Scaling Success : Unlocking Your Business Potential | BizBites with Angela Sedran

A very typical comment I hear is, Oh my goodness, I never thought I’d end up running a kindergarten that has a business attached to it. When you start a business and you’re on a shoestring budget, yes, then you have to do a little bit of everything. But as soon as you can start finding ways to stop doing the stuff that you’re not enjoying, that’s not bringing you joy.

Work out what your superpower is. And focus on that. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by com together, the people behind podcasts done for you, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out podcasts done for you as well in the show notes.

Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And I have with me today, Angela Sedran, and we got to know each other. We’ll get to that as we go into the podcast, but we got to know each other at a function that we were both at, and we hit it off straight from the beginning.

And I thought she’s going to be a great guest on the program. So Angela, welcome to the program. And I’d love you to introduce yourself to the audience. Hello, everyone. My name is Angela Sedran. I help scaling businesses to actually implement the right systems and this right leadership behaviours to drive accountability down, which basically means I help them lift their capabilities so that they can grow without the overwhelm, the headaches and the overwork.

Yeah. And I think that is a big thing, isn’t it? The whole idea of the headaches and the overwhelm and the overwork and all of these things. It’s such a big factor in business these days, isn’t it? It really is, particularly with a lot of the clients that I work with, because they’re great at the technical skills or the products that they’re actually building, it’s their area of expertise.

It’s where they’re super power lies. They’re not necessarily experts in growing a business, though there’s also a very big difference in starting a business and taking a business to the next level. Because what happens is that they have to start hiring more staff. And then a very typical comment I hear is.

Oh my goodness, I never thought I’d end up running a kindergarten that has a business attached to it. Yes, it is amazing, isn’t it? Because things change, don’t they? The, and I think they’re moving at an even faster pace these days than they have been in the past. But the truth is what a business starts out as and where it ends up as can be two completely different things and something that was not predicted at the time of opening it.

Look, that’s very true. And I think a lot of business owners got their business because they want something that gives them more time or freedom or money. And in the end, it actually gives them none of those things. It becomes, it can become a bit of a beast that ends up creating tremendous burnout.

And. That’s not why they started the business. It’s we’re not in Kansas anymore. This is not what I signed up for. So it’s really also about working with those leaders to work out what it is they want, because some of them have actually say to me, look, I’m quite happy winding this business back down to one or two people and having a much better lifestyle, or they might say to me, I don’t want to manage people.

I’m passionate about what I do. I love my service. I love my product, but let’s get this business to the point where I can bring someone else in to manage it so that I can then become the creative director or sit on the board half the time and then spend the other time pursuing what I love or sitting on the beach.

Yeah, it is a big difference, isn’t it? Because I’m finding it fascinating when you start digging into people, you start What, why people establish the business in the first place, how many of them are there really with their eyes wide open? Because I look back sometimes and people that I’ve met over the years.

And I think there’s this enthusiasm for starting a business because it’s the idea of starting a business without actually really necessarily understanding what the implications of that are and where it might go. So the enthusiasm is there for the, Concept of a business, but the reality can be so completely different.

It really can be there’s a whole world of things people don’t realize they have to deal with and that they have to do when they start a business. And I’ve often had a conversation with a business owner where he’s saying to me I’m not in love with my business anymore. I actually can’t stand it.

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Now back to Biz Bytes. And I’ve often had a conversation with a business owner where he’s saying to me, I’m not in love with my business anymore. I actually can’t stand it. So part of what I do is Come in and really help them assess where their business is at. Start engaging this stuff and really start pushing things down to this stuff so that they are doing the tough stuff and the daily grunt and the down and what I call the down in the weeds stuff so that you can lift yourself out of the business to really start working on the business again, because that is business owners get to the point where they’re doing everything.

They’re running the business and doing stuff, daily stuff they don’t want to do. They end up trying to do all the sales and marketing and the strategy stuff as well. And that’s not what they want to do. It’s too much. Yeah, it’s, and I think it’s that one of the hard parts about being in business is there’s that inclination to feel as though you need to do everything.

And I think that’s a, it’s a big danger that happens in society these days, because you’ve got a powerful tool in your pocket with your phone. For starters, there’s so many apps and so many bits and pieces that you almost feel like you should be doing it yourself rather than trying to work out what your core thing is that you’re great at, and that is really going to help you move forward.

That’s a really good point. So work out what your superpower is. And focus on that. And look, when you start your business and you’re on a shoestring budget, yes, then you have to do a little bit of everything, but as soon as you can start finding ways to stop doing the stuff that you’re not enjoying, that’s not bringing you joy.

