The Biz Bites for Thought Leaders podcast features business leaders of change talking about topics they’re passionate about, including their personal journeys. Listen as I share the stories behind their story.
Latest Podcast
Srimoyee Deymerwar
Lumen
Recruitment or Talent Acquisition
In this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, host Anthony Perl sits down with special guest Srimoyee Deymerwar, founder of Lumen, to discuss a critical blind spot: Why do companies ignore the marketing power of their own people? Re will show us how strategic talent marketing is the key to building trust, boosting retention, and aligning your reputation with your values.
Offer: Book your complimentary 45-minute session with book Lumen.
From corporate burnout to seven Figure Business re’s journey. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Perl, and today we are sitting down with Srimoyee who just launched Lumen, an employee branding and talent strategy firm that’s only a few months old, but already making waves.
She’s about to share why companies spend millions marketing their products, but. Get about the important product their people. We’ll explore how talent marketing isn’t just about hiring. It’s about building trust, retention, reputation, and so many more things to make sure it aligns with your values, your ethics.
So much detail in this episode. Have pen and paper ready for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. And hey, don’t forget to subscribe while you are there.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I’m delighted to have SRI joining me today, and I know we’re gonna have an amazing discussion about all things marketing and the fact that her business is very new, which is a little bit different for biz bites for thought leaders.
But I thought this was a great journey to take people on. So welcome to the program. Thank you so much Anthony. It’s great to be here. Lumen is an employer branding and talent strategy firm that I just started. It’s just been three months for me. And yes, it’s not a recruitment agency like most think it to be.
We try to help organizations attract, engage, and convert the right people by communicating what makes them a great place to work. And so happy to be here with you today. No, look and it’s great and there’s so much there to unpack as a starting point before we even get into your journey is to taking you there because, we hear a lot of people talking about cultural fits and things these days, but it’s it, there’s a difference between using the words and it actually meaning something. And I think that’s the key here, isn’t it? Because it’s the difference between marketing that is just made up terms because we think that’s the right thing and authentic based content. And that’s really what you are talking about here.
Absolutely. You know what we spend like millions marketing our products, right? But too often I feel, and many of us feel that we forget the most important product we have, which is our people. And talent is the engine of every business. You can have the best product, but if it’s your people.
Who make it real, authentic. And most companies I think invest heavily in marketing their products, ex and experience working in So your employer brand, it’s just not a campaign, it’s like one of campaign. It’s actually the foundation of trust, the retention, and the reputation as well. Yeah. And it’s something that is.
Underestimated, I think is probably the best way of describing in value. And I think part of that is business, has been very cautious previously about marketing team because they’re worried that they might move on. They’re worried what happens if they do move on. And so it’s just been kept very, close to their heart and not including other people.
And then other people’s voices don’t seem to count as much and it’s and it’s this steamroll effect of really what is. Old fashioned ideas and ones that in this day and age when it’s so important to build relationships, I think more important than ever before marketing is about relationship building with your audience.
And hence the reason why we’re doing podcasting for a lot of people as well, because it’s such a fundamental thing to be doing, including internally as well as externally. Absolutely. And I think talent marketing, like we call, is, it just doesn’t help someone to hire, it shapes who stays with you, what kind of experience a candidate is experiencing with your brand.
So when I feel that when talent marketing is treated like as a business strategy, hiring stops becoming reactive. So it becomes intentional brand driven and aligned with broader business goals. So it’s so important like a product marketing. Now think of a product that you would launch, right?
When you do launch the product, it’s important for you to understand your audience, the messaging. You would do some product testing. It’s the same way when you’re trying to hire, we need to do those tests in places to understand the audience, what they’re thinking. What is the candidate going through, and why should they apply to your organization?
Yeah, and I think this is the really important thing for business to remember is that. The right talent is everything. I know we’ve spoken a little bit about this in the past on the program how, having the right people is not necessarily about having technically the best person in the, in a particular role there, because if they are not a cultural fit with the organization, it can have much more of a negative impact than the positive of the fact that they may be brilliant at what they do.
Absolutely. And here’s where the strategy portion comes in. Now, suppose, we are trying to hire a key team. You, we could just do a job post and we hope that, the right people are coming in or we do something like a talent brand study Know, which is so important, which tells you what the candidates or employees perceive about the company.
What’s real, what’s aspirational, what are the gaps? And once you do that, you could craft employee value proposition or EVP. The, that’s just not a promise in words, right? So you are living that experience that you are going to give to people when this is like, when it’s clear people join for the right reason.
Your culture becomes tangible and candidate, especially Gen Z, trust you before they even apply. And today’s candidates the Gen Zs specifically are evaluating companies through a very different lens. They’re, they are just not looking at job ads. They’re not, they’re actually looking at some values, purpose and proof, and I’ll be happy to share some stats that, I came over while doing some research as we move on.
Yeah, absolutely, definitely. Definitely interested in those. And I think just to pick up on that point though, that I think there have been this kind of, this ideal, supposed, ideal working place that was constructed by big companies like Google, for example, where there’s perception that, you go and there’s rooms where you can, I don’t play pool and you can sit in different chairs and you can have coffee and whatever else it is that, that whole perception of what a workplace should.
Be like, has changed and therefore the younger generations have grown up with that perception that it should be different. And indeed, since COVID, we’ve obviously undergone this change again, where well do I actually have to be in an office, whatever that office looks like, and do I, if I do I have to be there nine to five, Monday to Friday?
Or can it look like something different? And I think the expectation of people out there is completely different to what it was, six or seven years ago, let alone what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Absolutely. In fact, my previous workplace, we worked remotely. So I was handling the talent marketing for apac as well as Americas.
And we were all connected virtually, right? It was never an expectation, and that was something that was driven from the leadership itself that, if you could get the work done. In a small, smarter ways. It’s not necessarily we would have to come to work. So it gave us a lot of flexibility because time zones was different for me based in Australia, we are much ahead in the time zone.
So it definitely gave that space and a comfort zone as well to finish certain things that you would like to do. It could be your person’s space before you could just come in and start your day. So I think that has been amazing and candidates are looking into those flexible options as well as we speak.
Yeah. Yeah. I like to think I was probably the lucky enough to be the forerunner to some of this and I wouldn’t say I was well among the first, I definitely wasn’t because I remember many years ago hearing an interview. With someone, and I’m sure it was someone who worked in a higher level at Channel nine at the time, who was spending quite a bit of time working from home.
And I thought, oh, that’s an interesting idea. And I was employed at a particular time to work in a in an office that was 45 minutes to an hour away from where I lived, depending on traffic that could increase even further. And I went to the CEO at the time and I said, look. It’s not very efficient for me to try and be here at nine o’clock in the morning if you allow me to work from home until nine 30 in the morning when the school zones are finished.
I can get an hour and a half work in. I can work for the 45 minutes while I’m in the car by taking phone calls and. Similarly, if I leave at the end of the day a little bit earlier to avoid that peak hour traffic, you’ll get more benefit out of that. And we trialed it and it unfortunately, it worked and it was great for a while and it was.
So I think that’s an important thing as well with all of this, is that with. The mix isn’t cut and dry as it used to be. It, it used to be literally you’re in the office nine to five, Monday to Friday. That’s what we pay you for and that’s what you’ll be, and and certain offices you’ll be there till six or seven o’clock at night and certain off certain offices, you’ll be there from seven 30 in the morning.
But whatever it is, that was the expectation. But now that blend of I can go and do a few things for a couple of hours. I can come back to work and work later in the evening. That flexibility is there. But the balance with that is what the expectation of the employer is as well, because the danger is that they expect that you’re now available 24 7.
And so we haven’t quite found that really nice way of making it work for everyone and designing it differently almost for everyone. That’s exactly like a great point that you you know. You’ve taken up here. Like I was talking about the stats, there is some interesting proof points which says that the current sort of talent, which is the Gen Zs right, are completely different.
And in fact, there are 44% of this group have rejected an employer because the company did align with their ethics. Now imagine you mentioned on your career site or somewhere about this, that we are flexible and, all of those words. But when it comes to implementation, it’s not they see and it’s just not about Gen Z.
So whatever promises you give on your marketing strategy, your career site, your social media, it’s the living proof of what you’re trying to say. And the minute there is a disconnect things just fall apart. So it’s important that, how do we ensure that, okay, if we are saying, talking about flexibility, that it is there, and to what extent should that be is something that the younger generation, they are, they live by that actually.
So yes, it’s so very important. And I think it’s almost like we’re writing new rules of the game. Yes. As far as marketing is concerned, isn’t it? Because it used to be that this was the trendy word, so we’ll throw it out there. It’s like one of my biggest bugbears in, in marketing is that every other business has, we are the leading.
In whatever it might be. Who says you’re the leading in it? What actual criteria have you met to suggest that you are the leader? Some can genuinely say that I get that, but that is a very small handful that have actually been through a process that says that they are the leading, because even a, even an award, even a competition, okay, you might have been the leader of the people that entered it.
But doesn’t make you necessarily the industry leader or the leader in a particular space and in what context that people don’t usually give it. I’m the leading whatever, but yeah, I might be the leading one in this street. That’s the, that’s, that might be true, but it’s, it doesn’t wash anymore.
I think that kind of phrasing and terminology doesn’t wash because people are looking for support to see that and saying, okay, if you’re the leader, where am I seeing that? That is actually evident. And I think the same applies to all of that marketing terminology that exists in different areas. Bang on I couldn’t just, we’ll talk about this more when it comes to certain words that we keep on using repeatedly.
Things like innovation, and these are very cliched in today’s word. And if you take that to a job description, say, where would we use those words? Because the job descriptions are so heavy and it already gives and an imposter syndrome to many when they read, even if they’re confident in applying, the minute these heavy words come into flow, it just am I too good to even apply?
Am I good enough to apply for these roles? So I think it’s time to shift, make. Easy. Some things that as per the job, what the skills are required, we have them do the real talks, have those real things that you know, matters. For example, that survey with the Gen Z also said that they need 88%.
They would need a clear purpose what they would like to do in the job and feel satisfied. So it’s just not about Gen Z. I think if today, me and you would read a job description. And it should be, wow, you know what? I feel connected and I think that’s what it is. And not glorified words so to speak.
Yeah. I, and I think it, it is so important to choose the phrasing correctly that matches in, I know, and I’m sure you’ve got examples of well as well of where, if you use the wrong terminology, the expectations of the people are different. That are applying to be with you and it ends in tears. I’ve definitely seen it.
I remember an organization I was dealing with a few years ago, and they used a particular word quite heavily in a lot of their materials. And despite me having conversations with the CEO at the time saying, it’s just not the right word for your business. It’s not a criticism of your business. It’s just not the right word for it.
No. It’s the right word. And I saw over a two year period, the the turnover in staff was astronomical. And when that word changed, so too, did the trend for staff to come and go as often as they were because they were attracted by something that wasn’t really. True to the business.
And again, not a criticism of the business or the person that was in charge of it, merely just the wrong word, reflecting something that they perhaps thought they should be rather than what they actually are. I completely, agree here to that and coming from I was attending a conference and it wasn’t.
It would, it was a networking event wherein this young graduate spoke up and said, you know what? I do pretty good in my college. I get good numbers, I get everything, and she’s now applying for jobs. And she mentioned this. The minute I open the jobs to apply, I pause and think if I’m good at it because.
It’s not even matching to what my, it’s, it might be the role that you open up, but then again, those heavy words make me feel like doubt myself even to applaud. So I think it has to be, those real insight has to be those authentic messaging and. The best people are your employees. So if they are the ones who come out and they are sharing their experience, that authenticity matters a lot.
So it becomes more credible and people are able to resonate to what they are saying and they are applying to you. Yeah and so I guess that’s the thing where we maybe start looking at some of the statistics and things that you’ve got there because. Again, we wanna put some authenticity to what you’re saying here because it is a very different landscape and I think many many businesses are not hearing it because.
They’ve got a mix of staff, right? They’ve got, it’s, they’ve got people that are old and young, different generations, so they’re catering to all of those. And that in itself can be a difficult thing because there can be a huge difference between it. I just while you are bringing up some of those stats.
I certainly recall a time when I was working for an organization and I hired someone. I had was just a three person team, so it was quite small. And I had someone who was working under me that was close to my age, and then we hired someone younger and I remember we were just having a casual conversation about influencers and TV shows and music and stuff, and this poor.
A younger woman was looking at us just very blankly and completely lost. We were talking another language to her and equally she would be talking about stuff and we’d going, what are you saying? And that makes it hard when you’re trying to build a culture and you’re trying to show these different things.
But I’m interested in some of the stats that you’ve got there as well. Yep. So this survey or the study report that I was looking through, they specifically focused on Gen Z. So today’s candidates how they are evaluating pri primarily our younger generation here. So I’ll just read this through to you.
They are, most of the Gen Zs are evaluating companies through a very different lens, as I mentioned earlier to you. So it’s beyond even the job act. So 44% of Gen Zs are, je have rejected a employer because a company didn’t align with their ethics. Now, that’s a very big thing. I would have in my so many years of experience, ethics was always there, but it never played such a huge role.
Right then you would have about 86% who said that they need a clear sense of purpose in their job to feel satisfied. Yes. We always wanted to be of, have that satisfaction to the kind of job that I was looking for too, but it was not predominantly on my top list. It was maybe on the fourth fifth.
But looking at the way things are changing with the new generation, it is good for employers now to look and think how their messaging should be. Now, if the report also said that, 75% of them, they actively weigh community engagement engagement and societal impact, not that heavy. We wouldn’t have thought that would play such a huge role in their mindset while applying a job.
So these are some very interesting data points for employers to consider because of the way hiring is now happening. And more we could talk about. How is the landscape of social media and content changing predominantly for this in a younger mindset as well as we speak? Absolutely.
Because the thing about anyone that’s looking for somewhere to work, they’re all a, they’re almost interviewing you as the employer rather than the other way around these days. And they’re looking at what you are talking about on social media in other places. And making some judgment calls around there because they’re seeing through what might just be the marketing terminology and what is the reality there and.
You talk about ethics and impact as well out beyond the actual job. I think that is an important thing to people as well. That there is a culture of giving in some way, shape, or form. We’ve certainly had on this program in the past, a shout out as I do every now and then to Paul Dunn from B one G one because B one G one is a great way that you can make an impact through a business and giving something to other parts of the world, but it is important.
When I talk about ethics, that it’s that it’s beyond just you are doing the right thing in the way that you work. It’s actually, you’re going beyond that. It’s not just ticking boxes. Absolutely. Most organizations, we always have a part of corporate responsibility or CSR activities that we all do.
But does it define me when I’m looking at a job, does it define that, okay how much of contribution this company is making? And it gives me then the deciding power to join a company. So I felt that it’s a big shift. Nobody would, and when they’re making a social media strategy, for example, to attract talent, then this plays a big role that you know, what CSR activities that they’re doing, they make it as part of their content strategy too.
So whoever is looking at applying, they would know, Hey, you know what this organization does. Do a lot in this space. So it is one of my decision making process of thought when I apply. Yeah and I think that when you are looking through all of those things, it’s important that they’re aligned with the business and that.
Is where I think is a lot of businesses fall apart as well. I’ve certainly, again, we’re going back into the past, but I remember working at an a fairly large organization and on the whim of the then marketing director who was. Personally very involved with a particular charity and for very valid reasons, and a very great charity at that, an international charity dragged the organization into a relationship with that charity.
And it was a failure because it had no alignment with the business itself, as wonderful an organization as it was. It just didn’t have any relevance. To the business and therefore nobody bought into it. And I think that’s an important message as well, is that if you’re going to align a business with something and a charity is one idea, but not the only idea, it whatever you are doing in marketing sense, it needs to be aligned with the business and where it’s going and the core audience and what they think as well.
Absolutely. True that because. It’s just not about the candidates. And the business impact that you’re mentioning here end of the day is the people who are making the changes as well. While we are looking at the content strategy with regards to CSR to probably attract talent, it’s also client strategy as well.
I’m sure clients would also be interested to see where we are contributing with regards to the society overall. Yeah, and I think it’s so critical. That businesses think about all of these things because it also impacts their own course of action and their success. Because we’ve been talking about it in the context of employees, but the truth is that this has an impact in the context of clients and whoever is buying from them and partners and those things as well, because you want to be in a relationship with someone.
That shares the same values as you, because the reality is you have competitors. We all have competitors. Why people choose you. Is because of you and who you are as a person, as a brand, as a business, and that filters out into the bigger world. And I believe that’s becoming more and more important. I think AI is making it more important because yes, people are looking for that, which is different.
That is true to who they are. That stands out from what is the AI driven content. Absolutely true that as well because in this aspect, specifically because you brought up the space of competitors everybody is looking into the, so your. Competition as to what they’re doing.
And specifically there is when you strategically do things with regards to keeping in mind the client perspective, the, the future candidate perspective, that’s when everything that’s what the strategy is all about. So I would again, reiterate that talent marketing is all about that.
It is a strategy with regards to keeping business in mind. And now, in one of, one of the times where there could be a lot of content strategy build with regards to the client stories that you have in a way that your future candidates get. Attracted and say, wow, you know what, they have these kind of clients and this is what the employees, so it’s, I feel it’s like a holistic approach from business from client perspective, where then your employees and your future candidates, one in a hardship.
Yeah. It’s such an area of underestimated value, and that’s where I think it’s about businesses knowing where to start from with this. Because we’ve been talking all around the idea of this, but the question is how do they actually get started on this and put, meat on the bone as it were, of what is really driving them and where that authenticity is because.
It needs to come from a place of authenticity and there needs to be, people like yourself that is going to find what that is and take them through a process. Absolutely. And it is. That’s what the beauty of talent marketing or recruitment marketing, employer branding is all about. It is about saying that as important is your product marketing or your client marketing.
So is your talent marketing. How would you shape talents to ensure that they are the right people, you are trying to attract them while you are trying to it’s even before you sit and you think about promoting those jobs outside, it’s a step much ahead of that. Like even your thinking of the job ads that you would write.
You, you keep thinking about how to ensure that this entire process comes into place. It is, it’s about everything. So if you are giving the product client marketing importance, talent marketing has an equal space completely out to your. So let’s go back a little bit because I want to give people a bit of a sense of your journey.
’cause we talked in the beginning of the fact that this is a fairly new venture for you. So talk to me a little bit about where this journey came from and how you got to the point of establishing this where you saw the gap that was in the market. So you’ve been, actually was born out of redundancy and I think I give a lot to my journey.
Of being redundant. I don’t think otherwise. Human, which means light would come into being Now after the journey of being redundant, I was like, okay, you have very less, because the space is very niche. Not all organization are heavily investing on employee branding services and.
That’s where my story is to most organizations or talent leaders are that do not treat talent marketing or employ branding as a cosmetic afterthought. It has to be something that you blend in your process just like you would advertise or do marketing with any product out there.
So I did see that, there was. Not, there was client marketing, there was product marketing, but the talent space is where it was missing. And of course there was less of roles in this EV space or employee branding space is when I thought that, I have had 15 years, 16 years of experience in this from starting employer branded services from ground up, so everything like, how should.
The EVP messaging be how should a career side be? How should the candidate experience be? And of course, engage, attract everything together. So I was like, why not do something for the talent acquisition team? So I think Lumen is a solid partner to a talent acquisition team, the strategic partners.
We try to tell you authentically how this could help you instead of that constant rush through applying chasing applications rather. Yeah, I think it’s it’s a wonderful thing that you’re doing and it’s interesting to me how you talk so openly about it coming out of redundancy, but it’s amazing how.
Often the great ideas come from there. And as, and I can’t remember who to attribute this to, so apologies out there, but I know someone who told first told me this little piece, which says that, have you noticed how when things break they open? And I think it’s so true that some of the best ideas have come out of exactly the kind of situation that you find yourself in.
So tell me businesses that are sitting out there at the moment going, okay, I hear you. What are the immediate steps that they can and should be doing? So the first thing that you know, I tell any of the talent acquisition leaders or employer employers, whoever I meet, is that you can’t fix hiring with more job ads.
You fix it with clarity. So that’s where I do a discovery session. And I try to take them through a journey of trying to understand what’s taking them or what keeps them awake the night to fill in those numbers. Because I’ve been a recruiter myself in my earlier days, so I know when, businesses give you the requisition and you have to fill in certain roles and specifically in the tech.
Space. It’s not easy. So what I do is I do a discovery session where I ask them a whole lot of questions and try to understand what is there. Do they have a EVP? They don’t have a EVP. Is it the candidate experience? Or sometimes I had a TA leader who said, Sri, I have a whole lot of applications coming in.
So I said that’s a great problem to have. But his challenge was something different. From having a whole lot of people applying, how does the candidate experience can feel broken when you have a lot of applications, right? So that clarity is where I’d like and I help TA leaders then think through coming back from the discovery sessions that I think this is what needs are fixed.
These 1, 2, 3 things could help you fix it. Now some things can be. A little longer process. Some can be a quick fix. So that’s accordingly how we shape it out for the leaders. Fantastic. We’re gonna include some links on how people can get in touch with you in the show notes and some of the, that initial discovery session I think is an important thing for businesses to be doing, like dealing with to work with you on.
So talk to me a little bit about the kind of. Ideal organizations that you are looking to work with, because of course there’s a, there’s such a range, right? I think what you’ve said today is relevant to someone who’s having their first hire to someone that’s, got hundreds of team. It’s would be for each and any organizations.
That is for my ideal customer, I would say, or a client would definitely be, I am focused very much on, the it and the tech world because that’s where I’ve done most of my my work experience is there, but then it’s just like shifting the coin if it is like an FMCG or if it’s some other clients coming and they want to fix their hiring.
So anybody who’s trying to hire in, every situation is very different. Every TA leader that I speak has a very unique challenge that they come up with. It could be from hiring, they’re having hiring problem. It could be candidate experience problem, it could be career sites. So depending on what that discovery session leads to, the solutions are given.
But mostly anybody’s trying to hire a hundred thousand, or they’re trying to set up. Probably a center offshore because we are with my ki, with my experience over across multiple countries and regions, I do have that lens of how the local experience or the local candidates would actually look at or what would help them to get them going.
Those numbers. Look, there’s so many more things that we can talk about in this space, and I think it’s a fascinating area. Again, reminded of people to check out the show notes of how to get in touch with Sri. Just one final question that I wanna ask you, and I ask this of all of my guests, and this is an interesting one to ask you because you’re so new in the journey.
So maybe it’s a little bit more about what you wish than what is actually happening at the moment. ’cause it’s so early on. But the question is. What is the at heart moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish and hope more people will know about in the future? So you’ll have more people coming to knock on your door.
I’d say this Anthony, that instead of, like treating the recruitment marketing or talent marketing, like as I mentioned as a cosmetic afterthought we need to see it as a strategic partner. And I think that wow moment is that the talent acquisition team feels, oh, she’s one of us because she knows the trenches.
There is something that I have dealt it in and out. So of course there are a lot of agencies who you can probably give your work outsource to, but unless you’ve been in that trenches of hiring or recruitment, you wouldn’t understand the pain of the talent acquisition leaders. Like what it takes them to fill those roles and everything.
