and so therefore they dilute that skepticism by giving a money back guarantee and they know by statistics that there will only be ever one or two or three in a hundred that will ask for their money back and because it’s a digital product there’s no cost involved anyway, so therefore if they sell a hundred three grand products and they get Two or three that come back again, they want a refund or so be it.
But in the game that you and I are in, where we’re offering advice, I could never, ever do it. And the reason I can’t do it is because, I cannot guarantee that the client, the business owner is going to implement what I tell them to do. I’d be like a doctor saying that, I’ll guarantee that you’ll get better if you stop smoking.
And then he looks out the window and the guy that just visited him is lighting up a cigarette in the car park. So if there are ways that the business who, you give advice to, can get away with not following it, then you can’t offer a guarantee. And I always say to people, I don’t know whether you’re wearing an ankle bracelet.
There’s good reason why when you’re offering advice, you can’t give guarantees. Yes. And look, [00:31:00] as I said, it flaws me that people still fall for that. And and that there are still agencies out there pushing for that. I think it’s really interesting to me. Jokes aside, you’ve got enormous amount of credibility for all of the things that you’ve done over a number of years, but it’s it’s getting harder and harder to stand out in a space that has so many scammers out there.
There’s just so many of them. Yep. Oh, look, I I have to say that one of my Children went to the New York Film Academies in his mid twenties, and they had to at the end of the course pitch a TV idea, a sitcom idea, and he pitched one of what was like The Office, but because he’s heard all my seminar stories, he called it The Seminar.
And if there was a tagline, it would be BS on steroids, because I’ve stood in the green room behind some of the stages of these conferences and seminars and Yeah, the guy that was just out on stage before I go out would be telling you that he owned a castle and he had the Miss World Wife, of course, and he had a Maserati and all this stuff that comes up on [00:32:00] the screen.
And when he comes off the stage and I’m having a drink with him behind the stage, I said, Oh, wow, things seem to be going pretty well for you. He goes, Oh, yeah. Jadu, that’s showtime. And I think, I said he said, I’m really down to my last 20 grand. I went, What? What? So I’ve shared these stories around the dinner table over the years.
And of course, this child of mine, who’s interested in video and film, filmography says, Oh, Dad, I’ve got this fantastic sitcom idea. I said, Don’t you dare use any of the characters that I’ve described to you. Yeah, so the seminar game has certainly got some yeah, it’s got some baggage. There’s no doubt about that because the phrase I believe for the seminar game is yeah, get them high, make them buy.
Yeah, I can believe that. I can believe that. I wanted to ask you as well, because it touches on some of the things that we’ve been talking about is this whole concept of gamifying. The things because in a sense, what you’re talking about with, winning a holiday and it’s a game, how important is gamifying [00:33:00] these days in incorporating that into business?
Because it’s a term I think we’re hearing more and more all the time. Is that real? Is it really working? Is it? Is it something that’s going to continue to work? Or has it had its day already? Yeah, there’s a yes and no to that. Look, you’re talking to someone who’s probably Run more contests and sweepstakes than anyone, certainly in Australia, but maybe even globally.
I’ve spoken at some places in America and when I’ve told them that I did all the scratch bingo games for Murdoch’s newspapers, and I’ve been involved in McDonald’s and KFC and all the fast food chains doing scratch games and all sorts of promotions they were blown away in America. So maybe I’ve done more contests than anyone.
But if you said to me today, would you recommend that a business holds a contest whereby People have the chance to win versus something whereby if they purchase, they get a reward. Not might get, but they get a reward. I will always go for the latter. Despite the fact that a large part of my career, some years back, [00:34:00] we were doing at one stage, 14 million a year in the nineties, which is, for a small business.
And now we I don’t know, 20 employees at the time, but that was a reasonable sized business. And that income was all doing scratch bingos for newspapers and, scratch games to win 50, 000 for blockbuster video and all that sort of thing. But if you said to me, would I recommend that? I’d say certainly in some instances, but in most cases I would recommend to businesses to give away an incentive.
So that means is that, if McDonald’s said, look, buy a Happy Meal and one out of every five boxes will have a toy, I don’t think they’d sell that many Happy Meals. And Kellogg’s likewise, if they said buy Corn Flakes and one out every 10 boxes will have a toy. They’ve woken up to the fact that you buy, you get, will always beat you buy, you might win.
But it leads me to this is that if you don’t have a happy meal toy that you can give away with every purchase of your service or your product, something that we’ve been experimenting with and it’s just like mind boggling in terms of the response to it for small businesses is what we call a Facebook [00:35:00] contest formula.
And so therefore we’ve developed a program that we sell to businesses or they can swipe and do it themselves. And when I. You describe it now, whoever wants to grab it, just go and do it yourself. But if you want it done properly, if you want it done professionally, then we have a package.
And what it is that you give away your product or service as a prize on a Facebook contest. You will get a gazillion entries. Let’s just say it’s lawn mowing services for a month. Win my lawn mowing services for a month. And you give that away as a prize on Facebook, they click the ad to go through to your landing page and on that landing page, which is the entry page, of course they leave their details, and then you give one away, and you’ve got, let’s say you’ve got a thousand entries, you’ve got 999 people who have just put their hand up and glowed in the dark and said they need So you, you then ring them or text them or email them, however you want.
You say, listen, you didn’t win the contest, but I’ve got some good news. I’ve got a special summer deal on at the moment whereby we can do this, that and the other. And if you order by Friday, I’ll give you a free holiday or whatever the bonus is. Shut the gate, it’s all over because, I was talking [00:36:00] yesterday to tutors.
It was a webinar for tutors, Maths tutors, English tutors, Chemistry tutors online and these are mainly women and they’re sitting at home behind their computer tutoring people. And I said to them, if you ran a contest where you gave away 10 Maths tutoring lessons, I said Maths because it was American without the S.
If you were to give 10 sessions away for Maths tutoring, who do you think would enter that contest on Facebook? And of course the answer is, mum and dad who have slow learners, children at maths. I said, if you’ve got 300 entries, you gave one prize which was 10 sessions, do you think it’d be nice to have, 299 people you contact and say, look, you’ve got a child obviously that’s slow at maths, I can help you.
It’s just so easy. It’s one of those things that’s so obvious, but no one’s ever used it before. Isn’t it obvious? I think that, I think the challenge for some businesses is that lawns is an obvious one because you’re not going to enter a competition to win a free lawn mowing for a month if you don’t have a lawn.
But One of the [00:37:00] problems with it with a number of businesses, of course, is that they might be a consulting type service, and they offer a service, and it might be valid for a particular business, but and for many of those businesses, but ordinarily they couldn’t afford to actually do it. So this is how much of a pre qualified do you need to put into that?
Or do you, you don’t, you can’t afford to do that? You because the old theory was just when you want people to get their details. Ask for as little as possible, because the more you ask for, the less likely they are to complete the form. Yeah, I don’t go along with that, because the thing is that I don’t want to talk to anyone who’s broke, and that’s not because I’m not a Christian, I am, and I would like to help as many people as I can, but I’ve got to put food on the table as well. Yeah, making sure you prequalify them like crazy on that landing page is so important. But we are so evil that when we’re doing seminars, and since COVID, it’s mainly webinars, but when we’re doing seminars, we would ask for their turnover, and we still do that now with webinars.
And so it will say zero to 250, [00:38:00] 250 to 500, 500 to a million, blah, blah, blah. And when they turned up to the seminar, we would color lanyard them based on their turnover. And so therefore, if they were doing less than 250, they got a red lanyard, which meant stop to me, right? If they were doing over a million, they got a gold lanyard, which meant that I’d give up my first born to talk to them, right?
What would happen, because traditionally, and I told this last Thursday when you and I were at that function, there was a guy in the room, Who worked for Tony Robbins for 20 years, and he was at the function that you and I were at. And anyway, we got talking and I told him about this technique that we used where I could easily, when I stepped down off the stage, and of course, you think you’re Justin Bieber at these things, because everyone comes up to talk to you.
When in fact you want them to go down the back of the room to have smoke coming out of their credit card. And I couldn’t work out who had money and who didn’t because at the end of the day you’d give them free advice for eight hours. You don’t want to spend another hour just talking to people who no way they’re ever going to buy from you.
So that’s what we did. We color coded them based on their turnover and it made it so easy for me to work out who [00:39:00] to talk to. And he was with Tony Robbins for 22 years and his jaw dropped. He went, Shady. That is insane. I said, Yeah, it’s pretty simple. It’s as simple as the red and green lights in the car parks at Westfield.
Why didn’t that come in 20 years ago? It’s only come in the last five years. But he said, I said to him, does Tony Robbins not do? He said no, we don’t know how wealthy they are. We’ve got no clue. I said it’s pretty simple. So yeah, you want to pre qualify them. You don’t want to be talking to people who just are not in with, in the lawn mowing thing, of course, you make sure that they own the house.