But the other thing I’m seeing, and interestingly, I was having a conversation with the CEO of one of the private equity firms recently. And he said to me, when people come to him with their business and he assesses Most of the time he finds they are not focused. So a lot of business owners suffer from the bright shiny object syndrome and a lack of focus.

We overestimate what we can achieve in the short run and underestimate what we can achieve in the long run. So It’s not only a question of farming out things that you don’t enjoy as soon as you can, so you can stick to the stuff you’re good at. It’s also about strategically deciding not just what you’re going to do, but what you’re not going to do.

Because strategy comes down to Actually, most of the time, the most important part of it is what you say no to. And there’s always this temptation to do more. Oh, a hundred percent, isn’t it? It’s so easy to be led off course. I think we’ve all had those days where you start off and you’ve got a list of might be one, it might be three things that you want to get done and you get to the end of it and you realize you didn’t do any of those things and you think, how did I end up doing all of those things?

Where did that day disappear to? Yeah, typically driving home Friday night going, Oh, it’s been such a busy week, but I’ve achieved nothing. Very cool. It’s, and I imagine that there’s that realization that people have, but I’m wondering as well, what drives them to you in the first place?

Because I often think that, it’s great if people have this realization, they go, either I’m not enjoying my business or I’m time poor, overwhelmed as we talked about at the beginning, does it need to be that, or is there a point before that where people have more of a realization? So they need some help.

Tony Robbins always says that people only change when the pain of staying is greater than the pain of changing. So number one, they have to be in a significant amount of discomfort to make a change. The other problem I find is that A lot of business owners don’t know what they don’t know, particularly if they don’t have any business background.

So they make a few plans, put a few band aids on things, and then they just accept that this is the way it should be. I really hate it, it’s a drudge, but hey, all business owners have to go through this. And this is actually a mistake. The business owners who come to me are the ones who have actually done some homework and even just open to having a conversation with me and saying, I think there’s a different way to do this.

Can we have a chat? It’s the ones who think, nah, I’m all good. I don’t need that. I’ve got it all covered that are the ones who suffer the longest. But what I would suggest is that you don’t wait until you’re literally overwhelmed, overworked and over it. If you realize that in order to take your business to the next level, to really scale it properly, what got you here is not going to get you there.

Most businesses where the entrepreneur has grown the business, unless they have changed something, that business has gone out of business. And I can think of Sophia Amoruso is a very good example with nasty girl. That business got to the point where it imploded on itself. So logically, If you don’t change the way you’re managing your business, like getting in a racing car, the thing takes off, it accelerates, everything’s beautiful.

But you must know that if you don’t change gears at a certain point, that car is going to burn out and your business is the same. What I’m saying is understand that is going to happen. It’s a natural progression in business. Don’t wait until you’re at your wit’s end. And unfortunately, a lot of business owners do come to me with that.

So part of what I also talk about is really starting to educate them and say that as your business starts growing, as you bring in more staff members, your problems are going to grow exponentially. But it’s easier to put a system in place at the beginning and make sure problems don’t occur than to unwind things and fix problems.

Yeah. And that whole idea of putting systems in place is in of itself an overwhelming task for many people because there’s, there can be a lot, it’s only when you start diving into it, isn’t it? Any given business that you realize how many systems there actually are for doing so many different tasks.

Yeah. Very true. It’s even something as simple as a process. To create a landing page, you’ve got to go through a system. But one of the things actually that I can say, I gave a speech last week on AI because overall I help businesses build their capability and I help leaders build their capabilities as well.

And AI is part of that. You can actually use AI to start documenting some of your more mundane systems, like. How do I create this? How do we go through the process of posting on a social media page? Those sorts of things are simpler to create, but there’s so many of them. But once you have them in place, and this sounds counterintuitive, Systems will set you free because it means that you’ve taken them out of your brain and put them on paper and it’s much easier to train someone else to do them.

The other thing about a business is that or a system rather. So the system I use is really to come in and implement what they call a balanced scorecard. So with the leadership team, We work for a day and a half together in a workshop removed from the normal day to day work, and we actually create a plan and a page for that business now that in itself is terrific, but it’s a piece of paper and it’s work done in that room unless the team take it.

And implement a system and a rhythm and a cadence where they’re actually tracking those measures every month and reporting on them, but not just saying this is what happened, actually saying this is what happened, but this is what it means. What is the so what of those results to the business? Is it good?

Is it bad? Do I do more of something? Do we do less of something? Who’s going to do it? And when are we going to do it by? So that at the end of every month, the business starts getting into that habit of really assessing and adjusting the sales. That’s when the They no longer have to worry about that stuff because it happens automatically.