A snap of a finger probably. So yes, I said that would be the aha. Wow. Movement. Fantastic. I love that. I love everything that you’ve talked about today. It’s so relevant and important. It stretches beyond just the internal employees. It also looks to outside relationships and it’s a very specific kind of marketing that is becoming more and more important to organizations.
So thank you for being an amazing guest on the program. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Anthony. It was great talking to you. Thank you so much and to everyone listen in. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Until next time, we look forward to your company then.
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Dr. Darryl Stickel
Trust Unlimited
Coaching
Drawing on his decades of experience with Fortune 500 companies, Dr. Darryl Stickel, author of “Building Trust,” joins today’s Biz Bites for Thought Leaders podcast episode to discuss trust as a leadership superpower. He explains why most leaders overestimate their trustworthiness and reveals the three core pillars that build unbreakable teams.
Offer: Check out his book here.
Trust is your leadership superpower. Dr. Darryl Stickel reveals the three core pillars that build unbreakable teams. Welcome to another powerful episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today we are diving deep into the currency that makes or breaks every business relationship trust. Joining us is Dr.
Darryl Stickel, who is the founder of Trust Unlimited, the author of the groundbreaking book. Building trust, exceptional leadership in an uncertain world. And he’s also the host of the Imperfect Cafe podcast. He spent decades helping leaders from Fortune 500 companies right through to smaller businesses, build unshakeable trust in the most hostile business environments.
In the next 50 minutes, you are going to discover why 95% of leaders overestimate their trustworthiness, how vulnerability actually strengthens your authority, and the three core pillars that underpin trust in any relationship. Plus, we’ll explore practical levers you can pull to close the gap between how trusted you think you are.
And how trusted you actually are. This is an amazing episode play. Please pay special attention to the way Darrell introduces himself as well. We’ll reveal more as the episode goes on. A lot of value from this one for every single person in business.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and today we are going to have, I know a very interesting discussion about trust. How do we build it? Where does it come from? What are the implications of it? So many things to unpack in this short word. That people hear all the time in business, but what does it really mean?
We have I would say one of the foremost experts in the world on this topic. Darryl Stickel joining us. Darryl, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you and with our listeners.
And I know you’re a podcaster as well, but I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself to the audience so everyone understands a little bit more about who you are and what you’re about.
Sure. So I grew up in Northern Canada. In a small community, and it was isolated, harsh. Winters minus 40 was not unusual. And so people had to rely on each other. And so I got a sense that if I could be helpful, I should, and growing up there you developed a strong sense of community. When I was 17, I was playing hockey and I got attacked by a fan with a club shattered my helmet, knocked me unconscious.
I apparently stopped breathing three times on the way to the hospital. Wow. And when I was growing up I had a. Retinal disorder, hereditary retinal disorder. I knew I was gonna eventually lose my sight, that I’d become legally blind. My intent had been to think for a living, and now all of a sudden, here I am, I can’t think I’ve got the attention span of a fruit fly.
And so there was this long stretch of helplessness and hopelessness, and what it provoked in me was a really strong sense of empathy. And it took me a couple of years to really recover. But what I did. Strange things started happening. So I would be sitting on a bus and a complete stranger would come up and sit next to me and say, I’m really having a hard time.
And people would open up to me quickly. And I wanted to understand why that was happening and it felt like maybe I was destined for a life working as a clinical counselor. So I started working with street kids and families in crisis and troubled teens and working on crisis lines. To further hone those skills and gain a better understanding of what was going on for me.
And I, I came this close to becoming a clinical psychologist and I realized that, it would, it had taken these people a long time to get where they were. It was gonna take a long time for them to find their way out of it, and then it would drive me crazy. And so I transitioned. It ended up in public administration doing a master’s degree in public admin, working in native land claims in British Columbia.
And they would ask me these deep philosophical questions like, what is self-government? Or What will the province look like 50 years after claims are settled? The last question they asked me was, how do we convince a group of people we’ve shafted for over a hundred years? They should trust us. And man, that just seemed like such a good question.
And it gets to the heart of these long-term disputes, why they’re so resilient, even when they’re not doing anyone any good anymore. So I went to Duke and wrote my doctoral thesis on building trust in hostile environments. And I had two incredible academics on my committee who were both experts on trust.
And they sat me down after I finished and they said, when you first came to us. We had a conversation with each other. We said, it’s too big, too complicated. He’s never gonna solve it. We’ll give him six months and then he’ll come crawling back and that’ll be his thesis. We’ll let him just shave off a little piece of this.
They said six months in, you’re so far beyond us. We couldn’t help anymore. All we could do is sit and watch. Said here we’re a few years later, we think you’ve solved it.
So I left academia, went into consulting. I got hired by McKinsey Company, a big management consulting firm. Now all of a sudden, I’m getting a chance to apply these concepts that I’ve theorized about and they recognized, they said, wow, you got great client hands. Let’s send you to the worst places possible.
So places where there had been strikes or hostile takeovers, they would send me in to work with clients. And I’m getting a chance to apply these concepts and having success doing it, and then I get injured on the way to a client site. The car on me rear ends another vehicle. I end up with a really bad concussion again, and I can’t work 80 hours a week anymore.
And so I start my own little company called Trust Unlimited, and I start helping people better understand what trust is, how it works, and how to build it. And over the next 20 years, my learning curve is almost vertical. As I’m applying these concepts, formulating better ideas, learning how to help people understand the concepts better and how to prob problem solve with them.
So that’s brings us up to today.
That is quite a journey. Yeah. I love, I love that. You know what’s fascinating to me as I was sitting there listening to you and I asked the same question of everyone coming on the show to introduce themselves, and we get a variation of people that give me the 15 second version to what you did, to the more elaborate one and the interesting thing about what you’ve just.
Given us is a story, a journey of your life and where you’ve got to, and you can feel already, and I, it’s not a matter of what you feel because there’s a mixture of different things in there. There’s admiration, there’s empathy, there’s lots of different things that are going on. But immediately with that, what’s interesting to me is I feel like I wanna trust you already.
How much. Of building trust is emotional.
It’s a really big part. And man, that’s good insight because that was the core of my thesis. One of the things that really differentiated most of the 99% of the trust research treats people like they’re rational actors. And you’ve met people before, right? We’re not always rational and the more emotional we become, the less rational we are.
And so for me I developed a full fledge model for how the trust decision works and how we can actually take practical applied steps to build it. But in the heart of this whole thing is our emotional states, whether we like or dislike somebody else. ’cause if we like people, we have this positive story about them.
We want to find reasons to trust them. We’re more likely to trust them, we’re more likely to evaluate the outcomes we have with them positively, and that makes us like them even more. It creates these virtuous cycles.
It’s really fascinating to me that. The, we live in these two sides of our brain.
In fact, we probably live most of our time in our very rational side of the brain. Yet from a marketing perspective, we always say that 90% of decision making is is, is the emotional side and 10% is justifying the emotion. With that in mind is that. The key to the formula for trust is it really building that emotional connection first before you can start to rationalize it in some way?
For me it’s about resetting those emotional states if they’re negative, right? And we can start a positive cycle fairly easily by finding things that we like about the other person, having a positive narrative about them, a positive story. When it comes to my sons, I have a relentlessly positive story about them, which means that new information that comes to me, I interpret it through that lens, right?
And so when they were younger and they were in school and their teachers would say, yeah, he’s misbehaving. I would start to get curious, what’s provoking that? Because I’m not prepared to just blame him and say he’s dysfunctional. I’m more curious about what are the settings, what are the triggering events?
What’s the environment that you’ve created that’s bringing that out in him? Because I don’t see it. But I think for me, we just need to be aware that these negative emotions, if they’re really strong, are gonna trump any kind rational approach that we take to try to build trust with somebody else.
We need to at least be aware of them and try to reset those emotional states. First, if they exist.
It’s really intriguing when you talk about some of these areas, because we do have a lens that is. What our life is, right? The, our experiences and things that we’ve been through, right? It is going to impact our ability to trust someone we’ve just met, for example, right?
Because I’m gonna give you an example. I was brought up in a time when very few people had tattoos, okay? And so you were brought up with a lens that if they had tattoos, they were probably from the wrong side of the street. Now fast forward to Australia. Now I watch a lot of football. There’s barely a player that doesn’t have tattoos.
The whole it used to be that you couldn’t get a job if you had them. You had to cover them up all those sorts of things. And that’s completely changed. So it’s very interesting how things change, but it’s interesting. But I was very aware when that transition started happening in society, that became more common, became very aware that I had this lens.
That said, don’t trust these people. It wasn’t a rational one. It was just brought up on, people don’t have tattoos and therefore if they do, they must be this kind of person. And it’s interesting how those things not only, I became very self-aware of it, but also how it can change when you are aware how it can change the way you think and how indeed.
Those things change. I suppose one other obvious example is, it wasn’t that long ago that people would say, don’t trust anything where you have to buy it online. We, don’t trust putting your credit card down online. Now you would argue that it’s probably more trustworthy to do it in some online secure environments than it might be to do it in person.
So again. Things change. So how do you accommodate that and how important is being self-aware and noticing those changes that happen?
Wow. So you’re opening up all kinds of things for me here. And it’s gotta be because you’re from down under, because you’re taking me in reverse order. Through what I normally talk about context is I hope that’s a good
thing.
Make it more fun.
Yeah, absolutely. So you’re talking about context in some respects, which is the formal and informal rules of the game. And context is one of the other pieces that I added in my doctoral thesis because I needed a way to explain why we trust or mistrust some people without knowing anything about them.
And overwhelmingly the literature talks about trust from an individual perspective, but it ignores the elements of context. And a lot of times what I would do is, I would say to people, if you could be anywhere with anyone doing anything right now, how many of you would be sitting here listening to me speak?
And I had to stop doing that ’cause it wasn’t good for my self-esteem. But, because the question becomes, then why are you here? And they’re there because it’s their job or they’ve got something else on the go, or they’re traveling somewhere and they’re listening to the podcast context explains why we go into a doctor’s office and the doctor says, take off your clothes.
And we do. I’ve tried that. In other places it doesn’t work. And if we change the context, we could have the same two people with the exact same dialogue, but move them from a doctor’s office to a gas station restroom. And it goes from credible to creepy in a heartbeat.
Yep.
And so what you’re referring to is the fact that perceptions and values have changed over time.
Norms and expectations have changed over time. And you’re right, a lot of times we’re not even aware of our own context until we start to become thoughtful about it. And one of the exercises I got a of senior executives to do was. I sit down and I want you to think about how the CEO is constrained and each of the VPs is gonna write down how they think.
The CEO is constrained by the context. And then I want the CEO to do the same for the for, for themselves. And at the end, we started going through and having a conversation. What have you written down? What did, what were the takeaways for you? And. It provoked this really interesting conversation because they had different perspectives than the CEO did.
I’ve done the same thing with a captain on a naval vessel when I was doing some training with the military. We have very different understanding is how of how each of us is constrained and making that surfacing, that making people more aware of it is a great way to help reduce uncertainty because.
For me, trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable when you can’t completely predict how someone else is gonna behave. And that definition includes elements of vulnerability and uncertainty. And so in my model, it’s uncertainty times, vulnerability gives us a level of perceived risk, and we each have a threshold of risk that we can tolerate.
If we go beyond that threshold, we don’t trust. If we’re beneath it, then we do. So what that means is that if uncertainty is really high, then vulnerability has to be low to still fit beneath that threshold. And as our relationships get deeper, the uncertainty goes down and the range of vulnerability we can tolerate cts to grow.
And so if we want to build trust, it’s actually fairly simple. It’s where does uncertainty come from and how do we take steps to reduce it? And where does vulnerability come from and how do we take steps to help the other person manage it? And so uncertainty comes from us as individuals, and it comes from the context we’re embedded in, and the better able we are to describe or outline our context, the less uncertainty there is for somebody else, the easier it is for them to trust us.
Interesting. I, so with all of that in mind and I’m interested as to whether the introduction that you gave. Is part partly because of the formula that you have in mind, because you were quite vulnerable in what you gave over about the journey that you’ve had in your life Because it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a, you didn’t gimme a resume.
Put it that way. You gave me a story in which you were quite vulnerable about, having been on death door at one point. And other things that have happened to you throughout your life. Is that a deliberate strategy to build trust or is that just something that’s become a reaction that you know to everything that you’ve done?
So partly I try to live the model. I use it when I raise my sons. I use it when I teach. And I, until you just asked me that question, I hadn’t thought about the reason I tell the story, but part of, you’re right, part of what I do is I make myself vulnerable and that initiates a norm of reciprocity in others.
They feel like if Darryl’s willing to be vulnerable with me, that it’s okay for me to be vulnerable back. And partly I get a lot of practice. I’m legally blind and my guide dog, Drake, and I wander the world trying to make it a better place. I need help often. And I have realized that it doesn’t make me less than that.
That there is the potential for people to take advantage of me. Of my vision and the challenges I have, but I’ve been overwhelmed at how wonderful people are and how willing to help they are. And I’ve had really positive experiences with being vulnerable and it may be part of what makes people comfortable being vulnerable back to me.
It is interesting, isn’t it? Because you are, as you say, you are being forced to, particularly if you are, in a situation outside where you’ve got your D guide dog with you, it’s very obvious what your vulnerability is, right? And wearing that on your sleeve is a difficult thing, but you don’t have a choice and.
It’s interesting though that today people are generally speaking more and more guarded, aren’t they? Yeah. And I find this an interesting dilemma in business and I remember back even to the, I think to the very first episode of this podcast for those that wanna go back, we had a discussion with with Karen at the time and talking about this idea that.
Is outdated notion that it used to be when you rocked up to business that you had to leave your personal life outside the door, and that it was all focused on business until you walk back in. Nowadays that attitude seems to be that you, the recognition that you carry it with you. And particularly if people work from home, but yet the guards are very much up.
There’s, AI I think is making things more and more. Polished and putting more and more barriers up and trying to separate that. And so that, allowing that vulnerability, it’s becoming challenging. It is.
Yeah. And you’re bang on. So you, your instincts are so good around this stuff. You’re doing a magnificent job, by the way.
Thank you. When I think about, trust is at some of the lowest levels we’ve ever measured. If we think about it using the model I described before, our vulnerability certainly hasn’t gone down. We feel just as vulnerable as we used to, or maybe a little more but our uncertainty is bouncing all over the place, right?
We’ve seen pandemics, we’ve seen. Changes in norms and values. We see technological changes at an increasing pace. We see political instability and conflict around the world. These massive fluctuations and uncertainty make us incredibly uncomfortable, and so the ask, asking you to be just a little more vulnerable to me by trusting me is harder than it’s ever been.
And this is part of the, I’ve started working on a project called the Aspiring Men’s Program because the statistics for young men right now are horrific. They make up 80% of the suicide rate. They’re trending down in terms of educational outcomes, mental health outcomes, addiction. They’re really in a time of crisis and they are struggling to be vulnerable in a profound way.
They are the hardest group to reach because they don’t ask for help and they don’t send signals. They are reluctant to accept help. They isolate. And so you’re right, it’s becoming harder and harder for us to be. Vulnerable with one another because it feels like we’re raw and already over overexposed.
And it’s, we live in a society where there’s an expectation of performance and I know it’s actually interesting that around me in the last year 2, 3, 4, even. Reasonably close friends that have. Found themselves lost out of work. That they’ve lost their, they’ve lost their position and mostly it’s been through no fault of their own.
It’s a, restructuring situation, whatever’s happening in different businesses and things. And I was actually thinking about this the other day, that’s, that is so vulnerable to tell people about that because there’s an expectation that you’ll always be employed and you’ll always be aspiring at a high level and you’ll keep going up and up.
And that’s not always the case. And but even that for, I think particularly for men, is actually a it’s very, it’s very vulnerable because there’s an expectation, particularly not just around performance, but around, financial side of things,
right? Yeah. It’s a real challenge for men.
And when I was teaching in Luxembourg and one of my students, I think he was from Russia, he was definitely from Eastern Europe. He said, any man who makes himself vulnerable isn’t a real man. And so there’s this very strong mindset around you gotta be perfect. You can’t make mistakes. And you don’t ever admit that you’re struggling or need help.
And I challenged that idea, right? I said, look I’m teaching here. I’m making myself vulnerable all the time. I’m sharing stories about myself, imperfections about myself. Are you suggesting I’m not a real man? And he went, I said, ’cause we could go outside and have a f. Fairly serious discussion about that.
He was like no. I said, okay. Because I think it’s actually a sign of strength to be able to be vulnerable, to ask for help. And I was working with a group of senior executives and we were talking about benevolence, which is one of the levers we can pull, right? So from the individual perspective, we’ve talked about context, but from the individual perspective, there’s three levers.
I can pull to make you think I’m trustworthy. One is benevolence, which is the belief you have got your best interest at heart. Two is integrity. Do I follow through on my commitments and do my actions line up with my values? And three is ability. Do I have the confidence to do what I say I’m gonna do?
And so I’m getting them to tell stories about times when they’ve helped someone when they’ve been benevolent. And there’s six of them in the room. And they go around and they tell these powerful stories and they’re all smiling, and the mood is just buzzing, right? You can just feel the intensity. And I said, this is fantastic.
Now if you could just explain to me why you’re so effing selfish. And they go, what? What are you talking about? I said, even years later, you describe how powerful a moment it was for you to help somebody. To show up when they needed you. And you feel the positive energy that in this exact moment, but you never let anyone have that experience with you.
You never ask for help. You never admit you don’t know something. You never reach out.
Interesting. It’s I can immediately thinking of many situations where I think I’ve seen that. I think we all can. Yeah. And what fascinates me about vulnerability is that saying before that the walls are up so often, and I mentioned to you before we came on air and those listening to the program are very aware that my primary business is podcast done for you.
Great. And so podcasting is very much about, building trust with your audience and vulnerability is a key part of that. And it comes into telling stories because it’s a learning curve. It’s showing that you’ve learned. I think it’s one of the differences between a podcast and a webinar. Webinar is very much a, these are my learnings.
This is what you’ve gotta do come by from me. Whereas a podcast is. Get to know me, let me share some things, let me share some how I’ve gone on this journey and these different things along the way. And I think that’s what makes a truly great podcast is when that is open and you hear that all the time.
Whether it’s a celebrity based podcast where you’ve got actors telling about auditions and things that happen early on in their career, et cetera to. A business. I’ve a podcast I’ve got with a particular client that I’m thinking of and was talking about, his early days of teaching and how things went wrong, in a particular episode that he talked about.
And I think that sort of vulnerability is rarer than what you, than what people think that these barriers are up. And yet we want people to do business with us. We want them to trust us. How do you actually get that message through that vulnerability is so important. Yeah. And this is
part of the challenge.
My podcast is called The Imperfect Cafe. And it’s around leadership. And I agree with you. We’re trying to build trust with our audience so that we can engage with them so that we hopefully have impact. We have a positive impact on their lives. And. When I talk to people about pulling these levers, the ability lever tends to be our favorite lever.
And so we’ll say, I have these much, this much experience, these credentials, this position in the world. But if I really wanted to know what good look I’d actually include you in the conversation. And
yeah,
something I normally do is I’ll say, I wanna be the best guest you’ve ever had, or one of the best guests you’ve ever had.
How do I do that? And so if I asked you that you’d say you’d help my listeners be better off than they are today before they’ve listened to the podcast. You’d be. Engaging and genuine. And you think about my audience, not just yourself.
Absolutely. And so I’m trying to be the best I can be for your audience. And one of the interesting challenges that you face is you’re helping people with vastly different audiences. And so you should be having conversations. ’cause in a perfect world, you and I would actually talk to some of your listeners and say, what’s compelling for you?
How do I speak in a way that helps make your life better, that makes you want to listen to this podcast that makes it change your life in a positive way.
It’s, and it’s really interesting you say that and you. May not be able to see what is behind me. And there’s a sign that says and for those that are listening and not watching as well, it’s worthwhile pointing out. There’s a sign behind me that says, being the voice of brilliance. Brilliance is something that I talk very much about in, in podcast Done for You.
That’s what we are seeking to do, is to allow other people’s brilliance to be heard. It’s part of what we’re doing on this program is allowing our guest brilliance to be heard and brilliance can be mistaken for perfection. But it’s not right. Brilliance comes from stories and vulnerability as much as anything else.
And I think, if I certainly, in, in ticking the boxes for what makes a great guest for this program, there’s two probably critical elements and the one we most commonly talk about is giving those little one percenters that will make a difference to people listening that can act on things and improve their life, their business as a result of some ideas that have come across on the program.
But just giving those ideas on their own without context and story is useless because why would you trust that person? Why would you believe them? When you hear the story around it and you understand the thought and the processes that have gone into it, and the insights that have happened along the way, then the trust factor increases and the desire.
Therefore to enact on some of those things and potentially also then to want to engage directly with the guest increases.
Yeah,
I’m definitely hoping that people are going to tune in and listen to your podcast as well, and we’ll make sure we include some links to that in the in the show notes.
Yeah, that’d be brilliant. Part of my mission is to get the signal through the noise. Because, ’cause when I talk to real people and I show them the model, they go, this just feels obvious. It feels like common sense. Like how is, how’d you get a PhD? And when I talk to trust experts, they go, nobody else on the planet is talking about it this way.
This is so practical and applied. You’re talking about, I have 10 levers in my model. We all have the ability to build trust. Some are just better than others. Those who aren’t very good have a lever that they pull. Usually it’s the ability lever. Those who are better have multiple levers, and those who are really good have multiple levers and they know when to pull which one.
So you and I just role modeled the ability lever. Trying to pull that and having a discussion about what good looks like for you, what good looks like for your audience so they can have a conversation. Because a lot of times leaders, I’ll tell them benevolence, integrity and ability, and they’ll go, I do those things.
Yep.
And I’ll say, says who? Because if it’s me telling you I’ve got your best interest at heart, it doesn’t land nearly as well as you believing it.
Yep.
And for you to believe it, I have to include you in the conversation
And it’s so interesting with all of that because one of the things that I talk about. And again, this is not what this conversation tool will be about podcasting, but I think it’s an important thing point to make here is that the best podcasts are a conversation where the people that are listening feel like you are talking to them,
right?
And that is what the key is. Is that, I’ve worked in radio for a long time. I’ve built large audiences in radio and the key thing that I learned very early on in the piece was you don’t think about the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people that might be listening. It just has to be one person that is sitting there going, they’re talking to me.
And if that’s the case, then you are building, as you said, you’re building trust.
Yeah, and I try to role model the model, so I try to show benevolence, right? There’s nothing I’m holding back. There’s no, buy this for 10 easy lessons or here’s the secret. I’m telling you everything that comes to mind.
When I wrote the book, I wrote it so that if I go away, what I know doesn’t, and I. I’m trying to help your audience be better prepared to have conversations about trust than they were before they listened.
I find it fascinating when you read a lot of content that’s posted online, and particularly now with the advent of ai.
It’s tries to talk in some respects, to an emotion. You need this very rarely. Are there stories that are built into the component and very rarely are there vulnerable stories that are built into it.
And that’s where I think the difference is. It’s fascinating. Even when you look at some of the well-known entrepreneurs the.
