Business Built Freedom: Recent Episodes
Joshua Lewis
Welcome to Business Built Freedom, the podcast made for business owners who want more out of life and ultimately, build a vehicle of wealth and freedom. We are technologists, owners, forward thinkers, and life hackers, most importantly, we are human and down to earth Aussies. Brisbane based entrepreneurs are interviewed regularly from all walks of life, in all positions of business from greenfield start-ups to long-standing owners looking for exit strategies to retire. If you want to increase your wealth, better your health and get a residual income, sit back with a beer and relax, unless you're on the way to work…. See how the new kids are doing it, get the time you deserve with the family, gain perspective, direction and stop the business owning you, instead OWN it!
AI is reshaping how businesses market, operate, and grow. Whether you run a small company or are expanding quickly, understanding how to use AI in marketing can help you stay competitive. In a recent episode of Business Built Freedom, John Daddow from Constantech shared his insights into how AI is changing the way businesses approach marketing—and how you can start making it work for you today.
Key Takeaways
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AI in marketing is changing how businesses create content, engage with customers, and manage campaigns.
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Automation simplifies tasks, while AI makes informed decisions based on data.
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Tools like Google Gemini, Meet, and Keep can be integrated into daily workflows.
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Start simple and expand as you become more confident.
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Concentrate on content, social engagement, and advertising to see real results.
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Being proactive with AI helps you stay ahead and improve efficiency.
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Have you ever copied and pasted terms and conditions onto your website without giving them much thought? Or maybe you haven’t updated them in years? While they may seem like legal fine print, outdated or missing website terms and conditions could expose your business to serious risks.
Learn how to protect your business with automated website compliance
Key Takeaways Before we dive into Mark Donnelly’s insights, here are some essential reasons why keeping your website terms and conditions up to date is critical for your business:
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Outdated or missing terms and conditions can cost you. New regulations mean businesses face hefty fines for non-compliant terms and conditions.
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Privacy policies matter, too. Rules around data collection and consumer rights are tightening.
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Copying from competitors is risky. Terms and conditions need to be customised for your business to hold up legally.
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Live Terms automates website compliance. Instead of manually updating terms and conditions, Live Terms ensures your website always reflects the latest legal requirements.
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Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in the daily grind of running your business with no time to focus on the bigger picture? When you first started, you probably wore every hat—handling sales, admin, customer service, and operations—only to find yourself unable to break free from the cycle.
Learn how to transition from daily grind to long-term growth.
Key Takeaways Before we dive into Kerrie’s story, here are some key takeaways on how to transition from daily business grind to long-term growth:
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Let go. Start by delegating tasks you dislike and build trust in your team.
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Fractional management can help. You don’t always need a full-time executive. Part-time expertise can be just as powerful.
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Processes and systems are your foundation. Streamlined, repeatable workflows will prevent inefficiencies and support scalability.
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Think of your business as an investment. Just like you wouldn’t manage a rental property alone, you don’t have to run everything yourself.
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In the latest episode of Business Built Freedom, host Josh Lewis is joined by Isaac Alexander, a digital marketing expert with a deep appreciation for entrepreneurship and AI’s potential. Isaac offers a fresh perspective on leveraging AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to streamline content creation while maintaining authenticity and originality.
Read more here: https://l.dorks.com.au/321
In the latest episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh chatted with Jason Tan, founder of Engage AI, about the impact of AI on sales and prospect outreach, especially on LinkedIn. With AI technology becoming a bigger part of business, their conversation zeroed in on how it’s changing the game for sales and prospecting.
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In the last episode of 2023, Josh looks back on the year that was. Due to the arrival of new baby Harrison, this will be the last episode of Business Built Freedom for the foreseeable future until later in 2024. Thank you to everyone for all their support - enjoy the holidays and have a great new years!
Have you ever wondered how Google works? What's the point of the search engine? How do you get to the top? This week, Josh was joined by Tim Nelson from TPR Media to talk about all things digital marketing.
Tim Nelson is the Digital Marketing Director of TPR Media, a full-service digital agency that specialises in developing and implementing online advertising. Their team includes designers, creatives, strategy and digital specialists, right through to in-house production services that provides leading directors, producers, film crew, and post-production services to produce inspiring and incredible content.
Did you like the episode? Leave us some love if so. Stay good!
One of the solutions to helping grow your business could be looking towards a strategic partnership for growth. This week, Josh is joined by David Martin from AI Group, who is an expert on all things to do with strategic partnerships.
David has been part of Australia’s Innovation Ecosystem for over fifteen years and has worked at the executive level across multiple industries including large and small organisations to facilitate innovative solutions to complex and wicked problems. If you liked the episode, be sure to give us some feedback and share it with a friend. Stay good!
When it comes to running a more efficient business, there are some things you can be doing in-house that can significantly improve your operations. Josh spoke to Greg Gunther from Your Business Momentum about one of the best days to do so - systematising your business.
Greg has over 30 years experience in business as an owner and advisor. Together with Joshna Daya Greg co-founded a premium professional services firm - Your Business Momentum to help business leaders enduring high stress levels in these uncertain times.
If you liked the episode please leave us a review. Stay good!
Have you delved into the world of Facebook ads? Dahna Borg from Bright Red Marketing joined Josh to share some valuable insights on maximise the potential of Facebook advertising.
Danha specialises in Facebook and Instagram advertising, graphics and video production for Facebook and Instagram ads, influencer sourcing and marketing and also offers marketing coaching and consulting.
Liked the podcast? Leave some feedback and please share it with a friend. Stay good!
In this weeks episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh is joined by expert share trader Louise Bedford from The Trading Game to discuss everything that has to do with share trading in Australia.
Louise is a best-selling author of five sharemarket books, as well as being a behavioural finance expert and the host of her own podcast Talking Trading.
Listen to Louise's podcast here: https://talkingtrading.com.au/ As always, if you've liked the episode, leave us some feedback. Stay good!
On this week's episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh is joined by joined by Sean Kelly to discuss some ways to get more out of your business.
Sean is the Founder of embrace and Director at moreton blue software where he delivers software solutions using frameworks and components to reduce the time and cost of delivery.
If you liked the episode, remember to leave us a review and tell your friends. Stay good!
On this episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh sat down with award winning real estate agent Nick Stankiewicz to chat about building positive relationships with your customers.
Nick is a multi-award-winning estate agent with a passion for property. He consistently keeps in touch with new market trends, identifying client needs and by maintaining constant communication with potential buyers and sellers.
If you liked the episode, make sure to throw us some love on your favourite podcast platform. Stay good!
On this week's episode, Josh and Sayju continue their chat about all things to do with migrating your business to the cloud, including what different options are available, the impact it can have, and how to make sure you pick the right solution.
If you enjoyed the episode, remember to leave us a review and spread the word. Stay good!
In this weeks episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh was joined by Andrew Weatherley from WCT Advisory to chat about all things to do with restructuring, cash flow, and having working capital.
Andrew has extensive experience in all aspects of personal and corporate insolvency and advisory in Australia. With over eighteen years of experience gained working in two of Australia’s foremost corporate restructuring and advisory firms, Andrew is an expert on business restructuring.
If you liked this episode, be sure to leave us a review and spread the word. Stay good!
Cloud computing is a major aspect of thousands of businesses, but there are a lot of mitigating factors that can confuse people. Josh was joined by Sayju Nath, a cloud mitigation expert, to discuss everything to do with the cloud and how to use it to help your operations.
If you enjoyed the episode, remember to leave us a review and spread the word. Stay good!
This is the final part of Josh's chat with Bryan Worn.
Becoming financially independent is the gateway to generational success, but the journey to get there can be very difficult. Josh spoke to Bryan Worn about achieving financial independence with your business and what it takes to get there.
Bryan is one of Australia’s most experienced and respected business and professional services practice mentors. He is on a mission to help business owners be commercially successful and achieve financial independence whilst still enjoying the personal life they want.
Hope you enjoy the episode!
Becoming financially independent is the gateway to generational success, but the journey to get there can be very difficult. Josh spoke to Bryan Worn about achieving financial independence with your business and what it takes to get there.
Bryan is one of Australia’s most experienced and respected business and professional services practice mentors. He is on a mission to help business owners be commercially successful and achieve financial independence whilst still enjoying the personal life they want.
Hope you enjoy the episode!
We all know we need to be effective, and we need to be efficient in business, but what is really the difference, and how do you go about creating a high-performing business? Josh was joined by Mark Pope from Pragmatico to talk about how to unlock high-performance business strategies.
Mark is a seasoned entrepreneur who, after a brief retirement, realised that his true passion lies in helping other businesses thrive. With a wealth of experience in building profitable and efficient businesses, Mark knows what it takes to succeed: a clear plan, high-performance expectations, and ongoing conversations about progress and targets.
Hope you enjoy the episode!
In today's world, there is a lot of talk about work-life balance, and many people are trying to find ways to achieve it. Josh spoke with Linda Joy Benn about how to maintain balance in life and some tools that can be used to achieve it.
Linda Joy Benn has been named a transformational catalyst and industry leader in consciousness evolution. She has helped transform thousands of people’s lives over the last 20+ years. She specialises in holistic health to help her patients return to being their true authentic selves.
Hope you enjoy the episode!
In today's fast-paced business world, it's more important than ever to have access to the right information at the right time. But with so much data to manage, it can be challenging to make sense of it all. That's where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. Josh was joined by Tony Webster from Inviga to explain how your business can be better with AI.
In this week's episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh talks with Jay Pandya from MVP1 Ventures about all things to do with digital platforms.
Jay blends significant experience with digital transformation, complex program management with a high level of ethical practices. He has a fiery passion for the transformational shift that digital technologies are bringing to our lives and deeply cares about our actions' impact on the quality of life for everyone on the planet.
As always if you like what you hear, remember to throw us a review or get in touch!
In episode two of our two-part series with business expert Martin Morris, Josh and Martin discuss growing businesses and Martin passes on five valuable tips to follow for business growth.
On this week's episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh chats with Martin Morris from C-Sky. Martin shares some great tips for making good connections and improving your networking skills.
Don't forget to rate and review if you liked the show!
In the first episode of 2023, Josh talks to Paula McLean about the top 3 digital marketing trends in 2023. Paula is the founder and director of PAK Digital, a boutique marketing group. She started her career more than 20 years ago when businesses had to rely on traditional media for marketing, which often came with big price tags.
If you enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes or Spotify. Leave us some love, and give us some feedback. Stay healthy!
In this week's episode, Josh chats to Grant Titman, co-founder of q4 financial. Grant specialises in delivering generational wealth financial services to the owners of 7-figure businesses. He and his team have spent the last 28 years working in this market and have a deep understanding of the unique problems experienced by these small businesses and their owners.
In this week's episode, Josh talks to branding expert James Flaherty about everything to do with it. Stay good!
James Flaherty is the founder of Social Beast. He has over 20 years of experience in marketing and strategy in the Australian and UK markets. He specialises in the business-to-business and consumer marketing sectors where his strategies are driven by who the customer is.
If you want a review of your brand, get in touch with James Flaherty on LinkedIn.
In part two of Josh's conversation with Ryan McDonald-Smith, the pair discuss Ryan's new book ‘Yes and’ and ‘Yeah but’, the process behind it all, and why writing books can make a huge difference to your business.
In part one of Josh's chat with world-renowned author and Younique Creation executive director Ryan McDonald-Smith learn from Ryan as he shares a few different changes that he has gone through to allow him to achieve that and gives work-life balance tips and techniques.
In this week's episode, Josh chats to Sean Castrina about all things recruiting and retaining talent.
Sean is the founder of The Weekend MBA, a serial entrepreneur, having started more than 20 companies over the last 20 years, and still seeks to launch a new venture annually. He is the author of 4 bestselling business books including 8 Unbreakable Rules for Business Startup Success, The Greatest Entrepreneur in the World, Developing The Entrepreneur Within and World’s Greatest Business Plan. He hosts one of the most popular business podcasts on the planet- The 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast.
Check out Sean's wonderful podcast here: https://seancastrina.com/podcasts/10-minute-entrepreneur/
In this week's episode, Josh sits down with Jason Daniels, Founder / CEO at LSKD to chat about all things small business, including making mistakes, why Jason chases the vibe, and the future of LKSD.
In this week's episode, Josh talks to Sarah Pietsch about how the state of insurance in Australia is changing.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes or Spotify. Leave us some love, give us some feedback. Stay healthy!
In this week's episode of Business Built Freedom, Josh chats to funnel expert Luke Charlton about all things leads, including how to make sure you are getting good ones. Listen now!
Learn more about Luke's 9 Email Offers That Get Clients for Free at https://l.dorks.com.au/lukecharlton
We're back! In this week's episode, Josh sits down with Michael Calam from Centrepoint Alliance to discuss all things related to work-life balance.
Listen now or read more about it on our blog!
In today's episode, we chat to Jeremy Streten about the legal aspects of your business, because if you don’t take care of your legal obligations, you will be exposing yourself to stress and other and inevitable problems that will surface.
In this episode, Josh details all you need to know about the upcoming release of .au domain names in Australia.
On this weeks episode, Josh talks to Cameron McMillan from Creating Succession about succession planning for when the time comes to move on from your business.
In this week's episode, Josh talks to strategic planning expert John Hale about making sure you've got the right strategy not only in business but also in your personal life.
Adam and Jim are back this week to tell us more about the manufacturing industry in Australia and what makes Products For Industry successful. They share 7 tips to succeed in building a long-lasting relationship with clients, leading a team, and managing projects that you can adopt no matter what industry you’re in. Listen to the podcast or visit the Dorks Delivered blog to learn more.
In this week's episode, we chat with Adam Piper and Jimmy Eckert from PFI about the state of the Australian manufacturing industry. Listen or visit the Dorks Delivered blog to learn about how the cost of execution in the manufacturing industry in Australia is the biggest show-stopper, how they can innovate to have something that nobody else has, and how automation in manufacturing, like in other industries, is not removing jobs, rather it's just creating better jobs.
This week, we'll be talking all things business grants with A Better Bid Director Toni Raso. Toni works with medium-sized business owners who want to sustainably grow their business by tendering for work or winning grants. To read the full transcript, visit the Dorks Delivered blog.
This week, we'll be talking about how to build positive workplace culture in Australia with Andre Van Der Merwe, a Managing Partner at Verity Consulting with over 20 years' leadership experience. To read the full transcript, visit the Dorks Delivered blog.
This week, we'll be talking about self-awareness around leadership with Lucy Faulconer, a leadership coach with a background in psychology and management consulting.
To read the full transcript, visit the Dorks Delivered blog.
We're always told that you need to create rapport to have better customers that know, like and trust you. What is rapport? How do you know if you've built too much rapport? Can you break rapport? Janeen Vosper from SpeechPerfect.com sheds some light.
Listen to the podcast or read more about it at Dorks Delivered blog.
7 Steps to Building a Smart Business Engine With Luke Fatooros
We've all been in a spot in our business where we're trying to work out how to get from A to B or how to get to the next level. But what is the next level? How many levels are there?
Luke Fatooros from Ideas Into Business shares with us the 7 steps to building a smart business engine to give you time, money, and freedom.
Learn more on how to build a smart business engine at dorksdelivered.com.au
Luke's Business Journey Why are there seven steps? What are the steps to building a smart business engine to give you the time, money, and freedom?
Luke: Let me start with my $12 million mistake or failure. It's something that I don't recommend, but this was my first step into business. My first business was a store that my father and I shared with $800. We thought we were going to conquer the world, and the first 14 months were a living hell. We didn't know what we were doing. We had all the ambition and enthusiasm, and that was really what got us through the first 14 months.
When we eventually learned a few things, such as how to distinguish myself from the competition, my first joint venture took off. After all that pain, it eventually became a $12 million, 65-staff business after five years. I was winning awards like Entrepreneur of the Year, Microsoft top companies, the Westpac finance.
And then I lost everything. My partner had to go to the staff and tell them we had to close this business. What came out of that were life-changing lessons. There are three critical lessons I want to share with you, and this was how the seven steps were formulated.
1. Understand Cash Flow Luke: I had to learn how money works and how money flows. The first lesson was to stop trading time for money—I didn't know what that meant. I had to move from a limited earning structure to an unlimited earning structure.
When I lost that business, I learned the difference between being self-employed and being a business owner, and I understood creating wealth in business. I realised that my business was worth nothing because it was strapped to me. We become burnt out when trying to build a business the wrong way. It took me 7 years to recover.
2. Work on Your Internal Structure Luke: By contrast, when I built my second business, a distribution business, I had three factories in China, the Philippines, and Korea, and I'm supplying five countries from a desk.
That gives you a lot of flexibility with the way you can travel. You're not tied to a location, which is something that's becoming very important with our current times.
Luke: If someone saw me with my notebook at my home office, they would think it's a joke, a hobby. But that business was valued at $3.5 million up to 3 years. It's not how fancy a business looks on the outside. It's how structured internally.
When I was 12 years old, I was given the opportunity to make these number plate brackets. It sounds like such a boring product, but I was getting $6 a bracket. I was able to make one in 1.5 hours. I sped up my processes. By the time I was 13, I was making 10 number plate brackets an hour, so I was then making $60 an hour relatively.
I went on to employ people, but the lesson that I learned was people are lazy. Don't tie things to money, and don't tie things to yourself. If you have a problem or a key person in your business has a problem, how do you overcome that? How do you make sure that you aren't the key person? How was that valuable to the next person that was buying it?
3. Build a Strong Foundation Luke: This comes to this thing called sequencing. You cannot step out of the engine. You cannot hand down management or the responsibilities with regard to the foundation of your business to anyone else. If you have a vehicle that's got a broken engine, you cannot paint it green hoping that the engine would work.
That is what people do in business. They change the website or invest in social media marketing and think this is going to grow the business. That has to come at a certain point. Your sequencing is wrong.
7 Steps to Building a Smart Business Engine to Give You Time, Money, and Freedom 1. Optimise Your Mindset Luke: People have this business idea, but people focus on marketing strategies, negotiation, sales, systems, processes, etc. But there's a thing called you. We all have our own personal brands. People don't buy your products and services. They buy you. They buy the image that you are projecting. Every one of us projects a particular image that we think we need the world to see.
Relay that to buying a Samsung phone or an iPhone. The image was around the inspiration and message that Steve Jobs had. Who's the owner of Samsung?
Luke: Exactly. No one knows who arrived second on the moon.
Every one of us has self-sabotaging patterns and limiting beliefs. We might think we're marvellous, but the truth is we're actually not. You want to be the best version you can be of yourself and your business. How do your customers want to perceive you? You have to pay attention to that.
When I started my first business, we went from $1 million to $12 million in 5 years. That incredible growth, the prestige and recognition, and so much money coming to my life as a kid made me think I was invincible. It didn't do any good because even though I sort of earned the success, I didn't know how to handle it. I didn't have mental maturity. My ego was running my show—a self-sabotaging pattern.
It doesn't matter how fancy you get into your marketing sales strategy. If you have this self-sabotaging pattern, your business is just never going to make it. What I've learned over the years is the people who resist openness, self-development, and willingness to learn are the ones who desperately need this help the most. That's the self-sabotaging trait. That is a disaster in business. Optimise your mindset.
The six inches between the ears is the most important six inches to measure on your body.
2. Optimise Your Niche Luke: There are lucrative niches, and the money is naturally flowing into those lucrative niches. The common mistake is when we have meat; we try to sell it to vegetarians. It doesn't matter how fancy your meat is; a vegetarian is just not going to buy your meat. That's not a lucrative niche for your product.
My philosophy is to just follow the cash. What you want to do is you want to find customers who buy from you the quickest and the easiest.
Out of 100 customers, there will be some of them who will buy from you instantly—they love you and your brand. I call these your real customers.
I think this is where a lot of marketing companies get things wrong. They all say that this is your ideal customer, but that doesn't mean those people are actually going to buy from you. When you've been in a business, or you've been trading, and you look back at your history, you see that there's a group that just hands you cash. Shift your focus toward your real customers, not your ideal customers.
I analysed why we struggled for 14 months with my first business. My business partner, Gary, was an engineer, so we thought we could do computer programming. We're going to write software to help businesses become efficient and more profitable. We thought this was just marvelous, so we took my $800 and launched the business. No one bought anything, and we couldn't understand this. We kept trying stuff, but the customers didn't want our stuff. Instead, they're looking for computer hardware. We quickly decided that we would give them what they were looking for.
We got rid of the software, and we opened a little shop in the back of some shopping centre. No one went there. We started putting the computers where people could see them. We still had a lot to learn, but we started to see a little bit of light.
If you are struggling in business, find where the money is flowing. Listen to your customers, what they are looking to buy, instead of ramming your product down their throat. Shift and sift to what the market really wants.
My first business really took off because we've shifted and sifted out of selling computer software, which was a dead niche. You can't keep flogging a dead horse, right? You have to be smart enough to move across.
How do you make sure you're not emotionally attached to that dead horse?
Luke: If you are absolutely in love with your idea, that's a self-sabotaging trait, and you need help with that. My help was a hammer on my head, and now I'm very aware of self-development and problems in my own business caused by my own self-destructive traits.
The people who ultimately fail are those who will not let go of their idea. That's ego, and that is a terrible self-sabotaging pattern.
Did you fix that through reflection or having other people come in?
Luke: Yes. I went through seven years of massive self-reflection and actually understanding that you need to get help in your life. I was not mature enough. I didn't have the structure to be successful in business, even though I was very good at business strategies.
I've done a lot of self-work over the years, and the biggest thing is getting rid of the ego. That's not easy for most people. But if you can do that, you're on your way.
Is there a certain size of the market that you need to start doing that? If you've been in business for a little while, say you've got a B2B business with 100 clients or a B2C business with 10,000 clients, how do you work out the numbers?
Luke: If you've got a bit of history in your business, you can take the time to analyse your database and then categorise them into A, B, and C clients. Who are the people who are just paying you and not giving you problems? Who are the people who won't just buy from you, no matter what you do, it's just never enough? And then who are the ones who buy from you after some hard work.
It's not about percentages, time, staff, or size. It's the process. Analyse, and then you'll be fine.
3. Optimise Your Sales Luke: What do your real customers want to buy from you?
I've been in business since I was 23. I've done probably every sales course under the sun, and I've never seen anything that's told me the two secrets that I believe you need to have to achieve success in sales. The first one is don't sell.
That's a big one that I've had a lot of trouble grasping. I've realised you shouldn't be doing the sales courses. You are already the best salesperson if you're passionate about your product.
Luke: I agree. What you hear is the secrets of closing—how do you trick people into this or influence people?
Looping, straight-line persuasion, that sort of stuff.
Luke: When someone is buying for you, what is that one thing they are subconsciously looking for? When they walk in, they scan you for one thing before they even want to hear your pitch about your product. It's trust.
If I don't trust you, I don't care how fancy your Ferrari or whatever your thing is, I'm not going to buy from you. I'm going to try and find someone else who I feel comfortable with to give my money to. I've never heard a sales course ever tell me that. They all try to show how to influence, trick, close, overcome objections, etc. to get the money in the bank. I genuinely don't believe in that.
Even if you do that sort of tactics, will they be long-term clients? Are they going to be happy at the end of the day if you use some psychological neurolinguistic programming thing? Are they going to be the type of client that's going to be a raving fan and going to be sitting in your A-grade pile? Probably not. It's better to build that rapport and relationship and to make sure that you can know, like, and trust the person.
Luke: There are two ways that you can build trust to influence sales in the right way. The first one is your personal branding; the second is your hook product. Its purpose is to let your customers experience your value with the least amount of risk.
And resistance.
Luke: For example, there are two pie ladies in the supermarket. One lady has a stand with flyers, and the other lady has a stand with a little microwave and pies. The first lady is handing out brochures, telling everyone how marvellous her pies are. The other lady bakes, and she has samples in the oven. People could smell their aroma. She puts some on a tray, cuts it up, and invites people over.
The second lady is actually letting her customers try and experience. That's what you call a little hook, and there's no risk. They love it. The other lady is telling everyone how marvellous her pies are, but there's no experience. There's nothing going on there. And that's the two different ways people sell in the world.
One of the things I found was my competition was garages. This was the early 1990s, so they sold computers in converted homes. It wasn't a mainstream retail thing. Customers would go in and then speak with some dude behind the counter who is unbelievably knowledgeable on computers, but the customers don't know what he's talking about—ROMs, processors, etc.—so it freaked them out. That's not a good customer experience, which is what customers really want.
What I did was I put displays up even if we didn't have a lot of customers then. We had to prove our concept. We knew we were in the money, but we just didn't know how to be known yet.
We're always told to leverage social media sites to bring in more business, but what does that actually mean? Sometimes just putting up posts of cats or just resharing things work. Some things don't.
This week, Chantal Gerardy, an online business strategist, talks to us about how to leverage social media to generate paying clients.
Get more tips on how to leverage social media at dorksdelivered.com.au
How do you work with your staff? How close are you to your staff?
Dorks Delivered Director Joshua Lewis and Geoffrey Wade, the founder of Onirik, talk about psychological safety at work.
Learn more about psychological safety at work at dorksdelivered.com.au.
We all need money in business to survive. Unless you're running a charity, there's no point in doing it any other way, but a lot of people have a weird mindset when it comes to money.
In this episode of Business Built Freedom, Aimee LaLiberte from My Virtual CFO talks about what money mindset is, how to change your money mindset, and making sure that you are healthy with the way that you're thinking about earning money.
Learn more about the money mindset at dorksdelivered.com.au
Are you running an old business but feeling like you're flogging a dead horse? Or are you running a new age business and pushing in the right direction where things can be done in a way that's leveraging your value but not your time?
What is an innovative revenue model?
Get more tips about new-age business models at dorksdelivered.com.au
Samantha: An innovative model is very dependent on what you want, and I think this links straight back to your podcast: Business Built Freedom.
Traditionally, we go into business for ourselves or one that's built around our expertise. We don't then look at moving forward, instead we kind of look back to how everyone else has done it.
It's shifting towards what success actually means to you—not what success should be—and towards building a habitat in your business that links all the way from your vision based on what you want to the financial statements, leadership, people, process and systems that you want. The next part of that is enveloping that in core values, safety and accountability.
The main issue around this structure is that we have not been taught how to do any of that. We've been taught how to maybe do our product and financial statements, but we haven't been able to talk about how to actually run a business. It takes 7 or 8 minutes to open up a business. Most of us spent years getting qualifications, I spent a decade learning how to be an accountant, but it did not teach me how to run a business.
It's something that should be taught more at school and as a career. I am guilty of it. I've been a cowboy trying to work out how to get to where I'm at. I've learnt by touching fire, most of the time realising that's not a good idea.
That's the problem. As technicians and as experts, we are taught not to make mistakes, but if you're building a business, you have to make mistakes and you have to make it safe to make them.
Failure leads to success. If you don't have any failure, you won't have success. If you're mining, it's very unlikely you're going to strike gold the first time you hit the ground.
Leadership Is the Most Important Part of Any Business
Samantha: We mainly work around experts and dollar businesses that have products or services that are very much needed, like IT. The problem is they're built around one person, and then we don't even know how to look after ourselves.
If you're building any kind of business, the leader is the most important person but the leader tends to come last a lot of times. First, you actually have to learn people skills. I know this because I've made so many mistakes. The good thing is I've learnt from those mistakes. I'm a very curious person by nature and I always ask myself "how can I make that better?"
It wasn't until very recently I realised that if I'd look after myself, then my people and everything will follow. That was a really big learning experience.
For me, it's to stop people who want to change—those who actually understand that it will take some changes and show that they actually have to change behaviour and skills to go forward. We think that we can just continue doing things the same way and then we can make those $ 2 million dollars.
Particularly in the expert style of businesses, we've got spreadsheets. I don't know how many spreadsheets that would say I would take this from here to here, and then you get to the end of the year and wonder why that didn't happen. It's because you actually have to make it happen and you have to have skills and you have to bring your team on board too. Nothing leverages a business faster than all in with your people.
Safety, Trust, and Collaboration Samantha: We have to learn how to make collaborative spaces. We have to learn how to trust. And the biggest thing to trust is to create safety.
You have to actually create safety to make mistakes, and I'm not talking about doing three times the wrong way—that's slackness. What I'm talking about is going and experimenting, rewarding that and finding ways to actually measure it. Actually say, "we're here and we want you to make mistakes," but you have to send rules and boundaries around that and actually then demonstrate it.
The biggest thing about leadership is actually leading by example. You do not get your team to do something that you're not willing to do yourself or you haven't done yourself. If you want your team to go on a high-level change, be ready to change.
I think this is the biggest mistake I made, particularly when I was in a very large accounting firm. I was trying to change, but a lot of our leaders did not. A lot of the business structures that we have now are not built for that. They're built on expertise and ego and everything else. We have to start shifting this, and I'm on a journey to find out how to do that. There isn't a lot of instruction on this, but there are ways to have really safe conversations and communication.
Building Relationships Toward a Heart-Centred Business Samantha: If you look at what's happening in the thought leadership area around this—the ones I follow are Bernie Brown, Simon Sinek, and Jim Collins—they're all talking about heart-centred businesses into the future and how we shifted from muscle-style businesses to the industrial age type of businesses to brain-style businesses, such as IT and accounting.
We have to build relationships, but no one teaches us how to build relationships and how to build community. The way most people spend their time is in businesses, so businesses have to be safe. And by safe, I mean you can come in and bring your problems to work. There's a framework for you to have a conversation, such as if you're having a bad day, and someone else will pick it up for you. All of that sort of stuff doesn't happen.
How to Quantify Value Samantha: First of all, we have to acknowledge it. When I say success on your own terms, the concentration is I want to make money. There's no question about that. You need to make money so you can empower other people. Your profit and loss should be how much can I help and pay my staff and my family, and then your balance sheet should be what's my worth and what's my value, my asset value and cash flows, how you fund it. Surely you need to concentrate there.
But you also need to say what success looks like and how I'm feeling, how I'm working, and how my staff are feeling. If you concentrate on that, I can guarantee counterintuitively the money actually follows. It follows where the good energy is.
That comes down to passion and why you do what you do.
Listen to Finding Your Passion With Joshua Lewis
We're talking about different business models and leadership roles. If you've got a lawn mowing business or you're a solo entrepreneur, it doesn't mean what you're doing needs to go if that's what you love doing. It does not mean that the asset that you're creating or the vehicle to your success has to change. That's a big thing.
Own the Kogs We were talking earlier about the way to shape a business and the way kogs can work in a business. I'm happy that I've written myself out of a job. I'm no longer the main kog, but I own the processes around the kogs and how everyone works together, which is a lovely position to be in.
Samantha: That's so interesting because those processes that you're talking about are your asset. If you can repeat them again and again, you've got an asset, you have a business, you have a business asset; you don't just have a job or the people in your business don't just have a job either.
Owner Alliance and Valuation Samantha: I started this work really early on when I used to do a lot of business valuation work. The biggest thing that would hit a valuation faster than anything is owner alliance, and most businesses up to the $10 million mark have a massive owner alliance issue. Now, that issue does hit you on the valuation.
If you've got somebody who the business is relying on, not just from a technical point of view but also from their mind they're not sharing, the valuation goes. What is interesting as you look forward now is those people are burning out. They're dying early. It's a health issue as well, and you've got to think why.