And this is where once you can get a system in place, it starts automating things. Yeah. I think that’s the key is to, you need buy in from people and you need that to happen, but I’m intrigued as well as your approach to the Developing the systems in the first place because actually taking that information out from people and putting into something that is constructive can be a difficult exercise within itself.

Look, people are going to be the hardest thing that anybody has to deal with in a business. And number one, getting the information out of them. And number two, also making sure that they start using it properly is the other real challenge that a lot of business owners face. So for me, engagement is super, super important.

When you are hitting someone over the head with a stick. To get them to do something, it’s much, much harder than when you have a carrot, when someone wants to be there and they feel engaged and they feel like they belong to the business’s vision, they’re going to start giving you discretionary efforts.

And this is where they are going to be much more willing to come on that journey and start using the processes. Because if you tell them they have to use a process. It’s like nobody likes to be told what to do, but when you can start explaining to them, this is why we need it. And this is how we’re going to use it because it belongs to this greater purpose of our business, whatever that may be.

This is where you’re going to start finding that your staff actually want to be there and they actually want to do the work. Does that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it’s very interesting. I’m going to cross reference a podcast that I’ve done with a client of mine, and he was talking about the fact that there’s some surveys done recently in his particular industry where everybody, all, everybody completely admitted that they’ve never worked to capacity because they were too scared to work to capacity because then people would expect that’s what they would be able to do all the time.

Interesting. It’s an interesting mindset when people have, because you can’t operate at 100 percent capacity as a human being all the time, it’s just not possible. And you need to have some leeway in there and you need to have some ability to keep up the slack. But engaging people, engaging your team is so difficult.

And we go back to the beginning. of where we discussing the idea that, you start this business and suddenly you’re hiring people. And just because you’re good at your job doesn’t mean that you’re good at managing a team. And there’s an obligation that you feel as though it’s my business. I should be good at this.

And sometimes it’s square peg in a round hole, really, when you’re doing that, because you’re genius or superpower may be in something that doesn’t exist. Doesn’t doesn’t really lend itself to that kind of level of leadership and engagement. And that’s difficult for a lot of business owners, isn’t it?

Look, it really is. And it’s not just business owners. I’ve recently worked with quite a senior level executive in a company where she’s really been slated to be the next CEO. And he brought her on board to help her learn to manage people. But what she realized on the journey with me is she doesn’t like managing people.

It’s not her thing. So what we realized from that journey was that maybe CEO wasn’t the right role for her. She’s much more analytical in terms of her thinking. I So it’s not her superpower and honestly, she scares her staff can change that you can work on it. It is an acquired skill, but it’s not one that she wanted because it’s not one that would give her a sense of fulfillment and for her it really would be hard work to actually have to be that different.

She’s extremely introverted. So you are very right. It’s not necessarily a skill of many business owners. I think the real question is do they want it? It’s not a skill. Then is it a skill that they want to do that? Otherwise, they’re actually better off bringing what he always calls an integrator into the business.

So the business owner remains the visionary remains the person who works on the strategy. Maybe they go out and do business development, but they have somebody underneath them who actually Makes it all happen and manages the people also like a chief of staff. Think of it that way, and I do that for some of my clients as well, but I also have a very different philosophy in terms of leading and managing.

So I grew up and maybe you did too, in an era where you came to work at nine o’clock and you left at five o’clock or they’d make you work till seven or eight, but the point is you had to be there at nine o’clock, not nine Oh five. Or even nine oh two, nine o’clock, and you had to sit at your desk between nine and five.

I actually Can’t personally work that way. I can’t sit still long enough and I’m also more creative. So my philosophy with my staff, and I will always say this to ’em, is I don’t, you’re not children, you’ve gotta achieve this job. This is what I’m paying you to do. I don’t care how you achieve it.

If you’ve gotta go and pick the kids up from school, or you want to do it at a certain other time or in a different way, that’s fine. I’m not here to babysit you. And I also think you’re an adult. I’m going to treat you like an adult, but I am going to hold you accountable. So what I’m saying to you is I need you to be the best that you can be.

And I will do everything in my power to help you be the best that you can be. But I’m also not a psychic mind reader. So if you know that these are the goals and the measures that you’ve agreed to in the business, know that my door is open to you. And if you need my help, I’m here for you, but you have to achieve them.

It’s, and I’m intrigued by all of that because a lot of that comes down to shifting the mindset of whoever’s the leader as, it could be the owner, but the leader and then trying to shift the mindset of the people that are underneath them. And that’s a difficult thing to do, isn’t it?

It really is. And I’ve been doing some research around Gen Z at the moment. And one of the problems that has been flagged to me with Gen Z, and it also comes a lot from the social media that they look at, is that they’re constantly being told they have all these rights at work. And I’ve got to worry about my mental health.