The big people over the years that and pick any number of different ones from a, Richard Branson onwards. There is a degree of vulnerability with what they give over as well. And I think that we lose that because everyone’s striving for the perfection and forget that a perfection’s not achievable.
But b, that it’s. It’s the journey which entices people along the way. That’s what’s fascinating about speaking to those people.
Yeah, and every leader I talked to, I ask them, are you the same leader now? You were five years ago? And they all say, no. I’ve learned and grown and developed. And I’ll say, are you gonna be the same leader five years from now?
No I hope not. So that means you’re gonna let go of some of the things that got you here, some of the things you’re good at, and step into the things that would make you great as you evolve. And anytime you try something new, you make mistakes. And so how do we prepare the people around us for the fact that we’re gonna stumble?
And I tell ’em they should be thinking about having a conversation with those they lead and saying we’re all gonna be learning and adapting and evolving because the world’s moving too fast for us to stand still. And on that journey, we’re all gonna make mistakes, including me. I will stumble and I may fall.
When I do that, my expectation is that you’re gonna be standing beside me, helping me back up, helping me learn from that experience. ’cause that’s exactly what I’m gonna be doing for you. Sure.
It’s, that idea is so simple, but yet. It seems like a, there’s a, there are many brick walls in between it for the majority of people. Yeah. And I imagine that when you’ve gone into businesses small to large, that it’s those walls being up, which is usually the cause of the problem.
Yeah. It’s often the inability to accept responsibility for our own mistakes.
Or to tolerate the mistakes of others. I’ve heard so many senior leaders say, if I make one mistake, I’m done. And that can’t be true because we all make mistakes on a regular basis. And so what I try to convince leaders to do is to actually talk about the fact that. They haven’t been perfect the whole time they’ve been around, but they’ve made mistakes and when they were in other roles that there was a learning curve that was involved.
It helps humanize them because if we wander around with this mindset that I have to be perfect, it means we need everyone else to be perfect too. And that leads to micromanaging and squelching of innovation and adaptation. It means that people become incredibly cautious. And one of my favorite papers is by one of my advisors, SIM Kin, and it, the concept is the gains of small losses.
And in that paper he says that if your people are pushing to the limit of their abilities, they should be making mistakes. And if they aren’t, it’s a sign that they’re being cautious, too conservative.
It’s there are, when you talk about businesses at that level, it’s amazing to me how many times you have A-A-C-E-O that commissions some research and when the research comes back that says. They might be the problem, how quickly they quash that and move to other areas because they can’t possibly be the problem and they’re not allowed to be the problem because they’re the CEO or the business owner.
And it just, that’s not what, it’s just not what they’re looking for as the answer, right?
Yeah. Or resistance to getting that kind of information in the first place. Because I’ve been involved in situations where we’ve said we could measure trust levels. And senior executives are quick to say, you could do that for middle management, but not for us.
And this gets us to one of the challenges that we face. Trust has incredible value. We’ve seen that it leads to world breaking performance leads to incredible outcomes if it’s high enough. Within teams and organizations, it leads to higher returns to shareholders, higher retention rates, all these things.
Yet it’s at some of the lowest levels we’ve ever measured. The biggest gap we tend to find is between how much CEOs believe they’re trusted senior executives, and how much they actually are. And so there’s this delusion, 95% of us believe we’re more trustworthy than average, and that’s not just statistically impossible.
It’s problematic. Yeah. Because it means that if something came up between you and I, we would both think be thinking it’s the other person’s fault. Yep. It means we’re not able to resolve those conversations or challenges that we run into. And I talk to people about the locus of control challenge, an internal versus an external locus of control.
And for your listeners, an internal looks of control means you’re master of your own destiny. You make things happen in the world you’re an actor. External looks of control means you’re buffeted by the winds of fate. Things happen to you. Yep. And so when I used to teach undergrads, I’d say to them, I’d explain that and I’d say, who here has an internal of control?
And all the hands would go up stirring site, and I’d say, this is awesome. This means that if you fail the class or do poorly, it’s not because I didn’t teach it properly. The test was too hard. It’s all you baby. And they’d all go, oh, wait a minute. I said, that’s right. We tend to have an internal lo of control and we’re successful and an external locus of control when we fail.
And my sons were heavily involved in sports. They never lost a game where the ref didn’t suck. And this is one of the challenges we have with learning, right? Because what we should be doing is looking at those situations when we’re successful and saying, what role did the environment play? So that I can look for environments like that in the future to improve my chances of being successful.
And when we fail, we should be looking at our own behavior and saying, what are some of the things I could have done differently? How could I learn?
I, it’s a fascinating analogy. I think for what you’ve just described is actually sport and football in particular, and it doesn’t matter which kind of football code you follow, we’ve all heard this.
The team has lost, they blame the, there’s a, particularly the fans, I wouldn’t say necessarily the coaches, but the fans often blame the referee. Sometimes the coaches do as well. Yep. If this had have been ruled this way, then we would’ve won the game and. But I think actually the truly great coaches might question some decisions, but still say that there’s so much that we can take out of the game.
It wasn’t that one, two second moment where the ref blew the whistle. That actually changed the fate of the game because there were, there were x number of minutes of other times that things happened that the game could have been won. And that’s the difference isn’t it as well in business It is that you can focus on those little things, but it is actually going back to being more vulnerable and looking at what were the other things that went wrong.
It wasn’t just that moment.
And we can also see the forwards blame the defense for not getting the ball to them or everyone blaming the goalie. ’cause he only stopped 30 of the 35 shots that came at him. And we could see that happen within organizations, right? Where we blame it on sales or marketing or operations or distribution.
We create these us and them scenarios when it should be we, and we should be creating an environment where if there are problems we need to solve them.
I think it’s. So important to not only be vulnerable as we’ve talked about here, but also to be willing to give in a way that makes an impact.
Yeah.
I think that’s such an important thing that often businesses hold back say we’re the leader. I hate that. Determined because so many businesses say that we are the leader.
I don’t know how you justify that. Who’s actually given that particular honor ’cause I’ve never seen it in a particular space. Therefore, you must trust us and we will do stuff for you without actually giving anything over, right? Because if you can’t be a little bit impactful with what you deliver, and you’ve given plenty of insights today in this in this conversation of what things people can do and the impact that they can make, then you can’t possibly expect to build.
Trust as well. And it’s one of the things I like doing and I often do this in business as well, and we’ve had a person behind this on the program in the past. It’s a terrific organization called B one G one, and it’s very easy to show when you have. Interactions with people, how you can make an impact somewhere else in the world as well as a result of simply having a conversation.
And I and that’s a positive impact through a charity. And it can happen from a few cents to hundreds of dollars, whatever it, whatever you choose to do. And I think impact for business. Doesn’t have to be necessarily just about what you do. ’cause that can sometimes be difficult to pull off, right?
But you can make an impact in some way, shape, or form to build that level of trust.
And as a leader, I tend to think that one of the strongest levers we can pull is the benevolence lever, right? So benevolence integrity and ability are the three sort of individual levers, and that’s where most of the trust literature sits.
A ability is a moving target. What made a great leader 10 years ago is probably not the same thing that makes them great today. And integrity is getting harder and harder to maintain because norms and values are shifting and the world is moving so fast, it’s hard to make long-term commitments, but we can always have each other’s best interests at heart.
We can always try to look out for each other. And, there’s a number of ways we can do that. Again, I was teaching in Luxembourg. I was sitting with a group of students. I said to them, I said to one of them, tell me a relationship that matters to you. One, that’s important. He said, one girlfriend.
I said, great, and what matters to her? And he said, her family. I think her family’s the most important thing. I said, tonight, you’re gonna go home. You’re gonna have a conversation with your girlfriend. You’re gonna say in class today, the professor was asking us about a relationship that really mattered, and I thought about you.
That’s step one. You’re showing her that you’re thinking about her and that she matters to you. I said, and then you’re gonna say to her, he asked me what was most important to you? And I said, family. Is that right? Step two, you’re thinking about what matters to her, but you’re open to her input. You are open to being wrong if you didn’t get it right.
Said when she says, yes, my family’s really important to me, then you engage in step three, which is saying, because your family matters so much to you, I’m gonna assume that it matters to you that I get along well with them too. And so I’m gonna start spending more time trying to build a stronger relationship with your family.
I’m gonna have dinners with them. I’m gonna have conversations with them. I’m gonna share more parts of my life with them because it matters to you. And that’s showing her benevolence and being transparent about it. He showed up the next day in class with a huge grin on his face. He said, I’m allowed to talk to you whenever I want.
And it’s about being transparent when we’re trying to show benevolence to one another. And I’d like to give your audience a brief framework that they can use to try this out
place.
Say that you were listening to the Biz Bytes podcast. ’cause that’s good for all of us. And that you heard somebody talking about trust and they said benevolence was really important.
And really, that’s just a fancy word. That means having someone’s back or having their best interest at heart. And then you’re gonna say, I think I do that, but it doesn’t always seem to land that way. Have you ever experienced that? 99% of people are gonna say, oh God, yes. You’re gonna get curious about that.
What did they do? What did they try? How did it not work out the way they intended? Then you’re gonna narrow the funnel and you’re gonna say, have you ever had a time when somebody really had your back really looked out for you? What did they do? What did it feel like? And they’re gonna get a smile on their face as they’re thinking about a moment when someone really looked out for them.
You’re priming them for the next stage of the conversation. You’re getting hints about what benevolence actually looks like to them. What, what matters to them. Then you’re gonna narrow the funnel further and you’re gonna say, what is success for you? How do I help you get there? What would it look like if I had your best interest at heart?
Now you’ve created an opportunity for transparency because later on when you follow up and try to act in their best interest, you can say to them, you remember when you told me that this is what good looked like for you? What success was for you? This is me trying to help you get there.
I love that. Thank you so much for that. And everything else in the discussion, I feel as though we could talk for hours and hours on this topic. Just want to wrap things up with one final question that I like to ask all of my guests who come on the program. What’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish they were, they knew in advance they were going to have?
So when people hear that we’re gonna do trust training, they often think about hot calls and blindfolds and falling off of things. Trust building is a skill that we can all get better at and. I wish I didn’t have to take quite as long explaining that to them, making it clear to them, because we need to be more intentional about building trust now than we’ve ever had to be in the past.
Our relationships tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep, and we’re losing the ability to build deeper, more resilient relationships. So I wish that people could realize right from the start that this is a skill that they can invest time and energy and to get better at.
I love that. And I will go on the back of that and say, I think that extends as well to when people are starting or building personal relationships in terms of just interactions on a direct messaging service, on a LinkedIn for example. Don’t go straight out and start selling your stuff. Build a relationship.
Find something that makes you vulnerable or an interest with people so that. When it gets to the point of curiosity about what you do, there’s already a trust factor that’s built in there. You really have to know that every time someone sends a message that says, oh, thank you for connecting, here’s all the stuff I do buy from me, right?
It just doesn’t work.
It doesn’t, and I tend to respond by saying, you could really use some trust training. Buy from me.
Yeah, I love it. And just in and I do wanna mention as well for everyone listening in that there’s a couple of things that you can get in touch with Daryl on. Firstly, as we mentioned, is the Imperfect Cafe, the podcast, and also there’s the book Building Trust, exceptional Leadership In an Uncertain World.
You can learn lots more from there. Darryl, I thank you for being so vulnerable, so generous, and for. Showing us all how trust can be built, and I look forward to having future discussions with you.
I’d love to stay connected and thank you for having me.
To everyone listening in, thank you so much for being a part of the program this time, and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
Don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.
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Barry Cryan
Do More Better
Coaching
In this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, Anthony Perl interviews Barry Cryan about implementing effective business systems.
Key points discussed:
- The critical difference between businesses that thrive and those that struggle
- How to identify which processes to systemise first
- Practical steps to document your business systems
- The role of technology in creating efficient systems
- How proper systems allow business owners to step away without everything falling apart
Offer: Check out his website.
Business systems for growth. How to build a high performance business that runs without you. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, the podcast where we deliver actionable insights to help you grow your business. We discover little bits of brilliance from guests, including today’s Barry Kre, who specializes in helping business owners implement systems that create high performance businesses.
Now lots of questions that you’ve got to answer. Lots of questions that you wanna ask that I’m going to get answered. I can guarantee for you. ’cause we are gonna learn all about businesses that struggle and how to make them perform at a high performance level. We are going to match that up with ideas around athlete.
Some things that you can understand, and the fact of the matter is there are some really great insights coming out of this episode that are going to make you understand how you can perform at a high level more consistently, and how you can implement systems that can ensure that you do that and find that work life balance.
Yes, that controversial subject work-life balance. We’re gonna discuss all that whole more. Let’s get into this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
Welcome everyone to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and we’re traveling all around the world. This time round we’re going across to Ireland and welcome Barry crying to the program. Thank you so much for being a part of it.
Thanks a million. I just need GR here.
Now we are gonna cover a lot of territory today because I’ve got some insights into what sort of things you do and what you cover, and there’s a lot for people to listen into.
But let’s just start off by allowing you to introduce yourself to everybody.
Yeah. So look at Anthony. I’m gonna high performance positivity coach for small business owners. Generally what I’m doing is put systems and structures in place for them so they can get the bulk outta themselves and therefore get the most outta their
business.
And there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to that sort of area. And I’m gonna start at the very beginning of that ’cause you talk about high performance. And we mostly refer to high performance, in terms of athletes or machinery is high performance achievable in business in the first place and what actually defines high performance?
Yeah. Look, ab absolutely. First of all, absolutely it is. It’s we can operate at different levels. It could be in sport, it could be, in a personal life, it could be in business as well. And high performance really is, it’s maximum life and what you can do with your potential, so some people are operating at a 2.0, some days they might be operating at a 8.0.
Other days high performance really is getting as close to that bar as, as close to that 10.0 version of yourself. As you can, and that, that’s where my goal is. Again, I talked about systems there and structures of without those you can never really consistently achieve your maximum.
And that’s the same in our personal lives or the athlete that’s trainer for the Olympics. They have to follow a process. They have to follow a system because when you do, you get predictable outcomes. And that’s literally what we’re, what we talk about is if you’re predictable, possible, predictable systems, you wanna get predictable outcomes.
And ultimately, if you can get the most out of yourself, then you’re gonna get the most out of whatever it is you’re doing, be it, sport or be it business as well. Co it’s absolutely 100% achievable without systems and structures. It’s up to the lap of the guards really, whether you get there or whether you, how much you get out of yourself.
When your system is in place. Correct those predictable outcomes and ultimately get as close to that 10.0 version of yourself as possible.
Before we delve into systems and perhaps some of your background to getting there, let me just ask you this question because you’ve, drawn the parallel to athletes, for example, training for the Olympics, if you are running the a hundred meters or a marathon or whatever sport it is that you are doing.
If you are not hitting that ideal, you know your best of time every single time you go out there, that just isn’t really possible. And that, in football teams as well. Commonly you’re building up to the end of season to a grand final series. That’s, it’s a matter of building up to that point.
So when you talk about high performance and the expectations of business, you can’t be going in, I imagine and expecting that you’re gonna be able to perform at that 10, 10 out of 10 level on an everyday basis because you’re going to have some buildup and some fluctuations. Yes. So
it’s like the way you look at it is it’s number one what’s, what are you going after?
So if there’s Olympics, it’s a certain time or maybe a certain place in life or in business, it’s certain goals. So what we do is we start with the end of mind and look, okay what is your goal here? What are we aiming for? And then it’s reversal engineer, it’s reversal engineering back from that point then to say, okay, what is that I need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to get there?
And then it’s, yes, it is, it’s that 10.0 of where you’re at. So where you’re at now versus where you’re gonna be at six months or six years is gonna be completely different. So operating at that optimal level of where you’re at right now, so you can ultimately get there for a quicker. And you’re building in that consistency because if you have, again, if you think about it you head out the road and you don’t have an end destination in mind.
You’re gonna end up anywhere. So it’s half that end point and reverse engineering back from that to say okay, what do you think need to look like on a daily, weekly, monthly basis in order for me to achieve that end outcome? And it’s then it’s built on structures around yourself in order for you to be at that.
Best version of yourself as consistently as possible. And yes, that’s gonna change over time. That, that, that think he always listening to him and he was talking about, somebody asked him, who’s your hero in in 10 years time? And he said look at, I’ll come back to you on, I said, he met the guy a couple of months later anyways.
And he said, look at who’s your hero on 10 years time? He said, my hero on 10 years time, but it’s me. And he said I am my hero. On 10 years I’ve that future word for me. Okay. And that’s what it is. It’s like the person that you meet in five or 10 years time, that version of you is gonna be different because you’re gonna evolve.
But it’s been, that best version of ourselves from now means we’re gonna be a far better version of ourselves in 10 years time. So we’re being the 10.0 version of where we are now, and again, that’s gonna change in a year, five years. 10, 10 years. But it’s consistently being that version of our status.
Of what we’re possible, of what’s possible and what’s what we’re capable of. Right now.
Now just, I’m just gonna break for just a second there. We’re getting a little, I’m getting a little bit of dropouts there, but I’ll keep pushing on, just so you know that if I pause for a moment or two, it’s just, there seems to be a little bit of, I have to press that internet lag, but we’ll be good to press that.
Why don’t you talk to me a little bit about your background as well, because I think before we can understand how you can add the value here in this is, let’s understand where you’ve come from to get you to that point where you can actually give people this advice. So tell me where it all began for you, what was the career journey that you’ve been on?
So basically my own background basically I was a safety engineer. I worked across the pharmaceutical industry here in Ireland as a safety engineer at, that’s literally. My own background and never, like always just focused and blinkered on my own career and what I was doing. And things changed for me.
I remember I just woke up one morning. I felt like almost absolutely like symptoms, aches and pains spiraled into worsening type symptoms. Brain fog, short term memory loss, real chronic fatigue. Over a period of weeks and months, it just started getting worse and worse.
And I couldn’t really find any answers what was happening. To me I couldn’t find, any solutions because doctors couldn’t find out what was wrong with me. And I was not performing out at all. I was struggling to get ideas work done. I used to have to, lock myself in a room for maybe.
15, 20 minutes trying to rest my eyes so I could recharge myself to go again for the next maybe 90 minutes or two hours. That’s the only way I could actually get through my day as I go home that evening, fall into bed, rinse and repeat. The next day I was probably getting about one day’s work done really in every five.
So I was, really not performing for them. I was like I like number one, I can’t, I’m not doing my job effectively. Number two, I, going to struggle, struggling to find answers and solutions here to what’s actually wrong with me. And actually went on for over two and a half years, and I was like, I have to find a better way to get more outta myself, with my reduced capacity.
So I was looking out and I was like, okay, who out there is doing, what I want to do with, at a much higher level? And it was like, I looked out in industry and looked at the likes that Richard Brads and the likes of these guys, the house, Branson is over 500 companies and.
Like how does he operate in aesthetic that allows them to do that and get so much more outta the time that he’s putting in? So that’s where I went, start going down the whole rabbit hole of performs productivity. And to get an understanding of I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. What are people doing?
That, that may help me. So I started belt battle test on some of their strategy, going down the whole Robin Hole at workshops from book and seminars and YouTube and literally taking strategies, testing it, implemented it, scared what didn’t work, take what did work. And eventually I started to see some commonalities between how the best in business do live.
I started applying then to my days and eventually I got to a point where I was getting so much more outta the time that I was putting in. I was actually getting about five days work done in every one at the end and not while I was still as, while I was still sick and looking for answers and solutions.
So I was at a completely different level of performance first with where I was and I didn’t think anything I was, I just. Went about my own work. I was still knocking on doors looking for ads for solutions. Anyways, two and a half years went by and eventually I got to the point where I was like, really, I was seriously worried because it was getting worse and worse.
So I had no short term memory whatsoever. I came across a local newspaper here and there was a woman on the paper talking about how she had never touched symptoms to myself. Just through a kind of series of coincidences, I got in contact with her. She was actually getting treated for this autoimmune condition that she had at the time.
She got me in there with her consultant. I got tested and sure enough I turned out that I had the same autoimmune condition as her. So I ended up, because the, that there isn’t much specialist knowledge in Ireland. All it, I ended up at the Czech Republic for a month, basically in a room by myself, and it gave me a lot of time to pause and think about my life, and I was at that point then where I was like I have tools and systems here and I looked around thinking about the office back at home and I was like this person is operating off sticky notes and this person, has a bit of a list and this person has no system whatsoever.
And I was like, but there is a better way. Maybe people don’t realize there’s a better way. I didn’t until I had to no choice but to count that go down this rabbit hole. So I started documenting things a bit more formally over there. Started helping out a few people when I came back, just rined, stuff like that.
And then that kind evolve then over COVID, whereas I started like seeing them get results and I was like, okay, maybe I should get this stuff out to a wider audience. Start putting out free stuff on online, doing free master classes. And that evolved over time then into the business coaching program.
That I have now. So it was just never started out at all, was created for my own need. I just evolved from that end into something that now I know how to people and that’s what I do.
It’s a fascinating journey and it’s one that I think that’s the interesting thing about someone such as yourself is that when you’ve experienced it. And you’ve ridden through that and delivering that. It’s so different to what is traditionally the method of coaches, which is, look, I’ve learned how to be a coach and I’m going to tell you stuff.
And there’s a lot of coaches out there that perhaps fall into that category. And so when I think when you’ve lived and breathed it, it’s a different beast.
Or not 100%. Yeah, 100%. I’ve, like if one person that came to before and they were like, yo, show me your, your coaching certificate and all this sort of stuff.
And like you can have certificate coming out the, co coming out the door work, but it’s really, it’s what you do, does it work? And there are people getting results from it. That’s the core thing. And often case with it’s created from your own need. That you’re damn sure that works because you have that, that practical hands-on experience of it.
Actually you need this. You implement it yourself and seeing it work as opposed to here’s theory, go now and try it for yourself.
Tell me how much is adapting and changing? ’cause there’s one thing when you build something around what suits you and everyone is, has their own individual quirks and backgrounds and feelings and all the rest of it That makes us human. And so with all the best of intentions, what works for you may not work for me.
So how do you find that balance and how much do you have? You had to tweak things over a period of time.
So I suppose first of all it’s like where I started and evolved and came from. I had really great opportunities to actually learn what helped other people. Then because of the free stuff I was putting out.
I would be able to adapt and change and tweak things. It’s based on feedback, based on how I see people implemented, based on see where I could actually improve on this and make things better. But at the it’s all based around one core framework. I call it my FEST productivity format and the framework, it’s the same framework for everybody, but it’s the inputs into that framework that gets the framework to work.
Okay. The first thing we do is, okay, it’s what I call our time officially accelerator, which is where we have to see, okay, exactly where you’re at. Okay. What’s baseline looking and what? What’s happening in the business right now? What’s happening in your days? What’s the ROI from the time that you’re putting in?
Where is your energy going? Where’s your time going? What are the outputs? As in where do you ultimately want to be? What’s the vision for the business? What’s the vision for your life? What are your goals? What are the kind of things that. You want to achieve? What are the milestones? And basically reverse the engineer all that back.