Listen to Inspiring Wellness With Karen Pyke
Samantha: Going back to your example, if you want to be a control freak—and that's okay—and you want to build a small business that makes lots of money, you can do that, too. The model of your business just needs to be built on what you want. So if you want control—although there is no such thing as control—or if you want that or you want the perception of it, build a model that suits you.
This is the problem. We should have these big growth businesses. We should have a model. We should have an online model or whatever model. Don't get too stuck on that. Ask: What do I need? How can I explore that and find that?
If you want a business that's small where you control all aspects of it, you can still make quite a good coin out of that. It's just that your systems and processes and everything will need to be worked on.
We often go, "we've got to go." Sometimes, the growth you need is internal as opposed to external. It's very hard to say this will be the model of the future. I think the business models of the future are going to be very much based on the humans who run them.
Financial Independence, Retirement Early You're familiar with the FIRE (financial independence, retirement early) movement. It's about finding out what are those key things in your life that you want to be doing that brings you to that retirement spot.
Now, retirement to people is a lot of different things. Some people just think it's a number, 65. As for me, I'm retired now. I'm happy with what I do. Do I do too much of it? Sure. Does it give you the shit sometimes? Absolutely. But if you're retired, is everything just going to be roses? I don't think so. There are things that will still give you the shits.
I look at the income streams that I've got coming in and the way that I've distributed the eggs in our basket—between real estate and the businesses that I'm running—and I'm very happy to say that if I wanted to stop doing what I'm doing, I could stop doing it. And that really empowers you to make the right decisions. You're not dealing with C-grade clients. You're dealing with people that you can be happier to work with.
But how do you know if you've got a C-grade client or an A-grade client or if your business is running like a machine, you're running a new age business model or you if you don't have these processes in place?
The other day, I went into a business that was still using timecards. It doesn't integrate into their systems like, they can't make sure that no one's doing something they shouldn't or they're doing what they're meant to be doing, etc. And that's where finding your A-grade client, your A-grade staff and focusing on your business are really important.
The Transformative Business Model If we're looking at a business in a transformative stage, how do you apply the transformative business model?
Samantha: The people who would be asking that question are the people we're looking for. How do we actually shift it? Honestly, it's one step at a time.
When we start working with businesses that have got blocks, the first thing we ask is what type of person are we working with and what energy do they have? Do they want to change?
We work with a lot of businesses and we start where you're at right now and we have a look at it. We always start with that process of finding out where you want to be personally as the leader because the business does not disconnect from the person.
About 10 years ago, I didn't get that. You do not become a new individual when you walk through the doors of your office, and you certainly don't become a new person when you walk through the doors of your home.
If you're dragging shit around with you, you're going to drag it all over so it's most important that you are happy and that you find joy in what you do every day. We need to start there, and then we build around that and we see where the next rock needs to go. Usually, it's around staff and actually starting to talk collaboratively with staff and then the changing skill sets.
Once you get the staff going and they're coming up, then if you are still using fax machines, then your staff will tell you, they will then take it, and they will empower it. If you hear me say we need to start working on systems, processes, people, financial statements, and all of that stuff, the first thing it probably would cause is absolute fatigue. We’ve got to start undoing that first and then you've got to bring other people on board.
Create a Collaborative Space Samantha: If you're a small business, that might not mean employees. Some of the business models of the future that we're working with are collaborative. So how do you work with the people around you? How do you work with your clients? How do you actually look at what your clients do and can they help you with it? But the first start to anything is what the hell do you want? Not many people ask that question.
The way you said it actually is perfect.
Why We Do What We Do I went through a spot where I was wondering if "Dorks Delivered" is the right name for our business. Is it really relaying what we're trying to do? We were called something else many years ago, and we changed to talk to Dorks Delivered in 2009.
And then I read Find Your Why by Simon Sinek. I got whiplash from how fast I stopped and thought that I'm going to change everything around. Over the course after about 4 months as I was reflecting on absolutely everything that I was doing in life—why am I brewing beer, why am I automating the gardens, why do I have fish—what it came down to is I realised that personally, I love automating things and bringing back time. Why do I do it? Because I want more time. We only have that time once on this earth.
I've got Our Shout Marketing, Dorks Delivered, and Business Efficiency Experts. I asked why am I running these businesses? And I thought that all of them are doing the same thing. They're automating a certain aspect of your business, like using technology as a fulcrum to better your business.
Ultimately, what we do isn't transactional with a business. It's transformative. We want to make sure that we're changing the way that they're using these tools, not just calling itself to say that this tool is a bit blunt. It may be to change from using a tablet to a laptop or laptop to a tablet or a desktop to a workstation or whatever the situation is.
In reflection, I love automating things because it brings me more time and you have a fuller life. That's why I'm in business. Knowing your Why allows you to have that trickle down and impact the rest of your business and make sure that your staff are aligned with your ethos and ideas.
It was only when I was reading through notes that I made in a diary when I was 12 that it all clicked. And I've always been automating things. I started building electronics at a very young age, started automating my bedroom, making it so that I could click a button on the remote control and the door unlocked.
When I was 13, I had all these things that I have been building, like an automated manufacturing line for technically the first business that I started. I was doing it because it was making me more efficient. It allows me to earn more money because I'm more efficient.
It was only by reflecting that I realised I've been automating my processes from Day 1. I was very lucky that I was given the opportunity to earn money through product development, instead of per hour, so I looked at the fastest, most plausible ways that I could create what they wanted me to create.
Finding Your Why Is Hard but Worthwhile Samantha: When you're looking at that, one reason it's so uncomfortable to do is quite often people come up with something that is what they want, but not what they should want. If you've worked in a business for 20 years and you realise that your passion is actually being creative and finding change for people, it's really hard when you're in that. My passion, my Why, never changed.
The first time I saw Simon Sinek on TED Talks, I wanted to make sure that people do not compromise their personal goals for the business ones. It makes decision-making really efficient. Every decision you make from then on is around that. So you're an efficiency expert and if you know where you want to go and you don't even know how to get there, that actually puts you on a longer path.
The other efficiency thing is we teach a lot, so getting people around you who are on your Why saves not just time but also a whole lot of energy.
Finding your Why is hard. No one is saying that it's easy. It took you a long time. It's taken me a long time. But there is a process that you can go through.
About BlueprintHQ If someone is thinking about changing to a new age business model or at least wants to have someone check in on their processes, how do you go about that at BlueprintHQ? How can someone get more information or more importantly, maybe a health check on their business?
Samantha: Jump onto our website and hit the free consultation. You can book a meeting with me for about 20 minutes.
For me, it's really important to build relationships straight up. And I love talking to people and really connecting to see if we can help. Worst case scenario, on that call, I'll give you some tips and tricks and give you value that's so important to us. I just love talking to people. It's one of my passions in life. My husband and my kids hate it because I'll go into a cafe or anything and I'll talk to anybody.
We have a podcast called Business Habitat. I would love for you to have a bit of a listen. We talk about this stuff all the time. We get a lot more into the behavioural issues and what needs to shift. We have really interesting people who have built businesses that are different from the normal. We're looking for really curious, interesting people. If you think that's you, give us a bell and we would love to have you on too.
Listen to Business Habitat Episode 78: Building Business Freedom with Joshua Lewis
I'm going to be having a listen because I love seeing people do cool stuff, especially around Southeast Queensland and on a global scale which can help and impact businesses.
Recommended Books: Dare to Lead and BE 2.0 What would be the most influential book that you've read that people could dive into to get more information?
Samantha: There are so many. I am a Brené Brown a freak. Her stuff is fantastic. It's all about being vulnerable. From a leadership point of view, I think her last book, Dare to Lead is very operational. It tells you what to do.
And I just don't think you can go past Jim Collins' BE 2.0. It's so practical, and it has a bit of a mud map and a road map as well.
What is freedom to you? What is business built freedom to you? Why do you do what you do?
Samantha: So I can ride my horse in the middle of the day and not feel guilty about it. That's the hard bit there.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, please make sure to jump across iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback. You guys drive the direction of who we speak to and the content. We've got to the Top 11 Business Podcasts. Stay healthy and stay good.
Inspiring Wellness With Karen Pyke
Are you healthy as an entrepreneur?
We are all busy workers. We all work too hard, but I think work and play are relative to your position and mindset. In this episode, Karen Pyke from Inspire Wellness talks to us about health mindset.
Learn more on how to be a healthy entrepreneur at dorksdelivered.com.au
How To Tell if You Are Healthy Sometimes, you're running from appointment to appointment, you go to these fast-food restaurants and ultimately that can have a detrimental effect. What are some of the telltale signs that show if you are healthy or not?
Karen: I think health is a really hard thing to define. Different people have different interpretations of what health is to them. The general telltale signs are a little bit of tiredness, fatigue, headaches, bloating, aches and pains, and needing to grab a coffee to give you that extra energy boost. They're the things that tell you that the body is not probably functioning the way it needs to function.
How To Work Out the Balance Can you have too much of a good thing? What if you're working too hard but you love doing what you're doing?
Karen: I guess it's working out what is too much. There are 24 hours in a day. Can somebody work 24 hours a day? Potentially they can, but it's what is going to happen later in life if you keep working at that speed.
We need to have a balance within life. Between work, play, and rest, the body can only function a certain amount based on the nutrients that it receives.
If you're continually burning all of those nutrients and you don't refuel your body either by taking a rest, by what you eat, or by what you drink, eventually something is going to stop. That's different for different people. That could be 6 weeks for some people, and 6 months for others.
We know that there's a certain amount of sleep that the body needs, and it's when we sleep that the body repairs and recovers. That's when it sets you up for the next day. Some people can survive on 6-hour sleep. Some people need 8 hours. Some people probably can survive on 3 or 4 hours at a time, but eventually, something will give.
I have a lot of respect for sleep. I think it's the most important thing. If you don't sleep well, your muscles don't recover so if you go to the gym, you're kind of just wasting your time.
Why Do Entrepreneurs Need Good Physical and Emotional Health I became single in 2017, and that meant I lost a business partner and obviously my mental health wasn't 100% while I was going through a breakup. I thought I could power through it, so I continued to do whatever I could.
I was eating reasonably healthy and going to the gym, but the amount of work that I had to do meant that I wasn't in check with my balance. I went from talking as a reasonably confident young man to developing a stutter; I wasn't able to talk on the phone. I could not get words out. We had to start culling clients so that I didn't have that happening inside me.
Be Aware of Your Balance What are some of the ways that you can make sure that you don't find out the way that I found out? How can you make sure that you keep yourself in check beforehand?
Karen: I believe that everything in life is individual. There's no one right or wrong for every person. It's really kind of sitting down and looking at your day, your life, how you feel—everything—on that individual basis.
1. Plan Karen: When my clients come in and I feel that they are running a little bit too high, I tell them to stop and have a plan for their day and themselves to know what they're doing.
We give a lot of time. As entrepreneurs, we want to put so much time into our business. You can only put that much time into your business if you put into yourself as well, so plan your time around yourself and your nutrition. What am I going to eat today? How am I going to fuel myself? Can I get nutrient-rich food into me or is it going to be the fast food, the empty calories, the kind of things that aren't going to fuel me for success?
I truly believe that planning is the key to everything that we do. It just sets you up for success.
2. Assess Karen: Work out what's realistic in your life. Is it just me? Is there anyone else that I need to give time to within my life? Do I have a family? Have I checked in on my friends recently? Have I been out socially?
If you're not doing those things and the only thing you are focusing on is your entrepreneurial pursuits, something's going to have to give eventually. You've got to give time back to yourself and nurture yourself.
Is it okay to sort of go on stints and not have a balance throughout the whole week? For instance, you got a big project or starting a business can be a huge amount of work. Is it okay to work hard for a month and then play hard for a week or two?
Karen: No, I don't think so. I believe that balance should always be there. Obviously, there's always going to be things that come up and impact our day. We planned to work for 5 hours but ended up working 10 hours. That's okay every now and again, but that shouldn't be every single day.
Ask yourself what didn't happen that day that created that? It's reflecting on those moments and how you can prevent that from happening. I think every day should be balanced.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
I've gone through phases. I've built up my business, and it was financially stable. I'm in a service-based industry so I'm meant to be talking to people a lot. When I started being unable to talk to people, I was spinning my wheels. I haven't built the business to the success that I wanted it to be, and mentally, that isn't a good spot to be in.
Physical Health and Mental Health Your nutrition and lifestyle hopefully support your mental health and your physical health. Your mental health plays a big game, your physical health plays a big game. From an entrepreneur's perspective, how are they tied together? Is there something that you think you need to get yourself mentally well to get physically well?
Karen: I think they're both so closely interrelated. It's so hard to define and say if I concentrate on my mental health, my physical health is going to be great or if I just concentrate on my physical health, my mental health is going to be great. It can't be that simple. It's really looking at everything as a whole and thinking about how you can understand when those points are out of balance.
Stop and allow yourself to understand. Ask yourself:
- What are the signs that I'm becoming out of balance?
- What do I need to do to bring myself back into balance?
If I'm really busy at work, the first thing I drop is the gym. If I haven't gone to the gym for a week and a half, I find myself lacking clarity and that affects me mentally because I haven't been doing the physical exertion that I would have otherwise.
I don't know any way out of that. I think it's just about being aware of it and bringing yourself back into balance as soon as you have. As you said, it all ties together and it all feeds together.
Karen: I have one particular client who's suffering a little bit with their mental health, and they were going to the gym too much to help themselves with their mental health, to give them clarity. But then, they were working really hard as well, and that was impacting their mental health. Something had to give, and I actually told them to have a day off the gym. Sometimes we think that we need to go to the gym to help with our mental health, but sometimes the gym might be impacting our mental health more.
With deadlines, I tell people to stop and think what would be the worst-case scenario if they didn't hit the deadline. Is the world going to end tomorrow if you don't put that extra hour in when you're absolutely exhausted and you need to go to bed? What happens if you actually go to bed, you get up in the morning, you're fresh and you find a solution to your problem within 15 minutes, instead of spending extra 2 or 3 hours at night trying to fix it and work it out? Sometimes it's okay to not always push for those deadlines.
A fresh night's sleep is huge. My PT said having a rest and a break away from work is great to sharpen your sword.
Your mind never stops. When you're sleeping, everything's being put into order. Our mind is always working.
"Go to sleep with a question, wake up with an answer."
A big problem that I have is I create synthetic timelines and synthetic deadlines. "I have to get it done by this date. Why? Because I said so. I've got other things that I want to work on that trump this project. I just want to see this project finished." But I'm also a stickler for details. I don't want to see it 80% finished; I want to see it 99.99% finished. That is a downfall for me, but again, being aware of it helps you out.
Karen: Like with kids, we always tell our kids to actually get up, walk away, have a break, go outside, and play for a while, yet we don't do the same and we think we can't because we've got to get this finished. The truth is we can and if we actually take those breaks, we give our mind a bit of a rest so the thoughts come back. It's like the network, which is being clogged with thoughts, clears up.
How Do Entrepreneurs Eat On average, how do you see the diet of entrepreneurs? Are we generally healthy or generally not healthy, or is it widespread and mixed?
Karen: Absolutely. I think that a lot of the time, we don't understand the importance of fuel inside us and what that actually does to help fuel everything else within our body.
Starting Is the Hardest Bit Karen: A lot of people always get up with good intentions, but then work-life balance doesn't actually hit the way it's supposed to. We then don't always follow through on our good habits. We become too busy, so we grab those fast foods or pull into service stations on our way running between clients. We don't actually drink enough water.
I think everybody eats the best way they feel they're eating for themselves at the time, but it's not necessarily the right food to fuel them and help them with the energy they need to get through the day.
Fast food is not only not healthy but also pretty expensive. I lost 38 kilos, but what I found was not having some of the temptations there really helps out.
I saw something the other day. What they did is they put the guitar right next to the lounge and they put the TV remote in a drawer in a bedroom. When they get home from work, they don't sit down and watch TV because now it's too inconvenient to grab that remote and have that bad habit. This then changes that habit into a good habit, and then they started playing the guitar.
Starting is the hardest bit. You need to remove some of the ease to get the bad things, create friction there and make it easier to get some of the good things and produce good habits.
Follow Through on Good Habits What is normally the timeline that you'd say to get people conditioned to be in a good balance?
Karen: I really do work on individualised nutrition. I encourage people to eat real foods again, not McDonald's or KFC, the real whole foods that you can buy from the outside of the supermarket, not the inside aisles, but the garden market, the butchers.
Once I get people eating the right foods for them to fuel them, the change is pretty instantaneous. People can recognise within a couple of weeks that this is the right food to fuel them.
I normally work around a 3-month period to really kind of understand that somebody can eat a certain way and make a habitual change to keep this ongoing. We don't need to be grabbing snacks all the time. We don't need to be using caffeine to pick us up for energy. There are other ways to fuel ourselves.
Just Give It a Go, Work With Nutrients I was also dealing with a lot of skin problems like dermatitis, eczema, and psoriasis. I went to a few different places, and they told me to cut out certain foods for about 3 months. The list was as long as your arm. Surprisingly, all the whole foods, all the good foods that don't have preservatives in them, weren't on the list.
I decided to cut out everything on the list at once and eat just the healthy things that were nutrition-dense but calorie-poor. The advantage is I lost about 2 kilos a week. The gym kept most of it off, and that was three and a half years ago.
I realised I am thinking clearer, performing better, and sleeping less but not because I didn't have the opportunity to sleep but because my body was just waking up. I'd go to bed at 11 PM and then I'd wake up at 3:30 AM, and my mind would be racing with thoughts and energy.
I also started doing polyphasic sleeping—sleep for 30 to 40 minutes in the afternoon—and I don't drink caffeine. It showed me the importance of food, and that changed my relationship with food completely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P8Av1hRqjU
Do I still like eating pizza? Absolutely, but I'm aware of what is good and bad food to have on a pizza.
I was on a quite heavy meat diet, and I cut out all meat because they were on the list. I went raw vegan for three or four months, and it was amazing. I was still building muscle and checking with body composition scans. I told a few friends that I thought I found the elixir of life, and they said they could never quit meat.
Karen: The way I look at it is it was the nutrients that you found. I never look at calories in food. I couldn't tell you what calories are in a particular food. I never work with calories. I only work with nutrients.
It's the nutrients that your body needs to allow you to sleep, have clarity, function, and allow metabolism to work again. Once you've got all those nutrients right and if it's the excess weight that your body wants to release, it will release it. If it's dermatitis that you want to get rid of, you've given your body the right fuel through those nutrients to get those metabolic pathways working to help with those skin issues.
By cutting out all of what I call non-food—the foods that have no nutrients in them—you started to put nutrients back into your body and that's what your body needed for fuel.
I went to lose the eczema. Before that, my hands would open up in the middle of the night and start bleeding all over the bedsheets. It was absolutely terrible, so it is a huge transformation. As I said, it really lets you sort of respect the position that you're in.
My wife's father was diagnosed with cholesterol and high blood pressure about six years ago. He was told he needs to be on these tablets and do this. And he decided to just try being healthy: eat healthily, go to the gym, and have balance. He's running a business with 50 employees, so he definitely understands the stresses of running a business.
When he lost the weight, he's never felt better in his life. All the health problems that he had were all gone. Everything is perfect now. It's just about finding that balance.
Pressure, Stress, Alcohol, and Relaxation It's important to know how to deal with pressure and stress. When it comes down to relaxation, pressure, and stress, where does alcohol sit in the mix?
Karen: It's interesting the way alcohol is dealt with on a daily basis. When we look at the Australian dietary guidelines, they used to have a certain level that we can actually have alcohol. Recently, they've taken that out. There is no prescribed level of alcohol in the Australian dietary guidelines.
The way I look at alcohol is, as with everything else, we should be able to enjoy things if we want to. We shouldn't rely on them to provide us with relaxation. We shouldn't be using them to help us calm down if we're stressed, and I think that's then where alcohol probably gets abused a little bit. It's like, "I've had a really stressful day. What am I going to do? I'm going to sit down, have a beer or a glass of wine." That's when I think it's taken out of context.
If you're having a nice meal and you're sitting with friends and everyone wants to enjoy a nice glass of wine, that's great. But it shouldn't be used to fix a dysfunction within the body or for stress relief.
Sometimes, we use alcohol to celebrate and socialise, but it can be the demise if you're using it to paralyse any of the symptoms of stress. I'm guilty of that. I know that I've been in a spot where my mind is going at a million miles an hour and you have a quick whiskey and then all of a sudden you kind of just focus more, but it's not for the right reasons. We shouldn't be doing that.
Karen: Absolutely. It's like having a whiskey to fall asleep. My question is why can't you sleep. Let's work out why we're not sleeping first and let's fix that. If you want a whiskey, you have a whiskey because you're enjoying a whiskey, not to get you to sleep.
And not enjoying a whiskey every night unless that's your job.
Metabolic Health and How To Inspire Wellness You've been running Inspire Wellness for a little bit of time now. What are the reasons that people would want to come to you? How can you help them out?
Karen: What I work on at Inspire Wellness is metabolic health. Metabolism is responsible pretty much for everything we do. It's responsible for movement, heat production, stress, weight gain, weight loss.
There are thousands of chemical reactions happening in our bodies every single day. Our lifestyle, what we've eaten in the past, the toxins we're exposed to basically takes it all out of balance. What I do is pull that back into balance.
We do a body reset. We actually look at individualised nutrition for everybody because everybody walking through the door has different requirements for the way they eat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1H7LUmulJM
At the moment, there's a lot of information out there on the Paleo diet, some vegan diets, the Mediterranean diet. Yes, they'll work for some people, but they won't work for everybody because it's not what that person needs.
The people that I work with are the people who recognise that there is a dysfunction happening within their body, within themselves. Whether they want to lose weight, they're experiencing headaches, or they're on medications that they don't want to be on anymore and they want to take control back of their life, we help them with food.
Food and fluids are the only things you can put inside you that will actually get everything functioning again. There's not a lot of exercises that you can put inside you to do that; exercise has other benefits.
It's really looking at anything out of balance, like after we eat, do we get bloated after we eat? Do we have to sit and have a rest after we've eaten because we have no energy? That's a dysfunction within the body. That's why we look at them individually. We find out the right foods for them, and then we teach them how to eat them to then live their life.
We only have a certain amount of time within our lives that we work. At the end of that time, we want to enjoy the rest of our life. We want to be able to travel. We want to be able to spend time with our grandkids. We want to be able to walk along the beach.
If you don't look after yourself through your working life, when you get to the end, there isn't any time because you're out of balance, you've got dysfunction, you've got some lifestyle disease. We're in too much pain that we don't get to enjoy it. I want everyone to enjoy the rest of their lives.
You are exactly right. We're working for most of our lives.
"If you put wealth before health, you'll be sure that when you retire, you'll be spending your wealth on your health."
I was only talking earlier about my mom and some of the problems that she's running into at the moment. She lives a reasonably healthy lifestyle, probably could have eaten less of some of the deep-fried food.
The thing is things can happen to anyone, but putting as many preventative measures at least doesn't accelerate whatever could happen to you.
Karen: And I think recognising those symptoms. When people come to me, we go through a certain number of questions, like do you ever experience headaches? They would say they get it most days but that's just normal. I would say that's not normal.
I think it's actually allowing yourself to realize that something is not right and something is out of balance. Sort it out now, and feel great again. I want everyone to feel amazing.
When I went through that transformation, it was amazing. Beforehand, I was having pizza once or twice a week. I was going out for Korean barbecue once or twice a week. I was eating heaps of food and not necessarily the best types of food. But once you find that balance, it'll change your life.
Contact Karen Pyke and feel amazing again!
We take our car to the mechanic every six months to get a service and a check. Check in and see where you're at. It would be worthwhile.
If people want to better understand their positioning, to be able to deal with things such as stress or understand more about the health of their body and wellbeing, is there any book or resource out there that you would suggest?
Karen: What I would do is I would do a Google search on metabolic health and what it really is and really understand the signs and symptoms of dysfunction within the metabolism.
Jump onto Inspire Wellness and learn more about Metabolic Balance®
It's about being aware of it. When I was overweight, I thought that the amount of energy that I had is what I was meant to have. I thought that the way that I was waking up every morning—feeling a bit groggy and wanting to click the snooze button—was how it should be. Being aware of it changed my life. I feel like Superman now, and before I felt like a sloth, but I wasn't aware that I was a sloth. I thought this is just how it was.
Karen: Before, I was actually a vegetarian for six years. I was eating incredibly well. I gained weight. I couldn't lose it. I was tired. I wasn't sleeping that great, had aches and pains. I was eating a great diet, but it wasn't the right diet for me. So it's not just eating bad foods; it's sometimes eating the wrong foods for you. A lot of my clients that come in would write down what they're eating and it's a great diet; it's just not the right diet for them.
That's definitely good advice. I've got friends that have tried doing what I'm doing and on Day 3, they're feeling like they're going to fall apart.
What is business freedom to you? What is business freedom to you?
Karen: There are probably a couple of ways of looking at it. Business freedom to me is having a business that doesn't feel like work. I work because I love doing what I do. Also, knowing that I can stop when I need to but having something where I'm giving back to people, like resources so people can still go to my website and find out how to stay healthy. It's also having a business where I can spend time with my family, with my friends. Putting those boundaries in place within a business so that I'm not the business all the time.
It's the vehicle to support them as opposed to the other way around.
If you enjoyed this and want to ask Karen, join our Facebook group or go to Inspire Wellness, leave us some feedback, send us some love at iTunes and stay healthy and stay good.
A Systematic Approach to Business With Ken Lundin
We all know that sales are important, and sometimes people look at that as if it's a yucky word, but we're always selling ourselves in one way or another, whether it's to find that beautiful lady, beautiful man, or whatever the situation is, we all need to know how to sell ourselves. We've got Ken Lundin from Ken Lundin and Associates to talk about the systematic approach to business.
We all know that sales are important, and sometimes people look at that as if it's a yucky word, but we're always selling ourselves in one way or another. Whether it's to find that beautiful lady, beautiful man, or whatever the situation is, we all need to know how to sell ourselves.
We've got Ken Lundin from Ken Lundin and Associates to tell us more about a systematic approach to business.
Learn more about the systematic approach to business at dorksdelivered.com.au
Key Takeaways: * Do your buyers know your value? What's the big pain that you actually solve? * Value development versus commoditization: what does "selling on value" mean? * How to increase your profitability ratio? Find out the real reason that your customers stay with you, market to that, and sell with that. * Why does sales training fail? Focus on what you can control and change the way you buy sales consulting.
How to Calculate Sales Growth Over 5 Years How do you calculate sales growth and particularly what should be the timeframe?
Ken: I think what I like to measure is the impact. Do you have an individual who's in a leadership position or a management position who's making an impact with what they're doing? We call that Alpha. We steal that from an investment term for investment management.
Ken: Alpha is literally like this. If your industry is growing at 10%, are you growing at above 10%? Because the difference between the industry is just organic growth, and what you're growing at is the rate that you're capturing more market share. From that perspective, you've got to put the right things in place.
Ken: Typically, when we talk about time frames, we ask what are we going to do now? What are we going to do in 3 months, 6 months, a year? And then what should we look at in 2 years. The process of putting sales in place, it's typically a year's process with iterations after that.
Obviously, there are lots of things that come into the sales process. If you've looked at people such as Jordan Belfort, it's all about tonality and looping.
Is it more about having a strategy around it rather than talking in a certain way like you’ve got a secret? What is the sales strategy? How would you comprise it?
Ken: Probably the number one mistake that companies make is they don't realise how the product is actually impacting the client or the customer because they think their product matters.
Ken: An example of the number one thing that you've got to figure out is what's the big pain that you actually solve? Let's say you're selling software or IT services. If you're trying to sell $50,000 software or a subscription and you're saying you can give a better report, no executive will wake up one day and think he should spend $50,000 to have a prettier report in a different font.
Ken: Executives will spend $50,000 at this moment if that means a way to better run my business with better data and make better decisions that will lead to revenue growth, expense decreasing, etc.
Changing fonts to Comic Sans doesn't win anyone's heart. It's definitely about solving people's problems, not looking at what they need, but instead looking at what they want and how you are going to better reflect that.
As business efficiency experts, we are all about making their business more efficient. The fulcrum that we use is technology, but that doesn't mean that that's the only one out there.
How to Write a Sales Strategy From a sales perspective, what are the key ingredients that you would need to leverage systemization and to be the right person to be able to sell your product in business?
Ken: You can look at it from a couple of perspectives. First, am I doing it right? What are my customer acquisition costs? How much does it require me to get a customer?
Ken: Second, what's the lifetime value of my customer? Do I actually have add-on processes?
Ken: Ultimately, what we're trying to figure out is how do we put in a process that's customer-centric, about solving their problem, and helping them realise the problems they don't even know they have. One of the biggest fallacies you're going to see right now is that the buyer is 67% of the way through the journey before they actually talk to a salesperson.
Ken: Here's the problem: if you believe that in business, you would decide that you no longer have to provide value or sell. It's like going to the doctor because your back hurts, and then the doctor asks you to walk to the door and tells you that you don't have a back problem but your knee is messed up. In business, the buyer usually comes in because they're trying to cure the symptom, instead of the actual problem.
Ken: That's why you have to build a sales process that helps the buyer understand how to analyse the problem and how to figure out what the latent pain is, not the pain they walked in with, but what's the real problem that they need to solve.
It sounds like there's a lot of psychology that goes into understanding someone else's problem, putting your head into the mind of your buyer. From our experience in business, we've seen that that is very difficult to do. Many years ago, we used to do web design and we had business owners tell us what looked good and what didn't. They're not their client, and they're not doing the voodoo that we do.
How to Help Your Buyer Realise Your Value How do you make sure that you jump into the right mindset? Is it best if you've got a few clients telling you why they are working with you? How do you make sure that you're finding those golden nuggets, the reason that the knee is broken as opposed to the back?
Ken: I think we're in such a hurry to get revenue for the wrong reasons. Early on in the cycle of our business called the launch phase, which is about product-market fit, some think they should be producing revenue in order to get feedback.
Ken: If you hurry through the product-market fit where you don't understand the customers' real problems or issues, when you install the process of sale, you can still sell some stuff but:
[bullet point] you're selling it at lower margins
[bullet point] you have a higher cost of acquisition
[bullet point] you're having more stress within the buying cycle
Ken: Ultimately, when you start to talk about being efficient about this, it's the ability to be okay with slowing down to speed up, slowing down to go big.
We were in business, booming and going crazy, back in 2010 when we had a bit of a recession. We grew too big too quickly. One of our key employees had a stroke, and the end result was the team not having enough capacity so we had to start shedding clients.
That would have been better if we had processes in place, which now we do, but we didn't at that stage because we grew too quickly to create the processes because we were too focused on the sale. That would be probably a good example of what not to do, and I've learnt the hard way and how to do it properly.
Ken: I think that's fair to say. I think the big issue there is sometimes it may not be slowing down as it may be focusing. Let's be efficient with our efforts and let's decide what are the most critical things that you need to address in order. We often talk about going left to right. We do the first thing and then the second thing. Businesses do the first thing, the 12th thing, the 6th thing, the 7th thing, and they forget the third and fourth.
