Biz Bites

TITLE:   LinkedIn Domination: A Deep Dive with Ed, Author of "No More Cringe” | Biz Bites episode

LinkedIn strategies for professional services, unlocking client acquisition. Join us as Ed who’s the author of no more cringe reveals some effective LinkedIn strategies to build meaningful connections, improve client acquisition and avoid some of the common networking pitfalls. You’ll discover the importance of authentic engagement and some practical tips.

You won’t want to miss for maximising LinkedIn’s potential. There’s also bonus content, which you can access via the link in the show notes on how to get a 70 percent LinkedIn ads. Connection acceptance rate. And I can tell you if you’re out there, you’re getting a lot less than that. So you won’t want to miss that bit of bonus content.

Then there is so much more that you’ve got in this very jam packed episode. Get your notepads out, get ready. Let’s get into Biz Bites. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by Com2gether, the people behind podcasts done. For you, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out podcasts done for you as well in the show notes. Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to Biz Bites. I have a wonderful guest today and I’m encouraging everybody to make sure that they stay tuned to this one because if you’re in business you cannot miss this. This is absolutely critical stuff. I’ve been talking to Ed for a little while now and I’ve, Read most of his book and we’re going to talk about that.

No more cringe in a little while, but firstly, I want to welcome Ed to the program. Anthony. It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. Absolute pleasure. And look, there’s so many things that we’re going to talk about, and a lot of it’s going to revolve around LinkedIn. But first of all, I wanted to just ask you to Introduce yourself to everyone.

Sure. Thank you. I was born in the sixties, only child. My father was a colonel in the army and back in the sixties, we watched television, at least I did. That was my main entertainment. I watched it a lot. My mother, my father died when I was young. I was four years old when he died. And so my mother had to raise me on her own.

She saw that I really loved TV, but wanted me to, if I’m going to watch TV, I should earn it. So she bought a lot of different puzzles and these math problem books for me to solve math problems. And she said, you can watch all the TV you want, but you either have to solve a puzzle or you have to go through one chapter and fill out all the math questions before you can watch TV.

So I became a really good problem solver, which is I think the reason why I have two engineering degrees. I think I was about 12. And our new neighbor invited us over her home. We had dinner and then she brought out this board game. It was called landslide. It’s a game that it’s it simulates a presidential election and you have to get to 270.

Electoral votes to win. I didn’t know anything about politics. I was 12 years old, but there was math involved, which I liked. And it seemed like a puzzle to figure out how to win. I failed miserably the first time. But I liked the game and I asked my mother to buy it. And I just played that game by myself for hours and hours on end.

And I discovered that there were different paths. To get to enough points to win the game. So then when I started playing my friends, I have my notes next to me and I’d have my paths already determined. And as we were playing as a path got taken away, I switched to another one, but I always won the game.

I never lost after that first time. The reason why I bring that up is because many times when someone’s starting a business, there is one path that they follow with two different methods. It’s either referrals or networking. Okay. And usually at some point that dries up. So then they, maybe they get on LinkedIn and they do the same thing.

They have two methods, one path, those methods, or that method is usually one of them, text posts or cold DMS or combination of the two. There are 16 different, I’ve identified 16 different ways to get a client on LinkedIn. Text posts and cold DMs number 14 and 15 on the list as far as effectiveness. So they are doing low probability things expecting to get a client.

It’s no wonder so many people fail. There are 65, 519 different paths. To get a client on LinkedIn. So what I do with people is I say, let’s figure out which one of these 16 things that you feel comfortable doing. We’ll then figure out what it in what combination provides you the best probability of getting a client.

And we’ll do that. If one fails. We have other paths that we can choose. And when they understand that they now have confidence that they can get a client and go All we’re going to do is get one client and then we’re going to repeat that over and over again And we’re going to have one path that we know really works really well And then we’ll have some alternative paths that we’ll follow and we can adjust them a little bit But once they do that the biggest I think the biggest thing That they get from going through that exercise with me is Yes, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the biz by its podcast.

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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, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now, back to Biz Bytes. Confidence in knowing that they can get a client. So it’s a lot easier than most people think, and you don’t have to put so much pressure on yourself.

There is. So much truth in what you’re saying there. And if I can just pick it up for the sake of people who are listening, who are nodding their head about networking meetings and things where, you know you go through these ideas of I think what’s typical about networking meetings and what happens on LinkedIn as well is people go in expecting immediate results that they’ll walk into the room And immediately people will say, ah, you’re just what I was looking for.

Where do I sign up? And when was the last time that actually happened to anybody? Like never. And yet how many messages do we all get on LinkedIn with people? We’ve never met before. The first thing they do is. Please buy my services. Here’s a list of all of the stuff that I’ve done. When can we talk?

I’m like, what’s the conversation? Where did we start? Did you even know if I needed your services in the first place? Like I, I wish I had a dollar for every time that happened to me. It is crazy how that works. It reminds me of a friend, my wife and I have she was a librarian and She thought she was going to get married to everybody that kind of looked at her, like the pizza delivery guy dropped off a pizza.

And she’s telling us about her future with this pizza delivery guy because he brought her food. I go, that’s his job. He’s the pizza delivery guy. He smiled at me. Gave him a tip. That’s why he was smiling, but that’s the way people act. As soon as someone gives someone a little bit of attention, like they accept a connection request.

Oh, I’ve got a new client. They’re talking about the future, how long they’re going to be working with them, what they’re going to be doing. Let’s meet for 15 minutes. So we can get this started. Doesn’t work that way. It’s, and it’s the same, isn’t it? That we’re trained. In this idea on, on, and we’re going to focus on LinkedIn but it happens on other social platforms as well is that we’re so focused on that number of how many people have actually bothered to click, like how many people have made a comment on it.

And. Most of those people are not your clients. Strangely, very few people. In fact, if you look at the numbers when you post, and this is coming from looking at my numbers and a lot of my clients numbers, LinkedIn only shows your post. To between two and a half to 20 percent of your first level connections.

And most of the time it’s between two and a half and 5%. So a very small percentage of your connections are ever going to see your post. And most people only have about 10%. And that’s being generous of their connections that are in their target market. So it’s, we’re talking about really small slice of people that are going to see your posts, unless you do something that’s really, To make sure that you put, you’re putting your post in front of them.

They’re most likely never going to see it. And it’s such a, an interesting thing. We don’t think about that, but yet when you go and look at your own feed, you wonder sometimes about the stuff that’s coming to you. I know there’s in my feed, there’s one person that I’ve been seeing in that feeds for years.

And once in a while I’ll click like on it, but. What that person does is actually not really relevant to me. They happen to be a former colleague. So I have, I like the person as an individual. We actually haven’t spoken for quite a number of years, but somehow it’s in my feet all the time.

Now I can’t really control that. I don’t, and That’s interesting. If that’s happening to me, and that’s just one example, because there’s several of those. Imagine what’s happening with your own stuff. Putting it out there and just hoping that it’s going to get lots of traction. That is a, it’s a real hit and miss strategy.

You cannot depend on the algorithm to help you build your business. You just can’t. LinkedIn is not in the business of helping you build their business. They’re in the business of driving revenue and their primary methods of driving revenue is sales navigator. So the monthly subscription there, which most people don’t use very well, even though they have the subscription or paid ads.

They’re not going to stay in business for very long. They wouldn’t be in business as long if they were to give away free traffic and put your best prospects in front of your content. It just wouldn’t work for them. That’s the reason why they don’t do it. Yeah. Their philosophy has to be, we want you to try harder.

We want you to keep trying and keep trying harder. We’ll give you enough to make you tease you that it’s you’re going to get somewhere, but. Not enough to, completely be life changing because otherwise if we did that, then as you say, there’s no revenue left for them. And I think that’s the interesting thing about it is that the whole way LinkedIn is structured is in their favor.

The house wins is absolutely philosophy, right? Yep. Yep. Absolutely. That’s for sure. That’s it. That’s exactly the way it works. But I think the point that you make as well is that there are ways to engage with people and it’s not just about. Posting is one part of it. And I think a lot of people get that wrong.

I, I keep playing with the way I post as well. But getting that magical post that goes to, whatever the, pick the number hundreds, thousands, whatever your tens of thousands, whatever you think is relevant to your audience. It’s so hard to get there on that. And unpredictable, as you say, with the algorithm and, in my experience.

Most people at LinkedIn don’t know what the algorithm is doing. So the chances that you’ll know a million to one at best. It definitely is a mystery. It is a mystery. The way I approach it is I take the algorithm, which is a variable that I don’t control on the equation and actually use what LinkedIn allows us to do to my advantage.

So I’m getting my content in front of the right people. And I’m able to It’s I say all the time, it’s easier to make a friend than to make a sale. And so I approach it in a way that is very relaxed, but I’m just out there making friends. And so it makes it a lot easier to do business once your mindset is, I’m just trying to make a friend.

I’m not trying to make a sale just because somebody said except for my connection request does not mean that they want to be a client. What I find really interesting about what you’ve said there is that this is coming from someone whose background is in sales, right? That’s, and is there this inner conflict?

Because, as a salesperson, Don’t you want to just go out and sell? It is. In fact, I have quite a few clients that are in sales and they’re always asking me, why, when do I start selling? When do I start selling? I said, we’re not going to sell. And they go how am I supposed to make any money?

You’re going to be fine. What we’re going to do is we’re going to make friends and then we’re going to get that new connection to discover your content. And once they do that, and they’ve done three things, they’ve become comfortable with you, they trust you. And they’re confident that you can do what you say.

Then they’ll do business with you, but you can’t skip steps. Most people want to skip to let’s do business. You skipped over comfort and trust. They’re not going to they may do business with you if they’re desperate. That’s not the greatest client to have because everything’s got to go right.

If you’re going to keep them and they’re probably going to be very difficult along the way. But once you have comfort and trust and confidence, then you can make mistakes and they’ll be very forgiving because they know that you can help them get to the end goal. And it’s more of a collaboration than them just handing everything over to you and say, okay, you do it and make things happen for me.

Yeah, so I, I think that this whole approach of being friends first is a really interesting one. And I don’t want to give away the whole book. There’s lots of things in the book. No More Cringe. I love the title by the way. So let’s just talk about that for starters, because I think that’s the basis of the whole idea.

Is that when you’re making friends with someone You don’t want to be cringy and yet how many times do you find yourself when you’re reaching out to people being exactly that I was thinking only the other day that how do I actually type an introductory message to someone that doesn’t sound like it’s either cringy or written by an AI, even though it’s genuinely me writing it, it’s so difficult to do that.

And I think you flipped that completely on its head. But tell me what encouraged the title, how did how did that come about? And then let’s get into the whole cringe factor. That actually was, we were talking about viral posts. It became A series of posts that I did that did very well. And so my best performing posts talked about, do you like, there were polls and there were posts about people reaching out to them after you connect and everybody agreed.

Not everybody, the people that want to sell. They thought it was okay, but over 80 percent of people said I hate it when people do that I don’t like it when they start pitching or they start spamming my inbox Or they ask me for a 15 minute appointment. I just met you. I don’t know anything about You don’t know anything about me.

Why would I meet you for 15 minutes? And because there was it was there was so much emotion In the comments that I got, I realized that I was on to something I should cover. I should talk about this process. And so I talk about the seven cringy methods that are out there and everybody can relate to any one of the seven because they’ve probably been approached in that way.

And they probably used one of them cause they didn’t know any better. But. There has to, I figured there has to be a better way and the way you work things and networking, if you I look at it as a client has more value or a connection has more value than just potentially being a client, they could be a referral partner, they could be a collaboration partner, which is more valuable than being a client.

Cause they could bring in several clients to you, or they could just be a friend, somebody that supports your content and you support them. And if you. Go, if you proceed and with that mindset, then you really can’t lose because most people are happy to be friends and they’re happy to support each other’s content.

Yeah, I think that’s an important idea, isn’t it? Because too often. It is a very one sided thing. It’s someone pushing, as you say, for the 15 minute meeting and it’s a very one sided idea that, that is what people want and willing to give up their time and that 15 minute meeting.

Meeting often is very forced because you’re going into that with this idea that I’m going to see if this person really needs my services or otherwise I’ll tick them off the list. And it’s a very guess very sales driven approach. And yet that’s the opposite of what most LinkedIn actually really want to do, but yet that’s the trap they fall into.

For sure. And I think what ends up happening is like you said, the 15 minute meeting usually it’s framed as let’s meet and greet, or let’s get to know one another, but it’s a sales meeting. And let’s be honest, it usually is a sales meeting and that puts pressure on you if you have to try and make a sale in 15 minutes and it puts pressure on the other person.

So it ends up being awkward all the time, as opposed to, I don’t have an agenda right now. I’m just trying to make a friend and then I’m going to see like Where this leads and I talk in terms of roles that people will have. There are one role could be, they’re just, they’re friends and that’s fine.

And when they see your content, they’ll read it and like it. And that’s as far as it’ll go. Or is we work with them. I call them work friends is. You begin working with somebody and you get to know them. So you get comfortable with them. You begin to trust them as you see their content. You don’t have to sell anything because they’re looking at your content and they see what you’re doing.