Okay. And we build it into a complete performance blueprint that we can actually build that framework around that system around. So the framework is the same for everybody else because you have to have a framework in order for you to get predictable results. But if the inputs into that framework that gets it to work, the inputs, which are different for all of us that gets it to work and then it’s after that, it’s I often think of us like that.
The toddler is trying to get the square peg in the square hole. It will go in there, but it’s dexterity isn’t informed and it’s like we have to tweak and adjust until look at that square peg goes in there and then that’s where people start to really see the benefits. For them it will fit, but as we’re all human.
We need to tweak and adapt it slightly to the individual. Then, ah, even after that point,
I wanna get into the whole idea of creating those. Systems and the tweaking of things as they do it. But I think there’s a, there’s an important aspect to talk about as well as you building towards this, and it’s something that I know you, you have front and center even on your website, which is the reference to work-life balance.
And this is, this has been a bit of a hot topic that I’ve had over the years with people because it’s a terminology within itself that is sometimes controversial, let’s just say. Yeah. I’ve posted in the past and said, work life balance and I’ve been, wrapped over the knuckles saying there’s no such thing.
What’s your take on that whole idea of work-life balance? Is it just an easy term that really means some, doesn’t really mean balance. Or what, how do you see it? So
In terms of work life balance I think there, there are seasons in our life as well. So you have this big thing that you want to achieve in the next week or the next month.
You sometimes it is, it’s working harder. It’s working longer. It, as long as it’s a season, as long as it feeds into the bigger picture, doesn’t mean you have to pin it at, 5:00 PM every single day. There’s days where social can go off track. There’s where you need to pivot or adjust. So it’s looking at the bigger picture of your life vision and ultimately what do you want to achieve and what do you want things to look like?
And it’s really building in place processes that, that allows you to achieve those outcomes where it’s not gonna impact on your health or your energy or your family or any of those other things in your life. So it’s about taking holistic look at everything and then designing that future vision of what that would look like.
Reverse engineering back from that point then. And then that’s it’s are you working? How are you working? Smart. Okay. It’s if you’re, if you have to put in, seven to 80 hours a week every week, and you’ve been doing that for, the last six months or the last five years, or the last 10 years, there there’s something wrong somewhere.
There’s something missing somewhere. So definitely it’s it has to be a, a holistic look at everything. In order for you to achieve, what you want to achieve without burning the candle or, sacrificing your personal time or your family time. And then I was saying maybe a time there is a fees in the way you need to put the extra hours or extra time that has to feed into the bigger picture.
So it’s it’s all about the bigger picture and where that actually fits into it.
Yeah, that’s it. It is true what you say in terms of seasonal, different stages of life, right? It’s can make a big difference when you’re on your own. It’s much easier to put more time into work potentially. When you’ve, as you maybe get married or certainly have children, once children come into the picture, it completely changes your perspective on things because you do want to spend more time with with your child, which means, invariably when they’re particularly young, it means you actually have to be home or available at least at certain times of the day.
’cause there’s no good coming home at eight o’clock at night and the child’s in bed at seven o’clock. It’s, there are lots of those things that come into the picture. So part of it is adapting. I imagine as well to, to where you’re at in your life and where your business wants and needs to be.
Yeah, it is, of course. It’s, yeah, there, there’s like that, for example, if you’re a startup business, then absolutely it’s gonna take more time. It’s gonna take more energy versus the business that’s established. So it just depends where you’re at. But the core part of it is it has to be. You have to be working as smartly as possible within the relevance of, what you want to achieve.
I’ve had people come to me and they could absolutely kill it for, a solid 12 hour day and focus Absolutely maximize their output, and then they’re flat as a pancake for five days after. It has to be sustainable as well. What you’re doing, you have to be smarter. And it’s a bit like we talked about athletes earlier.
Yes, we need to sprint, but we need that recovery time as well. So there has to be a delta into the picture. If we’re not getting recovery time, guess what? We’re not gonna be as effective tomorrow. And then we try to outwork that by working landlord tomorrow, and then we, therefore we get less recovery time and then we get into this vicious loop.
So that’s what that has to be considered as that.
I, I hear what you’re saying and I think that the trick, which is the next part of the conversation is getting your systems in place, right? It’s actually how do you actually make this possible so your business can function? Because the ultimate dream, of course, for most solo business O operators is how do you get it to a point where the business can operate without you, so that you can take that, holiday or.
Or it might just be taking some time off during the week so you don’t have to work five days a week, whatever it looks like for you. That’s the dream certainly at an initial point. So how important is it to find those systems? How easy is it to find those systems so they, is that something you can coach at a high level or is that getting into the nitty gritty?
Yeah look, it’s like a game. That’s what is it you want to achieve in your life? And everything revolves around systems, like everything, because systems must be reduced. The amount of micro decisions we’re making, systems take away a reliance of willpower or discipline or motivation or all these things that are really fleet things that come and go over time at the ent, they explode.
So what is it you want to achieve? For me, say in my personal life, I try to avoid sweets and sugar. Stuff like that, Monday to Friday. And if I didn’t have a system in place for that, I’d always be making my decisions. Will I have it now? Will I have it later? Will I, how much of it will I have? And then I’ll clear it in because sheer decision fatigue.
So instead, my system is, I don’t have it in the house Monday to Friday. My only decision is when I buy, when I go to the shop, the weekend. So that’s reduced hundreds of micro decisions across my week, down to one decision. Okay? That’s a system. So it really is what are you looking to achieve? Again, start with the interwind and reverse engineer back from that, okay?
To see, okay, in order for me to achieve this, what systems do I need to actually build around me to it to enable, let me to do the thing that I need to do. Yes, thought it could be personal review systems, it could be, systems for business. But everything comes down to systems. If you want to achieve a predictable outcome, then you have to create a system around you that enables you to do that.
Yeah, I, it’s. It’s easy to talk about. It’s difficult to implement, isn’t it? Those little things that can make a difference, like you said trying to identify those things that derail you. I know I’ve just been doing that myself in the last couple of days and came to this, realization I knew was always there that I was being dictated to by my phone and that I needed to turn the notifications off on my phone like permanently.
And it’s actually takes a little bit of getting used to when you’re making some of those sorts of changes because I had this feeling when I did go and check my messages and go, oh my goodness, I had all these text messages and this message on what’s happened. I didn’t respond to it straight away.
And then I realized if. No, I actually had some quiet time during the day to get a few things done because I wasn’t doing that, and it’s very, so those little things, like you say, knowing that you get a sugar rush and you shouldn’t have the sugar during the week, so you wait till the weekend like.
There’s two components to this. Really. There’s the recognizing it in the first place, or probably three, recognizing it, wanting to do something about it, and then doing something that is actually gonna meaningfully make those changes to improve those systems, because that third part is hard.
Yeah, of course.
And I it’s we have to almost. The ourselves from ourselves, we have to almost eliminate the profitability for not doing the thing. It’s in manufacture plants, they have called the cheeks or the fixtures to create, a duplicate inter interchangeable parts that you know at scale.
So they don’t have to cut up or cut or cast a new parts every single time. So that massively reduces the amount of areas where things could go wrong here. And it’s the same with herself. Like I had a woman recently and she was a devil. Her. Hopping on Instagram in bed at 11 o’clock at night, and she, they’ll scroll it through videos at two, three o’clock in the morning.
So instead of trying to motivate her or tell her to have more discipline around that, like we set, we just set up a system that would eliminate the possibility for that. So does set the phone, that would time her out basically, after 15 minutes she could do it. She could do it for 15 minutes. That’s her little reward at the end of the day.
Then she got timed out and then she can’t go back on it again till the next day. So again, it’s eliminating the possibility for it not happening, if there’s little friction points to it. It’s reducing those friction points to make it easier for it to happen. And it’s it’s, again, having a process that means either completely unlikely or to for not to happen or it’s, you’ve eliminated the possibility for that happening.
How easy is it for people to recognize. What it is that they need to be tweaking, if that’s the right terminology, to be able to improve their performance. How? How easy. It’s like I had the realization, but probably prompted by someone else. Yeah. With regards to the phone. How do you identify what other things, the phone is an obvious starting point ’cause it does, I’m sure it does impact a lot of people, but there are less obvious things and so how do you find that within people and help them recognize it, as that first step?
Yeah, that’s a great question that it really comes down to, measuring and managing you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So what we do is we literally look at everything that’s happening in their daily weeks, okay? I have an AI tool that I built to actually track what they do, where the time goes, where their energy goes, where their focus goes.
That actually is able to measure that. So we can actually see what is happening in their days? Where is their time going? What’s the ROI from the kind of things they’re working on? What are the kind of things that pulling ’em off track or distracting them or interrupting them, could, we can build out a full picture at the very start and when we use that picture in front of them and we sit down without me even there anything.
They can up with pinpoint and get that aha moment to say, actually, I didn’t even realize I was doing as much of that, or didn’t even realize I wasn’t doing enough of that. It’s really getting the data at the very start to the, okay, this is actually what’s happening in real terms. It’s not based on what I think it’s in or looking back at the weekend and kind of wonder, Jesus, what did I do?
Or where did I go off track? It’s in real time actually, man, measuring this stuff so that over a period of time we can build up a full picture. And then when we have that level of data then it’s clear then this is, these are the systems we need to build around you and nobody in order to enable you to achieve the end outcome you’re after.
Yeah. Those systems are so important. Does that scare people? Being able to systemize it. How easy is it? There’s so many tools out there now in terms of automations and various things like that can help with systems. What is the right place to start when building it?
And what does systems in real terms look like?
Like I person come to me recently and she was like, I’ve, I have this, I’m going to do the AI tour, and I was going to train me how to do all the. I used the utilize these 30 AI tools, it’s gonna be great. You know what you think should I do it?
And I was like what’s the outcome you’re after? And she was like I’ll get to use all these 30 AI tools, but I know what’s the outcome you’re after ultimately when you use these tools? And she didn’t know. So it was like you start with the end of the mind and you reverse back from that point to say, actually what do I need?
Okay, do I need all these 30 AI tools or do I need just one or two tools? To make my life easier. Okay, do I need all these things or do I need just a couple of things? So it’s like, what’s the outcome you’re after? And reverse the engineer backing that. Okay. For example, if you want to, cook back on working hours and your are just, from an efficiency point of view, then it’s okay, that’s one of the, that’s the end point.
You’re working at this level baseline, okay, this is what you want to get down to. Then we reverse engineer back from that point. For example, somebody wants to increase turnover in their business by agile. Let’s say, 20%, okay, we start with the end of mind. We’re first engineer back from that.
What do we need to do? We have to bring in new client, 12 new clients. Okay. Step back again. What do we need to do? We probably need to bring in a one new client, say every month. Okay, back again. Step back. What do we need to do? We need to probably bring in about four new leads a week.
Okay. In order for you to bring in four new leads a week, what do you need to do that? I have to spend about two hours on market then. Okay. In order for you to spend two hours on marketing on what you need to do you know what’s the best thing to do here? That’s where the fifth clubs come in.
Then do we need a VA that we can delegate that will actually do our LinkedIn outreach or social media post? Do we need to carve out in your schedule a two hour block for you? Go through a certain criteria to actually, to bring in those four new leads so it all gets. Which starts with the end in mind, we reverse back from that, and then from that then it’s very, becomes a lot clearer what you need to build around you system wise, in order to enable you to achieve the pain.
Then at the end of the day.
Yeah, that’s a it’s a great advice, great piece of advice to start at where, what you want to achieve because you can get trapped in systems and building systems for systems sake. And then micro managing those systems. I know I even experienced it recently where I had someone who had tried to build a system for part of the business and.
There was actually I realized that after it was implemented going, there’s more effort in trying to. Fill in the steps of the system, then there is in actually doing it. And so the system got too, we just went too minute in detail. And so you ended up going I have to tick this, and this. And I thought I, no, I don’t like, just lump some things together and do that.
And I think that’s an important part of this in getting the system right as you say, it’s focused on the end outcome. So the best way to achieve that without necessarily always having to go into the minutia of detail.
Yeah,
it
is. It is a course and it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Ful is better. Like the example I gave you with sweet and straw wasn’t this big complicated thing. It’s just they’re not in the house. Okay. I don’t have them in the house. That’s the rule. And then it’s much easier to get one division right, and have one rule that have, get a hundred decisions.
Simple. Simple is much better, comes off a hundred percent.
Let me put you on the spot a little bit. Give me a couple of, you, you pick the number. Give us a few tips for people who are looking to build systems for themselves in the business. What are some things that they need to how to identify what systems they should be putting in place and what they need to do?
Look at it’s the, again, going back to it, okay, what is it you want to, what is it you want to achieve? How would you like your days to run? How, ’cause I get people out there yeah, but this is the way it is right now. What about if, if I do, if this happens or that happens, or what about if I don’t hit this target and I don’t worry about the way it is right now?
Yep. I just lost you there for a minute. Yeah, I just lost you there for a minute with your internet picture is now saying it’s good. So do you mind just taking that back and answering that question again about just from the top about some of those tips. Yeah, a hundred percent. So a again,
it’s what, how would you like things to be?
How would you like things to run in your day? Like at a person that was talking to me recently and we were talking about this, her certain goals and targets and obvious saying, look it, they’re not specific enough. You don’t have figures, you don’t have dates, you don’t have any of that kinda stuff.
And if you just want to make more money, that’s. What does that mean? That could mean an extra five bucks in your pocket could mean an extra million at end of the year. What is it you actually want? And she would say, yeah, but what if I lose a client and I’m not hitting it and that you won’t motivate me?
I’m like, don’t worry about all the things that could go wrong. Think about the way you want it to be. Okay. Think what you want to achieve. Okay. And then it’s what do I need to do in order for me to get there? Okay I can see this is the ideal outcome. This is what’s happening right now on my days.
How do I get there faster? Okay, so I’m working on hours, I’m spending too long doing okay. We use the marketing example there. I’m spending three hours per week doing marketing and okay, it’s fine. Let’s, one system we could do is, one thing I do is. Is build playbook. So very simply, you have a loop video.
You take the lymph video from you doing the task, it’s not actually taking you extra time. And then you upload that loop video to chat GPT. You ask chat GPT to act. Yeah, as a, as an ai delegation expert. And you get chat gt to actually build you out on step by step playbook. Based on this video, based on success criteria, how success looks like economistic to avoid and a full step by step.
Then we take these playbooks, we hand them over to vas@maxfiver.com or Upwork, and then we can delegate the thing that you need to do in order for you to achieve the outcome. So you can spend even worth time per in something that has a bigger ROI for you to actually achieve the end outcome you’re after.
It’s all about getting people down into their zone of genius, because if they get the people down into that zone of genius things only they can do as leaders, as business people, then ultimately that they’re going to achieve those goals much faster. Okay, so what else could, like either another guy that kept using the business owner just left as an engineer company in Dublin and he had this big triage process for QA and documents.
Okay. So his team would have to QA the document to make sure there’s no, and everything is just right. And then it would come to him for a second triage. Why he would spend them like probably the guts of a day every week, just triage documents as a business, order, an admin type task. So what we’ve done is we’ve built out a custom cheap pt.
Okay? So we built a custom AI tool that will actually do the triaging for him. Okay. That enabled him to get the guts of a did per week back to get on the business. Now again, in his sort of genius progression towards the goals. So it’s like, what is it you want? How would you like things to run? Okay.
How would you like things to be? And then it’s what are the things we need to do in order for me to get there? Okay. And it’s thinking really outside the box as well. Okay. It’s if you had to. Okay take this task off your plate. How could you do it? Sometimes we think we have to do X and we have to do Y, but there’s often a much better way for it.
Another guy I was working with there later, he’s a four hour invoice process to do every single week, and I was like okay. That’s again, not value add for him, as in this is somebody else could do. Or what we done was we completely automated the task in about 15 minutes. So we’ve mapped out of current workflow, we’ve mapped out the future ideal workflow.
Usually ai, build a playbook, hand that over again to somebody on five.com or rock worker or one of these outsource websites. And then when in three days yet that process completely or when I say completely, was about 95% to the automated. So again, we’re getting him further down to that zone agen so he can spend his time on things only he needs to do as part of the best.
The challenge with all of that for small business particularly, is spending money. That’s the hard part, isn’t it? It’s like it’s easy to say, great, we should have a VA that comes in and do X, Y, Z or we should have another person that does this. Yeah. And sometimes that money is easy and makes sense and I’ve often used this example and say, look, the first hire I had in business was a bookkeeper.
I loathe doing invoicing. I loathe doing the books. I take too long to do it and dreaded it every month when I was doing it. The best money I ever spend and, every month with my bookkeeper and shout out to Anna who I know listens regularly lifesaver. But the but it is a lot harder when you are, you’ve got someone who wants to begin regularly to do those things because it is about how do you equate.
Spending the money versus saving time versus being able to bring in more clients, do more work, so that you can pay those bills.
Yeah.
It has to
be ROI led. So again if it’s ROI led, it’s you go to a bank machine and yes, you have to put, a dollar into the bank machine.
But if your back machine is gonna give you back $2, $5 or $10 back, then you put that dollar in. I’ll do that, wouldn’t you? But unless you stay way in business, it has to be ROI led and when you can get down to the initial grad say, is this actually ROI led? Is there an ROI here? Then it, then it makes in to do the things.
So again, it’s not. A lot of people trouble mud against the wall and hope something sticks. It’s specific and pinpoint it. All of our oil lead, and by the way, hiring is not the first step. I always make AI express higher. Okay. Can we automate it? Can we delegate it? Can we can we divide that for that?
Again it’s one and done so you don’t have to hire somebody and now they’re doing the repeatable thing. That potentially could have been automation in the first place. Can we actually automate this process or. Must be reduced, the friction in the process. Okay. So we can streamline it. So we make AI our first hire.
Then we think, do we need somebody? And again, I wouldn’t typically recommend hiring somebody straight off the back. It’s okay, let’s bring somebody in. As and outsource this task to I’d say yeah, where it’s like maybe hourly, paid hourly or based on a block of time as opposed to now we, someone working full time on us with pressure on us to, to pay them.
Don’t know. Keep working in front though. What you can do is incrementally increase that. Then over time it’s like, what I always do is generate wins. Generate wins. You can see okay, the light bulbs go off and say, okay, if they can do this, Wallace, it’s could they do, that’s a thing with ai. Generate wins around all that so you can see the return on your investment of time.
’cause that gets people to buy in. And it’s if you could deal that, what else could be If we if our VA can do that now and it’s just working really well for us, what else could they do? And then the light bulb start goes off and then they don’t mind, but it’s r why lead? And it’s getting those quick wins at the start so that people really buy in to do the next thing or the next thing or the next thing.
There’s so many things that we could talk about here and there’s just not much time left, and I just wanted to get in a couple of things before we finish up. It’d be remiss me not to mention the book you participated as part of rise Above. Tell me a little bit about that and what people can expect from it.
And of course, preface it by saying we will make sure we include some details in the show notes so people will be able to access it. Tell us a little bit about Rise Above.
Yeah,
it’s,
so look I was lucky enough to, to quarter with Les Brown, myself and Nine Underwriters. We all have own individual chapter in the book and it’s really a series of inspiring stories of people’s journeys.
The, like myself had faced, really challenging and difficult situations. And how we overcame it in order to achieve the kind of things that we went on to do in our lives and our journey almost to, to this point. So it’s really, I often describe it, it’s a bit like, it’s basically the concept of if you ever read him stick for the Soul.
It’s basically not concept where our whole goal was just to inspire people that maybe come through a tough time, a difficult time, and knowing that, look at there is a light movement forward. And the times where I felt like, look, this isn’t working out. I didn’t know where to turn or where to go because I couldn’t find answers and solutions, but.
I I always seen then and liked that if you just stay consistent long enough, you’ll get there. And that’s was my message in the book. I know the other quarters were the same. If you just stay consistent long enough you’ll get there. Okay? Yeah. Les Brown has done great catch first, have done it.
He is the first chapter in the book and he says, look if you can look up, you can get up. And it seems difficult, but you can’t get up and you can move path, whatever those challenges are now. And when you do that, you just keep taking the steps forward. No matter how small those get, you’re going to get there.
You’re going get whatever it is that you want to achieve. There’ll be humps and there’ll be bump and be ups and downs. And especially in business, there’s that’s prior to the course, but if you stay consistent, whatever it is you want, you will get there. That’s really what the book is about.
Fantastic. Said we will make details of it available in the show notes so people can get a hold of that. And just before we wrap up, the question I always like to ask my guests is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?
Yeah, I think it’s, yeah, I got it. We can normalize the way things are right now and we can think that this is almost just the way it is like this. It’s like I often think, the weather in Ireland, like when it’s day after day after rain, we almost feel like, geez, there’s never gonna be a sunny day.
And then when the good weather come, then it’s day after. So you feel this is going to go on forever and it can be the theme in our life and our business as well. But the big thing is to get people at quick wins at a nearly stage that they can say actually. It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t have to put in 80 hours a week.
I don’t have to, I don’t have to feel stressed all the time during my days is to get people a quick win so they can almost say actually, there, there is a better way. For example, there was one woman who worked out recently and just one very simple thing. We bookended our day.
We either like a little 15 minute shutdown routine at the end of our day where it was like, this is your finished time. This is the time you, ’cause in business, obviously we’re not on a nine to five. It’s like you can work all the hours, you can work none of the hours. That one thing pulled her easement and her weekends back for her because work expects to fill the time available.
Okay? And when she seen that, it was like light bulb moment. Okay, what else can I do? Then she was all in. Okay. So it’s like, what is the one thing you can do that can make the biggest difference? Getting people, that one went straight away. They can say, actually, you know what, there is a better way.
And it doesn’t have to be like that because I can say it and you can hear other stage. But when you get those wins at an early stage, then that’s the moment where they’re all in.
Fantastic. I love so much of the information that you’ve given today. It’s such a not only a unique perspective in so many great stories, and I think there’s so much for people to learn from it. So I really thank you for being a part of the program and it’s lovely to speak to someone on the other side of the world.
Fantastic accent. We love it over here. Thank you so much for being part of the of the Biz Buys for Thought Leaders podcast. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
And to everyone listen in. Don’t forget, of course, to hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
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Joanne Brooks
Navig8 Biz
Women’s Business Growth Mentor
Join us on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders with Joanne Brooks, an entrepreneur with 17 businesses and 20 years of experience. Joanne is on a mission to revolutionize how women access higher education and business growth, emphasising that a traditional degree isn’t necessary for success.
In this episode, Joanne discusses the importance of ongoing learning and coaching, and introduces her new platform offering affordable, comprehensive support for women in business. We’ll also explore the unique challenges and opportunities for women in business, highlighting Joanne’s initiatives through Navigate Biz and her championing of innovative MBA programs. Tune in!
Offer: Check out Joanne’s exciting offer to Biz Bites listeners here.
Why successful women never stop learning, accessing proven business advice and growth strategies with Joanne Brooks. Joanne is an old friend. We’ve known each other for a number of years, and today’s conversation is going to challenge everything you think about how business education should be for you, particularly for women in business.
She’s had a vast amount of experience across 17 different businesses from multimillion dollar ones to smaller ones. And here’s what makes this episode really special. Joanne’s revolutionizing how women access higher education and proving you don’t need a university degree to earn an MBA. If you’ve ever felt locked out of traditional education or wondered about alternative pathways to advance your business knowledge, this conversation is going to open your eyes to possibilities you never knew existed.