What Does "Selling on Value" Mean If you're going to be making sure that you're selling in the right way, you're talking to people, and you're selling on the right things, price becomes a factor when it shouldn't, especially if you can monetise your products and you're selling exactly the same thing as your competitor.
Here we have Burger King and Hungry Jacks, which have exactly the same franchise model, same business, same logo, different words. Both nearly like a cookie-cutter copy of McDonald's. There's very little difference between the products that they're selling and they're both competing, to a degree, on price. What does selling on value mean? How do you make sure that you're selling on the values that your clients want?
Ken: For years, I have been looking for a way to really try to show people what value development means versus commoditization. You just gave me the leverage to do that. Thank you!
Ken: Hungry Jacks and Burger King are a perfect example of how you allow commoditization to happen and what your business may be doing wrong. Think about it: that's kind of a walk up and take an order—we all have buns, we all have meat, we have cheese on it, and we have a price.
Ken: Unfortunately, that's how the vast majority of businesses in the world present their products. Think about the difference of an experience, though. If you walk in and somebody is actually going to talk you through it.
Ken: That burger at Hungry Jacks or Burger King might even be better quality than the one that I'm getting down the street from the craft burger place, but they're asking me what I want, they're having a conversation with me, and I'm paying almost twice as much for that.
Ken: Same thing in B2B sales and B2B servicing. If you want to let the client walk themselves through a do-it-yourself process, you're going to have commoditization and price value problems all the time. On the other hand, if you're going to create a process where you actually get to have conversations and expose the things that they truly want and need in their business, you can increase your prices and your margins.
Is it ok to have a hybrid model? What we've done for the last few months is we've looked across all of our competitors and we've looked at what they're doing and what they're selling. We've commoditized exactly what they're doing and selling and then dropped the price by 10% to 15% even if we're not making any money on it. Even if we're losing a portion of money on it, we know that if they're coming to us for that, any of the other professional services that we offer, we've already put them in a position where they know, like and trust us.
If they've already looked at prices across the board and then they see these guys selling in markets $1 to $6 cheaper than the other guys, they will go with them.
We've called it "Would you like fries with that?" model because we know that they're going to be interested in the first thing but it's opening up the conversation to then sell them other things, the same as when you get a junk mail in the post. All the things that are on special generally have these add-ons, which is where they make money.
Is that hybrid approach okay or are there some sort of pitfalls that people should be aware of?
Ken: The answer is it depends. Look at the home printer market as an example. Right now, I think if I sign up for Office Depot, Staples or any kind of office loyalty card, they'll give me a printer for free, but they make money on the ink. Then they charge you $50 for the ink to go in the printer.
Ken: Yes, the model works as long as you know the lifetime value of your customers. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. If you do less than break even on the initial acquisition of the customer and then you don't know what your actual ability to sell is, you don't know how often they actually buy from you afterwards, or how often they add on services. It's a pretty risky play. It's like gambling and playing craps.
Ken: On the other hand, we have a customer that does mobile application development for Fortune 1000 companies. We know that they're going to sell seven figures once they get somebody in the door, so I kidded with them and I said, "Sell them supersize fries because once you get them in, they're buying seven figures."
Ken: But I found that it depends. The only way I'd say to do that is if your sales cycle on the front end is very short, doesn't require you to do a lot of selling, it's futures based and you're okay with that.
It’s very automated so you're not wasting people's time. You don't want to be spending time on things unless it's really bringing a lot of money.
When you've got this situation where you've got this hybrid environment, are there things you should be aware of? Obviously, you don't have to say yes to every customer. I think that's important.
We've all seen and dealt with low-lying fruits, bottom feeders, Karens, and people who are just looking at the dollarydoos and don't care about anything else. If they come through the door, is it okay to say no?
In that printer example, is it okay to not sell them a printer because you know they're never going to buy ink from you? Or should you still keep face and sell to everyone and stuff up your 80:20 ratio and have more of that 80% you don't care about?
Ken: There's no such thing as a good bad deal.
Go with your gut, and make sure that you have a look at what the potential is for that customer. Don't just sell them just for the sake of it. Don't give them supersize fries if you don't see them buying a burger.
How to Increase Profitability Ratio If you've already been selling a bit and your business is going well, hopefully you have your work-life balance in check, but you're looking to better things and the only way you can do that is by increasing staff or increasing the profitability ratio. If we focus on just how to increase the profitability ratio, how would you go about doing that?
Ken: When you talk about the profitability ratio, I think most people are priced too low to begin with because they don't spend enough time trying to figure out the big problem that's actually solved.
Ken: If you want to increase your profitability ratio, ask your customers who've been with you for any period of time the following questions:
[bullet point] Why did you originally decide to work with us?
[bullet point] Why did you decide to buy our products or services?
[bullet point] What would have you kicking and screaming if we took it away from you?
Ken: Most of the time, businesses miss the real reason that their buyers want to stay with them. Find that, market to that, and sell with that. That will move up your profitability ratio substantially.
It's a very easy way to do it, isn't it? If you find out what the carrot is and what the fire is, at least you know what's having them move toward you. That's something that you could then use to create sales, sales group content, no market towards the same customers. You'd only go to obviously the top 20 that you want to work with, your A-grade clients, to do that.
Why Sales Training Fails We've spoken a lot about different ways that you can better your sales process. In what ways have you seen that sales training fails? I've covered off a little bit about Jordan Belfort and his sales persuasion stuff. People sometimes get caught up in these 6-hour master classes where they think they're going to jump out of there and start the next Wall Street franchise. Why do sales training fail? What are the things that you've seen that people should just stop doing or alternatively, what should they start doing?
1. Focus on What You Cannot Control Ken: Focus on what you can actually control. Oftentimes, we think about our business and we think about if this would happen, if this could occur, and so on. Focus on what you can control.
Ken: And push the accountability of what your individual employees or salespeople can control. They can control the number of conversations that they have. They can control the number of first meetings they have.
2. Do Sales Training in Small Bites Ken: Second, from a sales training perspective, you actually have to understand that sales training has to be done in small bites. It's my belief that the world of sales training has failed business.
Ken: There's something called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, which says that you'll forget 77% of everything you learn in 7 days. Are you paying people thousands and thousands of dollars to come in for a two-day training to fix your people? That's the fire. Burn the cash and then spend it on carrots.
Ken: We use a process called Habit Stacking. I got the terminology from somebody else so attribution to whoever it was. We don't do one- or two-day deals. We do two hours of training in January, two hours in February, two hours in March, and so on.
Ken: In between those training sessions, we back it up with coaching to help get the behaviour to change. The number one thing that you need to know about making your team better is it has nothing to do with training. It has everything to do with behaviour change.
Ken: If you say “what can I do to get behaviour change out of my salespeople to make them more successful for our business?”, that will flip your mindset and change the way that you look at how you can actually increase your sales.
How to implement efficiency processes? A lot of people in the B2B sector can be in professional services or selling a product. Generally, they have the people that are on the coalface of business.
Ken: Everyone should care about sales, but everyone is not in sales.
If you have people that are on a support desk or answering the phone, how do you make sure that her behaviour has changed into something that aligns with the company's core beliefs to ultimately produce more revenue and have a longer period of client retention?
Ken: You have to have people who you have to have a culture that cares about the ultimate client experience, which has to be the thing. As long as that's true, everybody can pull the wagon the same way.
Change the Way You Buy Sales Consulting Make sure that you do have these sorts of things in place. I know that you've brought in efficiency processes and made sure that you've got a systematic approach to be able to have people in line and have people accountable. Tell me a little bit about how you implement that for businesses.
Ken: We've done something that's very different. One of the things we figured out a year ago was that people were buying sales training and coaching and they're trying to fix the symptom. It's like they're driving down the road and they have four flat tires and they were asking us to fix one. But if we change a tire, it's still a bumpy ride.
Ken: What we find is that our sales training and coaching strategy, as well as process work, need to be delivered on a monthly basis. That makes small changes and tweaks because that's the only way you get long-term behaviour change for your staff, your leadership, etc.
Ken: We look at the world very differently. We want to do small changes because we are interested in long-term behaviour change. We try to take a holistic approach.
I couldn't agree with you more on that one. As business efficiency experts in business, we look at micro changes to make macro differences. We look at shaving minutes of every employee to save hours for your whole team. Don't change things that aren't within your control. Use your resources and become resourceful with those resources.
It takes 21 days or longer to start a routine. I learned in hypnotherapy that you'd need to do something for at least 21 days or 21 times. After you get to the 65-day mark, it becomes autonomous with what you're doing. You can't do that in a 6-day sales training or 2-day blastoff workshop. It has to be something that's done over time with an accountability process where you're able to bring it back to your staff, and change the way that you're buying sales consulting. It's something that is identical to sales as a service (SaaS). How would you frame how you should buy sales?
Ken: I have an aversion to calling anything "a service" because it seems like the lazy man's way out. Everybody is like, "I want to reinvent my business. I'm dry-cleaning as a service." Suddenly everybody's got a SaaS business.
Ken: What we say is "You get everything we've got and it's a subscription plan for a flat fee." We're able to do what would cost about twice as much in total dollars for half as much in monthly spend because we can set it up, we can put our team on it instead of an individual consultant who bills hourly. You call it what you may, but we call it impactful.
It helps you plan your business because you're able to make sure your staff is fully utilised. That means that people aren't sitting in seats waiting for calls or waiting for people to call, which means you can pass those efficiencies onto your clients. It's a better system for everyone when you're able to have a predictive income and they have predictive spends and they know what their outcomes are going to be.
Ken: It allows us to slow down or go fast too because we do a 3-month entry and then it's 6-month renewals after that.
Conferences are a waste of time. You go to a conference and you think you've got to change your business, and then a week later, you've gone back into the same mundane routine that you're always in because it wasn't something that you had anyone helping you out and guiding you through.
[insert the "conference is a waste of time" video]
It's Okay to Be Wrong It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to fail. That's something that I learnt after leaving school, which I kick myself for doing so. I remember sitting in the advanced math class after I missed two weeks and I didn't know what the hell they were talking about but I was too embarrassed to put my hand up to learn. Then I was missing 3 weeks, 4 weeks, and 5 weeks; I was so behind I couldn't catch back up. If you have a question, ask the question. It's okay to be wrong. We all do it. That's something that everyone needs to be more aware of.
Dorks Delivered's Worst and Best Year In 2020, the COVID year, we had our worst year in 10 years. We've been in business for 14 years, and most people in the technology space are kicking goals. We stuffed up.
There was the G20 back in 2013 in Brisbane, and we had put in processes so that everyone could work from home securely. That was part of our onboarding process. When COVID hit and everyone had to work from home, we already had it in place, whereas other IT businesses were putting out projects and cashing in on it. We stuffed up there, but all of our clients were so appreciative of it. The moment their businesses bounced back is looking to be the best year that we've ever had in business.
Where are vendors' responsibilities? A lot of the time, there are products that we're selling or that we require in business to leverage whether that be for our business backup type of things or for your business, like Salesforce, CRM systems, and Xero. Where do you think the vendors' responsibility sits with ultimately selling their products? Do you think they should have any say in it? Do you think they need to step up their game, given that our business's success ultimately drives their success? Or do you think that it's just "you package it up however you want it to look?"
Ken: I think at the end of the day, they have a responsibility to represent their product and train the people who sell their product depending on the kind of the lift. As an example, if they are not helping you at all, whatever that product is or the channel partner is, then they should be paying you a lot more than everybody else.
Ken: On the other hand, if they're providing you a substantial amount of backup, resources and other things, then maybe that's not the case because they're actually investing in your success. I think when I look at our channel partnerships, I'll take the least amount of money to be a part of the partnerships that I'm most fond of.
Because you believe in the product and the positioning, and they've probably got enough backing to be out to support you.
Ken: Absolutely, because that's the idea of outsourcing to gain efficiency and leverage.
Recommended Book: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford If there was a book that would help our listeners to be better at sales, what would that be?
Ken: Don't read any sales books. Here's the problem. When people read sales books, everything they read about sales was written 30 years ago or earlier.
Ken: The sales books that we read all used very common concepts using different languages. If you're not educated in the actual process of sales and how to sell, you read these sales books and you think they're saying different things. You end up in a zig-zagging pattern of trying to implement what you read in the latest book, and you change it even though all it should have done was reinforce what you've already done.
Ken: Unless you have the ability to group things in context, I don't think reading sales books is a very good way to actually figure out how to do sales because it confuses most people.
Ken: I'll tell you a cool book I read recently, which helps you think about how to be creative and figure some stuff out, gives you some positioning. And that's called Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. She's based in Canada, and she's the go-to for small businesses.
You're right, there are a lot of books that talk about how to do, not what to do, and not things that are actually actionable. When it does boil down to it, most of the time it's just about taking the first step and that's most of the time the hardest.
Ken: "Done is better than perfect."
I love that because as an engineer, one of the biggest problems that I find is I do 95% planning and 5% execution. Have you heard of the "ready, fire, aim" concept? I'm getting better at this, but I find it very difficult.
There are different ways that you can help businesses. Tell us more about it.
Ken: We have a 3-month start and then a 6-month renewal. Our average client stays with us for probably a year and a half. They can come in and just see if we actually know what we're saying for the first three months and then at the end of the first three months, we will automatically renew for six months to continue the engagement.
Jump onto Ken Lundin and Associates! The podcast is called Business Built Freedom. It's different for everyone. What is the vehicle of business or what is business built freedom to you?
Ken: Choices. Options. People say, I want to make money, I want to make a million, I want to do this or that. Business freedom is about creating options because there’s nothing worse in life than not having options. Just look at last year with COVID when most of our options were taken away globally.
It definitely helped people think laterally and out of the books. I like that: choices and options. A lot of the time, if you're working for someone else, you're doing it by whatever the man has said. You don't necessarily have as many choices and options.
Ken: I think at the end of the day, the idea of being efficient has to transcend every piece of your business because that's how you actually will squeeze the most value out of it. Whether you're running a lifestyle business or an enterprise business, you have to ask: are we being efficient? When you say yes or no, you have to know how you actually measured it. Whether it's sales operations or your IT systems, understand how to get the measurement to answer the question the right way instead of just answering it with your gut.
If you have any feedback, comments or love to give, please jump across to iTunes. Stay good. Stay healthy out there.
How to Find Ideal Clients With Paul Kennedy
We all have clients. Sometimes we have great ones, and we call them our ideal clients. Other times we have some of the bottom-of-the-barrel, less-than-ideal clients. It might be a bit noisy or a bit squeaky, and frustratingly, the squeaky wheel gets the grease a lot of the time.
We've got Paul Kennedy from PGV Consulting, and we'll talk about how to find ideal clients and remove the terrible ones.
Get more tips on how to find ideal clients at dorksdelivered.com.au
How Do You Identify An Ideal Client
How do you identify a bad client?
Start With Your Why
Paul: I'd like to start with the “Why” and focus on what we have previously discussed about Simon Sinek. I love what Simon Sinek is about, and most of your listeners will be familiar with him.
Paul: If you find out your “Why”, your purpose, why you're doing what you're doing, it could be a mixture of both business aspirations and personal ones. Particularly if you're self-employed, it's good to blend the two because your personal life and your business life have to live in harmony with each other.
Paul: If you focus on your “Why”, it gives you your passion as to why you're really doing this. For instance, I'm an accountant by qualification. That doesn't necessarily mean that I actually really want to do accounting, especially a few years down the track. My “Why” was not to be an accountant, and that kind of led me to where I am.
Paul: Working out your “Why” makes the other questions—your “What”, “How”, “Where”, and “When” so much easier. It's like picking up the correct piece of the jigsaw first. Once you've done that, the rest of it follows much more easily.
Paul: Most of us meet and start off by asking, "What are you doing?" In my case, I'd perhaps start telling you about accounting, but it's not where I really want to spend my time and perhaps not where other people want to spend theirs.
Nirvana: Ideal Clients Seek You Out
Paul: I've got a few beliefs. One of them is Nirvana. It is when you get your business to the point where your ideal clients are actually seeking you out.
Paul: Once you've reached Nirvana, it means you're in a very privileged position. If somebody is looking for somebody in your field and they know what you can do and what you've done for others, they will come to you and it won't be all about price. It will actually be because they want Josh Lewis to look after their business, their IT. You change the relationship, and it becomes one where they actually want you. It's not an argument or discussion over price.
Have a Business Plan
Paul: I am also a great believer in a business plan. I think it's very unwise to start a business unless you have a plan. It doesn't mean you have to be fixated on it, but it gives you some sort of general direction to where you want your business and career to go. Once you've started on that journey, that will lead you to who your ideal clients are and what makes them ideal.
How Do You Identify a Bad Client?
Who is Your Ideal Client?
Paul: Identify the criteria and the things that make up your ideal client—the people who value, respect, and actually act on your advice.
Paul: A non-ideal client would be someone who neither respects, values, nor acts on your advice. They might still be paying you, but from your perspective, it would be very frustrating to give them your best advice but they do not actually act on it.
Think About Your Criteria
Paul: I encourage people to think through what are the criteria of your ideal clients. It is actually quite helpful to spend a bit of time identifying the traits of non-ideal clients.
Paul: I often encourage people to think of a situation they might have had where they won two clients, they're driving home, and they're pretty happy and excited. They're particularly excited about winning Client A. They're a bit lukewarm and cool about having Client B.
Paul: I encourage people to think through what were the traits of Client A that got you excited, and what were the traits of Client B that made you feel a bit cool about it (I've won them, but I'm not sure this is going to go the way I hope it does)? The more you can drill down on that, the more it will help you identify the clients you want and those you don't want.
Should You Keep a Non-Ideal Client?
If you've just started in business, the expenses are being covered, and there's food on the table, is it okay to stick with bad clients if removing them will mean that you're no longer financially healthy?
Paul: We obviously need to be and want to be financially healthy. It perhaps comes down to timing as to how long you might bite your tongue and continue working with somebody who's not an ideal client.
How do you deal with a non-ideal client?
- Think About Increasing the Price
Paul: All of us in business invariably have some clients that we perhaps don't want. You can have a very direct conversation and say, 'Look, perhaps I'm not the best person for you.' We could do it by increasing your price to be unattractive to people who are not ideal clients.
That's something that we've learnt, so we changed around our business model from charging per hour to charging a flat rate per month.
In 2009, we're charging $55 or $85 an hour. In 2010, we changed the business model around to per month. One of our clients didn't want to pay per month. I told them that with the number of hours they're doing with us, they're going to be saving money in three months on average.
But they were not interested, so I went from $85 to $110 to $150 to $200 an hour before they agreed to go per month. We were making heaps less money, but they were fitting in with the model and how we wanted our business to work. And they were happier with that because then it was back to less than what they were originally paying, so it worked out for everyone.
Paul: If you really don't believe that this is the sort of business you want to be working with a particular client, increasing your price so that you're unattractive is one way of doing it.
- Be Upfront
Paul: It's not a bad idea to be even a bit more upfront and simply say, 'I don't think I'm the right person for you.'
You were talking about different ways to terminate a contract with a client. We've done this before as well. We've noticed that the businesses that we're working with are getting bigger and bigger. One of them was going in a different direction and was more interested in running a home network for the 40 employees as opposed to a business network. We said that's not really what we do and we're more than happy to put you in contact with someone that works with businesses that have the same ethos. We found that was a professional way to break into that closing doors should situations change. Is there any way you shouldn't terminate a contract?
Paul: I do it as pleasantly as possible. I think that we need to be honest, not everybody is going to work with everybody. Otherwise, you'd end up marrying everybody.
Paul: You can't be everything to everybody. You shouldn't try to be. If you do, you'd probably come to grief and a bit unstuck.
- Be Innovative
Paul: I have a client with whom I've done quite a bit of work over the years. My role was to identify people that I knew that represented his or his company's ideal client criteria and to introduce the two. They would host a high-quality event, and I would invite these people along and learn a bit about each other. One thing would lead to another and invariably business.
Paul: In doing so, I was introducing my client to his prospective client, who loved what my client did, but because they were spread across Australia, it was just going to be prohibitive.
Paul: After I've done my initial introduction, my client and the prospective client sat down and talked it through. The latter said that they love what my client does—bringing our senior management together for a day and a half once a month for 10 months—but the cost is much more than they are prepared to pay and bringing together the senior management from across Australia once a month is really overwhelming for us.
Paul: This happened 5 years ago, so I was a bit surprised that my client hadn't thought of doing it by Zoom. Five years later, they are still doing business. The client is delighted. They've achieved it at a much lower rate, and they've managed to do it without disrupting their business every month when they bring a group of senior executives together.
Paul: It's often not what you do. With my client, all they really changed was how they did it. I can't really take the credit, but my client said that I have changed the criteria of their ideal client. They see themselves delivering what they do—business coaching—to a much larger audience than what they previously have perceived. I'm a great believer in knowing who your ideal clients are, who you would like them to be, and who they could be.
- Look At the Good Side of Things
Paul: I think with COVID-19 essentially everybody has recognised that we can do so much. What we were previously doing physically at one location we can actually do via Zoom. COVID-19 has actually accelerated much of the change that was going on.
In business, being able to do things through Zoom is awesome. It's not about the lack of resources; it's more about being resourceful with what you've got. That's a big thing that we bring to businesses. People don't want to use the XYZ tool and aren't ready for that. Most of the time, when you push into a corner like what COVID-19 did for a lot of businesses, you find out that these tools aren't that bad. They're not the enemy, and they're going to help you out. They're going to take you off the road, and you're going to be significantly more utilised throughout the day.
Some people drive. I have a friend that drives an hour and 40 minutes to work every morning, five days a week. It's ridiculous. When his business went into COVID lockdown, he found that he had more time for his family. He spent an extra 40 minutes with his family in the morning and an extra 40 minutes in the afternoon, and they were happy but he was still spending an extra 2 hours a day at work. It's definitely a blessing in disguise.
Paul: Personally, I'm not particularly good around the technology side, but you obviously have taken to it like a duck to water. I think that's a wonderful gift.
Paul: Technology is your friend, and I'm learning that myself and enjoying working with people who have that outlook and have that ability, which I very much respect.
It should sit there like electricity is your friend. We don't need to know how it works. We don't need to know if it's AC or DC coming through on high voltage lines. It just matters that we need to flip the switch and it works, and that should be what all business owners want.
Ensure Your Ideal Clients Know Who to Call (You)
Paul: If you turn the switch on and it doesn't work, even though you might not know how it works, you at least know who to call.
Henry Ford said that he doesn't have to know everything. He just has to know who to contact to make sure that he can achieve everything.
Paul: That's very much what I'm about. I believe in the business plan and in knowing your ideal client and who they are.
Make Your Ideal Clients Remember You
Paul: What I do is I work with my client in identifying a number of activities. They could be one-on-one introductions, giving presentations, writing articles, whatever's right for my client so that we are constantly getting them in front of their ideal clients.
Paul: I think some people go way over the top. They're excellent at what they do, but I think they significantly overcommunicate to the point where their target market is annoyed and say, 'If I get another email from Paul: Kennedy, I'll scream.' You don't want to do that.
Paul: On the other hand, you don't want to go to the other extreme where your target market says, 'I've got an email from this guy Paul: Kennedy, and I don't think I even know him.' You've got to be just right. It'll be different for every business, but you have to make sure that when your ideal client has a need, you are the one they think of and they know how to contact you.
Build a Business Development and Marketing Calendar
Paul: Identify those five to eight activities and then build a marketing and business development calendar that bullet points down which activities you are going to do each month. They are all different because there is no single silver bullet. I don't believe you could do it all via LinkedIn or do it all via one-on-one introduction. You need to be doing a variety of activities that are getting you in front of these ideal clients and you need to do it consistently, not just once.
Paul: Get yourself to the point where you've built your brand amongst your target markets or your ideal clients so that when the time is right for them, not when the time is right for you, they keep thinking, 'I need to go and talk to Josh at Dorks Delivered.'
I agree. We call it the digital fridge magnet. When you look at the plumber or the nice pizza place around the corner, if you don't have that on the fridge and you forget, a lot of the time you end up going somewhere else. You want to be in front of them enough but you're not annoying them and pestering them.
Paul: Absolutely. I've got an excellent database of people I know and who know me. Some of the people are so good at their social media, but personally, I think they do too much of it to the point where I have it set up so that it's automatically put into a subfolder in their name because I respect what they do, but I physically cannot consume everything that they're churning out. It could be one video a day and I just physically don't have that time.
Paul: I think so much of that good content that they're sending out goes to waste. In my case, it goes automatically into the subfolders. Sometimes I get to look at it, most of the time not. These people are so good at what they do, but it's actually going to waste.
Paul: On the other hand, you have the extreme of people who don't communicate at all. I think finding that right balance somewhere in the middle so that you're there enough, but not to the point where you are an annoyance, is the way to go.
How Do You Avoid Losing a Prospective Client?
Do you think you can get too close to an ideal client and break the relationship? Do you think you can do things that are too friendly and they think that's weird? What situations could get you too close? What are the Don'ts to make sure that you don't destroy a relationship with an ideal client?
Remain Professional at All Times
Paul: I do think you must at all times remain professional. You don't want to get to the point where the relationship has become casual and taken for granted. If there is an issue, either party might get reluctant to raise it because of the closeness so it festers away. Equally, if you do get too close or your relationship has become too entrenched with that one individual in the company, what happens if that person moves on and he's no longer there?
Paul: It's a fine line. On one hand, you obviously want the relationship to be a healthy one, a productive one that works cooperatively for all parties. It's important to make sure that it always remains professional, but you don't take each other for granted and that you deliver what you say you are going to deliver. Don't get to the point where you're essentially living in each other's pockets. I think there is a dividing line and it's important to keep that.
I know one time that I felt a bit uncomfortable. We don't work with this company anymore. We were quite close to them, and they would have parties and I'd bring along a keg of beer to celebrate.
There was this one Christmas party in particular. I was there with a keg of beer and then a few hours went by, they shut the gates. I thought that's a bit weird, and then a few of the key decision-makers in the business started smoking a joint. They offered me to join them, but I'm not that guy. I said no judgement, but I obviously did. They felt comfortable enough to do that in front of me, but I did not feel comfortable being around that.
Paul: I think that's an example of where getting too close can cause a bit of grief and can actually ruin the relationship.
Planning, Growth, and Value
Tell us about PGV Consulting and how that works with businesses that are listening and how they can leverage your services to be able to help them find ideal clients.
Paul: I'm an accountant by qualification, but I don't do any accounting. I just wasn't very good. In the last 25 years, I've been really about business planning, business development, connections, and introductions.
Paul: PGV stands for planning, growth, and value.
Planning
Paul: I like to begin with the business plan. Otherwise, it's a bit like going and trying to put a house on a roof before you've put the foundations down. I see the business plan as being the foundation, and it's important that you do that. As part of that process, you go through all the normal things like mission, vision, strengths, SWOT analysis and so on, but I really like to drill down on ideal clients and equally non-ideal clients.
Growth
Paul: If you've reached Nirvana, your ideal clients seek you out, sadly, non-ideal clients will also seek you out. When that happens, it's always good to know your competitors. Refer your non-ideal clients to them. Anything that can slow a competitor down is possibly a good thing.
Paul: Work out what activities are going to engage you with those ideal clients on a consistent and ongoing basis so that they get to know you and particularly what you can do for them.
Paul: People can engage my time by booking me for a certain number of hours per month where I work with them initially on the plan, if they don't have one, and then actually implementing the plan and particularly getting them in front of their ideal clients: people I know and who know me.
Value
Paul: I have a wonderful database that's very up to date and very comprehensive. I go through that when I'm working with a client in my database to see who I know that meets my client's ideal client criteria. And then we set about a series of activities, such as one-on-one introductions and presentations, so that one gets to learn the story of the other and see if they can do business together.
I think that's very valuable to any business. I guess a lot of people out there claim to do similar things, but I think what's big and promising is you've got a client base where people can hit the ground running. You know these people, and being able to find the right person that fits your business means that it can be a few hours that you're spending with them and they might be coming out on the other side with maybe not a client, but at least an introduction to an ideal client.
Paul: A person or an organisation might not necessarily be an ideal client themselves, but they may know your ideal client and be able to introduce you or where you work in partnership, alliances, etc. I'm also a great believer in that so long as it works for all the parties involved. You don't really want to be doing work with people who are frustrating, not ideal, can't pay your bill, don't actually act on your advice.
Paul: Do anything you can do to avoid that so that you're always working in your circle of people who do actually value what you're about and actually act on it and are able and willing to pay for your services.
'How to Find the Ideal Clients’ by Paul Kennedy
Paul: I wrote an article some time ago called 'How to Find the Ideal Clients.' If it's of interest to any of your listeners, I'm very happy for them to have a copy. It was published in Spark Magazine about 4 years ago. [insert link to article]
Paul: Also, with the new financial year, I think it's the perfect time to sit down and revisit your business plan if you have one or build one if you don't. Identify who your ideal clients are, work out what those actions and activities are going to be that you will progressively unfold over the next 12 to 18 months, and consistently deliver it and get your story in front of those people you want to have as your clients. I'm sure you'll find that your business grows the way you want it to.
I love going back to the business plans that I've done in the past, and I can look through some of the stupid ideas I had and some of the amazing things that I've been able to accomplish to sort of put things into perspective. Sometimes we are too busy running the rat race to realise how far we've run.
Recommended Book: Start With Why by Simon Sinek
Paul: I think that really takes you back to where we began: Start with “Why”. As you go home every night, you're pretty excited and pleased about it because you've actually helped the sort of people you want to be doing business with. You can see the difference that you're bringing about in their business, and that's the motivation to get up the following day and go back and do it again.
You took the words out of my mouth. I was about to ask about your favourite book, but I think you've answered that question perfectly. Start With Why [italicize] is definitely up there if it's not your favourite.
Start with your “Why”. The big thing for me is to try to remove your business from it. That's what I did. Look at why you do what you do outside of the business. What is the driving motivators for you? What would you do for free? If you were retired, where would you stand and how would your day look? If your business fits into that, awesome. If it doesn't, make it fit into that.
What is Freedom to You?
What is business built freedom to you? What would you say is the vehicle of business and how does that bring freedom to you?
Paul: It's spending your time doing what you want to do, enjoying it and seeing the rewards. That kind of almost defines your “Why” for each of us, doesn't it? It will be different for everybody, but business freedom is getting your business to the point where you want it to be and where your ideal clients are actually coming to you and that you can see that you've created that.
Paul: I can see that you're getting your business to that point where the sort of people you want are approaching you. And at the end of each day, you've built your business so that it's delivering the outcome that you want.
If you have any feedback or any questions, feel free to jump across iTunes. Leave us some love, give us some feedback. Paul will be in our Facebook group where you can ask different questions. Stay good and stay healthy.
Hiring Business Lawyers With Katie Richards
Have you ever put yourself in a position where you're thinking, should I do that? Should I not do that? It might not even be something that you've done legally wrong; it might just be a situation where you're having a separation or whatnot, but a lot of the time, you can find yourself in hot water if you have the right relationship set up.
Today, we've got Katie Richards from Law on Earth, and she's going to be talking to us about why and when you should hire a business lawyer. What is the right time in business to do that? When should you set up these relationships? She'll shed some light and remove some fear from everything legal in business.
