Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

Mortgage broker Secrets, building trust and long-term client relationships. It’s something we can all learn from no matter what business you’re in. I have a fascinating discussion for you today with Eli who is going to talk not just about mortgage broking and some of the secrets behind banking and building client relationships, but also about mentoring and the value that has in building the future for your business for other people as well.

And the give back that has as well. It is a really interesting discussion that we are gonna have today, and there is something I promise you for every business thought leader to gain from this particular episode. So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and I have a very special guest. In fact, I don’t think we’ve had someone in this category on the show in the past, so I’m really interested to see where this conversation takes us. Eli, welcome to the program.

Hi Anthony.

Thanks for having me on, as I will say. And so yes, my name’s Eli and I’m a mortgage broker extraordinaire supposedly. And so I’ve been doing that for probably about 15 years, banking before that. And before that I was in small business myself, so I went across to the dark side at one stage when business was tough and banking was easier.

But that’s, could give me a good insight into sort of both, both sides of the coin and probably what has driven my business for the last 15 years.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The banking sector probably gone through some ups and downs at the moment. What’s the assessment of the banking sector given the, the global financial crisis and the cost of living crisis and all these things that have happened in the last little while?

I think banks work on the same premise. They’ve always had to retain, basically maintain their margin as best as possible, and, so they’ll put out policies to make sure that’s, that they’re competitive in their space. Not over competitive because they don’t wanna be seen as the, specifically the cheapest or whatever that implies.

But they certainly fight to keep, maintain their margins and that reflects in their credit policy, credit appetite. Obviously they’re driven also by government, policy as well. And so they’ll, I’m sure they make forward plans for any all sorts of different alternatives they might have to to do.

But at the end of the day, they give Australia’s unique in this space that banks give 70% of their profit back to the back, to their shareholders. That’s why most, a lot of people don’t complain about the banks too much because if they’re a bank shareholder, they’re making good money on their shares.

Whereas the rest of the world, you’ll find banks will only give back maybe 25, 30, 40% of their profit, and they retain the rest for their own growth and development. But anyway yeah, I think banks haven’t changed in all time. They just, they’re pretty fluid with what they do.

It is an interesting idea, isn’t it, in Australia where that it, it’s often questioned by the public, who are they more concerned about the clients or the shareholders? And that’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Because it’s fine if you’re sitting in both camps, but not everyone is. No,

I think their first I think first and foremost, it’s always been the shareholders. And then they’ll drive their policy around that to make sure that they’re obviously not losing customer share.

And we’re talking mainly about the big banks, and I’ll throw in Macquarie into there as well, because they still hold the lion’s share of of, in this case, mortgages in the Australian market. Commonwealth Bank being the largest of all. So yeah, I think the shareholders are still.

Primary focus, bottom line. You only have a look at their, this month they all released their profit taking, 4 billion, 3 billion. It’s a massive amount of money, which means they’ve, and so they haven’t actually gone backwards in the last 20 years, have they? So they’re maintaining their margins, which is what they want to do.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s an interesting position. For the public to decide where they go, because I think, we come round to the big thing, which is lending money. Because when it comes to putting money into a bank account these days, you are lucky to get very much interest.

It’s very little interest that you earn anyway. So it’s really about the lending side, which is the thing that most people think about in relation to banks these days, but. There’s a lot of alternatives now and that’s, but how real are those alternatives? What’s the breakup? Is it still the banks dominating?

In terms of share of market, yes. The banks will still dominate because they’re still the reason people are tied to the banks because they’ve got deposits, they’ve got bank accounts tied with them. The rest of the non-banking sector, which are not what they call deposit taking institutions their only re connection to those their clients is.

Generally lending. So they very rarely offer anything else. So you still have to go back to the bank to do all your daily banking needs. But that being said, with open banking and the way technology’s gone that’s obviously a lot easier these days. You don’t have, you don’t have to walk into a branch to do it, but you’re still tired.

For the most part financially to some sort of banking institution, whether you borrow from them or not. So they’ve always got a a leverage which they can, a lever they can pull to talk to those clients. But certainly non-bank lenders have taken a large slice of the mortgage industry, mortgage lending industry.

That continues to grow because the diversity of the kind of clients that the banks will do as opposed to what non-bank lenders will do, has grown. Although the banks are slightly catching up, but so there’s a market for each, but. The banks will never lose their, share, a large share of it because of their intrinsic connection through banking facilities, deposits, transactions that need to be made.

There’s all those sort of things. So it’s a close system in some ways. So

yeah it’s a challenge, isn’t it, because. The, I’ve often heard it said that one of the biggest issues for people is that the actual work that is involved in moving from one bank to another. There’s so much and there’s so little to be gained that it’s hardly worth the effort.

And that’s the biggest lever that they have to pull is the lack of inertia. As far as, most people are concerned. And look, and I could say I’m no different. Look, I was one of those people that I. When I was a kid in primary school that the Commonwealth Bank in those days offered the opportunity for you to open a bank account.

Yep. And that’s what happened as a kid. You opened a bank account there. I think my parents were still banking at the Commonwealth Bank then. I’ve pretty much been a Commonwealth Bank account holder. Then because

movement is hard. Interesting enough that those days the bank was not owned by the, it was not private bank.

It was owned by the government. The people owned it. Yes. So it was. You felt okay. That’s why they were able to go into schools and do all that sort of stuff because it wasn’t a private institution, which changed obviously many years ago. But like you, many others are still there.

They’re still banking with the Commonwealth. They, they complain. They go we don’t like this, we don’t like that. Can’t get hold of anybody but moving. Absolutely. There’s no inertia to move because what’s the difference? It’s another bank with the different rules. Same. Same outcome. You people move accounts and that when they move their lending, then they’ll tend to move everything across.

Business lets less so because there’s much more tied up in their transactional arrangements with the banks. So to move that moving a business is even less likely. So that’s why they ch and, but they’ll, but for the banks, the business accounts are much more lucrative.

Yeah. And I think that’s an interesting one because obviously a lot of the people that are listening into this program are business leaders, and that whole issue of being able to move banks for a business or even to have an alternative one.

I was talking to a colleague recently who showed me a system that he’s developed and it, and it’s more just of keeping things in different. In different pockets.

Yeah.

And we talked about the idea of setting it up in two banks, so it makes it less easy to touch things that you shouldn’t touch so that they can stay in their various buckets, which is a great concept.

And looking at where you can actually go to a new bank as a business holder to set up multi things. So you have multiple accounts. Gee, that’s hard work. They don’t make that easy.

And it’s even harder now because of even though digital technology has made everything a lot easier, but now with the, the fraud that’s going on and all the, and the ability for people to hack into accounts, the compliance regime, the security regime has tripled. So now to open I just recently moved, not bank accounts, but I just moved internet providers and website provider. And I had to change all my Microsoft and all that sort of stuff.

The amount of work. To get that moved across, double authentication. If you had the wrong password, you were locked out. It’s to the point where I think, and why am I doing this? Because it’s a nightmare. Banking much the same, to move accounts. Yeah, applying is easy, but providing all the relevant security information that we now need behind it takes time.

I I think what I find and maybe this is and I’m interested in your view, whether I’ve got a, a where I’m looking through a particular lens or not, do banks really and do many of the other institutions where you can do banking care much about small business. Really,

they all say they do.

And when they say, oh, we care about your business and blah, blah, blah, blah. Really the care of the business really comes down to the people that you’re dealing with in the bank. So the care factor is only as great, only as good as the person you’re dealing with. Even though the bank may have a banner saying, oh, we, we love small business.

But if they’ve got. Poor people in there with poor relationships, that’s where it breaks down. So having been a small business banker myself and a lot of those clients who I used to work with came with me when I became a broker because my relationship with them was strong. But then there are other bankers who just see what they do as transitory in their career path.

So they do what they have to do, tick boxes, blah, blah, blah. Do they really care about their small business clients? I don’t think so. Not only as much as they need to make sure that they, um, get repeat business, that they’re not that they’re not doing anything wrong or they don’t get, or the other way they don’t get any complaints by the, by their small business clients.

So do they really care? No.

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Get repeat business that they’re not that they’re not doing anything wrong or they don’t get, or the other way they don’t get any complaints by the, by their small business clients. So do they really care? No. The caring implies a sort of love, but there’s no love there. It’s, do we make money on you?

Yeah. Great. It’ll stay if we do, we make not make money on you. So move. We don’t care.

And is there a difference between, we talk about the, in Australia we certainly talk about the big four banks, but if you go beyond that to some of the smaller banks, and even if you go to the other alternative organizations. Do you is there a better deal there for business?

I think there’s, again, it depends. Small business has been such a variety of cases. I think we’re, I. Bigger banks for small business are good because they have the facilities, they have the technology to assist small businesses much better than smaller players.

Smaller players tend to be limited with their technology. Can’t do a wide variety of transactions, particularly if it’s overseas. It’s all case by case basis. If you’re just running a if your business is like just an owner owner operator, and it’s very simple. I. It’s just transactional.

You’re not needing much else from the bank. You can really go anywhere. And now with digital, you can just do whatever you need to do. But if your business relies on overdraft facilities, business loans overseas facilities, if you’re an importer or an export, if you’re dealing with overseas money, transactions, all that sort of bigger infrastructure stuff, then the big four unfortunately have still got that, I still own that space because it’s a legacy and that’s built into the world of finance. So for a small player to come along and try and get in there, not gonna happen, right? So everyone, the smaller guys tries niche, their markets. I would, they’re also there for clients that don’t fit the mold in terms of lending, let’s say they’re outside of the scope of what the bank will offer them, then yes, they’ll go to a smaller lender for business loans what they call non-conforming, or they might have built policies around serviceability.

So yeah, they’ll move there. But they won’t move their accounts. I’ll leave their accounts with the big, with the major and just take the lending from the small, smaller player. That answer your question? Not sure.

It’s, no, because it is an interesting thing that having been down this path a little bit and tried to invest, investigate it and what I found as well as we talked about Macquarie earlier on, and they have some specific targets that they have, and I think that’s an interesting thing about Macquarie perhaps versus some of the other banks where they are very specific about who they want as their client.

And they’re not afraid to say no. Yeah. Which is a lesson that really we should all learn in business. That, that that’s not necessarily a bad thing, knowing exactly who your client is and knowing who you say yes to, but importantly who you say no to.

Oh, absolutely. And Mac Macquarie is probably unique in that out of the bigger banks.

They’re very specific about the kind of clients they want to, they wanna bank, and if you don’t meet, and you might have a great business, but if you don’t meet that that criteria, they’ll just, they’ll politely say, look, thanks. But we’ll pass on this one. And it could be for various reasons, but, they know their lane, they wanna stick to that lane. I think it gives them better risk analysis on their client base. ’cause they’re not, haven’t got a wide, it’s not as wide as the bigger banks. Then again, the bigger banks don’t have, don’t really have that luxury in some way because they’re seen as being, part of the community finance structure. You can’t just pick and choose, guys, come on, I’ve got, as long as I service or I’ve got the facilities that you need to take me. Whereas Macquarie probably ’cause it’s a bit it’s not seen as part of the big four. Yeah, they can make their their choices a little bit more obvious.

What does that mean for you in your side of things as a broker? Does it mean that someone like you should also choose a very specific type of client, or does it mean that you’ve just also got, you can take any client, but you’ve gotta know which way to go depending on who the client is.

So as a broker, and I made for myself specifically, I made the conscious choice to stick with a certain kind of client similar to what I was already dealing with at the bank when I was there. So honestly, I don’t deal with first home buyers and I’ll tell a first home buyer. I’ll, if they’re one of my client’s kids, yeah I’ll look after them, but I don’t specifically chase that kind of business.

There are people that are brokers who do it much better than I do. And I’ll tell clients, say, look, I’m not your broker. And sometimes my approach to to lending and things like that doesn’t fit in with the client’s view of how they want things done. So I’m quite happy to say, look, I’ve got another broker.