A wonderful episode of Biz Bites for Thought leaders that will change the way you think and add lots of value. Particularly for women in business.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today’s guest she and I have been, I dunno how many years we’ve been corresponding back and forth a bunch. Quite a while. We’ve we’ve managed to, even though we’re in different cities, we’ve managed to sit down and have a meal together as well.
And it’s never quite materialized, but we think that’s gonna change in the very immediate future. So I guess I should start by welcoming you, Joanne, to the program. Thank you.
I’m so excited to be here. Finally on your point. Finally. Yay. It’s about time we made it happen. Yes. So for those that don’t know you, why don’t you give us a little bit of a, an explanation as to who you are and what you’re focusing on these days?
Yeah. Thank you. So Joanne Brooks. I’m based on the Gold Coast. I am the founder of Navigate bis which launched, gosh, nine years ago now. Can, I can’t believe it’s that long ago. I’ve been an entrepreneur for. Over 20 years. And in that time I’ve spent a lot of time in the education space. I’ve owned my own registered training organizations.
I’ve owned a ver variety of businesses. So if people ask me how many companies have I run or operated 17 in those 20 years, some of them are all at the same time. And Navigate Biz came about because I had a business that had rapid growth to 30 minute million in 24 months. That was crazy. But it took me 20 odd years to get to a point to be ready for.
It wasn’t one of those overnight successes but it also took me seven years to liquidate it, a a. A myriad of micro moments that caused a tidal wave to have us liquidate that and navigate biz popped up as a result of that. Today I work with women. I call myself the Circle Builder. It’s about bringing women together in circle to support them in their growth strategy, whether it’s, and Circle is a concept that’s.
Eons old, right? We’re very used to sitting in circle and supporting and guiding one another. And so for me, it has landed very nicely for me to have women understand that I’m bringing other women into. Their various businesses to support and guidance. I don’t know at all. One of the, yeah, you’ll be helping us and supporting us in that way as well about getting your story out and so on.
And circle Builder, business mentor, using all the things that I’ve learned all over those years to help and support women in business. That’s as short as I can do it for you. It is, it’s very short. And having known you for a little while now, I know that’s only kind of scratching the surface in some of the, in some of the things that you’ve been doing.
And I suppose I wanted to start off with that a little bit ’cause you touched on about being the registered training organization in the education field. And I think as opposed to where you are now in terms of coaching and that sort of area, this is as well, a lot of the things that you’ve been doing is more specifically in traditional education, I guess the MBA programs and other sorts of training and things.
Yes. So tell me a little bit more about this, that space and what you’ve been doing there.
So in the so I haven’t owned an RTO for that period of time, but I’ve certainly worked in them. I’ve been consulting to them. I have helped a number of organizations create their own. RTO help with audit, get ready for audit.
So that’s the place that I hang out at the moment from a consulting perspective outside of my mentoring. And for me, having been being a female and having run my own RTOs, you could also say that one of my niche areas is to help and support female led RTOs because I get what it is.
I get the compliance, I understand the complexity of it. It’s a ridiculously heavy compliant compliance heavy industry. And I rightly it’s not easy to become an RTO but I also understand that, there’s a lot of women out there who are navigating that, and it’s hard. Really hard, business is hard anyway, but the RTO space, I don’t need to be one, but I certainly help women who are in that space to be better RTOs.
Hmm.
For those, listen in and we always like to clarify the acronyms, registered training organization and post. People usually have heard of it, but I don’t think that people, most people actually really understand what it is and what the implications of it are and why on earth you would do it.
Because a lot of the time people e expect that training comes just from your traditional educational institutions, universities, TAFEs, that sort of thing. Yeah. But RTO kind of fits.
In between all of that.
Yeah, it is people will heard of will know it potentially as vocational education.
I know that’s a trade space. I know that’s a terminology that’s common overseas. To become a registered training organization is not an easy task. If we, to put context as to what it is we are the competitors to tafe. TAFE are the free. Government subsidized certificate one through to advanced diploma.
And there are over in Australia, which might surprise the audience here. There’s over 3000 private RTOs in this country. When most people, general public think, oh, I’m gonna go and do a certificate or diploma, I. I’ll go to tafe. That’s their, they feel that’s their only option if they find someone who’s dabbling in it.
Aren’t you tafe? I can’t tell many times I’ve been asked that question. So there’s the government one and then there’s private RTOs. What does it mean to become one? You have to, as I said, there’s heavy rigor in the compliance. And why is that? So we are educating people to take on an occupation.
If we put it into some to simple terms, if we’re teaching somebody on how to build a house, they are a laborer and then they’re building a house and then a three story house, and then a highrise and a shopping center. There’s, that goes from certificate one to advanced diploma. And so thinking about the complexities of what it would take to do that sort of construction.
There’s some very heavy education that needs to be passed on to that person to be authorized and to be able to apply for their license. So that’s a simple explanation that most people could probably relate to probably as most people live in a home.
I, yeah, absolutely. And I think it is a very simple and easy way to understand.
Standard. But I think there’s the next layer I suppose to that is, is yes, it makes sense that if you’re looking to become a builder and you want to build houses and you’ve gotta go and do that. Yeah. But we come to further education really, that also falls under this banner as well. And I think that’s an interesting space, particularly for women who are, maybe I’m being a bit.
Wrong here, but I seem to feel like there’s a lot that feel like they need to prove themselves and need more education. I don’t know whether that’s necessarily true. Yeah. But it feels that way at times. How is, am I right in thinking that?
Yes, I agree. I recently, which I shared with you the other day, I completed my MBA or two weeks ago.
And a lot of people went, wow, that’s such a lot, big effort and amazing, and all those sort of things, which it is like, it was I was very. Pleased to be able to complete it, but I’m someone who was never given the chance to go to university, so it was definitely a bucket list item for me. I’ve done a myriad of certificates and diplomas.
I do come across many women when I start talking to ’em about the higher education opportunity. And I guess we, again, default, just like looking at certificates, we default to TAFE when we are talking about degrees, we default to the traditional university spaces. That are out there and we’ve got the lovely thing about Australia, we have an amazing reputation of education.
The quality of the education is outstanding because we have such rigorous compliance and protocols that the government insists that we deliver under, which is a good thing because it’s good for the student. To get the depth of knowledge that they need to learn. But when I speak about the deli, the degrees that I’m bringing into Australia they’re via Deser Global Business School, which a good friend of mine has owned that business for about 17 years.
And the wonderful thing is, whilst he’s based outta the US and Aussie guy, he is, he has had these MBAs built to Australian standards. Because he understands the quality that implies. And I, what I know is, and we’ve seen it before, many people from overseas come to Australia to undertake higher education because of the quality.
And this is just a different option for women in business. What I love about it is nobody loves exams. I can’t take say anybody could put their hand up and say, yeah, give me a three hour exam, please. That would be amazing. I’d love that.
No thank you. No,
definitely not. You gotta get that stuff outta your head.
But what I absolutely love. And feel so relevant to entrepreneurs today and particularly my audience, female entrepreneurs, is that there are no exams in these particular MBAs. What you get to do is to work on your business as projects and produce projects that are based on your business. And so what has come, what has helped me to redefine my marketing message, my branding and my focus has been a direct relation to my completing my MBA Circle builder came out of my final project, rebranding came out of my marketing subject that I did.
So we all know we should work on our business, but we often don’t make the time to do that. So we’ve got a double whammy if you like. We can work on our business and build our skillset to be, to step into our C EShip is how I think of it. And that’s why I speak a lot about it for women in business.
And the awesome news is you don’t have to have a degree, which is why I was able to do it.
Yeah, I think the, these are all really important points and I think, the education system, a lot of people’s view of how it works is not actually the reality of how it works. Yes. And now’s not the time to get into it, but, certainly this pushed for the need to do the HSC is a good example.
There are ways and means around. Doing it getting the education without having to do that. Yes. There’s still ways you can get into university if you want to do that later on. Exactly. So there’s lots of opportunities as you’ve done. I guess the question as well is, I. There’s one thing in this sort of scenario that you’ve painted in terms of doing the MBA, because that scenario of course, is that there’s a bucket list of wanting to do it.
There’s the combining it with being able to work on your business, it ticks those boxes. Yeah. But there are a lot of people who’d be sitting there and going, I’ve got a university education already. Yep. I’ve been in business. We’ve got people working on the business. What’s the incentive to do an MBA does?
It does, and not just an MBA. There are other things that you can do. Of course. What’s the real incentive to do it? Is it. Is it for your own ego or is it because it’s actually going to help you get ahead in terms of achieving the next role? We’re talking about people who might be employed here.
Employed, yeah. Is it gonna, is it gonna put you ahead of the next person?
I genuinely believe so. Particularly the Deser Global Business School opportunity. And the reason is very simple. A no exams great. However, the people who’ve written these programs are entrepreneurs and traditionally our academic, our academia will write the degrees and the master’s degrees, all those sort of things in traditional university space.
So what Matt Jacobson from Deser Global Business School, who’s the owner he specifically sought. Entrepreneurs to help him write them. And the entrepreneurs that he’s got woven through in video interviews and the written content are people like our past prime ministers heads of state. The head of the CIA Goldie Horn, Desmond Tutu Julie Gillard, just to name a few of them.
And a lovely equal spread of men and women. But, if you’re gonna learn negotiation skills, who doesn’t wanna learn it from the person who’s been the head of the CIA, I think he’s got something to share. And so that, that piece was one of the main. Main reasons besides the bucket list for me, one of the main reasons why I wanted to go and do mine, because I wanted to hear what those people had to say.
I wanna hear Julia Gillard and how she navigated the tricky piece of the, the, we all remember the misogyny speech that she did and how she navigated that environment that many women face in corporate and or even in their own business. And I didn’t do it for the letters. The letters are going to be handy potentially if I’m going to go for tenders or corporate work, et cetera.
So as an entrepreneur it makes total sense. But what I see these programs are. Learn from these world leaders who are sharing their insights. And some people would say to me I can go and find them on YouTube, and absolutely you can. But I know that the interviews have been curated to meet the learning requirements of the subject.
And so they’re sharing their insights in negotiation skills. I, Goldie Horn, I always thought of her as the crazy ditsier actress. She has an amazing business mind and an amazing foundation that she has for women and children. So she’s somebody that go, wow, you, I’ve learned a bunch of things from you.
And we all learn differently. Video, audio, text. So it’s got all those through it. So for me, when I speak about it as an entrepreneur, for me, it’s the final piece to my pathway for entrepreneurs in what Navigate Office and I speak to women in business to say. We’ve worked on you. We’ve got your foundations right now, you are ready to grow and scale your business.
Let’s really step into your C EShip and let’s build your international network, your global network, learn critical thinking skills, learn problem solving, all those things that you need as a CEO of a business that you are gonna scale to whatever level. It doesn’t matter.
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We’ve worked on you. We’ve got your foundations right now, you are ready to grow and scale your business.
Let’s really step into your C EShip and let’s build your international network, your global network. Learn critical skills. Thinking skills, learn, problem solving, all those things that you need as a CEO of a business that you are gonna scale to whatever level, doesn’t matter. So I see it as a natural process, a natural endpoint, if it’s, if there’s going to be an endpoint in working with me, is that you need to do your MBA because of the, all those other elements, not so much the letters.
It’s not as important for me.
Yeah, and I think that’s, and it’s an interesting thing, isn’t it too, is it’s that we, this program is all about thought leadership. And I think to be a thought leader, you need to keep working on things you need to keep learning from other people. And you need to keep expressing your ideas.
I think that’s the important thing too, where, you can get stuck in this idea. And I think that’s the traditional educational model. Yeah. Where you do a bunch of things, you answer an exam, you’ve got something at the end of it, and it’s huh, what was the point of that? Which is exactly, sadly, what happens with a lot of degrees I.
Yeah,
indeed. Yeah.
But I think this whole concept of ongoing learning and challenging the way people think and talking and allowing them to talk to yes, that is so important, is what’s gonna help people stand out. And so the MBA and other such, courses is a culmination of where that might.
Take your mind land. Yeah,
exactly. Exactly. I remember speaking to a lady who enrolled in a an MBA with er and she was having challenges in securing a promotion in her. Particular business. And I said, I asked her, I said, have you shared with your employer? He knew. They knew she was doing the MBA, but have you shared what you are learning and how you are implementing it within your role?
And she said no, that would be a bit egotistical, wouldn’t it? I went. Absolutely not. And this is something that women struggle with a lot is I can’t go, oh, look at me. And it’s not about that. It’s about I suggest to, you should approach your manager or your boss because she’d been bypassed for a promotion when somebody with less experience, et cetera.
And I said, just think about. Think about this when you’re applying for a role, a lot of corporates, rightly or wrongly look for the letters, right? MBA and Bachelor’s and PhDs and all that sort of stuff. But do they ever look a bit deeper and go where did you get that from and what did you do to achieve it?
I said, what? What I would recommend you do is you write a paper about what projects you are working on, because some of the MBA programs through deser, you get to work on. Live global projects and I think at the time she was working on one for Disney. So how cool would it be to have on your resume that you’ve worked on a project in Disney and they’ve implemented it?
So she was an employee and it took a fair bit of convincing to have her. Step forward and share that because I, the way it is, men and women are women, men will tick three of this 10 criteria and go, yep, I’m gonna go for it. Whereas women just won’t naturally do that.
They find that pretty confronting. But when we looked at the criteria of the role and what she was learning in her MBA, I said, you are ticking boxes left and center. She said, but I haven’t finished yet. I said, doesn’t matter, you’re still you’ve, you’re passing subjects as you go. Take a big breath, have a go, and just, even if you just go and have a talk to the boss and say, these are the things that I’m learning and this is what I’m implementing in my role for you as an employee.
I never did find out how she went, but I, I don’t think that’s an unusual situation. Sad.
Yeah, it is. And I know what you mean. It’s being scared to have that conversation. ’cause you feel like you need to get to the end of it first to be able to do that. And then there’s, at the end of it, you think, oh, I need to get some runs on the board before I do.
And suddenly you’re 10 years down the track. No. And rather than having the conversation now, and I think that’s the important thing, what separates. Leaders ultimately is not being afraid to put yourself out there. You’re not always going to be right. Correct. And it’s also how you frame the conversation as well.
Yes. Having a conversation with the boss and saying, look, I am, in this particular case I’m doing an MBA, and these are some of the things I’m looking at. This is what I’ve been implementing and thinking about in the role. I’m interested in your opinion as well. Suddenly you are mixing it at an intellectual conversation Yes.
At a completely different level to what you were before. And that on its own is of value. Whether there is a position that you’re aiming for or not.
Exactly. And to take that to the next level. What does sir are always looking for. A larger organizations that have a team of executives or management, they, they would love to work with a team of management.
To work, to enroll, and then they will ask that organization, what project do you want them to work on for your business? That doesn’t cost that organization anything, but they might have outsourced that project to some of the large consultancy firms and spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars. But think how the return on investment for an employer to have a team, a cohort of staff working on a project for their business at the same time achieving their MBA game changer.
Yeah. It’s something we’ve spoken a little bit about on the program in the past, but investing in your team Yes. Is more and more important these days, I think. Exactly. Particularly in the face of AI and other things when you can invest in your team and that creativity and that ability to problem solve and think about things differently.
Which you can transfer to new things as they come along. The truth is that, the information that we’re dealing with today on how we navigate AI and where we use it in a business was not something we were thinking about really five years ago. In most businesses cases.
Certainly not 10, 20 years ago. No. For the majority of people. Now, there are some exceptions out there, by the way. Yeah. And I remember working with an organization probably 10 years ago that was already dealing with a, an ai. Yeah. Type situation. Very basic compared to what is out there today.
Yeah. But nonetheless, 10 years ago it was extremely advanced and we don’t know where we’re going to be. So being able to problem solve and understand these things is an incredibly important part. An organization and, pushing that with your team is rewarding.
Exactly. And the great news is for Deser, literally, I’m gonna say about two months ago, they launched their MBA in artificial intelligence through one of the European, university. So it went, oh my gosh, that’s something that I’m not gonna enroll straight away, but I figure I might do that next year.
Another one on the bucket list, another one
I went.
I’d love to learn more about that. Yes.
So let’s change tact a little bit because I know that the things like the MBA are the culmination of things, inspiration. It’s not necessarily where people are able to start, and I think that’s often, I. We don’t know what we don’t know as a lovely phrase.
Yeah. But it’s and I think a lot of people think that you only can learn on the job and pick things up that way. There’s often a gulf of people who. Don’t understand the value of coaching. Yes. And being enrolled in courses that are going to advance you, that are beyond the very simple technical things.
’cause I think most people think about that going, okay, I’ve gotta learn how to operate this machine so I’m therefore gonna do a course on how to operate this machine, use this piece of software, or whatever it might be. Yes. But your business or the business that you are working in is in of itself. A machine and multiple pieces of software, usually many liars.
And so how do you, how do you get people into the kind of program that you are running in the first place? In that? Do people have to put up their hand first? Do they have to know that this is something they wanted to do? Or are you spending a bit of time telling people that. This is something you should be thinking about.
Yeah.
I think as a business owner, I would be remiss in not talking it about it loud and proud. So I do that every day. And the main place I hang out is LinkedIn, but I also am very strategic that it’s, it cannot be the only place that I find clients. I. So for me, collaboration has been my biggest success factor.
So I’ve identified some networking and industry groups that align with me and my accountant who has my, cus my customer as their customer. So I am somebody who will be. More than happy to reach out to a network associate and say, can I be a member? And what I’d like to do is share my thoughts and my thought leadership to your audience.
What does that look like for you? So I do that regularly. I host a number of master classes for different industry bodies around Australia, networking groups and the u and the us. For me that’s smart strategy because they have my audience in abundance. I recognized many years ago having a one-on-one conversation whilst it’s absolutely delightful and amazing.
It’s not scalable and, you have a podcast that other people will listen to. So it makes total sense to me. As much as I like you, when we wanted to get this thing going, there’s always a strategy behind it. Why would I do that? So I do that often, and I volunteer my time. I write a post, I think it was last week, and I actually taught it up.
All the things that I do for free, I. Master classes, podcasts, all sorts of things, and I went, crikey. There’s a lot there. But I do it deliberately so people can. Be like, no one trusts me. Over time, I get it. We, look, I had this situation that I thought I was speaking to a real person on LinkedIn and it turns out clearly it was not, because I asked it the same question three times and I was questioning what they were responding to, and I got the exact same phrase back and I went clearly you are not a real person.
And the really sad part was that piece of software that they were talking about was that service. About how to respond to people on LinkedIn. And I went, oh my gosh, there’s never gonna happen in Pink Fit
That reliance on ai. And it’s quite funny you say that this has happened to me on more than one occasion.
So there’s a little tip for people that you get a question from a potential client. And so you think you’ll be clever and you’ll jump onto a an AI. Platform. And you ask it to answer that question on your behalf. Yes. Now. That’s clever to a degree, but if it does a, doesn’t know your tone of voice.
Exactly. It’s gonna be pretty obvious in a conversation. B, please read it before you post it. Oh, yes, please. I had someone post it today and it clearly said, oh, and don’t forget to ask them, you know this about their business or fill in their business name. Yeah. And things like that, that were clearly meant as a direction for you to do, to personalize it.
Yes. Not to cut and paste and they cut and past. And it was so not them. They’d literally taken my questions that I’d asked, put it into a service. Yes. Cut and pasted the responses, and it’s done them more harm than good because now I’ve gone from, I might trust them and I might utilize them to.
They’re not even interested. I in truthfully answering it, they’re answering what they think they need to answer. Yes. Yeah. And you’re just being taken for a ride. And I think that’s it’s so important to avoid that, but it’s so important. But we digress a little bit here. I wanna bring it back down to some of the people that you are actually working with.
Because I think this is where there’s such an important role in making an impact. I think we. There. There is this gulf between those that have the higher education and those that don’t. There’s those that there is a gulf between regardless of what the level of education you’ve had and when you next perceive that opportunity to learn, if at all.
Yeah. And so bringing people into an opportunity that enables. Them to learn and advance different aspects is so important, and it’s something that we have to foster in order to generate more innovation into. It’s not just about the individuals, it’s about the collective res, as well. And the benefit that we all have.
And I think this kind of idea of what you’ve got with your program is. It’s such an important one that I think there’s not enough attention being paid to these opportunities, and it’s part of the reason why I wanted to have you on the program.
Yeah. Thank you. If I, so I have four, four elements to what I offer, and the MBA is the pinnacle one at the other end.
But let’s go back to here. So I’ve had a program for a while, which is my signature program, her transformation. It’s. It’s $12,000 for six months. So I get it that there’s going to be women in business who financially not ready, mindset business, a number of reasons why it doesn’t work for them yet.
And I realized by golly, there’s a lot of women out there that have a desire for coaching. But I did do some research on that for my MBA so that I need to clarify this. We have had an abundance of coaches land on the landscape coming outta corporate with an amazing amount of skills. But I, what I want everybody to be cautious of, and it’s not to say that these people don’t have the skills that they need to be a coach, but when you are looking for a coach, and let’s say you’re looking for a financial coach, have the courage to say.
How’s your financials? If you’re looking for a sales coach, how’s your sales? Because if they’re a coach in that expertise. We have to quality check their credibility. I’m a business resilience coach. How many businesses have you had? 17. I’ve liquidated one. I’ve had trade, whole bunch of things. So I feel I can put up that shingle with pride to say that I had the experience, but I, but in my research, I realized through my MBA, that there are so many women in business who didn’t know that there’s a coach for every micro element of your business.
Every, there’s coaches across so many facets, and a life coach will not necessarily be the one you need for strategy. I’ve heard it so many times, and it hurts my heart that they go and engage these people, they pay money, and they’re not utilizing those persons brilliance at all. So that, that I have a concern about.
I have a, have therefore created a platform for easy entry into coaching for any female entrepreneur, and it’s $97 US a month. I feel I’ve made that incredibly accessible, but what I’ve loaded this platform with is the many hundreds of video conversations I’ve had with people about business. Two minutes to 10 minutes.
Numerous tools and resources and lots of mini courses, but they get me for an hour and a half every month of client led mentoring. So there’s discussion forums, all these sort of things. So I wanted to create a circle, a place that was safe for women, whether they’re brand new to business or whether they’re in the messy middle, and they’re going, oh, I need something, but I’m nervous of spending a lot of money.
But I know I need quality, so I wanted to create something that would tick all those boxes for them and they can dive in and out. It’s not a course to finish. It’s not start A to Z. You can go a KLZ, whichever direction you want. It’s there for you to dive into, what do I need today? I need to know about sales, what I need to do today.
Oh, I need to understand the financial terms of my profit and loss. I don’t understand financial literacy. I can go find that in here. So for me, it was about filling a chilly great big gap for women in business to. Maybe to reaffirm the things that they think they know and make sure it’s right, but also I think I’m gonna learn a bucket load of things from these women as well.
I don’t know at all by any means. So I wanted to create a safe circle for women to, to come together and learn and absorb and download whatever they need for their business.