They see other people commenting on your posts and, that’s social proof that you know what you’re doing when they have the problem that you can solve especially if they’ve been commenting on your posts, they’re going to be congruent with what their public. Statements are, and they’re most likely going to do business with you.

It’s rare when they don’t COVID catching up to you a little bit. One of the things that you said in the book that I think really struck out to me was we live in a permission society. And I think that is lost on a lot of people because as we’ve been talking about, there is this people forcing themselves through their messaging onto people and it goes completely against the way people feel.

You’re right. And it’s. What I found was if you can ask somebody first, would you like to connect would you be open to supporting each other’s content? I like your content. You like mine they’re willing to go along. If you’re if you want to get them on your email list, you ask them, Hey, can I put you on my email list?

But you’ve got to frame it different than that, because just the sound of that makes it seem like, Oh, I’m going to pitch you an email now. Can I update you with it? Thanks. It’s things that I come across. I think you may be of interest, maybe of interest to you. Maybe I see a motivational quote or I saw a New app that you can use to help you with a part of your business and most people are okay with that the emails sequences that I help set up for clients we use the power of the PS to remind people what we do, but we’re talking about stuff that they would have an interest in, like a motivational quote or a product that they could use, or something that’s happening in the news that may affect their business or some government regulate regulation that they’re unaware of.

And so they’ll read those emails and it’s something that a friend might send to them as opposed to somebody who’s trying to market them something. And I think that speaks to, I’m going to read another quote from your book and I don’t want to do a lot of this because I don’t want to stop people from reading the book themselves and what they want out of it.

But this really, I think goes to the heart of what you were saying. Give people an opportunity to become familiar with you, not just as an expert in your field, but also as a person. When you do that, selling becomes superfluous. I’ve just, that’s absolute gold, isn’t it? And true. True. And true. It’s I think people get so caught up in business, but we do business with people at the end of the day.

And so once they get to know you as a person they’ll get comfortable with you. I don’t know whether you’re going to ask me this question or not, but One of the things when we talk about posting and cold DMing and what in the 16 different methods you can use to get a client, the one that’s at the top of the list, the top method is engaging with somebody else’s content.

And the reason for that is they care about that content more than they care about ours. So if we’re supporting them in their content, liking it. Commenting on it, making a comment that draws them into a conversation, asking him a question about it, sharing it with others. We have done something that very few people have and they notice whether it’s a or it’s a comment, I don’t care how big a following somebody has, they notice.

When you repost somebody’s post, I don’t care again how big their network is, they notice. And it’s just those simple acts of doing that get you to a point where they can get comfortable with you. They want to know you. And then at some point they may end up doing business with you. I think what is the precursor to all of that is also that you is also doing the research, isn’t it?

Because it’s. You have to be reaching the right people. And I think most of us, if you look through your own LinkedIn connections, you probably don’t know 70, 80 percent of the people in the first place. And if you were really being serious about going through it and looking, are they your ideal clients?

You probably eliminate at least 50 percent in one go, but nobody wants to do that because you’ll want to seem to have you, like you’ve got thousands of people that you’re friends with. And but I think this, whilst you might not want to change what’s happened in the past, moving forward, you do want to do that, don’t you?

You want to be able to do the research and to get that right. So what are your tips around getting the research right and what people need to be doing? There’s a couple of different paths that they can take. I like to find people that have problem symptom awareness. Not, they may not be aware of the problem, but they’re aware of the symptom of a problem.

I’ll give you an example. In email deliverability, which is one of the things that we do people are getting, their emails are going into spam. And they may not know why that is a problem symptom of something that’s bigger, like the cause of what the problem is. So they may be unaware of the big problem.

They see. There’s problem symptom awareness. I heard, see that some of my emails are going into spam, but they may dismiss that until you come in as an expert. After they’ve gotten to know you, they’re comfortable with you. And you tell them that is, that possibly could be a bigger problem you may want to look into because you may have a problem with one of the mailbox providers.

They’re blocking all of your emails. And I’m happy to look into it and see if that’s the case. At that point, what happens is a couple of different things. Thanks. Number one, you help frame the problem and the solution for them instead of them framing it. I’ll give you another quick example. Probably this is the case in Australia.

If you want to buy a car, you can go on the internet, you can do all your research, you can find the best price for the model and the color of the car that you want, and you can even have it delivered to you. That puts a burden on the local dealers because if now, if you go around to the local dealers, they have to match the exact price that, you can get somewhere else in the country because they can deliver the car at that price.

You’ve already determined. Your buying criteria at that point, and nobody can change it. But if you can catch that person before they’ve formed that buying criteria and maybe you recommended someone that they could go see, and he’s a really good, he took care of us. You did a great job that the dealership did a great job with us.

We love the car salesperson. You go to him and now he can form your buying criteria because you haven’t had a chance to form it yet. Yeah. And that’s why we want to meet people there. So that’s one area that we can meet somebody. If we can identify problems, symptom awareness that they may have, or just a problem symptom.

The other thing, which is a little easy, a lot easier to do is you take your best clients and you break down their profile and you determine like everything about them. How old they are, how long they’ve been in the business, how many employees they have, how big the business is, how much money they make.

And let’s say if you’re working with accountants, one accountant is going to have the same problems that another accountant has. So you know that you can go after those accountants that are a lot like your client. And they probably have the same problems. And if you’re aware of the problem, symptom awareness that your client has, the other people, those prospects have that same problem, symptom awareness.

So you can go in and then frame their buying criteria so that you are the person that they end up working with. Yeah. And that is Insightful in that whole idea of the problem symptom, and I think it’s something that is it is not always easy to understand what that is, I’ve done similar kind of thinking, my Podcast done for you option where, it’s easy to jump in and say, to talk to people who have been thinking about a podcast and really, they just don’t know how to go about it.

And therefore, okay, I can come and I can help you. But it’s actually that the symptom is actually a lot. It’s a lot harder because there’s a lot of people that have never even occurred to them to have a podcast and the symptom is really that they think more people should know how great they are, but they have no idea that they’re not getting enough business.

It’s probably better to frame it in that way that they’re not getting enough business and they wonder why the competition is getting more when they think we’re just as good. We’ve got the expertise here. Why are they getting more attention? And we’re not, there can be any number of reasons why they might be, but it’s a question of what you can do about it.

But it’s actually quite a difficult thing to nudge that into, and to see to people and take them from that idea of this, of the symptom that they’re aware of to a solution that you have. It isn’t. It isn’t easy. You do have to do a lot of research. There used to be some filters you could use on LinkedIn that would help you more closely identify it.

Like you used to be able to do. You can still do this. Where you go into LinkedIn search on regular LinkedIn and you can type in different keyword phrases of a problem symptom awareness that somebody might have. And they may be asking about it. They may be in the comments, they may be saying something about it.

They may be posting about it. And that’s one way to find people. Another way is people that are attending events free LinkedIn events about a specific problem. Then again, you can go through that list and find people. All right, they’re trying to solve this problem. Part of the problem is that their buying criteria is being formed by somebody else.

So you have to figure out how to, based on the buying criteria that they’ve already formed, how do you come into the picture and sell your solution? What angle can you. Bring to the table that maybe corrupts the thinking that they had and makes them reset their thinking. So I maybe that’s, I didn’t even think of that.

That’s a good point. And then they start asking you questions. How would that work? So when you hear those types of responses, okay, I’ve done my job. I have corrupted their buying criteria, and I’m going to help them form a new buying criteria. And it’s to my advantage, but.

Also to their advantage. You don’t want to it’s easy to manipulate people. But what you want to do is make sure you’re doing it in a way that I truly feeling like this is a better path for you to take. And here’s the reasons why. I wanted to just pause for a moment and let everyone know that we’re going to have an extra bit of content at the end of this discussion, where anyone that is interested in getting a 70 percent better connection acceptance.

Then you want to stay tuned for the extra bonus bit of content, and you’ll just have to follow the links in the show notes to be able to access that. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit. There is there’s so much to continue to explore here on what is happening on LinkedIn.

And I just want to talk about AI for a moment and understand From you as if I’m reading between the lines, I think that AI creates an opportunity to stand out, doesn’t it? Because if you’re, if the people are using AI, then you who are not using AI can make it very clear to the, particularly the person who’s posted is that you’re real and sincere.

That gives you an opportunity to stand out, doesn’t it? It does. It does. And I think people right now are being a little bit lazy in the way they use AI. It’s funny that you bring that up because I saw a it was a YouTube video that was talking about creating AI content and how they could produce a really nice looking article in seconds.

Or a post or multiple posts. But when you start reading it and you go through it, you can detect there’s AI in there. If you’re going to use AI for one thing, what the way I do it is I’ll write an entire post and then I’ll go through AI and say how could I improve this? And then it will give me some suggestions, but I’m writing it now.

I’ve got even more direction to make it. Clearer or more engaging. But the A. I. Isn’t doing the writing for me. The eye is giving me some suggestions on how I can improve it. You can do that. You can use a I to help build a strategy. For example, when I mentioned this earlier, when we’ve got these 16 different Methods to get a client.

And then we’re looking at the right combination of methods that will give us the highest probability of getting a client. I’m using a an AI model to help me build that path for a client. And then I’ll also do a simulation. Okay, what happens if this? This method is gone. So now it changes our path. What do we add something?

Do we continue down this path? So we’re able to predict ahead of time what our results are going to be. And we can tell if we run into a problem, we’ve already anticipated that. And then we can change paths or we can make an adjustment to our path. So we get, so the goal is the same in getting a client.

One of the keys that you glossed over a little bit there is you’ve got to track all of this, don’t you? This is the trick is to actually work out what is working best for you. And the great thing is that you don’t have to just do one method. You can try multiple different methods, but you just have to understand what the numbers look like.

And so you ultimately know where you should be putting more of your energy into it. Absolutely. As it, one of the funny things is I look at the 16 methods and we’ve got a probability is as, as far as effectiveness of each one the top one easily is engaging with somebody else’s content.

The bottom one is a celebration post. But if you do a celebration post in the right way, it can be one of the best posts that you can put out there because celebration posts get the most and I won’t, I don’t want to say traction, but they’re going to get the most impressions. If you write it correctly, you can get the most engagement.

And then if you tie it to one of the other 16 methods, or maybe there’s two or three that post can actually get you as many Opportunities to sell is anything else, but you have to understand what is the, what is, what are the order that I use these methods to create the path that will get me to where I want to be?

I get a client. Yeah. And I think It’s that’s the, I love how there’s this clarity in what you’re doing in terms of recognizing there are these different methodologies that you can use and that you have to understand where you’re fitting into which one and what you’re doing. As I was reading your book, one of the things that, kept bringing through my mind was, as we touched on before was, How do you send the right message to someone if you are going to direct message them?

And what I found fascinating was that That the simple idea that just a thanks for connecting if they reach out to you and connect with you that’s enough that you don’t need the rest of it because it’s not about that part of the conversation. Yeah. You don’t want to show your hand too early and I’ll go back to, we’re just making friends.

So I don’t know where this is going to lead. Thank you for connecting with me. And I leave it at that. You’ll have other opportunities to have a conversation with them and there’s going to be the right opportunity to have the conversation with them for them to be more than just a connection. But the thing that I think most people try to do is they project this person is going to be a client and all their actions show that they’re trying to get them as a client.

Whereas if you just leave it open and it’s, They can be, as I mentioned, a friend, a collaboration partner, which is more valuable in my opinion than a client. It doesn’t have the immediate results but long term you’re, it’s a much more valuable relationship or a referral partner, again, not maybe immediate results, but long term a better position to be in or a client.

And is if you approach people in that way, and I don’t know where this is going to go, But let’s talk and get to know one another, get comfortable with one another and see what happens. And one of those four things are going to occur. And if you play your cards it’s going to be one of those things, whether it’s a win position, win situation for the both of you.

One of the things I wanted to just touch on finally is I know we can talk for hours and hours here. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack in this, and I’m sure we’re going to do it again. And we’ve talked about talking and I think this is a good example, by the way, before I even get into that question is that you and I connected on LinkedIn because of someone else that I’ve that I connected with and who has also been a guest on the program, we connected With the simple idea of collaboration and and for, from friendship and collaboration, we had an initial conversation and we just hit it off and here we are doing the podcast.

And I know there are other things that are going to come out of it as a result of that. And that’s a valuable relationship. And people underestimate that hugely because they’re going in with this whole idea of, as we even started the program, when we’re talking about networking, that people go in with this attitude of, who am I selling to?

Yeah, you have to be careful with that. It really does put so much pressure on you and the other person that usually it doesn’t turn out well in sales, especially when you’re cold selling somebody more often than not, you’re, it’s not going to go anywhere. The odds are not in your favor when you approach it in a way where you’re open to possibilities and realize that there are other possibilities than maybe your initial one.

Good things do happen. The other thing that I say is success is a team sport, so your team members can be your clients. Because they can refer business to you. They can do more business with you, your employees friends that you know, can then end up being people that refer business to you or collaboration partners.