They’re not a renter. And you make sure they’re not living in an apartment. Yeah, absolutely. Because it is an important thing. And as particularly for all those people listening out there at the moment that are thinking, okay how does this work for my business? But it can, if you put a bit of pre qualifying in there.
And I think the message is that if the prize that they’re going to get is worthwhile, then people will submit their information. If the prize is ho hum, I don’t really care. Then feeling like they’re putting their life away. [00:40:00] Is it is an interesting one. And then I think the next part is which I think because the laws in Australia quite different to where they are almost in the rest of the world now regarding the collection of data and utilising that.
And most people Just, I’ve seen it over the years. You go to a networking function, there’s an exchange of business cards and all of a sudden you’re receiving 500 emails from that person. So in Australia, it’s been the case that pretty much anyone can end up on a database. But if you’re operating on it in a global sense, and I am, you are those laws are quite different depending on where you are.
So how important is it to then be, asking them to tick a box as well that you can send them other stuff. Is that the necessity now? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Or not even necessarily tick a box. Although that’s an easy one, but at the top of the page, it says that should you fill in the form below, then you are giving consent for us to forward other details, to you.
But you know what, if you come across Mother Teresa style, whereby you are giving value in [00:41:00] everything, then no one will complain. When someone that webinar that I held yesterday for tutors, okay, mainly in America, but they were in other countries as well. When a tutor was and it was it came about because there was a lady in America who had me on a very similar thing to this podcast and she coaches tutors.
She used to be a tutor, but she’s now, moved on to be a coach of tutors and she interviewed me. And when she was doing what you’re doing now, Anthony, she was quite impressed. So she said, Oh, what else can we do? And I said, Oh, if you like, I’ll teach tutors how to do that Facebook contest because it’s just so easy for them.
It doesn’t cost them to give away five or 10 sessions. And of course they got to attract people who need tutoring or their children need tutoring. And so when we were talking yesterday about it on the webinar. They just said to me how do we prequalify them? I said it’s pretty easy. You don’t have to dig too deep.
It would be first of all, are you absolutely the parents of children? Okay. If it happened to be a, a math tutoring thing how old are the kids? So you know exactly how old they are at school. Specifically, what are the symptoms that you see in terms [00:42:00] of, I guess lacking in math skills, and I don’t know what they are, but a tutor I would.
Tick A, B, C, D, whatever it might be, so you give them the options. And then just your contact details thereafter. That’s all you need. And that means is that when you give the prize away, you’re going to have a database from heaven. It’s not a database. It’s the world’s most valuable database, because people who entered the contest for their child to, get tutoring for languages, they have a child that they know wants to learn languages.
It’s pretty simple. Yeah, it’s amazing how simple it is. I wanted to ask you a couple other questions before we have to wrap things up, we could speak for hours and hours on so many things here, but I’m intrigued. You thinking outside of the square is the big thing of what you I think what you do and trying to come up with these things.
So firstly, let me ask you, what’s wowed you in recent years? Oh, gosh probably Elon Musk. Over the years I’ve, when people ask me, do I read books? I say, no, I haven’t got time to read books, so if I did, I’d just go to the last [00:43:00] chapter and find out what was happening. I just watch the movie, I watch the movie of the book because it’s over and done with.
It has to get the AI to give you the summary. That’s all you know. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I remember before the HSC, the higher school certificate back in my day, back in the 1800s we were just, I just bought the crib notes before, we went for the exam and I’m exaggerating for the sake of humor, but yeah I’m, I’ll read autobiographies, no question about that, but yeah, just a fiction book, not a chance in the world.
So the thing is that I used to, be. I guess driven by the likes of anyone that was super creative. So that would be Walt Disney and that would be Richard Branson. It would be Spielberg and people like that. And I’m sure anyone who’s right brained and that’s the creative side of your head would be probably the same.
You have to hold those people in high esteem. I’ve been to all the Disney parks a hundred times and, My wife hates me I’ll be measuring the bricks on Main Street to make sure they’re the 3 quarter size, to enhance the fantasy feeling. And she’s going, would you just get on the ride, but these days, yeah, Elon Musk. When you, you look at who’s, At the moment, probably the [00:44:00] most innovative, creative being on the planet with a massively high IQ Elon Musk. No question about that. Yeah, it’s, it, isn’t it amazing to watch? And I think the great thing is too, that you can watch some of these people.
You don’t have to agree with everything that they do or say, but their ability to think outside of the square and to come up with something that really is next level. And so that’s what I wanted to ask you about is that how much of. What you’re doing these days is a balance between coming here. We’ll do it for you versus inspiring people to be able to do it themselves.
And how do you actually inspire people to, to think outside of the square? If they’re not in that part of their brain, most of the time. Great question. And probably 80, 20, 80 percent packaged and 20% advice. I can’t say inspire because I’m not a consultant. All of my Clients say that I’m an insult and a marketing insult and I love that.
That’s funny, because if you are either gifted or cursed with sarcasm then what happens when you are [00:45:00] holding an event or group webinars or zoom calls and this, that and the other You can’t help yourself but be sarcastic and I often cop it back as a contest so that, and in fact, I had one event on the Gold Coast about a year ago, and we had, 60 or 70 clients in the room, and at the end of the two day conference, I said does anybody want to make comments?
And one guy put his hand up and said, JD, I’ve been here for two days. Yeah, I want to make a comment. I said, what is it? He said, not once have you insulted me. I said, and he goes I want to make a complaint. You’ve insulted everyone else. And I said hang around for another 10 minutes. So it’s all a joke, but we get on pretty well.
It’s the Aussie sense of humor, of course. I have to say that Yeah, probably 80, 20, 80 percent businesses just want it done for them. And so we do for example, that Facebook contest formula. You can run off and do that tomorrow yourself right now. But we had a client last week who just came on board and he runs a landscaping business and he gave away a 2, 000.
value landscape makeover, and he spent 290 over three days and got one entry.[00:46:00]
And when he rang me to say, JD, that didn’t exactly work. I looked at his ad, it was just awful. And I explained to him that we had another company come on board about a week earlier who has medical equipment. people. So they’re walking frames. And we gave away a wheelie walker, which was worth 500, which is a walking frame for older people.
And we put it on Facebook and because of the, yeah, I guess just, the little tricks that we play, he got 822 leads in one week. And he spent, Not much more than what this guy spent. So therefore, 822 leads versus one. I think it might be best if you’ve got a sore tooth to go to a dentist, and the inspiration thing I have to say to you is that because of my sarcasm, I don’t know how inspirational I am, but with the advisory staff, normally that’s the business that has someone in their business that can execute. The advice is not much good. If I give it to the butcher and baker who’s just there with his husband or, sorry, with her husband, or, it might be if it’s a husband, he’s there with his wife.
They want the done for you. They haven’t got time to be inspired. Yeah. And it’s an interesting point. And I think also [00:47:00] hopefully the podcasts and other things are good ways of inspiring people to do those things. I wanted to ask you one final question on that subject before we have to wrap things up.
But I. Get there and you’ve got someone who’s got 822 leads. How does someone on that size cope with 822 leads? Because most people, that’s dream stuff that they’re going if we actually had, 20 legitimate leads, so we could ring, four or five a day, we’d actually be quite happy with that.
When you suddenly. Get those kinds of numbers. How do you actually not do yourself a disservice and actually manage that? Do you need the AIs to actually be part of the package to, to be able to implement? What do you do? Mate, the reason I’m smiling and giggling at this end, because I only just got off the phone with him before we got on to do this.
And he said to me, JD, had you not implemented what we did a week ago, then he didn’t know what he was going to do because he said to me when this came in the first week and he used a couple of colorful words to say what the so and so am I going to do? And I said because he’s [00:48:00] only got five people working for him but he has a warehouse of all of this equipment, wheelchairs and scooters and walking frames and all that sort of stuff.
Then we just got the robot. So therefore the robot just rings all of the people to say, look and most of these people are in their seventies and eighties. And the robot rings and says, look, you didn’t win, but we’ve got this special deal for you. You obviously do. have some sort of interest in this Walker.
But it’s not just with the Walker. We’ve got other things. They’ve got CPAP, machines, they’ve got all sorts of things for older people. And what we’re happy to do is that we’ll give you the equivalent, if you like, a second prize. And that is a hundred dollar voucher that you can put towards any of these other things.
And the interesting thing is that the robot, because he had run a few himself beforehand, by the way, and then he realized he’d never get through 800. The robot is beating his conversion. So I said to him I said, mate, that shows you how bad you are as a salesperson. A and it’s the truth, isn’t it?