Maybe he might be, or she might be better for what you need, but this is the way I work. So yeah, I do. Curate my clients, so to speak. ’cause that way I know who they are, they know who I am. And I think other brokers do the same in different areas. There are some brokers who specialize in first home buyers other, maybe distressed clients.

I think if you do that, it gives you a better focus on what your business is like, who. You can deal with in terms of banking or lending, the players you have to go to facilitate good outcomes for your clients. So it’s a, it’s, I think it’s a definitely a focus that I think a lot of brokers miss out, especially new ones coming on board because they wanna do everything, everything goes past their desk, they wanna do it all.

And, being a mentor to a couple of, to a number of brokers, I tell ’em no. I said do that because you need the experience, but start to develop a lane for yourself. It helps you with your marketing, helps you with your understanding of your clients if you try and keep within a specific lane of type of clients that you wanna deal with, and then that reputation comes back to you.

’cause they, oh, you go and see Fred because he’s really good on asset finance. You don’t go to anybody else. So to build your own brand as well, I think.

Yeah. And I agree. I think it’s a principle in business that is often taught, but very little, very often ignored. That whole idea of niching is such an important thing.

And I imagine particularly in a space like yours, we’ve just touched on it, that they’ve got, we’ve got the major banks, but there’s so many other lending options. Out there. And that’s just on the lending side. That alone, the banking side and then keeping it on top of who’s doing what and got what facilities available, including the electronic options and things like actually staying on top of what is in a particular area.

That’s, a massive task within itself, isn’t it?

My inbox floods over every morning with all the new players, new policies. Keeping up with it is I. Becoming a bit of a nightmare. So you’ll ne you, you’ll never know everything about everything even in your own space, no matter how niche you are.

You’ll never know everything. And so having good relationships with particular bank institutions, BDMs, and that is always helpful. And I still do it now. Even though I’ve been doing this for a long time, I think, oh, I’m not sure about that one. Or I’ll key I’ll email my BDM. And sometimes they don’t even know which is a problem.

So yeah, look, it’s, there’s such a, ’cause information is so easy to. Transport. It just, it hits you every day like a wave. So you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta wade through that. And again, if you’re niched, you can get rid of two thirds of it. ’cause it doesn’t relate to you, right? So you’re only concentrating the stuff that that matters.

And that’s much easier to remember. But you’ve then gotta have a system really where you start to put those changes somewhere that you, so you can remember where they are. But it’s not fa, it’s not far safe either. But this information overload is a massive issue I think for brokers, especially if you’re new and nothing.

Gee, it’s n it’s a nightmare.

Yeah. Because I think the volume of options is huge, isn’t it, these days. That’s the truth of it. If, if I come to you and say, okay, I’d like to borrow X amount of money I. What are my options? Like the list is a mile long really, isn’t it?

So you, you can short circuit that, that list because, so yeah, you’ve come to me and said, okay, I need X. So my first response would be, why? Y do you need X? What are you going, what are you? It’s a bit like a financial planner. You’ve gotta get beyond the initial need to understand what the purpose is, what the future looks like for what you wanna do.

And that will actually quite narrow then sometimes the people that you need to go to, because if you need to be able to plan, not just for what you need today, but to make sure that it’s flexible enough for what you wanna do. That it meet your goals down the track. So my conversations and teach that to my mentees as well have a full conversation.

Not about the rate, not about how much they wanna borrow, but understand why your client is doing what they’re doing, what’s the driver. ’cause quite often the drivers might be. Might, you might be a great driver and say, do you really want, need to do this at this point? So you need to question and push back on your clients sometimes as well.

So to make sure they’re thinking in the right way. ’cause sometimes it’s an emotional decision. Oh, that’s it, we’re selling up, we’re doing, or I’m buying, or whatever. And it’s an emotional decision. It’s not always the wisest decision. So I think brokers worth their salt, need to make that discovery.

Piece prime in their initial discussions because whatever comes outta that, it will be the loan, the amount, the product, the rate that, that’s all a consequence of your discussion. But there are many brokers that say, yep, no problems. I’ll find you a deal. Boom. That’s it. That doesn’t take into account really what might be a more important principle for why the client’s doing what they’re doing.

Yeah.

Intrigued about your profession because there’s a lot that I think other business people can learn from it because it is super, super competitive and I think it’s super competitive on three different levels because there is the option of, okay, there are multiple brokers. How do you choose one?

Then there’s also the option of, ah. Look, the big banks particularly do plenty of advertising. So why don’t I go directly to them? And then there’s the third option, which is, look, I’ll just sc the internet and find someone new myself. So in that kind of environment, how do you actually stand out in the first place?

Oh, that’s a good, that’s a good question, Anthony. Thank you. Standing out. So again, it comes down, I think to if, first of all, if you differentiate yourself by as we said before, niche that already sets you apart from all the other brokers that you need to compete with. You need to build a reputation about with clients, about what you do and how you do it and the outcomes you provide, and that builds your brand again, to differentiate you from somebody else.

Your biggest referral source is always going to be. People you’ve dealt with, the people they know. Because generally, I think maybe first home buyers, because they’re out, they’re technologically savvy, they’ll go on the internet and go and they’ll look at Google reviews, who’s got four out of five or five out of five?

I. Especially if their friends haven’t done any lending, but if their friends have all done some sort of lending before the first, per, the first people they’re gonna ask is them, because they’re people of trust. So if they trust their friends, they’ll certainly try their friend’s recommendation first.

They may follow it up with a Google search to see if the people that have been recommended are adequate or if they’ve got other favorable reviews which is no different than it was 20 years ago before Google. You go to mom and dad and say who’s the guy at the bank that I have to talk to?

Or when the brokers came through, you’d ask someone who’d used a broker? I haven’t used one before. ’cause they’re only new. Who do I go to? And so that is probably, I would say 85% of a broker’s business has to come from that because you’ve already got a trust level that starts when someone’s already knows who you are or something about you or being recommended.

By somebody else to you. The rest is all marketing, which is, funnel stuff. Put market, advertise, promise the world, I’ve got the cheapest rates, I’ve got this, I’ve got that, and you will get a certain volume of people through that. The quality, I, I would question the quality of the, of those kind of referrals that come through, but experience.

Will dictate and you will learn where to get your referral network. It’s not to say you don’t go and advertise or network. I think networking is important and you need to decide what kind of networking you’re doing as well. That’s more for referral partners rather than direct to clients. Think ref building, building a business in this industry is hard because you have to have, you have to have the track record to get the, brand up and running, and you can’t get a track record until someone actually refers you a loan. So you’ve gotta start at probably at the bottom end and try and get, as and do, and try and get as many client deals across the table and slowly shuffle through the till you finally start building a rapport with those clients.

Because otherwise why are you different to the guy down the road? No. It’s really just a case. Talk to the people you know, your family, your friends. Everybody know, even network meetings when I go there they always ask, so who’s your target market? Who do you want us to refer you to?

And I go, okay, before we start, there’s 20 people in the room. Put their hands up. You’ve got a mortgage. So 20, quite often. 20 outta 20 will put their hands on ’em and go, I don’t need to go any further. I’ve got 20 people right here, and you all know me, so sure, refer me your business. But how about.

Referring me your own business first, get to know what I do so that if you do wanna refer me to somebody else, you actually know how I work. Otherwise, I’m just a stranger to you that does loans. So I, I push hard saying, let me do the business for you first before you start referring me business.

But then you’re confident. So using the opportunity to plug your trade, especially if you’re going out to and meeting people. Don’t ask for a referral business. So the guy in front of you is the first deal you need to do. Or at least try and do. And that will measure, that’ll give you a measure of success to start building beyond that.

If you’ve if you’ve had a loan for at least a year, that being able to move to somewhere else, if that’s, the process. If you go, if. If you conduct a review and say listen, you can get a better deal by going over here. That’s possible, isn’t it? It’s not that, it’s not that you’re locked in for the length of the loan unless

you’ve got a fixed rate facility, which Australia’s an outlier in that because most other countries, when you get a loan, they’re all fixed rates.

So if you take a loan in America, it’s a fixed rate for 30 years. They’re not variable. So Australia’s a bit of an outlier in some of that, where we do most of our lending’s all variable. So yes, you can move and it’s easier saying I’m moving and move your loan. But then I ask the, I always ask the question, why are we moving?

Oh, better rate. I’m going, how much is it gonna save you? Is it worth one? Is it worth your time and effort? And two, is there a real saving in, in, in doing that? Just for, a small, and so I get a lot, we all get, as brokers saying, get me a better deal. What does that actually look like?

Are you having issues with your bank? Are you paying too much? I have. Look at your rate. Okay. It may be a small, maybe five, 10 basis points off where the cheapest bank is. But how long have you been with these guys? That’s, that’s important as well. People don’t realize that history does is important.

With banking institutions ’cause they see a consistency in what you’ve been doing. And quite often, sometimes that’s a contradiction sometimes and quite often. But what I’m trying to say is that don’t disregard your length of time with a particular institution that. In case there’s a decision to be made and it’s line ball a good reputation with the bank you’ve been dealing with can sometimes sway the bank to say, you know what?

We’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna give you the funding. Even though it doesn’t quite meet our criteria, because we’ve seen what you’ve been doing for the last 10 years with us. And that’s not always gonna be a deal winner, but it’s, it certainly puts weight on your side of the ledger.

Whereas you’re going to a new bank, it’s all lovey Doy. Oh, we love to bring it across. But we don’t like what you’ve done over here. Sorry. We can’t take you.

Yeah. And. I think on the back of all of that, what you are saying there, even from someone new’s coming to you and looking to change, is that there’s a de a large degree of service that needs to be offered by mortgage brokers.

But what fascinates me and is that from what I’ve observed, is that it’s an industry where there’s a lot of service When someone first walks in the door. Then it’s just thanks for coming. We’ll just hope that you sit there for the next 5, 10, 20 years and you will possibly call me if you decide you wanna change, you wanna move house or something like that.

But otherwise we’ll just take the little cut that we get and move on to the new client. Yeah.

So if, so there are two kinds of brokers in that space, there’s the ones that you’ve just described that all lovey-dovey in the first six to 12 months. And then the service level falls away because what?

What do I need to call the client for? Really? I. Their loan’s done and dusted. Then there’s the other half of brokering where is, yes, that’s true, but you need to stay in touch with your clients and technology makes it so much easier now to be able to put out feelers to your client base to see how they’re tra traveling.

Now we don’t actually lot, a lot of banks don’t give us line of sight of what their what their rates or appliance rates are. Some do. And there’s called interest creep where banks won’t always give them the full discount and they’ll all of a sudden, five years later, the margin between what they’ve started with and what’s available now is massive.

But sometimes you don’t get to see that. So that’s, I again, important. Even doing a once a year annual review, send me your. Statement because I want have a look to make sure that one, that you are in a competitive, you’ve got a competitive rate and two gives you an opportunity to talk to you about what are your plans for tomorrow or next week, next year.

They changed since we spoke. It’s a bit of engagement. Now the clients must say, look, no, it’s all good. Thanks very much. Tick box. Go away. Doesn’t matter. The first thing they’re gonna do is if they need something, they’re gonna, they’re gonna call you. Not the last broker they just spoke to 10 minutes ago who’s asked those same questions and you think hang on.

Eli hasn’t called me in freaking three years, not even an email. You know what, I’m, I’ve got no reason to stay with him. Brokers, he is offering me good, good service and change. Thanks very much. I’m outta here. And the broker only gets to know when he gets to know, they’re saying your loan has been discharged.

So for brokers is important because they’re. I don’t know if but we’ve got two parts of our business. One is the upfront commissions, which we make, but more importantly is there’s what’s called trailing commissions. So I’m not sure if you’re aware of what that is. So we get a very small percentage of what the outstanding balance is paid to us every month.

Now, the reason we get paid that is ’cause we’re meant to be servicing our clients. So we’re still getting paid for doing that, but most brokers or a lot of brokers don’t. That builds. That’s your superannuation, that’s your legacy. If you start getting leakage at the bottom, which means you’ve gotta keep replacing it, you’re not gonna grow your book.