So you’ve got to look at is maybe if someone is okay, where are they going to fit on my team? I don’t know yet, but let’s figure it out. And how can I help them in building their team? And when you’re approaching things in that way, everything just seems to fall into place. I wanted to ask you about one other element that you Touched on a little bit earlier on sales navigator, and it’s an interesting tool.

And as you suggest, most people have that have it, don’t use it properly. I think there’s many people out there that don’t have it. And I think one of the things that you need to realize if you want to get places on LinkedIn is that if you’re, it’s like anything, if you’re using only the free tool, then you’re only going to get so far.

It’s not that you can’t do it without it. It’s just that you. You’re doing it with one hand tied behind your back. So talk to me about the value of. Sales navigator and the right way in an overall sense of how to use it. It says sales navigator really is essential. If you’re going to be serious about getting business on LinkedIn, you can get lucky and get a client here and there but you can’t do it on purpose.

For example, in the process that I go through, I I’m using sales navigator to qualify the people that I go after. I’ll use an example here. Let’s say that I challenge you to a game of darts. And you say, maybe you’re like a dart throwing champion. So you go, Oh, this is going to be easy mark for me.

So I go, okay, but two conditions. I get to pick the dart boards that we’re going to use and both yours and mine. So I give you a dart board and it goes from floor to ceiling. It’s massive. And you’re thinking, Oh boy, this is going to be really easy. And then I have my dart board, which is standard size.

The difference between the two is your bullseye is about the size of a pinhead. My bullseye is the entire dart board. And so the second condition is. It only counts when you hit the bullseye. So I could throw mine in the dart and I’m going to hit, as long as I hit the target, I’m going to hit the bullseye every time it’s going to be close to impossible for you to hit that a bullseye.

And that’s the difference between using sales navigator and trying to find somebody without it. I can zoom in on the bullseye where it’s very difficult, almost impossible for you to hit the bullseye if you’re not using sales navigator. It is such a powerful tool. And yet, as you say, I don’t think it’s particularly well used.

And I think it’s also about spending the time with it. I think that’s the problem with a lot of these tools is that people go in with this, okay, it’s just going to give me a whole bunch of things and spit it out really quickly because people don’t want to spend the time. And I think that’s the interesting thing that I’ve learned as well along the journey with LinkedIn.

And I’ve been. Active on LinkedIn for a number of years now is that you go through phases where, you might pump out a bit of content and it’s being posted, could be by someone else. It could be being scheduled in and you, it’s, you just going through the motions and it can be the same with reaching out to people.

Oh, we’ve got to, and there are various tools that are out there that are going to reach out to people for you. And I find all of that. So as your book title would call it cringy and yet there’s so much that’s happening with that. And I think there are two, there are tools out there that are, that will send out birthday wishes to people or anniversaries and things like that, that are taken in there.

And. It’s insincere is probably the best way of describing it. And people don’t know where to go when you even respond to those half the time. I know someone that sort of teaches that methodology and it works. It, if you’re sincere with it and using it as a conversation starter to re energize connections that you might’ve had, and you haven’t spoken to in a long time, it can start a conversation again.

And I get it in that way that works quite nicely, but the other people who have no intention and just send all these things out and just hope that by sending that it’ll start another sales conversation. To me, adjust. It’s infuriating. And I think that’s one of the problems with linked in on the one hand is that it’s a very cluttered space with people doing the wrong thing.

And that’s probably I don’t know what percentage of people are doing the wrong thing, but it’s a pretty high percentage. And but at the same time, it creates opportunities for those Who can follow the methods that you’ve talked about, which is based on the idea of being friends first. It’s an opportunity to cut through it is I will i’ll mention two things to you that You may question so one of the things and this is a fairly new thing that linkedin has changed.

It’s In the your network or I think network or my networking Linkedin there is growth and there is catch up catch up with one of your connections. So I think maybe that came out two or three months ago that they made that change. And so I tested it. I started to go to the catch up tab. And when somebody had an anniversary or a birthday, I would use the automated tab.

Just click. Congratulations on your your anniversary, work anniversary. And I’d send them a gift. The gift part is important. If you send just the message without the gift, it doesn’t work that well. But if you send in a silly gift is what I send like the sillier, the better, especially for the birthdays about 10 to 20 percent of the people will get back to you.

If you do that, it’s like the easiest way to get somebody to get back to you. What you do after that is the key to making it work. If you start Pitching somebody after that, it’s just absolutely the wrong way to do that. You can have a conversation with people from that, and then you just leave it at that.

For example if it’s somebody’s birthday, I’ll send the birthday wish and the gift. And a lot of times they’ll get back to me and say, thank you for wishing me happy birthday. I say, Oh, my pleasure. And I’ll send back a picture of me giving a thumbs up. I’ve got a whole bunch of them with my hat and thumbs up thing.

And that’s all I do. I may come back to them three, four days later, if it’s in a post or maybe in a DM. And if it’s in a post, I will like the post. I’ll comment on the post, but then I’ll go back and I’ll reference their birthday and I’ll ask them how was their birthday. And I’m doing that in the post.

Did you did you go out? To dinner. Did you have cake? Did you get presents? So I asked him one of those three questions, and they usually respond to that from there. I can go back and DM and talk to them a little bit more. But that’s a different approach than what somebody else might do. Hitting the automated happy birthday.

And then maybe sending them a gift and then transitioning to you. Oh, I have this special report that I’d like you to see. Don’t step on their day, let them have their day. And then the next time you talk to them, like what happened during your special day, they’ll remember that. They’ll also remember that you pitched them on their birthday and probably never do business with you at all.

I think there’s just lots of gold in all of the things that you’ve said along the way. We have to wrap things up. So just a couple of things. Yeah, I know. I know. We’re definitely going to do this again. Because we could talk for another couple of hours. Unfortunately it’s the time of day where you’re wrapping things up and I’m just kicking things off for the day.

That’s the nature of what happens when you’re dealing with time zones, but a reminder to everyone. We’re going to have a little bit of bonus content on how to get 70 percent more connection acceptance. So that’s something you want to stay tuned for and follow the click on the links to be able to do that.

A reminder also that we’ll provide links to be able to get access to the book. It’s on Kindle. I believe on Amazon. And that is no more cringe in case you haven’t, in case you’ve missed the title that I’ve been repeating a few times during this, it is a fantastic and very easy read. I encourage everyone that is listening to this.

If you’re listening this far, then you are a hundred percent are interested in LinkedIn and doing it better. And it is a must read book. It won’t take you very long, but you’ll get lots of things out of it. I sat down and wrote lots and lots of notes of things that I want to adjust and change as a result of it.

And you just keep nodding your head throughout the whole book because you think this is just, It’s in many respects, it’s obvious but it’s not obvious because people aren’t doing it. I just wanted to wrap things up and as well and say, aside from all of the different ways that people will be able to connect with you that we’ll share in the show notes, give me the two things.

One is. What’s the great way that people can work with you? And secondly which is probably the most important thing. The question that I like to ask everyone is what’s the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew in advance of more people had come knocking on your door.

The aha moment is this is not as hard as I thought it was. I’ve been working way too hard to get clients. That’s usually the thing that people say, they’ll also say, now I get it, now I understand what I was doing wrong. So yeah, both of those things are true. I love that. And what’s the best way that people can come and work with you?

Is it start with the book? What’s the best way to do it? I would start with the book. There’s going to be on my profile probably by the time that they are watching this episode there’ll be a quiz that’ll be there and it’ll be like a LinkedIn IQ quiz. It’ll be story based like a choose your own adventure and you’ll get customized advice on how to adjust your approach so that you can get business on LinkedIn.

I love it. It’s been amazing talking to you and so many great bits of advice for people and the whole philosophy of being friends first, it just resonates. And I think it should do with the majority of people out there because it’s a human instinct. And I appreciate the friendship that we’ve been able to grow not just through this podcast, but through previous discussions that we’ve had, and I look forward to that continuing well into the future for now.

Thank you for being an amazing guest on the Biz Bites program. Thank you so much for having me, Anthony. It’s been it’s been a great pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. 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.

Contact us today for more information. Details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.

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Mastering Financial Literacy and Wealth Creation with Andrew Woodward

Mastering wealth creation insights from Andrew Woodward of The Investor’s Way. In this episode of Biz Bites, we discuss the importance of mentors, financial literacy, and proactive investing strategies. The conversation also provides some insights into managing personal and business finances to achieve both financial security and retirement goals.

So Andrew’s journey alone from CEO to financial educator is also going to give you some fantastic insights. It’s an episode you don’t want to miss. Check out some of these excerpts before we get into it. Understanding what type of lifestyle they want to have both now and in retirement and what it’s going to take to fund that.

In the event that you’re no longer working. So a lot of people will come with the idea that they don’t want to work till they’re 65. I’m very much about trying to get people to think about their money far more consistently and be more proactive so that they’re growing their wealth consistently every month.

Hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the people behind Podcasts Done For You, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out Podcasts Done For You as well in the show notes. Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites and Andrew, it’s so great to be able to finally do this. We’ve been, we worked out, we’ve been, we can have a bit of a laugh about it. We’ve been backing and forthing for what, probably two years on trying to make this happen. And then for whatever reason, now is the right timing for it to happen.

Welcome to the podcast. Anthony, thanks so much for having me on the podcast and being polite enough not to mention that it’s probably been my fault more than yours that it’s taken this long to get here. There’s always something that gets in the way. We all know about that, but but all good.

Great to have you here. And I suppose we should start off by asking you to explain a little bit more about who you are, what you do. Yes, Andrew Woodward, founder of The Investor’s Way, which is a business that effectively is an educational business teaching people how to manage and grow their wealth. And came about from a business mentor challenging me to teach people what I’d done for myself when I was complaining to my business mentor, that I wasn’t loving what I was doing.

And I was the CEO of an organisation here in Sydney and look, we were doing some good things, but I just wasn’t loving it. And this business mentor basically hit me between the eyeballs with the reality stick and said he was part of multiple businesses. And I just had one job and he basically said to me, surely you can do more.

And so I started it as a side hustle and now it’s the main gig of what I do to just keep me off the streets and occupied because I do live what I teach. I love that. And I love the fact that sneaking away in there is having a mentor. Can I just unpack that for just a second before we get into the main bit?

Because I’m always fascinated by that. I’ve had some interesting discussions with people online about this whole idea of mentors. And some people have found it. I found out are vehemently against the idea of a mentor. I’m not quite sure why. That’s certainly not my stance on things. I’ve valued the mentors that I’ve had along the way in my business.

And there’s probably, two or three that stand out particularly. I’m interested. How did you find the mentor? Or did he find you? And or, and also, you don’t have to say who the person is, but I’m just interested in their approach and what they’ve actually meant to you for over a period of time.

Yeah, look it’s actually a long and interesting story, so I’ll give you the shortened version though, but I joined a cycling charity to raise money for cancer research after my mother in law passed away from cancer. And I got quite proficient at raising money, and so I became known to the board of the charity and ultimately the chairman of the charity who became the business mentor and we just connected well and got friendly with each other.

And anyway, I was having conversations with him whilst we’re out riding our bikes, raising money for cancer research. And he just said to me one day, look let’s keep this conversation going beyond, The bike ride. And so I’d go and see him initially pretty sporadically, just every month or two, and we’d have conversations about what I was doing and what I wanted to do.

And over the process of having those conversations, it was where he discovered that where my passion was and what I was doing were not aligned. And that’s where that question or that not really a question, but a. A very direct statement about, go and do what it is that you love doing for yourself, but teach others to do it as well.

That’s where that all came about. And it was effectively an informal arrangement that became more formal over time and more consistent over time. And he just really found that what I was, Yeah, struggling with was I just wasn’t in alignment with what I was doing and what I love to do.

And so he put those pieces together for me. We’re still friends. We don’t necessarily catch up as often anymore from a business. Mentoring perspective. But he was a very important factor in driving that development of my business. Hey, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys Podcast.

Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world? Come talk to us at podcast. 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, podcastdoneforyou. com. au, details in the show notes below. Now back to BizBites. Yeah, they are. I love the fact that what you’re talking about, there is purpose and and you met with purpose.

That’s what I love about that story particularly is that there was a purpose in what, led you down the path of actually meeting in the first place. So when you’ve got those shared values and ideas in the, it makes. Complete sense that those conversations continued on and went further and clearly that person has had a significant influence on, how you’ve shaped your business and the ability to do that.

And I think often there are those people in our career that don’t. Necessarily always get the wraps and they don’t necessarily stick around for the long term either. I, I’m not sure if I’ve shared with listeners before, but I had a, I’ll call it more of a colleague rather than necessarily a mentor in the early stages and we had been talking about things and I’d been working in a couple of different jobs over a number of years.

He’d come across with me as a, as an external person. And he knew I’d taken on this contract and it was short term. And we were having a discussion one day over coffee. And he just said, you’ve got to take the lead, go out and do it yourself and do this, and this is how I got started. And he got me started in a networking meeting.

That was his first thing is come in and do this. And whilst, it was. very sporadic and not official, never became officialism as a true mentor in that specific sense. It had that kind of influence on me in the early days. So without giving his full name out there, shout out to Chris, if you’re listening in.