Because so many people get into business because they’re good at what they do, or they’re passionate about the product or service that they’re selling, but they’re not necessarily [00:49:00] great at the sales process. And I’ll be the first to put up my hand and say, the selling part is not my forte.
Yeah. And I know that the efficiency is one thing too, isn’t it? Because. The AI is going to be quite efficient in how it handles things and what it does. It’s not going to get sidetracked. It’s not going to turn a, what should be a five minute call into a one hour call, which can happen. I’ve, I’ve had those, I remember walking, I think the classic was because my business, name that most people will know is come together and which is a great name.
And it’s also got, it’s linked back when I originally thought of the name, it had its roots immediately to the Beatles song come together. And that often triggers people. And I had this conversation with someone. And he said, Oh, the Beatles come together. And he started singing to me and we just went off on this tangent.
And after an hour, I’m just going, what the hell have this guy’s vocal been doing? Where did I go? It just went wrong. The robot would never have stood for that one. We’ve called our robots AI journey. So we have a business called AI engage journey. com [00:50:00] and essentially we tell everyone, aside from the wizardry of the technology, she doesn’t get sick.
She doesn’t take days off. She doesn’t have any relatives that pass away and she doesn’t get in any moods. Imagine if you had an employee like that. Goodness, man, yeah, it’s a way to go, a way to go. So we’ve got to, we’ve got to wrap things up. So I’m going to do something. Look, I’m going to ask one question then I’m going to get a, get, ask you one other question.
Normally I just finish with this question. And the question is what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish they knew in advance they were going to have? What’s the aha moment, is that what you said? Yeah, that’s an easy one to answer. And, it’s just how.
How obvious this stuff should be to them because really, whilst I thank you very much for your kind compliments, and we’ve only known each other for a short time, so it was lovely of you to say that, and I’ve got a reasonable track record, not everything I touch turns to gold, but there’s a reasonable track record there.
The aha moment that they get is how [00:51:00] simple The concept is and yes, is there some inherent DNA of creativity? Of course there is. But when I give the answer and I, you were at the event last week and I gave this very simple example, a little country town we lived in in country, New South Wales in the Hunter Valley.
It was just a little main street and there was a hairdresser there that had been there forever. And my wife would go there to get her hair done. And the hairdresser’s name was Kimberly. And she said to go. Would John have any of that wow stuff because I’m in trouble and my wife said to her, what are you talking about?
She said, I’ve been the only hairdresser in town for a thousand years and all of a sudden there’s a lady that’s opened across the road, directly across the road from me and she’s stolen all of the men because men don’t care where they get their hair cut. And she has 10 haircuts for men. And she said, I charge 55 for a men’s haircut.
So either I’ve got to drop to 9 or I’ve got to do some heavy advertising on Facebook. And can John help me out? Is there any wow factor idea that he has? Because I’ve lost all the men that just walk across the road for 10. They’re going to get the haircut there. So Gail comes home and of course this was a [00:52:00] freebie.
And I went, Oh, thanks Gail. Another freebie, and but I knew Kimberly, so I thought I’d do it. And two days later I came back to her and I said, look, here’s the answer to it. And what we did is put a sandwich board outside her hairdressing shop. And the sandwich board said, we fixed 10 haircuts. I love it.
Yeah. And I know the story of the event that you’re at last week. And so therefore Kimberly’s aha moment was, Oh my God, it was that simple. But of course it’s not that simple for people who are not in the marketing or advertising or the ideas game. And so I always say, when you are a dentist and you go to university and you come out with a dentist certificate, did they ever teach you how to get clients?
Answer is no. Yeah. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a builder, or a doctor, or a dentist, or a butcher, or a baker, they all go and get the certificates from, college or university, but no one ever teaches them how to get customers. And therefore, that’s where we fill that gap. They are very good technicians.
They’re just not marketers. I love it. Now to wrap things up, two things. One is that you’ve got to show us the book. I know you’ve shown me the book. [00:53:00] We’ve got to, we’ve got to see the book. Now, unfortunately for people who are just listening in and missed this, and I encourage you to go back and watch the video on YouTube if you haven’t.
Take a look at this book. John, tell us about the book. Yes, it’s it’s, we are called the Institute of Wow, but because I do things like this gigantic tabloid sized book, which is leather bound with gold tip edges and all sorts of things, most of my clients and most of my mates don’t call it the Institute of Wow, they call it the Institute of Wank.
So therefore I’ll take that, I’ll take that as a compliment. This book, if you’re not watching on video, but you’re listening, it’s the size of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, so it’s the size of a tabloid newspaper, and it’s called The Wow Manifesto. And I released this a few years back because I thought, okay if we’re going to write a book, and everyone who, has some degree of knowledge is expected to write a book on whatever their knowledge is, in this it’s just case study after case study.
So this is really A gigantic swipe file, okay of just direct response ideas that have worked. Everything from the puppy dog sale, through to how to win a million dollars if you buy this product. And [00:54:00] yeah, there’s basically, look, if you do get this, and I’ll show you how to get it in a moment because that’s our evil plan, of course Anthony.
But yeah, if you do get it, it’ll be a swipe file from heaven. You’ll be able to go through this book and just swipe ideas and use them for your business. And the reason I’m happy to give Do that is because, as Anthony, I live to give. Absolutely. Absolutely. And and we’re going to include all the details on how to get in contact with JD and to be able to get ahold of the of the book as well.
Can I just say to you, Anthony, the way that they can do this, and this is my evil plan. And and this is absolutely wrapping up all the stuff that we’ve just discussed. Remember I told you in the early part of the interview that I have this robot phoning the right people, not people, but the right people and inviting them to have an hour.
Zoom webinar with me. Absolutely. I’m gonna do that and whoever has the zoom webinar with me, you’ll be on with half a dozen other business owners. So it’s a group call, but whoever that has that with me gets the book. Okay. Digital version of the book. Do you mind if I just give you the URL.
Absolutely good. It’s . This is sounded [00:55:00] really corny. This is terribly, I can’t believe I came up with this domain name, but anyway, get more jd.com . Now, if that’s, if that’s not ridiculous, I dunno, is, but anyway, get my name is John Dey, but I get called jd, so get more jd.com. If you go to that page, then you will be able to just simply register to have an hour with me the following week.
So we don’t mess around. It’ll be the following week and it’ll be you and half a dozen other business owners. And I will give you the book. Fantastic. I love it. I love it. So the last thing that I’ve got to do is in the spirit of it because you alluded to it before when you’re at the conference and you did it last week.
So beautifully, I’m going to get you to wrap up what the podcast has been, what your experience has been on the podcast. This is like Johnny Carson just telling a guest to wrap up the Tonight Show. That’s unusual. Absolutely. Why not? Yeah, full marks to you. That’s fantastic. You’re out thinking outside the square and that’s my sort of person.
Okay. Look, I’d like to say Anthony, I, to wrap everything up and, you’ve run this [00:56:00] webinar, sorry, you run this podcast. Now for how long, mate, would this be 12 months you’ve been doing podcasts or? This podcast is now into its second year. After two years, we’ve done it. You know what?
I have been a guest on podcasts to the tune of probably between five and 10 a week for the last six months. And so I’ve been a guest on a lot of podcasts, so I can compare you against, a lot of them, and some of them have claimed to be in the top five podcasts. Podcast audiences with matchmaker FM and with pod match and all these things.
But I’ve gotta say to you all of all the podcasters that I’ve I’ve been a guest of, I’d like to say this was the very best run podcast I have ever been on. You’d like to say it, I’d like to say that, but I can’t. , I said See your line then should have been Oh, thank you, jd. I no.
Don’t thank me. I’d like to say it was the best, but I can’t. It’s pretty ordinary, to be honest with you. Oh, I love it. I love it. But it reminds me, and I’m going to finish up with this. When I was when I was at university, I went to university out at out at Bathurst, at Charles Sturt [00:57:00] University, and a couple of years before me had finished a very well known a very well known radio personality, Andrew Denton.
Yep. And Andrew wasn’t big on coming back. He made it big on triple M in those days and everything. And somehow they got him to come back and they, we got him on the local community station said, would you record a promo for us? And his promo was very simple. He said, when I’m in Bathurst, I choose to listen to two MCE.
However, fortunately, I’m only in Bathurst once every 10 years, and it was very spontaneous and very well delivered. So I love a bit of sarcasm. So fantastic. JD, thank you so much for being an incredibly entertaining guests on the program. And I know that everyone’s got so many things out of this, which I’ve loved.
So as well, so much for being part of it. My absolute pleasure. Pleasure. And all sarcasm aside, it’s been very enjoyable. You’ve been a great host. Thanks, man. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t [00:58:00] forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by Podcasts 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 BizBytes.