So God help you if you ask me to read an email after five o’clock, even five 15, that’s a no. And the thing about mental health days, I’ve got to have a mental health day today because I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. That’s not quite the way it works. A mental health day is when I just can’t cope anymore.

And I need some space sort of thing. So on the one hand, we have the older generation who still have this idea that we’ve got to be like little soldiers who have to conform to the nine to five and literally we’re going to measure how many minutes you take for lunch. But then you also have the new generation coming in and not all of them.

Obviously, this is a generalization. Who are like, Oh I need to fulfill myself and I’m going to work certain hours a day and I’m not going to work too hard. If I have to work too hard, then I’ll just go and become a social media influence and make a lot of money. So there is a grind in terms of all of this.

But what I would say is that it also really comes down to the business’s values. And if you hire to the right values, then hopefully you’re going to get that match between what you need you. And the ability to actually manage not more loosely because believe me, there is accountability, but manage a system where people feel valued because it’s a give and take.

And they’re prepared to give if you are prepared to give what you talked about there about values, it’s something that I’ve hopped on about with people over the years many times. I’m interested in your take on it, because it is a difficult scenario to get. What the business values might be versus what personal values might be when it comes into a, a business that’s been started by one person and built up from there.

There is a difference, but there isn’t a difference. And to some extent as well, isn’t there. And it’s and trying to make sure that you’ve got that. Very clearly done. I know the whole idea of putting values down used to be the realm of corporates who just did it to tick a box, but really, we know that working out your values is such an important tool to do.

It really is. And values is a term that’s bandied around like strategy, leadership, almost gets to the point. We’ve heard it so much. We don’t even, we don’t even hear it anymore. But values, really, every business has a set of values. The thing is, have they created them and nurtured them strategically to be the right values?

So I’ve worked with a number of businesses now where I walk in on that first day when we do the audit and they have no actual articulated values. Some of the ones have articulated values and they might rattle off five words for me that they have. But then they haven’t actually written down what it means.

What are the behaviors that support this value? And what are, what I call the roadblocks, the rock stars and the roadblocks. The roadblocks are the behaviors that we don’t really want to see, the uncool behaviors. And that is the granularity that you actually need. One of my clients, they didn’t have any values in their business.

They were struggling with a couple of staff members, the owners. They had two notes. They weren’t keen on doing any sort of personal development discussions, and they were trying to work out with me, how do we hold this guy accountable? He’s a fantastic operator, really knowledgeable, but quite toxic to the business.

He was a perfectionist. He was a bit of a grump, but not the most pleasant person. He’d almost come across as rude sometimes to people and upset them. And the way he did things also just things didn’t flow through the business because of him. So what we did is we went to the entire team and we asked them to Pick what their values were.

I have a template for it. And then we came back. I went through all of them. We really grouped the similar ones together because there were themes that came through. One of the themes, for example, was family and family for them was the way we actually treat people. And we treat everybody in our business that way, whether it’s our customers, whether it’s our staff, our stakeholders, it doesn’t matter.

We would treat them as we would family. We really careful. That’s about having an actual definition, not just a word. And then it was about saying, okay what behaviors do we want to see that support this value? And from the research we’d done with the group, they had already nominated a few things. So we were able to start listing things that really supported that.

But then we also said, okay what is an uncool behavior? So for example, being really rude to somebody is an uncool behavior in terms of the family values. To really implement values into your business, you have to have that clarity of a what exactly is the definition? Because having a word on its own tells you nothing.

And then saying what is it that we want people to do? Because then you start rewarding people for that and celebrating that. And what is it we don’t want people to do? And what you find is the more you talk about this, the more your team will actually be. Police themselves, police. I don’t particularly like that word, but I might say something to you.

Are you okay? Because I noticed earlier that you were a bit short with Susan and it’s not like you at all. It’s everything. Okay. Because that’s, obviously one of our values that the uncool behavior, and that’s where you really start getting traction in a high performing culture. Is when the staff know very clearly what’s expected, what’s not expected, and then they start actually looking out for those things.

It’s such an important idea. So simple, but yet so often done wrong from the beginning. I’ve, I recall this is a number of years ago working with a client and one of their values Really stood out for me as being something that I questioned because and ultimately it, it rang true that it was misplaced was it’s, there are often when you talk about the words and then the explanations, but if you talk about the words, there are often words that people go.

This should be a value of the business because they feel it’s the right word. And it’s what everybody does. So we should value this. And what actually happened was over the next 12 months, as I was observing the business, that particular value, as great as it was in theory, in practice, it’s not the way the CEO operated.

That’s not saying that he operated badly. It’s just saying that a value that he thought was should be there and should be really important. And ultimately, a lot of messaging and things was built around that particular wording was simply not true for the way that he operated in the business.