Learn more about hiring a business lawyer at dorksdelivered.com.au
Does every small business need a lawyer?
Katie: I think it depends on what phase of the business they're going through at the time. I would always suggest that before someone gets into business, have a chat with a lawyer first so they understand what legal needs they're going to have coming up over the life of the business.
Katie: You get a bit of a strategy in place because it's not just your business planning that's important. You have to understand what legal risks happen at the beginning, while you're running the company, and then also on exit so you can be ready for them and then you'll be less likely to need lawyers along the way if you already know what to watch out for.
A lot of the time, businesses start because you're really passionate about the work that you do. It could be that you're a labourer, an accountant, etc. A lot of the time, you start in the trenches doing that sort of work and you jump in because you're good at what you do. That can obviously cause some conflict if you're doing exactly the same thing as when you had an employer.
When should you hire a business lawyer?
Are you better off speaking to someone to make sure you're doing things right? Or is it just when you've started turning over some dollars? When should one really start looking towards consulting a business lawyer?
Solicitor Before Accountant
Katie: I think it's actually before that. It's right at the beginning when you actually have a chat with an accountant because you need to work out what kind of structure you should be setting up before you actually go and set the business up. That's important because the structure comes down to how much risk is going to be on you personally.
How can a business lawyer help you?
Katie: If you're set up as a sole trader, you could have issues such as something going terribly wrong in your business, especially if it's your first business. If you don't really understand how businesses operate, you could have your house on the line. You could lose your car, all of your assets, and all of your savings because you are personally liable as a sole trader, whereas generally, people will wait for a while before they set up a company down the track.
Katie: There also could be taxation issues if you do that. If you've got some potential contracts already set up, you're probably better off going down the company path from the start. You know that the revenue amount is likely to be a lot higher. The right time to talk to someone about that is actually before you start trading and then you've got a bit of a road map and you understand why.
Video Sessions With Business Lawyers in Brisbane
Katie: At Law on Earth, we've actually done a lot of free guides around this so that people can just go and have a look at them, get an understanding around what all the different options are in terms of the structures, think about what would actually suit their lifestyle not only now, but also in the future.
Katie: Think three, four, or five years ahead because if you set up as a sole trader now, you're going to be paying tax through the roof once you get over a certain financial amount. No one in their right mind is going to want to set up a business if it's not generating at least a decent amount of money that exceeds what you were doing as an employee, unless you're only doing it as a hobby or for some kind of lifestyle benefit, because there is a lot of pain that comes with setting up and running businesses.
Katie: You must have a good reason why you want to put yourself through that. Otherwise, sometimes it actually is easier just to remain an employee, doing what you love.
I couldn't agree more. Some employees think that their employers are bringing in double or triple of what they earn, and then they wonder about jumping out on their own without thinking about any of the nitty-gritty and the mechanics that go into the infrastructure that supports the business. You're right: you want to be able to earn a little bit more money or just be a side hustle or a lifestyle choice. That obviously changes the structure.
If you're going to start a business, first, make sure that you're passionate about doing whatever you're going to be doing because you're going to be doing a lot of it. Second, make sure you're able to do that with enough time to be able to do all the other admin stuff that comes with it. Don't think you'll get to do 80-hour weeks that are going to be billable to clients. On top of that, probably talk to a solicitor before you talk to an accountant.
Katie: It really comes down to that risk piece. What we tend to find in the last couple of days through the platform at Law on Earth is people who are passionate about a social cause want to set up a business around it. They're trying to work out whether to set up a charity, a social enterprise, for-profit or not for profit. It all comes down to how far you're prepared to take that social cause.
Katie: There's a lot to think about. At that stage, you also have to think about not just the business, but what about the people around you? If you have a family, what are you prepared to put them through when you're setting up this business? Are you even going to bring them in down the track? If that's the case, then you're going to be employing people within the business. Again, it's probably better to do that for a company.
Katie: The conversation around trusts will come up as well. You might have some kids at home and your wife or husband may not be working. You might want to get money by the business to them in the most cost-effective way.
How much does a business attorney cost?
Katie: You'd have an initial chat with your accountant and your lawyer around those ideas. People are using just like a 20-minute advice session on our platform just to ask those kinds of questions. It's only going to cost them $150 to answer all of those questions before they even think through the next part of their strategy. It's not prohibitive.
That's pretty much nothing in the scheme of things. That is going to protect you because different opportunities or things can come up.
There are always bumps along the road of business, and you can have situations where you're being sued depending on the type of work that you're doing or having partnerships that go south. Even if you are set up as a sole trader, for instance, and you invest a little bit too much time in the business and the business is going really well.
This sounds terrible, but if you look at Melinda Gates, she is one of the best investors in the world. You need to be very careful. If a break-up does happen in your personal life, that can affect your business life and ongoing time. When you do engage, you spend $150, you get a little bit more visibility and insights and confidence in what you'd be doing with your business.
How often should you talk to a business lawyer?
What are normally the touchpoints with small business lawyers? Is it something that you engage with clients every three months, or is it something that you set up the relationship and then when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, you then start talking or what happens?
Katie: I think it depends on the person who's setting up the business and what their circumstances are. The way that I deal with clients is that I'll have that initial chat with them. I'll give them a list and priorities as to what they should do and how soon they should get them done and at what stage of the business they'll think about activating the next step.
Katie: That way, it gives them the tools that they need to actually go away and be in control of what they're doing. We have stuff in the learning centre that will help them do that. As they reach those little milestones in their business, they know what to do and what to watch out for. That just makes it a lot easier. It takes a lot of the anxiety away from the business.
Katie: A lot of my clients will actually Zoom me once a month and just ask me and do another 20-minute session and say what they've done and ask me to have a look over. They can actually watch me read into contracts that they've prepared themselves, just keeping them out of any risk so that they don't have to lie awake at night because they know they've already covered their bombs and then they can take that next step a little bit more confidently.
Katie: There may be someone who's just really slow to get a bit of traction. If that's the case, they don't have to push themselves ahead at any rate to actually go and get more legal advice. It's only as they need it. But as they grow, you'll tend to find the need will pop up more often.
Katie: It really comes down to the stage of growth and how risk-averse that business owner is. There are some people that will do all these documents, go forth and conquer—and they will just call me when they're in trouble.
Katie: No matter how good of a business owner you are, things just pop up in business and you can't avoid it. If you can at least recognise when an issue is coming up, jump on it straight away and get some advice on what you should do next. You can probably go forward and just sell back and look after yourself potentially.
Katie: You just need to find out what the laws are around it and get a bit of a commercial understanding of what you can do and what repercussions there are for each of those different options—what are the repercussions now and what we're going to be the repercussions, say, two or three years time. If you do take this path, how is that going to impact the relationship you have with all the business owners? How will that affect me on a reputation level?
Be Proactive, Not Reactive
You brought up a couple of really good points. Do you find that business owners who are looking for business lawyers particularly in Brisbane are more proactive or reactive when it comes to these situations?
Katie: I think they have been quite reactive for a long time, and I believe they're starting to get a bit more proactive. Maybe that's just the ones that I deal with because we've made it a bit more accessible for them to get little snippets of advice and not cost them a billion dollars for that.
Katie: It's easier to be proactive. Like going to the doctor, you don't go, 'I'm not sure if I want to go to the doctor even though I'm sick because it is going to cost me a fortune.' You just go. That's what we've tried to recreate: an ability for people to just grab it as and when they need it so they can be proactive.
Katie: But I think a lot of people in the past have been really reactive. The problem is that by the time I actually engage someone to help them with it, the problem is 10 times bigger and you actually could have fixed it for one-tenth of the cost had they gone to you at the very beginning of it before they sort of got into too much of a deep hole.
The old adage is 'Save a nickel, spend a dime.' Once you've gone too far, you kind of have to do what you have to do and that can be a big problem for you.
There's a business that we were talking with a month and a half ago. He decided to set up his own business and he thought it is going to be great because he loves doing what he does. His boss was fine with him doing that. The clients that his boss had went to him because they enjoyed working with him more, and that caused big problems.
His previous boss sued him, and then he engaged some legal advice. He had to change a whole bunch of stuff around to get everyone happy and ended up having to sell his business to his old boss to keep his boss happy.
You've already worked for a whole bunch of stuff and then you've got all this stuff that's taxing on your mind and soul. It's not going to help you very well mentally to be having to do that while already going through the mechanics of setting up a business.
Katie: That's actually one of the first things we chat about when we're having that initial strategy session. When talking about the structuring, the first thing I say to them is, 'What did you do before you came up with this business idea?' And then I add, 'Who did you work for? Show me your employment agreement.' Some would say, 'No, it's okay, we all parted on happy terms.'
Katie: Stealing their IP and setting up a business in competition with them, they're just not going to be happy. Some employers will pursue it, and some won't. Some will have this ridiculous restraint of trade clause in there, and it'll be for like five years. The court is not going to hold that up, but you have to get advice around it to find out whether it's a reasonable restraint or not and whether it's worth the punt.
Correct. He's still in business now but trading underneath a different entity on advice that he got from his lawyer. That would have been easy just to get it at the start, wouldn't it? I think it's a total cost of $150,000.
Katie: I know someone else that's had a very similar situation. They're doing really well now, but it was really crushing. You just don't want to be in that situation.
Not at all. It's not going to make you feel very good mentally. And that changes your whole game with how you're dealing with clients and giving you that confidence to build up your business.
How do you legally protect yourself from risks in business?
Do the legal requirements for business and milestones in business vary depending on the business vertical? For instance, hairdressers are dealing with scissors and if they have a slip, someone could get hurt. I'm running an IT business and if something goes wrong, their infrastructure could be down, costing them tens of thousands of dollars an hour or more depending on the business.
How do you protect yourself against things like that? Is that through agreements that you set up with your clients?
- Set Up a Business Plan
Katie: I think what people really need to be doing at the very beginning is setting up a business plan. Most people put it in a drawer and they don't have a look at it again. That's not useful. You need to actually write some kind of document about all the things that could go wrong in this business and then write out your mitigation. If this happens, what would I do next and then next and then next so that you don't have to worry about those kinds of risks so much because you've thought about it.
- Have a Business Continuity Plan
Katie: Your next step is to look at each of those risks and think about what you can insure and what you can minimise any risk for. How likely is it to happen? If it does happen, like the electricity goes out and you can't run your business, can we jump to another premises so we can keep trading? If not, do we need business continuity insurance in place? Pulling all those ideas together is what we call a business continuity plan.
Katie: Continuity is essentially continuing. What kind of plans do we need to put in place so no matter what comes up, we've actually got a Plan B that we can jump to straightaway. How do I train my staff to also know what the Plan B is at any point in time?
Katie: If you're on holiday in Hawaii and all of a sudden something goes wrong in the business, you need to know that someone can grab out the continuity plan and have a look at what you would have done if you were here.
Katie: Otherwise, if you end up building a business where you're stuck in it and no one else can run it for you, you're going to end up basically buying yourself a job but that's quite high risk. And you don't want to go through the pain of building a business and get to make this great revenue to have it all ripped away from you all of a sudden.
Continuity plans are very, very strong to my heart. In the IT space, things are moving into the cloud, and you have to be more and more creative to allow for people's infrastructure to stay up and running when it's not necessarily available in your hands.
There's a gun that's pointing at us. If something goes wrong with the client, we have to see how we can make sure to mitigate this risk if Office 365 goes down or if you have a problem with G-Suite applications. We've worked out things here but it's surprising to us and this is why I was asking before about the proactive versus reactive.
We talk to business owners and say let's do this but a lot of the time they want to wait until it happens. Then it happens and they're like, 'We need to be up and running now. We can't get the contract out.'
Katie: When you're dealing with big clients and if you can show them that if this happens this is what we do, but if that happens that's is what we do, it actually puts you way ahead in their eyes because they know that you have a much better ability to deliver on work, especially when it comes to tender processes.
Katie: We've actually gone down the path with Law on Earth to do ISO certification. Even though we don't necessarily need to do that, I want to make sure that no matter what happens, we can be reliable and consistent so that people can keep using us. That was a big ask to actually get someone to come in and actually do all that.
- Have a Risk Mitigation Strategy
Katie: Risks are really important. If you don't watch the risks in your business, you won't have a business.
That can destroy lives and families. That's what it's all about: risk mitigation.
Does risk mitigation negate the need for more insurance?
You're saying about possibly needing to get different types of insurances. Does it complement or mitigate the risk?
Katie: I take it one step further with my businesses. I've got Virtual Legal, my law firm, and then Law on Earth, the software platform.
- List Down at All of the Risks
Katie: What I've done is I looked at all the risks and wrote up a disaster recovery plan as well as a business continuity plan. And then I took that to the insurer and put them on notice on what I've asked them to insure for so there can't be any grey areas as to what risks they had to cover. It actually makes them accountable.
- Reduce the Risk, Reduce the Insurance Premium
Katie: Second, I said, 'I've done all this risk mitigation. I want you to give me a discount on insurance because I've done half of your job for you.' That's actually helpful too because you can get your insurance premiums reduced because I know exactly what risks need to be covered.
Katie: When it comes to things like negotiating a contract with someone else, sometimes what people do is they contract out of provisions. If I say, 'We don't want this liability clause in there.' and the business owner is like, 'Oh, yeah, no worries.' because they want the big contract. The problem is if you actually contract out of something that the insurance company then can't use to help you fight that claim, then your insurance sometimes might payout. You must have a think about those kinds of things.
Insurance Can Be a Double-Edged Sword
Katie: Insurance can be a double-edged sword. If you cut corners, you could end up not getting insurance paid out. I think it's a really good way of knowing the risks, making sure that you've covered up on what you can and that your systems actually back up what you say they're doing. It makes your business more valuable.
When you're more repeatable with what you're doing, at least you know what your risks are. At Dorks Delivered, we call our agreements with clients business continuity agreements because we want their business to have uptime. We want IT and technology in their business to be like a utility.
If we tell a client that this is what they need to have in place and they say they're not interested, we put in denial of service agreements. We have them sign off on something saying, 'We're aware that this risk is what we're taking on ourselves,' and they can't come back to us and say this doesn't work.
Should you use legal documents or templates available online?
There are different documents that you can find online, such as NDAs and employee agreements. Are they worth the digital paper that they're written on? Does your mileage vary if you're just going to get a boilerplate document off the Internet that hasn't been checked over by business lawyers in Brisbane?
Katie: It's funny you bring this up because this is my biggest pain point. This is literally the entire reason I set this platform up about three years ago. The problem with templates is that people don't know what's in them. When you actually sign a template or some kind of contract without understanding what's actually in it.
Katie: There is no standard contract. It just doesn't exist. You can actually contract out of protective rights you would have had under the law if you had no agreement in place at all. You can actually contract out of different types of rights that can actually be in that agreement.
Katie: What we did was we went through and drafted out all the precedents that you would need for business and then you get a guide that comes along with it and explains in really simple English what every single clause in that agreement actually means so you can understand what you're doing.
Katie: Make sure you understand what's in the agreement before you sign it. If you don't understand it, don't sign it because you could really do yourself some damage. That's why at Virtual Legal, we get a lot of the cleanup work from people just using templates they found on the Internet. Sometimes they use American documents, and sometimes they don't even change the names in the contract.
They haven't even read the contracts. Far out. I'm a stickler for reading things. When I got my first credit card in my teenage years, I read the 68-page document that came with it to make sure I understood. That's just a small document about how your information is shared.
You've got a fantastic service there to alleviate some of that pain and make sure people are using Australian documents. Most of the software that we use in business or the SaaS platforms come from overseas. We're using these ERP solutions or CRM solutions, and a big sales tactic that I've seen is that they'll say they'll give all the documents that we need for our client relations and everything else, but they're all from America, so they're practically useless unless you're an international business only dealing with America.
How does Law on Earth work?
We've covered a little bit of information about what Law on Earth does. With $150, what does that entail and how does that work for someone who's looking to get into business or someone who's looking to have a review of their documents if they've got something that's been made by someone else or maybe they need to dust off the documents that they haven't looked at for 10 years. How does the process work for Law on Earth?
[add this photo https://d3hh6raz9l4662.cloudfront.net/media/various/homepage-banner.png]
Katie: It is really simple. It's a social enterprise that was set up for a social purpose. It's essentially established just to help people. Just go on the platform and set up a free account. Once you've got a free account, you'll get a full dashboard so you can go into the learning centre and have a look at all these different guides that actually teach you what you should look out for, what to do next.
Katie: Once you've found a guide that matches your legal situation, you can then work out whether you just go and get the documents in our system. You can just answer a simple question. The system actually does much of the legal work so it'll slot all the right clauses in and then give you that human God that we talked about and then you can read through that.
Katie: If that doesn't work for what you wanted practically in the business, go back, unlock the document and then answer the questions again. It will slot different clauses in there. You have complete control over it. You don't necessarily have to get a lawyer if you don't want to get a lawyer, but you have the ability to do that.
Katie: We've restructured it recently so even if you get a 6-month subscription, it's unlimited documents so you can use as many documents as you want and the whole 6 months is only $197.
Katie: Once you drop down to that, you get your video calls with a lawyer for $97 for 20 minutes. It becomes ridiculously cheap to get a lawyer online.
Katie: Some people do more videos, others do fewer videos and go crazy on the documents and then go and do the business stuff, set up their wills and powers of attorney, and all that stuff. We've got a bunch of people doing their divorces at the moment.
Katie: Essentially, a lot of people will actually book their first calls in their sixth month and they'll extend it and then book in a couple of days later. Once they've gone and done their documents, we'll reverse the screen and help them re-drop bits and pieces of it for their situation. I might not hear from them for another five, six, seven weeks. Some people check in every week because it's just easy and affordable for them to do it bit by bit.
It is a fantastic service. You've only been around three years, right?
Katie: Yeah, we built it inside Virtual Legal, and we split it off about two years ago and then we actually launched it last July. We have 150 people signing up since August 2020.
Katie: The good thing is that as and when we find other needs or documents that people want, if it's not in there, they just click a button to email us, and we actually draft it and then upload it. You're not going to find any lawyers that'll do that without charging you $2,000 or $3,000.
That benefits everyone.
Katie: It helps people with whatever they're dealing with because if they need it, someone else is going to need it at some stage as well. We just have a team of guys here that just jump straight on it.
Get free guides to setting up a business in Australia and affordable legal advice. Jump onto Law on Earth! [link to https://lawonearth.com.au/howtos]
There's pretty much no reason why every business in Australia shouldn't be jumping on Law on Earth and checking out the work that you do and how it can help their business. I know I'm going to be signing up for an account because it's going to give more visibility and assurance for the times that you might not expect things to go as well as you want them to or at least mitigate some of those risks.
Recommended Books: The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Measure What Matters
If there's a favourite book that influenced you in business and in being where you are now, what would that be?
Katie: There was actually one that I listened to recently. It's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
Katie: I really resonated with that because he said that as a CEO, you have to get used to everything being your fault. I thought that sounds like a really negative thing to say, but it's true. You are responsible as the head of the company, whether you are the founder or just the CEO, but you're responsible for making sure that everything runs smoothly.
Katie: If something happened in marketing, you should have had some kind of process in marketing for feedback so you can make sure those things don't happen. If you are not watching what's happening in all the other divisions, even though you're not the one executing on it, it really is your fault.
Katie: I think it just puts it back into place. You have to get comfortable with being a bit uncomfortable as a business owner. You can say, 'My job is just to do this bit here' but if you are the person running that business, that's not correct. You are still responsible for the feet up. You just need to make sure reporting back to you is good if you've delegated work out.
That comes into play with what you're saying about strategies, making documentation processes, accountability systems, and things like that. I'm going to be checking that on my radar.
Katie: Yes, it's downloadable so you can listen to it while you're going for a run. Another is Measure What Matters by John Doerr, and that's all about objective, key results and understanding how to give reporting responsibilities out to your teams so that it can be feedbacked correctly.
I'm going to check out that one.
What is freedom to you?
The podcast is called Business Built Freedom. What would you say business freedom is to you?
Katie: For me, freedom is not necessarily having a lot of time on my hands. It's more about being able to actually do what I want to be able to do, even though it's still a lot of work for me to do.
Katie: Virtual Legal runs really well, so I can actually have my freedom but I've gone straight back into the grind with Law on Earth. I'm passionate about it, so I'm happy to spend my time doing that. As and when I find different elements that I can delegate to other people, I can then do that and then I can spend more time thinking. I think freedom really comes down to having just being engaged in what you love and finding ways to start stepping back from it to have thinking time again.
I think I couldn't have said it better myself. I find working in business isn't really working if you're enjoying it. That sounds so cliche. People go on holidays to read books, but if you don't think an editor would go on holidays to read books, I still think they would.
If you have enjoyed the podcast, jump across to iTunes. Leave us some love, give us some feedback. Katie: will be jumping into our Facebook group to answer any possible questions that you might have. Stay healthy!
Mitigate risks and turn your IT into a utility. Schedule a free consultation or check out the Dollar IT Club for affordable business solutions.
[module-379]
Improving Your Business Strategy With Jason Button
You might be wondering, how do you improve your business strategy? A few weeks ago, we spoke with Marty Lewis about how to prepare a business plan. If you've already got a business plan or you want to improve your business plan, this is going to be the episode for you. We've got Jason Button from JB Strategic, and he's going to be talking about improving your business plan.
Get more tips on how to improve your business strategy at dorksdelivered.com.au
What is meant by “business strategy”?
What does business strategy mean?
Jason: Let's sort of get into the nuts and bolts of it. If anyone hasn't listened in before, I really encourage anyone to jump in and listen to Marty Lewis's piece around preparing a business plan, which is used to start a business and direct operations. That's going to cover your “Who” and “What” within the business.
Jason: From the strategic side of things, a strategic plan will look at implementing and managing the strategic direction of your existing organisation or the business that you're in. Think of that as your “How” and “When”.
Know Your Why
There's this pretty cool book called Know Your Why about understanding why you're in business. It allows you to understand your “Why”, “What”, and “Who” to further build on your business strategies.
Jason: That's got to be the starting point every single time. You've got to start with the “Why”.
Jason: For anyone who owns or operates a business, it's really critical for you, as a business owner or operator, to understand what that “Why” proposition looks like to you. Looking at it from a customer's point of view, what is the “Why” for them? Starting with that is a really good grounding point for you to build out that “Who” and “What” of your business plan and then the “How” and “When” we get there from the strategic proposition.
Jason: The other things to take into consideration with your strategic plan is how to tie in things like your vision, mission, objectives and how you are going to achieve everything as well as the “Who” and “What” of the business plan.
Know Your Customers’ “Why”
You brought up a good thing there: knowing your customers' “Why” as well as the business' “Why” and objectives. A lot of the times they don't line up. How do you make sure that from a business owner's perspective, your “Why” is solid but clear to your clients and you're not pulling any emotion into that?
Jason: The exercise that I'll generally go through with people in this position is you've got to turn off all the noise around you. Take the emotion away and then think of why you are in business. What do you want to ultimately achieve within that?
Jason: Once you've got that as a framework and then you start to look at it from a customer's point of view with whatever product or service offering that you've got, there has to be some sort of alignment. That's not to say that it's got to be exactly the same, but there's got to be some sort of an element that ties both of those things together for you to have a really strong value proposition, which you can live and breathe in your employees or contractors or whoever is working within your business or organisation.
Jason: From the customer's perspective, they start to understand what your value proposition is and how that ties into whatever the offering is and ticks that box for them.
Know Why People Choose You
If you've already been in business for a little bit and maybe you had a napkin-type of business plan to start off with that you created when you're at the pub with a few mates, and now you've already got some clients, is it polite just to ask them, 'Why do you work with us?' or 'Why don't you work with someone else?' How do you pull in that data?
Jason: Generally, what we'd look at is getting feedback from your existing customer base and suppliers. Go and talk to your employees or contractors. You could go to friends and family just to get that sounding board and start to really shake that up.
Jason: If the feedback that you're receiving isn't lining up with your “Why”, there is something amiss at that point. There's got to be some realignment because the “Why” stitches everything together and where you want to head. If you can't get that alignment and what you're projecting out there, there's got to be some time and attention spent on that.
How Much Time to Spend on Improving Your Business Strategy
We read Know Your Why a few years ago, and then last year we revisited it and I looked deeper into why we are in business. It racked my brain, nearly turned me into turmoil. I didn't know what I was doing. I just dived straight into it and ended up coming back full circle on why we're in business. How much time is the right amount of time to be spending on this sort of stuff?
Jason: If you've genuinely got some concerns in your “Why”, I encourage anyone to take the time. When we're all stuck in the grind, Monday to Friday is not the time to do it. You need to get away from things and turn off those outside influences to really drill down on that.
Jason: Have some time on that and start to line it up starting with the feedback. There is absolutely no reason why you can't spend time on this during the different phases of your life. You've always got to get that alignment and revisit your “What” on a regular basis.
Revisit Your Why on a Regular Basis
Jason: You've also got to start to spend time looking at your “Why” on a regular basis. I work with clients and we re-evaluate our “Why” on an annual basis and then that starts to shape that strategic plan. We do it on a financial year basis, but that doesn't mean you can't do it on a calendar year basis or whatever suits you, whatever you're comfortable with. What's really important is to always bring that back to your “Why” while you can.
We have a boring book. I've got all my different business plans that I've written in this book, and every year, I review it and see where I'm at. It's also going back through and seeing what the idea and direction and vision of the business was for us in, say, 2007—when we started—and then how that changed in 2010. Who was our target client and who were our suppliers and why were we in business?
Having a look and going far out, we've changed. I just get this big hit of energy because I've actually done a lot. Sometimes you feel like you’re just on the grind, you're spinning your wheels, and you think I'm not getting ahead as fast as I want to but reflecting and looking at that, you'll find that you've done a lot. Keeping the book is a very huge value-add for us.
What should be included in your business strategy?
With a business strategy, should you be talking about how many staff or is that not important? Is it more important to talk about revenue or is it more important to reflect on the numbers or the emotion? How do you know that you're balancing things properly? What are the three basic business strategies that you should be having in a business plan?
The 4 Ps and Your Why
Jason: Whenever I'm looking at a strategic plan, I look at the 4 Ps: plans, people within the business (i.e. internal stakeholders), process (i.e. how we go about certain things), and the purchaser (i.e. customers). I love to just segregate the 4 Ps into four quadrants there, start with those areas and start to drill down. You might write your “Why”—the value proposition—right in the middle of that.
- The People
Jason: Start to look at what’s the value of all your People. We start that with a survey to get some feedback and we might do a bit of an audit on the skills and experience. We look at career pathway mapping, the culture within the business, how engaged they are, what sort of capacity we've got. There are so many different things that we can look at with just our People.
- The Plan
Jason: When I say Plans, we also have to look at the timeframe. When do I want to achieve X, Y and Z? Taking it back to your book, I think it's really cool that you've got a reference point to go back to when you put your strategic hat on. Start to look at your plans at that snapshot in time. Then, look at any outside influence or any change to your “Why” and then update that to ensure that you're on the right track. That's sort of a lot of planning.
- The Purchaser
Jason: Jumping across to Purchaser, it's looking at your “Why” standpoint from your customer side of things. It's improving the experience and communicating the value proposition. You need to do some thinking on how you communicate that effectively to customers and making sure you've got the right customers.
- The Process
Jason: In terms of your Process, what are you doing in terms of capturing your training internally so that it can be replicated for new people coming into the business? I can come up to your “What” proposition really quickly and look at all documented actions.
Jason: I know you do a lot with business process automation so I'm keen to get your thoughts around that and what process you go through when you talk to a client.
I started the business off as a cowboy with no processes and everything was in my head. That story is pretty familiar to a lot of people. I was running a very profitable business, but it was just myself. I brought one extra person, and then if I shall use the term, he was the Robin to my Batman. He was fantastic, but he sadly had a stroke while we're working 80-hour weeks.
I thought I'd try to do my best to do the work that he was doing as well as the work that I was doing. There are only 168 hours in a week, so I don't have very much time to do the work he was doing and the work that I was doing. I ended up having to instigate the 80-20 rule, and get rid of a whole bunch of clients that we kind of didn't want to work with anyway.
It sounds terrible, but everyone has them. I now had a profitable business that I was able to manage myself. But the push came when I brought on the first employee after him. That was when I realised I really did have some better processes in place. It took me 6 months to have that person become profitable, so we started putting in fantastic processes internally to start off with and then we noticed a lot of businesses don't really have this sort of stuff.
What is automation?
For us, what we call automation is a mix between software and delegation. It's about understanding the processes yourself that might be in your head, pulling them down onto pen and paper, and then looking at how things work to then make them work better.
If you're doing any level of repetition, we have a look at how long that takes and then we take that and look at how long it would take for us to automate that process. Then we make an assessment: is the squeeze worth the juice?
A good example would be I was learning about electronics when I was 12 years old. I wanted to automate my door—I could press a button on a remote control to open or unlock the door. I worked out how the pneumatics were going to work and thought this is going to be awesome. I showed my brother, who's 13 years older than me and an electronic engineer, and went through the whole thing.
He asked how long it's going to take to make. I said, probably 100 hours. He said, 'How many times could you have stood up out of your chair and just open up the door in 100 hours?' I said, 'That's fair. Many, many, many more times than I'll ever need to do it.' But it was the process to learn how to do it.
Don't automate something that doesn't need to be automated. Don't create a process or have a faceless process if there are people involved.
Profitability and Efficiency
Jason: I really like that point and the early part resonated with me. This is going to seem a bit funny. Let's pretend that we're at a restaurant. If you watch MasterChef, there was this little trend called deconstructed everything. They deconstructed desserts and other food.
Jason: Everyone knows what a pavlova looks like, but then you get a deconstructed pavlova—may still taste nice, but you just haven't had the time to do it so you've done all the elements separately. That can often happen in business when we're talking about process. Just because we are making money, it doesn't mean it's the most efficient way to do it.
Jason: I'd like everyone to look at their business and what they're offering once it hits the purchaser or the customer. Am I serving up a whole pavlova dessert in its completion or is it a bit of a deconstructed base where I've got a lot of good little elements and they're still leaving you satisfied, but it's still not quite right?
That's a great way to look at it because a lot of businesses will have all the bits, but they might not be the best chef to put it together either. It's good to be engaging people like yourself to be able to gain visibility.
An Extra Pair of Eyes Helps
I am the worst critic of our own business. In our head, we always know we shouldn't have done this or we should be doing that. A lot of the time, you can't see the forest for the trees and you need to have someone come in to help deconstruct some of the different processes to find out if there is a better way to do things.
You don't know what you don't know until you know it, you know? That resonates strongly with a lot of stuff that we do with businesses.
For instance, we went in and he said they've been doing something for years. I asked if they have any problems with it locking up and they do, but everyone just jumps out of the file and then they all—10 people—jump back. I asked how often it locks up, and he said, 'Twice a week.' He has to organise 10 people to jump out and then back in twice a week. He calls them up on the phone to make sure everyone jumps out of the file. It's 30 minutes that everyone's jumping out and waiting to use it twice a week; an hour for 10 people. That's ridiculous.
Jason: From an outsider's perspective, it's really difficult in the day-to-day grind to see some of this stuff. When it is pointed out to you as obvious as that, that's your profit margin. You might still be making money, but all that inefficiency could be either replaced by tightening up your training or introducing a technical solution is profit.