And I think you touch on a really important point. There is a time and a place for certain mentors. And, with this particular mentor that I’m talking about, he was very much, in the right place for me at the right time. When you know that conversation started, I’ve gone on now to have other people that are helping with the development of my business, which is not necessarily where his skill set necessarily is.

So I think you’re right in that they don’t have to be around for the long term, but there’s a time and a place for each skill set that you need when you need it. And so You know, for those people that are, open to the idea of having business mentors that you don’t need to be married to them forever to get from them their skill set and their benefit for you or your business.

I think it’s a great little insight into mentors, and I’m glad we explored that a little bit, but we need to get into the main part of what you’re doing and this whole idea of wealth creation is something that it’s lovely. It’s a lovely common phrase that is used. It’s a phrase that I think people aren’t genuinely in touch with.

And I think it’s about as well. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot about how people are brought up. And, being restricted by their own sense of their own limitations. Yeah. And you’ve touched on probably the biggest component of why I do what I do and why there’s a market.

And that is that. Financial literacy, wealth creation, money management, whichever one of the terms you want to use, is not taught at school. And therefore, we develop those skills, good or bad, from our parents, who develop theirs from their parents. And we have to keep in mind that our parents and their parents didn’t learn this at a school either.

And so if they’re good at managing money and growing wealth, then that you might be successful in doing it yourself. If they’re not so good, or it’s not something that is talked about because, we grew up in an era where you didn’t talk about money, politics, or religion. Then again your capacity is going to be very limited when it comes to what to do with your money and how to grow it.

So it’s those factors have led to any number of statistics that I could throw at you about why people need this knowledge. The biggest one being that only 5 percent of Australians will retire with enough money or assets. to support their desired lifestyle. The other one is that 80 percent of people are going to have more life at the end of their money.

Yeah, that is, it’s some scary statistics and I definitely, and we’re going to come to that in just a moment. But I’m, I want to establish as well is that the challenge is having this financial literacy is so important for any of the small business owners and operators out there as well because often people start a business because they’re good at what they do.

That does not mean that they’re good at the financial side of things. And I’d have to say to you that my eyes glaze over when it comes to the financials. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people sitting me down and explaining. Balance sheets and all the rest of it. And it is just it’s a challenging thing for, someone like myself, who’s more of a creative side of things than a financial side of financial understanding, but I’m intrigued as to, as, as far as the stuff that you’re doing is concerned, do you focus more on the personal?

Do you bring in the business side of things? Where do you find that? I think the simple answer is it’s both. because a lot of my clients are business owners and There’s another statistic I’m going to throw at you that there’s a very small percentage of businesses that are saleable or sell. And most business owners have wrapped their entire wealth into their business, both their time, their energy, and what it’s going to be in the future in terms of creating or selling that business and materializing that into cash that they’re going to use for retirement.

And they discover too late that they haven’t got it. So when I’m dealing with business owners, it’s very much about let’s, Have a plan B. So the business might be salable down the track and you might be able to generate a large sum of money and use that for retirement. But let’s in the meantime, use some of what you’re generating from the business now to grow your wealth.

Over the long term. So there’s a backup plan just in case so they’re very much aligned. But when it comes to the work I specifically do, it’s very much about what’s coming into the household income and expenditure scenario and helping people manage that from a money perspective and then grow it.

From an investing perspective, from a personal scenario, but we’ve always got the business out to the side as a part of the equation. Yeah, I, and it’s a really important lesson for people to understand exactly what you’re talking about in that businesses, Don’t sell, not easily.

And there’s what is the statistic? It’s in excess of 300, 000 businesses in Australia will shut down every year, less than 5 percent available. Yep. And it’s scary. And what’s even more scary is, by the way, that I’ve talked to a number of business owners where they’ve actually Got something that strangely would be salable if they did a few things about it, but decide not just going to shut it down when I’m ready to shut it down.

And that’s the end of it. And so it’s a really interesting dilemma on that in that space. And, so how much is, is it giving them that reality check, as you’ve just done and saying, look, Your business is your business and I’m not, that’s not necessarily your space of where you’re helping them with, or is it a case of saying, look, you need to do stuff.

You need to also be investing in your business to make it more potential for more saleability in the future. Or is it purely just looking and saying, let’s put the business aside and let’s look at something else. Yeah, I’m very much about letting other people coach. Mentor, help grow, whatever the right terminology is, consult in terms of the business profitability, growth, salability, all those type of things.

I’m very much about let’s take what you’re currently deriving from your business. and put it to work so that in the future, if you need a plan B, you’ve got one. And understand and appreciate that, the ability to draw out of the business is another aspect of owning a business that a lot of people struggle with.

And that’s the dilemma of how much do I leave in the business versus pay myself. I don’t want to pay too much personal tax. And then they get all this cash in the business, but it’s doing nothing. It’s just sitting there doing nothing. So we’ve got to, we’ve got to balance. The management of the business and the personal, money management and investing for growth and for security in the future.

So yeah, so it, I’m very much separating the personal financial wealth scenario versus. The wealth that’s tied up in the business, but we’ve obviously got to recognize that it’s there. Absolutely. And I think one of the scary things that you spoke about before is the fact that most people, when they retire, will not have enough money in their superannuation to last them very long at all.

And that is a very difficult thing that we as a society have to cope with as well, because it’s, I think the we could probably talk for hours about this whole idea of superannuation and whether it works or not. I personally am not convinced that it does for the overwhelming majority of people and that perhaps there’s more benefit in being able to invest that money in a particular way to benefit your lifestyle rather than putting it into a fund.

Per se, but that is a an argument for another time. Don’t give me started on that argument. Yeah it’s, yes. Let’s let’s pipe that one and have that another time. And perhaps we’ll have that in a separate podcast, but. I’m interested in then that reality that people are facing.

When is the right? I suppose the right time is the earliest time possible. But when do people start coming to the realization that they need to work with someone such as yourself? I think the easiest way for me to answer that is by just looking at the demographics of my customer base, and 90 percent 40 to 55 years old.

And so I think they’re coming to that realization in that age demographic where they’re starting to, move past the, I guess the growth of their family and looking after kids and all those type of things and schools and high schools and all that type of stuff. And the entering that age demographic where they’re starting to look ahead and go.

Hang on a minute, I’m doing all of these, crazy things with my time and working really hard to grow or just keep my head above water. But hang on a minute, retirement’s only just around the corner. What have I done about that? And they look at their numbers and go, Oh, they’re not where I’m going to need them to be.

I better actually start getting proactive and do something about it. And no matter how old somebody is, whether they’re 33, 43 or 53, Every one of them will tell you, I feel like I’ve left it too late, but can you help me? And it’s never too late to do something. It might be too late to get you, your ultimate dream, but it’s never too late to do something and get some things in place to try and improve your position because, the thing we were just alluding to, soup is not the answer.

So where does it start? What is the, what are the, some of the basics that people should be thinking about? Oh the initial thing is really just understanding what type of lifestyle they want to have both now and in retirement and what it’s going to take to fund that in the event that you’re no longer working.

So a lot of people will come with the idea that they don’t want to work till they’re 65. and want to be able to retire when they choose to retire. So you gotta put some numbers down on what does that look like and where do you need to be to get to that point. And then it’s really just about what resources you throw at it as to what, speed you’ll get there.

So the real initial, uh, conversation people are having in their household is I just don’t feel like I’m getting everything out of my money that I could be or should be and that normally comes by just looking at your For most people that’s you know, their tax return and going you know it’s just I just don’t have the assets that I think I need in order to support myself down the train and They get a little bit more proactive as a result, but that conversation can happen any point of the year because I think we should be investing consistently, but for most people, they don’t think about it until they’re forced to do their tax return.

Yeah, it is an interesting dilemma, isn’t it that most people, their relationship from a financial point of view, whether it’s a financial advisor or an accountant, is generally Four or five times a year, and it’s all, tied up with between Baz and tax. That is, and the negatives, right?

That’s the hardest part is that we develop this negativity with money because that is it’s. Yeah. The only time that we start, really thinking about it and realizing how much is going out all the time and not enough going in and, you, and I think that whole idea of when you want to retire I’m sure that age is going to go up.

The average age of when people retire, forget what the legal age is, but when people want to retire is going to go up as life expectancy increases and importantly, as inflation and other other things that are happening in the economy, particularly at the moment where it’s very difficult to keep, on top of the cost of living.

What you need to retire and what you need to be doing. It can be feel like a mountain. Yeah, absolutely. And you’re right. Like the those relationships you were describing a transactional. And it’s all like compliance and so forth. I’m very much about trying to get people to think about their money far more consistently and be more proactive so that they’re growing their wealth consistently every month and not making it something that gets buried.

And I come back to that comment I made up front, which was, we only think about these we’re not, so we wouldn’t. Brought up to talk about our money. And so it’s something that’s very much in the background of day to day living, whereas if more people would have that conversation and realize that there’s things you can do to grow your wealth without having to slug 40, 50, 60 hours a week for somebody else’s wealth, or even if it’s your business and you’re putting those type of hours in we’ve got to get the balance right.

And life’s about now, not down the track. And there’s too many people that I see who are getting to retirement age and they’re no longer got their health to be able to enjoy whatever they’ve created in the meantime. So I think that getting that balance right is really important. The only way to do that is to be proactive with your investing so that you can have choice as to when you retire or when you reduce the amount of hours you work because you’ve got the funds and the assets to fund your lifestyle.

So when we talk about investing, that’s the interesting thing for me as well, is that we’re not really taught the whole ideas of the ins and outs of investing itself. In, in school you may have been lucky and your parents may have Talked a little bit about investing, whether it be on the share market or be it in a property.

But that’s usually about the sum total of what people know, if they know any of that at all. And I imagine that in this day and age, investing goes beyond those two basic ideas as well. Oh, look, there’s a lot more options and there’s even within, the stock market or the property market, there’s a lot more options.

So when I first started, so yeah, you’re absolutely right. There’s a very broad range of products as such out there that or strategies even that people can use. And, if you’re not taught them, then you’re completely oblivious to them. And getting a financial literacy education and taking control of your money and your wealth is what I’m all about.

Because nobody cares more about your money than you do. And so you need to be proactive in managing that money and learning. That always overwhelms me with the number of people that are fearful in this country around the stock market. And it’s mainly because if you look at the media, what sells media is fear.

And so if the stock market’s having a bad day, it’ll be all over the place. If it’s having a stock standard day and just doing its thing and continuing to grow, you won’t hear about it. And so that does, generate a lot of fear in the stock market, which we can dispel pretty quickly when you understand how it works and, the fact that it’s just driven by humans anyway.

And without wanting to go into a big discussion about it, the modern approach, Bitcoin and the like where do you stand on those kinds of investments? Look, I I’m not convinced with Bitcoin. I’m one of those rare people at the moment who I don’t teach it because I just don’t believe the risk profile matches what most people would be comfortable with.

And You know, if people want to own Bitcoin, I always say to them don’t make it much more than five and maximum 10 percent of their portfolios because you could wake up tomorrow to be worth half of what it was the night before when you went to bed and not too many people can live with that type of risk.

And so I don’t teach it. I’m not, I do believe it’s around for the long term, but maybe not, in the current structure. I think banks and governments are going to have to work out how they can get they, they’re working on ways to find out how they can get more control of it. And once they get control of it, then it might settle down from a risk perspective.

But it scares me a little bit and therefore I don’t touch it. But I know plenty of people who do want to touch it and, love it. But I just haven’t got there yet. Yeah, I think there’s there’s a lot of, um, stuff out there that is goes beyond that. I think that I think the difficulty in that space is that it’s incredibly complex and that it goes beyond.

the simple idea of do I buy Bitcoin or some other currency that you’ve heard of? And then you start talking NFTs and a lot of other things that I think make it incredibly difficult to follow and understand. But I think what is perhaps here to stay is is particularly the technology around it, that idea of trading in a different way and not having the restrict.

Having different levels of restrictions, I guess that it’s a more fluid 24 7 market and trade in different things, not necessarily just in straight, version of the currency. That’s right. I think you’re right. The technology behind it is very much here to stay. Just, at the moment, some of the things I hear about, the foundations of, Bitcoin in particular, scare me a little bit.

So I just, I caution people to just be mindful that it’s a, an asset class. It’s an emerging asset class. We don’t know enough about, you know what it’s done in the past to know what it’s going to do in the future. And I know there’s plenty of people out there who would probably disagree with what I just said, but, it just doesn’t have the longevity yet to know exactly what it’s going to do.

And therefore it’s susceptible to, major risk events. And that’s not something that you want to tie your wealth up in over the longterm. Absolutely. I think it’s very good advice to be cautious, depending on how much and how much you’re prepared to risk.

And that’s which I suppose is the same with anything in fairness, it’s, if you’re convinced you want to invest in the Sydney property market, then you’re going to do that, even if I turn around and tell you, you should, you’re better off investing in, pick another city. And it’s what you know, and what you’re comfortable with, that’s always going to make a big difference.

Yeah. And that comes from confidence. And so that’s a huge part of what I do is about teaching people to have confidence in their decision making and confidence comes from understanding what they’re working with. And so that’s what I, that’s what I educate people on is understanding the assets that they may choose to invest in because they make all the decisions.