And he was not going to change that. So that word was just misleading. And what actually happened was they attracted a lot of staff. Because of that particular messaging and value, and ultimately they had a massive turnover of staff. What’s fascinating is that the CEO ultimately left, management changed, new people came in, the values changed, and retention has not been a problem.

And it’s just because there was a mismatch, as you said in the beginning, it’s getting it right for that and it’s something that you have to review regularly. Absolutely. And the thing is, it actually speaks to, the integrity of the business. Because if they’re saying one thing and doing something else, then there’s a lack of integrity.

But you’re right about businesses saying, Oh, we need this as a value. And the typical one that I dislike intensely is integrity. So for me, a test of a value is, Would it be idiotic not to have this as a value? I don’t, I can’t think of any business that could say, Oh no, we don’t worry about integrity.

It’s not an issue. It’s just, it’s a ticket to the game, right? So for me, that shouldn’t be one of the business’s values because every business should have integrity. Even the mafia have a code of honor and they stick to it. But it’s more about the way I guess that. The value is interpreted. And it’s also about something that is true to your core because you have to have that authenticity of this is our value and we genuinely live it.

And what you’re saying is not untypical. I have seen many businesses. I worked a lot in mining and consulting for mining before. And there were a lot of businesses where there was one particular one that I visited that had 12 values. And one of the senior people said to me, Oh yeah, every time the owner, cause it was a privately owned company thinks of a new one.

We just stick it on the wall over there, but actually we don’t necessarily live to that value. And what happens is it undermines everything in that business. Yeah. And I love what you say there about the, integrity as well, because the thing is that there are things that should be accepted and staple.

It’s, it fascinates me that communication, which should be a core value of every business, because if you can’t communicate, then how are you going to retain clients, suppliers, staff, like those things are all reliant on your ability to communicate. But yet sometimes. feel as though it needs to be there as a reminder.

And but I think quite often people don’t understand what the implications of it are. But as you say, it’s a bit like integrity that you can’t have a business without communicating. So you need these core rules of the game, if you like that need to be there, which are. In addition to the values themselves.

Yes, exactly. And communication is an interesting one because what I find is where communication breaks down, there’s usually two reasons for it. People are not good listeners. And the other thing is people will not say things because they are fearful of the potential yucky conversation. They could be called courageous conversations, whatever you want to call it.

But it’s usually a conversation where something hasn’t quite gone and it may even be something like a PDP or a colleague may have upset you. And it’s about really, Building behaviors and a mindset into the business where if we’ve had a disagreement or if I’m offended by something let’s say I’m even sitting you down for a performance development discussion.

It’s not about hitting you over the head with a stick and saying, Oh my gosh, that was just you’re an idiot. That was terrible. I’ve got to punish you. It’s about saying, Hey, let’s talk about this. So what do you think went well there? What do you think didn’t go so well? This is, let’s say if I’m performance managing you now, if you don’t immediately say to me, actually, I reckon that could be done better.

I will then prompt you to say, okay, I see what you were coming from. What about this particular area? How do you feel about that? And then we’ll talk you through it. And if you still don’t see it, I might say from my perspective, I really feel that could have been done this way. What do you think? So it’s about leading them through a question process where they actually come to the point where they got, what, You’re absolutely right, or they think of it themselves, and that’s a very different paradigm too.

I’ve got to sit down and whack you over the head because you’ve done a lousy job. And that’s also not necessarily a yucky conversation either because there is development in there. It’s not just right. This is your personal development discussion. Let’s go through the list of 25 things I’m going to wrap you over the knuckles for.

But if you’ve got that level of trust where I know I can come to you and say look, When you spoke over me yesterday Today in that meeting or when you interrupted me. I really felt disrespected or I felt a bit embarrassed. Could you please next time just watch out for that because you’ve done it a couple of times and it really makes me feel this particular way.

Now if I frame something in that context of when you do dot I feel dot can you I’m not coming to you and saying hey you’re an idiot you keep doing this. I’m actually owning it and saying look I feel this particular way. Could you please do it differently? And that is also a very useful tool to have those conversations that could potentially be yucky and we could have a stand up argument with somebody over this.

Or you could actually approach it from the paradigm of, I need to fix this. Your relationship, our relationship matters to me and I’m honoring that. It’s not that we’re best friends, but we work together and it’s important to me that we have a constructive relationship. Or it might be that I have a staff member who I’m working with and developing and I have this life preserve and I can see they’re struggling.