Jason: It's always good to zoom out of your business and spend some time looking at what your strategies for those areas are. Look at those 4 Ps—the people, the plan, the process and your purchasers—so you can get the most out of your business and yourself. You're a happier individual with it as well.
Step Out of Your Business to Work on Your Business
I think stepping out of your business is one of the most intelligent things you can do in your business. We were talking about some of the different house renovations that I'm doing, and I made it very clear that I'm not a builder, but I find that your brain never turns off.
When you're sleeping, your brain is not turned off. You're always thinking about something—a business problem, a personal thing. Whatever happens, you're always thinking about it.
I think swapping skillsets sharpens your sword. It's not just diving into your emails and becoming monotonous and repetitious with what you're doing. Just by changing out to doing something else like a run in the morning, you'll find that thoughts just come to you.
Have a Record of Your Ideas
Almost everyone experiences taking a shower and then the answer they've been looking for comes to them. Or you're asleep and then you write it down. There's actually a funny Jerry Seinfeld episode where he wrote down a funny joke when he was asleep and woke up the next morning didn't know what the hell he wrote.
I've got the Amazon Echo units. I'll think of something great and I'll say it, but I'll say it with such blubbery mess in the middle of the night. In the morning, I'd wonder what the hell I was talking about.
Jason: That's a really good point. If you have some way to capture these ideas, whether it is a notebook, a whiteboard or a Google sheet, and just go back and sort of reference it when you've got time. I'm hopeless when it comes to ideas and idea generation. It often happens when I'm driving all over the countryside in traffic. I use just an audio recorder, and I'll just talk out loud by myself in the car. I can sort of throw all sorts of crazy ideas out there and dedicate a couple of hours a week to working on the business, not working on the business operations.
Jason: I use that reference point, pull out that notepad or play that audio file. I go, 'The guy in the car that day made a really good point, and I could probably translate that into the business in some way, shape or form.' That's a little technique that I use, and it might help.
Thank you. That's fantastic because they don't always come at the best of times, but we have to be able to find these ideas usually when we're nearly running out of time.
What should NOT be in your business strategy?
I want to just ask a couple more questions. People ask a lot: what is a good business strategy? I want to ask you, what are the things that you should avoid having in your business strategy? What is a bad business strategy? It helps to know what you shouldn't be spending too much time on or shouldn't be putting into it?
- No Accountability
Jason: A bad business strategy for me is one that is missing any sort of accountability.
- Unrealistic Timeframe
Jason: The other thing that springs to mind straightaway is timeframes that are unachievable. You've just got to understand and get a feel. Don't bite more than you can chew and make things too ambitious. Make it so that it is achievable and will push you out of your comfort zone. Let's just make sure that it's something tangible and achievable and we know the steps to get to the final point.
Jason: Don't get hung up on the design of your plan, the front cover and the pages, and the look of it. That's where we all sit and procrastinate. Rip the Band-Aid off and then you can come back tomorrow and start to put a bit of a sense to it. It's sometimes the best way to go about that.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Starting is always the hardest. At least, if you just put something on the paper, you can then start refining it and massaging it into something better. What I do is I look at the big audacious goal and then I do the timeline in reverse.
What is it you're looking to achieve? For instance, you want to earn $10 million in two months. What are the steps that you need to take before that gets to $10 million? If you're at $1 million now, then how are you going to get to $10 million?
Is it times 10 of your client base or are you going to change around the products that you're selling to clients? What is it you're doing to allow that process to come to fruition and then put steps on that? Is it going to be a marketing plan that needs to go towards promoting these new products and everything else? You can make it a more realistic timeframe.
Avoid saying what a lot of people starting off in business say: 'I can make triple of what the boss is paying me because he charges a triple of what he's paying me, so I can do all this and I'm going to be a millionaire and pay my house off in a year for getting all of the mechanics.'
Jason: I couldn't agree with you more on that point. Once we start to get the data down and write the figures down, such as insurances, you start to work out pretty quickly that the proposition with your boss wasn't looking too bad if everything's just about money. When you're earning just over $12 an hour, once you pay yourself, it might not be the best suit for you.
Jason: It's really important that you set your goals and then work backwards from that—what it's going to take, what the steps are, and then go back and look at those 4 Ps of how they're going to help you achieve that.
Suggested Read: Good to Great
What would you say is your favourite book or a book that covers business strategy and improving your business strategy?
Jason: My go-to is Good to Great by Jim Collins. I encourage everyone to go and have a look at any of Jim Collins' works, particularly Good to Great and Built to Last. I find them really inspiring. Every time I go back and look at it, I can go with a different context and framework, and I'll get something out of it every time.
Is that the type of book you can listen to as an audiobook?
Jason: Absolutely. It's quite long, but just try and break it down and get a really good understanding of the concept that they're promoting and then take that little bit of time, work it back within your business and then go on to the next one. A lot of great stuff there.
Jason: The reason why I love it so much is I'm a data guy. 'The numbers don't lie' is one of my favourite sayings. That book was created out of years and years of research by some of the best companies in America at the time and as far back as World War II and the trends they've got in common to make them great companies.
I actually haven't read it, so I'm going to check that on the side.
What is business freedom to you?
The podcast is called Business Built Freedom. What is business freedom to you or what is freedom and why are you in business?
Jason: Freedom for me is always time. Time to be a better parent later and mentor to people. It affords me the freedom or the space to continue my learnings and absorb different concepts so that I can start to shape that in my own experiences and then share that with others to inspire them. That's why I do what I do.
Jason: I'm one of four children, and my father had a small business. He left before we got up and came home in the evening and we didn't get to spend a lot of time together. I appreciate the time, effort and energy that it takes to own and run a business. If I can come in and help a business, give them that bit of freedom back to be a better parent or a better individual while their business is sustainable and growing at the same time, happy days. Everyone wins.
If anyone wants to contact Jason from JB Strategic, jump across to his LinkedIn profile, check him out, and have a bit of a chat.
If anyone has any questions to put those up for the greater community, go to our Facebook group.
Jason: I'm more willing to share anything and speak out.
That's what it's all about. The world goes round on knowledge, and I think everyone should be sharing as much as possible and not holding their cards too close to their chests. We will grow and become better together.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback. Stay good and stay healthy.
We specialise in improving processes to boost your businesses’ profitability and efficiency. Call 07 3166 5465 to enquire!
Enhancing Customer Experience With Floris Blok
You might be wondering why customers sometimes love you and sometimes don't. Is it something you're doing or something you're not? It is like when you go to a trash-and-treasure market, sometimes you find trash and sometimes you find treasure but that doesn't mean anything is wrong with those customers. Today, we've got Floris Blok from Blok Business Consulting and he's going to be talking to us about the customer journey, the customer experience, and what it means.
Get more tips on how to enhance customer experience at dorksdelivered.com.au
What is meant by customer experience?
What is meant by a customer experience? How can you say it’s a good customer experience?
Floris: To actually figure out what the customer experience is, you need to understand who the customer is. So if you're trying to sell something to someone, you want to know who they are before you try and sell them anything. That would be your first point of call or a call to action as an organisation, as a marketing department or whoever you may be. Understanding the ideal customer profile (ICP) is actually the first thing that you need to do.
Floris: Once you have a deep understanding and insight about that, like a group of people or certain demographics or psychographic segmentation, then you can start understanding where they get their information, where they actually go out and buy stuff, what it is they are interested in, what makes them tick. Once you figure that out, then you can actually expand and actually build that customer journey or at the very least identify what the customer journey is through all kinds of different ways of research and analytics. And then, you can start optimising each of those touchpoints that you have with that particular segment's ICP.
Floris: There are many different ways of doing it. For example, if you're an e-commerce platform, one way would be certain KPIs, like how many people dropped out from your website once they've done a search or how many people leave a basket with stuff in it and don't actually convert to an actual sale. There are different KPIs that you can measure.
How do you identify your ideal customer?
If you've just started out in business or maybe you've decided to start a business, but have no idea about marketing or who my customer is going to be. All you know is you make really good pies or you're a little bit faster laying a concrete driveway or you've got a cool way that you're doing your accounting, how would you know who is going to pick up on this? How do you work out who your customer is before you've had one?
Floris: If you are already working for an employer and you want to go on your own, then you already have that experience. You would have had exposure to the type of people that are purchasing the products or hiring services that your organisation is actually putting out into the market. You would have at least some kind of idea.
Floris: If you are completely new. Let's say hypothetically, you've just rolled out of college or university. You've got this great idea for something, like software. First of all, what you need to do is actually develop it into a product. There are all kinds of different things that we can talk about here from the product management point of view and a product development point of view, like setting up your MVP or minimal viable product, and then how do you go about getting financing, funding, etc. so you can develop it further and all of these things.
Floris: Let's go back to your example of pies. Let's say you've just won MasterChef and now you've got $250,000 in your pocket, but your entire life, what you've done is you've basically put these pies or baked these pies for your family. Now you're sitting there with $250,000 in your pocket and they're burning a hole in it because you want to open a shop. You need to understand what it is about your pies that people like because three MasterChef judges liking it is fantastic. They've talked about it in front of the entire Australian population that watches MasterChef and all the international ones abroad and all of these things. Kudos!
Floris: But you need to understand what the people who are going to come into the shop are going to come in for. They need a pie, but is it a breakfast pie? Is it an afternoon lunch party? Is it a snack? These are the things you need to understand.
Floris: Once you understand what people like about your pies and what time they like to eat them, you can manage your production schedule, the marketing, your shop front or where you can actually locate your shop. We know that with COVID, there's a lot of real estate in the CBD that's emptying up because workers are not there. Are you going to move into CBD or are you going to be selling pies out of a truck? Food trucks are doing great because you can move locations and you can be in different places at different times.
Floris: Understanding what your customers want and how they want to consume it, whether it's a product or service, is a very good start to understanding how you can then deliver that service to them for them to give you their hard-earned cash.
How do you measure customer experience?
On the MasterChef example, I've got this $250,000, let's go through the process. You might have a mobile location or something that's static. If you've got these people coming to the front of the van or the shopfront, and they're ordering pies, you can obviously say the pies are selling really well and then have things like best sellers and know how to promote and critique and change different product lines and measure the analytics, the same way you could do that with an e-commerce website. If you've then got those numbers in play, how do you know that you're attracting enough of the right audience or you're measuring things? Are you looking at people that are coming through the door going, 'Okay, they look like 45 to 60-year old business people, so I should be marketing more towards that segment.' How do you put pen to paper to actually work out the demographics and psychographics of your customers?
Floris: I can give you the theory from now up until the moon shines tonight, but I think the answer was in your question, which is analytics. Once you have the data, then you can be a data-driven organisation and you can then adjust based on the data. For example, if the data says that you've got a meat pie that sells more than a cheese pie, you're more likely going to start buying in more stuff for the meat pie and making more meat pies and having them on hand, especially if you've got another data point that says that you've run out of them halfway through the day. A lot of this can happen quite instinctively with a lot of people. Now we're taking an example and we're applying it to a lot more complex processes, but principles are the same. If you have a pie that sells really well and it goes out of stock midday and you still got people coming in asking for it, then you've got a great set of customers that actually know what they want and they like your product but if you run out of it, that means that you haven't forecasted enough of that product. Now you're delivering a very bad customer experience. All of a sudden, you end up having to offer an alternative product, maybe even at a discount just to keep the customers happy and coming back through the door the very next day.
Floris: It is about the data. If you have the data and you can see where the data is actually, providing you insights. Information, knowledge and insights are three different things. Information leads to knowledge, and knowledge leads to insight, which is then applied into an action in a business sense. You can translate that into future actions in order to improve.
Floris: Data analytics can be very simple. It could be just you sitting there at the end of the day looking at your cash register or your receipts and looking at the number of pies sold and left. That's enough to give you an idea. It doesn't have to be as complex as an ERP system hooked up to a CRM that's tracking your website and all of these things.
Is scarcity a good customer experience strategy?
You brought up something that's quite interesting. You said if the pie ran out halfway through the day, it affects the customer's experience. Apple intentionally creates short runs of their products so that there is scarcity in the market. How does creating scarcity affect the customer experience? Is that something that can be good or bad? You have these people then talking more about it. You have this line at the door versus having an empty store. Because you're really good at serving people quickly, they're coming in and out of the store very quickly, but it ends up looking like your store is empty because you're too efficient. Is that a problem that you should be worried about?
Floris: It's a complex question and no simple answer can be given here. Let's give it a try and unpack it. If we use Apple as an example, Apple has an enormous level of brand loyalty, right? The level of scarcity only feeds into that brand loyalty because of the marketing around it and the hype that Apple creates around its brand. In this regard, it doesn't really matter whether you are in shortage of stock. You've got such brand loyal customers that even if they have to wait six months to get a phone, they will wait six months to have a phone. They'll walk around with a cracked screen, iPhone 11 or whatever it is, and then try and upgrade to an iPhone 12 because the Apple TV shows how you can take a great picture of your dog. That's brand loyalty for you. Apple does that almost to perfection.
Floris: On the other hand, if you've got a product like a meat pie or a pie store and you run out of pies, it's not going to look very good for you because it looks like you don't know how to run your business and this is a consumer product that's consumed in very high volume. It's a low-value-high-volume sales that if you don't get in our instant gratification culture right now, we're going to go somewhere else and get it. If your competitor has a product that is of equal quality, equal taste, in this case, potentially cheaper, they're more likely going to become your competitor's loyal customer. You would have lost a customer, which is why in the service industry or in the hospitality industry, it becomes very much relational based on relationships. If you can provide a good customer experience by making people feel welcome, making them feel that they are in a store where they are heard, whether they can get what they want and all of these things to actually make them feel good and activate these dopamine levels, they will then keep coming back.
Customer Experience Differs
We've got McDonald's, Wendy's, Hungry Jack's, or Burger King if you're not in Australia, and Grill’d, which is a gourmet burger place in Australia. All of them are doing reasonably well for different reasons. McDonald's and Hungry Jack's are very similar, but we've been led to believe the burgers are better at Hungry Jack's through repetitious marketing. Grill’d is a bit more gourmet. But still, the customer experience could be very different for the three different places.
In my eyes, I'd say if I were to go to McDonald's, which I don't go to very often, I'd be going there because I need something quickly, not because I need a high-quality item. So the customer experience for me in going to McDonald's is because I want something now—I'm on a road trip going somewhere or in between meetings—and I know that they're consistently quick and that would be why I'd go there.
That's also exactly why I wouldn't go to Red rooster because they're consistently slow. On that same vein, I guess people don't go to Grill’d because they're quick; people go there because the quality is better. But the customer experience is around the demographics of the people that are coming there and the reason why they're going there. If you've got a pie shop and you ran out of pies and customers go somewhere else and the pie is better but they are slower, they still may come back to you. Is that fair to say or is there more play here?
Floris: Yes, it's absolutely fair to say, which is why earlier I said that it was a complex question with a complex answer because there are multiple factors. If we take it purely on price, then if you've got a competitor with a low-priced pie within the same geographic area, then there's a good chance that they'll go for that one.
Floris: But let's say, yes, it's a bit slower but it tastes better, then you're more likely going to want to have that pie because it does taste better than the quicker one.
Floris: Yes, it's fast but one of the reasons I don't go to McDonald's is because personally I'll eat a burger and within two hours I'm hungry again. Yes, they've got a great customer experience inside now with the ordering screens as well. You get your number, you pick it up, and then you can sit down. You can do the drive-thru, and you can take it home. But I don't do drive-thru because it stinks inside the car. I don't take it home because it's cold and inedible by the time I get home, in my opinion. If I go to McDonald's, I'm in a rush and I need to get something done right, and I'm more likely going to be doing it in the store. The only other reason I go to McDonald's is the kids love their Happy Meals.
What a scam that is. Did you know that McDonald's is the largest toy distributor in the world just because of their Happy Meals?
Floris: Forget about value, just purely on volume. That's because they've done some amazing marketing on getting these kids hooked on Happy Meals.
Happy Meals and sugar, and they do great. I know a lot of people, including my sister, who love McDonald's. I'd rather eat a hundred other things before McDonald's.
Floris: They've catered to the customer, which is the little one that will nag and nag and nag the parents until the parents cave in and say, 'Yes, we'll go to McDonald's.'
Very emotional decision.
Floris: Absolutely. Not in the sense of I'm going to get something I really want. What I really want is for my kids to stop nagging me. Not to destroy the McDonald's brand, because we can't and that's not the aim of the conversation, but it's the lesser of two evils. I love my kids and I respect them enormously, but still, when they nag, it's unbearable.
It Depends on Customer Expectation
Floris: Back to the customer experience. They've created that customer experience. You go in, you get what you get.
Floris: They've got their 500 or 700-page manual that every franchise is exactly the same, so your expectations are met in each and every store that you walk into. Each and every McDonald's will give you the exact same thing, and the exact same thing is not that burger in the picture because we all know that's fake. It's consistent in its delivery and its service and in its product. The tastes are the same. They're all sourced locally, they say, but in any case, they are built all to the same standards, and therefore, you will get what you pay for.
Floris: And that's the expectation of the customers and they provide that positive experience that, regardless of the taste, you keep coming back to McDonald's, even if you go there every blue moon or something.
Floris: On the other hand, Grill’d, you're absolutely right. It's more gourmet. Location-wise, they're more into the CBDs, where you've got a high-net-worth, middle-class people who are willing to pay slightly more than a convenience fast food store. They will sit down. They'll eat it as well. They'll enjoy it. They'll have a conversation. It's much more of a social event. These are the expectations they have and these are the expectations that are met by growth, which is why they're doing fine.
Businesses Measure Customer Experience Differently
So it doesn't always have to be the same metrics that you're measuring, as long as you know what they are and why people are coming to you. How do you go about creating that customer experience strategy? How do you go about actually playing through that?
We do a lot of work with IT companies to better their processes. We also do a lot of work with schools, governments and small-to-medium businesses, and all their needs are very different and things that are important to them are very different. A lot of the time, small businesses could be more money-conscious. They are only just starting up. They're on an oily rag. They just want to have the smallest thing to get them through to tomorrow to be able to continue working.
Generally speaking, a more experienced business will look more towards longer-term goals and have different interests that will then market ourselves around. With pen and paper, how would you go about creating a customer experience strategy? Should you just maybe cancel out all the different things and look at whatever is bringing in the money to your business and focus heavily on that one vertical.
What is a customer experience strategy?
Floris: Let's go over the definition of strategy. In its simplest form, the word strategy means a roadmap to do A, B, C in order to get you to Objective X. It's nothing more than a roadmap on how to achieve your objective, so you need to know what your objective is.
Floris: In order to know what your objective is, you need to understand who you're doing it for so we can go back to the assignments in a golden circle.
- Why is it that you do what you do?
- How is it that you do it?
- What is it that you deliver in order to achieve it?
Floris: Let's assume for a second that you know why you do things like in your case, you have an absolute obsessive joy of delivering highly automated and optimised processes for organisations because you want to give people their time back in order for them to be able to scale up but also have a family life. The way you do it is you set up an organisation with like-minded people and you now have a team that will then have the same passion and the same drive as you in order to deliver the service or product to your customers. You do hosting, you do automation, you do processes and all of these things. That's the 'what.' These are your products and services.
Floris: But you started off by understanding who it is that you're trying to do it for. You have your objective. Let's say this year I want to have 20 million in turnover. And now the strategy comes into play, which is how you map out going from A to B in order to achieve that objective.
Floris: Now you have all the elements in place. Let's go back to the pie store example. You know the customers like these five pies out of the 10 that you've got on your menu, so you're going to focus your production, stock purchases, etc. on these five pies. You still need the other ones because they're about 20% of your business, but you need to focus on 80% right now.
Floris: You also know that most of your customers are in or around the CBD area, and they eat around lunchtime. You need to have a location that can actually put you in the most optimal place for these people to actually come to you. Is that an actual store, a fixed store, or is it a van or a food truck?
Floris: Once you've answered these questions, you start looking at how are you going to market services? Should you go around all the companies and drop a flyer at the reception area so that people can see when they walk into the building in the morning? Should you do targeted Facebook ads or should you do LinkedIn ads because you're targeting professionals working in CBD?
Floris: Pure statistic. There are about 26 million residents in Australia, and 11.6 million of them are on LinkedIn. If you would do LinkedIn targeted ads, which are a bit expensive, but you can actually market your pie to all of these professionals that are looking at their LinkedIn in the morning and getting hungry and then go look for that food truck.
Floris: You know what you want to do. You know who you're doing it for. You know why you're doing it. Now you just basically build a roadmap in order to get there, and that could very easily be a pen-and-paper type of strategy where you go like, 'This is the shop or the food truck. I need to be there from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM. I need to have the meat pies half-cooked by then. And I need 200 of these. 600 of these. 700 of these.'
Customer Experience Strategy Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
It's not that hard. It doesn't have to be that difficult. As I was saying at the start, you can have websites looking at the different types of traffic that are coming, the demographics of the people that are coming there and then have your website do all other sorts of stuff to make sure they're on their customer journey. But it doesn't have to be that complicated.
Floris: No, that could be your optimisation process afterwards. Once you get the foundations or the basics in place, and they're working. Let's say you now have another food shop that comes next to you and it's selling nachos. All of a sudden, you're competing. How can you start getting an edge? How can you start improving your business so that you can be more efficient in terms of your stock or in terms of your marketing?
- Focus on the Foundation
Floris: We can go back into marketing terms like customer acquisition cost and all of these intricacies that business consultants love to talk about, which is all optimisation. This is all fine tuning. This is all taking the basics that you have in place and just making them slightly better.
Floris: If you don't have the right foundations, you're basically just amplifying something that's not good. It's absolutely essential to actually have the foundations in place. Once you have these, then you can optimise and start looking into more details.
Floris: Customer experience and marketing are very close to each other, but it's all about testing. You've got the basics in place. If you do this, what would happen? You can do A/B testing.
Floris: Let's say you chose to sell pies in Location A on Wednesday, and you earned $100,000. You went to that same location on Thursday, and you earned $80,000. So you know that it's probably best to be there on one day and choose another location on the other day. It's about taking that data, analysing the data, finding insights out of it, and then applying it to whatever it is that you do.
- Keep a Record of Everything
Make sure you're recording that and keeping that so you can see what the trends were. If there were things that you weren't aware of and you picked up on, that would be very important.
Floris: What can be tracked can be managed, and what can be monitored can be managed. If you're not monitoring your income, even the ATO is going to come to you.
Floris: The same principle applies to everything else. If you want to be good at what you do, you have to be able to track it, monitor it, and then draw conclusions from it or insights and turn those into business applications.
A lot of the time, we try and think that we do A and B happens, but there could be a whole bunch of different things. Like on the Wednesday and $100,000 example, maybe there was a huge conference just around the corner and you had a lot of people that came out.
I'm happy to say that in October I'm going to become a dad, so I'm pretty excited. It was interesting. I've been doing a lot of research on how babies communicate, how language works for them and things like that.
- Gather Data Until You Get a Pattern
One of the cool things that I thought is when they see something or they're introduced to a new object, they don't start saying it until they're confident of that object and what it's called. It's the same as if you're sitting there and there are five different types of exotic fruit, and I just pointed across and said, 'That's a holla baba.' You wouldn't say anything and the baby doesn't, but then if you then saw that same piece of fruit in a completely different example someone said, 'Oh, that's a holla baba.' The baby would be like, 'All right. I now know through the process of elimination that that's what it is.'
Floris: I'm not an expert. I'm not a neurologist. I'm not a medical professional in any way, shape or form. What I do know is what you just described there is how kids learn, and I know that from my own two kids. It's pattern recognition. In order to recognise a pattern, you need data. Without the data, you can't really do anything.
Floris: If you've picked up that on that Wednesday, you made $100,000 in front of that location or at that location, that same location made $80,000 a week later, and you made $120,000 the week afterwards. It averages out quite nicely, but why were there differences? Is it just a normal everyday life or were there events during that? Observe the data points. Two points make a straight line. With three points, you start getting a bit of a trend or a pattern.
Floris: The more data points you have, the more accurate your insight could be. But now that you have them and if you have a curious mind, which every entrepreneur should have, then you can start investigating what was happening at that location or within a kilometre or a two-kilometre range of that location. On that day, was there a museum event? Was there a conference? Was there a street band that was playing really well? Was it good weather? Was it bad weather?
Your competitors down the road shut down.
Floris: Absolutely right. You can take all of that data. For a large corporation, it's becoming easier to actually take all of these different data points into account because they can throw it into a machine learning algorithm and then something will pop up that says, 'Hey, you've done really well on this day because you had the high exposure for the number of people that were walking on the street.'
Floris: But if you were a small organisation, you can do quite a lot of this quite manually and all you need is Google for your searches and YouTube, which is the second-largest search engine in the world, for your how-tos, in case something doesn't jive really well or you need some help with some piece of software or whatever.
- Ask the Right Questions
Floris: All you need is a curious mind. Ask yourself all of the right questions. If you are going down the route of the back questions, it's good to have some sounding boards like either coach or consultant or anyone that you have on retainer for a once-a-month check-in or accountability sessions.
Floris: Entrepreneurs sometimes might get a bit slack. They can lose their motivation for a day. It's not easy being an entrepreneur. It's not easy setting up a business. You could lose. It takes a lot of mental energy. If you have a bad day, it could impact your business. If you have employees, that could impact your employees. Having that support structure from a consulting perspective is actually quite helpful, but it's about asking the right questions.
- Get an Extra Pair of Eyes
You've touched on a lot of information here. If anyone is out there and they are looking for a consultant or someone to be able to talk to and make sure that they have the right strategy, they're looking at the right data, possibly not getting distracted by cat videos, make sure they have a level of accountability, they are keeping on track and looking at the right resources, is that something you can help people with?
Floris: Absolutely. As a consultant and an entrepreneur myself and as an ex-corporate myself, I have the experience and the passion, if you wish, to help people to get the answers and to help them along their way to achieve the success they want. I'm focused quite a lot on marketing strategy, customer experience and digital transformation. When I say digital transformation, I'm not talking about IT stuff. I come at it from a commercial and business point of view.
Floris: Digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation are three different things. Digitisation is basically analogue to digital. Digitalisation is looking at your value proposition. Digital transformation is when you look at the entire structure of the company—its culture, people, processes and technology in that order. That's where I focus on as well, and that fits quite nicely with marketing strategy.
I definitely think that extra eyes can't hurt, and having a set of eyes go over that would help anyone out. We'll get you in to check out our process. I always think that we're doing all right, and then I get on one of these conferences and I go, 'No, we're not okay.' Now, there's lots of it you can be learning. There's Always Be Learning. ABL is something I'm very, very fond of, and hearing from someone else's perspective is always exciting.
Floris: A word of caution: never really go down that rabbit hole. There's always that risk. Sometimes what you're doing is actually good enough, right? It's having someone affirm that sometimes that is needed.
Bonus: Plan, Plan and Plan
I am guilty of being an engineer first, business entrepreneur second, and that means that I have a ready-fire-aim mentality. It's very difficult for me. I'll spend 90% of the time on planning, and 10% on execution. When it's executed, it's fantastic and it always works.
Floris: If that's your mantra, that's really good because Albert Einstein said that if he's got an hour to solve the problem, he'll spend 55 minutes on understanding the problem and 5 minutes on actually solving it.
Perfect! I hadn't heard that quote actually. That's cool. We're coming very close to the end of the podcast now. I had a couple of quick questions. You might have already answered them, but you brought up Simon Sinek's Know Your Why. I wanted to understand from you what is your favourite book or what is the book that you suggest for some of our listeners to read to further understand customer experience.
Suggested Read: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Floris: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. One of my favourite quotes is you can control what's within your reach, but you can only influence what's not within your reach. That's something that helped me quite a lot in my career as well. Similar to you, I used to go down quite a lot of rabbit holes and I used to want to impact all kinds of things, but I couldn't and I used to build so much frustration in me. I read the Stephen Covey book, and since then I only focus on what I can manage, what I can influence is great. Anything outside of that scope is unfortunately beyond.
I have that book. I thought it was in my bag. It must have been in the car at the moment. I'm going through for a second read. It's definitely a fantastic read.
I love having you on the show. Is there anything else you'd like to cover?
Floris’ Tip: Breathe, Think It Through and Move Forward
Floris: If you're a budding entrepreneur, if you're starting out, it might feel overwhelming. Focus on your breathing. I tell that to all of my kids and my wife, and I use that technique. When you get overwhelmed, whatever the reason, slow down, breathe, think it through and then move forward. That applies for business, sports, even tests. Focus on not getting overwhelmed. Don't overthink.
The guts sometimes, right?
Floris: Yeah. Even now at my age, I'm still learning to listen to my gut. The older I get, the more I want to listen to it and the less I want to use my head because my head sometimes can go off on many tangents. Instinct is one of the crucial factors in business that cannot be monitored or quantified, but it shouldn't be underestimated.
I completely agree. I think everyone's played a couple of games of pool after a couple of beers and they all of a sudden become better when they stop thinking about it.
Floris: Inhibition levels drop.
What is business freedom to you?
One last question. The podcast is Business Built Freedom. What is business freedom to you?
Floris: Business freedom is another way to actually get life freedom. Being able to secure an income for my family so that I can actually spend time with them. Live to work and not work to live. It's the freedom of actually being able to have that good work-life balance but also have an impact on the life of the people around me. Hopefully, if I'm big enough one day to actually have an impact on people beyond our Australian borders, that would be nice.
I love having you on the show, Floris. I hope everyone else has enjoyed the time that we've had together. If you do have any questions, we will have him jump across to the Facebook group to better answer anything you might have there. Otherwise, feel free to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback and as always, stay good and stay healthy.
Floris: Thank you very much for the time and for having me on the show, and thanks to your listeners for listening in.
Improving Communication With Marlise van der Merwe
G'day everyone out there. You might be wondering what we're going to be talking about today. Funny enough, it's exactly that: communication.
We're going to be talking about talking and body communication, verbal communication and the right time to communicate, how to communicate in business and why it's important. We've got Marlise van der Merwe from the Alternative Board, and she's going to be talking about exactly that.
Get more tips on how to improve your communication at dorksdelivered.com.au
Why is communication in business important?
Why is communication in business important and how does it vary?
Marlise: Communication is a process and you have to consider the message you want to send to your audience as well as the different listening styles because different people communicate differently and they have a preference to be communicated to.
Some people like more details. Some people would like the communication to be slower. They need time to process what you're saying and feel safe and have that comfortable, calm feel around them. Some people prefer to read through things and process the material in that way.
There are various options on how you can communicate. The important part of it is to consider the intent of the message. What is it that you want to communicate and why?
What are the most common communication challenges, and how can you avoid them?
I remember many years ago, I was doing a meeting with a business north of Brisbane and I spoke to them at the rate that I normally talk, which is quite quick, people say you must have 15 coffees before you get here and I don't actually drink coffee at all. That's no caffeine doing this. It's just how I talk.
At school, I could get in trouble. I needed to slow down with what I was saying, and it feels like I'm going in slow motion sometimes when I'm talking. But I know that for people to listen, people are only hearing a certain amount of what you're actually saying and a lot of that comes down to the body language in the way that you're talking, eye contact, etc.