Revolutionise your service delivery, data driven transformation. Join us as Jason MacLean from Freepoint Technology shares unique insights on measuring and improving manufacturing performance. Now I know what you’re saying. You’re in professional services. You’re a management consultant. There is so much we can learn from what manufacturing does.

They’ve got real time data that enhances productivity. That’s something we can all learn from. You’re going to be able to reduce downtimes and foster continuous improvement in your business. We’ll talk everything from AI to change management. It’s an episode you don’t want to miss. Let’s get into Biz Bites.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And my guest today is someone we met online, but we actually got to meet in person, which is a rarity considering he’s way on the other side of the world. Jason is. All about measuring performance, improving excellence as a result of that in a very interesting way.

I’m gonna let him introduce himself. Jason. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, Jason MacLean. I’m director of enterprise accounts and sales here at three point technologies in London, Ontario, Canada. Pleased to meet you and see you again. Yes, that’s the great little story that we had where we actually had an opportunity.

We engage with each other and unbeknownst to me. You were traveling to to Sydney and we actually got a chance to meet in person, share, share a drink or two, and and discuss a whole lot of different things that we’re going to touch on some of those as we go through it go through the episode today.

Just tell me, I guess that’s the first thing is the business itself is not just located there. You obviously were in Sydney amongst other places in Australia for Yeah. What we do is primarily in the manufacturing sectors. We have software and hardware that we bring into the manufacturing environment where we can attach sensors and different types of software solutions to measure performance.

A lot of my customer base is in Australia and New Zealand, so I try to make it down at least once a year. To, visit all the customers. I don’t always get to see all of them, but I try. Yeah, so we connect all these sensors and limit switches and software to a manufacturer’s environment and we can pick up downtime, count measure performance and benchmarking.

We have scheduling solutions for production scheduling where, you can optimize your output. Standardised work instructions, the list goes on, but that’s primarily what we do. We come in and give that manufacturer the visibility from the shop floor perspective that they may not have had.

Before I think what’s interesting about this space is that particularly I know a lot of my audience are in the professional services or consulting type spaces, but ultimately, there’s a lot of similarities here because it’s still people driven, even though there’s a fair amount of equipment and automation that might be involved in the process, there’s still people that are driving the quality of the workmanship that’s happening along the way, let alone the end quality of the product itself.