I don’t make any of their investing decisions. I’m about teaching them how to make decisions and understand what it is they’re investing in and why so that they know when it does. Go up in value or fall in value. They know why and they know how to react and and that’s a huge part of it is the confidence side of things.

Yeah. And I think it’s such an important area because it really is, confidence is a hard thing to get into something like this, it’s, I still recall in my early days of corporate life, I worked with a company that listed on the stock exchange while I was there. And we were given the opportunity to buy in as before it was released to the share market and it was easy in hindsight to look back and go, Oh, I should have invested more, at the time we were about to renovate a house, we had already borrowed the money and we were a while away from having to use the money if we’d have invested that money In for that period of time that we had for that, we’d have paid for the renovation With it, but it’s easy in hindsight and that’s the difficulty and I think the dis in and I look back and I go why did I make that decision? Because I’m incredibly conservative to because I didn’t understand very much about the share market. And three, because, it just was a complete lack of confidence in the ability to do that. However, that’s the biggest thing. And looking back on that is going well, if I’d have had an opportunity to have been educated a little bit more and to have developed a little bit of better understanding and therefore confidence in it.

It wasn’t actually a difficult decision. It wasn’t as big a gamble as it might sound to have made. Would I have done it or not? I can’t tell you, but it’s certainly as again, easy in hindsight, but it’s, I can totally appreciate having that there and having that education process and I imagine is that the difficult thing with a lot of people coming to you is them firstly recognizing that they have this deficiency?

A little bit, but most of the time when we’re talking to people, they are fully aware. that they just don’t have the knowledge. So there’s two challenges that we hear in different words that people might use. But the two main things that people are looking for a solution to is the time and the knowledge gap.

So they want, they believe they don’t have the time to learn or learn how to invest and or they’re running out of time. And then from a knowledge gap point of view is, I don’t know what to invest in, I don’t know how to select it, how to manage risk or, come up with any of those other variations of that.

And ultimately, that’s what we help people solve is the time and the knowledge gap. And ultimately, that gives them the confidence that they can do it themselves. But most of the time, the people that are coming to us are aware, and that’s normally because we’ve been there. Potentially, we have, triggered their pain point in our content or our advertising to get them to think, Hey, where am I?

And where should I be here? And it’s piqued their interest. Yes, I totally understand. That’s the case. And I think at a time when we are really struggling, as far as keeping up with pricing and keeping up with the cost of living all those lovely terms that are out there and, flooding the media at the moment.

How much of that is also driving people towards you. How much of that is actually making a difference in. What you do and how you go about doing it. Yeah, we absolutely cost of living is huge, and it’s a very strong motivator for people to get proactive on being able to get more from the dollar that they’re earning on.

We did some survey work both in our business and through my business coach and discovered that there was three main things that are really triggering people at the moment. One is how do I pay less tax? How do I pay off my debt more quickly? And how do I grow my assets to produce a passive income?

And. I believe in particular with the paying down debt, that is very much driven by the cost of living. So we’ve seen these massive increases in interest rates at a rate, far quicker than ever, anyone could have planned. And therefore there’s lots of people who are in mortgage prisons, as I, use that terminology, is that they can’t go and refinance and get a lower rate because they would fail the current, assessment for the loan that they already have.

So they’ve got to just live with the one they’ve got on. It’s making it very hard for them to manage all their other costs, given that they’re going up as well. So cost of living is huge as to why people are looking more closely at their money and thinking, I need help. How do I get out of this scenario?

And yeah, we’re having to tailor a lot more of what we do at that front end page, which is the money management phase before we can dive into the investing phase. Yeah, it’s a difficult one. And again, a conversation for another time, perhaps, but it can certainly see how, sitting in and you’re thinking, when is it going to bottom out?

When are things going to turn? Which is an interesting one. As far as investment is concerned I had a conversation with someone very randomly at a event I was attending. And I’m not even sure how it started because we were actually leaving the event and it had nothing to do with money And he was just adamant that Sydney property prices were going to drop.

And I said to him, look in, I’ve lived in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney my entire life. And I don’t recall prices ever dropping. There’ve been times when they may have flattened a little bit. But even then that’s for a moment, they’ve just continued to rise. And this idea, and I think in many respects, property in Australia has been the primary investment that people have always seen.

I remember being brought up and saying the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to pay off your mortgage. Now, the reality is you probably never pay off your mortgage. You just get to the point where you downsize. Yeah, and I think what I’m also observing and, I’ve got kids in their mid twenties who are living this experience, but the younger generation, and in between my kids and my generation they’re not as fixated on owning bricks and mortar and paying off a mortgage if it impacts their lifestyle.

So there’s more and more people who are happy enough to rent and live where they want to live. And then invest elsewhere and have the freedom to be able to move around with their living experience. Rather than being tied to a property and a mortgage, because that’s what our parents did. And that’s what everyone told us we should do.

And I actually believe there’s a lot of merit in that and that like you said, with the current interest rates, current property prices, the fact that wages are still probably 10 years behind in, in terms of purchasing power, it makes a whole lot more sense to live where you want to live.

And, invest where the market’s growing so that you have the best of both worlds. As someone who’s having to rent at the moment while I’m building a house rent prices are insane. And that’s where the that’s where you have got a problem. They’ve continued to rise at such a ridiculous amount.

I know in my area, and I spoke to several people in the area that earlier this year, they went up by 23%, and quite specifically by 23 percent in everyone’s case. I’m not going to say there was collusion amongst anyone there, but it’s coincidence. Happy coincidence, but and it’s not sustainable.

That’s the hard part is that the flow on effects of that are either forcing people to move out of the area and that comes with its own consequences because it depends on whether there is accommodation to go to in the first place. It also is a practicality. And so you’ve got people living beyond their means or having to cut lots of other things in order to be able to sustain rents.

And so again, this whole idea of investing and being able to get out of that out of that situation is a difficult one. I’m lucky enough that I did, invest in property very early on in the piece. And so, the rental idea is a short term one while we build, but it’s it’s a painful one and it’s eaten massively into our budget.

It’s money being thrown away for. What will amount to a good couple of years? Yeah. Yeah. And it is a challenge. We’re in a very challenging environment. We’ve seen a massive amount of migration to catch up for COVID and everyone’s looking for properties. We just, and the cost of building going and you’d be experiencing this yourself with the cost of building going through the roof raw materials and all of that going through the roof.

It’s just, it’s become this snowball. I often do videos where I’m looking at news in the financial. markets and pulling apart the story. And the unfortunate part with interest rates is it’s a sledgehammer approach that becomes self fulfilling. And so we’ve got a, an arrangement where interest rates have kept going up, which forced prices to go up, which forced rents to go up, which forced, property prices to go up and it just became self fulfilling and still is.

And, interest rates aren’t necessarily the answer to bring prices down. It’s a sledgehammer to stop us from spending. But, if interest rates keep going up, then rents are going to keep going up, which is going to just fuel more inflation, which they’re going to say what, how do we get control of this inflation if everything keeps going up?

So I get quite on my high horse on that one. But you’re right, like there’s an absolute shortage of properties which is causing rents and, property prices to keep going up. And. It’s something that’s going to have to be dealt with at much higher levels than what I do. I just try and help people manage their way out of the scenario in a way that they’re comfortable with, whether it’s renting or buying or both.

It’s about what works for them. So talk to me a little bit about as well. I know we spoke about before we started recording about you’ve got a wealth tracker. Tell me a little bit more about that because we’re going to make it available for people to to download access to that. But give me a little bit of insight into what that’s all about and how it helps people.

Yeah, so the wealth tracker is a workbook designed to enable people to track how they’re going with their money and their wealth. and ultimately great tool to see how you’re going month after month and a little bit of ninja built into it with a dashboard that is designed to tap into our money mindset.

So we’ve got three parts to our brain and there’s one part that if it sees us doing something good, actually encourage us to keep doing whatever is getting those good results. So the wealth tracker and the dashboard in particular is that tool we use to keep us motivated to keep doing what’s getting the positive results.

So it’s our support mechanism to keep us going because investing is not something we do for eight or 10 weeks of the year. It’s something you should be doing all the time. And so that wealth tracker, Whilst it’s a great place to see all the numbers, it’s also tapping into that motivational tool in our head that says, I like what you’re doing, keep doing it.

And so yeah, it’s a way to track your shares, your properties, your superannuation, your personal household budget, your cash balances, and see it all in one dashboard and hopefully see it going upwards month after month and therefore motivate you to keep doing what’s getting those results. I love the idea that it’s built on that whole idea of that dopamine hit because it’s one of the reasons why we are unsure of what we’re doing and not don’t do the things because we don’t get that.

And if you’re just relying on looking at a share market every day and going, has it gone up? Has it gone down? You’re setting yourself up for failure really on that, isn’t it? Because there aren’t many stocks that you’re going to say if I invest today, it’ll go up tomorrow and the next day and the next day.

It doesn’t work that way. Being able to find ways to get that hit is incredibly important and absolutely it’s like I said, it’s a great tool to use, encourage people to use it when they’re presenting their numbers to banks and show them that they’re in control of their numbers.

They know what they’re doing and all that. But at the same time, using that dashboard, I use the analogy all the time of diets. The diet industry is worth trillions of dollars a year around the world. And it’s not because diets don’t work. It’s because most people go into a diet and use willpower as their sole tool for success.

And we know from science that willpower on its own doesn’t work over the long term. So the same with wealth. If you’re going to stay the journey and do it month after month, year after year to get the results you want, you need something to keep you motivated. And so the dashboard is designed to, like you said, give you that dopamine hit that says, wow, I’m getting, I’m going forward, I’m making progress, I’ll just keep doing what’s getting those results.

And eventually you’ll get to where you want to be. Fantastic. So thank you so much for making that available to people listening to the podcast, and we will include that in the show notes. So before we wrap things up I just wanted a couple of things that I wanted to ask you. One is that, we talked a little bit in the beginning about how you got to where you are, but what was the dream when you first started out when you were in school where was the career going at that point?

That’s an interesting question. And. I was explaining this to somebody the other day about how I, became so passionate about what I now do. I played squash against men at a young age. So I was playing men’s comp midweek at the age of 14. And I played a season of squash, which was over about four months.

There was two seasons a year, and the season went for roughly four months. And the guys that I was playing with, the team of five people, three of them were in the financial markets. And so for the entire season, they got in my head as a 14 year old about why it’s important to get your money working for you.

So you don’t have to work for it. And that was just. drilled into me for four and probably longer than that because there was preseason and so forth. So I just copped this message at a young age and I then became fascinated by initially the stock market and how you could invest today and then in 10 years it’d be worth more and 20 years even more and so forth and I just got completely engulfed in the idea that I could invest and not have to work for anybody and that really triggered that That genie in the bottle type of thing and got me into that.

And I ended up working as a chartered accountant for a long time. So I was always dealing with numbers and numbers just seemed to flow for me. I can, I see the world often in numbers. And it just became a passion. And so when I first started out I didn’t really want to be an accountant, but that’s where I ended up going, and being a chartered accountant and working in one of the big firms and doing all that type of stuff.

But I knew that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. And I guess that training was spectacular for what I’m now doing in terms of I can read numbers, I can dispel the, the mystery of numbers. But it all came about all the way back from when I was 14, just having these people in my ear week after week about, you don’t want to have to work for the rest of your life.

Amazing. It’s amazing those influences and what they have on you from such an early age. Here’s a little bit of trivia wrapped around all of that. First of all, are there many squash courts around anymore? Because I can’t remember the last time I saw a squash court or anyone talk about squash, but my first property that I bought.

Was a converted squash court. I converted the squash courts into an apartment and I remember people thinking it’s squash court into an apartment, but actually a squash court was, as I learned was 65 square meters, which is a very big one bedroom apartment. As that was my first investment. I did have a wonderful housewarming party.

All my friends decided to dress up in squash gear and bring the Gatorade and everything along to spark the memories of it. But it was a wonderful first First apartment to have so there you go. So I had a similar experience, my junior, I played my junior squash on Saturdays and the squash courts I played out of were threatened to be taken over many times by developers.

And eventually it happened. And then now, there are a combination of, retail space and apartments, and we had to go and find new courts to play in. And Yes, the number of squash centers in Sydney and Australia is rapidly diminishing because, as you said, the real estate is very valuable.

Yes, I think it’s, and what’s interesting is those squash courts disappeared because they started living in it. The other squash courts that I used, I didn’t play squash all that often, but became a consulate. Here you go, different uses, but the real estate is nonetheless quite valuable.

Final question that I wanted to ask you before we go is a question I like to ask all of my guests is what’s the heart moment that clients have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew about in advance? I love that question because I love the aha that comes up and that’s when they realize that investing is not that complicated.

And I often say in my sales presentation to people that my strategy is simple and it’s simple for two reasons. One, it has to be repeatable by people other than me. And the other one is that I believe banks and financial institutions overcomplicate wealth. So we feel obligated to pay them to do it for us.

So they make all the money and us not so much. So the aha moment I get to see is when people realize that they can do it. And they’re making money off the decisions that they’ve made from what I’ve taught them and. They realized that they could do it for the rest of time. What a fabulous way to finish the program.