All you’re gonna do is keep the book just about where it is, right? So the idea is to one, grow that that trailing book, because that’s really where the value of your business is in dollar terms. You can get up in the morning and know you’re making X amount for the year because it’s just gonna come in.

But retaining that. Is doubly important just as important as doing a new loan. ’cause for every loan that goes out the door, you’ve gotta rewrite another one. So easier to keep the one you’ve got than try and chase a new one. So it’s, yeah, it’s important that brokers do. Keep and stay. Again, it depends on their book as well.

If you’ve got a large commercial book for versus a residential book it would, might be slightly different approach. But certainly as again, with technology today, there is no excuse, no reason why you would not be outreaching to your clients at least once every six every 90 days. Just a quick email, and trigger points like birthdays, anniversaries, if you’ve done your job, you’ve got all that information.

It might seem a bit, oh yeah, this is just autogenerated when it comes through them, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a touch point, people know it’s just auto generated by the system still. It’s a touch point. Might trigger something. Oh, got in touch with Eli because A, B, and C. Yeah,

it’s, it, ’cause it’s fascinates me that, as someone in the early days of me starting a business, I did a lot of the networking and between that and other things I seem to automatically get on the list of a whole lot of mortgage brokers over the years.

And consistently what happens is, with the interest rates announcement comes out every month, you get, swamped with. The standard newsletters telling me what what I could read about in the news anyway. Yeah. And it’s just seems to be a very, consistent line that people tread.

And so that’s why I’m fascinated by the idea of standing out in your profession, because I think there’s a lot for other people to learn, is saying that you’re a very service on the, at the front end. You’re a very service dominated one. There is a degree of automation, as you say, that can happen there, but offering real service in between is ultimately what’s gonna make you grow even better.

And that’s. That’s something that a lot of businesses forget about. Not just only mortgage

brokers. No, absolutely. So you’ve gotta just rehashing what they’re, what clients can already read in the news. The rates have gone up, the economy’s crap, the inflation’s up. You’ve gotta put all that together and say.

Because I understand you. ’cause if you’ve done the right thing in the beginning, you’ve got good notes on what they’re, what the client does, whether they’re in business, whether they’re self-employed and maybe, or sorry, working PAYG in a particular industry. If you’ve got those notes and things change your approach to what you speak to them about, whether it’s by email, phone call, text, or whatever will be more pertinent, if you can then relate that to their own.

Situation. So if you’re dealing with a small business client. And rates have, changed and they can read all that and inflation’s gone up. So it, the reach out is about, look, this has changed. You and I both know that. Has that affected your business? Do you need some support in what you currently got?

Or maybe you’ve, what you’re currently looking at, so you are offering more than just, I’ll get you a better rate. You actually are actually, I’m just trying to get some interest in there. Their life and what’s going on. They might be a c you know, they might be a lawyer on high on, on high income, but they might, the lawyer’s got four investment properties.

He knows that the land tax has gone through the roof. You reach out and say, look, you and I both know land tax has gone through the roof. What have you done or what are you thinking of doing to maybe mitigate some of that? Have you spoken to a financial planner about maybe having a look at your structure and seeing.

What can be done about, so it’s not all by always about offering something that you can do for them, but, and that’s why networking is important to have the right net professionals in your network. Not so much for them to refer you business, but for you to be able to leverage off their expertise for your clients.

So when you reach out to them, that’s the service part. I’m not worried about your loan. What I’m worried about is are you structured right? Have you got the right plans in place? Have you spoken to a financial planner? If you haven’t, I’ve got two or three that I trust really well. Might be worthwhile talking to you ’cause you’ve got four properties and you’ve had them for a while and you haven’t done anything with them.

I’m just concerned that might, that you haven’t prepared yourself for what’s coming down the track. Do you wanna talk to somebody or have you, oh, are you already talking to somebody? And that’s great. Terrific. Move on. Using your networking partners, and I call ’em partners because I put ’em on my, I will put them on my website as partners with me.

Not because I want to get business from them, but I wanna offer their services to my clients to help them improve their circumstances. That doesn’t always translate into a business for me. It doesn’t matter. What it translates is into respecting who I am. And they think, you know what? The next person they speak to about maybe doing some boring, now you gotta go and see Ali.

You just gotta go and see him. Why? Because you just gotta have to see him. So that’s the mindset you put you’re trying to build that there’s a high level of trust in your relationship beyond the initial transaction.

It’s. It’s such an important thing, building that trust and and I like what you’re saying.

There’s a lot for other businesses to learn from, your approach and what makes you stand out. I wanted to touch on one other area just before we wrap things up because you mentioned it earlier and I a couple of times and I’m fascinated by it. Yeah. So you’re obviously mentoring a number of people.

Tell me how do you actually get into that space in the first place, and what does that actually, what does that actually look like and, and ultimately what’s the benefit to you?

Actually we actually, by accident, I actually met another broker at a networking meeting, which unusual, you don’t intend to go to networking meetings where there’s two of you.

But in this case there was we got on fairly well and we hooked up on LinkedIn as you do. And then. She was a mentor with a particular firm and that particular firm was looking for new mentors ’cause their business was growing. So I thought I can do that. Lemme see what I mean I’ve got all this stuff in my head.

I’d like to get it out give back to the industry because I see what Paul. Brokering does to clients. It’s like you get you get to hear them because I dealt with client with broker X and they absolutely screwed up my loan, right? So you, you get the driftwood that comes outta that.

So to be able to so I thought here’s a way I’m gonna be able to give back to the industry by trying to help. New to industry brokers developed their skills, developed their ethos, their ethics help them with deal scenarios, information. So yeah, I, I spoke with the woman who was, who owned it in Sydney and, after a couple of chats and meetings said, yep, no problem. We’ve got plenty of, we’ve got a few to already start giving you. And so that’s what I do. I, we deal, we, I speak to them sometimes, especially new ones. They’ll ring me three, four times a week, sometimes three, four times a day. How do I do this?

How do I, what should I do? The joy out of what you’re do doing that is, yeah. Initially it’s what have I done here? I’ve just adopted, two, four year olds. But what happens is over time is they get more confident, they get more expertise at what they do. And actually, I feel that, that help.

I feel good because I think you’re good. You’ve grown and like your own kids. You, when you see your kids grow and they’re successful. You take some kudos in that, right? So make, it’s always about the giver. The giver gets more than the person who gives who receives.

’cause the giver receives that sort of good feeling about what they’ve done. So yeah. It’s, I realize how much, when I do that with the with mentees, I actually realize how much I actually know that I don’t, that I don’t remember knowing. ’cause unless you actually use it, you don’t remember it.

But it just comes flooding out and I, and then at the end of the conversation go, I should have, I’m glad I remembered that. ’cause I didn’t know actually. You remembered it, knew it. No, it’s a it’s good fun, but also actually you get to weed out the rubbish because sometimes you get.

Guys, girls are coming in and you think, why are you being a broker? And so we have our initial first in interview about how the relationship’s gonna work. And I give feedback to the owner of the business. I’m going, look, this one’s gonna be finished in six weeks. I’m telling you now. How do you know that?

I just know. And lo and behold, six weeks later. They’re gone. But that’s just, I think that’s a good thing. ’cause you don’t you need to it’s a weeding out process. So you want people getting into the industry who know what they’re doing, passionate about what they do and will improve the industry in the whole, which improves our reputation as brokers.

Look, 85% of all lendings done by brokers now, so we can’t be doing it that bad a job.

I love it. And it’s so you can hear the joy that you get by being a mentor from the way you talk about it. And I think that in itself is a good way of describing how much benefit there is to you, is there is or clearly to the people who are who you are mentoring.

Just to wrap things up, a question that I like to ask all my guests on the program is what’s the aha moment? That people have when they come to work with you?

The aha moment? When I haven’t, the aha moment comes when, why haven’t you asked me how much money I want? I’ll go through that process of, tell me the Anthony story.

That’s my first question to all clients. Going back to an old, television personality. He used to ask his invitees on his show. That was always his first question. Tell me the Anthony story and then just sit back and let the floodgates open. And by 20 minutes later, we haven’t even talked about anything financial.

I’ve, I’ve learned about them, their history, much like what we’ve done a little bit today. Yeah. And by the time we get to the point where, okay, let’s talk about what we’re gonna be doing. I’m going, oh, okay. It’s a trust moment. That’s, I think for them it’s a, they feel relieved that the person they’re talking to actually cares about who they are, what they do, and why they want to do it.

But it’s not a transaction for them. That’s the aha moment. And that can take 20 minutes, depends.

Relationships. Relationships are everything. And it starts. From the moment you first meet people, and I love the approach that you take to that. And and I thank you for being so open about, the different choices and the different options that are available to people because I think there’s a lot for people to learn, not just about specifically about where to go for.

And what to look at in terms of mortgage brokers, but even generally about how you approach being a service related business. And I think that’s what being a thought leader is all about. And I appreciate you being part of the program,

Anthony. Thanks very much for having me on. And it’s been a, it’s been an eyeopener for me as well.

Thank you and thank you everyone for listening in. And of course, don’t forget to check out the show notes for all the information on how to get in touch with Eli, as well as other information about the show. And we hope that you will of course, hit the button to subscribe. We look forward to your company next time on this bytes for thought leaders.

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

We have a manager readiness crisis. Why Leadership development is failing your business. We are joined today by expert JD Walter, and let me tell you thought leaders, you are setting your managers up for failure. It is a fact that employees don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers. Join us for this very special and important episode because traditional leadership models are most definitely broken, and there’s a critical gap that’s costing your business.

We are going to talk about management as a skill set on its own and separate it from technical expertise. It is a whole different way of thinking. You’re gonna get some very practical strategies to develop your managers. And to truly drive some peak performance. We are also going to talk about leadership itself and the human side of business success.

This is a great episode, some amazing insights, and a very special offer at the end of the podcast. So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. You will be a little bit familiar with my guest today. He appeared on a panel podcast that we aired just a couple of weeks back. Jd, welcome to the program. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Anthony. It’s great to.

See you again and come on your show one more time. So thanks.

Look, it’s an absolute pleasure and I think there’s a big topic that we’re gonna discuss today about manager readiness, and I think it’s been, as you like to say, a topic that’s been neglected a little bit. But before we get into that, why don’t you refresh everyone’s memories and tell everyone a little bit more about yourself.

Sure. So my name is JD Walter. I own a company called Walteric. We’re a small learning workforce, learning and development company. We focus primarily on human skills development and what I. I got into this backwards, I started out really studying and looking at and experiencing organizations from that structural, systematic perspective.

So all of the administrative and management sciences were in my wheelhouse. Over the years I came to realize that you, it’s an incomplete equation if you really wanna understand how to achieve peak performance in an organization. And that got me thinking more about the human aspect. And what I mean by that is humans not as assets or resources in an organization, but.

Humans as human beings and all of the fun stuff that goes into us being these psychological creatures, these emotional creatures and how we bring our lives with us to work every day and we take our work home with us every night and all of the things that swirl around us and how they influence and impact our behavior.

And so it caught my attention years ago when somebody said work life balance. And I was like, man, I really have an issue with this. Because I don’t feel like I, I can segment. And as I thought more about human experience, I realized there’s no way to compartmentalize this. There’s just life, right?

And we live it. And there’s a number of things that we do in it. It really got me focused in on this human piece. And so now. What I focus on, we can do technical training, but what we really like to do is get in the room with small groups and mix it up over a couple of days and really dive deep into some of these competencies that are just absolutely critical for not just success in an organization, but success in life. So things like leadership and emotional intelligence and strategic thinking.

These are all important things that I wanna get into in a moment, but I just want to start off as well with the idea that you alluded to there about both about work life balance and this idea that you can, that it’s all just life.

Because, we have this I don’t know if you’ve seen it, there’s a show on Apple TV at the moment called severance and the whole idea based around this, that you could go to work and completely forget that your. Outside life and vice versa. And. But, and that’s a, it really is based on a principle that many had for so long, wasn’t it, that when you come to work, you should leave all your personal life behind.