I wanted to pick you up on something that you said there, which is safety. Women feeling safe. And it’s. I don’t wanna gloss over it because I think it’s an important, it’s an important term and I think it’s important that people understand what it, what that actually means because it’s easy to gloss over it and go safe.
Why wouldn’t you be safe? Yeah, you are reputable. It’s fine, but it’s not it. It’s more than that.
Yeah. It is. It’s wraps around mindset. It’s wraps around the quality of the material that you’re going to get access to, the people who are welcomed into circle. For me initially, I want to interview every single one and make sure that they are ready for that.
Particularly for her transformation. You will be invited. You can’t just come in because it’s such an intensive program. But safety isn’t a really important thing that came out of my. Search as well, which is why I landed with Circle. I’ve heard stories of people spending an awful lot of money maxing credit cards mortgages.
And what I know is we’ve got somebody, a partner, a husband, a significant other looking at you going. When is this thing gonna happen? And that creates an element of fear and scared and overwhelm and you’re going, oh my gosh, I have to show this person that I love and admire and who’s in my life that I can actually do this.
And they may not say it out loud, but there’s a lot of that going on inside. We’ve got these little people on our shoulders. And so for me the safety piece was to make myself accessible. So even for a hundred bucks, if you want 15 minutes of my time, my link is there and you can ring my phone number.
I want them to know that they can call me. No dramas. I want to, I generally want to serve and help women to get to the point that they’re ready for her transformation. To me, that means that their business is growing or maybe they move on to something else, and that’s perfectly okay as well. I just wanna help women to feel that this is a place that they can, I’ve got an idea.
What do you think? Without the fear of going, oh, that’s rubbish. Don’t do that. You’ll put some lipstick on, whatever. That’s not what I want. I want. People to go. Amazing. You gave it a good shot. How about you tweak it here or go for it Let’s, 80% is perfect. Don’t try and hit a hundred percent ’cause it just doesn’t exist.
How important is it? For it to be a space that is purely for women. I know it doesn’t mean necessarily the people who are teaching the things and ’cause you, for example, you’ve invited me to come and do some stuff with you. Yeah. But the people who are doing the course are women. How important is that?
Because I, I know that there’s, I. If you go to lower education in school system, there’s a trend these days to be making what were single-sex schools to now being co-ed.
Yes.
So how important is it to keep that separation and dealing with those separate issues? Is it still. Yes. Is it still
relevant?
It is for me, absolutely vital. I will work with men, no dramas at all. And I guess I would say to you it is for those people who identify as female because there’s gonna be men who, who identify as that, as long as, and which is why I’ve and it won’t be scalable forever, but as, ’cause I literally launched this program 15 days ago, so it’s.
Brand spanking you. It’s a brand new baby. So my intention is to interview have a quick meeting to make sure that they are the right fit for the program and if I have to make those hard decisions. When people are in, I’ll make that hard decision because it has to be, it has to be a safe place for all women to feel that they because a lot of it is confidence, A lot of it is imposter syndrome, all those things that, and I know it’s not unique to women but it’s prevalent in women.
They’re very comfortable and they’re genius. But then to actually get on a camera and talk about it. Which is why I wanted you in there because it’s so important to share your story. So important to me. I.
Yeah, the, we could go on for hours about the power of story.
We won’t do that. We won’t do that right now. We could. But I do, and hearing your story is in incredibly important and powerful as well, because I think that’s, you also hit upon something that is around. Credibility and asking people that, what their background is.
There are an awful lot of coaches and consultants out there. And many purport to be a lot of things. I’ve experienced different coaches and some where you sit back and you go, wow, they’re are amazing. And maybe not for me, but they are amazing. Yeah. Others where you just shake your head and you go I’m not really sure.
Yes. And and others which are just constantly, educating and furthering themselves. And I think there’s also an important thing to, to realize when it comes to this space is that as I’ve experienced myself, is sometimes you also need to change. Sometimes it’s. Being in one thing for a while and then recognizing that someone that there’s something else that you can get from going somewhere else.
It’s not a slap in the face necessarily to the person you’ve been with it, it just sometimes opportunities. Yeah.
Yeah. I had a very interesting situation last week. I was sharing the circle with navigate Circle with a number of people who are my Facebook group. And so one of the ladies came back to me and she said to me I’m a business coach, so it’s not relevant for me.
And it, I actually it caused me to really ponder that and I actually wrote a post on LinkedIn about it and said, so why not? Because for me, this person was an expert in marketing, not business strategy. So in her mind, she’s a different and I then reflected on my research for my MBA, that the data suggests that the influx of coaches that have arrived in the, on the landscape, most of them do not have a coach.
I find that absolutely fascinating.
I think that’s it. It’s and to me, I, you, you asked the question you should be asking them, if they’re a sales coach, how are their sales? Yeah. The second question you need to ask them is who is their sales coach? Because, or at least who their coach is, because if they don’t have a coach, then I agree with you.
I’ve worked with some some coaches who. Work on a pretty high level. I know they’re still being coached as well. Yeah. And that’s, because it is constantly learning, as we’ve alluded to, things are constantly changing and this is just a factor that that people have to incorporate into what they do.
Yeah. Is understand that learning is a constant, but making sure that you’re learning from the right people and understanding as well that a lot of this stuff is is about. I see it as being on two levels, as one is about making you aware of certain things. That you might not have a literacy spot.
And the other part is stimulating new ideas. Yeah, exactly. ’cause if you think about new things and different ways that ultimately then you can deliver for whether it’s your business or ultimately clients Yeah. Is a big factor in having. This opportunity to learn. I know, from coaching I’ve had over the years that I can see it playing out when I’ve sitting in front of a client and going what if we did this?
And I’m thinking in my, in the back of my mind I’m going, that’s how I was taught, wasn’t it? Yes. And yeah. And that, and this is my, interpretation of it, that’s the thing. That’s how it keeps advancing. Exactly.
And, you think about so many professional sports.
People out there, they have coaches until they retire and be, probably become a coach themselves. So can you think about, the professional footballers and tennis players? Oh, I’ve landed, I’m now a professional. I don’t need a coach anymore. That’s just not the case, right? So why does this happen in business?
I struggle to understand.
Yeah, it is a really interesting thing, isn’t it? When we think about our kids, right? They, by the ti, by the time they’re in their late teens and early twenties, they think they know everything. Yes. And when they get close to 30, they realize that they don’t know anything at all.
And we’ve all been there and done that ourselves, I should say. And, but it doesn’t, that same maturity doesn’t often happen in businesses. No, it’s not. People are on this. Quick path that they like to be in, in shopping and changing from one job to the next. And that’s their idea of learning, because I’ve just, oh, I’ve gone from here to here.
And suddenly they find themselves in a higher profile position. They’ve got no real additional training. Yes, indeed. They haven’t got a coach.
And and. If they’re an employee, you are running, you’d to, you’re walking on a tight, there is supporting them in having these things.
But I also know the importance as an employee to be aware of where your gaps are and to approach your employer and say, look, I would love to, learn these skills. How can we do that? Can I get a buddy out of the organization or assess some training that I can do? And, the beautiful thing about Australia is we have an amazing education.
System amazing. But there’s also an abundance of education that’s not accredited. So it’s not a certificate diploma or whatever, and coaching fits in that. But there’s so many other opportunities to learn. And a great place is a network absorb. Attend those masterclasses though. Watch those webinars.
Don’t sign up and don’t do it. Don’t sign up and not watch the replay. Take.
I think. I think it’s a pity that when we are asked to put in our resume for want of a better term even in a place like LinkedIn that it doesn’t really allow you to say I’ve been participating actively in coaching for X amount of years with this kind of ca caliber of people, whether you want to name them or not.
I think that’s one of the other interesting things too, when it comes to. Naming coaching. It’s like we’re very, we are very happy to name the institution that we have an education at. But we’re not happy to name the, the people who have been coaching us Somehow that’s kept a little bit private or, and I think it’s kept private because people do still look down think that this look down on them, oh, they need coaching.
That, that’s a negative when it should be seen as we’re talking about as a positive and celebrated. And I think, and investing in yourself. Whether it is, a $97 a month program or whether it’s a, $12,000, MBA program, it doesn’t matter. It’s, those things are important to do and you should be proud of it.
And it’s what books have we read this year? There are some, like one of my mentors is Robin Jama. I think I’ve read every one of his books, if not once, twice. I’ve signed up to his master classes. I listen to him every day and he’s just one. And he’s not for everybody, but for me, I’m happy to tell people this is the people that I listen to because.
They’ve, they’re arriving. They probably will never say they’ve arrived, but they’ve achieved some amazing things. And, the people who founded Netflix, what an amazing story. Mark Randolph amazing story of how he got that done. So why wouldn’t we put that like LinkedIn tells you about, you can put your roles I put in my products, but it definitely has no space for you to go, what am I reading this at this moment?
Who am I listening to? And you could write a post about it, but it doesn’t sit on your profile for very long. It’s buried.
It’s, so it, again, it goes back to the power of telling stories, right? When you start missing, messing around with with that and and giving those ideas to people, sharing it, whether it’s in a post or in a podcast or in a course, I think it’s so important.
We have to wrap things up. So I’ve got one final question that I like to ask all of my guests, and this is an interesting one for you because technically the program’s new, but I know you’ve been doing this for a long time. What’s the aha moment that people have once they come to work with you that you wish more people would know?
They going to have.
Yeah. I guess it’s, I had I seem to have this gift where I’m talking to people and thoughts just come to me. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Oh, I’ve got a tool that will help you with that. Have you read this book? I know somebody who I can connect you with.
So I have been known as a bit of a connector. So for me, my strategic brain is always on. And I feel I’m incredibly generous. I share a lot of what I know and happy to introduce you to people and will steer you in the direction. So I. For me the platform is, you’ll find an abundance of things in there and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Fantastic. Joanne, thank you so much for all of the information you’ve shared. I love the different perspectives on education and something that we haven’t explored in enough detail on the podcast before. I really appreciate the insights and particularly into women in business as well and understanding a little bit better.
And I’m so glad there is a. Platform like yours that has so much material accessible. We are going to include all the details in the show notes of how to get in contact with you. But thank you so much for being a part of the program.
Thank you so much. It was awesome.
And thank you everyone for listening in.
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Debbie Wildrick
Debbie Wildrick Consulting
Food and Beverage Consulting Services
In this episode of “Biz Bites for Thought Leaders,” join us as we chat with beverage industry expert Debbie Wildrick, who reveals why 80% of new products fail in their first year. Drawing from her extensive experience at Seven Eleven North America and with startups, Debbie highlights the crucial need to understand market opportunities, develop viable business models, and truly assess consumer needs.
She’ll share the 10 critical pillars for business success, emphasize adapting to consumer feedback, and discuss how passion and innovation differentiate products.
We’ll also dive into strategic considerations for startups, including the goal of selling to larger companies and the vital role of scaling, offering a comprehensive guide for entrepreneurs aiming to build sustainable, successful brands.
Offer: Check out Debbie’s exciting offer to Biz Bites listeners here.
Thought leaders, are you ready to learn how successful brands are really built? So in today’s episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, we dive deep into the world of product development and market success with beverage industry expert Debbie Wildrick. From their experience at running seven 11 and North America to helping startups achieve multimillion dollar exit, Debbie reveals why 80% of new products fail in their first year, and what separates the winners.
From the losers. Discover the 10 critical pillars every business needs for success. Whether you are launching a beverage brand or building any consumer focused business, stay tuned because this is a game changing set of insights that could transform your approach to business growth. Get ready for this very special episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and I think we have someone extraordinary with us today because Debbie and I got chatting a little bit and she’s got a lot of really interesting stories that I know is gonna benefit everyone in our audience listening in today.
Debbie, firstly, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
And guess let’s start, let’s kick things off with, just give everyone a little bit of an introduction as to who you are.
Okay. I’m Debbie Wildrick and I’ve been in the industry, in the US for all of my career. Mostly many a lot of my experience has been in the beverage business.
I actually ran all of beverages for seven 11 North America for a. Quite a bit of time in the two thousands, and that led me to really understand a lot about what it takes to put a product on the shelf and have that shelf leave the shelf and into the consumer’s hands and then into their mouths, of course, over and over again.
And that really. Is what it takes to successfully develop a product. So I’ve been working with startups either directly for in executive positions, running every aspect of a business, all verticals, everything from product development to sales and distribution to certainly the financials and the viable business model and whether or not we.
Whether or not we have a chance to really be successful, and my whole goal is helping entrepreneurs really mitigate risk and help them to be successful with their with their product launches. A and it is a a really interesting space, and I know a little bit about the the beverage industry, but it’s it, I think the one thing to keep it for people to keep in mind as well is that it’s not always direct to consumer.
You’re selling either, is that you’re selling a lot to retailers as well, aren’t you?
I spoke with somebody else the other day about this. It really is a B2B. Because you are selling to the retailer and you. Are E except with e-commerce. Obviously you are B2C, but most of this industry will remain.
The shopper still spends a lot of time shopping at retail in person and. That’s what it really means you’re selling to the retailers, to the distributors who get the products to the retailers. And where the real consumer aspect comes in is that the retailer agrees to put your product on the shelf.
And so you’re selling to them and they’re selling to the consumer and the consumer makes those decisions. And if they don’t make the decisions, obviously. You’ve got your challenges on your hand.
It is quite a complicated industry in many respects because you’ve got a lot of suppliers, generally speaking in the first instance and leading you into a, what can be a large production set up that one needs, and then you’re going into, as you’re saying, there.
Understanding multiple audiences because you, you have to really understand what your distributors want. You have to understand then what your retailers want, and you have to understand ultimately what the consumers want. That is a lot of a lot of different moving parts to think about.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. So you’re absolutely right. The distributor has to be convinced that. That they will put a product on their trucks that the retailer will actually support and purchase. And in, in our business, a lot of times we say This is a chicken and the egg business, because the distributor going out as an, as a new brand.
The distributor expects you to already have the acceptance of the retailer and the retailer of course. Really would like for you to have the acceptance of the consumer, but you don’t always know that and when you’re first moving forward. I have just written a white paper and overview of what I call my pillar number one, to having a successful company, and it is about market opportunity.
And consumer need and figuring that out before you ever even enter into a product launch so that you have a better understanding that it will actually move off the shelf. And that’s really the end result. But the, all the steps in the way of the supply chain. Everything from production to distribution to the retailer are just getting you to the consumer and the consumer has to respond.
I. It’s not an industry for the faint-hearted really, is it? You can’t it’s not something that you dabble in. Although what’s interesting is there’s been a lot of I guess pop-up small, particularly particularly in the alcohol related beverage side of things. A lot of small players in the market who more or less start from their home or a small facility building and then go and go from there.
But it is a it’s a very difficult space to. Make money in and to be competitive in.
Yes, it is. There’s a very famous brand, and I talk about, I tell this story quite a bit. It’s called Vitamin Water, and I’m not sure if how far they spread across the world, but they actually sold to Coca-Cola.
For $4.1 billion when they were at 600 million in revenue in trailing revenues for the last 12 months, and they were in year number nine and had not shown profitability until year number eight and had raised a lot of money before that their, the sale of the company of 4.1 billion. So it’s an industry that is.
It’s got great stories great stories if you’re able to do that. But it is really hard work and it is very hard to make money. Eight outta 10, eight out of 10 new companies fail every year.
It’s a very high percentage because a lot of people come in with a great idea and it’s easy, isn’t it, in that sense to have the idea, because we all go and buy a drink from a local store, and we think, oh, if it only had a touch of this, or what if we did it this way instead?
So it’s easy to have those ideas, but the reality of it is quite a difficult one. And talk to me about that. You’ve worked with startups as well. How does that. Come about for people, what’s the, what is the step to actually get them out of that 80% that are going to fail and to get them on the right path from the beginning?
I would say that it’s really ticking on all levels of the industry, and I’ve been working on writing the 10 pillars. I’ve had the 10 pillars for a long time. As to what you need to have in order to be successful. But, having four or five of those, that’s one of the biggest issues.
Um, and like I said, the starting point. Most entrepreneurs, many new products come to fruition because I have a need. I want to I’m lactose intolerant and the people that created the brand called Oatley, which is an oat drink as a, as an example, were I. Looking for something that lacto was lactose intolerant and or for people that are lactose intolerant.
And so they, they said there’s nothing on the market like this. And so they created a product and Oatley, as an example, was very successful, but. There’s so much more than that. So the first, the very first step is you have to have a consumer need, even if you’re trying to create it to some degree on your own.
But you also really have to begin to understand all aspects of the business. And so the second factor that is critical is that we go into this. Without really understanding our viable business model, which is real simple. We look at what can we command as a price point at retail to the consumer.
And we back in all the supply chain aspects of it, the distribution, the retailer’s profitability, but and all the way down, of course to the cost of goods. And if we’re not making. The right levels of product on a piece of paper, on a back of a napkin. You can do this. You really are setting yourself up for failure because you get into production or you you get to retail and you’re shipping costs are outta line.
Any number of things can happen if you haven’t really, you haven’t really done this simple model and then. One of the areas that I think is critical, I said that eight out of 10 fail in the first year. In the second year, eight out of 10 of those, if you will, or 80% of those will fail because they’ve run outta money or they didn’t have enough money to begin with.
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Eight out of 10 of those, if you will, are 80% of those will fail because they’ve run outta money or they didn’t have enough money to begin with.
It’s a very expensive. Place to be. It’s not unlike a lot of industries where you can come in on the back of a computer and you can design something and start offering your services.
There’s a lot of things to consider because production is a huge thing. And I think the other thing too, of course, is there’s. A fair amount of time that’s needed before you can actually get up and running and selling products. It’s not, again, not a lot of service-based businesses that can open their doors today and start serving clients that afternoon.
It’s, there’s a lot involved. So what’s the actual lead time before you actually get you, you start from the idea and actually getting out and selling something.
Six to nine months. Six to nine months, absolutely. I’ve done a, I first started creating products when I was with seven 11. And of course our executive management team, it had expectations that were unbelievable.
And so I did a critical path document way back then that that actually puts all the steps in the timing in one. One model so that you can really look at making sure that you are getting those steps ahead of time completed, and then. You’ve got a launch date at the end and if you’re following your critical path, then you’ve got six to nine months If you’re not following your critical path very well or things, if there’s hiccups along the way, then, it could be a year to two years.
I’ve seen new brands not launch for two years. Wow.
It’s, and I think the interesting thing about this space as well is that generally I would gather that a lot of the majority of people that come into this space have no experience. Absolutely. So following a critical path and having someone like yourself to Abbott to guide them is going to be so critical because of the amount of moving parts that are involved, as we’ve said.
Yes, absolutely. And. One of the things that, that happens for me quite often, and it’s especially been happening in the last 10 years, but a lot of a lot of famous brands even even 20 years ago, right outta college people, I wanna be an entrepreneur. I wanna start. My own company. I wanna build a brand.
I have a need I believe that there’s nothing like it on the market. I can make it happen. Zero experience. Zero experience, even running any kind of business, much less running in the food and beverage business.
Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of lessons for people in this that. A lot of people wait for a while before they get some kind of coach or consultant in, but often, particularly in the startup phase like this, having someone that can mentor you, guide you, coach you, consult you for you is just super critical, isn’t it?
It is. And I like to say that the best coaching that you can have is. Is to have somebody like myself who has actually started out in the industry when I was in my mid twenties, working at retail and moving up along the industry. And so it’s important when I start a consulting agreement that is for a new entrepreneur, we will actually do the critical path that I referenced.
And we’ll lay that out. And then each week we’ll meet and I will guide them through exactly what they need to do to meet the next objective.
And I can imagine in this kind of space that it’s really passion driven, that the people who start this up have a real passion for what they want.
This is not just a kind of a side hustle ’cause they just said, oh, this might be a nice place to make money. You, because of the lead time, because of the amount involved. It’s a passion project, isn’t it?
It’s a passion pro project. Speaking of that lack of experience, there’s so many times I’ve had conversations and even after I explained to them some of the aspects of what it really takes to get.
The product to market you, you will have that entrepreneur that says, but I can do it. I can do it. I’ve got a great idea. I’ve got a great idea, and I can do it. And, she’s making it seem so hard, but it, I’m so passionate about it that I can do it and it it really gets in the way sometimes of being successful.
I I want to explore that because that is such a common thing in so many businesses that it, the passion that people have is fantastic, but it needs to be curtailed and it needs to also be, I. Pigeonholed in the sense that you need to be can thinking of your audiences, and in this case, multiple audiences because what you want doesn’t necessarily match ultimately with all those different audiences either.
So you have to you might have started off with passionately about a good idea, but you have to listen to what everyone else wants. I, I guess using it, it’s, we had this debate in my family just the other day where. Do we have ginger in the drink or not have ginger in the drink?
I love ginger, so I’m quite happy to have it in the rest of the family. Not so much. And but that’s the little thing where you have to understand those little decisions can have huge implications. And it’s not just about ingredients, it’s about all of the things that make up what ultimately is the product that you’re selling.
Yes, that’s true. I actually had a client who was developed a ginger beverage. And do you know that it took about six months for them to get the formulation? Not only because they had all the family members involved, and it was two sisters and the one sister had created it for the other sister who was always getting sick while she was pregnant.
And so that was the start of it. But it, it’s not, it’s certainly not just listening to your family members either. The ultimate guide is being able to try your product with multiple consumers before you ever even think about formulating. And that’s where we also miss it.
We, it’s our idea. We think we’ve got it the way that we want it and we haven’t really spoke outside our internal network. I.
It is surprising how often that simple idea translates across to multiple businesses that people start off with an idea because they believe there’s a gap there without actually ever testing it to see whether other people think exactly the same thing.
And it’s such a simple idea. Yet, it’s often often lost and it has to happen all the way throughout the process, right? We’re talking about the basics of the makeup of the product itself. But it goes into, certainly from a marketing point of view into the branding, I’ve often seen that go go astray because, oh, I like this color.
I. You like that color and that font, but that’s got nothing to do with whether your audience likes that and it doesn’t. And whether that stacks against your competitors and what the message is that it sends, there are so many different things to think about that go well beyond what your personal preference is.
And that’s where the difference isn’t it? Between creating what is a brand that’s just for you and your family to, to consume and maybe a few other people, if you’re lucky, and something that you’re actually turning into a decent sized business.
Y Yes and you know what? It’s not just at the beginning either.
The ginger beverage that I was talking about, they ended up launching and changing formulations and changing labels and branding two or three times. In the first two years without really ever getting to market, and brand in the first five years could change as, as much as two to five times, and that’s not unusual because you don’t always.
Know that you got it right in the beginning. Even if you did all this work in the beginning you’re still tweaking with the consumer. You’re changing your messaging, you’re changing your packaging because the consumer hasn’t responded as you expected them to. But it can be fixed. Many brands go through this, but it.
So it’s not out of the question to, to have that happen too, which again, expensive way of doing business. But successful brands have to tweak and tweak because they continue to listen to the consumer and and the consumer really tells ’em what they want.
Yeah, and a brand’s such an important thing because you start to identify with it and people make so many subconscious decisions before they even pick something up.