Thank you so much for being generous with your time and giving us so many insights. I really appreciate everything that you’ve given over in that. And of course, the link to the WealthTracker spreadsheet, of course, will be available in the show notes as well as All the information on how to get in contact with you as well.

Andrew, thanks so much for your time. Anthony, thank you so much for having me. We had a great conversation. 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 to the world.

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

TITLE: Mastering business systems with insights from John Tonkin | Biz Bites episode

 Welcome to mastering business systems with insights from John Tonkin. I’m your host, Anthony Perl. And today we dive deep into the strategies and systems that drive success in small to medium businesses, especially in the professional services B2B space. John Tonkin from Brain in the Box is a renowned business systems expert.

He discusses the latest trends, tools, and techniques that can help streamline your operations, boost productivity, and enhance client. Satisfaction, whether you’re struggling with scaling your business, improving efficiency, or simply looking for ways to stay ahead in a competitive market. This discussion provides practical advice.

And actionable steps. So sit back, take notes, and get ready to transform your business, brought to you by CommTogether, the home of podcasts done for you time now to get into Biz Bites. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the People Behind podcast.

Done for you because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to biz bites and check out podcasts done for you as well in the show notes. Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of. Biz Bites. And John, thank you so much for joining us. We have got a lot of things to discuss and I should say, John and I have known each other for two, three years, at least, I think. Maybe longer. And this is long overdue to get you on the program.

So John, welcome. Thank you very much, Anthony. Lovely to be here. And I guess we should start with the simple idea of what it is you do so you can explain it to everyone. We work with business owners and their teams to capture what they do in their business, help them to take the risk down as low as they can, boost the benefit as high as they can, so that they can get more time out of their business, more profit and less stress, and make the business a place, a fun place to work.

And also make it compliant and, regular rate, regularized, regulated. That’s the one, regulated, like that. And so is the summary word systems, and is that a good word to be using these days? When I had a partner back in 2007, when we started Brain in a Box, we were talking about systems, and we were about the only people in the world, or in Australia, talking about business systems in the, the level we work.

So the small business level. No one else was doing it, and we had the market to ourselves. And then gradually as we went along people started calling themselves systems experts, and systems this, and systems that. And so it’s really interesting when you talk to a lot of these people, or when you go behind the pretty cover, you often find out that what they’re talking about isn’t actually systems, it’s simply organizing your business, or using a particular tool.

So for us, systems has a particular meaning. And we apply that meaning, I won’t say religiously, but it is a very broad meaning, but it covers everything that helps your business achieve what it’s supposed to do. So anything effectively where you’ve got the right person doing the right thing, the right way at the right time.

To achieve the right result. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how words like that take on a new meaning and you, you have to roll with the punches a little bit, don’t you? Because it can be, is it a deterrent more for people these days? Is it, think, do the eyes roll over when people, when you talk about systems?

They do. And the thing is with systems that it’s so easy for people to misunderstand what you mean You say systems to 10 people in a room and half of them are thinking about software You know the systems the software the other half are thinking about The tools they use and that might be you know Spreadsheets or checklists or whatever else and they think of that as being the systems and they rarely think of what the team is doing, what the people do, because that’s what systems is.

Systems is people using software, spreadsheets and other tools, and all the other things that make up their broad systems to achieve the right result they want. So system starts with people. It has to. Yeah. I think that’s an interesting part, isn’t it? That people are the center of business.

And at a time of talking so much about automations and AIs, you have to start with the people. Yeah, exactly. You take the people out and what you’ve got is software. If you want to build software and call it your business that’s great. If you, Want to have software that’s directed by people.

It’s still the people at the top. So a lot of people will get caught up and say, no, but we’re running it good. It’s your business, but if you’re handing it over to software and I hear people, real people in real businesses saying, Oh yeah we’re not doing our systems formally like that. What we’re doing is we’ve got these questions, this set of questions all the prompts we’re giving to AI, and then it tells us what to do.

And I think, oh geez, okay, I wonder if we’d use that for brain surgery or for designing that rocket to get these, the people off the International Space Station who may be there till next year unless they can work out how to do it. Why didn’t they ask AI? Geez, surely they could have got them off months ago.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting, Dilemma with I don’t know. That’s not, really what we’re here to talk about. But the thing I find fascinating is that I only works if the people ask the right questions and that initially as well, if people are feeding it the right information, because if you’re asking it to pluck something out of what’s on the Internet you don’t know if it’s actually true or correct and particularly for your business.

Hey, 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, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites.

Yeah, when you’re thinking of AI and asking questions of AI, you have to think of AI as a child. And if you tell it, small things or a small amount of information, you will get a childish answer. You have to build its maturity by telling it about the business and about, give it context so that it can work it out.

And then it will use that to amplify the search, if you wish, and come back with a result that’s halfway useful. We use AI quite a bit. I won’t say every day in Brain in a Box, but we use AI a lot. We use it a lot for code, to write code for some of the apps and things, or the mini apps we build for our clients.

But we also use it for even just for risks and benefits, for working those out, and I’ll talk about them and their importance later. But it often brings up things we may not have thought about. So it’s good to go out and reach broadly into the written world and come back with things you can use. But If you rely upon it, it’s like saying I have this child prodigy and I can ask this child anything I want and they’ll give me an answer and I can rely upon it and that’s great right up until you don’t realize that the answer that you’ve got is just total rubbish.

And that’s the danger with everything AI. If you don’t have the internal intelligence, if you like, to work out how much the artificial intelligence is feeding you rubbish, you’re not getting a good result. Yeah, and it’s, it must be so important in your space. What you’re trying to build is based on What should be happening in a business and how it needs to happen and based on the human element, and you can’t just rely on AI to write that from the beginning.

, there are people who do. And that’s what amazes me that there are people are saying, Oh, no, look where we’ve got these prompts as I say, I don’t want to go through it again, but where they’re handing it over to AI. And I think that’s. That’s not a clever thing to do.

I wouldn’t hand over my business to anyone or anything. I want to retain that power at the top. I want to be there at the top. It’s a little bit like the same thing that people put blind trust in systems by saying things like your system should be so good that you’re going to hand them to someone who’s never seen it before and they can follow you.

Follow that system and they can get the right result. I think, Oh, good. That’s fantastic. Cause I’ve got the the full procedure for brain surgery and one of my children needs it. Could I ask you to perform that brain surgery? Here’s the system, here’s the procedure. And I don’t think any of us would be doing, would be foolish enough to hand that over.

So it sounds like a good idea. It’s got elements of a good idea, but overall, it’s not a good idea. It says it’s an unsafe thing to do. It’s a good tool. It’s a horrible weapon. Yeah, and I think, it gives you some prompts as a starting point if you’re not really sure where to start, but it should never take over.

I know within the context of our project management tool that we use in the, In the business that it offers an opportunity when you starting a new project that you can use an AI to build out what that project might look like and all the checks and balances. And I did that as an experiment to see what it would say about a podcast.

And, broadly speaking, some of the head headings were correct, but it doesn’t really work for our business model. So as much as it was. It was, a fascinating insight when it came down to it. I’m going, no, we’re going to rework all of this. And, this one’s really got to go up here and it’s almost what’s the point of starting from something that is completely wrong and trying to manipulate that into being correct.

Why don’t just start with doing the right thing from the beginning. Yep, and when you realize that it is artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligence It’s simply drawing from a large language model. In other words, it’s read lots of books lots and lots of books articles and papers and everything you can think of and then it Works goes through that to find answers which match what you have said.

So even those people who are putting a set of prompts to it, even by using second level prompts. So I use the initial prompts to get a response. And then the next thing I do is to interrogate those responses to say, why is that important? Could you please rank what you’ve told me in relation to a business like mine?

But these characteristics and so on. And you can improve the result, but you are still getting something which is going through and regressively working through a huge world of information to give you its best guess or its best take on everything that’s there. So I don’t want to talk about AI all day though.

No let’s move away. Let’s move away from AI. Let’s go back to, let’s go back to the beginning of what this is. So talk to me because Your target is the small and medium businesses, which in itself is a bit unusual in this space, isn’t it? Because most people tend to think that this is the an area that is for the, for the larger businesses and that smaller businesses shouldn’t need to worry about this.

But I almost feel like that’s completely the opposite, isn’t it? Because small businesses really need. Network systems in place to function because it needs to work efficiently. If you don’t work efficiently, you’ve got a job for life. You don’t have a real business. So if we go back to where I started off with systems and anything to do with it, my background, corporate background was banking.

So I was working in Bonkness in Aldepayee and then later on Macquarie Bank in Securitization in Puma. And it was a great place to work, to see how systems work. Because in Banque Nationale de Paris, what we were doing there was we were implementing PCs. So this is back in 87, 88, 89, a long time ago, I realized.

But it was a matter of taking things that had been mainframe and getting to work on PCs. So believe it or not, we were using Multiplan as our spreadsheet on a mainframe. And what we had to do was to make everything work. Firstly, on that PC, we were using Excel before Excel was released, so I had a big blue or black DOS window, and in the middle was a Windows window, and in that was running this rudimentary version of Excel.

There was no manual. There was nothing to guide us, no training notes or anything. And we were training it across Australia. And so it was really exciting. But then the other things that happened very shortly after that was along came something called Lotus notes, which was a tool that allowed you to build applications, which of course we went heavily into.

And that meant we had to explain to people. In the branches, so this was a, it’s a foreign bank, so there are only, there are only five branches in Australia, so there wasn’t a lot of spread to cover, but nevertheless, we had to explain to everyone how to make it work, and so we had to put together the processes for everyone to follow, so I wasn’t a super involved in all the process work there, but I was very much involved in the training for it.

So I was producing training materials and going around Australia doing that. Then when we went to Macquarie Bank jumped across to there and in that area, we were working in securitization. We had 18 mortgage originators working force for Macquarie Bank or not working for them, but we’re using Macquarie Bank as the funder.

And what it meant was that we had all these mainframe. systems that had to be made PC systems. And we had to get out there and train people. And that meant we had to have something to train them on. And so that’s when I realized, we’ve got these techie people up on the 22nd floor going through and talking in techie language to people who were in the octagon out of paramount or in Aussie home loans there, and they’re trying to understand what these techie people are talking about.

And I realized, It’s got not working guys. My background is education et cetera, masters in adult education, et cetera, et cetera. All the things that came before that. But let’s talk people to people, not technology to people. And so we were flow charting everything, writing full training notes around everything and distributing that and running that around Australia as well.

And it was much more effective. And that’s when I realized I was reasonably good at doing it. And we went further and started, I won’t say it was a methodology at that stage, but we certainly had a pretty consistent approach to working at what the people needed. And again, it came down to people.

And it was amazing how we would map things. We’d go, I’d go out to Parramatta three or four times and capture what the guys were doing. Talk to the tech people and say, here’s what it has to do software wise, marry the two and then come up with this training manual on it. And then I would go out and present the printed, beautiful printed training manual to the team.

And the first thing they did was to look at that little table on the front where it said, we would like to thank the following people who were involved. So it wasn’t, they want to know what, how, wonderful the complex systems are. They’re looking there to see, where’s my name? Oh, good. It’s got there.

And you’d see the smile on their face as they discovered, oh, good, you got my name right, or something like that. And even when they were looking through the book, they would be looking for the bit that they had worked on to say, oh, good, there it is. So people have an ego, we know that, and we rely upon the ego to reward ourselves, to motivate ourselves and take us further.

And it’s the same in systems. We’ve got to look for that bit where people can look at it, feel that sense of ownership, and then they will follow it. So if I extend that a bit further, people talk about accountability as being the key thing. I want my team to do what I tell them. You’re probably talking about accountability, aren’t you?

So there’s only one way you can get people to be accountable. And to be accountable, you have to have a sense of ownership and to develop a sense of ownership. You really need to be involved in some way in creating it or developing it or reviewing it or something. You’ve got to be involved somewhere.

Involvement leads to ownership. Ownership leads to accountability. And when I looked at it, sorry that’s what became important. We had to develop that ownership. I was going to say so that begs the question then all businesses have turnover of staff. How important is it to, when that turnover happens, how important is it to have a review process so that the new person can put their stamp on, on it, that they may have some sort of ownership.

Yep. And that’s a critical point. I’m glad you brought that up because someone’s going to say, what are you saying? You’re telling me that as soon as I’ve got new people, I’ve got to rip up the old systems and then do it again, create them new and new with the new team. Of course not. But what we would be doing would be to say, Hey guys, look, you’re brand new here.

I want you to go through and have a look at these particular processes related to your job. And could you go through them with an eagle eye and tell me which bits that you would recommend we change? Because you’re coming into it with fresh eyes, you’re coming into it potentially with ideas you can bring from where you worked before, or expertise you’ve developed over the years there.

We’d love you to see how we can apply that in what we do here. So could you please review it? Tell me what we can change. And then if you do come up with a change, make that change quickly and let people know, Hey, this came from Jim. Who’s just joined us. It’s really good. Thanks, Jim. You can see how this has improved the flow here.