It’s just not possible to do that. And particularly post COVID where this whole work from home idea has become so. Prominent and I, in fact, I just read recently a survey which suggested that the whole push to get people to come back into the office is flawed because most people want to spend 60 to 70% of their time still working from home it’s. This work-life balance idea is an outdated idea.

I, yeah, I think as a concept I think we’re starting to recognize its outmoded ness, right? But it’s never been realistic in that we can actually do this, that we could actually achieve it. I think if you go back to the industrial age and you think about work and life where you’re standing in a factory and you’re, you’re hammering steel or you’re, putting fenders on cars, et cetera, those things are easy to leave behind because there is no work to take home.

We live in an age now, knowledge work, predominates and or dominates and. So we all have the ability to take our work home with us because it’s not just, I’m gonna take, I’m gonna go home and write this report that I didn’t have time to write today. I think things are getting so fused together that it’s hard to distinguish the thoughts, right?

So the thoughts about how do I better connect with these people that I’m working with? So that we have a better work experience so that, fill in the blank, right? Reduce stress, less absenteeism, all those things that we’re shooting for. Those principles apply right across the board in terms of our lives.

And so it, I stopped thinking about work skills and, soft skills and hard skills and I just, I think about human skills and what are, there’s, so the way I think about it now is there’s job skills. I’m an accountant. This is how I use Excel. Here’s a p and l. These are the things that you have to do.

And then there’s. Life skills or human skills. It’s all the stuff that makes us wonderful creatures, but it’s also all the things that is incredibly vital for us to be able to. Get along.

Yeah. I think that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s more and more these days that differentiation of your own human experience is going to become more and more prevalent

Otherwise, you may as well just be it, a robot yourself and whilst that was a term that was used in the past without much real meaning to it. Nowadays with the advent of ai, it’s. Realistic that, everyone is just, can just be the same if all you do is utilize the same as everybody else.

So in using your own human experience is absolutely vital.

Yeah. Going back to your show idea, I haven’t watched any of the episodes, but the premise is interesting. It also just scares the crap out of me. That, that, that’s an appealing, now it’s a great, I’m not, this is not a comment on the show, but rather the idea that idea could be appealing.

I would, I would be so scared of missing, I. Those moments, right? All of those things that are required from our past that inform our present. And if you’re bifurcating that and you’re taking a, an entire, a major chunk of your life and you’re saying, okay we’re putting this behind closed doors, and you have no access to these memories until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

I, it feels like there’s gonna be a lot of repeated mistakes. It feels like we’re not gonna learn as fast. We’re not gonna grow and develop to the level that I think we all aspire to. And I don’t so ultimately our contribution, not just at work, but our contribution in life becomes grossly diminished, right?

Because we don’t have the totality of this lived experience to draw from. And I, that scares me because I think I’m constantly going back through these, through the hard drive in my head to find all those nuggets and to remember things and to think through. I go back and do my own like case studies.

I go back to experiences where. I am only now just realizing how poorly I behaved in a particular moment, and this could be 20 years ago. But I go back and I think about it because I was there. I know all the details. I experienced it. I was the one that behaved and I think through. The scenarios, like, how could I have done that differently?

Because these are the same things that we do in workshops. This is exact same conversations that I’m gonna have with participants trying to figure out what our ideal is and how we wanna move forward. Developing ourselves. And yeah, that I. That bums me out that would even be, I would not sign up for that.

I was sitting

here thinking as you were talking, going. The ironic thing about it is this, first of all, it only came on by complete accident last night when I was watching it, I was watching something else on Apple and I was distracted putting some dishes away, whatever I was doing, and automatically another show came on and this came on.

And the ironic thing about it is. That if I hadn’t have let it play, and I hadn’t have remembered it, if we had have been, in exactly as the show says, I had have severed my personal life from my work life, we wouldn’t be able to talk about it this morning anyway yeah. So it’s a it’s an interesting irony with it.

Anyway, but I think what, getting back to the whole idea of what you are focusing on is around around managers and. The whole idea that they’re being undervalued at the moment, and I think this is an important thing for listeners of the podcast to understand because you are either the manager or you are the CEO business owner who has managers underneath them, and whichever you are.

You’re still wanting them to encourage them to be thought leaders. And so if we are not doing that, if we are not valuing them, then that’s at real risk and that pushes everyone down. So tell me a little bit more about how you’ve recognized that this is a, this is an issue in the first place.

Like so many things something pops up and just catches my attention. And as I ruminate on it longer and longer I start to feel something about it. And this is it goes back to every single one of those. Posters and LinkedIn posts and wherever else you find them. That, and this is a distillation of all of them, but it’s managers direct and leaders inspire.

And that just chaffs me because when you get down to it, leadership is a, quality management is a function. There are, we don’t go out and we don’t hire leaders. We want people that have leadership qualities, but we don’t hire a position called leader. We hire an executive, a director, a division manager, maybe a team lead, but they’re still a manager or a supervisor.

So this is the first, and I think the biggest thing, this is what really got me thinking about managers, was. What I think was, I call this the fallacy of leadership, and it’s not that leadership itself is a fallacy. It’s that leadership is at best synonymous with management, and at worst, a replacement for it.

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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 podcast done for you.com au. Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites.

What I think was, I call this the fallacy of leadership, and it’s not that leadership itself is a fallacy.

It’s that leadership is at best synonymous with management. At worst, a replacement for it. And so when I think about organizations, and I think about the organizations that I’ve been in and what I hear from employees constantly, and we know all the data, right? 85% of employees don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers, right?

We talk about what do employees, I’ve done tons of focus groups with employees. What do they want? They want to see equity and workload distribution. I. And part of the reason is because they feel like they’re overworked and they observe others not. They see the distribution of special projects and they look at those special projects as I.

An opportunity to develop, to stretch and to be recognized and they don’t get the opportunity. So there’s something about workload distribution, there’s something about time management. Do we create space so that individual contributors can do deep work? Or coming out of COVID, are we jamming everybody with, constant back to back meetings And there’s all kinds of stuff that we can talk about, how detrimental that is.

But, so it was the starting point was this idea of leadership. And management and of, and I was all in on leadership and I started studying it. I do did a lot of guest lectures on leadership and championing the idea, but it started to come up as a competition or this binary that I thought was incredibly disruptive.

So what I’m talking about here is we set managers up as the evil empire. We didn’t like ’em in the first place. Now we hate ’em. So that’s strike number one against managers. But what I’ve also observed is that organizations aren’t developing managers and here’s a typical scenario, right Anthony, you are the top technician in our organization.

So I want you to be a manager. Have fun. Hold on. Management is its own skillset. Yes. The knowledge and expertise that you have as a technician helps you manage that group of work. We have to remember that a manager’s job in every organization, and people won’t like these words, but I use them deliberately.

Is command and control of production, executive sets, visions and strategies managers take that strategy and operationalize it so that the technicians can actually go complete the tasks, right? So this command and control over production is the direct frontline oversight for this thing called production.

We’ve gone through all these different epochs of management where, we started out, maybe it was more systematic looks at organizations. We got into standardization at some point. And you draw the string out. And and these are approaches to improving management. I think leadership is an approach to improving management.

I don’t think it is a competing idea. And to go back to why are managers under fire? So first of all, just like everybody else, they’re under stress. If they don’t have resilience developed through, some aspect of their existence, whether it’s in their personal life or their professional life, they don’t have the self-awareness to behave the way individual contributors or executives are gonna expect them to behave.

When their work, their individual contributors are under stress. They don’t have the awareness, the social awareness to recognize that something’s happening in this group of individuals. And then to be able to employ authentic empathy and to bring them into a conversation to understand what is actually going on in the moment so that the manager could potentially do something about it.

So they’re not developed as, they don’t have a manager skillset. They’re not trained in leadership. The competency of leadership, they are, overlooked as a vital component of the organization. And there’s this sort of, this binary that I talked about. So all of these things come together and have put a premium on, kinda banging on managers.

And so I. I wanna champion them because I’ve seen too many managers just being beaten down in organizations. These are good people that are trying to do good things and they’re struggling on their days. And when that fear takes over, the default is to white knuckle your environment, and that’s what micromanagement is.

And nothing kills the human experience inside of an organization, particularly for individual contributors. When. Somebody’s trying to micromanage every aspect of their work existence.

There’s so many things in what you’ve just been talking about that I think back even on my observations of different organizations, and you’ve got this concept of lead by example, which I think is, I.

Embedded in this concept that someone’s been thrust into being a manager and the only thing that they know about managing is to keep doing what they’re doing, which is not really leading. It might work in a sports environment. It might be that, if you’re in a, if you’re on the football field and you are leading it, and you are the leader of a team, that the best way to lead is by you, up your enthusiasm.

You get in there and you. You make the tackles, you lead the attack, whatever it might be, that can be leading by example, but the sports field isn’t necessarily always relevant to the business field. And getting in there and just doing and getting your hands dirty and doing all that stuff isn’t always the answer.

If you’re a manager, I.

I love that analogy because it makes me think of divisions of labor. There’s a reason that we have specialization of labor within an organization. There’s a reason that there are individual contributors, managers, and executives. Everybody plays a very specific function.

If you go and at all each of those levels, they’re not homogenous, right? Individual contributors don’t do the exact same thing. So take take the football pitch and say, I’m the center. You’re a wing and somebody else is a defender. Okay? We all have three very specific roles to play.

Now. We can be a leader in terms of positive attitude grit, determination, celebrating each other, lifting our teammates up, all of those things. But we can’t do anybody else’s job. So part of being a manager. Is creating that environment where somebody can do their job to be able to be the individual contributors that most employees wanna be.

It requires some level of autonomy, trust, right? And a willingness to accept. Failure at least at a small scale, right? Because those are perfect learning opportunities and failure is the impetus for innovation. So if we if I’m an individual contributor and I don’t have at least the autonomy to control my immediate production environment, my tasks, if I don’t have some control over that.

I it’s hard for me to connect to it. I don’t, there’s no way for me to own it, right? I’m just stamping out widgets, and that’s not what we’re looking for in employees. In a modern world, what we’re looking for is strategic thinkers. We’re looking for problem solvers. We’re looking for innovators, even at the lowest level in an organization, those individuals are critical.

You do this work on a daily basis. You are the one. In the best position to say, listen, there’s 27 extra keystrokes here that we can get rid of. There are four forms that we don’t have to fill out anymore. We don’t have to wet sign this. You know what, this doesn’t need to go through four people. I. In the routing chain, just one approval is all we need, X, Y, and Z.

But those are the ones that are observing that work on a daily basis, and so they’re in the best position to be able to say how it can be innovated. Now, those innovations are smaller in scale from an organizational perspective. But they’re vital because if you don’t hit efficiency at this ground level, you’ll never ev never be able to get to efficiency at the macro level.

So the manager needs to be prepared to grant that autonomy and to some degree, push back when someone above them. Doesn’t want, doesn’t appreciate that. Doesn’t like that. Hey, you’re giving them too much space. Nope. Have to. I use this example a lot. So what I think of is not the perfect manager, but like an ideal manager is somebody that says, you know what, Anthony?

I. I got a special project and I want you to work on it with Susan, right? I want you to show her how to do this. You’ve done it a hundred times, but I don’t wanna keep coming to you. You can’t be the only one that we rely on. And then I need to be able to turn around and say to my boss, potentially an executive, Hey, I know you want that in 24 hours, but I need 48, and here’s why.

It’s because I need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of this opportunity to develop someone, right? And then I need to be able to distribute the workload more equitably going forward. So this is critical. So you’ve gotta gimme 48 hours and that manager has to have the confidence and the trust, right?

They need all of that emotional intelligence to be able to establish that relationship with their their boss, potentially an executive. So that there’s some faith that what the manager is asking for, right? The default is you want 48 hours. What? Why are you being lazy? No, I’m not being lazy.

I’m trying to take advantage of this opportunity. And this opportunity actually benefits the organization as a whole. So that manager really needs to be able to, in the military we call this top cover, protect the people that are under them. At all costs, right? I always say this, and we talk about this in leadership, and I’m, and I know you’ve talked about it as well, Anthony, right?