Yeah, I felt like our solution gives you that visibility from, say, production supervisor or management standpoint to see that action and that activity on the shop floor. If anything, it’ll boost productivity and quality because the team members on the shop floor. typically want to do a good job and they want to be rewarded for that.

This gives us a visibility of that activity, right? Yeah, I find it boosts that morale, it boosts the quality output of whatever product that manufacturer is making, and and that OEE, if you want to call it that, right? I think it’s interesting too, because most people would assume that once you put Whatever equipment you need in place, that efficiency just happens.

That’s not necessarily the case, right? No, typically, what I see with my customers anyway is, if you deploy our solution on the shop floor and you show the visibility give that visibility, whether that’s on big screen TVs hanging up on the shop floor or maybe it’s operator monitors that they can view their own activity.

You typically see about a 15 percent increase in productivity across the entire shop. And that’s not with, that’s without doing anything. That’s just showing what, because people are going to see that. They’re going to see their own metrics and their own KPIs and try to improve. That’s just human nature, right?

Whether it’s competitive from shift to shift, or it’s just them challenging themselves. But yeah, when you start really diving into, say, the reports and all the metrics that we do capture, and then form plans, whether it’s continuous improvement projects, to make processes or environments better that’s when you see The real ROI, right?

Yeah, I think that’s, it’s interesting as well. I just want to touch on the initial reaction that you have from people because they’re effectively being monitored. And so the one part is to go as you described it as being competitive and going, Oh, I’ve got, and that willingness to want to improve, but is there the other side where people are going?

Hang on big brothers watching me a little bit too closely. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites 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, but is there the other side where people are going? Hang on, Big Brother’s watching me a little bit too closely. Oh yeah, you get that. It’s all in the approach. I try to be as hands on with the deployment as I can.

There are some customers that they want to do all that onboarding and set up themselves. And deployment is in their control. And that’s fine, but you do have that, that mentality that Big Brother’s watching every move that I make now, or You also have that, depending on how you deploy solutions is You know, you’re giving the team member a voice and the ability to tell their side of the story.

So if there was quality defects, if there was downtime, I’m giving you a solution where you can enter in that information now. Or it’s captured in real time and you aren’t going to have That big brother coming down from the head office to, to question you, the story is already told, right? It’s all in the approach, I believe.

If you just deploy a solution on the shop floor and don’t get that team member feedback and interaction, then I think that big brother mentality is what’s going to stick, right? Yeah, that’s, it is an important thing, isn’t it? I think for any business and automation is becoming more and more a part of, of businesses all the time now, and it is about how you manage that human interaction that is going to become more and more critical in that process of not only deploying it, but overseeing it.

Yeah, and the more lean customer, like I know a lot of companies are trying to run as lean as possible, especially post covid. I think having a solution in place like ours it eliminates that need to have You know, supervisors walking the shop floor as much as they used to pick up, say, Excel sheets, or team members writing down things on paper, and it has to get entered in later on.

It’s a huge time savings to have a solution like ours on the shop floor with companies running as lean as they do. Or at least as lean as they try to run, right? Yeah. I think that’s an interesting point too, isn’t it? That, that how lean are they trying to run? Because that’s one of the things that people are seeing is okay.

Invest in the technology, eliminate the people. Therefore, greater greater profit, but it’s not necessarily that way, is it? And some of it is also changing the changing. There might be some jobs that are lost, but there are new jobs that are being created as a result as well, aren’t there? Yes, that’s right.

Like I’ll use my perspective and my experience with our solution specifically. Like I was with Toyota Motor Manufacturing for 21 years and then I went to a Tier 2 automotive supplier as a maintenance manager and I actually brought this solution that I’m promoting to, every day into a environment where there was nothing.

And I found there was a little bit of that big brother mentality at first. I changed my approach and I was giving the team members the ability to, say, call for help in a process. They no longer had to leave the process to find somebody, like maintenance or a supervisor. They could tell their side of the story.

I as a maintenance manager was able to showcase through all the reports that I was generating with our solutions that I was understaffed. So I was inefficient because I didn’t have enough maintenance team members. That gave me some of the metrics that I needed to go to the front office and say, Hey, we need to hire somebody.

And this is the reason why. Whatever those reasons were at the time. So I got two new maintenance team members out of that. One electrician, one millwright. You can, it depends on how you want to use and analyze the data, right? You can. Promoted that you need more people, or you could use it as a time savings and eliminate some of those old outdated, antiquated tasks.

Yeah, I think it is an important perspective that people understand that it is perspective, right? That it is about how you want to drive into it, because a lot of it is fear based. That we’re bringing in the machines are going to take over, we don’t have any work, what are we going to do? And it’s actually not really that’s not a fair perspective on how things work.

Going. And as you say, there are opportunities then where if you improve efficiencies in one area, it may create new positions in order to support that drive, not only for greater efficiencies, but for increased productivity. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. And there’s a lot of fluff out there, like whether it’s marketing or I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn where they’re talking about Industry 5.

0 now, and I don’t even know what that is, right? The, Industry 4. 0, I know it gets tossed out there a lot I don’t think the majority of manufacturers out there are at Industry 2 or 3. 0, A lot of fluff. There’s a lot of over exaggeration with regard to AIs taking over everything and Yeah, AI has some pretty cool stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s just cool stuff.

It’s cool tech. It’s not a solution. It’s not a permanent solution. You need to have those team members, managers, supervisors, leads on the shop floor driving these changes, right? Yeah, absolutely. You still need that human element in there. And so talk to me about that. The human element itself, once you come in there and how much of what you’re doing is improving the balance between what the machines are doing, what the human element is doing, how does that, how do you find that blend?

Because some of it is, some of it I imagine is improving what the machines can do as well as what the human element can do. From a Consultative base, like I’ve been in manufacturing, say, all my career. Some of these pain points that some of the manufacturing leaders are trying to solve, I’ve been through.

I can put myself in their shoes. And we can deploy our solutions tailored to those pain points. Which is great. But, yeah, driving change on the shop floor. You need to have a, what’s your cause, what’s your purpose, what’s your reason for doing this? Is it just to check a box, or are you trying to improve a process for X, Y, Z reasons?

Benchmarking is a big one. Do you know your throughput, your OEE, where you’re supposed to be at versus where you are in real time. You’d be surprised how many manufacturing sites don’t know their OEE don’t know their throughput, what it’s expected to be. They know what it costs for, say, downtime.

But they don’t know their throughput. They don’t know their OEE. And if they do, it’s written in a binder somewhere and nobody knows where it is. Running into that a fair bit. Having those questions in mind or those tasks in mind. Okay, we’re going to benchmark. We’re going to try to improve this process by identifying bottlenecks, identifying, is there excessive steps in a process that don’t need to be there?

Or maybe you need to rebalance your entire line, right? Is the job that you’re doing underburdened, and the job that the person beside you is doing is overburdened, and that’s why you overcycle on that process all the time creating a bottleneck. If you don’t have tools to visualize all that, then you’ll never know.