So it’s just doing it. And it’s again, that acknowledgement, Jim feels rewarded. Other people realize, Oh, good. They do make changes. So systems aren’t locked in time. It’s not we did it. Yeah, we did that. Yeah. Six years ago, there it is, and you look at this pristine thing up on the top shelf that no one has ever looked at.

To me, a systems manual, if it’s going to be on paper, and think of paper as a metaphor rather than saying anyone’s going to have paper manuals these days, but if you couldn’t see grubbies all over the manual, you know it’s not being used. It’s like the best recipe books are the ones that have got bits of pastry stuck in the corner or you can see someone’s held it with an oily finger or whatever.

That’s a good recipe there. The one that’s in that beautiful book on the coffee table with the lovely pictures and, fantastic quality paper. That’s probably not a real cookbook. That’s a look at cookbook. Yes, I think we’ve all had, we’ve all had those and including the manuals. Having worked in marketing for many years, the amount of times you would build something and they’d spend so much time dotting I’s and crossing T’s and then it did sit nicely on the shelf for five years until they said we should do that again.

And I think that’s the part that I wanted to ask you about it. And how do you make it so that it is practical and being used? Cause it’s one thing to have a business owner or a CEO that says. We need to have this documented, but it’s another thing to have it actually utilized. Okay, so the first thing is, as we’ve already said, that if we have the people who use the systems involved in creating them, and I don’t mean we hand it over to them, I want to make that point very clear.

A lot of people these days will say things like, get your team to video themselves doing it. And then transcribe that and there’s your systems. Okay, at one level, you can say that works and anything is better than nothing. So if nothing was your base, you’ve just improved. But if we look at it, we’re going to realize very quickly that there are other things that aren’t in that.

Because if I’m the doer at a relatively low level, do I know anything about managing costs across that division or managing it? Head count across the company or anything else. I may not be aware of those things. All I’m saying is, here’s how I assemble this widget or here’s how I manage the invoicing.

I don’t have that higher level. So we want to involve everyone we can to build that sense of accountability. But we want to make sure that we don’t throw away the constraints, the the touch points the watch points, every Pardon me, everything that means that our company will remain, pardon me, compliant, our company will retain that success that was there before we decided to systemize everything.

Yeah, because the important thing about all of this, as you said, it is fluid to some extent. That it is going to change over time. And I think the critical parties as well, because obviously businesses change what there are very few businesses that what they’re doing, what they did five years ago is exactly the same as what they’re doing today anyway because Lots of things changes, here we are doing stuff, virtually that would have been done in person 5, 10 years ago, for sure.

And so that changes those changes and things need to happen along the way. I need to keep pace with all of that. And it’s, how do you make those, making those decisions to bring something new in and to trial that and then to realize the impact that’s having on your systems and constantly looking at where are new ways to bring efficiencies in.

That’s a challenge for businesses. Yeah. And I think managing change is always going to be a challenge. And the critical thing is that we don’t commit until we test. If I could, I’d love to step back and I was going to write another word change. So I come back to that because I don’t want to lose that. But I do want to introduce something, two things actually, the only reason why your business, my business, any other business, whether it’s the sandwich store down the corner or BHP Billiton or some other global power corporate, the only reason we can be in business is because we manage risk more effectively than our competitors in the eyes of our clients and because we achieve benefits for our clients more effectively than the competition.

So those are the only reasons we can be in business. So we can only be there because somebody considering who will I get to do this. If they look at us and our competitors, they’re going to look at it from the perspective. They’re not thinking of risk and benefit necessarily, but subconsciously those are the things guiding them.

Oh, I’ve heard bad things about them. So that’s looking at the risk picture. If you wish, I’ve heard good things about them, the benefits and so on. And there may be objective measures they use. too. So how long have they been in market? How long this how much that do they comply with this and so on. But effectively, it comes down to the risk and the benefit.

So everything we do in systems has to be about making sure that we know what the potential risks are, that we’ve worked out The ways to manage them. And there are five ways to manage risk. Everyone just talked about mitigation as if it’s the the magic word. It’s one of five. And then the next thing is that we test what we do against that to make sure that by the time our systems are implemented and they’ve been released their wild, then we know that they will work, that they will work with everything else.

We saw the impact recently of not managing that so well with CrowdStrike, where here’s a company which is right at the center of the security part of the banking world and much of the technological world. And one little thing in their release didn’t work and it put a lot of things at risk.

So if we bring that back to change, because as we were saying, we have to make sure that we keep everything up to date, we’ve got to manage change. Every time we do it, it isn’t respond. Oh, this has changed quickly do that. In the heat of the moment, you may have to do things like that. But Very quickly, you have to go back and say we’ve got past the nightmare time.

Now let’s look at it a bit more carefully and assess the risks related to that change. What do we do that manages those risks and still achieves the correct outcome? So it really everything comes back to that. Assess the risk. What can we do to manage the risk and then assess the benefit? What can we do to improve or achieve at least that risk that benefits?

Sorry. Yeah, and there’s so much change happening at the moment, isn’t there? Is it, you’ve been in this for a long time. The rate of change seems to me like it’s sped up enormously in the last couple of years. You think about it new tools, new materials, new legislation just new way people work.

Like you get a Gen X, Gen Z, Gen whatever, and a baby boomer. And I can guarantee you they have a different approach to the way they work. And we all see that in daily life and so on. We hear people talking about it everywhere and so on. So there are so many things that change and they’re not stopping.

They don’t stop changing. Like it isn’t when I was young, everything was like this. Now everything’s like this. And in the future, everything will be like that. It’s a matter of saying, things will change all the time. I remember writing a paper back in 1992, and it was looking at that change. And it was this was the time of a mini recession in Australia in 92.

And. What a lot of companies did, imagine they were a square and what they did was to say what do we have to do? We have to change. And what many of them did was to work out. The best thing to do was to turn into a triangle just using geometric shapes. And so they did everything they could to turn into a triangle.

And of course, The change wasn’t a finite change. More things happened than that one change. And so very shortly they realized, shit, this isn’t working. We’re going to have to look at something else cause we’re not being successful now. Whereas what it should have done was to open up that idea that change is a metamorphosis.

It’s constantly occurring. So that square that they thought they were was simply a statement in time of where they were at the beginning of the change period when they were looking at the awareness part of it. Yeah. And then what they should have been doing was to say what is changing and what can we do to respond to those changes as they move along.

And so if they had that flexibility rather than from A to B, if they had thought A to interim B to interim C, and we better have the mechanisms in place so we can keep on changing, in other words, make those things a variable rather than a constant, if you wish, make it so that we can change again, that’s where you start getting flexibility.

So it’s in, in small business, that sounds very technical, but in small business, what it means is that we are going through and saying, Hey guys, we think it’s going to be okay using this system this way, let’s look at it again in six months or a year or whatever it may be based on the complexity of that system or the risk involved in that.

So the higher the risk and the complexity, obviously the shorter the review cycle. Or the number of runs that you put it through before you review again and so on. But we’ve got to build in that constant review so that we don’t get along and find that, you know what? Ah, geez, our systems were great three years ago and now they don’t work at all.

And it’s catastrophic for the business. What I wanted to ask was in all of that is that you talk about change. And the biggest change that’s happened, I think, in the last few years is The idea of remote working and remote working must put more emphasis on getting not just systems right, but the communication between different points is more critical than it ever was, because before you could rely on incidental, water cooler chat as they people love to call it that doesn’t happen in a virtual environment.

Yeah, there are so many different demands that take place then, obviously. So one, If we think about us all working at a big table, imagine we’re all working. We’ve got our jobs here. There are five of us and we sit around this big table and we can work. If I want to ask you a question, I can just, Hey, Anthony, what do you think about this?

And you can give me an answer straight away. And I can make changes if I need to, I can show you my work, or you can ask to look at it and so on. And we can get that instant response as we separate into different groups. Desks in offices and so on. It gets more difficult to do that. So we over overcome that lacking of that immediacy of communication by putting in systems or tools and so on to get us there.

But then, of course, it is now a huge degree further extended by being remote. When we’re remote, what we’ve got is this Horrible thing where I can’t just get you. I can’t even just call you on the phone because we say, Oh, but surely you can just get me on the phone or we just do a zoom call, but that person may be in a zoom call with someone else.

So they may have their phone off cause they’re taking an early lunch. They could be a thousand things that are happening or they could be not working today because they didn’t feel like it or anything at all could be happening. So we’ve got to now have a whole pile of other things. When you look at the world of remote work, There’s so much more these days of having, the companies in country A and they’ve got team members in country B or C and D and E and wherever else around the world.

This globalization thingo and so on. And it works perfectly, except that now we have different challenges along the way. So people came up with things what is it Hubstaff and Time Doctor and so on where I can actually see your computer and it’ll take a screen grab every five minutes or every Timeframe I set and so on and I can see what you’re doing But now we become policemen and there are a whole pile of things that need to change And so what we try to do and we recommend our clients do is to one Change the way we give and receive work so that people are very conscious of the fact that when I give you a task, if it’s across that table we were sitting at before, you can say, Hey, John, what do you mean by this?

And you can ask me, or I can tell you, or I can ask you and make sure you understand immediately. If one of my team members is in Mexico or somewhere else, it’s a tad harder to do that. So now we have to have a job acceptance thing. We have to have a handover process that makes sure that when I give somebody, when I give that process to somebody, they can say, or that task to them, they can say, okay, I’ve got this.

You expect me to produce that. So that’s the outcome you expect. These are the resources or the tools that I have available to me. I understand the task. I can complete this competently. John, I’m accepting this. And so on. And that’s when you say, Oh good, it’s happening. What’s the time frame? Thank you.

I’ll expect it then. And so on. And it’s, we’ve got to have that. And then likewise, when we get it back from somebody, when we get the completed widget or the thing that they’re producing back from them, we have to have that acceptance process which says, okay, you’ve given me this. I asked you to do this, etc.

All of that part of it. And then And now assessing what you’ve given me and saying, yes, this is what I want. Thank you. It’s usable, so it’s something we don’t think of and I’m not trying to make it sound big and heavy, but there has to be something around about that issuing of tasks and acceptance of outcomes.

That means that now we can both rely on it. And I give you feedback. That means that if there was something that you didn’t understand, you’ll be better at it next time. And so on. So we’ve got to have that idea all the way through. And it just becomes a bigger thing in terms of monitoring because I’ve got to monitor times.

I remember way back when I was at BNP, one of the things that happened was that I had a presentation to the the highest management level and it was coming up in two weeks. And I said to one of my team members and I said, I’ll call her Mary Ann. And I said, Hey, Mary Ann, could you prepare these figures please?

And have it ready by Friday fortnight. Yes, of course. And then we got to Friday fortnight and I said, Hey, Marianne do you have that report? And she’s, Oh, John, I meant to tell you, I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance. This happened and that happened and it didn’t happen. It’s not ready. And so I stayed up all night and got it done and minimal egg on my face.

However, what I learned from that and what I’ve done ever since is I’ll have a due date for any task I give and I’ll put in a first review date. So imagine I were doing that same thing again. I would have been saying, Hey, Marianne, I’ve got to have this report ready for Friday, two weeks away. Could you here’s what it is.

Do you understand exactly what you have to do? Yes. Can you commit to doing that? Will you achieve it in time? Yes. Okay. First review date is this Friday. I’d like to show me what preparation you’ve done and what stage you’re up to then so we can assess whether you’ll be there in time. So everything we do now has a due date in the first review date.

And believe me, we have a lot less work that isn’t done on time. Yeah, there is nothing. There’s nothing more frustrating particularly in small business when you are reliant on whether it’s a, an external source or an internal source on delivering something and in a timely fashion. And for whatever reason, they’re unable to deliver that because they Don’t have the same implications as you do.

Cause you’re the one at the, the front facing, you’re the one that’s actually going to cop it. The people that are expecting the information from you not, don’t really care that it wasn’t personally your fault. That it doesn’t matter. They have a deadline and it needs to be done.

And equally though, we’ve I’ve had this discussion on BizBuds before. This whole idea of artificial deadlines and things that the other point is sometimes you can go back to them and say, look, we had planned to have this done a Friday fortnight, but in reality, because of this is this, Would it be okay if we push that out another week?

In which case, more likely, more than likely, most people will say yes, because most of those deadlines aren’t set in absolute concrete. Just made up. The other question I used to ask I remember asking it of the very highest managers there was. You’ve asked for it by Friday. Friday is the end of the work week.

As a general rule, if I give it to you on Friday, when will you be acting upon it, reviewing it or reading it or doing something with it? Now, if they said, I want to read it for the weekend over the weekend, then in that case, I’d make sure I had it by Friday. But then if they say, Oh I’ve got this thing on Monday.

And I said, all right, you can rely upon me having it there by Monday. If I have, can have it there by Friday, I will, but I will definitely have it there by Monday and so on. So it is really understanding what those deadlines are. If I were to give it to you on the day you said, when would you be using it?

Because there’s no point in me busting a gut to get it done by Friday and then you don’t use it till the following Wednesday. I could have timed myself more effectively and used the resources better and got it there by Wednesday or Tuesday or some other time. Exactly. Exactly. John, I just wanted to take things up to a very high level because I can see that there are people that are sitting there listening to this podcast.