How do you pick the right audience or how do you know what other people are going to be listening to? Like, if you've got ADHD, a lot of the time, you listen or talk really quickly. Other times, if you might be talking to someone who's a country fellow that likes talking a bit slower but just enjoys the conversation and every single word is meaningful, how do you make sure that the words that you're saying have meaning and you're not just dribbling and that while you're talking, you're using the right style for the person that's listening?
Marlise: The general rule of thumb is to use easy language at a general age of 15 years old. If a 15-year-old is listening and he or she understands the message, you can use this type of language to communicate with people. Not everybody knows a specific industry talk, the jargon and abbreviations they use.
When you use those terms, make sure that you also give a proper explanation of what it means and put it in context. When you're going to talk to people, say, at an old age facility or a specific city, you should do a bit of study of who your audience is—what is the general age, what's the culture, what are the language that's spoken, is English the first language, is it younger generation? Do a bit of research around that region: what's the history like, what technology trends are going in there, what type of firms and technology are they used to.
Once you've got a bit of a background regarding that, you can then work on how am I going to send a clear message? What is the best medium to reach them? Would it be an email? Would it be going on one-on-one talks? Would it be broadcast media?
Business Communication and Cultural Differences
You've touched on a couple of things, including cultural differences, like if you passed your business card to someone in Japan and you handed it with one hand, it would be seen as very disrespectful. Hold it using both hands when passing a business card. Similarly, in a business meeting, the first few minutes are meant to be friendly banter. You don't just start talking about business straight away.
When you came to Australia, how did business communication or communication in general change? Has that been a big shift and change for yourself? How did you fit in or make sure that you were doing the right things?
Marlise: I'm from South Africa. In general, South African people are pretty straightforward. They will tell you a spade is a spade.
When I got here, I had to learn Australian English or the terms and things like, 'No worries' and 'Do you want a cuppa?' I thought, 'cup of what?' Getting used to the terminology was quite interesting. It took about a year to adjust but before coming here, I already started to look out for what certain words mean in Australia. For instance, Brisbane's talk is different from the outback. People use different terms and you pick that up when you talk to people.
By being honest and asking, 'What do you mean by that?' helps them to also understand what might be misinterpreted. Australians love to explain or put a story to the meaning of the word.
I think in Australia we say 'I blew a thong' and it means you've busted a sandal as opposed to in America mother’s would be holding their hands over their child’s ears.
When I was in Vegas, I said, 'Can I have a jug of beer?' He said, 'What? You want a jug of what? You want to see someone's jugs?' And I said, 'No, no. That's definitely not what I want to see.' I pointed to it and he said, 'Oh, a pitcher of beer.'
What are ways to make communication more effective?
Contextually, you need to know what it is that you're talking about and who your audience is. Talking in gigaflops and terahertz to someone who is not in the know isn't going to make you look smarter. It's going to make them feel stupid. And that's not necessary.
Marlise: Imagine the confusion.
A lot of the business communication stuff comes down to not just talking but also the way your marketing is felt. You might talk about marketing in a way that's not recognised by the people.
- Use Terms That People Will Understand
If you're writing about features and benefits or specifications of something, some of the readers might not know why that's important to them. You might be writing it fully as a really passionate business owner, but a lot of the time, you're not your customer. That means that they're not necessarily understanding what you're writing, so they're not going to call you up.
- Ask for Feedback
Effective business communication is very important. How do you know if you've got good communication or you don't? How do you benchmark yourself or how do you do that?
Marlise: Get trusted resources. If you know someone that's got a bit of a background, such as culture, or if you can approach someone that can give you a bit more context, go and look up a few people. There's usually someone in your circle. There's always someone that might know someone that you can reach out to and bounce your ideas with.
I would say go to an expert in a specific field. If it's communication and you've got a specific message you would like to say to Western Australia, talk to a contact over there and you could be introduced to someone in the marketing space that's been operating there for a few years and that might know the demographics of that area. It's always good to test your message with someone to just get a bit of feedback into the message you want to send and they will give you some input into that.
If you've got an important message to share with someone, check it with various people. Check with someone from the Asian culture. Check with someone with South African culture because Australia is so diverse. I read something the other day that the original Australians were like third and fourth generation. There is always be that you could reach out to, and remember to study your target audience.
If you're going to do business marketing and you consider doing a radio advert, talk to the radio owners and ask them what your demographics are like. What's your reach and who are your listeners because they know the market quite well. You don't want to talk to the audience in the 45-65 age group in a young language.
- Utilise Your Target Audience’s Platform
Do a bit of research on the platform that you want to join. If you're going to talk to teenagers, you might consider talking to them through Snapchat or the newest one that they're talking about: TikTok. Who would have known that Facebook is actually used more by the older generation, like 45 to 65.
It depends on who you would want to reach. Consider their platform and the type of users. Some people don't want too many words, and you have to send the same message in different ways. Some people would like to have a bit more explanation of your intent in a certain way. If people want to know a bit more detail, then prepare a message in that regard. If people prefer a short message, do so but with the purpose. Bring that across like in a picture and you will publish that in different areas.
I'm going to think of a scenario here and you tell me if I'm right or wrong or if I've missed the mark. Let's say I run a sandwich shop. You could say that everyone's your customer because everyone eats sandwiches, but if you were to advertise your sandwiches on Instagram, you'd be wanting to have a really nice photo that's going to be relaying the message and getting people's mouths watering. They'll be seeing the crisp lettuce and the steam coming off of it and things like that.
If you were to advertise on Facebook, you could still use a similar photo. But because the audience is more likely to be parents, you might be talking more about the nutritional value of it as opposed to just quickly grabbing a sandwich on your way to work.
If you were to advertise exactly the same sandwich on LinkedIn, you might be talking about big platters and the cost-effectiveness of how this would work and how quickly they can deliver and cater for businesses.
If you talk about catering for businesses on Instagram, no one is going to pick up on that. Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn have their own purpose. Does that pretty much sum up how you'd want to make sure that you're adjusting your message accordingly?
Marlise: Yes, that's right. Good example. You know that McDonald's advert? I think it is 'Shut up and take my money.'
We went to a marketing company a couple of years ago and they looked at our marketing stuff and they said some of the stuff we got there were a bit offensive. I said, 'Really?'
He said, 'Yes, it is. Your email signature has "Leave us a Google review for a free six-pack" and a six-pack relates to alcohol, which means you're completely missing the whole Muslim community who are very much against alcohol.'
I thought about it for a while and thought that's cool, except we just don't happen to have many Muslims that are working with us. So we kept it even though it's grossly offensive. I guess it's about knowing your audience and you can't be friends with everyone. There are too many different ways that people might misinterpret what you're saying, and that comes down to how to know who your clients are and the advertising platforms that you might be using.
- Communicate to Understand and Be Understood
Even if you were stepping away from marketing and business communication, like knowing your family and knowing your business. You see all the time in shopping centres, a child throws himself on the floor, 'I want that lolly.' And then the mother's yelling or the father's yelling, 'No, you're not going to get the lolly now. Get up.' If you have a look, the child is communicating exactly the same way as the parent—yelling—as opposed to effective communication. How do you make sure that you have effective communication?
Marlise: I would say upskilling on one-on-one communication is really important, especially if you're in a leadership position. If you want to be better at communicating, you would have picked up body cues, like yawning or they just want to interrupt you the whole time. If someone interrupts you the whole time, it is like, 'You're oversharing information with me.'
Those types of things will give you an indication, especially in your family members and close relatives. Sometimes they are brutally honest and they will tell you if you've got to speed up what you're saying or they don't get what you're saying. Practise with them and ask for feedback. There are organisations that can help you work on effective communication and they generate more awareness of the different types of communication with people.
How would you communicate with someone who has a specific disability? What if a person can't really observe what you're doing with your hands? You've got to consider that context as well so that your message comes across properly. That also makes the medium that you're going to use.
I love that nowadays, when you look at the news, they've got an interpreter for people who are deaf. They can see and do sign language. Did you know that there are various languages in sign language? I never knew that. I found out by speaking to experts in that field. If you have a hearing disability, you must consider that you've got to know maybe more than one dialect. That's so interesting.
- Listen Twice as Much as You Speak
I've been taught you have two ears and one mouth and use them in that ratio—listen twice as much as you speak. Many years ago, I was working at a shop called Jaycar Electronics and I was one of their highest skilled audio engineers. I've gone to university to study it all. I was selling speakers for certain applications to people that really needed them. I wanted to do really cool stuff, maybe on a budget. I was able to say, 'Can you hear the difference between this and this one?' I was a salesperson, a sales assistant, and I was able to say this is why this one is better and that's why you want to spend the money on this one instead of this one.
Someone came in and he's deaf and he was looking to buy speakers for his son. When he came in, it nearly made me cry because he just completely entrusted everything on what you had to say. I helped him out, but it definitely gave me that you don't know when you're doing something wrong or you might take it for granted that you might be saying things wrong or you might be being rude to people and not even know, which is obviously very different to being deaf.
I guess I was effective at communicating the product, even to someone that was not necessarily able to hear the same way as me.
How can communication be improved in business?
If you're yelling at your kids at home, does that mean you're bad at communication at work? Are there ways to know that you've done one thing wrong or there are things that need to be adjusted? Where would you go to make sure that you're improving on yourself?
- Establish a Safe Environment
Marlise: Usually, when you look at your business processes and company's performance and a specific department or certain areas that are not doing as good as they should but some areas are great, you're expecting more from that specific area. About 90% of the time, it is because you are not having a crucial conversation with someone even if you have all the processes documented. Making sure people are doing what they are supposed to be doing by having that crucial conversation has a big impact on your legal and financial environment.
For instance, when you're having a crucial conversation with someone, he or she will not be honest if the emotional environment is perceived to be not safe. So how do you create a safe environment?
Make sure that they understand that all emotions are accepted. Sometimes when you say something, it might come across as being dictative or aggressive. They say there are two cues when people perceive it's not a safe environment. It's either silence, that is, people don't say what they want to say because they don't feel emotionally safe, or the conversation becomes aggressive. That's when they become intimidating and start shouting. Find the balance to create that safe environment to speak with people.
- Understand Nonverbal Cues
We talked about body language earlier. When people talk to you but don't make eye contact with you, there are various reasons why they wouldn't do that. Figure out which is applicable. You can say, 'If this discussion is too much detailed for you, how can I communicate more effectively with you? What works for you?
You should know your team. If you're in a leadership position, know what motivates your team. There are various tools that you can use to figure that out, the DiSC Profile method is easy to use.
You can get an expert to coach your team and help you with general cues. An interesting thing I've heard is dealers know when a poker player has got a good deal just by looking at their facial expression.
Have you heard of Paul Ekman? He's got a book called Emotions Revealed that reviewed hundreds of different court cases where people have sworn an oath that they're not going to lie. He looked at these microexpressions as they're answering questions. He's also known as the human lie detector and inspired the TV show called Lie to Me. His books have been used in a lot of police academies to teach police how to pick up if there's someone who's lying or not telling what they meant to be saying. I've read some of his books, and it's amazing. As you said in poker, your facial expression can potentially be the giveaway of thousands of dollars if you've done it wrong.
Marlise: Listen to cues. Cues like 'uh-huh' that means they are listening to you. When they're silent and sitting with their arms or legs crossed, they are not engaging with whatever you're saying. Adjust your message a bit and use communication tools to make things a bit more interesting.
- Practice, Practice, Practice
It takes practise. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Practise and talk to your family and even strangers and see how that works for you. Join networks. Have you heard about Lunchclub? It's a networking platform for practising your communication skills, but it's like a networking setup where you get to meet people. They facilitate the introduction, and I use that to meet interesting people. There are various reasons why people do that. It could be to be in contact with people that advance your business in a different area or a country, for instance. They match those needs with other people's similar.
The conversations I've had with those people are very interesting. For me, I've got to practise my communication skills and I've used different platforms to practise my skill set.
For instance, I've joined Toastmasters, and I found that it's a really good platform. I go to various networking events and I listen to what people say and I try to repeat what I heard.
Asking for complex response questions and then say, 'Does that make sense?' The answer is very close, yes or no. Most of the time, people are going to say yes to that, especially if they're not engaged.
Marlise: In business, something that will indicate that your communication isn't effective is productivity levels go down. It could be ineffective communication and leadership, people not holding people accountable for what's happening in that space. They're not having those conversations they're supposed to be having or maybe they're having those conversations but it's not effective. It doesn't come through or across to the individuals. It's very important to have those good communication skills developed.
Marlise: It is also very important to learn and figure out all of the skills that each individual needs to function. You wouldn't employ someone with English as their third language to do safety work, where safety is a high risk.
If you have something slightly misinterpreted, it could affect people's lives.
Marlise: Communication skills should be tied to your positions. Your position, skills and skill levels should be part of that. On the softer skills side of understanding the way people talk, they should have empathy. Those are the types of skills you can develop over time. But if it's a crucial role or position, you would rather employ someone that fits that profile.
- Determine What Motivates Your Employees
People also have different motivational methods. What motivates Joshua and what motivates Marlise might be totally different. I like to learn new things and have different experiences, but maybe you like to have a journey through life and experiment with things and feel safe in that area to do so and then give feedback.
Use what motivates people when communicating with them. If I'm going to talk to my daughter about something that she's done wrong, I won't be shouting. With my son, I have to make him realise the consequences of whatever he's going to do, like 'That's not a good idea because you're going to lose this and this.'
It's about knowing the audience, understanding what motivates them, and adjusting the message. I know that some of the staff members at Dorks Delivered will be very passionate about telling me every single reason why they've done every single thing they've done, while others don't want to be mucking around, wasting anyone's time talking about things that need to be told. Some people really want to have that appreciation and be known. It all comes down to knowing who you're talking with and vice versa. It's not just about having the business owner having good communication. It's a whole team approach.
Join the Alternative Board
If there are people out there that are looking to gain more information or more knowledge, tell me a little bit about the Alternative Board and what you do with them.
Marlise: At the Alternative Board, we gather small business owners and medium-sized business owners with similar complexity and in similar stages of their business around a table for a safe, secure environment.
The type of people that are there are not just open to receive input but also open to give input into someone else's challenges. We use those boards to have a more affordable option for people to talk about business and solve challenges using the room’s expertise.
It's similar to a board of directors in public companies. It has the same structure. Each one gets a chance to present a challenge and then a round of questions goes to understand the challenge a bit more and make sure that the goals are addressed.
And then they go into suggestion mode and then the person presenting takes suggestions and makes commitments according to the business and what he's willing to do, and then gives feedback in the next meeting. That happens on a monthly basis.
They form a trusted environment because they meet with the same people every month and they get to know each other's environment. When they've got an idea, they would bounce the ideas and the way they want to talk with people inside that group. That's really the key to solving challenges and helping each other out and becoming trusted advisers in that regard.
We also do one-on-one business coaching in terms of forming a strategic plan and then having goals in place to reach that specific personal vision of the owner. As you progress, you take those challenges and opportunities to your board.
Sometimes it's really lonely for some people. I met someone who told me that his wife just wants to spend his money but doesn't want to know the challenges at work. He enjoyed joining the board.
Other people from different walks of life join the board to prepare the next generation and someday distance themselves from the business. They want to prepare their team for different roles and responsibilities. Through the Alternative Board, you can meet very interesting people and become good friends.
I've been in business for more than a decade, and sometimes you really feel very lonely over the years. You think you can't talk to your client about that because that might look like a weakness. You might not be wanting to talk to your partner, as you said, either because they have no interest or it's not their cup of tea.
Having a sound board or an alternative board to talk about this sort of things is really handy because you can really dive into business problems and talk to people. How much money are you making? How many hours should I be working? Am I working too much? Am I not working enough? Am I getting to where I should be for the many years that I've been in business?
Marlise: How do I employ someone? How do I write the job description? What should I be looking for? Do you know someone that can help me with this?
There are a lot of scary things for a lot of business owners, and that's cool. I like it. Do you have anything else you'd like to add before we finish up for today?
Marlise: The only thing I would like to add is when you have conversations, consider the relationship you have with that person. When you have a good relationship with someone, you want to keep that relationship and you would use different communication styles that suit that relationship.
I 100% agree. You've got kids. Are you aware of the Captain Underpants books?
Marlise: Oh, yes.
I was only just introduced to the rally a couple of weeks ago, so I'm definitely late to the party. Talking to your kids about fart jokes might be appropriate, but not necessarily talking to a new business contact. They might not necessarily think it's very funny. Just make sure you're doing what you need to be doing, where you're meant to be doing it and being present.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, and give us some feedback. If you have any questions for Marlise, we're going to have her join our Facebook group so you can jump onto the group. If you have any questions, I'm sure she'd be more than happy to help you out. Well, thank you very much for coming along. Everyone out there in podcast land, stay good.
How To Prepare a Business Plan With Marty Lewis G'day everyone out there in podcast land. Everyone's told you need to fill out a business plan, prepare a business plan, review a business plan. What does it all mean? We don't know what's going on half the time in business, but we know that we have to have this business plan that a lot of us can't be bothered doing.
Today, we've got Marty Lewis from Orb Services and he's going to be talking to us about business plans, why they are important and easy ways that you can produce those for yourself.
Learn more about Business Plan at dorksdelivered.com.au
Key Takeaways:
- What's your break-even point and where do you need to be making money? Cross-reference that against your service offering or your product and your price point and make sure that you've got the capability. There's no point saying I need $20,000 a month when on my own I can only generate $5,000 a month because you're lost from the start. You've got to be able to make sure you can deliver what you need and work on that.
- In the early days of your business, focus on volume more than efficiency. The efficiency can come later, worry about getting the volume of customers that you need. You can improve your profit margin from 20% to 23% later or 7% to 15% later. You can't improve it from 7% to 15% if you're not making any money.
- Keep it simple. Focus on what's near. You want to build from that level. What are the things that you can do now with the resources that you have that will allow you to take a step towards that end goal that you're doing?
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Have some uncomfortable conversations. Don't be afraid to get out and make some phone calls, go to some events, all of that kind of stuff. There's not a person that you would look at in business as successful or walking a path that you would like to walk that hasn't done those things. Get out and get amongst it. Embrace it.
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Celebrate the small victories. Celebrate the progress along the way that is moving you towards that end goal.
What's the easiest way possible to prepare a business plan?
- Start With Finances
Marty: I think the first challenge in writing a business plan that people come up against is there is such an abundance of information about it, so it's so easy to get overwhelmed and it's so hard to know what you should focus on—what's going to actually add value. Like most things in life, the best way to write a business plan is to keep it simple, keep it clean and work on what's going well for you.
The first phase is the reference. Where is your business at? If you're in a start-up phase or if you're in a pre-revenue phase, whether you're trying to change the world with your business or you're going to be the next I.T. person or the next consultant, you've got to work on how you are going to get started? How are you going to get out into the market?
The first place that I always recommend for people to start is their finances because that's the thing that brings most people undone. Tell me if I'm wrong there, but you've launched your own business and you're involved in other start-ups. If people don't have money and they're worried about non-revenue generating things before they start generating revenue, they burn through their cash, and all of a sudden, all the great business promise that they had doesn't count for too much.
How to Calculate Risk and Your Finances
I set up Dorks Delivered in 2007. I would say that my risk level is quite low, so when I started it, it was a side hustle. A lot of people start something on the side while they're working somewhere else. For me, it was Education Queensland.
I had to look at what the ongoing expenses were and where they were sitting with the business. For me, I'm always comfortable with three to six months of rainy day expenses. That's three to six months of me not earning a single dollar, and that's where I'm comfortable with my financial bubble. I thought if I've stuffed something up and I couldn't crawl out of it in six months, shoot me. That was sort of my financial level.
I guess it all depends on different businesses, but where's the benchmark? How do you write that into a business plan?
What are your expenses?
Marty: It comes to your personal preference. More than 90% of the people who run a small business will have less than 20 staff for the course of the life of that business. When we're talking about starting a business, I'm not talking about starting the next Apple. I'm talking about starting a side hustle and going out on your own as a professional in the industry that you've been part of.
The way that I do it is the numbers are going to come down to your living expenses. What is your weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly living cost? What's the security blanket that you need? There's no right or wrong answer, but it's the time frame that you need. How long could you survive if you don't make a dollar?
That’s the number one thing that a lot of people get stuck with during the starting phase. People get so wound up about the product and how good they think it is, and they ask the wrong question. They ask their friends if it is good.
The format that I use for writing a business plan is this: how much does it cost you to live each week? That's going to be different and depend on whether you're a single person sharing a flat with four of your friends or you're married and you've got four kids and a mortgage. How much money do you need to bring in every week for your family or personal expenses? On top of that, add how much money your business needs.
Generally speaking, even a small business is going to need $500 in early stages and $500 to $1500 a month to operate. That's without spending any kind of money on marketing.
Marty: If it costs you $1,000 a week to live, so that's $4300 a month. It’s always 4.3 weeks in a month, not 4. You need $4300, but let's say you need $4500, plus your business is going to cost you $6,000 a month to survive.
What's your comfort factor? Are you prepared to start your business today? If you run out of money in a month, do you need 6 months or 3 months to go back and get a job?
Generally speaking, I would say you want 6 months of runway if you're going from a zero revenue position. I've seen people do it with less. I've seen people who need more. It really does come down to you as an individual.
What are the expenses that you need as an individual? What are the expenses that the business is going to need and how long do you need? That formula will give you the dollar value that you need to have that security.
Can I do a better job than my boss?
A lot of people start a business not because they're looking for a good investment. It's like when people buy an investment property and don't look into the numbers. They start a business because they can do a better job than where they're working. They're buying a job, not buying a business. 'The boss earns a dollar, and I earn a dime.’
Marty: 'The boss makes so much more money, and I'm getting paid $40 an hour. The bosses charge me out of 100. I can do this.' That's very small-minded thinking.
- Survive v. Thrive
The risks that the boss takes are also quite high, and let's talk about time. You're talking about $6,000 a month to survive. You didn't say to thrive, and that is very important. You didn't say anything about marketing expenses.
When it comes down to running a business, there's the trench work that you do, which is earning the dollarydoos, and then there's the work that just comes about the actual time invoicing, the time doing the reconciliation, the time finding those clients and any other maintenance stuff that you need to be doing, filling out insurance forms every year or whatever it is that people just used to take up their time, and managing staff.
If you had to say I can work an 80-hour week while I'm working with my boss at the moment, is there some way that you can work out how much time I’m going to spend in the admin world where they aren't billable expenses before you just go out and undercut what your boss is charging by $10 an hour?
Triple Your Survive Level to Become Your Thrive Level
Marty: It is really rookie thinking, but plenty of people have done it and in a lot of cases, some people can't do their job. Maybe their boss is not looking after their people, maybe their boss about looking after their customers, but you are naive at best and stupid at worst if you think that the boss is making a lot of money just because they charge $100 and pay you $40 an hour as a tradesman. That's not the reality of it.
Without a specific business, it's hard to quantify. Coming back to that example that we started with, let's say you need $6,000 a month to live. Generally, double or triple that figure and that will be your comfort point. Let's say that it's $6,000. At $12,000 to $18,000, you're probably pretty comfortable. This comes down to one of the really important pieces around business planning: what is it that you're trying to achieve?
If you’re someone who wants to make $20,000 a year as a side hustle—and I would rather help those looking to do a side hustle in semi-retirement or a job to put their kids through school than help Apple make another half a percent—there are so many different business plans out there. You just have to know what's good for you.
As a business owner, you're going to need to make $6,000 a month to live. Your comfort point is, let's just say, going to be double that. Do you have the capacity on your own with the price point that you think you're going to go at? Say you're going to charge yourself at $120 an hour or $100 an hour?
That means you're going to bill, not work. Your price point is 6. Say it's 100. You've got to do 60 hours a month at $100 an hour. Do you have 60 hours a month worth of work lined up? The next step on the back of that is the balance between capacity and revenue. Say your thrive point is $12,000. Can you physically work and bill 120 hours a month? You may be able to or you may not be able to.
You can start to stage it out at that point. As you know, business is a constant balance of 'Okay, with the resources that I have now and the price point that I charge, I have a capacity for this.'
If that's $12,000, then you need to keep an eye on the triggers because when you're operating and generating $10,000, the question is, what are you going to do? Are you going to expand that capability and put on another employee so that now you have the capability to make $20,000 a month? Or do you invest in some systems processes, try and refine things so that you can still make $10,000, but you can keep more of that $10,000 or you can profit more out of that?
It's very specific to what you're trying to do. But generally speaking, if a business is starting out, they're going to try and make somewhere between $250 and $2,000 a month. That's a very common target.
As you said, it's all about what is it that you want to do? Is it your 10-year plan to just have it sitting there, putting away in the background, turning over some coin, creating a residual income? Or is the plan to have created a legacy to pass onto your kids and it's going to be a family business that you're running? There's no right or wrong answers.
When I had my first contracted staff member come on board, he was working 10, 20, 30, 50, 80, 100 hours a week. We had work coming at us. It was just going crazy. We went, 'This is fantastic. This is so great.' He's going nuts. I'm going nuts. He's loving how much he's getting paid. I'm getting paid plenty.
And then he had a stroke and then I was well stuffed. I went, 'What am I going to do?' There weren't enough hours in a week for me to do what he was doing and what I was doing. We did lose a couple of clients. We nearly lost the business because we hadn't planned forward for some sort of catastrophic event like that.
The reason I'm sharing this story is with COVID that's hit, we've got businesses we're working with that had 50 or 60 employees and they've been dropped down to 5 or 6 employees and they’re more profitable now than what they were before. The business owner's back on the tools, and he's enjoying it because he's not doing any of the stuff anymore.
- Keep It Simple
When it comes down to writing a business plan, how long should it last? Should it be a 12-month thing or should it be reviewed every 6 months?
When do you reassess your business plan and make sure that you are on the right path? How do you make sure you're making achievable micro goals instead of a big dream?
Trading Time for Money
Marty: There's a couple of pieces in that. I started out helping tradies a lot, and I help a much broader spectrum of that now. What it boils down to is my core clientele seem to be people who have made money out of their professional skillset.
Trading time for money is a big part of their service range and they make a margin on the staffing roster. The core thing that I see across industries is people start out on their own, got 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 staff, and then gone. They go, 'This is just too hard. It's too much headache. I don't spend any time doing what I'm doing. I'm cutting back. It's me and two people.'
And they're significantly happier! Their overheads come down, the stress comes down. These are all things that you've got to be mindful of as you're going through. How do you time it?
The Penthouse
Marty: A very common question is how long do you plan for. The crux of this is people get tired of fantasising about what their business will be, which I call the penthouse. They fantasise about that ‘big, hairy, audacious goal.’ This would be the business.
You're fantasising about the penthouse, but you can only build the penthouse when you've got the other 45 levels done. If you're in a position where your penthouse is a good goal, that's great.
Breaking It Down
But instead of spending time working out what decorations you're going to put in the penthouse, work out how you are going to pull the foundation. Work out how you get from the foundation to level 1, from level 1 to level 2, and so on. Whilst it's good to have that big, hairy, audacious goal or that grand plan for your business, your business plan must guide you to put your time into what's most productive for you now.
Often, the things that people get tied up in are decisions that don't need to be made until there are extra two staff and extra 15 clients. Put your time and your resources right now into the next two clients because that’s how you get the next 5 clients, which is how you get the next 15. It's breaking it down.
- Focus on What’s Near
To give it a timeframe, have an idea for as far ahead as you can see, and that'll change depending on the time frame and your situation. I've had times in my business where I'm like, ‘If I get to the next financial year, I’ll reassess it then.’ Other times I'm like, 'Oh, I can see this in 10 years being this nice penthouse.'
Think about your business as far away as you can and then bring it back. What are the things that you can do in the next 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? If you want to come a little bit smaller than that, what are the things that you can do in the next month.
What are the things that you can do now that are going to take you towards that penthouse? If you're on level 0, then build level 1. When you’ve built level 1, you can build level 2. When you’ve built level 2, you can build level 3 and so on.
You've got to put 98% of your effort into level 0 to 1. Otherwise, 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and the penthouse definitely is never going to happen.
You use that penthouse as a great guide for you to shape where you're going, but bring it back to 3, 6, 12 months and what's going to make the impact for you right now?
- Celebrate Your Progress
I think it's really good because a lot of people look straight to the goal and don't look at the footings. They don't have a look at how big what’s sitting underneath the iceberg that hit the Titanic.
Marty: It's a one-degree change that boils water because 99 degrees is not boiling, but at 100 degrees, it's boiling. It's a one-degree change! People are only focused on that boiling, and anything less than boiling is considered failing. But the movement from 20 degrees to 23 degrees is massive—23 gives you the capacity to go to 25 to 28 to 40. You've got to be able to celebrate the progress along the way, which is moving you towards that end goal, not just the end goal.
Upon the looks of it, whatever the time is that I say something's going to take and then mentally times it by two, that's probably how long it's going to take.
6. The Plan Needs to Adapt I set a three month goal to automate a lot of stuff that happens to the podcast. I thought three months should be fine to create a project management piece of software that will show us the Day 1 to the day the podcast is aired.
It didn't take three months. It took probably six or seven months to get it finished. It didn't take just the hours that I thought I'd be doing in my spare time. It took longer than that. Life gets in the way, things happen, COVID hits, who knows what's going to happen.
One of the things that I thought that definitely encapsulates it is the way that bamboo grows—the first year it sleeps, the second year it starts to creep, the third year it leaps. It just grows ridiculously quickly, but it's not without the seeds, the nurturing, the watering and not seeing any growth for quite some time.
With relationships, you don't just go and ask someone to marry you on the first date. You talk to them and you get to know them. It grows out, and that's the same with clients, your business, your staff.
Marty: I've just upgraded and rolled out a fairly substantial SharePoint set up, an infrastructure for myself as an operating system. I wouldn't call what I do project management so much, but there's a project management element to it. It's how I manage my clients, the relationship that I have with them, the information that I exchange with them, and how I deliver that in a really professional and top-of-the-line way. I've used SharePoint to do that.
I haven't done a project like that that I haven't underestimated by 50. You got to accept that you got to wear some punches.
And the point that you talk on is the plan needs to be able to adapt. You've got to have some element in there for you to be able to adapt when things haven't gone well. Plan for the best, and expect the worst. You've got to be able to work with this stuff that you have.
7. Volume v. Efficiency When it comes to software, you've got a budget that you're trying to achieve, you've got a number of hours that you try to do, you've got a way that you deliver your core service. I guarantee you, if you're starting, there will be software off the shelf that will help you deliver that.
One of the easy things that you can get bogged in is refining your product, refining how you do this, and refining all of those things. That won't matter for you nearly as much in the early days as getting more volume. You can refine the efficiency of how you do something once you have volume.
There isn't a software suite in the world that is going to serve absolutely everything that you need it to do. So whether it's your CRM, your marketing software, your Monday, your Azana, it doesn't matter. Work with what you've got, especially in the early days.
If you're somebody listening to this thinking, 'Hey, my boss makes a dollar, I get a dime, I'm going to step out and do this.' You can't afford in the early days to be spending so much time refining your product. You've got to know that you add value to somebody. You've got to know why you add value to somebody. You ought to be able to deliver that at a fair price point. All of those things.
When to Refine Products, Processes, etc.