I always take the blame and I never take the credit. If I’m the manager, I always take the blame. I never take the credit. You do not get to talk smack about my people. If something went wrong, that’s my failure. You wanna talk trash about somebody, you talk about me. If something went well, they did it. I’m not here to be getting gold stars.

I’m here to take the beatings and do the translation and protect these folks so that they can be the peak performers that they ultimately wanna be in an organization. So managers play this sort of vital function of keeping the organization out of the way of production.

Yeah, it’s it’s so important that people understand that differentiation in the role that managers play.

And, also understand, I think equally that there are people that don’t want that responsibility, that they’re really happy being the technician. They’re really happy showing up every day because ultimately, whether you are. A worker, a manager, or the owner CEO, director, whatever you wanna call yourself.

You still need joy in what you do. And that’s at the heart of it. We talk particularly small business owners will have heard a lot about for various various people talking about business owner joy. And it is true that you need that and you need to be aware, even as a manager that the, that you need to have it, that the people working underneath you need to have it as well, because otherwise this whole thing doesn’t function at all.

Yeah. I don’t, I know we’ll all go to work for a paycheck and that’s fine. ’cause that’s what this wage labor exchange is all about. Now I get it. There’s work that we can be more emotionally connected to our levels of engagement or higher and work that we’re inspired by or that we see some greater benefit in.

But at the end of the day. We all wanna take advantage of these experiences to become better, right? To grow in some way. So when we show up at work, it’s not just about grinding out eight hours and stamping out widgets. There’s something needs to occur in that experience. Where I’m growing as an individual because my growth, my development, that’s what allow, that will ultimately be what allows me to continue to contribute.

And you’re absolutely right, just because somebody I. It doesn’t wanna take on a manager role. It doesn’t make ’em a bad employee, doesn’t mean we need to ostracize them. We need to celebrate them. You need senior technicians, right? That’s why you have technical leads, right? Like you take the senior most technician and you say, make sure that all the other technicians.

Have the level of skillset that we need, that they’re apprised of changes right in the way we do the work. If there’s a policy shift, something about the market, materials have changed, et cetera. So everybody is brought into how the work is being done and then the junior folks are being developed.

So you’re taking, and this is that apprentice, journeyman, master schema, right? So we always wanna have those more junior folks that are at the very front end of becoming a technician, a skilled technician. And you need those senior folks to guide them on that process and. I think you don’t wanna lose them.

The milit, the US military, sorry. I was in the US Navy. So the US military did something the US Navy did something while I was on active duty, and that was, we took the master chief, that’s the senior level of an enlisted and they split it and they said, okay, if you wanna be, if you want to continue to be a technician, you will stay in your rating.

I was a Jo. That was a public affairs person, so I could have been a Jo Master Chief, but I never would’ve been put in a command master chief role, right? I wasn’t qualified. I could only take over as the senior enlisted of let’s say a public affairs shop, a broadcasting unit, armed forces network, those sorts of things.

But if I wanted to actually be a command master chief and have insight and, contribution to how the command was run and the decisions of the command staff, then I had to declare that I would leave my rating behind. I would get a new designation as a cm. It was a CMD, so a command master chief. I went to school and then those were the billets I filled.

So I would take on a command master chief. So this is the difference between being a technician and a manager at the most senior levels. It’s funny that I don’t see enough organizations doing this very thing, creating a band for senior technicians and then saying, okay, and then these are the managers, and how do those two then interact with each other?

’cause that’s very important to figure out as well.

Yeah, and it’s interesting too, isn’t it? Because if you start thinking about it and going, management is its own own skillset. We always think of managers as being senior, but if you start thinking about managers as being a role to coordinate and do things, it’s just a different role and it’s not necessarily a question of seniority.

The seniority happens at the owner CEO level. That’s definitely a level of authority because they’re the people charged with the full responsibility and the strategy. But at those levels, if you start thinking about it differently. You understand that the roles are there to support one another?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I was 18 and I was the assistant manager of a franchise pizza chain here in the United States, and I. My job was I made pizzas but I didn’t deliver ’em. I didn’t really, I answered the phones if nobody else was around, but I didn’t usually answer the phones. But what my job was to make sure we were staffed with enough.

I. Folks every night. So I had to know volumes of, throughput over the course of the week. I had to know when our busy hours were, when our lean hours were. I had to know when we had more deliveries versus carryout. I had to have all of, so I had to have the workforce, I had to have the supplies, so I had to get the orders in and the orders incorrectly.

So we always had enough, but not so much that we had excessive waste. I had to make sure the facility was. Always clean, safe, and then up to all of the codes. So the roles that I the work that I did, the things that I spent the most of my time on were all this other stuff, back office stuff every now and then, during the heavy loads, I was out there making pizzas right, and talking to customers but the primary function wasn’t being the greatest pizza maker.

Using our analogy here, it wasn’t about being the best technician. It was about all of the things that allow all the other folks that are working in that shop to be the best that they could be, the best drivers, the best customer service, the best beat to makers. So back to your point, I think were, there was probably a clearer idea of what a manager was in the industrial age.

It was a little easier to. Place people on an assembly line and then have these rovers that were managers who were just like coming by and doing spot checks, making sure quality was there and seeing if anybody was having any issues. That, so it was more of a utility player. But I think in like a, go back to this idea of being, here in the modern age and knowledge work, it’s a little bit different because it’s not about problem solving as part of it.

But we’re actually asking for innovation. So I’m taking one of the most junior people. I had an intern a couple years ago and I said, and I was putting together, I was doing a bunch of learning and development programs for supervisors in this particular organization. So I would do this lunch and learn.

So I took my intern and I said, I want you to watch me do one of these. I am gonna walk you through how I create the content. I’m gonna give you the template, the formula, and I’m gonna show you how I present the content. You’re gonna sit through one of these, and then you are gonna go make one, and then in a couple of months you’re gonna present one.

And so I. Took him and I put him imme almost immediately. I was getting him developed ready. So to your point about managers now, I could have very easily taken that intern and said, okay, now this is how we’re gonna manage a series of contracts where we have p and l requirements for the company where we have service level agreements for our customers.

And where we have individuals that need to do the work. So to your point, I could have very easily taken a college intern and said, I’m gonna put you in a management internship and we’re gonna learn how to manage these projects, these contracts. And I think we would do very well if we recognize that managers.

Management, to your point, is a skillset, a competency, all to its own. And we started treating managers as if that competency was incredibly vital to the organization because it is.

I wanna shift gears a little bit for this last part of the podcast. If I can to talk the other side of things, which is leadership.

So we’ve talked a lot about managers. And that functionality there, and particularly this program focuses on thought leadership. What’s your definition of the idea then of leadership? If we’ve got managers performing a function that isn’t necessarily leadership? It can be what actually is the definition of leadership then?

There’s a thousand of them out there. As Anthony, my definition is leadership is a set of qualities that you bring to bear on the work that you’re performing. And it doesn’t matter if I’m the pizza guy, I can be a leader if I’m the, I’m on the soccer pitch, I can be a leader. So leadership is actually available right to everyone at every level all the time.

What leadership? I think the focus on it as an acumen or a competency that we can develop, and I don’t want to say perfect, but look for that continuous improvement is that leadership’s about creating space for others to be successful. So it’s about seeing how other people are feeling. It’s about recognizing where there are obstacles and challenges.

There’s, figuring out how to navigate difficult situations and have tough conversations and engage in productive conflict. So those are the sort of the things, the skills or the, that we or the traits of leadership. But leadership is really just about. Being, I think being thoughtful, recognizing that I am a part of a collective, however big or small that is, that everybody here is incredibly important.

So these ideas like inclusivity, celebrating diversity, championing diversity because of its absolute value to the decision making process, making sure that people are included. An example, is I’m hosting a meeting and it’s in a remote platform, like we’re doing this podcast and there’s 10 people and two people are dominating the conversation.

Or worse, we’re in a hybrid situation where there’s five people in the room and there’s another five people on a digital call. Part of leadership is recognizing there’s a distinction in that environment. And that it’s not the same experience for everybody. And so there has to be an accommodation.

And so demonstrating leadership is something as simple as Hey, Anthony hasn’t had a chance to chime in. He’s been on the call. This last however long we’ve been together. Anthony, what do you think about this? I’d really like to hear from you. And that’s bringing people in.

So leadership can be as simple as. Always making sure the door stays open till everybody’s through.

And by the way, the Be I wanna break in there and just say one of the best examples of how you can realize if you are doing that successfully or not. ’cause I observed this recently where I attended a particular meeting that’s happens on a regular basis with a regular group of people.

It’s a, and on this one particular occasion, one person who is usually quite a dominant voice. Was not able to attend and. I observed how different the dynamic was. Now that’s not a criticism of that individual. It was just more that other people were able to have a say and then the nature of the meeting was quite different without that dynamic in the room.

And I think that’s such an important thing to be aware of, is that some people by nature are a bit more dominant in a conversation and other people like to sit back and listen and you have to actively prompt them in order to get their. Opinion out. And that, as you say, I think is what leadership is about, is recognizing that you have those differentiations in a particular setting.

Yeah, and that’s such a great point because we can’t default to, Hey Anthony, what do you think? Anthony might need more time. And that’s really what we have to recognize is that, you know what, Anthony’s gonna take about 20 minutes to really get into this, and then he’ll be ready to talk. So I need to make sure that I’m mindful of how I’m navigating this conversation so that I’m not putting people off, but I’m not letting them feel excluded either.

I think at the end of the day. Leadership, if I distilled it down to just a small set of words, is leadership is helping others to see that they belong. And that my way of saying that for years has been to create space for other people to be successful. But that’s really what it comes down to, and that has to happen at every single level of an organization.

That behavior has to be modeled from the top down and the bottom up. It has to be. That is the culture that we’re trying to build in organizations. It is a leadership culture. We can talk about all the other things in inclusive culture, a diverse culture et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, what we’re really trying to build is a leadership culture where everybody is taking on the responsibility and owning the opportunity to be a contributor to making sure that everybody else feels valued.

Such an important idea. I. And what I was sitting here thinking about as well was that the extension of leadership is what we talk about here, which is thought leadership, which is exactly what you’ve demonstrated, in, in the way that we’ve talked about it. Because it is about using your experiences, thinking about I.

How those, that interpretation of all of that can have an influence on others. And that’s exactly what thought leadership is. And I, I appreciate that’s what you’ve been demonstrating here in this particular podcast. And in talking about management I. We are just about out of time, but I do want to a allow you to talk a little bit about an offer that I know you have coming up for for people who are listening into the program. ’cause I think it’s an important one for people. Again, I, I’ve kept using the word important in this episode, but I really do believe that. This is an an area that business has forgotten. Business is moving so quickly, so at the moment, the rate of change is, almost daily and leaving all of this behind is at your own peril. So talk to me about what the offer is that you’ve got.

For everything that we talked about today, Anthony I was trying to figure out a way simply to get engaged with organizations and have a very meaningful and productive conversation.

The last thing I wanna do is go in and browbeat anybody. Because just like you said, change is occurring every day. Everybody that owns a business, everybody that’s an executive, everybody that’s a director or even a manager, they know the fire that they’re under. The rate of change is accelerating in an exponential pace, and none of us can keep up.

And what I did is I created a, I just call it a manager readiness assessment. It takes maybe 15, 20 minutes to complete. It’s got a bunch of questions. But it’s designed to see, to get an organization thinking about their managers and have they done enough and are they doing enough to make sure that they can be successful because they are a critical function in the organization and it’s not designed to be the, light shining from the heavens. It’s just designed to be a trigger to be a little bit more deliberate in the thinking about, are our managers ready? And if they’re not, what impact are they having on the organization? So for all of your listeners go to my website, wal trick.com, click let’s chat. Send me a note.

Just mention that you heard this on this show. And what I’ll do is I’ll send you a link to the assessment. You complete that assessment. We’ll schedule a two hour complimentary scoping session with you and your stakeholders, and then I’ll take all of that information. I’ll wrap it up and I’ll send you back a complimentary report that’ll just give you about five things that you can do as an organization immediately without any external assistance.