So we try to give that ability and that visual, visual shop floor perspective where you can see all the bottlenecks right away in real time. I think most people can relate to that. I think particularly any business owners that are listening right now, is no matter what size your business is, I think you, everyone would be nodding their heads and going, I realize I’m probably a bottleneck at some point in my business.

But it’s actually understanding how. How vast that bottleneck might be and how, how easy it may be to unblock it and to go around that. And I think that’s that is such an important aspect for any business to fully understand. Yeah, and it could be something simple as you’ve been monitoring your process for a month or two.

And you’re looking at before and after data. And, hey, at the end of the day, you make a plan to save. Whether it’s a couple seconds, in some cases, or a few minutes of whatever task that team member is doing or that machine is doing. It could be as simple as an equipment, move or change.

It could be in some cases we’ve had some locations that re engineered the entire process just because it’s non profitable, but they always thought it was a big money maker. Once you start visualizing it and showing it, reporting out on these benchmarks, you’re able to make some critical changes and some, I’m not going to say smarter decisions, but some quicker decisions on specific processes, right?

I think one of the interesting things about processes for any business is there’s history, and often, The reason you started doing something was a valid reason, and it might be because of, where things were placed or the opportunities, and then everything has been built around that, and you haven’t gone back and questioned why that, or whether that decision that was made in the first place is now still relevant and could be changed, and I bet that’s something that you see all the time in business.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it kind of attitude where You know, in some cases it fits, but in a lot of cases it doesn’t anymore. The whole point of continuous improvement is it’s continuous, right? Yeah, it’s a great idea, let’s implement it, and then let’s build on that, right?

It’s, once is never enough. Let’s continue, it’s continuous improvements. Let’s continue to build on whatever that good idea was and optimize that process. And then go back to it every year, right? Go back to the changes that we’ve made. Reevaluate, before and afters and put a plan together to make it even better or more efficient.

I find, yeah, a lot of customers out there, including past businesses that I’ve been in. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it. We’re comfortable this way. So that’s the way we’re going to stick with. It’s not always the best case. No, and it’s funny because when we met, you told me a story that stuck with me.

About you walking into a particular manufacturing place and just questioning the placement of equipment. And they were looking to replicate that placement of equipment in a new facility without questioning why it was there in the first place. I don’t know if you remember that example, but I do.

Yeah. Talk everyone through it. Yeah, it was a industrial bakery and I was just getting a tour of the facility, not a customer of mine, but potential. And we walked through, and they were showing me different processes, and I just happened to glance at the end of the line where all the material comes off, and it was, being picked up by a forklift and driven about five minutes down to the warehouse where it gets wrapped up in shrink wrap, the skid does, and then brought all the way back to that process to get parked in a freezer beside that process.

So it’s just a simple, why don’t you move that Wrapping device right to the end of the line and eliminate all that travel time. And I guess, being that was the way they’d always done it, they were just nose blind to it. They didn’t see it right away as a waste, but it was about, I don’t know, what did they say?

I say, that idea, they did implement it. They did move the equipment saved them about, 20 minutes every hour of just travel time back and forth to the forklift. Just lost time, right? A double handling of material and that was a bottleneck because the product would stack up and stack up while the forklift operator was traveling around with this material.

And that was just something that I noticed being a fresh set of eyes on site, right? Now using solutions that will visualize all of your data and all of your machines and processes would have easily identified that the end of that line is a bottleneck, but they already knew that. They just didn’t know that there was such an easy fix, right?

I think that’s the key, isn’t it? So there are solutions. Sometimes you get so close to something in your business that you can’t, you might be able to see, as you said, the bottleneck, but having to see the solution, sometimes the obvious is really there and you just can’t see it because you’re so close to it.

And it was free for them, aside from hooking up some hydro, right? It was a free, they already had the equipment they just had to get their electrician to hook up a new outlet to plug that equipment in, and there, they saved 20 minutes per hour, just in travel time. It was a huge savings for them, and it eliminated that bottleneck so much that they did replicate that in that second facility, and on that second line that they were installing.

A little pat on the back to me, I feel good about it, it’s always nice to have a different perspective I don’t think any ideas are bad ideas, but I do think that this is the way that we’ve always done it, and this is how it’s going to stay, isn’t It isn’t always the best course of action.

It is a big thing to do to look at something and say, and businesses that have been around for a number of years, sometimes decades and to walk in and say what if we were starting today? How would we do it? What would we do that’s different and completely go with a blank canvas? And that is a difficult thing to do for a lot of businesses.

But this is the whole idea, isn’t it, really, that you, when you start measuring efficiencies and things, you can start to see that, hang on, maybe there is another way to do this. It could be a group effort. Nobody I’d be lying to you if I said change management in any course is easy. And never, it’s never easy, right?

It’s bad. You can’t do it by yourself, especially in a manufacturing environment. You can’t have one person trying to drive change across the entire organization. But having tools in place specific to people in the roles and it starts from the top down, not the bottom up driving some of this change and continuous improvement is definitely key for success.

And make it a group effort, not an individual effort. You’ll find that it’ll be a lot easier to follow some of these things through versus, uh, one person trying to lead the whole herd, right? Yeah, and I think you make it a really important point because Often businesses come in and they will bring some tech or something into the business and they’ll, champion that piece of tech.

But what they’ve forgotten about is the change management process because it impacts people around them. So you do need a specific change management team depending on the size of your business to help people come to grips with what is being done and what the implications are for it.

And What the positive outcomes could be. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s be honest. Once you start measuring things that you haven’t measured in the past it might look really bad. You know what I mean? It might be worse than you thought it was. And I’ve seen that out there too, where somebody started measuring something and they’re like, What’s going on here?

This is twice as bad as I thought I was doing. But it’s true, and it’s real. So let’s put a plan together and get you to the next step where you can go to your betters or your counterparts and go, here’s where we are. We didn’t know where we were. Here’s where we are, and it’s bad. But now we have a plan forward to get to that next step, all right?

And the next time that you have to present out your findings or some of those changes that you’ve made, maybe you were here and now you’re up here, right? Yeah, it’s That’s what I see out there anyway, for sure. Let me come back to that in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you about, when you’re starting to drive efficiencies in people, there is a danger as well that you, while machines are designed to operate at near optimum capacity consistently humans are not.

As much as we would like to. Walk into the office at nine o’clock on a, on any given day and say we’re going a hundred percent until five o’clock. It’s just, that’s just not the reality. People don’t perform at their optimum peak level every day. So how do you manage that?

Because there has to be some, there are always outside circumstances. There are always reasons why someone may not be able to perform at a particular, at the highest level on a day to day basis. So how do you, Manage that shift in a business on a day to day basis. From a manufacturing perspective, I say you have to build in some of that and do a process cycle time and there’s tag time.

You got to give a team member the ability to stop what they’re doing. Get a drink of water or stretch or what have you in between whatever tasks they’re doing. But you can never, yeah, you’re right, you can’t expect 100 percent out of everybody all the time. I don’t find that a lot of manufacturers out there are setting targets at 100%.

Like I know from my Toyota days, it was 95%, throughput throughout the shop. And a lot of those days we do that, nothing was ever perfect, like there was lunchtime builds, there was break builds, there was making up for downtime, there was making up for, if a team member went home sick and somebody else had to cover them and things like that.