The point for you to really refine that and put a polish on it is somewhere between your above break-even and double break-even slash triple break-even. You're in a comfortable place. You've got to get uncomfortable, particularly if you don't have a budget to be doing. We haven't even really touched on marketing and promotions.
If you're starting a business, one thing I can guarantee you is to get comfortable selling yourself because that's going to be part of it. Those relationships take time to build. Two customers become four. Four customers become eight customers. Eight customers become 16. It's hard work, but you've got to be doing that work at the start. Use what you have and accept that it's going to take some time to drive through that.
- Everyone's Not the Right Fit
You're ready to speak in front of people. Cold calling isn't that bad.
Marty: I am a horrendous salesperson, but you ought to remember that you're not trying to sell something to somebody.
You’re Not Selling Something
Somebody showed up at our door yesterday and he was trying to sell us a solar system. He was doing stereotypically all the things right. I was listening to my fiance talk to him, and he got her to say yes, that that would be good if we could save that money. And then as soon as she said no to anything, he was just like, but didn't you say you wanted to save that money? $200 a week.
If you're starting your own business, you're not selling something. You're just looking for the same people as you.
We know what you're selling. You're making sure you're making the right connections and everyone's on a different path.
As a consultant, I am fully aware that I'm not a great fit with hundreds of people. I still to this day pick up the phone, introduce myself to people. I do that with much less emotional baggage than I did in the first 3, 6, 12 months of my business.
What changed my opinion on that was the moment that I realised I'm not picking up the phone and acting like that guy who showed up at the door and trying to sell them something. It's not my job to determine whether you see value in what I have. It's my job to put it out there. If you see it and if it fits right but if you say no, we don't have to spend any more time together. I'm just looking for the person who does. That was how I was able to reframe it. That really made a massive difference for me on my sales side in business.
I agree: everyone's not the right fit. If you're the right fit for everyone, you don't fit well with anyone.
Have Some Uncomfortable Conversations
Marty: It all just comes with confidence, and it comes with time. Again, it's one of those things. You can't fast forward that. It's really hard to give that to somebody who's 3 months into business when you're 3, 4, 5 years.
I've been back in Brisbane doing this for 3 years full time. You started this in 2007. You're 14 years in. It's easy to have confidence and belief in what you do when you've done it enough for that belief to be reinforced.
When you're starting out, that belief is fractured and vulnerable, and a bad sales call can shape that. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have to happen, but you're just looking for the right people, you're not looking for everybody.
Who can help with a business plan?
For anyone out there that's listening wondering what we can do to try and get on board here, can they contact you for help?
Marty: Most certainly. I write between two and three business plans every month. It's what I do. It's the fundamental piece of Performance Edge, which is a programme that I run, so if you want to grab a coffee or frothy, jump on Orb Services, head to the Performance Edge page, drop me a line. I'm happy to grab a phone call or grab a beer or coffee. We can talk specifics about it.
Always happy to have a conversation with somebody who's trying to add some value. There's a video that I've got on YouTube, which is some fundamentals around planning. You can check that out if you want to try it yourself, as well as a couple of other resources there on the website.
What is freedom?
Marty, tell me one last thing for anyone else out there that's listening to Business Built Freedom. What would you say is freedom to you?
Marty: I would say freedom to me is the ability to spend the time doing what I want to do. I would still do what I do. I would be even more specific about who I do it with and I would put time into causes and passions. It's being in control, and to a certain extent, we all can access that early when we take control of our choices.
I think that's bloody good advice.
Becoming a Leader With Tim Stokes G'day everyone, I'm sure we've all been in a spot that we've thought about how do we become a leader, are we already a leader, what is a leader anyway? And ultimately in being a leader, is that going to be something that's going to leverage your ability to achieve business freedom? Today, we've got Tim Stokes here, and he's going to be talking about exactly that. How do you achieve business freedom and how do you make sure that you are a leader, and you are a developing leader, and you are continuing your skills, etc. He's from a company named Profit Transformations. Tell me, Tim, in your opinion, what is a leader?
Get more tips on how to become a leader at dorksdelivered.com.au
The Qualities of a Leader
Tim: I've got a great answer to that one. You're a leader when someone is following you because if there's no one following you, then you're just a dictator going for a walk on your own. That's the simple definition for it. It's the effect that you have on other people. If you're inspiring people to follow your words willingly, that's what I would call a leader. If people are regretfully, resentfully, slowly or not very effectively following your words, then that's the sign that the leadership skills could be improved. I think it's as simple as that. It's the difference you're making to other people. I believe leadership is one word: servitude. You're there to serve...serve your followers. It's about redundancy. You're aiming to make yourself redundant through the people that are following you, not rule them, if you like, not dictate to them, but empower them to be like you, to give power to them, to increase their confidence, and to be able to do what it is that you are doing yourself. Ultimately, anyone can be a leader, but it's also very field specific. You could be a leader at home, but not necessarily be a leader at work. Do you think that leadership can be taught or is it something that you are or you're not? We’re All Leaders
Tim: I think we're all leaders. We just probably don't recognise that we are because we all influence other people. As a parent, you're a leader because your children are watching you, scrutinising everything that you do, copying you, mirroring you, following you, saying what you say, doing what you do and copying your body language. I remember watching my daughter look at me when she was about three and she looked at me, saw it on, and then she adjusted her posture and I said, don't do that. She just copied my posture from just watching me without saying a word, and I watched her do it and then I watched her adjust and I was like, 'Oh, don't do that. Have your own, not mine.' We're always being watched. Employees are always watching their bosses. If the bosses aren't punctual, the employees think, 'Oh, punctuality doesn't really matter here. That's great. I don't need to be that punctual.' So we're leading whether we like it or not. I think everything is co-leadership. Sometimes other people lead, sometimes you lead. We probably have a prioritised role of leadership in business, but definitely, leaders are always leaders. I believe selling is leadership because you're leading people from doubt and potentially resistance or a bit of fear into making a confident decision. So when people are in doubt, they need leadership. So selling is leadership to take people from 'I'm not sure what I need to buy,' 'I'm not sure of the price, so I don't have my decision-making criteria,' 'I'm a bit ignorant of what I'm buying. Someone guide me to making a confident decision and buying.' That is a leadership opportunity. Every sales phone call, every sales opportunity is leadership. That's exactly what it is, so I think it's everywhere. Everywhere in business is leadership. At home, you're in leadership mode. Sometimes I say the wife wears the pants, but that's not true all the time. It'd be alternating leadership because that tends to be how relationships work. We call it co-leadership. I completely agree with everything you've just said. I think it's important to make sure that you are walking your best step forward for everyone else to follow suit. With punctuality, as you said, it is important making sure that you are punctual at work. With situations like remote workforces and even workforces that haven't ever met in person, I guess this is coming more and more common, you're very disciplined, very passionate, and you've got all those traits and the business is going absolutely gangbusters. Maybe you're a solo entrepreneur and you're doing that and you decide I'm going to outsource some of these roles and grow a bit bigger. How do you make sure that some of the good traits that you have when you're not necessarily in the office and they're not seeing everything that you're doing and it's not being completely obvious to them because you might only be seen for a couple of hours in a Zoom meeting a week or something like that. Support Your Employees
Tim: I believe that the emotions that you share with your employees is what they pass on to their customers. It's about being there for them. It's about supporting them. It's about constantly being in touch to show that you care about them and care about the work they're doing. It's recognising the work they're doing, appreciating the work they're doing. They actually work for you. So even though they might not be in eyesight, they still work for you. I have clients, and their business has grown and grown and they're in other states and have employees in other states and even other countries. I've got a client who took his business into four countries, and it's just a regular contact. Those clients are always talking to their people wherever they are, touching base with them, seeing how they're going, making sure they're happy, making sure their needs are met, etc. It's not assuming that they are okay on their own. It's actually finding out all the time. 'How's it going? How did you go with the job? Do you need any help? Yeah. Great. Could you do this? Fantastic. Great. Sounds like it went great.' So it's just those regular conversations that I think are crucial. In having those regular conversations, how do you make sure that you come across as someone who's appreciative and not necessarily someone that's micromanaging? Tim: That's really getting the context of what they went through, not just the content. When you start saying, 'Did you do this? Did you do this? Did you make sure you did this?' That's micromanaging. I love introducing numbers into businesses, the eight ingredients that achieve business freedom for business owners. One of them is KPIs and having numbers for the person to see themselves that they're doing a great job because the numbers don't lie. The numbers help people to see that they're doing a great job. The regular communication is great, but when you back it up with the numbers and say, 'Hey, you did an excellent job. You're on that job for two hours. I estimated it to be two and a half. Well done. That's excellent.' And the number backslap. And I'll find that over time that the numbers can fulfil a person with a couple of other ingredients. Then that way, when an employee's fulfilled, they need far less supervision. But it's getting them to that stage is what takes a lot of work. Quit Micromanaging and Being a Business Dictator
You said earlier that everyone's a leader in some way, shape or form. But I'm sure that there is people that we've all worked for or worked with and we've seen that they're not people that would like to follow. You've come across someone that isn't necessarily willing to step away from the dictatorship role. Is that still going to be a successful business or is it just not as successful? I'm sure there's been some famous dictators in that time that have done well. Tim: Well, Steve Jobs is a bit of a dictator, for example. He's controlling everything in a way because no one in any department knew what they were working on until the launch of the product. And then he went, 'Oh, is that what I was making?' I mean, when it all comes together, they finally figure out what they're making, but it's like everyone's sort of locked in a little area. Don't talk to anyone in any other department. It's all secret stuff. That's how that business was run, but it became the most successful company in the world, whereas Google is the opposite. It's like I have half a day off with pay. Just mingle here. Here is a community area. Everyone go and play pool and play video games and everyone talks to everyone from every department all the time. Yeah, you can be very successful if you're a dictator. I've had clients that it's like, why did my staff keep leaving? I can't stand staff leaving. I've got to build in some penalties and get better contracts. I'm like, 'Well, maybe you need to improve your leadership skills.' So I'm subtly trying to say, 'Well, they're leaving because of you and how you treat them.' But he's looking for tighter contracts because he's too much of a dictator, not enough of a leader. Still had a successful business, very successful business. However, if he wasn't there, they used to complain. If he's not cracking the whip, then they're not going to do it. So, yes, businesses can definitely be successful without great leadership. However, I'm about the word optimising and efficiency and taking businesses to an extremely high level. That's a very important ingredient. We're not born leaders. Some people are, but the rest of us are going to figure it out by trial and error of what leadership is by the results that we have and the effect that we have on people. We go 'Oh, okay, let's not say that next time.' You slowly improve your leadership skills from the experience. But we can take a proactive approach to learning this thing called leadership. It's like most people in sales don't know they're in a leadership role. Give them the good news and say, 'You understand you're in the leadership role.' 'What's leadership got to do with sales?' They're in doubt and they need to go from doubt to confidence. There's a leadership opportunity, the leadership journey, to facilitate and take them from their doubt to the confidence of saying to you, 'Oh, this is exactly what I want.' Getting people to that state of mind where they're so confident that they're asking to buy from you is good sales, and it's actually good leadership. Stopping Your Bad Business Owner Habits
As a generalisation, if there's a problem in your business and it seems to be consistently happening, chances are it's the business owner that's causing that problem. If you find that people are leaving or that people aren't answering the phone or aren't doing things in a suitable amount of time, even if it comes down to people having more sick leave than usual, it can be something that they might not even consciously be doing. But that does boil down to something that needs to be corrected. The ship needs to be steered in the best direction or a better direction to what it's currently going. If that is something that you're wanting to do, this is all about leveraging and achieving business freedom. If you're trying to teach your staff how to be minions of yourself, mini-mes, so to speak, what is the best way to step away from a bad habit and towards something that's going to be closer to leadership can be a gift or a developed skill. What's the best way to make sure that you identify and then correct? Tim: I think a really good thing to do as a touchstone before is understand that it's about context. It's not about content. As a leader, you want to create the context. And it's like saying there's a soccer field, there's boundaries, here are some rules. Don't play the game. It's defining the rules and the parameters with which to play the game or how an employee can occupy the role in the business by knowing the parameters and knowing what the expectations are, which is sort of KPI can kick in. 'Here's a performance guide. Hit this number and you're doing a great job.' Run Your Business By The Numbers
It's about getting from Point A to Point B. The road that you follow is not critical, but it's getting to a Point B. Your Point A gets you to Point B, and leadership is about defining Point B so that the person can figure out their way of getting there by using the parameters which you set and that's where policy is. The policy is like a rule or guideline that an employee follows. A simple one is answer the phone two and a half rings. That's a policy. So it's a parameter with which to perform well in your role. So when a business owner gives the clear parameters, which are systems, when you digitise the roll with the parameters and the policies, the procedures are not as important. It's clarifying what the outcome looks like because in the end, that's all that really matters. I was fortunate in about 1999 to look at the business reports that Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire, wanted from his newspaper every week, sent to him by fax by his general manager. And the guy, the general manager, was showing me this. We got on really well. He said, 'Hey, come and check out the office.' He's got like 50 staff in there. And he said, 'This is all the salespeople over here, the production people over here, all the journalists that are doing all the writing, and then we have the finance people, admin people, etc. These are the reports I have to fax Rupert Murdoch every single week or I don't have a job.' I started to realise that billionaires run their businesses remotely by numbers, straight numbers. He said there are 23 offices faxing the same reports, so 23 separate businesses every Monday seeing the same reports. And he said we don't talk too much because the numbers tell the story. And that insight was great for me to understand that when you set the parameters up, which is a lot of work, and then you introduce the KPIs that show the outcome that they're aiming to hit from that role, and you have the systems in place for them to follow as guidelines, you don't need to micromanage. That's when you achieve business freedom, where you don't have to work in your business, because if you set it up correctly or at a very high level, then that's the outcome that you can achieve. Well, I can say that I wish I knew you were around when I started business because back in 2007, when Dorks Delivered was in its infancy and I started off as the cowboy who just went around doing everything that he read online once or had the trial and error and worked out that was the best way to do it. And then I went down a path and hand over fist loads of coin, but went to a spot where I thought, 'Okay, this is fantastic. I got to bring someone else on board. Brought David on at the time. He was going really, really well. He was working 80 hours, I was working 80 hours. We're both going gangbusters, loving it. The family wasn't as keen on it, but everyone else says you got to balance these things until they had a stroke and end up in hospital. And then I can't do 160 hours in a week. So I went, 'Okay, what can I do here to make sure this doesn't happen again.' And removing onboarding times and things like that and started systematising and putting in processes, practices, operating procedures, KPIs, I got to get our business running to a spot where I could step away. His heart attack happened in 2012. It took me until 2016 to be pretty confident in my systems. It was 2018 I was able to step away for 3 months and not do anything in the business and I thought, 'Okay, sweet.' but it took time. Tim: Oh yeah. It takes a lot of work. I can shortcut that for a lot of businesses but you know what it's like. I was talking to a client yesterday about that exact thing and we were just guesstimating that it's probably at least 500 hours' work on your business that you got to do to get to that level. It's a lot of extra work, and if you can shortcut it, excellent. The way I did it I looked at the different things that I do in the business, and I just started writing a list of absolutely everything. I got about 500 different things on a list, and then I was categorising them so you could see was it an accounting role, was it an administration role, was it a technical role, was it on the tools? Where was my time going? That was eye-opening. I saw where my time was going and then speeding up all the different processes, and I love it. You've got to be passionate about it to be able to move it away from a job into an investment. Remove Repetition
Tim: Absolutely. I found that one of the reasons business owners go into business is they just want a change from doing the same stuff all the time as an employee. I think it's a mixture of ingredients. One of the most rewarding roles that you can have in a business is being in a non-repetitious space. You set your business up so that you're not dealing with the same customers, which is the production, you're not doing with sales, which is the same stuff. Same problem, same sort of stuff. And you move into that non-repetitious stage and that's where you can occupy different roles. If you're the business development manager for your own business, that could mean a few things. You could be the product innovator, researching to find new products to introduce into your business that can sell them as line extensions, or you could be going in a state meeting people in your same industry that you're not competing with having lunches and dinners with them and sharing ideas and swapping ideas. You can travel around tax deductible and have this great lifestyle and choose when you turn up for work and when you're travelling and having fun and staying home, researching kind of thing. And that's I think a great role to strive for as a business owner, to be in a creative, non-repetitious space, then life's just fun. It's just enjoyable. Well, the terrible thing is while most people are being rewarded by being paid per hour, most people aren't looking at faster, more effective ways to do things. That is something that I'm really happy that we step away and help other businesses step away from that and make sure that they and their staff are doing things that are speeding up their processes. We don't charge our customers per hour for the work that we do unless we absolutely have to. We normally try and scope it all out and then have a set rate that we're charging them to achieve certain key objectives, and if we don't, then we don't get that money. It's very important that we set up ourselves like that, and I think other businesses should be doing the same thing. That ultimately has everyone strive towards the same common good. You don't want to have people in monotonous, repetitious work for lots more reasons than just it's boring. If they're doing something that's repetitious, it's something that we'll be able to automate. If it's not us doing it, it'll be someone else doing it. If no one's doing it for them, then it'll be their competitors that are doing it and then they'll be out of business. Any job that is repetitious can be automated. Tim: Yeah, that time's coming. We'll definitely move in that direction. Always be learning, and that's the great thing with the BDM role. You're always learning new things about the industry, new ways to talk to people, new ways to become a better version of you and ultimately I guess become a better leader in doing that sort of research. If you had to pick just three effective leadership qualities, what would you say is the three main things that people should make sure they're doing? Consider Weekly Meetings
Tim: I think it's really good to set up a weekly team meeting in businesses. When you set up a weekly team meeting, then you get the collective but you also get the individual at the same time. That's an example of something to be doing, is listening to a collective and instructing a collective instead of just instructing people one on one or communicating with people one on one. I think that is a huge ingredient that moves people towards that business freedom stage. And people like getting together and hearing from other people's point of view. That's a method of redundancy. I found that clients that I've set up the weekly team meetings with and then introduce numbers to employees use the word 'love' like say, 'I love working here since these meetings have happened and we're talking about numbers and all that.' We might think it's a bit scary to do all that sort of stuff initially, and sometimes there is a little bit of resistance from the business owners to do it as well as when trying to get the employees to do it. It takes a few months, but about Month 3, 4 or 5, often employees use the word 'love.' I think that's about as good as it gets kind of thing. 'I love working here. I want to work here until I retire. It's the best job we've ever had.' It's not changing the type of work they do, but just the environment that you create, the culture that you create from that weekly team meeting, getting together. And then I work for the team that doesn't work for you, and that makes a huge difference. They don't care if you're there or not because if a person is happy and fulfilled, they don't care what you're doing. If your employees are not happy and you go, 'I'm taking two months off.' They go, 'Why am I still working here?' They have a grudge about it. If you make your employees happy and fulfilled in their roles, they don't care what you do. You can do whatever you like. You can turn up for work or not, and they really don't care because they're not working for you. They're working because they're a significant part of the team. I think a leader can set that up and then create that redundancy, which I think is an essential ingredient of leadership: to figure out how to make yourself redundant in the role. You've got to make sure you're redundant. We do our best to have a weekly team meeting. I have spoken to other people that have daily huddles to talk, and the staff said that they would love a weekly meeting, but it just becomes too much having daily meetings. Can you overdo it? Tim: Absolutely. Weekly is a magical timeframe. I've had hundreds of businesses that I've introduced team meetings to. Those that strive fortnightly don't make much progress. Those that meet monthly don't make any progress, but the ones that do it more often than weekly doesn't achieve a lot. A week is a magical timeframe. That's what I've found. It's a different day name for every week. And it's just a really good time trying to get your head around so you can say, 'Okay, last Tuesday, remember when this happened.' So they have a good memory for the events of those five days in that week kind of thing. So a week is just a great timeframe. You don't need to be more often because you're trying to review how you went for the week. Reviewing how you went for the day is not going to motivate you, but reviewing how you went for a week, it's a significant amount of effort to review how you went from that week's effort. It averages out some of the bumps as well. You have a great day one day, not so good next day, average day the next day. When you look at the average of the week, 'That's good. I averaged well.' The Meaning of Business Freedom
What does business freedom mean to you or what should that mean to everyone else? Tim: I think business freedom is a state of mind. It can be a physical thing. I like saying to business owners: would you like to have a business where you can go holidaying wherever you like? I got a client who goes surfing in Indonesia in a remote place for two months, sometimes three. That's business for you. That's great. As you said, it's different things for different people. But I think most people, as you said, 19 out of 20 would relate to that: wanting to be able to spend time on the things that they care about, be it surfing, painting, hanging out with snotty kids or whatever else that you're doing. Tim: It's the choices to do what you want, when you want, with whoever you want, wherever you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Final Word
That sounds awesome. I'd love to go surfing for that length of time. I think I'd finally learn how to stand on the board properly. One last question before we head off. What is your favourite book on business and leadership and why? Tim: The E-Myth Revisited I love it. Michael Gerber. He's great. Tim: Yeah, I discovered that when I've been in business for seven years, and then I read the book. I was actually really absolutely shocked and stunned that there's this subject called business and it has got nothing to do with an industry. And that's what the realisation was. Because I was like the typical person. I've got to be really good at my job. I was in a trade service business. I was a fantastic climber, great at destroying trees and turning them into mulch. However, I didn't know how to run a business, so that's seven years of struggle and then I realised there's this thing called business. You can learn about this topic. Then I did the Michael Gerber two-day workshop and that was just life-changing. It changed my whole philosophy, everything about business, because he'd say, why do you work? That's what your business is meant to do. Business works hard so you don't have to. I think that's the best book. It should be compulsory for business owners to read that book when they start a business. I read it in 2007 and loved it. I've since read it again, and just on 'McDonaldising' your business is a big part of that. I think we'll leave it there unless there's anything else you'd like to add for our listeners? I know that there is one thing that I wanted to go through with you, particularly understand that if you are struggling in business, you have some options for people to have a bit of a review and you've got a book that you have on offer at the moment, is that right? Tim: Yeah, I have a book called Eight Ways to Improve Your Business in Five Days. It's got eight strategies to implement to improve your business in eight different areas like employees, profitability, cash flow, marketing, etc. It gives you eight strategies to implement. They don't cost anything to implement them, but all of them will make a difference to your business. That's my challenge for business owners. If you're willing to put eight new strategies in your business, I challenge you to make a difference in your business within a week. It sounds like something no one can lose with. That sounds awesome. If anyone else out there has any questions for Tim, we'll have him part of our Facebook group so you can jump on there, ask any questions that you have for him. Actually, what is the best website to go to? That's going to be easy to say. Tim: Just go to https://www.profittrans4mations.com.au/
Thank you for your time, and everyone out there, stay good.
Working Remotely with VoIP Featuring Renier Schrenk
Today we're going to be talking about working remotely with VoIP with Renier from VoIP studio. So, Renier, tell me, when you jump into working remotely, what are some of the things that you need to keep in mind to make sure that it does appear as if the business is as usual when your phone systems are now abroad or potentially distributed between many places?
Learn more about VoIP at dorksdelivered.com.au
Keeping Busines As Usual
Renier: The main thing is you want a system that moves along well that you can pack up into a laptop take it somewhere else. And with that, the whole cloud-based solution means that everything is kind of already in the cloud in one place ready to go, and you just connect to it. So if someone calls up, it's not being forwarded somewhere. It's not going to someone's cell phone number, it's still going through the system. So you have all of your messages, you can have your call recording style and you can still transfer calls as if you were in a normal office. Understanding Different Phone Systems
So there are lots of different types of VoIP and lots of types of phone systems, such as IDSN, IP PBX, VoIP systems, cloud systems, on-premise systems, hybrid systems, systems that have trunking, SIP trunking, the list goes on. What's the easiest way to drill it down and simplify it? Renier: Many countries have made promises to shut down ISDN because it's old infrastructure and it's becoming redundant to an extent. Some countries have said that 2020 they'll do that and others in 2030. IP PBX is basically the same concept, but it's a completely digital system. So that's also still something that you have in the office, but it's a bit more versatile. You can also get a free PBX, for example, and you can run that from a normal PC. Even if you have a small requirement, you can use something like a Raspberry Pi to put on your little PBX on. That’s a digital system that runs through the Internet. It’s a cloud-based system that backs all of that equipment up and puts it on a server run by the cloud provider. This means you don't have any hardware that you need to worry about. You just need to worry about your connection to that server. That's a pretty big difference when you think about it. Traditionally PBX systems came with this bulky package of hardware. Businesses were paying thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars locked in contracts for years and years and ultimately kind of just felt like that's the way that they had to do it. Gain Flexibility
A lot of people aren't aware of how easy it is just to move across to a cloud system that allows you to remotely work and allows you to have a distributed office without any of that hardware. Imagine you decide, are you going to move office from X to Y, especially if we're looking at commercial real estate in Australia and the way that it's working at the moment. You think, well, ‘what's it going to cost to move everything?’ The beautiful thing is you can move your office two, three, five times and there's going to be nearly no business interruption. Renier: Exactly right. Our team started working from home a long time ago because our very solution allows for that. So why not utilise it? And ultimately, even us as a company, we've saved money because we're a company with global focus. So you need people in different places, different countries that speak different languages. So now we can have a team member in the US, for example, which didn't need us to buy up, you know, a property or rental property or something so that that person can have an office. You just ship hardware that they need and you're done. Most of the things that you use already are probably cloud-based, so you might as well move your phone system too. It definitely gives you flexibility, and it shouldn't be something that you're too scared about as well. It sounds like I'm spruiking VoIP studio, but it's just a product that we've come to love. We've tried lots of others out there, and you could probably do it yourself without having to have any other technical expertise. Renier: Depends on the scale and how quickly you really need it. If you hustle, you can be done in a day. The main thing that takes time is migrating over to a different VoIP provider. But usually, you can have everything set up beforehand. Again, that just depends on the scope. VoIP Can Save You From Disaster
With VoIP, you're not going to be up shit creek without a paddle. It's not going to be the end of the world. It's not going to be that hard. It's not like you have to learn a whole bunch of other things. I'm happy to say that VoIP should have come through and done really well with us and the other businesses that we've been working with. Nearly 10 years ago, Brisbane had huge floods, and as an IT provider, I was asked to quickly go into Brisbane against all the rules of that that were being put in to help people remove servers and critical infrastructure. Now, the good news is for most of our customers, we didn't have to do that because we already had the computers and other bits and pieces backed up. The bad news is we weren't doing phone systems. It wasn't a part of something that we did. And VoIP definitely hadn't really had the legs that it has now 10 years ago in Australia. And that meant that they pretty much lost their phones. They had to be on the phone to Telstra to be able to get the phones diverted to their mobiles.
It was huge havoc. Now, let's imagine the floods happened again. Hopefully, they don't. But imagine they happened again, the desk phone that you're using, if it's already connected to a cloud-hosted PBX system. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can just unplug that phone, take it home, plug that phone in and you're up and running. Is that right?
Renier: Yep. And even if you hadn't said anything up yet, go into your browser log and change whatever setting you want. Now you're forwarding goes to wherever you need it or download the app on your smartphone. Now it's ringing in your pocket. Download the app on your laptop, log in and you're done. And you don't have to contact anyone for that. The Perfect Solution to Remote Offices
One of the things I want to talk about with a cloud-based VoIP phone system is if you've got a distributed office already. So let's say you've got some people over in the Philippines or in India, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, wherever you have you, anywhere and everywhere. As businesses are growing, there's more and more people working from around the place. This gives them access to be within your own infrastructure, potentially available to do inbound outbound calls to clients that are fully recorded with all the analytics injected into your CRM systems. Is that correct?
Renier: Yeah, you can definitely do that. For some businesses, they need that 24-hour coverage, either for inbound calls or for outgoing calls. Because you can have everybody on the same system, all of your data, all of your billing, everything is in one place. If there is some kind of disaster somewhere in the world, like, let's say, you know, an office somewhere either loses its connection completely due to a natural disaster or, you know, a damaged datacenter or anything like that, calls can be redirected to other teams in order to pick up that slack. If you're in a business where you have this very elastic team, it's a fantastic option because you can go from having two people working with you to two hundred in two days and then really two minutes and then back down to two the following month.
Renier: Not all providers work the same way. You know, some contracts don't always allow for such flexibility. So it's just something to consider. But most like monthly rolling contract things, you know, if you suddenly need someone, you add them, you pay your move on. When you don't need them anymore, you to move them. You don't pay for them anymore. We used to basically have the system where, OK, if you don't need to use it anymore, you need to delete them. Now we’re a little bit different. If you need it in the future, instead of having to enter all of the data that you might need from scratch, you just edit that user, make any changes you need to activate them. Monitor Your Employees and Run Your Business Efficiently
That's pretty cool. You also can also make sure they're all staying professional on the phone as well, right?
Renier: So that's a feature we call barging. You can barge in on the call and either just listen, whisper in so your employee can hear you, but not the caller. You can take over the call and make it like a three-way conference. And then at any point in time, the listener can go back to either just listening or just completely disconnect the call if they need to do. We started implementing the system, we started incorporating it ourselves. That way you can have your level one or your front line support assisted by main support without them having to take an entire call. And they can just inject and help with little bits of information. A big part that a lot of VoIP providers don't have that you should be considering when you're looking around are the cool integrations that VoIP offer. There are so many integrations that you offer to further help any type of business improve what they do.
Renier: One of the big integrations that we did recently was Zapier. They automate things, but they do it in a very smart way. You can link to so many different devices or services. It's an incredibly powerful addition that definitely puts VoIP Studio above the competition by a significant magnitude. Renier: It does it in a very simple and complex way, in a sense, because it only points and basically manages all this information. It's very, very cool. It means that if you don't have an integration or you're using sort of a very bespoke product for your CRM system, Zapier is a tool that will most likely build an integration before anyone else.
The Final Word
I hope everyone out there has got a lot more knowledge around how you can work remotely with VoIP, what to do when disaster strikes, how to integrate and use VoIP in a way that lets it be more than a phone system. I recommend that you jump straight across to VoIPstudio.com and sign up for a trial.
Renier: Yep. We don't want a credit card. We don't have any obligation after the trial is done. We're reasonable people. There’s no reason why to not try it. You can't break anything. You're not going to stuff it up. It's not the end of the world. They've got a fantastic support team that's going to be there to help you out. Renier: We have a live chat and a support ticket system. Anybody that signs up will get a welcome email from us. Just reply to that and someone will be there to help as soon as we can. Thanks Reiner, and I hope everyone learnt about the benefits of VoIP for remote workers.
Finding Your Passion
What is passion? It sounds like such an easy question to answer, but you really don't know. Now, today we're going to be talking about exactly that.
I'm sure we've all felt that feeling when we want to go to work. We absolutely love it. The day just glides by, but then other times you get to work and it just feels like you're in the trenches and nothing happens. You think, what am I doing here?
Then when you go home and you work on that passion project and you find the time just flies by. How much does that piss you off? You want to spend some time on what you love but the time goes from six until 12:00 at night. All of a sudden, you're in bed and back at work the next day.
Get more tips on how to find your passion at dorksdelivered.com.au
Consider the “Why”
This is important to think about because most people don't consider why they go to work and what is passion. What is passion, and what is passion to you? Because sometimes you might find time gliding by, while other times it feels like it's standing still. It's important to understand what's passionate to you because at the end of the day, you want to be doing that when you go to work.