You don’t have to spend a bunch of money to improve the manager experience and ultimately help you move your organization closer to the ideal of peak performance. And it does a couple of things. I’m happy to have, I love having the conversations, but I’m also, I’m interested in how we’re perceiving our organizations.

I know how I look into an organization and see it, and I’m really excited to hear how others are seeing them and experiencing. I. The organizations from inside and so yeah, reach out to me via the website. Let’s chat mention this episode. I will send you the link, complete the survey or the assessment.

We’ll schedule a session and then I will provide you a report for things that you can do to improve manager readiness in your organization without spending another dime.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. And of course, we will include all the details in the show notes. Just to wrap things up, a question that I love to ask my guests, what’s the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

I think at the end of the day, it’s that. The, we’ve put such a premium on systems, processes, technologies. That we’ve forgotten about humans and the absolute magic that humans can create if we just give them some space, some freedom and some safety to do that. I think we’re so focused on, oh my God, it’s gotta be right, and catastrophic failure, rapid pace of change and tolerance for risk and all of these things, it’s gone over the edge.

And I think what we can find is that investing broadly in workforce development will pay bigger dividends than any other investment in your organization faster, specifically if you don’t do anything else with your workforce, but you just focus on that management band and ensuring they’re ready again without spending a ton of cash, you’ll see monumental changes.

Very quickly. And it’s that moment where they realize oh, if I just give people freedom to bring their A game, by golly, we’ll do it. ’cause we’re inclined to do it. We’re not lazy as a species. We’re not, we don’t stand back on our heels. We’re not looking for the easy way out. We are predisposed as human beings to roll up our sleeves and get in there and get greasy.

And get the work done. And what stops us most of the time is some obstacle that has become. Muted or it’s invisible to us in the organization. And so we constantly look I need a new ERP, I need a new CMS, I need a piece of ai. I, and we go out and we spend so much money in organizations on things that don’t fundamentally move the needle.

They make a bit of an improvement. But they don’t make the kind of improvement that we could make in our organizations if we actually put a premium on developing those folks that have come to this opportunity, called our organization, and are willing to give their very best effort on behalf of us. And so I think that’s the moment, and I love it when I see it, and I love to celebrate it because it’s.

The, because it changes people’s lives. This is the, let me be soft and squishy for a moment, because what it does at the end of the day is those employees, they have a better experience. Their lives are improved because this work experience has been improved. It’s such a big part of our lives and we so undersell the negative impact that work can have on our mental wellness.

What a. Wonderful way to end what’s been a fascinating discussion. And I really appreciate all of the insights, jd. It’s been a absolute pleasure talking to you and I know we’re gonna have more conversations into the future, but thank you so much for being part of Biz Bites for thought leaders.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Anthony, for having me, and I appreciate everybody listening.

And a reminder to everyone listening in all the details in the show notes about how to get in touch with jd. And of course, don’t forget to hit subscribe, so you never miss an episode of Biz Buys for thought leaders.

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

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Thought leadership. What does it really mean? Why does it matter to your business? With Chris McNeil, Chris is going to delve into that whole idea of what thought leadership really means and why it should make a difference to your business. Normally, on Biz Bites for thought leaders, we talk to thought leaders who are really talking about their expertise in their space.

Well, in this particular case, Chris’s space is on being a thought leader itself. And what it really takes and why. Particularly in an age of ai, it is more important than ever to exercise your creativity and what the impact it is on a business. He’s got plenty of examples, plenty of insights. This is truly an episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders that you cannot miss.

It is going to be defining for your business, so stay tuned.

Well, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and what a great episode we’ve got coming up because we’re gonna talk all things thought leadership. That’s what you should be talking on it. We’re gonna be talking about it with someone else who has his own podcast, but is also, uh, very much in the thought leadership space.

Uh, Chris, welcome to the program.

Great to be here. Anthony

and Chris, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone just to kick things off.

Sure. Um, I’m Chris McNeil. I. And I am the developer of what’s called the Thought Process spelled funny, T-H-A-U-T, of Strategic Thought Leadership, which is a methodology for building a model of thought leadership designed to lead an audience or a market segment to a specific way of thinking that’s empowering for them.

And that cast the leader or the business or the client business in the best possible light at the same time. So it’s a method of what I call strategic thought leadership, doing it very consciously and intentionally with a method.

I really want to delve into lots of parts of that and to talk a lot about thought leadership.

And uh, I think in order to do that in a moment, I wanna delve a little bit into what’s led you to this position. But just to start things off, what do you define as thought leadership?

Well, when I first heard and saw the term Anthony, it was very intriguing to me because I took it literally. It’s about leading thought and I was thinking, well, that fits me perfectly.

Having a background in neurolinguistic programming or NLP, which is all about leading thought to specific places, uh, systems thinking, which is, um, often has to do with leading thought to new places, different perspectives. Um, so I was surprised to learn that the most common perception. Was a thought leader is someone who has a large social media presence and is known for their expertise.

So I went about bringing it more to the definition I thought it had as list lead thinking, and that means, um, it’s a little tricky because then we’re thinking about thinking. Which, which is a bit meta. Yeah. Um, but it becomes actually understandable and it lends a lot of power to the process when you realize that you are building blocks by which you can understand the thinking of an audience or market segment.

Um, both in terms of how a competitors position their. Competitive products or services and pitch ’em to the public. And in terms of how the public perceives that segment. And it’s interesting when those things don’t match up that provides opportunities.

Yeah, absolutely. It does, doesn’t it? It that’s the, that’s the, uh, intriguing thing about it is that, uh, without.

Thinking about the thinking, then you just keep going along as is standard and mm-hmm. Also, you don’t give an opportunity to yourself, to yourself to put it out there. I think that’s one of the critical things about being a thought leader, uh, to me, is that if you are, if you have the thoughts, but you don’t share them with anyone, then are you really a thought leader?

Absolutely. I mean, you have to share ’em and you have to know both, uh, what I call baseline audience thinking. What are the standard mental models or belief systems about your category that, that people tend to hold? And sometimes it’s so fundamental to the perception. It’s like asking a fish what’s slaughter like?

Hmm. People just live within their assumptions and when they become deep and widespread, they don’t even notice ’em anymore. This just how the world is. But when you learn to uproot and question the assumptions behind a field, you, in every case that I’ve found so far, they’re not fully functional. Just, it’s how human thinking works.

It’s how language works. You know, we connect things. And then maybe through generations, maybe through a few product cycles, we accept this is the way of doing things and we don’t question it anymore, but the world changes. So our models grow stale. So I see it as a necessary component of innovation. Yeah.

For, and, and you know, Peter Drucker said there’s only two things that create results in business marketing. I. And innovation. And to me, strategic thought leadership is where they meet because it’s innovation in marketing, it’s innovation in messaging, uh, and even if you have a really powerful innovation in a product or service category, something that delivers much more benefit, it’s easy to just anticipate that the public will automatically appreciate it.

But in almost every case, you need to bring the public up to speed and get them to embrace it by leading them to a better way of perceiving your category so they can fully appreciate your innovation. And it’s extremely effective when it is designed from the point of view of the recipient. That’s kind of the magic of it, and that’s what we miss in business.

You know, one of my. Um, favorite gurus in marketing’s Jay Abraham, and he said something that impacted me powerfully. I picked up many years ago, and I said, in almost every business, the business person falls in love with his or her product or service or business or company, when really you should fall in love with the customer in the market segment.

Uh, and I was influenced largely, um, by a methodology called the Vanguard Method out of the uk, and it’s a systems thinking based consulting program developed by gentleman I’ve become friends with named John Seton’s. Brilliant man. Written a number of books on it and, and they go into businesses and they create breakthroughs.

They will reduce expenses by 30 or 40% and increase profits by 30 or 40% in a matter of months, and it’s How do they do that? Well, one way they do it, one essential part of it is they take the leaders of the business to the point of contact with the customer. And study the transaction point. And John told me recently that almost every business person initially goes to the front lines and they wanna study their employee.

He’s like, no, we’re here to study the customer. I. What’s the purpose of your business in customer terms, not your lingo, and then how many ways does your business, your business’s mental models, your ways of doing things create friction for the customer getting what they want? And it changes minds because they see it.

And you know, my innovation in this was to take it to marketing and ask if we consider all of our media part of the business. What if we went and studied it from the customer point of view to remove friction as well, because then you’re asking the question, what do people want in their pre-purchase research?

What do they want to learn? What empowerment do they need to feel like they’re making a smart decision? Or how can we help them extract more of what’s important to them? More value in our category by leading them to better ways of using it, better ways of perceiving it, smarter ways of making decision, elevating it to new and higher purposes.

And what this does is it makes our content way more magnetic because it’s so empowering and it’s so customer focused. And it’s about giving, not giving, but you know, by giving. We earn their attention. By earning their attention. We earn their purchases when they’re ready.

It’s so powerful what you’ve just said, and it really speaks to the heart of marketing, because too often the businesses that you’re doing marketing for, and as someone who’s, you know, done a lot of marketing over the years, that too often the business leaders.

Fall back on what they want, what they like, rather than what actually suits the clients. And it is a big area where things go wrong. I mean, even I, I think I’ve used this example before, perhaps on the podcast, but you know, I recall doing a branding exercise with, uh, a particular organization and. This is just an example of where it goes astray.

And we did all of the research came up with the colors, everything that suited the audience. And one particular manager said, no, I like everything in fluorescent pink. And just went ahead and did everything in fluorescent pink because that was her favorite color. And it was like, but you are not the audience.

You know, it’s not about what you like, it is about what resonates with your audience and doesn’t mean matter whether it’s you’re talking about color or content or any number of other things. It is ha, your audience has to be first. I. And mm-hmm. Too often businesses I think lose sight of that very simple idea that that’s the reason they exist is because of their audience.

Not just because they thought this would be a good idea and want to thrust it on people. The audience has to think that it’s a great idea.

Absolutely. And you know, it’s our job in doing strategic thought leadership. If we’re offering something that truly benefits people better than the current choices, to help them perceive why and perceive how to get that benefit from it.

And you know, in almost every category there is value left on the table. That customers could extract and businesses could benefit from because customers aren’t getting as much value as they could with leadership. Here’s how you use it. Here’s something you didn’t think of. You know, here’s, here’s a ca, here’s a way it fits into your life you probably didn’t imagine before.

That can help you at a higher level. Uh, you were thinking it was for this purpose, but actually if you use it for this other purpose, it’ll solve problems you didn’t even consider connecting to this category. And those are the kind of eye-opening kind of statements when you back them up with fully built out models that are truly empowering.

It also solves a problem for us as business people because it gives a coherence and a sense of purpose and a sense of organization to the content that we create. It makes it much easier. We have a plan. It’s well organized around customer thinking and what I’ve seen that, that prevents that, um, we were talking about earlier about, you know, standard thinking.

This is how it’s always been done.

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and what I’ve seen that, that prevents that, um, we were talking about earlier about, you know, standard thinking. This is how it’s always been done, but there’s also social media, which has a lot of. Positive benefits. Absolutely. Um, but when you start following all the thought leaders in your category, everybody starts sounding alike.

And, and I encourage clients to step away enough to gather information from fresh sources and analyze it in different ways. We call it audience attunement, to discover unmet values in a category and stale mental models that are ripe for improvement. And we create these graphs like um, XY graphs of the market, landscape of value satisfaction and, and all the current offerings in the category.

And then visually you see a gap. Oh wow. Nobody has led them to connect it this way. There’s an opportunity for thought leadership. And to me that’s the beauty of this way of thinking is when you learn to see the world in terms of assumptions, mental models and values, marketplaces, that way there’s an abundance of opportunity everywhere you look.

I. Because human thinking is, uh, faulty by default because of the, um, problems with language. Language doesn’t capture reality fully, but it’s our way that our filters through which we see reality. We don’t operate on the world directly. We operate on our maps of the world or models of the world that we create largely with language, which is, you know, a problem in humankind.