And then you, once it’s embedded as well, it’s hard to change as even big companies like Coca-Cola will tell you, try and add a new variation in the label. Add something different in add a new, flavor. All of those things can actually be incredibly difficult at times.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely. It’s I think Coke has been through that a few times where they’ve had to backtrack, haven’t they? They’ve they’ve introduced something and then they’ve turned around and gone. The public didn’t like it. And so even the big brands get it wrong.
Yes, absolutely.
And the big brands sometimes go through it more than the startup brands go through it because. They’ve got all kinds of objectives from return on investment. They’re their branding people and their new product people have to prove the viability of it. And if it’s not successful on the sales side, then they’re constantly re revamping the brands and trying to.
Increase and build their sales and profitability. And so sometimes they’re doing they’re doing more work with that, thank goodness they have more money to do that. But they’re doing it even more than we think. That they are, and then they make misses, zero coke, zero years and years ago or any number of things.
And I don’t know what they’re doing today with their packaging. They’re putting names of people on their packaging.
Yeah. And I think that’s interesting thing, isn’t it? It’s it’s an industry that is so super competitive, but it is an industry where that therefore where that desire and the need to stand out.
Is. Prevalent all the time, isn’t it? Because there are so many new things that are coming onto the market, and how do you actually stand out and be different is, if it’s one magic ingredient, how do you actually highlight that? Or is it something more, or is it not actually even a matter of being different?
It’s just a matter of producing something that looks different, even though it might be the same as something else. Like it’s a. A very interesting industry in that respect.
It is. It is. And you’re constantly tweaking and, the US market is a little bit, is a little bit. Different. I like to say sometimes we’ve been this way for years and years on steroids and especially because, the big companies are public companies and you’re always managing based on the stock market.
But we, unlike any other country in the world. Our maniacs with regard to introducing and launching product extensions, new brands new, um, new and different categories. And the big companies are, they work really hard at doing that. And that’s why they end up the other big thing about being an entrepreneur and developing a product and building a product and being eventually successful about with it, like I talked about Vitamin Water, is that the big companies end up buying up these brands that the entrepreneur has been able to build and build to a successful point because.
They’re, they have a hard time really getting it done in their systems.
And is that the ultimate goal for a lot of these businesses to that, that they’re trying to build something that will get on the radar of the big companies who, who will then buy them out? Is that what the goal is?
Absolutely.
This industry, I don’t when I interview. Entrepreneurs in the beginning and ask them about their goals. I always ask, are you building this to keep it or are you building it to sell it? And if entrepreneurs are almost always, I would say 90% of them are building it to sell it. They’re not building it to have a nice.
Family business. And I think that is because there, this industry has been like that for 20 years. That the brands, the buying and selling of brands and the people that have really been successful at it are. I have seen all this happen over the years, and so they they want the big gold at the end of the rainbow.
And is that the starting point as well, that you have to be prepared to scale and scale fast? Is that the is that how you have to be thinking when you start something like this?
Yes. Now. It does take a while so by the time I, and I’ve also had a lot of entrepreneurs ask me I wanna get in front of Coca-Cola, I wanna get in front of General Mills, or I wanna get in front of any number of companies.
And Coca-Cola always had a venture capital group, but you can’t even speak to Coca-Cola until you’re $10 million in revenue. And it can take a long time to get to $10 million in revenue. And so, and $10 million in revenue is also. Most likely national distribution with several retailer channels.
And so you’re pretty equipped to, to have a company that is moving in the right direction, but they, the big companies don’t even wanna talk to you before $10 million in revenue. And they’re buying distribution. They’re not buying. They are not buying a brand or an idea because they think that, oh, it’s differentiated and we could take and build it from here because we’re gonna be better at it than the entrepreneur.
No, they, they wanna buy distribution, they wanna buy velocity, and they wanna buy consumer demand. And that has to be proven in order for them to begin to look at it. And a lot of times they’ll buy into it. A portion of it and take a portion of the company before they actually buy the brand.
And that goes on for anywhere from two to five years where they may buy into the brand, but then then eventually they’ll buy the entire brand.
And I, is that, I, is it realistic that most businesses that are going into this. That’s where they’re trying to head. Is that a realistic goal for pe for businesses?
How many of these kinds of companies can a Coca-Cola and the various others want to buy?
How many businesses
I. How, yeah. How do they want to keep buying businesses like this all the time? Are they buying them for the innovation or are they buying them to, to shut them out?
They’re buying the, they are buying them for the innovation because they have not been able to innovate within their own systems. The way that, that the smaller companies have. I’m, all of a sudden what just popped into my mind was Crave. And Crave is a natural beef jerky company that was bought by General Mills, I believe several years ago.
And. And what was happening during the time when General Mills was also doing, they had a big venture group that they still have, but they’re not buying as much in recent years. They actually would general Mills was looking in the natural foods business quite a bit and so they were looking to get into.
Each category, snack foods, you name it that they could actually add a natural product because natural foods and health and wellness and the consumers ta taste as well as what they want in their ingredients and has changed so much over the years and the bigger companies.
Are just continuing to want to add that to their portfolio. I think PepsiCo just bought Poppy, which is a probiotic beverage as an example. I.
Yeah, I think people forget the simple fact that you mentioned earlier on is that smaller companies have the ability to maneuver and make changes fast.
Bigger companies don’t have that luxury. There are too many moving parts. There are too many things to consider. So often that’s the reason why they can look to some of these smaller companies because the ability to be more flexible in the market and to make change is much easier.
Yes, it. It is it’s much easier to be able to make change and have flexibility in the marketplace when you actually don’t have to, you don’t have to go through the product development as much in your own system.
If you’ve got the ability to evaluate those brands that have been successful and are really moving the needle,
talk to me about you personally though. Do you get, do you still get the thrill out of every ti of new brands all the time and new businesses and doing that because you’ve been there and done that a few times.
I do. I do. I’m fascinated. It’s really tough to walk around. The largest trade show in the World is the Natural Products Expo that is out in Anaheim every march. And, every year you go there and you look at all the brands and you look for innovation. And when I get most passionate when somebody comes to me that really does have a strong idea, and then I can take, I, I can really help them run with it.
And I loved I loved to be able to help them with the consumer messaging, to be able to dig into what ingredients they might, they might want to switch around and to really help them. I find myself much more challenged than somebody coming to me with another energy drink. That, that, that is true, that if you’re just coming to me with another.
Something that really doesn’t have the innovation or the differentiation, then I’m certainly not as excited and I may not even, I may not even take you on as a client.
And it’s interesting when you say the innovation in the industry because it’s tough, isn’t it? It’s not I don’t know how many years ago that someone first came up with the idea of going there’s this thing that we can, everyone can get for free by turning on the tap, but we’re gonna put it in a bottle and sell it to you called water.
That was, that was, an innovative first step. But it’s, how innovative is it really these days? Is there actually stuff that hasn’t been done yet because it, it feels like there’s always something new, but how have we not ran out of ideas in this industry?
That’s I don’t I don’t mean to snicker about that, but you’re absolutely right.
You walk this trade show with thousands upon thousands of new entries and you come back from it and you say what’s the most innovative thing that you saw? And sometimes you take a stretch, but there’s there, there are ways of innovating and. It’s not just about ingredients, it’s not just about functionality.
It’s, it can be packaging. There’s a lot of innovations that are coming to fruition from packaging and the way that we consume are. Our products, functional beverages as an example of, they’re convenient. I can, in, instead of taking a pill, I can take I have to drink water anyway and I can put collagen in it and I can put it on the market and.
And so we’ve got the opportunity still to do things if we really dig in. And, but it, it’s a challenge. And that’s probably one of the other challenges about building a new product these days, is that I’ve gotta figure out how to differentiate it.
It is such an important thing, isn’t it?
It’s those little things that can make a huge difference in the way something, is marketed. And the way it captures the audience and knowing who your audience is. It goes back to where we started the conversation really, isn’t it? It’s that whole idea of understanding your different audiences and being able to be seen as innovative to them.
Is what counts. And it could be, as you say, it could be the packaging or it could be the actual in this case, the actual drink itself.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It I a story that goes back quite a bit, but when I was at seven 11, I just had this gentleman reach out to me. He said, thank you so much.
I my nickname is Queen of Beverages, and he, I had sent him an email and he said, I remember when you helped me get Fiji water on the shelves at seven 11. And, I evaluated this, I had a category where the pre there’s three segments of water and it was premium. It was mainstream and it was, um, value and I had one one premium water on the shelf and based on volume in turns, I really could only afford to have one, one premium water on the shelf.
And Fiji comes to me. Fiji had a square bottle. They had a picture of. Fiji waterfalls in the back that showed through the front and I said, you know what? You’ve got something that is totally differentiated that the consumer’s never seen. Nothing different about the water, you know? Really I have been in the water business in other areas too, so I know a lot about water and what can differentiate you.
But it was all about the packaging and. And sure enough, PG became, it was about a $10 million brand when they came to me and they grew to over 200 million.
Amazing. It’s and it is. So it does bamboozle people at times where you go, it’s. It’s water. In most countries, you can just turn on the tap and get the water for free.
And it’s, and yet people are buying the bottled water on a consistent basis. And I find it fascinating as well, when you go to whether it’s a seven 11 or some equivalent thereof. And particularly I fascinated by it, particularly when you’re on the road, you’re driving on the road, you make a stop and you.
I wanna get some water to take in the car. Fine. That makes sense. But looking at it and trying to go, why would you pay extra for a premium brand in water when you can get the generic brand, whatever it might be, that is so much less. It just. It astonishes me, because there isn’t really a difference.
Is there, when you, when it comes down to it, it’s still water.
It’s still water. There’s a lot of factors to it. Certainly. And we I was actually involved still am a little bit with a source water out of Brazil, which is. The marketed as the purest water ever discovered. But what does the purest water ever discovered mean?
What it means is that it’s really low on minerals or anything. It has less than 10 total dissolved solids in it. But how do you communicate that to the consumer? And we would put these test things in bottles of premium, other premium waters that were higher and just a regular spring water to a Aquafina or Dasani as an example, which are Coke and Pepsi brands that, that are reverse osmosis.
So they don’t have a lot of TDS in them either, but, you know what, what makes me want to consume one versus the other? Now the tools that we were using to put in the other premium waters that were really high on minerals would turn the premium water into what looks like palms gun, a scum.
And I kept on telling my business partner, I said, I don’t really think we can market that to the consumer. It’s. Great. I know that you raised the money based on the fact that the investor would not drink those other waters, but, and so you have to, um. With premium waters and there’s a ton of ’em, and they’re all, they come from all over the world.
You have to really figure out the marketing aspect and the emotional connection and the, like the example with Fiji, your marketing it through the packaging and that’s what’s really selling it.
We could talk for a long time about a lot of these a lot of these drinks. It’s been fascinating.
Just two final things I wanted to ask you about, and one is just something you alluded to earlier in the conversation. I know you’re working on putting these 10 pillars into a book, but tell me just in a broad sense, what are the 10 pillars really about?
The 10 pillars. I like to also say that without all the spokes of a wheel, you can’t really move it forward.
The 10 pillars are all the pillars that I believe are critical to having in place in order to have a successful company, and they range from. The first one, which I’m actually in, in the link that I’ve given you. I’ve written an overview of market opportunity and consumer need, which we talked about a lot during this meeting.
But it goes all the way from the viable business model, which I talked about, and that’s one of the pillars, making sure that you have the viable business model product differentiation. Then sales and distribution marketing, both consumer messaging as well as how you promote with your customer base and financing, the critical areas that you really need to have in place to make sure that you’re funded well, so that you can be successful year over year.
And so that’s what the 10 Pillars are all about. They’re putting team and infrastructure that’s it, it covers every vertical, every aspect of what it takes to be successful.
Fantastic. And then there’s something we’ll talk about more into the future, I’m sure. Just tell us just on the back of that, the the link that we’re gonna put in the show notes to people, what are people gonna find in that?
What’s the value for them?
The, they’re going to find an overview of pillar number one, which is the market opportunity and, um, the market opportunity and the consumer need. And I. I have basically written a, pretty much a white paper on. What it takes to, what you need to know about that first pillar.
And and so it’s it’s a a teaser if you will to help the the client understand. Anybody who’s interested in really. Looking into it further. And of course my website as well actually has all 10 of the pillars and what you’ll eventually learn from the program that I’m putting together.
But, and the website has a recap of each one of the 10 pillars. And
I think what’s important for people to understand as well is that these learnings from, that you’ve had extensively in this industry apply to other industries as well. So it’s not something that is just restricted to people who are thinking, oh, I’ve got it.
I want to get into the food and beverage industry. There is the implications for this and the learnings from this are extended to many businesses.
Absolutely. And I like to think that way with regard to the 10 pillars. And a lot of times, somebody came to me the other day and said, do you have experience in the beauty world?
Even though it’s not food and beverage, it is still B2B, then B and B2C, and. The all companies, to some degree, are working the same way, whether it’s technology or building. A another type of product that is, is to be sold primarily to the consumer. But it the things that you need to have in place do crossover.
Other industries, almost every industry.
I’m gonna encourage everyone to check the links out in the show notes to get access to that. Just one final question that I like to ask all my guests is, what is the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?
Have to go back to the lack of industry experience and the. Their passion is so strong, but their frustrations around everything. I had somebody a lot of times they’ll, the aha moment though for them will be we’ll talk through all of this. And I had somebody call me about a product that, that was to be added to coffee that you bought.
That was. Ready to drink. And I said, you really need to know you, you really need to be going to the coffee buyer, not the beverage buy, not the package beverage buyer. And the gentleman said to me, are you kidding me? That’s amazing. And so it’s just those little nuggets that when we have the conversations and I don’t.
Like to give out a whole lot of information necessarily, but as we talk through their idea and I share with them answer their questions and it’s a nugget like that will be an aha. It’s not just one area or one thing. It’s just that all of a sudden I say something and they’re like, wow, I never thought about that, but that’s amazing.
That’s. That’s great feedback.
I love that. I love that. And look, thank you so much for, in incredible insights fascinating industry and lots of things that I think all business leaders can learn from in this. And as I said to everyone, I encourage people to go and check out the links in the show notes to find out more.
But Demi, thank you so much for being part of the program.
Alright, thank you. Thank you for having me.
And to everyone listening in, don’t forget. As I said, check out the show notes. And also don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Until next time, don’t forget to tune in to Biz Bites for thought leaders.
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Beyond Management: Leading with Purpose, Resilience, and AI Smarts | Biz Bites for Thought Leaders
Join Anthony on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders as he chats with Johann, a sales coaching expert focused on purpose-driven business, and Brigitte, a master coach empowering female leaders with emotional resilience and work-life balance.
This episode delves into the critical differences between leadership and management, how to align individual strengths with organizational goals, and AI’s transformative impact.
Discover why both guests see AI’s potential to free us for creativity and connection, emphasizing the importance of adapting to technology while maintaining ethical practices.
Experts include:
Johann Psaila – Blueprint Coaching
Brigitte Johnson – Coach Adviser
Sustainable leadership and ai, a panel discussion with two people who haven’t met before this particular podcast, which makes it all the more exciting and it made for an absolutely amazing discussion. You do not wanna miss this episode. We have Johann, who has a background in sales coaching, and he brings decades of real world experience helping business owners scale through authentic, I should say, sales leadership.
But what we really love about his approach is he is so much purpose driven that he has also established a publishing company where proceeds a hundred percent of the proceeds, I should say, are going back to a charity in Africa. I. So we are talking to someone who truly understands purpose driven business, matching that with Brigitte Johnson, who is a master coach and strategist who spent 20 years helping leaders, particularly female lead leaders, I should say, navigate the challenges of sustainable success.
Sustainable is something that we are really gonna press home in this discussion. Mixed in with purpose driven and mixed in with the impact of ai. It makes for a really an amazing discussion from two people with incredible varying expertise who come together and really do agree on the way forward. So you don’t wanna miss this episode.
Sit back, relax, enjoy it, whatever you are doing, and make sure you listen to this full episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
Hello everyone, and welcome to a very special episode of Biz Bites. I have two guests with me today. They haven’t met each other until a couple of moments ago, and this is gonna make it for an even more interesting discussion. So welcome both Johann and Brigitte.
Thank you. Thank you for the introduction and lovely to meet you too, Brigitte, on a short notice.
It’s been it’s always good to connect with new people.
Fantastic. Lovely to meet you Johann. Thanks for having us, Anthony.
Absolute pleasure. So as we like to do at the start of the program, it’ll allow each of you to introduce yourself. Johann, why don’t you kick things off and tell everyone a little bit about you.
Cool. So I’m very transparent. So Anthony, you can even ask any question throughout the show as well, both personal and professional. But on a professional level, I’ve got two business to. I basically help business owners make more money through sales. I do a lot of sales training, sales coaching, one-on-one coaching sales workshops with large and small medium organizations.
But the reason why I love it is I’ve been in sales since I was 14 and I’m now 40. So whatever I teach and preach for businesses are things that I’ve actually done in my own world. So that’s my big point of difference there. And then I’ve also got a second business. It’s a publishing company.
So I’ve created actually my first children’s book only about eight months ago, and I created a publishing company called Blueprint Publishing. And a hundred percent of the net proceeds of this children’s book that I created go to a charity in Africa. So on a personal level, that’s my purpose is is helping others and that’s part of function that.
So that’s a bit about me for now.
Fantastic. I love it. We have plenty to come back to. Brigitte, what about you? Introduce yourself a little bit.
Sensational Johann, that’s I could have done with that when my three kids were little. I am a bit of a rebel thinker. I’m a master coach and a strategist and pretty much a thinking partner for my clients, which range from leaders in education to across.
Probably quite a number of different sectors. I cannot think of many sectors that I haven’t worked in my 40 years of coaching and leading. So yeah so basically my core strength is curiosity. And I didn’t even know what coaching was. When I was leading a team of 50 back in the early, earlier part of this century.
And then. Discovered through McKinsey that this thing called coaching exists. And sure enough, I unleashed myself and set up my practice pretty much, within weeks. And so it’s been a journey of 20 years of my practice, which is really cool because I’ve got my three teenagers and my dog.
I love to travel and and help purpose centered humans to, to lead sustainably really is my core value.
I love that. It’s a it’s a lot of really important ideas that you’ve both hit upon there. And this is where I want to start this. Discussion. If I can talk to me a little bit, firstly, Brigitte, about that whole idea at the end, sustainability and purpose driven, because I think that’s such an important aspect and I know I can see Johann nodding his head.
And I know from reading a little bit about your background, Johann as well. I know this is something that’s important to you. So how do you define that? What actually is it?
Yeah. So for me a lot of the client community that I’m, I work with successful on the outside and hopefully on the inside. Female leaders struggle with common themes of burnout imposter syndrome just feeling like they’re just spread too thin and there’s not enough time.
Really. What we do is we look at, okay, what is sustainable success? How can we get to where we want to go and stay there and hang in because the world needs. More female leaders. We know that organizations that are, that have a good representative of females on the board and on in the C-suite do better.
Yeah. From an ROI perspective, they perform better. But our systems aren’t designed, haven’t been designed. For women historically. So what we’re looking at is, okay, how do we elevate the leader to have not just authentic leadership, but sustainable? So these are micro habits. These are evidence-based practices that you probably have heard of, but with coaching.
It creates that safe place for someone to sit and go, ah, you know what? I really marked that bit up. I’ve done it again. I’ve over committed or I’ve tipped the balance too far in, in the favor of work, and now I’m feeling, totally disconnected from my partner or my kids, or whatever it is.
So these are the sorts of issues that we help to address in coaching.
Yeah it’s such an important. Aspect, I think to be able to look at that whole notion of something that is sustainable. Because when you start with trying to elevate people, unless you’ve got longevity to it, it’s a hit and miss kind of scenario, isn’t it?
Correct.
And I guess that’s the element as well where coaching comes into it, doesn’t it? Because it’s about trying to find ways to keep maintain that.
Yeah, absolutely. We’re obviously in a very interesting time in history globally. There’s a lot of disruption regardless of what gender we are, for across the board for all of us politically economically there, there is enormous.
Disruption happening. And what we’re finding is that, and that, and I haven’t even got to the sort of, the main one, which is obviously the technology. And when we think about this, we’re looking at, okay, how can we be more human in our leader our approach to leadership agreed. How can we bring more empathy, more compassion, more resilience?
How can we navigate transitions because. Humans aren’t going to be replaced by machines in the most important aspects, which is connection, right? Um, sustainable leadership is also about riding that wave of technological disruption as well.
I think that’s something we need to come back to.
But Joanna, I wanna bring you in here because I think it’s really important to understand as well that sustainability. In terms of sales and sales leadership is incredibly important, isn’t it? Because there is a quick burn and a churn and burn theory that’s existed in the past as well. And if you want to survive, you have to find a way to make it sustainable.
Yeah, I think Brigitte, hit something ahead on the nail like I think my coaching aspects and philosophies are very aligned, and it might be for a different market, but. It’s for the same outcome. And usually when I work with business owners they have this expectation on maybe what they wanna achieve within their business, but it’s not necessarily aligned to what their staff think that achievement is.
So always this alignment. So sometimes what I need to actually do is integrate and alignment theory where both the owner has a target and the capacity of a salesperson as well. Because Brigitte mentioned, burnout is such a big thing. And I’m a big believer that compounding on small steps is such a greater thing than trying to do things on a massive scale than then burning out and ruin, ruining your whole ecosystem as well.
But the other thing that I like to personally do with sustainability is that when I’m associating or talking to a business owner, that’s what I primarily do is I don’t look at how business is performing, how internal. Perform. Are they in isolation mode? Are they neglecting, are they angry, are they frustrated?
And that usually will paint me a picture on what’s happening in the business, not vice versa. So I don’t look at the business. I actually look at the owner first and seeing how they’re reacting, trying to find out exactly what is happening within them. So that is my sustainability. Sustainability means long.
I’m a marathon. I run. And it’s all about steps. It’s all about doing things in slow patterns. So I’m a big believer in that too.
Yeah, sustainability is. Important and I think misunderstood word. You know, Brigitte, if I can bring you back in there, that I think people, think about it in terms of the environment.
They think about it this kind of eerie fairy sort of term, but it has more meaning and depth to it, doesn’t it? And is that getting through to people? Are people understanding what it really means?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m talking as practically and fundamentally as 70% of adults are not getting enough sleep.
We’re going about our day with our, executive functioning, nowhere near full throttle. So leaders making critical decisions, under enormous pressure. Sleep deprived, or, I love hearing Johann’s running. Just having that outlet. ’cause we know that kind of energy is important for sustainable leadership.
Yeah.
We know that’s what gets our, the blood flying to the brain and so those sort of fundamentals. But then there’s also. Sustainability I think about with purpose, right? Are we tapped into the purpose, the why of what we’re doing every day? How do we get that practice happening so that we’re actually not just clear on our own purpose, but also that our teams are really clear on why.
They’re doing what they’re doing and the difference that they’re making and the impact that they’re having. And I think that younger obviously the younger generations are really wanting to go to those purpose-led purpose-driven organizations. So you’re gonna win the war for talent when you have that.
Level of sustainability.