I think it’s just having plans in place that, with the expectation that, Nobody’s ever going to operate at 100%. Now a team member operating at 50%. That’s a different discussion, like whether that’s recertifications, retraining, or maybe they just don’t want to be there anymore. I don’t know, but you’ll find that out there as well. I was going to say you must it must uncover a fair bit of What happens in every business, right? Where there are people that are not performing at their optimal level. And when you’ve got the data to understand that is happening consistently, you’ve got really a couple of choices, don’t you?

Understand why it’s happening and whether that can change in the current environment or realize that it’s the wrong person in the wrong job. With the data that you get and that you collect, if you’re analyzing it and scrutinizing it and doing it properly Yeah, you’ll be able to identify that there’s either an abnormality in the process or inconsistencies between maybe two or three people that do that same job.

And then it might be a retraining exercise that you have to do. It might be Like an overburden is, you could be, you go down to the process and see what that issue is, and maybe, I’m shorter in stature, so maybe I have trouble reaching something that somebody six foot doesn’t. So it takes me longer.

So yeah, it’s all what you do with that data. As I say, most team members aren’t trying to do a bad job, most want to do a real good job. And, You get a little pat on the back at the end of the day, week, month, whatever it might be, but everybody’s there to do their job and go home safe and sound.

It’s not always a team member’s fault. It could be the process and how it’s set up as well. But with that data that you get and that you capture and analyze and scrutinize, Go to the process and see. Watch. The team members, they do that job day in, day out. They’re going to know it better than any supervisor or engineer or manager.

They’re going to tell you or show you exactly what the problem is, right? Yeah, take that data that you’re capturing, go to the shop floor and see what the problem is for yourself. And I gather you’ve collected a lot of very interesting data. I don’t know whether that data is necessarily pulled across all all the places that you deal with, or you just look at that individually.

But tell me about some of the interesting finds that you’ve had, because there are efficiencies that can be quite easy to overcome if you’re aware of them. If you’re aware of what they are, that can happen in any business, right? I’ll give you one example that just comes to mind is I had one of my customers call me up one day and he’s I’ve had this solution hooked up to my CNC machines for two years.

And he says, it doesn’t make sense to me. It shows that I’m a hundred percent uptime every day and I can’t get it. my product out to my customers, on time, like any day of the week, and he’s I don’t understand what’s going on. So I said, all right, we’ll go to the shop floor and, ensure that the machines are actually on and running.

He says your solution is telling us that it is, right? I’m like, okay, great. Why don’t I come down to your site and take a look and see what I see versus see what he’s yep, come on site. So I made a day trip of it. Went on site to that customer’s location. They had 21 CNC machines on the shop floor and what the operators had been doing, not all of them, but some of them had been doing, is they caught wind that The way that customer was monitoring and tracking their productivity was if the CNC machine was on.

Not if the CNC machine was cutting chips, making chips, cutting the part, right? The team members would dial down the spindles, so they wouldn’t have to have, say, certain amount of change overs per day, leave it for the night shift guys, stuff like that. That’s what I saw right away is, yeah, it shows that you’re up because you’re monitoring your powers on, but you’re not monitoring your spindle load.

Showing that you’re actually being productive on that machine. So once they started tracking that, then you get into the real truth of, okay, are we really at 100 percent efficiency here? No, you’re at about 63. That’s why you’re not getting parts out. They have since changed their logics and their controllers that The operators can’t dial down the machines when it’s running these programs, unless they get supervisor passwords or buy offs or whatever it might be.

So their throughput has improved and they are able to get product out the door now. But it, yeah, their efficiency was never really at a hundred percent. They just thought it was. Yeah, I can imagine. And it’s, and I suppose it happens in any business and sometimes it’s not really meant with malicious intent.

It’s just, we can ease things up here. We don’t have to stress out and they’re not thinking about the bigger picture because there’s the element of people being employed and yes, they’ve got some some pride in their work. But it’s limited to those who are sitting at the top and are going this is about making money.

And this is about being able to pay for all of those team members that you’ve got sitting there and everything else that you want to be able to do. So it’s finding that balance, isn’t it? Between that strategic need and what is happening at a human level. On the floor. Yeah, 100%, 100%.

But yeah, at the end of the day, you gotta go and see. So you take your data that you capture, whatever that might be, whatever’s important to that specific manufacturer or individual, and then go and see for yourself You’re not going to solve any problems by sitting behind the computer, right? You need to be out there on the shop floor with that data in hand, analyzing these, whatever those metrics were that you captured, and then what’s next, right?

Continuous improvement. What are you going to do with all that information that you’ve got? Is it because team members are dialing down the spindles, right? Slowing it down so they don’t have massive changeovers. Is it because you’re expecting too much out of somebody? Is it the process is imbalanced but it’s coming up with that countermeasure or that plan for change and then seeing that through, right?

Yeah. And I imagine there’s lots of. Other interesting bits of data that you collect along the way. And in fact, I seem to recall that you mentioned to me there was one where you collected about the amount of toilet breaks that people were taking and how long that was taking up in a business and how that can drive inefficiency.

And that can happen anywhere, right? That sort of thing. That sort of thing. So you’re collecting the data about when people are taking breaks and for how long and how often that’s can surprise a lot of businesses. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, like I know that I’ll speak to me as a maintenance manager.

I’d always often oversee production as well if I was covering for holidays or whatever from production managers. I would see team members either late to line late back to a process from lunch, excessive bathroom breaks, and, one or two a day, okay, great, that’s you’re right but, if you’re gone for a half hour at a time, three or four times a day, come on, that adds up if you’re hourly, right?

And I often found that, I’ll speak to my perspective, when I deployed this solution as a maintenance manager, I found that one of the processes, main reasons for never making target or having terrible OEE was not down time, which everybody blamed it on, it was team members being late.

Returning back from lunch on afternoon shift. Equates to about 430, 000 in lost product because the line wasn’t running at all, or that machine wasn’t running at all. Not because it was broken down or missing parts or a team member was working too slow. It was idle time, right? Idle time was a silent killer.

That’s what we, I noticed and identified on that. for that. Within probably four months of just watching, right? Yeah it’s amazing, isn’t it? Because often business owners will give some liberties to their staff. And it’s not necessarily that those stuff again are deliberately trying to take advantage, but you give a little bit and that little bit extends and it continues and continues.

And suddenly, it adds up if you’ve got a few people that are consistently taking 10 minutes longer for lunch than you would otherwise have allowed. That accumulates very quickly and the bottom line can be huge. And again, that applies to any business. It doesn’t, whether it’s manufacturing or whether you’re producing a product or a different product or service, that is a consistent thing.

You lose that time multiplied by the amount of team members multiplied by the flow on effect, even from some team members being late and delaying the others. And then take that over a week and take that over a month and over a year and it can be a significant amount of drop in efficiency. Oh, absolutely.

What’s a team member rate? Hourly and then if they were gone an extra 20 minutes a day times, I don’t know how many working days you guys have in Australia, but 268 working days here in Canada. So how many hours over those course of those days? What’s that cost to you in wages where the team member just wasn’t there?