If I don’t go and tell them that there’s something wrong, I’m actually at fault as the leader because how can I let them drown if I’m standing there holding the life preserver? So these are the kinds of behaviors when you use value as an example of, sorry, communication as an example and as a value of a business.

where you can actually start shifting a paradigm of what that actually means. And it doesn’t necessarily mean, sorry, you go. No, I was just going to say, it’s so important to, for people, in that active communicating and that idea is to make people understand what your interpretation of it is.

It’s a bit like when you do a survey and they say, can you rank me? Can you rank whatever out of 10? Now there are some people that will only ever give a nine. doesn’t, it could be the best thing ever, but they will never give a 10 because they’re always holding it back in case there’s someone better.

There’s all sorts of reasons for it. So how do you actually work out that someone’s nine is actually really a 10 for everybody else? And I definitely, I remember working years ago in a business where it came to Performance review time. And there was a certain percentage that was thrown up as saying, this is what you can get.

When the truth was that they never gave that full amount that they, if they said it was going to be seven and a half percent, they never gave more than 5 percent bonus because that was the. That was the rules that they played by. Now, if every, if all the staff had have known that was what it was like going into it, you would have had a very different perspective.

But if you go into a performance review thinking I’ve done everything great. I’ve been really good all this year. Everyone’s told me I’ve been great. And I’m going to get seven and a half percent bonus out of this. And they say, you’ve been really great. We’re going to give you five. It’s a it’s a really slap, big slap in your face.

And I think, that’s a raw example, but that happens all the time. Doesn’t it in the way that people’s understanding of what words mean and what expectations are that needs to be, on the table and. part of the value system of understanding that you’re going to be on that same page? Very much and I think a lot of disagreements and guffawfuls happen because people are not on the same page. And there’s two, the biggest reason I think for that is that They make assumptions. So I make the assumption that a five means the same to everybody or I make the assumption that you know I would give something a ten because it’s it was really good, but I’m assuming you would do the same.

So assumptions are one of the biggest things that get in our way. So I would always say test your assumptions and make sure that you’ve tested them before you go into something. Either at the beginning, when you start going into the performance review process, I would say to my boss, what does good look like?

Would you give, so what would be the best score you would give it or whatever the question is, but I would make sure that we both understood how things were viewed and measured. And look, in terms of performance reviews, there’s always a little bit of subjectivity as well. And when man’s poison is another man’s pleasure, hopefully in performance reviews we’re somewhat aligned.

But I would still always test assumptions because they can trap you up. I think you talk about that from an internal point of view, but the same thing can happen externally as well. That if your clients have an expectation at a certain level, And you’re not on the same page with that. That also spells trouble.

It really does. So there’s an interesting story. I was asked to give feedback on a business, a club that I’m a business club that I’m a member of recently, and we were invited by email. Would you like to come and do it? I said, yes, I made an appointment with the CEO. It was half an hour. And I then had another appointment straight after that.

And I turned up on time and he was 15 minutes late for half an hour appointment. And I was starting to get antsy because I had to, I knew I had to leave on the dot to get to my next appointment. And he then turned up and he was quite flustered. He was clearly having a bad day. And there had been an email that had gone out a few weeks before for a charity event that a friend and I were working on.

His team never responded. So when he came downstairs, I said, look, no problem. I know that things happen. I can’t stay, but whilst I have you, can I just ask you, we sent this email a few weeks ago. No one’s responded. And he was like I’m very busy and we get lots of these requests and I said to him I’m actually quite busy too, but all I needed from you was to say, forget it, go away, send me anything, smoke signals, a carrier pigeon, whatever.

Just tell me that you’ve received it and that you can’t do it because I don’t know what’s happened with this. And he calmed down a little bit and then we spoke for a little bit and then I left but he had actually Asked me for my opinion and my feedback and I genuinely went with the attitude of I love this place I want to help make it a bit better because there were a few things that could be improved So that evening I sat down and I thought well, I’m not gonna go into the city again to do this It takes me half an hour on both ends.

It’s just a waste of my time to do it again And I didn’t feel My time had been respected because a, he should have apologized to me for being late and he should not have been rude to me either. So I wrote him an email and it was a very nicely worded email and I said, look, Your style is very dominant and very direct, and it’s incredibly useful in a number of situations, but that style is only 9 percent of the population.

So please consider that there are 91 percent of the population. This does not work for, and for me, I really felt disrespected. And I was quite humiliated the way you treated me. And then aside from that, you’ve asked me about how we can make this better. I’ve sent a number of emails over the last year to my relationship manager, to the CEO of the club, haven’t had a response.

I really think that there is an opportunity to improve the service in this business, because certainly from my perspective, and there’s some of the other members, we never hear from you. Once we’ve joined up, You’re so busy trying to sign up new people that we never hear from you again. And I said, look, I have heard that in the past it was a bit of a cocaine and party culture because it’s established business signs, but I didn’t believe any of that.