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You’re gonna win the War for Talent when you have that. Level of sustainability. And then there’s like that, there’s, look, I’ve got eight huge pillars of, of all of these micro habits that you can pull into your day. But we look at each leader individually and figure out where are your strengths?
Where are you energized? Where are you playing to those strengths? But where are also the blind spots or the weaknesses or the areas that you, you’re gonna. They’re gonna become big traps if we don’t address them quickly.
Yeah. It is important isn’t it, to try and understand that because there’s one thing zeroing in on your purpose, but it’s another thing as you say, trying to find those blind spots and yeah, and I think that’s an area that is.
Particularly interesting when you talk about the marathon and running step by step, like it gives you a lot of time to go, okay, you can focus on what’s in front of you, but what is on either side? What are those areas that you might be a little bit weaker on?
Yeah it is actually interesting.
A lot of people say to me, or how do you become such a great marathon runner? Or you don’t like to run, and it’s a natural gift, if I’m being honest with you. So I’ve always had that bit of advantage that. We’ve got like what Brigitte said, or strengths, and I’ve probably realized what those were.
Quite a young age, which is naturally sales, natural running, and I’ve influence. I succeed when I step out, not outta my comfort zone, but something that I’m not a specialist at, that’s when I really get fatigued. I really get burnt out and I actually really crash. And I’ve got a big faith background and I believe that we all have a special gift or two.
And I think sometimes we need to understand that we may have four or five different talents within us. And then how do we use us? Use it. So it’s not just happening for us, but through us to empower leaders, staff members, and everyone within our circle, both on a professional and personal level as well.
And that’s something that I really love to, to harness in. I believe that everyone’s got some, unique talent within them and had we extract it out so they can use it within the marketplace to benefit them. And I’m a big believer in that too, to be honest with you. You probably see me smile because I’m very passionate about that.
And it’s interesting I think all three of us have a very clear idea of what we. Great at and what our, superpowers for want of a better term are, but Brigitte, how easy is that to make sure that when you’re dealing with teams and people that in, in, whether it’s across an organization or just individuals coming to you, that their purpose has actually been realized That they’re not just going through the motions and fallen into something.
Because I think we’ve probably all done the same thing at various times in our career, right? Where we’ve fallen into something and we can do it. But it’s not our purpose. It’s not what we love.
Such a great question, Anthony. It’s that kind of golden, that zone of deep fulfillment when one’s strengths are aligned with the purpose of the team and the overall mission of the organization.
That is a sweet spot that I think, every young person or EE, every person, emerging leaders, established leaders. Everyone in an organization should have the opportunity to at least have that conversation with their manager of how do I align and bring more of my strengths to this role, and how do we evolve the role to suit me?
Because that’s when a team of individuals is more than the collection of the individuals. It’s a real kind of. It’s a force to be reckoned with. And the organizations, you can see them that get that that really actually tap into what’s the, what are the gifts that these people are bringing every day?
How do we dial that up? How do we get them more in flow, more energized with what they’re doing? More intel. We know that when you’re playing to your strengths and when you’re bringing your strengths to work and you’re acknowledged for that, and and there’s an outlet for that. The performance improvement is more than 40% sustainably, right?
So you are, people are feeling like they belong. They’re aligned with the purpose. And it’s extraordinary. It’s it’s so wonderful to see those benefits and this is where sometimes working with the leader to see that maybe they’ve got this candidate in this role that is not gonna, is not a good fit.
But it’s a great person for this activity over here. Let’s just change things up a bit. Let’s not be too fixed in our mindset of who we want in each role. So it’s a bit of bit like a jigsaw puzzle really.
Yeah it’s an interesting point. It’s something that sort of crosses over to the topic that I was discussing recently on another episode.
It’s that definition or that differentiation I should say, between management and leadership because they’re not the same thing. And trying to find people that might be a leader in a certain area doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be a manager. The people who are the best at their particular area of expertise doesn’t necessarily make them a manager or, they might be a leader, but they might not be a manager.
And we very often.
Very different. I think it’s a very different d different aspects, isn’t it? And the reason why I just jumped in there was I was talking to an individual after a workshop and lovely lady said to me, I wanna become a leader within my organization, but I haven’t got that management title.
And I actually said that there are many functions you can do internally without that title. You don’t need that title to become an actual leader. Leader leadership actually starts within yourself and what you do without people recognizing it. So we went through some structural behaviors for who to implement within the workplace, but I said actually for experience, what you can actually do, if you want real hard core evidence, is go out to a local community group that needs volunteers.
Use those leadership examples or skills that you’re learning in that environment. See how it’s actually portrayed, and then use it within your workplace. And the feedback was that, hey, in this volunteering place, I’ve got the experience of real leadership. This is what I don’t like about it. This is what I love about it.
And within her workplace, she had the confidence to then talk to her manager and saying, look, I wanna become a leader. But even without the title, but what can I do with you to, blow up my leadership skills? And it was such an amazing thing to, to see. So I think with leadership you don’t need to be a manager or a title or a director.
In fact anyone, everyone’s a leader in some sort of capacity where it might be at home anyway or in, in any environment. So I think it’s about having the confidence to know that. We all have leadership qualities, but then how do we utilize it in different environments as well? I think that’s very important as well.
Yeah. Brigittete, I’m interested in how you respond to that. I.
Johannn, that’s Kenny, because I’ve got a client that I’m working with at the moment who is definitely CEO material, but she has four kids and the realization and they’re at a certain age that, there’s just this small window, and she’s totally leadership material. But we’ve got to the point of do I want it now? Yeah. And the answer is not yet. That there’s times. To, and seasons in one’s life. And it’s fantastic problem to have that she’s, leadership material. She’s been tapped on the shoulder as well, so recognized, but to have that self-awareness and that ability or that maturity to go you know what?
I don’t think this is right for me right now. I’ll I’ll go this other path and then I’ll find my way there. There’s so many pathways but you’re spot on with that leadership influencing without authority, that self-leadership is absolutely where it all starts in my book as well. It’s, a hundred percent is, and then, the leadership journey unfolds, I believe as people are ready for it.
Yeah. So true. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because you often hear it in sports analogies lead by example. I. And that’s, that, that’s probably the one that, that most people relate to.
You watch a team, whatever team it might be, in whatever sport, and often the leader is that person that is digging in deep and when things are looking a little bit vulnerable in the game that’s when them, going and putting a little bit of extra effort in to try and rally the troops as it were.
And that’s really what leadership is about, isn’t it? It’s not, it doesn’t have to have the title.
Yeah, totally correct.
Yeah. And I think that’s something that isn’t recognized as well, but that’s, but there is that difficulty. Brigitte, bringing back to you. That’s one of the hard things about, you talk about women in business and particularly giving them recognition for where they’re at.
And that’s one of the hard things that they can be leaders within a business as part, the client that you’re referring to would be a leader within the business, but may not have the title of CEO or whatever the. The leadership is, the top management position might be, and that’s a hard thing too, isn’t it?
Because sometimes that title does carry weight. That is important.
Absolutely. It carries weight. There’s a reason that, you’re being paid the big bucks, the responsibility is on those shoulders to make. Really tough decisions. It’s not a popularity contest. We want our leaders, to, as I said, coming back full circle sus to, to sustain their level of.
The quality of thinking, the quality of leadership, and to sustain their energy because we know that organizations, are gonna everyone’s learning and following what the leader is role modeling. So it sets the cultural tone for the organization. And the flip side of that is what we’re seeing is, you get leaders making.
Poor judgment, poor ethical decisions, mucking up. They’re out, that’s it. They’ve self-sabotage, whatever. It has been gone and more and more we have less tolerance and less forgiveness for leaders making. Really bad mistakes because everything’s so transparent now.
Yeah. Agree.
And whether you like it or not that’s just the way it is. That’s another thing that I think that leaders of today are really exposed to, not just the rapid rate of change, pace of change. But this transparency.
Yeah. Yeah. It is it’s there is, and we wanna come into this rapid change in a moment, but yeah.
Johann, I just wanna bring you in as well as is that the. We’ve talked about CEO kind of level, but when you talk about sales management level, is there a discrepancy between the people who are the lead, who are the leaders, and who are the managers and who they have the title and who don’t in the sales area that you are seeing?
Yeah, look, sales is a very unfair part of a body of a business, unfortunately, because I think generally if you’ve got that management position and you’re not a leader, but you’re bringing a lot of revenue. Sometimes your optical lens will be focused on revenue rather than leadership qualities from a high management point of view.
And that’s probably the biggest thing that I see when I speak to owners. But they’re like, this guy might not be the best leader, but he’s a state manager or a manager because he brings in the most, revenue in. And then sometimes my argument is that I can guarantee if that person wasn’t in your business.
Your other people would fire up more to a level where that revenue will exceed. Because again, going to what Brigitte said, you’re gonna be more sustainable, more happy. You’re not gonna have that churn rate of salespeople leaving in and out, which is probably costing you more than what you realize. So I think when you’re coming from a coaching point of view, where’re a different set of lands that we’re not working in the business it’s an overview.
So the advantages that you get is we get to see things that. Maybe, a biased owner won’t be able to see. And I’m very transparent in those conversations that just because someone’s making the most numbers doesn’t mean they’re the best manager is a or a best leader. It’s two different functions.
Yeah. And yeah.
And sometimes right that taking people away from what they do best. In this case, they’re a leading sales person, means that they’re spending more time on the management side of things and not doing the thing that they’re probably a best at. And B, most importantly, love.
Yeah, correct. And I think just on that point, sometimes what I actually do is if you’ve got. A person who’s a manager and you’re expecting ’em to do a lot of sales, I tend to find out burnout really occurs, or again, a churn will occur ’cause there’s too much responsibilities. So sometimes it’s having that conversation that your sales managers are not there just to bring revenue, but it’s really to lead, inspire your team.
It’s all about, that’s how you scale. Sustainability, not just everyone’s trying to do everything. That’s where problems occur. And especially in sales, when people get desperate, when their revenue’s low, they do crazy things. They self-sabotage or a lot of bad things can occur in that place as well.
So it’s so important to be number one, transparent. But number two, just to, just to be flexible as well, and move people around. It’s very important.
Before we just come into the technology thing, there is one question I wanted to ask you, Johann, because it’s something that I’ve seen over the years and I’m wondering where you stand with this.
There’s an often sales sits. I wouldn’t say independent of the organization, but they seem to be a law unto themselves and often there’s a lot of friction between the operation side of the business and and sales. I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it firsthand very early on in my career where sales and operations were literally at 50 cuffs at this particular organization.
But is that something that still exists or is that, that those tensions seem to have watered down or what are you seeing?
I would say 95% of organizations still have it. I wish it wasn’t the case. And a framework that I actually will share with everyone, and this is just like free value is I always get both teams to be together.
And what I’ll do is I’ll ask the sales team, what are three things you’d like from your operations team? And I’ll ask the operations team, what are three things you’d love? From your sales team, and it’s not about cleaning a fresh start or a clean slate, but it’s about building trust slowly and over time as well.
And I’d be, I’m a big believer, my philosophy in sales is that when I do well, I’m helping people. I’m employing people. People are growing. I wanna support my operations team. And I always encourage the salespeople that your operations team are the backbone to what you do.
Yeah it’s really hard isn’t it?
Often to understand. I think part of it is the commission based, right? That’s a source of tension within a business because you’ve got operations who are paid a fixed wage, generally speaking, and then sales who are often on some sort of commission based, and so that. Breeds friction
inness.
Yeah, for sure.
Now I don’t suppose that there’s not really an answer to that one, so we’re gonna move on to something that I, that we’ve, you’ve all touched on, which is around technology and the, and there’s a lot of tension as well with technology at the moment, and it’s moving at such a rapid pace, particularly in the past couple of years with ai.
And there’s people who are, feel threatened by their job. There’s, there’s peoples whose business feels like they’re under threat because they need to move faster with technology than they can actually handle. Where does that sit firstly, in terms of leadership? Brigitte? Where is it that people should be positioning themselves in relation to technology?
How do they harness it?
Yeah, I think ignore it at your peril. Really. I’m there is no conversation that I’m having in any client boardroom where, it’s a good idea to I. Downplay the impact of ai. What we are seeing is, and you might have heard a lot of people talking about, be the thinking partner.
Use it, leverage it as a a thinking partner collaborate. I think it’s a, you are the master and it is the servant. It’s a very poor master. It, there is not an ethical kind of dimension there. There’s not a human dimension. These are not human beings, right? These are machines, right?
And we need to feed, but the opportunities. And what the applications that we’re seeing in organizations that have got this alignment with their purpose and their people, and they’re using and harnessing ai. To actually boost the roles, boost the performance of of their teams. It’s extraordinary, really inspiring.
One of the things that I was I was looking at was, how do you. Can you create an AI coach? Now, of course you can. I’ve actually created one, but with this little app replica, and Richard, my coach, he’s onto me, right? He’s holding me accountable, but I can ignore him. You can’t ignore me.
I’m actually right. I’m holding you accountable. So there’s and there’s also conversations and emotional intelligence and nuances and all the soft skills they can emulate, but it’s not there yet. But I love seeing, I love playing around with it. Because, it’s important to know where you sit in the world and not to be kidding yourself, that you are irreplaceable. My key strength is the relationship that I have with my clients that is. If that’s strong, then, and that’s what I train other coaches in too is be confident in that and really own that and own your presence as a human being and as a coach in terms of, having these authentic, real relationships.
The other thing I was just gonna say quickly, and we’ll come back to this hopefully later, but is in this area of mental health and. Looking at how can we leverage all of the apps, which we do. We teach, I’m a mental health first aid trainer, but we also look at how do we help people leverage apps and technology for E-Health because they can now get access to affordable mental health that was not previously available.
And there’s still unfortunately such a stigma in Australia. Around mental health conversations inside organizations. You think about sales teams and it’s warfare sometimes, right? And you’re looking at. Performance is key, right? The, and the the metrics are really king. Is it safe to to talk about, my vulnerabilities as an employee, maybe not.
So this and not anonymity that technology provides in the mental health space. Amazing.
Yeah, it’s, and it is, you’re right about harnessing the technology. It’s using it for good is certainly important. But I do wanna pick up on a point that you mentioned earlier in that, with the having a coach sitting as alongside of you, that’s a, that’s an AI.
Like any of any tools that you can switch on and off, you can switch them off. Which is, that’s the point about the human being. You can’t switch them off. Not to the same extent. There’s the unpredictability of that, that they call you at a, at an opportune time that you get messages in lots of different ways.
And the way those messages are said is very different to what an AI might do, that you can literally just turn off if you want to. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Johann, how are you seeing AI in the sales space and impacting that because that’s an area where there is a big increase in the use of it and the use of it potentially to replace people.
Yeah. Look, I’m a big futurist on ai. I love to always think for the future, and it’s a bit of a frequency that I have, but I actually getting a lot of salespeople and managers and owners of businesses, especially that SME space, to really embrace it because it’s gonna give SME opportunities where they can cut costs, not in terms of human capacity, but on tasks that rather than that sales person doing admin.
They can go out there and actually communicate with customers more because, like Brigitte pointed out, the best thing about ai, you can allow it to take off mundane tasks. But when it comes to creativity or human connection, you need that in sales, but you also need it in life. And I believe that if we encourage businesses to use it correctly and ethically, you are gonna have more opportunity.
Rather than having 20 meetings about, something that’s not productive, let AI do that. But then you and I, Anthony, or you and I, Brigitte, we can connect up in person and actually discuss real problems. But the other thing as well on the human side is that humans love other humans. And empathy, human connection, like love, energy.
We never be. Hopefully we’ll never be taken by ai. But AI will be able to take on jobs that don’t fulfill us. And I think coming back to what Brigitte probably said at the start, is, that’s gonna allow us more time for our purpose. When you think about it within the workplace, what tasks can be taken from AI and where can we sit within that business to use our time and value efficiently?
So I don’t think it’s about replacing staff. I think it’s about how do we change our skill sets within that marketplace, if that makes any sense.
It absolutely does. I think it’s a really important differentiation. I know a couple of instances in small businesses where AI have taken control of booking appointments, that they’ll answer a call and they’ll be able to have a conversation and book you in.
To have an appointment with the main person. So that’s more, as you say, more the administrative mechanics. Whereas if you’re trying to have a more creative conversation about, I. Buying a tool and you want some different kinds of ideas of it and other things that might happen as a result of it.
That involves a, booking an appointment and having a conversation with a human being. Yeah. And if you can make those more direct and channeled that’s definitely going to work. And it’s how. People learn to interact with the ais as well? I think at the moment, from various things that I’ve read and people that I’ve spoken to, it seems to be the rough percentage seems to be that 90% of people don’t even identify that it is an AI at the other end.
And those that don’t seem to care that it is because of the nature of the functionality of what they’re being involved with. And I think that’s going be the hard part is. Where do we start to draw some lines in the sand about saying, no, I don’t wanna deal with an ai, or, yes, I am happy to deal with an ai.
Will all the people be ethical in, in making it certain that everyone knows that you are dealing with an ai? Certainly those that I’ve talked to have make a point of saying if someone asks the question is, are you an ai? They will answer. Yes, I’m,
yep. And it’s, sorry to just jump in again, guys. Something that I actually practice with.
Of clients is when you’re communicating with a client, actually ask ’em how they wanna be communicated with and some will say, I don’t mind what it is. It could be an AI robot, or it could be just an email or a call, but you can have your people that says, I still want that human connection, and I’m still really big on that.
And I’m just looking forward for AI taking tasks away from us that don’t fulfill us, so we can have more time in the bank to do the things that make us more productive and mental health. We’re gonna have more tools. My, my wife has a Tony Robbins up on the phone that she can communicate with every day, and it’s great for those crisis points.
But then when you’re a deep conversation, you still need to reach out to a Brigitte or yourself, really meaning conversations where. It’s other problems, not just one or two problems as well.
It’s gonna be fun times.
Yeah. Fantastic. I I was going to say that I, it’s in the contracting. So you’ve raised a couple of really cool themes there.
One is the contracting with clients, certainly. So with each client engagement these are the options. We have client dashboards where we’ve got lots of resources that can be tailored for clients using ai. But really important with confidentiality and what is documented and how long we keeping, records.
So there’s the, this space, which is very much in this transparency and ethics, and it comes down to contracting, not just for making life convenient for me, but really how are we adding value. To the client relationship here, how are we adding value to the mission? How are we using, AI to, to really as you say, take these resources, offer, the this sort of grunt work.
Away from us, so that we are actually the quality of thinking, the caliber of our collaboration together, the thinking partnership with the areas that we can start getting into, which is creative thinking, which is problem solving, which is really exploring certainly relationship building and taking, making big decisions.
Those are, there’s more space to, to do those things. But again, it has to be negotiated without wanting to sound like a broken record. Yeah, it is. But because it’s, you can have a conversation one week and then the next week, this is the rate of changes. Suddenly there’s a new opportunity that’s opened up for a client.
What do they want to hear about it? Probably. But do we need to negotiate how we bring that on, into the, to the program of work or to the relationship? Yes. It requires a lot more collaboration.
Yeah. It’s it’s important isn’t it? That establishing that, that small point, but in a very important point, establishing that means of communication for people.
And the interesting thing is. Where people might say, oh, I don’t really care. But I think the truth is all people do care. They just don’t know which one they like the most or they want to understand where different ones are appropriate at different times. I think that’s the hard part, isn’t it?
It’s establishing, yes. Book an appointment. That’s a simple thing where an AI could do that functionality because it’s not, it’s a very straightforward task, but have a conversation about what’s going on in my business at the moment. Definitely a human conversation, right? Understanding mental health issues.
I imagine, there’s only a limit as to what AI can do, isn’t there?
Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting question or point that you’re making because what we know with high performing teams is when you have an organization and a team culture where there’s psychological safety, meaning it’s okay to not be okay.
This is and there’s a, and there’s a great deal of trust. This is great, but how psychologically safe do people feel if they’re worried about their jobs being, consumed by a computer? So what you want to gain is transparency, is, clarity from leaders on this is how we’re using technology.
This is how we want you to evolve. And are we upskilling? That’s
the,
our. People, to think, think differently and and see this as an opportunity. Do they feel supported in their roles to evolve? Because change is tricky. Do they feel valued? Do they feel like there’s a, a sort of a.
A conversational channel where they can grapple with some of the issues that they’re facing. So those organizations that have got that actually understand this is where we need to be to support our people with this change, then, you’re gonna see some fantastic results and, and it’s exciting, it’s really exciting. Hopefully it gives you more time to write children’s books, Johannn.
You know, it’s actually my first one and, I’m so passionate. I’ve got another book that I’m gonna be writing an adults book actually in August. Sure. About mental frameworks fantastic.
I can’t wait. So yeah, may, maybe it’ll give me more time, but we’ll see what happens.
I think that’s the interesting thing about change. And just to wrap up the the conversation and is that. It does give you more time to do different things. The question is what are you filling that up with, isn’t it?
It’s the rate of change is such that there’s an expectation that you will respond quicker. I had a exchange some messages last night with a with a client who was like how can we speed things up a little bit further? Can we instead of move away from email and can we use Telegram?
Can we use WhatsApp? The implication with some of those things are that you get in contact with people out of hours as well and trying to. And so it is, technology is pushing those boundaries and the speed of change and the availability, and it’s how you actually blend somewhere to find the time to what you should be doing.
And I think that’s the important thing is what you should be doing is important as creating that creativity in the workplace in order to be able to, promote some innovations and things that moving forward. So perhaps just get your thoughts on both of, on, on that. Just to wrap things up.
Johann what’s
So look, humans are very intelligent creatures. We’ll always survive different errors, I think those who are scared, if you’re watching this about ai, embrace it. If you look at history, always look at history. We’ve went through massive changes in different kind of times, and those times would make people scared that things are gonna change, their jobs are gonna be replaced, but we’re evolving human beings.
And I believe if we’ve made ai we’re intelligent enough to evolve above that too. So we just gotta believe that we can. And. Not be disrupted by those things and focus on what we can control and not what we can’t control as well, I think is a big thing.
Brigitte, how do you respond?
Just to wrap things up here.
Yeah. I think it’s a, it’s exciting times. Staying curious is really, I think, my key message for organizations and those that are seeking to, to have, as I said, this sustainable leadership. How do I stay in for the long term while, partnering with ai.
Upskilling learning as much as you can. But remembering that it’s the quality of your thinking, which you know, is gonna make a big difference to and make you irreplaceable when it comes to high performing teams. And. Organizations that, that you wanna be a part of, moving forward. So yeah I think it’s exciting times.
I think I just wanted to say thank you for the conversation because, looking at it from the different perspectives, certainly of sales and organizational leadership it there, there are extraordinary opportunities.
Yeah. And thank you again as well. Yeah, appreciate it.
No, thank you both.
It’s been a really fascinating discussion and I really appreciate it and certainly two very different perspectives and some in some regards, but I think there’s very much a common ground here and I think that’s what’s important and hopefully everyone listening in has got lots out of that. And of course, we will include in the show notes how to get in contact with both Joanne and Brigitte as well.
So thank you both again for being part of the program and, we look forward to everyone, to your company on the next episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
Thank you very much.
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