And then you start factoring in, okay, all of those hours of non runtime or ridal time at the machine that operator is supposed to be managing and running. What’s that cost to the business? It’s huge. It’s a huge input, impact on non business for sure. And you times that by however many processes or team members you’ve got, it can be catastrophic, right?

And I think this is the hard part as we come full circle a little bit in terms of you’ve got this, on one hand, you’ve got this obvious thing of that there’s inefficiencies here that’s costing the business. On the other hand, you’ve got this idea that, hang on, Big brothers watching me and telling me I’m taking 10 minutes too long for lunch or taking too many toilet breaks during the day.

It’s hard to bring those two back together. Isn’t it? I imagine that, that it causes some conflict in trying to, a be able to implement that Idea of watching those kinds of things in the first place and be what those what the outcomes of those things are. I don’t think anybody really deploys a solution on the shop floor aiming to improve productivity.

With the intent that they’re going to monitor you know how often their team members are going for break or late back to the line or you know when they swipe in or swipe out. I think that Information just presents itself over time, like all signs point to Joe who’s late every day after lunch the story told itself, it doesn’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily need to go looking for it visualizing the shop floor or a process it will identify it.

Bye. If the line is late to start or the machine is late to start or if it’s lost some productivity due to a team member being late where they can police themselves, so to speak, or big brother themselves and make those appropriate changes oh, if I keep doing this, people are going to notice, right?

But it becomes pretty self evident. Through the data that you collect, where the problems are, and whether that’s bottlenecks or whether that’s team members late back to the line you don’t necessarily have to chase after it or take that big brother approach. It’s there for everybody to see.

You don’t have to showcase it to everybody it could be strictly upper management to view that or supervisors, but yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna air itself and show itself. You don’t have to look for it. Just wanted to come back to something that you talked about a little bit earlier on. And this whole idea of moving into, you talked about whether it’s a 5.

0 version of things. Talk me through the different stages because, I think often these terms get thrown around, right? And you go, okay this is the base model. And 2. 0 became this idea, very early on that we’re just introducing some tech or some initial efficiencies. But have those lines been broken?

Those lines are very clear now at what’s 2. 0, what’s 3. 0, what’s 4. 0, and indeed what 5. 0 is going to be. At this point in time, there’s, like I said, there’s so much made up stuff out there and fluff out there and marketing, just, let’s call it Industry 5. 0 today and yesterday it was something completely different.

I try not to, fall victim to that. Um, I don’t know, I find a lot of manufacturers out there are just trying to do their best, trying to stay competitive whether that’s through cost and or profits or throughput or maybe they’re moving sites to different locations, whatever it might be, maybe it’s continuous improvement initiatives, so on and so forth. And yeah, solutions, tech is part of it. Industry 4. 0 from my perspective is getting your major ERPs in place, getting your MRPs in place, which is, managing assets or inventory. Getting your MES systems, manufacturing execution systems in place, which is some of that visual management and reporting and KPI collection type info.

But there’s, CMMS and the maintenance management systems, call it what you want. It all falls under that Industry 4. 0 umbrella. And a lot of businesses, one, don’t have, like a lot of these solutions are, like an ERP system is pretty expensive. And it’s a big job for someone to take on, you need somebody full time dedicated to it.

A lot of companies running lean out there don’t have the assets to assign to this. I’d say a lot of them aren’t close to that industry 4. gap yet. Some are, whatever 0 is. Trying to catch up with All this Industry 4. 0 stuff. I think Industry 5. 0 is more like, okay, take all the solutions that you’ve currently got from Industry 4.

0 and now add AI into the mix, or it’s going to do it all for you. I don’t think it works like that. I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen some pretty cool tech out there. We have some too with AI, where it’s AI reporting or AI scheduling, where it’ll optimize your schedule. Whether it’s to run most efficiently or make the most profit.

Things like that, which, yeah, it’s cool. But, you’ve been in business for however long without this stuff. You know, You could probably get by without all the cool fancy tech. Yeah, I don’t know, I’d just say be mindful of what you’re looking for and what you truly, really need.

There’s, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff out there, a lot of fluff, a lot of, it’s just a, I don’t even know what to call it, just a hot topic for the week, flavor of the month, maybe, visualize your shop floor, get your, whatever solution is going to organize you the best. And set you up for success and then stick with it and build on it.

Not every solution is going to, take place of say four or five or six different key individuals. You can free them up or get rid of them, I just wanted to touch on lastly Toyota, because you had a lot of experience in Toyota and we look at Toyota as being this huge, big brand.

And I assume one of the technology leaders I don’t know if, in terms of not just manufacturing overall, but in terms of as a business brand, they’ve always seemed to be a real leader in that space. What can you learn from The way a company like that is operating and what can be relevant for smaller businesses in running.

And indeed, you know how much emphasis is there on a company in a company like that to continue to improve and to continue to bring new technology in. I know that I would try to do a special project as a team lead on. We had different KPIs that we were responsible for safety, quality, cost, productivity.

team member development, right? So I would try to do a special project on each KPI every year. Which could be a huge project, or it could be just a little change in a process that bettered that process for a team member. What I find is, Toyota was really good at monitoring and tracking, their throughput, their OEE, their downtime.

But also From a team member’s perspective, always trying to make the process better for who is doing the job day in, day out. And better meaning more efficient, less steps, less burden. And, that levelness or evenness of each process along the way. So that process flow. And that’s what I find when I’m going into a, Manufacturer’s environment where they might be struggling a bit is I take some of that mindset that I brought from Toyota with me and I try to adapt that in other places.

Where would this fit in their organization or where would this fit in that organization? And then that continuous improvement mindset where, once is never enough. You always have to build on it and better it and better it, right? Absolutely. Look, there’s so much that we could continue to talk about, but we’re pretty much out of time and I just wanted to finish with a question that I like to ask all of my guests is what is the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you want to let more people know that they’re going to have it if they come and start to deal with you?

The aha moment? Yeah. When they see how much money they start saving. When they see that ROI start populating, that’s the ra ha moment, right? They can take that either money saved or, that throughput, the production that they’ve made that they weren’t making in the past and start benchmarking and proving that out across different lines, different sites or locations.

But at the end of the day, it comes to profit, right? We’re going to see more profit, less downtime, less waste. Yep. And ah ha! I should keep doing this. I love it. I love it. And look, thank you so much for being generous with your time. And I think what’s really interesting for people that have been listening in, that are even from different spaces, they may not be in manufacturing, is that there’s so much to learn from each of these industries.

And that All the efficiencies and things that you’re looking at are exactly the same in most other businesses, that they can look at the things that they’re doing. The machines, maybe a big or small factor in what they do, but the human element is there and the efficiencies that you can drive and the way you can monitor and then the things that you can bring in to change a business are huge.

And I appreciate the insights. I appreciate the time and I hope to be back soon to maybe we’ll meet up for another. I definitely look forward to that one for sure. And of course, we’re going to include all of the information in the show notes about how to get in touch with you and to look at Shiftworks, which is the business and MachineMonitoring.

com, which is the which is the website. And people will be able to get a hold of all of that information in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for being part of BizByte. No, I appreciate it. 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.

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