I chose to overlook it because I believed in you and I believed in the service and in the membership. Oh my gosh. He sent me an email that knocked my socks off. He told me I was rude. I was unprofessional. How dare I talk about people’s businesses like that. And I appreciate he was having a bad day, but he acknowledged that he was rude to me the day before, but he didn’t send me an email that evening saying, I’m so sorry for being rude.

Or even 10 minutes after he was rude to me, or pick up the phone. And that should have been an instance where Instead of him saying, calling me names effectively, he should have just said to me, I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s really interesting though. Can you tell me more? Because I wasn’t calling his business names.

I was literally saying there is. And for me, if it had been my business, yes, I probably would have been a bit still taken aback. But if this had happened in the past and I knew it, then I’d say, okay we did have some issues at some point, but you’re right. We did clean it up, but that’s still there, that some people are still talking about it.

So tell me more. What else can we do to fix this? Even in the end of the day, if I don’t ask that they use everything that person’s shared with me. If I’m asking you for advice to then barrack you, because you’ve given me feedback is ridiculous. So there’s gotta be a level of trust in any business. And your customers have to be able to come to you and say, look, I really think there’s an area for improvement in this space.

I’m not saying they’ve got to come and give you a bollocking. And sometimes they do. And that’s not really right either, unless it’s a business. Sometimes we have to take that, but you’ve got to have a level of trust in the business because your customers are going to, your values transfer down to them.

If you have a culture that’s a little bit sour where you don’t trust each other, where you can’t talk to each other, Your customers in all likelihood are not going to be able to come and talk to you. There is so much to explore in, in what you’ve just said there. And I’d love to do that, but we’re going to our listeners are going to end up going, hang on, we’ve got to, we’ve got to get to work, got to do these things.

So we’re we’re going to pick up that a lot of that conversation another time, but there is certainly plenty in that because I think that realistically What you’ve talked about just then is such a common problem. I learned very early on in the piece from a a very good boss I had that it’s all about the way you respond.

Things will go wrong. We’re human beings, we make mistakes, we get upset, we have outside influences, but it’s how you respond is Absolutely everything because that’s what you remember and I’ve seen too often examples of businesses that do something along the lines of what you’ve just described and that’s what everyone remembers, whereas if they’d have turned around and he’d have apologized, as you said, and you’d have said, You know, they’d done something about that, listened, taken on some advice, then the way you would have felt about that business and the way you would be talking about that business would be completely different.

And in fact, one big differentiator would have been, you probably would have actually mentioned the business name. I’m not asking you to mention the business name, but you would have done. If the experience is positive. We’re never afraid to really tell people about it when it’s negative. We might in a private situation, probably not in a podcast, go out and say they’re a bunch of loonies, but they’re we do tell people don’t go near them, and that’s the, that’s a problem.

And people, I often say to people, you never know what you’re missing out by having poor or no communication. And that’s a really good example of very poor communication. Absolutely. Even just the opportunity to say, look, I really felt this way. We sort it out, but now this is left in the air.

And every time I go there, I feel a little bit uncomfortable. So if there’s one thing I can leave people with today, and this is something that Harry Upanana told my dad at his graduation, kindness and good manners cost absolutely nothing. Use them liberally. And it works both ways as well. If in that situation he just said to me, look, I’m really sorry.

I’m having a really lousy day or a lousy week or whatever the case is. No problem. It happens to all of us. I have shitty weeks too, all lousy days. And I completely understand that we’re all human, but I don’t know if it’s an ego thing that gets in the way. So yeah, remember you’re dealing with humans.

You don’t always know what they’re going through. Good manners and kindness literally cost nothing. And even in the business, the more you can get that going in a business, the easier it is to create values that everybody loves and that works. For the business. 100%. I want to give listeners the opportunity to also say that there’s ways that they can get in touch with you.

And we’re going to share that in the show notes, but also that you’ve got a thing called the profit pulse of the five P profit formula that you’ve got, that will include a link to that in the show notes as well. So people can get ahold of that information. And Also, I wanted to point out that we’re going to have an extra little discussion about how to identify and fix the bottlenecks in your business that are holding you back.

We’re going to have that little separate discussion in our bonus bit of content. So again, something else to look forward to in the show notes, click on that, and we’ll get that there. But I just wanted to wrap up the main podcast with a couple of things. One as we talked about right in the intro, you and I met at a function for B1, Thing that I wanted to ask you about, and for those who don’t know who B one G one are, buy one, give one, look up B one G one.