And it’s a great opportunity for us as strategic thought leaders.

It’s so much to unpack in everything you’ve said, but I I, I want to pick you up on two things.

Okay.

The idea, and, and it goes back to the definition. The really interesting thing is, is you’ve, I. I talked quite a lot about being an original thinker.

Mm-hmm. And there’s two parts to thought leadership and the one part is, is having the courage to think differently. Yes. And put it out there, which goes hand in hand with the second part of the equation, which is your ability to actually lead. And to me there’s a bit of a, um. I, I, I guess it’s a, I don’t know whether it’s a peer pressure or it’s, there, there seems to be a, a, um, communal pressure to repress both of those ideas because people want to fall back to what’s always been done or what everybody else is doing.

So even those people, as you say, that are trying. To have, uh, new thoughts are often restricted by what they’ve already learned and seen and a need to, uh, fall back to somebody else and which p. Parks into that second idea of do they have the courage to actually lead, to actually put themselves out there and tell people about it and be seen as the new leader?

Because there’s always this whole idea of do we, um, are we worthwhile or not? And so I’m, I’m interested in what and what you and what your take on both of those concepts are and piecing it all together as a thought leader and what it truly means.

That’s a fantastic set of questions, and there’s a few questions in there, but let’s see if I can cover all that territory.

What you said is part of the reason that I use a coaching and consulting model. Training model as well as opposed to an agency model is what I found was doing marketing through an agency model worked extremely well for certain businesses, but a lot of business owners would see it is down the hierarchy, you know, and, and, uh, someone the just delegate to here’s some money, go get us some leads.

When to do strategic thought leadership. You have to engage the thinking of the leadership. ’cause really gotta come from them. And my job is to help pull it out of them. But that means it’s not just the external thought leadership of the campaign and the organization of the thinking and the components, the building blocks of it that we create, like the, the backstory report and defining thought leadership positions a certain way, understanding audience thinking a certain way.

Um. You know, creating what we call position papers, which are kind of the internal manifesta manifestos. There’s our position, here’s what people think, now here’s you wanna lead them to, here’s a library of talking points that undermines the old thinking and supports a new thinking. That’s external thought leadership.

Then all the media we create from that, and it might live in a form of a manifesto, in a themed podcast or a book or ebook. Um, and, and there’s lots of ways to do that. Then there’s internal strategic thought leadership, and I see it as an authentic path to self-mastery, because if you are going to commit to leadership, that requires stretching yourself, and that’s one thing I love about it, is it calls us to draw upon what I’ve heard called hidden human reserves, the unlimited capacity.

Within every human levels and levels we were, we’re not even aware of that we can tap into if we confidently call upon ourselves to draw resources, to cross the bridge to new territory for a strong enough reason. And that’s why I do a lot of work with values, because if you can elicit a leader’s values then and higher values to me are the ones that unify.

And they’re about service and contribution. And the good news is in entrepreneurship, service and contribution lead to profits ’cause you’re making a difference. When you act in alignment with your values, you’re happy. When your behavior matches your highest values, then you feel good. It’s when we don’t act in accordance with our values.

So to me, that’s a big piece of it. And I approach it like a sports psychologist with an athlete where it’s not like counseling psychology where we wanna relive a troubled childhood and analyze these things. Now this is about performance psychology. How do we model the characteristics of peak performers and integrate those?

Of being able to step into the zone automatically when we need to, to be able to call upon reserves of high level confidence, how to get into the zone of focus, a cocoon of concentration, and, and these are skills, mental skills that I think are all the more important in this day of distraction through devices and apps that are designed to consume our attention and keep us engaged.

So these. Companies can sell ads by keeping us on their app for longer and things like that. But it creates a, a real attention economy that if you can manage your attention and manage your focus and manage your state and step into that confident self, then you can use this as a path to self evolution as well as to making a difference in making a lot of profits in the marketplace.

Yeah. Does that answer

your question?

It it, it, it does, it definitely does. And I think, um, it, it, it’s, to me, the, one of the keys in thought leadership is that recognition of the fact that we all process things differently. We make sense of things differently. Mm-hmm. What tends to happen is. That people are afraid to speak up and to have those different thoughts.

I, I, I recall learning this many years ago when I was involved in, in, uh, with a company that does market research. Mm-hmm. And one of the first things I observed and, uh, of the, when you do market research in a group environment, is that they’ll always be a leader. Suddenly, and whatever anyone says, they’ll start nodding their head and saying, yes, that’s what I was going to say.

And, and you find that Uhhuh, any kind of, um, any kind of environment where you do that, I mean, you know, if, if anyone listening out there, if you think about it in a work environment, in a family environment, how often do you say something or someone says something and then you, you sort of notice around the room that people say, oh yes, that’s what I was going to say.

The question is, were they really going to say that? Were they really going to say that in that way? It’s very interesting in market research that before you actually get in a group environment, people to, uh, to discuss a particular topic, whatever it is they’re looking at, to get them to write it down on a bit of paper first and to find out what their original thoughts are.

Because we are so influenced by those people around us and our, and our desire to comply. And that’s what suppresses thought leadership. And you spoke about innovation earlier on. What fascinates me about innovation is most people attach innovation to, uh, technology. And that innovation mm-hmm. Has to be based on some new piece of tech that is doing something.

But in fact, innovation is very much about what is human nature. Mm-hmm. In the way that we have original ways that we think about things and make sense of anything that we observe. It’s not necessarily the same as the next person. And it’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about being different. That then allows you to have different original thoughts in other areas.

Absolutely. And thoughts worth sharing of others. You know, and I, I mentioned values and this, understanding the values of your audience and your market segment that the attach to your category. You know, it’s people like to go see a band play, you know, it’s fun. Would be a value. For instance, you know, people buy the latest technology, maybe competitiveness is a value.

People that are paying to learn a skill might be achievement. You know, everybody’s a little different in values, but usually there’s prominent values and when you can find, there’s areas that your segment doesn’t quite satisfy because. Of their, the outdated thinking of the segment. Well, there’s your opportunity.

I’m such a contrarian thinker. I’ve never had that issue because I’ve always been one to see the need for something different. Um, but I, I have seen it in others, um, where there’s a pull towards the familiar, strongest human desire according to gsam, um, is the pull to the familiar. So I relate this kind of, um, boldness in leadership, you know, both to managing your state, if you can get yourself in the right state of confident daringness, you know, and we’re not asking people to give up everything and start all over in a new field.

Not that kind of daringness, but the daringness in breaking patterns. It’s the most important human attribute in business is creativity. According to Success Magazine and Eat Magazine, they both had cover stories on that, especially in this day of artificial intelligence. I. Where repetitive things and things that depend on organizing past knowledge in this knowledge economy can be done now very effectively by ai, much faster than humans.

But what AI doesn’t have is the ability to access the creative state to make a break from the past. And that’s why I, um, sometimes describe creativity is how different your behavior is from what AI could predict. Even given all the data on your past behavior, how different is it? How creative is it? And then you run into the belief systems that inhibit creativity.

Oh, I’m not creative because my second grade music teacher told me I wasn’t creative. Because people think of creativity is just, if you’re a painter, a musician, then you’re a creative. Hmm, but doesn’t creativity apply to every human endeavor? It’s, it’s your ability to see outside of patterns and to access that creative state, and which means, um, and, and the work I do, I, I try to encourage clients to make things really efficient with ai, where they can, where it doesn’t inhibit creating fantastic products and services, but to free up time to reflect.

You know, people often access creativity when they’re moving, like walking a dog, like that’s when I get my ideas. So I use an app called Rev where I can wear decent quality earbuds and record my ideas on the fly. But then I’ll use AI to help me organize those ideas. I. They’re the creative ideas and use the AI for the organization.

So it’s creating these workflows where you had create space for creativity, but then you kind of create a production line where you then organize that creativity into models and chunk it into action steps and bring it to life. You know? So I see it like an assembly line, but, but I think when people remember that there’s been times in really everyone’s life where they’ve been.

A bold leader where they’ve had to act boldly in the moment, maybe to step in to save a child from walking in the road in front of a car, you know? Or, or maybe, um, when they came up with an idea out of the blue that worked and they just trusted that would work. But what we aren’t always good at is recognizing how many of these.

Uh, peak experiences of creativity and creative leadership we’ve got in our personal history that we can grab a hold of, grab a hold of that feeling and bring it more fully to life and apply it on a regular basis to make life better for ourselves and for our customers and our families and those around us.

You know, and to me that’s living life belongs to the creative. You know, it’s, if you’re creative, you’re close to life. Now musicians tend to be pretty happy people because they’re close to life. They’re always in the creative mode, you know? But we can bring that to business too, and we should,

it’s fascinating when you talk about, uh, musicians, uh, artists, and even comedians.

I. You hear them talking or see them demonstrating through music, through artworks, all of these things that have happened to them. And you think, why do all these things happen to these people? And nothing happens to us, but in fact it is happening to us. We are just not being observant of it and not providing an outlet to push it out there.

And I think that is a, a huge thing that increasingly we have to learn from. The creative arts field because if in an age where AI is being used more and more to stand out, you actually need to embrace that creative energy.

Absolutely. Uh, it’s a strategic asset the way I see it, and in, in teams and organizations.

It’s finding space for people to go into that creative mode, giving permission. I. To come up with outlandish ideas. The more outlandish, the better, because we don’t wanna put limits on that stage of the creative process. I think Walt Disney had it right? Not the company, the man he, he was famed for combining creativity and business acumen together.

Forget the starving artist, you know, archetype. You know, he was this very successful business person who’s also extremely creative. I. And his creative process that he ended up calling Imagineering involved three separate rooms. One was for the dreamer, where he’d go in and dream up futures with no limits visual process.

Uh, another one was the realist, where he’d take those dreams and break them down into steps. So that first step has a high probability of success, and his animators actually. In that room of the realist created storyboarding by taking the cartoons and breaking them into scenes and putting them on a wall so that you could see each chunk of the journey.

Mm-hmm. That’s where storyboarding came from, but that’s a kinesthetic piece where you take the visual dream or break it into action steps that you can do. And then the third room was the critic was, which is an auditory strategy where you’re thinking, what’s the criteria for this? Market category, what are the things we want in this and how does our product compare to that?

Does it match up here, here, here, and here? Um, and then in, in Disney’s model, it was somebody viewing the movie from a critic’s perspective and critiquing it. Whatever the critic came up with, then they would take that and bring it to the dream room. So Disney’s innovation was in separating these states so each could unfold completely without being contaminated by the other.

And that’s where people mess up as they try to do all the states at once. Instead of taking time to go as deeply into the creative state and not have it tied so tightly to the production state, for instance, and, and like Disney, create a workflow out of the different states that you bring your dreams to life.

It is, it’s so interesting because, uh, you know, I’ve worked with a number of businesses and organizations over the years, and when you go into them and you pull people out and you offer them a rare opportunity for them to be creative, and where you say nothing, there’s no such thing as a bad idea here.

Let’s throw them all out there and see mm-hmm. Where it goes. It’s such, um, it’s such a rare thing that happens in, in an organization and it’s amazing what can start getting into the flow and how rejuvenated people can feel. I. Then you have to take them through that, you know, that real exercise later on to say, well, what’s realistic?

What, what is going to work within the bounds of which, you know, it might be budget, it might be the structure of the organization. There are any number of things which bring it back down, which doesn’t mean that, that you can’t work towards that bigger idea because now you’ve got an idea of, of. Of where you could go.

And I think that is something that businesses very rarely do, take themselves out of it, allow that freedom to. Generate new ideas and to see where that could take the business. And yet that is exactly how businesses thrive in an environment where we all have competitors, where there’s always someone doing something very similar to what you are doing.

So you have to be out there and trying something new. Otherwise you just fall back into the. Into the main populace.

Absolutely. Even if you are competitive now, if you are not innovating in reinventing yourself or your company’s category in some way, shape or form, your competitor will do it or the marketplace will shift somewhere else.