I think this is all very interesting and I understand that, but my business is relatively small. Why do I need this in place? It’s, it’s me, it’s one or two other people. It’s not 50 people. What is it that you see as being essential and for smaller businesses to have developed.

a series of systems in place. Okay. I really think it comes down to what you’re selling. You’ve interviewed George Bryant and one of the things that George Bryant said was your customers buy what they get. They don’t buy what you sell. And so most of us, when we go into business, we have an expertise or we have a specialization of some sort.

And we think, wow, this is something people need and they will pay for. And so now we have a product, whether it’s a product or a service. And so on. Now that’s great. But if people are buying it, they expect to get the same product or the same degree of care with their service every time. So therefore consistency becomes a key part of your delivery.

Delivery consistency doesn’t come from, yeah, we’ll be right. We should just be okay with this. Just do what you do what you think you can and we’ll get there. That’s not going to get you there. You have to have something that will produce the best. the same thing every time. If it were widgets that we were producing, just using that metaphor, every widget has to be the same.

We don’t maybe have to go to six sigma, which very simply means that in one million products coming off the line, there can only be one fault. That’s what six sigma actually refers to. Most businesses don’t need that, but we do need to have a fairly high level of compliance. Which is a measure of consistency.

The example I use with people is to say, Hey what level of consistency or what level of compliance do you want with your systems? The ones which guide what you do in your business, small or big every day. And typically I’ll say, Oh, a hundred percent. And I say, is it really a hundred percent? Because, if I have a cup of coffee and say, I want one sugar in it, whether the sugar is a little bit higher, a little bit low, doesn’t make a big difference.

And I’ll never complain. Is it like that with your business? Oh yeah, probably. Okay. What’s a realistic level of compliance for you? And they’ll say, Oh yeah, probably 80, 90%. And I say let’s work on 90%. As a matter of fact, let’s work on 99 percent because when I look at it in Sydney at the airport, there are 800 landings or takeoffs every day as a general rule.

Probably more now, but 800 landings and takeoffs every day. 99 percent compliance means that we will have 8, accidents every day. Now, last time I went to, to fly, I didn’t look down the airstrip to see whether there were any crashed planes there or anything like that. I used to fly a lot more than I do now, but certainly I was quite happy knowing that if I went there, there was a pretty good chance that I’d get to the other end of the flight.

So 99 percent compliance means Eight to eight or so crashes every day, or incidents, shall we say, at Sydney Airport. So it’s the same if you parallel that in your business. If you have an 80% compliance, that means that eight out of 10 customers that you have will get what they wanted, and the other two will have something that compromises the quality or what you’ve delivered.

To have that consistency, you need to have the same way of doing it. And we talk about the one best way of doing it. That’s the title of my book which sadly hasn’t been published yet. But, if we think about it, the one best way of doing it, I speak to three people, how many best ways am I going to get?

Probably three because if you’re baking scones, I’ll make sure you do. No. Don’t do that. Make sure you, and everyone has their best way. What we want to do in our business is to make sure that the best way is actually the one best way. So we’re not compromising. We don’t say, Oh all right, you don’t have to do that.

Then we’ll just do this. What we have to do is to actually find out what the one best ways of doing something and then standardize that and make sure people are doing it. Now, everyone wants to do the right thing. Everyone. No one wakes up thinking, I’m going to go to work and leave off a couple of zeros in the accounting area.

I’m going to break something. I’m going to leave off some screws on that engine or whatever it is. And so on. No one does that. But what we do want to do is to make sure that we have a means of knowing exactly what the quality level is. what they have to produce. And so we have to have systems that will say, here is how you do it.

That’s why, when you look at a, an engineering thing, how to service your car there’ll be something that says when you’re assembling the nuts the bolts, sorry, on the head in your engine this is the order you put them in and tighten them. And this is how many Newton meters you do it initially.

And then here’s the finished tension on each nut. and so on. So everything is calculated to make sure that if you do that, the engine isn’t going to explode or it won’t crack as you assemble it and so on. So we’re looking at that all the way through. Why do small businesses need systems? You don’t if you don’t care about the outcome.

But if you want to stay in business, you want consistency of outcome. Your clients want consistency in what they buy from you, service or product. That means you need systems. How complex those systems need to be will depend upon your expertise. So that brings us to another component here. Everything we do in business is based upon some level of expertise.

So why did it go into business? Because I’ve got expertise in this or that. And so on. That’s good. And if it’s just you can do the same thing a hundred times. You watch people assemble these little things by hand in India or wherever it might be. And you’ll see people doing things and you think, how can they do it so quickly?

Because it’s the only thing they do. You get somebody else doing it. They might do it quickly too, but differently. And we don’t want that differently. So when we think about systems versus expertise in our business, we have the expertise, but now I have to capture the expertise and put it into the systems.

We build the systems to capture the expertise in the team, and then we train that expertise to other people so that we can get them doing it too. And in. Afterwards, I want to talk a little bit about how we train, but I’m not going to do it here right now. No, we’re going to, we’re going to do that. It’s a good prompt for everyone that we we to have a bit of bonus content and to access that, you’re gonna have to go to the show notes and you’ll see a little link and you’ll be able to access the the bonus content that we’ll do shortly.

But and I also want to point out that John is kindly going to have a link to an ebook 11 steps to To better sorry, to, to better systems. And that’s going to be an ebook that people can have the link to in the show notes of course. So thank you for supplying that because that’s a crucial bit for people to have.

I did want to ask you as well, when it comes to all of these all of these things and businesses getting it right and putting the systems in place and doing that. What does it look like? Because I know that’s a little bit more difficult when we’re when largely speaking. I know we’re on YouTube here, but largely speaking, we’re not being that visual with this.

So give you know, give people a bit of an idea. Is it? Is it? Is it usually just a document? Is it? How does it? How does it work? When you start building things for clients, okay? So when we’re building things for clients, when we’re capturing the systems, we capture them by talking with the client with the team.

So I’m grabbing what they do. And that all comes down to questions. The outcome is how you’ve got it. How you present it, but the what you do to capture the systems from the team is the critical bit. The questions you ask could bring out the fact that it’s not just do this, it’s do this.

And if they’ve already signed up for that, then you can do this. Otherwise you have to do that. They’re the variations and the options that come into play. But what we want to do is to make sure that we capture it in a way that is easy for people to apply, to implement, to use. And that’s the critical component.

And that comes down to how people learn. There are four learning styles. So the visual, the auditory, the read write, and the kinesthetic. If I only go with read write, we’re going to end up with things which are written down, lots and lots of words, and 25 percent of the people in the world are going to be happy with that.

And the other 75, roughly percent aren’t going to be happy with that. If we think about driving, everything goes to visual and some auditory stuff, the horns and the alarms and things like that. But we want to go to what people will use. So therefore when we capture it, we represent things in a flow chart.

Because somebody can read a flowchart with very little practice, often without any practice at all, and they can just go, All right, so we do this, then we do that. Are we using that? What’s that thing? That’s a checklist, is it? We’re using that checklist and then and so on and going on, follow the steps each step as we go.

And that’s a great way to do it because it allows us to capture all those variations and the options as we go. It doesn’t take a lot of linguistic skill, and it’s very visual. I can look at it and I can see the flow of it. So we find that’s very useful, but on top of that we overlay. Here’s a video that will give you more detail on how to assemble that widget.

Here’s a video that shows you how to do the invoice in Xero or whatever it might be. Here’s a checklist or here’s a guide that makes sure that when you’re doing this, that you check those 10 things that are critical to success. So we talk about the policy, the process, the procedure and the props are just as critical as everything else.

But so now we’ve got a flow chart which captures the flow of the process. We have what we call the props on there so you can see where they fit. So when you get to this step here, watch that video and so on, and it’ll be a short, sharp tailored video. And then we’ve got the other props that are in there that are all available to you right there.

So what this means is they’ve got to be in one place. So what we don’t want is people putting Procedures and their systems, things all over Google Drive or Dropbox or SharePoint or in my documents or wherever they are, heaven forbid, and so on. We don’t want that. What we want is to say when somebody is looking at how to do this, Everything is in the one place.

It’s right there and someone looking at this, how to do this, how to follow this process, everything they need to do it is right there. Everything. So who does it? The roles are in there. Everything is on that page. So we use, typically we’ll use Google Drive, we’ll use a SharePoint drive. Site, sorry, Google Drive to store things, SharePoint to store documents and tools, but then we’ll present it via a Google site or via a SharePoint site or Confluence or OneBrain or all the other different tools, and there are hundreds of them out there that let us make it available to people.

But again, that overriding principle, everything has to be there. On that one place. So we create a an Internet site for our clients. We publish what we do to there. We make sure all the checklists and guides and templates and everything are available through that Internet page, and that means somebody can go to that one place, that one source of truth is everyone likes to use that terminology, that one source of truth and find everything that tells them how to do it.

I think there is so much there, John, and I know we could keep talking for hours and hours on all of this. Again, a quick reminder, the 11 Steps to Better Systems ebook is going to be in the in the show notes. And we’re also going to have a special bonus bit of content that you and I are going to talk about in a moment, but people are going to need to click on the link to be able to access that on the most effective ways to train your team to use the systems because it’s all very well to have it.

But it’s another thing to train the team on it. So we’re going to get to that in a moment. Just to wrap things up. I guess that there are two questions that I wanted to ask. One is just going back to the very beginning of where you are at school for the like, did you see yourself self getting into this way?

Was your brain wired in this particular way from the beginning? Because I’ve seen some of the stuff that you do and and I admire it. I couldn’t produce it myself because my brain is not wired that way. Yeah as a child growing up in New Guinea in Rabaul, there were lots of tunnels there tunnels from the Second World War.

And we, as young kids, would be going through these tunnels and avoiding collapses and things like that. I don’t know how we weren’t killed, but nevertheless, it was good fun. And I used to come back and draw maps of the tunnels and so on, which is a bit fun because obviously it’s three dimensional and it helped me understand it more effectively.

So what are we doing today? I want to go up and I want to go down that one and see what’s there and so on. And it was really exciting doing that. And I think I’ve always had that part of me that wants to understand how it works and I don’t like inefficiencies. So when I This will sound negative, but when I saw other people explaining how to do something, and I thought, oh, they will never understand that.

It was a matter of wanting to do it more effectively. So this is not a mission I had or anything. It’s simply discovering a skill that I had. My the administrative general manager at BNP, Paul Taylor, who is a Belgian despite having that name, he’s Belgian. And he said, John, you have a particular skill.

So everyone has people skills and tasks skills. And normally they’re at one end of that spectrum. They’re people, or they’re tasked people. You have that innate ability to be either or to be both. And I think it really comes down to that. You can make the complex simple for anyone, effectively what he said.

And it is that being able to explain things so that it will be. Not just in the words of the person who’s listening, but in a way that they will understand. It’s not magic. It’s a skill. It’s a learned skill, I’m sure. But there is, I think, maybe something else in it there. Not magic, but just, a skill.

So to me, it comes back to that. I’ve always enjoyed doing it and I would always write things. It’s a matter of trying to make things work. I like puzzles. I like things like that. So I don’t know whether that does it. No, it definitely makes a whole lot of sense. So last question for you before we get into our bonus bit of content for people.

Is what is the one thing that people realize after working with you for a period of time that you wish more people would know about in advance that they’re going to get?

It’s work. It isn’t me or one of my team sitting in the back room and we come out and say, geez, we’ve finished. It was hard work. We finished. Here’s your systems. We’re actually taking it out of your head. Believe me, when we work with a client, we get two comments. One while that was a huge thing we’ve just done.

The other thing was that is a huge relief that I feel now I can feel had one fellow Eric and he was saying at the end of each day, Honestly, just the stuff we’ve captured today, I can feel the weight coming off my shoulders. And he said this five times, five days, it was a matter of feeling the weight coming off because once we’ve captured it, it’s this is the gold it’s right there in front of us.

We can all see it. And now we can show it to other people and get those people to follow it by using the training method we’re talking about, but we can get people to actually do it, which means I don’t have to be involved. It’s a bit like, it’s your aeroplane. Hey, at the moment, you’re the engine, you’re the fellow going jump jump, jump, jumping, making everything work.

The trouble is when you’re in the engine, you can’t be the pilot. And so if you want to be the pilot, you’ve got to step out of the engine because you’re holding things up being down there. And it’s really learning how to do that. So that’s what we’re doing with systems. We’re making it so that you can be the pilot in your own business rather than the engine in your business.

I love it. John. Thank you so much for being an amazing guest on on the Biz Bites program. Again, a reminder to everyone, we have the the ebook, the 11 steps to better systems linked in the show notes, and we’re also going to have a bit of bonus content, which we’re going to stay tuned for but for now, John, thank you so much for being part of the program.

It was my pleasure. I could have talked for hours. You’re lucky I didn’t. But anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it, Anthony. Thank you. It’s a topic that is not dry, is not boring. It is fundamental to business. Simple as that. If you don’t do it, you don’t have a business. Very well said. And I hope that people have got lots out of listening to this one.

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