We’ll probably include that as well in the show notes. Love it. Yep. Yes. And go back to the interview I did in a previous episode sometime ago with Paul Dunn. It was earlier this year, and you’ll hear a lot more about it there. But talk to me about the importance of impact for you because that’s what B one G one is all about.

Look, I spent most of my life in corporate and I was stuck there. I had golden handcuffs because I was raising my child on my own. His dad died when he was a baby, but it never really felt genuine to me. So as soon as I could, I left, which was eight years ago. I started my own business. And part of that was making a difference and making an impact.

So my goal is actually to help a million women achieve financial freedom or a life on their terms by 2030. And I was looking for a way to do that. And I wasn’t sure what the best way forward was because I’ve often seen companies put I donate to X, Y, and Z on their website, whether they do or don’t, one never knows.

And with a lot of these charities, you don’t know where the money actually ends up going. But when Paul was introduced to me by a friend and B1G1 with it, I really fell in love with it because I can actually donate to projects that are Doing exactly that. My million women is not just obviously clients, although that would be lovely.

I don’t know how I’d cope with it. Actually, maybe it wouldn’t be lovely. It’s also about my speaking. It’s about the impact that I can make. It’s about what I can do to help women with maternal health. And people don’t know this, but something like five jumbo jets of women a day die because they don’t have access to maternal health in third world countries.

Trafficking is the biggest industry in the entire world. Human slavery is a bigger industry now than in the days before the American civil war. And generally it’s women and children. It’s bigger than the cocaine industry. It’s the biggest industry in the world. And it galls me to think that women’s value are the biggest value monetarily actually, is because of having sex with us.

There’s so much more to it. So I am a very big proponent of helping women get an education. So I will also sponsor things through B1 and G1 providing them with sanitary wear so that they can stay in school or providing them with a bicycle so that they can get to school. Maternal health is another one that’s really important for women because whether it’s something like Hospital by the River.

I don’t know if anybody’s ever read that book by Katherine Hamlin, where these little girls are married off at the age of 12 and they can’t give birth at that age because their little bodies are too small. But because they strain and the child won’t fit through the birth canal, that child ends up dying and they tear everything down there.

So three or four days later they pass the stead fetus, but everything’s torn, so they leak and they get ostracized and sent to live on the edges of villages. And they have to live that way for the rest of their life. And what Catherine Hanlon’s hospital is doing is it’s actually providing them with a surgery to fix it.

There was another instance in the bulge of Africa where these little girls were being taken off by the rebels and raped. And then once they had their children they were no longer useful. So there are operations there to actually teach these girls skills. And also empower them to understand it’s not a shameful thing.

They can go back to their families if they want to. If families will accept it. So it’s also about training the families and in instances where they don’t, they actually teach them the life skills so that they can afford to look after themselves and their child. And these are the things to me that are making a difference.

I was CEO of a children’s charity in Australia that provided wishes to kids who were not actually dying. That was just, they were chronically ill. And whilst I feel that’s a lovely cause, For me, there are much more critical things that we actually need to address. And B1G1 helps me do that. But it also gives me a community who think like me.

And maybe this is why when you’re in my eyes locked across the room, we have this instant like we’ve got to speak to each other. I think so. I think it’s just, it’s an amazing community. And and the impacts that you’re making by doing this. Those things are huge and being able to speak about it.

And I think the accessibility to be able to make an impact on that. I feel strongly about B1G1 as listeners would know. I’m lucky enough to have known Paul Dunn, who’s one of the founders for a long time. And every opportunity to speak about B1G1 is worthwhile because I per, I personally believe that the best way to change the world is to make an impact one person at a time.

And B1G1 is enabling that to, to actually happen as well, which is amazing. Just to wrap things up one final question I like to ask my guests, what is the what is the big aha? that clients have with you when they start to work with you that you wish other people would know in advance that we’re going to have?

Oh, that’s an interesting question. The big aha for me would be, I think one of the biggest ahas comes for them when we actually go through that initial diagnostic process. And this is where we’ll talk about bottlenecks later on. But when we actually start strategically looking at their business, because One of my superpowers is the real ability to look at a business and think strategically and look at it from different angles and see things that are right or wrong, but then also see the potential of that business.

So working with them, the first AHA is really to See the low hanging fruit and realize what they should be saying no to. And then working with me to actually get a team that sees that as well, and then understands where the business has to go and gets on board. Fantastic. I love that. As you alluded to, we’re going to have a continued discussion and there’ll be a link to be able to access that on how to identify the best.

bottlenecks in your business that are holding you back. But as far as this is concerned, this main podcast, it’s such a pleasure having you on the program. We covered so much territory and probably could talk for about another, 10 hours quite comfortably. But for now, thank you so much for being part of the podcast.

Oh, it’s been my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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