So, so I see it as necessary. It’s competitive advantage and it’s competitive necessity in this kind of fast changing world to unleash the human spirit. And untether it. Um, not all the time, but enough to create a critical mass of fresh ideas that are untethered from the constrictions of limiting belief systems from limiting mental models, which is to be is also the beauty of strategic thought leadership.

We’re helping people loosen the hold of limiting mental models or limiting beliefs about a category and what is for. And your stories, you know, I’ve got stories of those. Um, I dunno how much time we have, but, uh, sometimes it helps to bring it to ground with the real life example because we’re talking a lot of concepts here, obviously.

Hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, I think it is important to to bring that, to bring that back because you’re right, we have talked, we have talked very much to the thought space of all of this and encouraging people to lead and hence the thought leadership. But yes, there is a need to understand how does this actually play out.

For a business in, in reality because, um mm-hmm. You know, we, it, it, it’s it. I often use this example in the past where I said, it’s all right to have this idea that I’m going to fly to the moon and land on the moon. But if you have no ability to become an astronaut or build a rocket ship, what’s the point of, of talking about walking on the moon?

So you, you need to have a way of being able to work out that pathway because thought leadership isn’t just about the end concept, it’s about how you get there.

Absolutely. And, and you build bridges and, and again, it’s just so, so much could be done just by identifying and freeing people from limiting concepts.

And concepts are limiting by nature. You know, it’s the nature of language. If something’s this, it’s not that. So by definition it breaks things into two. There’s a company that does youth sports fundraising that I consulted for, and the created an app to help kids, sports teams raise money. And it was a very crowded field.

And, and here in the US there’s companies like high praise that have a lot of market share and you know, but millions and millions of dollars and, and funding kid sports teams. And the general mental model of this whole category was he used to do baked seals, used to have to do car washes to raise money for your soccer team, uh, or your hockey team or whatever team.

And now you have an app. So we did our market listening research and we found natural conversations where people speak openly online, thus places like Reddit or in the, um, comments threads of a polarizing block. ’cause you can find gold there. ’cause if a blog divides people around a topic, if someone feels like their beliefs and values are being stepped on, you can be sure they will tell you what they are.

If you know how to see between the lines. Well, what we found out with the coaches and parents, the people who made the decisions weren’t saying, oh, glory, these things make it easy. They’re saying, what the hell is that? Teaching the kids, we used to have to work to raise money. I walked uphill to and from school, and now we just give ’em an app to click a button and raise money.

Aren’t they entitled enough already? So I went to the owner and said, David, every competitor. Is preaching convenience. Your app is just as convenient as theirs, but the real unmet value is growth for the kids. So we created a model of partnering with nonprofits, with charities. So the kids’ sports team would co-promote a charity’s message and they would share a small percentage of the money they raised, maybe 5%, or do volunteer work if they couldn’t afford to do that.

And this elevated the whole business dramatically. He got front page sports section exposure in major newspapers. He got an exclusive deal with a large sporting goods chain to be the only provider he. Constantly according to him, getting regular emails and messages of sorts, saying things like, we’ve been looking to get the kids involved in the community.

We never thought about doing it through the sports fundraising. We’re only going to use you from here on out. That message cut through the clutter like a knife through warm butter. I wasn’t trying to make a rhyme, but I’ll take it this time. Sure. Um, and, and it was just a, but it just, when you, when you find that, it’s almost like, how did everyone miss that?

Because they’re looking through tunnel vision, you know, of technology entrance by technology, because sometimes technology brings benefits, but sometimes it doesn’t or has benefits, but has drawbacks. And if you can recognize a drawback and solve it, hey, you’ve got an innovation that’s gonna work. If you can convey it the right way.

Now, this is a beautiful model because it got the PR teams, the email campaigns, the social media campaigns, the PR campaigns of these nonprofits saying thank you to the teams. Raising awareness of the campaigns made it easier for the kids to ask for money. ’cause now it’s not just help me buy my, my football suit, it’s, oh, we’re also raising money.

For this nonprofit that helps, um, treat kids’ cancer or looking for a cure for this disease, that there’s no cure for that. We have somebody locally who’s very prominent, who has that, I mean, really powerful, you know, messages that, that bring people together. It’s about contribution and making a difference for those in need.

Uh, and so there’s an example of a simple thought leadership position. It’s not about the convenience. Ours is convenient too. It’s about the growth for the kids and talking points in support of that campaign became the basis of the marketing that took a startup and gave them prominence and a foothold in a marketplace that had been very difficult competing head on with large national competitors like that.

So there’s a for instance story of how powerful that can be. I.

Such a, such a great example and very powerful. Um, we could talk for many hours still on all of this topic, but I did want to ask you a couple of other questions. Mm-hmm. Um, one of them is just briefly because you and I spoke, uh, prior to the podcast and I wanted to give this across to the audience.

Just give me very quickly your backstory on how you came to be in this space.

Well, I was doing strategic thought leadership without having that name for it or knowing to call it anything. Um, by being a contrarian in the fitness business for a long time where I was 20 years old, I was managing several big box large health clubs, which I love the fitness part.

You know, it’s helping people, but I hated the business model. It was, sign up as many people as you can and hope half of ’em don’t show up. So we can sell more memberships that they have to pay, whether they show up or not. So I developed a model based around solving that problem and solving the problem of yo-yo dieting with a lifestyle management approach in structured exercise with a trainer in small studios.

So it’s more expensive than a traditional health club. It’s pretty reasonable ’cause we could organize the studios for effective 30 minute workouts. It’s 30 minutes of the trainer’s time. Also made it easier to stick with the workout because you’re not. Working hard for an hour at a time, and that grew to a chain of one-on-one fitness training studios.

I sold some years back and then I won some innovation awards for software I wrote to support all that. It turned it into a, a game of tracking progress visually and competing with others with a point system, uh, called Fit Point, um, that led to. Doing software for a very large food service company for wellness, for their employees.

At would point, I sold the studios because I’m a musician, I want time to play music. That kind of business didn’t give it to me.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but the software I wrote morphed into marketing software, like full panel integration of search engine optimization, website management, and email marketing and all the things we do.

Um, and I wrote custom software for that. And found a, a niche in five to 50 million a year companies, and that’s where I discovered the need for strategic thought leadership. So as I mentioned, certain companies would actually have breakthroughs and they would grow by, in one case, over a hundred percent a year, several years in a row.

Another case going from, uh, also ran 10 20% market share to over 50% market share in a, in a very competitive category, becoming the, the strong leader in it. Others, not so much. So I started using this, um, modeling methods from N LP or neurolinguistic programming, which is a way of modeling excellence to discover the difference.

And the difference was the companies that had breakthroughs, the leadership saw themselves. Is leading marketplace thinking, is teaching their marketplace how to perceive their category. And so that taught me two things. That’s the way to do it. Lead the marketplace to how to perceive your category.

Otherwise, you’re gonna be a commodity and just able to compete on price. But if you can set the game. If you can not just be a player in the game, but the game designer and create the game rules for the benefit of the customer, you can be the leader in market share in terms of sales, as well as thinking.

Um, the other thing it taught me was that I. The consulting and coaching role is necessary to do that because you have to have a relationship of equals with the leadership of the company. Because my role became working with them, help them extract that thinking and to study marketplace thinking and to work through models of here’s the marketplace thinking, here’s our innovative ideas.

How do we create a path? How do we turn our ideas into a model that is. Meaningful to our customer and can help them get more value or make smarter decisions or upgrade the use of what we sell to a whole other set of values. Uh, and that coach consulting, relationship communication flows the. Other type of relationship, more the agency relationship in, in many cases, not every case.

’cause obviously you’re companies that work really well with, but in many cases you would just see it as something to delegate down a hierarchy to. And the problem with hierarchical business relationships is that communication doesn’t flow up and down a hierarchy very well. You know, it’s like, oh, we know what we’re doing, just go sell the stuff, you know?

But I’m like, well, it’s your thinking that’s gonna lead the marketplace. We need to help organize it. This role is perfect for that because I work directly with leadership, um, and, you know, have designers and um, web people, writers. Uh, we can draw upon whatever resources are needed, but in a lot of cases I like to not have those as part of my organization, but really strong talent that I’ve cultivated I can draw upon because in a lot of cases, the organization will have the resources in their company that can do these things.

They just haven’t organized around that. And say you got people in your company that can do these things. And I think a lot of executives now are realizing that customers are expecting company leadership to be visible. And uh, there’s a guy named Carl Feldman who I met who was on my Thought Leadership Studio podcast promoting a book he co-authored called The Visible Expert Revolution.

I thought that said it well. And another guest said, um. Not doing that can be called hiding behind the logo. So they expect us to be out there for, for business leaders, you know, and communicating directly with our audience about why we’re in business, what we wanna do for them, what our vision for them is, our vision for the marketplace, and having a relationship with them as a result of that, you know?

So that I think has been a convergence of factors that has made this the time for strategic thought leadership.

You, you’re spot on there. Uh, it is absolutely the time. In fact, I think it, I personally, I think that whilst many people are talking about the AI revolution, I actually think the real revolution is around thought leadership and mm-hmm.

Um, the, the creative thinking and the opportunities that will present itself because the standard tasks can be done by. Automation and overseeing that automation and those things that will will exist there, but where we’ve got a real opportunity to really take the world to new and exciting places.

Excuse me, is by encouraging creative thought leadership and, um,

absolutely.

And, and, uh, just finally, um, I should tell everyone that as you’ve mentioned, you’ve got a podcast and we’ll include the links to the podcast, uh, there in the show notes. But also you have a book coming out, uh, that’s right.

Unthought Leadership for for Market, uh, for marketing. Um, so just, uh, just give us quickly on what that is, uh, all about.

The book is called Strategic Thought Leadership. And if you’re listening to this, um, it may or may not have come out by the time you’re listening to this, but you can, if not, get a free preview@strategicthoughtleadership.com.

And um, I have a free ebook that’s a much condensed version of that called The Marketer Guide to Strategic Thought Leadership. And if you just. Google Marketers guide strategic thought leadership. It’ll take you to it, and that’s a free ebook. Anyone can get instantly it. It’ll show you the building blocks, you know, because we talk about creativity, but I think you have to anchor that creativity to what’s real too.

And so working with the system where you’ve got building blocks to help organize your creativity around market, influence it, it grounds it in reality in a way we can use it to get traction and make a difference. In achieving our business goals more effectively and with less work.

Fantastic. And look, we, we will definitely include those, uh, links in the show notes as well for everyone.

And just to wrap things up, a question I like to ask, or my guests is, what is the at heart moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?

What are the aha moments people have when they come to work with me? That people would want more of? Is that the question? Am I understanding it right?

Yes.

You know, the best aha moments to me that I see in clients are when they realize they are the creator of their experience and in large measure their creator of their category.

Even if they see themselves as a small player, they’re co-creating, you know? Um, Peter Drucker, great management writer and and theorist, said that a business is an organ of society and we’re all connected to each other and through our economy in how we, we trade products and services. So never underestimate how much influence you have and revere that.

And when I see people have that aha moment that. I am making a difference on this. It feels good to watch people waking up to more of their own potential.

I love that. Well, let’s hope we can. I’ve unlocked some of that in, uh, in this episode of the podcast. Uh, Chris, thank you so much for being an amazing guest.

We’ve delved deep into thought leadership and, and, uh, I would encourage anyone that is, uh, listening in and enjoyed this conversation to not only. Follow up on Krista’s, various links that we’ll include in the show notes, but also to give us some feedback because I think thought leadership is what you and I talk a lot about and, uh, why we have the things that we have out there.

Uh, we have different ways of encouraging people to, uh, to get their thought leadership out there. And, uh, I, I encourage people to be strong to follow, uh, the opportunities that you have. To think differently and to put it out there so you become a leader. So Chris, thank you for being part of the program.

Thank you so much, Anthony. I greatly appreciate you and your taking your time to interview me

and to everyone listening in. Of course, don’t forget to subscribe. And, uh, stay tuned for the next episode of Biz Bytes for Thought Leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program.

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