You might be in the position right now where you've been running a business for 10, 15, 20, 40 years. Who knows? Or, you’ve just been working for the man for 10, 15, 20, 40 years. It doesn't matter. What's important is you have had this emotion. We've all had this emotion, and we all need to work out why did we feel that way when we're doing that thing? Why do we love doing a certain thing and not another thing?
Because too many people are working in a dead end job or a bosses of a company that they don't really care to be bosses of. They are just looking at a way to escape, we all need to work out a way that we can be passionate about the reason we come to work.
Help People That Help You
I'll tell you what you can do. If you're running a company and you find out that you're really, really passionate about helping people, or change the reason that you're running the company to be more about helping people.
Bill Gates ran a software company for many years while he was running that he was helping people, but not necessarily in the same way as helping people now. The major thing that changed was he understood that he wasn't helping people through technology. That was just one way that he was helping people. He was helping people in many, many different ways. And he decided to step back and understand exactly what he was doing and what drove him.
That’s what moved him away from technology, a very competitive area into what he's doing now around making sure that people are staying safe.
I have a similar, more Queensland based story. When I started my company, I really loved solving problems for people with computers. I loved technology and loves everything around it. What I've realised is I love finding out about new ways to fix a situation that people weren't aware of. So I don't necessarily care about I's and O's and ones and zeros and bits and etc, etc.
I care more about helping businesses succeed through introducing them to new technologies that they may not have otherwise understood or even knew were available. Let that sink in.
I started fixing people's computers when I was about 11 years old or something like that, and I had my first computer from when I was four. All that changed over the years that I've been doing things wasn't just fixing people's computers. It was always about helping people and helping people achieve more with less, because I'm introducing them to new things.
You need to think about what is your why? Why do you exist? Why are you in business? Why are you in your current job? And let's bring it back to the start there. What are you passionate about and where do you find that time just flies and you enjoy doing what you're doing now?
VoIP 101 with Reiner Schrenk
Everything you need to know about VoIP
You might be wondering who Alexander Graham Bell is? He invented the telephone many years ago. That device has changed the way that we communicate around the world. We're going to talk about how to ensure that you are cost-effective with how you communicate. And more importantly, what is VoIP? We've got Reiner here from VoIP studio to go through how a cloud-based phone system works. What is the difference between VoIP and a traditional phone system?
Learn more about VoIP at dorksdelivered.com.au
Reiner: The main difference between the two is traditional phone systems are traditional analog, and VoIP is digital. Analog is not as versatile as digital is nowadays. And with that comes a lot of benefits.
I would say from personal experience is that it’s very convenient. The first analog recordings from recorded tape players were no longer valued as they went over further distances. You'd get weird noises and interruptions. But with using VoIP, the difference between having to go through your CD collection to find a song, you only need to jump onto Spotify with just one click. That's one of the benefits of VoIP being cloud-based. There are different flavours of VoIP and the way it can work. But why should a business jump into a cloud-based phone system?
How VoIP works
Reiner: Yes. Traditional phones have less versatility. For example, when you are on a call with an electrician, you can't move from one point to somewhere else because you are using a traditional wired phone. The advantage of switching to VoIP would be, you can easily have your laptop with you anywhere you go by connecting it to Wi-Fi without moving your desk.
You've got a lot of versatility, traditional phones. You have to have a traditional phone line coming into your property. You then have to have that wired to different rooms, and then you end up having to call an electrician if you want to move the point somewhere else where a huge, big advantage to VoIP would be that you can easily have that on your laptop that can be going over Wi-Fi, you can move your desk, and it's not going to cost you any money.
So there's a lot of these other just infrastructure costs that aren't necessarily always taken into account that you can have that flexibility with VOIP.
Reiner: I've known a lot of people who work from different locations. When they move from the UK over to the US every few months or every few weeks, they'd pack their laptop up and plug in their VoIP phone and use it over the internet.
Finding a VoIP Provider
With VoIP, you also don't get that annoying echo because the whole phone system is digital and faster than it used to be. Rather than running copper lines or going underneath the ceiling around the place. It sounds super, super flexible. But if you've got your current phone system, can you still use a normal phone with VoIP?
Reiner: You can. You just need a VoIP provider. Some people have their phones at home or in their business, and they are looking to swap to VoIP. So what other companies provided was this little box that you plugged into an internet cable and plug your phone in. This transforms your analog phone into a digital phone. This is way more cost-effective and less expensive. These boxes I am talking about are configured.
That’s great that it will give you the ability to use your old phones. You can also go to new phones by using an app, which is another cool thing. Am I right in saying that most providers would allow you to have an app on your phone you can use to make a call using a professional business number? So you don't end up getting calls at midnight from a client through your mobile?
Reiner: Yes. Most providers have both applications. And in some cases, you can still use third-party applications that might be a little bit more lightweight. It's become a far more common practice nowadays with 4G strengthening and with 5G coming in. This will make everything better.
If I'm not in the office, I've got the softphone. A softphone is a little program on your computer that allows you to answer and hang up the phone and take and transfer calls. But when I'm on the run, I jump into the mobile and use the same app when someone is calling in. How does this vary, especially if you're a smaller business without an existing phone system in place or an intelligent phone system? How do people get that sort of hold music in place? One of the cool things about cloud-based phone systems is you can add your hold music, which could be promoting your products. But you're able to add your own hold music, which could be promoting your own products and things like that while people are listening in, is that right?
Reiner: I've been in the VoIP industry for over ten years, and one of the main things that I've realised now is, everybody has blind spots. Someone might be an expert in medieval literature. They might not know anything about VoIP or computers, so you need to make it simple and easy to use while still maintaining that versatility. I know people who were born sometime around the Second World War who use VoIP like most of us. You just need to know which buttons to click then you are set and ready to go and do it all on.
Some of the people that you're talking about were probably around when they had one phone for the street to share as opposed to a phone. If there is a problem with it or clarity solutions, you can always call someone else if needed.
Reiner: It happens quite often as someone will learn how to use the system and then won't change anything for over a year because they don't need to. It just keeps working for them as to how they need to.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of VoIP
A few things that I know people might be wondering about the advantages and disadvantages? Will people lose their number if they move across? This is their lifeline to most people's businesses. The last thing they want to do is to lose their phone number. What's the process around migrating a phone number?
Reiner: There is a porting or migration process depending on the country. Germany has quite strict rules when it comes to telecoms. It can take quite a long time to complete. But in the US, they have this intense competition amongst telecoms providers. The main thing is, while you're waiting for the porting to happen, your number doesn't stop working.
You can have it set to automatically and go to a new number which has the flexibility. And then when you're calling outbound, any of your staff can use the number you've got. The new number will appear and even if people are still calling the old number. Is this a workaround?
Reiner: That's a common workaround.
In Australia, the average onboarding time would take around 30-35 days. This means that you can change the solution without having to worry about being locked into another contract. What are some of the disadvantages of using VoIP? Is there any scenario where you'd say it's important to make sure that you have this extra backup for an emergency? Or is there any time that you'd say VoIP isn't the right solution?
Keeping a Stable Internet Connection for VoIP
Reiner: VoIP needs a stable internet connection. If you are somewhere where the connection is a bit spotty, you might need to find a way to strengthen it. Stability is important because it's a constant transfer of data. You also need to secure an emergency service connection because as soon as the power goes out, your internet goes out, which means you won't have the VoIP either.
Yes, that makes sense. During a blackout, as long as you have a traditional non-cordless phone, the electricity is provided through the telephone line. If you've got a bad internet or satellite internet connection, it might not be the best solution. But the advantage is, it's more cost-effective. It's still good to know that if you are looking at something like an Internet-based phone system for your business, you're aware of some of the potential downfalls. So when comparing different phone systems, how do you choose what is the best phone system?
Reiner: Everybody has different needs. The solution we have at VoIP studio might not fit everyone's needs. Most of the time, we need to schedule a meeting and ask the client's specific requirements, then we will try to wing it. So the best solution for getting the best phone system is to choose the right provider that can provide what you need. A lot of providers can offer a month or a long-term contract if you need additional features. But take note that they might be strict with cancellation fees. What I can recommend is you can ask the provider if they can provide a trial so that you can test it out and make sure it can work for you.
I'd agree with that. You don't know what you don't know until you know. For you to understand more about what the best system is, you need to understand the way different people build the system. I prefer cloud-based VoIP systems. We can get an on-premise solution. Other phone systems can work by charging you per user, per minute or call. And that's where you need to work out what works best for you.
Reiner: Some providers may ask for a credit card upfront for trial services. Trial services may vary depending on their terms. If the trial services worked for you, then you can either move on or ask them about your options. It's always a good idea to discuss what you need more than what you want because once your needs are met, you will have a strong foundation.
The Final Word
We have covered a lot today. Reiner, is there anything in particular that we should leave any of our listeners with to be aware of before we close off for today?
Reiner: A good thing to consider is what is special about you and what you do, and how can VoIP enhance that. Because any company can get away with any kind of telephone system, but if you go for VoIP, it's something that will not just replace the phone system, rather it'll enhance it. And how can VoIP make it better? There are loads of features out there, and those things can make a company sound better and look better.
We're going to have you for a couple more episodes to talk more about that. It's been lovely having you, and I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this. If you have any questions, feel free to email us and as always, stay good.
Defining Your Message With Lisa McLeod
Focus on what you really need
Are you being caught in a trap of spending heaps of marketing and getting no traction? We’ve got Lisa McLeod here from Selling with Noble Purpose and she's going to talk about how to make sure that you have a clear cut and defined message. So Lisa, what are some of the main blunders when people start marketing and trying to sell in a new business? What are the things you think they need to focus on?
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Focus on these three areas
Elizabeth: There are three main things that get in peoples’ way. The first thing is, what they think it means to sell. This is over-describing what they do. Secondly is their expertise. Most people start a business because there are some customers out there who are not getting their needs met. What gets in their way when they are trying to sell is that they are too deep in their expertise. Lastly, they don’t have clarity and purpose. They think their purpose is to sell, but the purpose is to make a difference to your customers. This should be the center of your marketing message and not your product. How do you make a difference to customers? What is your impact?
I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of doing that previously. I’m an engineer who thinks very much in detail. I was in a spot where I knew I had a great product, but I thought, what if I have the cure for cancer but I don’t have the voice and clear message to tell everyone about it. Do you have an example of seeing businesses that highlight what they do instead of why they do it?
You need a clear voice
Elizabeth: That's right. What they do versus why they do it. Let’s say with the cure for cancer, the fact whether it's injectable or it's a pill, all we care about is the cure for cancer. We need to think this way as sellers. We had an IT company we were working with and it's an American based company. They do IT services and you can outsource all your IT to them. So when I started working on it, we said, what impact do you have on customers? One guy in the room stood up and said, we help small businesses be more successful. That’s what happens when you have that clarity of purpose.
Every time you interact with a customer, that's what you're trying to do, is to help them be more successful. And if you're a business owner one of your challenges is getting your people to have the right behaviors with customers.
Absolutely. We changed our marketing messages around after addressing the question of what are we actually doing? We've redefined the message of what we do in business and what we do for people's lives to challenge their operations through creating kindhearted personal relationships driven by cutting edge advancement. We changed our marketing message and said we guarantee your uptime and if you go down, we pay you. The message is very clear, we guarantee that your business will run perfectly with technology and we're happy enough to put our money where our mouth is.
Elizabeth: The exercise you have done is really important. Finding your why can be easy if you have a small business with a handful of employees, but if you go to a mid-size business, you need to be explicit. Why? Because you want a competitive differentiation.
Even if what you are selling is not unique you’ve got to show that you do your business differently. Second, you need an emotional engagement with your people. You have to drive emotional engagement with your team to motivate them to try new innovation. As a leader, you have to articulate the impact you have on customers and make that the north star of the business.
Differentiation is Key
As your business becomes bigger, the message shouldn’t get watered out. What is the differentiator between copycat-like businesses such as McDonalds and Hungry Jacks?
Elizabeth: You’ve got two key ways to differentiate yourself. Number one is your product, and number two is the experience of doing business with you. I was running the session for a group of leaders and we were talking about this. McDonalds and Hungry Jacks can’t be differentiated from each other. What interests me during the session is, I asked who stands out among these organisations? There is an east coast of America company called Chick Fil-A and a west coast company called In-N-Out Burger. I thought people were going to come to blows arguing about which one is better. The reality is, is the food better at either one of these fast food chains? The place of true differentiation is the experience that you were creating for your customers.
Don’t change your business only in response to your competitors
If you've got a business and you're trying to try and work out how to make sure that you are targeting your audience appropriately and being separate from your competitors, what's the best way to do that?
Elizabeth: If response to your competitors is the basis of what you're doing for your business, you are not going to create a differentiated experience. If you want to create true differentiation and be clear with your message, you need to find your purpose in the way you do it. You have to answer these three questions:
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How do we make a difference to our customers?
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How do we do it differently in the competition?
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What do we love about what we're doing?
When you answer these questions, this creates the story of your business and that's the story you go out to the market with.
Talk to your customers and get honest feedback
I always say the best way to find out how you make a difference to your customers is to ask them, would that be fair?
Elizabeth: Totally. If people are buying your products or renewing their contracts with you, this means that you are doing something as simple as creating a great experience. Or maybe helping them to be more successful because as an IT company, you are doing all their back up IT. Company owners can sleep at night knowing that you take care of the technical side of their business. It’s not just about the product but the impact you are making on your customers.
Find out the “why”
We've had a customer who had to leave and so I asked them, what could we have done differently? So if you're selling something that's not very much a commodity and not like a burger, like an IT service, How do you make sure that you understand your competitors? How do you make sure that you know them well enough to know that you're doing the right thing and you're definitely doing it differently to the competition?
Elizabeth: Instead of asking your customers why did you buy from us, instead, how did working with us impact you? They can say, you were cheaper, you were the first one here or you had more widgets, but what matters is to know the impact you have on them. This is how you will differentiate your business in the competition.
One of the products we sell was by far the cheapest in the industry, it is selling us as the hook to get you in the door. It is not a high-profit product. It is up to think about possibly what if their current provider isn't doing what they meant to be doing and starting to dive in to see how we are different from their current provider.
In B2B, target businesses you are excited about
Elizabeth: I once asked the customer, “why did you pick us”? They said, we picked you because we could tell that you were really excited about our business. And so I started saying that we only go for businesses we're really excited about. You have to be specific on what you sell and make sure you have a lens on it.
It’s the frame of mind. When you are excited that rubs off on other people. Once you have purpose in business, what's then the connection to profit?
Elizabeth: Companies with a purpose bigger than money outperform their competition by over three hundred and fifty percent. People that sell with purpose, whose purpose is to improve life for customers, outsell people focused on targets and quotas. And this is important if you're in any kind of a sales function or if you're a leader in the business, the reason why is flip it. Who would you rather have calling on you? Someone whose purpose is to help you or someone who's just trying to close you? It shows up in every aspect of the business because you've got to have really clear systems and processes just to be a successful business.
But you will not be a differentiated business which is the most profitable business, you will not be differentiated unless you have clarity about how you and your team make a difference to customers if you're just sort of running your business in that transactional way. Profit is the test of your validity.The purpose of a business is to improve life for customers. Profit tells you whether you're doing it or not.
Create a tribe of true believers
So you're focusing on the right information. A good example is Apple. What they're selling is the experience of selling the support. They're selling a beautifully crafted product. Their message is clear.
Elizabeth: That's right. Steve Jobs was very famous. He had a conversation with John Sculley and he was trying to persuade John Sculley, who was the CEO of Pepsi, to come to work for him. And as the CEO of Apple with the great excitement and honor, I got to interview John Sculley a couple of weeks ago for a piece I did for Forbes. And he said, I remember Steve Jobs saying you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or you want to change the world?
Apple is a good example. And you might be listening to this and you might sell ice cream or concrete, but there is innovation in every space. And the reason Apple has innovated, the reason the customer experience is amazing. The reason the products, they're always on the cutting edge, the reason they look beautiful, the reason that out of the box experience is great is because they're not selling technology. They're selling making a difference to you. They're selling you on having a beautiful experience. And that's where everyone's eyes are pointed to. And where that comes from is the language of the leader.You point the team and if you point your team towards revenue targets.You'll only be mediocre if you point your team toward something bigger and then use those commonplace metrics as a way to measure your progress. You'll create what I call the tribe of true believers, which is definitely what the people at Apple are also places.
So I understand that you've got a special code that we can copy for any of the listeners now?
Elizabeth: Yeah. So if you want to buy the book, you can enter your receipt number, which I love. But if you don't, just for your listeners, just enter the code BBF and you'll get the assessment.
There's no reason why people can't jump across it and get that happening. I'm going to ask you a question. It's probably going to be an easy one to answer, but we ask most of our guests, what's your favorite book?
Check out Selling With Noble Purpose
Elizabeth: So my latest book is Selling With Noble Purpose. I will tell you a book that has influenced me greatly, which is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. And there's a connection between that and the work that I do. Some people don't think a man searches for meaning is about finding something to tether yourself to during challenging times. And he was a victim of the Nazi concentration camps. The thing that I realised in reading that book years ago was people need to tether themselves to something bigger than themselves and that that was the key to surviving a challenging time.
While my circumstances are not as dramatic, there's a story in selling with noble purpose about when my husband and I lost a business and I had to dig deep and find a way to come back from bankruptcy. Selling With Noble Purpose is a lot of how I did it. I'm not comparing myself to Viktor Frankl. I'm saying I was inspired by him and I thought about him a lot. I thought about what I didn't know ten years ago when I was having to come back from the recession, but I realised in hindsight that tethering yourself to helping your customers vs tethering yourself to your revenue number, that will give you the tenacity to prevail.
That's good advice. I know that I found that a long time ago that I love helping people with technology. But what I really love doing is making a difference in their lives. And the book that changed my life is the Go-giver by Bob Burg. He's changed my mindset about business and how people hold your information.
Elizabeth: There is now reviewed data that says that everything that you've just described about helping others and putting them first results in you. Winning your market, having more profitable business and enjoying your life a lot more.
Living for something bigger than yourself. Hopefully that means you're leaving a legacy behind or you have set a good example. If anyone is looking to better their business and make sure that you are selling with noble purpose, you can jump across sellingwithnoblepurpose.com and jump onto the assessment. Otherwise, stay good and stay healthy out there.
Understanding Branding and Marketing With Susan Meier How does branding and marketing work? We've got Susan Meier here from Susan Meier Studio, and she's here to talk about how to ensure your branding works. Susan, how do you measure marketing and branding?
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Susan: Branding and Marketing are tricky things to measure. Both are relevantly related to each other. It is essential to utilise reliable metrics and net promoter score to measure the success of work. Brand awareness is necessary. Through brand awareness, you can weigh the organisational goals versus providing excellent customer service to your clients. I always look at the overall health of the business when I am working with a client. People that are looking for a branding expert like you should have an established business or at least they have data to work on. Is that correct?
Susan: Yes, I usually work with established companies that are looking to upgrade or expand their business. I also work with start-up companies that are looking for growth. I like to measure success in how well you are creating a relationship with the stakeholders, with the users of your product or service. Getting feedback and building communication about your brand is highly recommended as part of all branding projects. Setting up and measuring your goals
Listening to your audience and setting goals is very important. How do you go about setting goals and measuring them appropriately?
Susan: There are three parts to consider: Get to know your customer -You have to listen to them and identify what's important to them that relates to what you can offer.
Get to know yourself -Who you are, what do you care about and what do you stand for because this will make your product special.
Get to know your competitors - You have to be unique and different.
When my clients want to develop a longer-term relationship with their customers, they would normally need a name, logo, legacy and a website. Initially, we will talk about the objectives and goals and sit down in a room with all the stakeholders. Remember that, when everybody is aligned with the goal, the organisation becomes more powerful in getting the team on board and making these things happen.
Your branding represents your business Does this mean that you need to change your branding strategy from time to time? How do you make sure that you stay on top of it? Susan: Everything is always changing. You have to ask yourself, "Where do we want to be next year?" It doesn't mean you have to redesign your logo or rename your company every year or every ten years. But you can do a re-assessment with your audience, people, personal target and the market. Some clients are refreshing their process by talking to their customers to get feedback and test the communication materials. And every so often, maybe the logo and the branding evolve. Branding logos are important because people will remember the business name. But how important is your logo and its colours? Susan: People have these intimate relationships with logos and brands that are often subconscious. The big iconic brands like Snickers, Kellogg's and Big Brands have super tight style guidelines and they are careful about how they evolve. Your colours, typefaces, tone of voice and your photography style will support your personality so think about it mindfully and create. Before your branding shows up in the world, you need to know what your brand or logo stands for.
Susan: There are visual cues that tell you this food is fresh or if this product is food, hardware, etc. I was a strategy director of a packaging design agency. Back then, what designers do when they are designing or packaging a new brand is they do an audit of what category this cue falls to. You have to be good with design and it needs to be consistent.
How Susan Can Help
You are correct, you need to look at the category carefully. I wanted to find more information about how our listeners can go about their branding. You have a website (www.electrifyyourwork.com) Can you please tell me more about it?
Susan: That's right. So that's the landing page for my site, and from there, you can get to a couple of different things. So I serve large corporate clients as I was speaking about. But then I also have developed a toolkit for smaller businesses so that they can leverage the same tools that I use with larger clients to help them. These include the process of understanding the customer, reflecting on their own business in their own company DNA, and then thinking about those things that really will make them stand out and be different. You can go to both parts of my site from there, whatever is relevant to you. You can download the overview of good branding and then some workbooks and other good content if people are interested in going further for free.
Find Your Freedom Very informative website. What book influenced your life and made you realise that this is what I wanted to do, or this is why I wanted to help people to find more information about brand strategy? Susan: The seminal book shaped my path is not about branding or business. The book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, which came out a long time ago, probably in the mid-nineties set me on the entrepreneurial path. It's not just for artists, but the idea sent me to running my own business and creating life and my professional life in the way that I wanted. I treat my whole life like an art project. That's why being an entrepreneur works really well for me. We talked before we started recording about freedom, which is the core of this podcast, and that's very much a subject near and dear to my heart. Freedom will give you a blueprint on how to succeed and live your life. That resonates really strongly with you. But what do you see as freedom or what is the vehicle of your business driving you towards?
Susan: I think freedom is the ability to do what you want to do. It serves as your internal compass and your purpose. I'm in control of my schedule. I can pick the clients who I want to work with, travel and have hobbies when I want to. You don't have to do things the way they are laid out for you. We have this path like you're supposed to go to school and then go to law school then get a job. I think we all have these things that hold us back from being kind of free and creative. I can spend time with the family and make sure that I'm not working at the end of my life. I'm enjoying everything that I'm doing and that some weeks that means I'm in front of a computer eighty hours in a week. But it doesn't mean I'm working. It's something that I'm enjoying doing. There's always the little loose ends and not that you don't like time, but that's going to be anywhere. But being at a peak is, I think, pretty special.
Cash Flow Basics With Sarah Stein
G'day everyone out there, today we're going to be talking about cash flow basics and why cash flow is important in your business. Cash flow should be straightforward enough, but people seem to keep doing it wrong. So we've got Sarah back again from Miss Efficiency Bookkeeping to see what we can get through when it comes to cash flow. So Sarah, what is the number one rule when it comes to cash flow?
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Where is your money going?
Sarah: I think the number one rule is just to keep an eye on it. Just because you're profitable on your P&L doesn't necessarily mean that your business is going to be successful. You could have lots of profit on paper, but if you have no money in the bank, how are you going to make payroll? Or how are you going to make those loan repayments? I think the number one thing is to know where your money is going and when and where it's coming from.
Is that more around the forecasting things? What if you've got a brand new business that you haven't done any groundwork with? If that's the case, when is the right time to start planning and seeing where your money is coming from, where it's going, and getting your ducks lined up from day one?
Sarah: From day one. Before you've got any money coming in, because how do you know how much money you need? How do you know what your expenses can be? How much money do you want out of the business? So I didn't do that. I didn't do that from day one.
Ideally, if somebody came to me and said, I'm going to start my new business, this is what it's going to be, what should I do? This is what I would say to them. Put a cash flow in place. Now, it's hard, don't get me wrong. I'm a bookkeeper, and it's still hard.
So think about a cash budget, for example. Now I like to reverse engineer things. So most people will start at their income. Then they'll put their costs in the net, their expenses, and then if they're lucky, they may or may not be some profit at the end, which the business owner may or may not get, because that profit may or may not actually be cash in the bank. So instead of doing that, let's reverse engineer. Why are you in business, and what you want to get out of it? The first thing you could do is make a clarity plan. This is for you personally. It's not thinking about the business yet. It's thinking about what do I, Sarah, want to get out of the business? For myself and for my family.
We haven't even got to the vehicle; we're just starting at the destination. That's where we want to be.
Example of a clarity plan
So my clarity plan, for example, is really simple. I have no debt and have two investment properties. So that if either of my children wanted to be, they could be set up with their own houses. That's it. I don't need a million dollars in the bank. I don't need flash cars. I just want to have no debt and two properties. That's what I want to work towards.
Think about your business plan
Then you need to go to the next layer below that, which is your business plan. So your business is going to achieve your clarity plan. What do you need to do in your business in order to achieve your clarity plan? So that's going to talk about what are the projects that you've got to do. Put your business plan in place now with the end goal in achieving the clarity plan.
Think about what you want from being in business
The clarity plan can change over time. When I started the business went gangbusters, but what I really wanted was to help businesses. So I pivoted to helping with automating businesses rather than automating Education Queensland. Nothing wrong with Education Queensland, but I would rather help businesses between five to 100 employees then help businesses with 10,000 employees.
For myself, a lot of what I want isn't to do with finances as much as it's to do with what I want to be remembered for and what I am leaving behind for my children. My business changed from being a business of passion to being a business of flexibility. Now it's a bit more well rounded and balanced. So I wanted to ask you, so what are the different types of profit and should you just be looking at your business as a vehicle in your investment property or separate to that?
Sarah: That's probably a question that's a little bit beyond my scope, and more in line with an accountant or a financial planner, but I think that you need to look at everything as a whole. You need to look at your asset protection, where those properties are sitting, how you set up for tax, but that's a whole different conversation in itself.
Cash flow is how you achieve your business plan
Coming back to the business plan, the step before that is how are you going to achieve your business plan? That's your cash flow projection. If we start at the bottom, you've got your cash flow, which is working towards your business plan, which is then working towards the clarity plan. They're all in alignment with each other.
We run our cash flow on a weekly basis, so I look at my numbers every day. But again, I'm a bookkeeper. I don't pull a report out of Zero, because that would be too easy. What I do is I take all of my numbers out of Zero, and I manually enter them into an Excel spreadsheet. I think putting it into an Excel spreadsheet manually submits it into your brain. That's the most important thing in my business because I know exactly what's in the bank. I know what's coming in, and I know what's going out
Business owners don't always have to miss out on the piece of the pie
Sometimes shit happens when you are trying to stay in control of your business. If you have some unexpected things happen, maybe a key person within your business leaves or a pandemic, do you prioritise your expenses and income streams if you know that your expenses each month? If they become slightly out of balance, is it the business owner that takes less of the pie at the end of the day, do you need to be more ruthless there, or how do you prioritise your expenses?
Sarah: I don't entirely agree with the business owner taking less. I, to a degree, work with the profit-first philosophy. But something like COVID, our generation of business owners, I think that has fundamentally changed the way we will go into the future with how we think about and do business. Many businesses have had to change the way they deliver their product or their service. I think, in some aspects, COVID has actually been great for business, because it's meant that business owners have gotten out of their comfort zone, and looked at their business differently, as well as looking at their money differently.
Make your payment terms work for you
It's definitely about being aware and putting all of those things that you would normally put in place for good healthy cash flows. Making sure people are paying you on time, making sure you're giving people lots of ways to pay, getting good payment terms, things like that. Then in times of COVID, if you offer a service or a product, get paid upfront. There is nothing wrong with that. I'm of the opinion that if people are not happy to pay upfront, or even make a deposit, and how do you know that they're going to pay you at the end of the job?
We made a decision when it comes to direct debit requests; if someone is not interested in signing straight away, we're not interested in having them as a client. Every time, not once or twice, but every time that clients have said no to direct deposits, instead of abiding by the net 10-day term, it gets to net 90, and there are 1000s of dollars owing. I ran a quick compounding interest calculation and worked out that I could have had a free carton of beer every month if everyone paid their invoices on time.
Sarah: If everybody stuck to that exact same model, it would work for everybody. The other thing with COVID is that I've found many of my clients actually are in a much stronger cash flow position now than they were before COVID. I think it comes back to people are so more in tune and aware and conscious of the money.
Regularly check up on your contracts
Last year I had a look into what can we do to change around the way the business is working. I changed a few bits and pieces and shaved $15,000 worth of expenses a month out of the business.
In the first quarter of COVID, we had the worst on record for 10 years. If that had happened before we cut some costs, we would have been $45,000 worse off. It was followed by the best quarter that we've ever had in history, so I can't complain about COVID. We saved for that rainy day and had six months of expenses in the bank. If you can run the business with no income at all for six months, you should be able to combat nearly everything.
The book "Profit First" may be a gamechanger for you
Sarah: I heard about this book called "Profit First" a lot, and I didn't really know too much about it. My only perception was you had to have all of these extra bank accounts, which seemed ridiculous, but that's from my lack of knowledge. Something came up in a forum in January last year, and I told myself to get that book.
So I picked it up, I read it, and absolutely loved that book. I followed the guidelines of the book quite closely, and I set up the other bank accounts, but then I thought, you know, this doesn't really work for me. So I've changed it to make it work for me. In Profit First, they talk about getting to a certain percentage that you want to run your operating expenses through. My 12-month prediction was to be at where those percentages were, I was there within three months.
That was purely from being more conscious. I cut some expenses, but I also increased some expenses because I realised I could actually be more efficient if I just changed a few things. So it got me thinking about what I actually need to run my business, I have never in my business had spare money. Now I do, and it just gives me so much peace of mind. It has been honestly, quite effortless.
If you put in the work, you will be rewarded
Everyone out there that's thinking, I can't do this, just take a deep breath. Really feel the stress leaving when you think about that money just sitting there and how much better it is.
Sarah: Why put your energy into worrying that you can make payroll on Monday, when you know that you can meet it and put that extra energy and passion into growing your team or growing your business or developing new products or service offerings? If anybody has not heard of Profit First, make it work for you. I would say absolutely, 100% do it. This is not an ad for Profit First, but it absolutely works for me. It's really easy, and not something that's going to take you hours each week to get done.
Ask yourself these questions
Why did you get into business to start off with? What was your clarity plan? Are you achieving that clarity plan? Are you stepping in the right direction? It's important to make sure that you are continually revisiting your clarity plan. Profit First is a tool in the toolbox, and if you're not going to use the tool, you might not be necessarily building the right thing that you want in the direction that you want.
Sarah's favourite books
So around now we normally asked what your favourite book is, but it sounds like we might have already answered that question.
Sarah: My ultimate all-time favourite book is The E Myth.
By Michael Gerber! That was the first business book that I read back in 2007. It's amazing the way he describes how to make sure that you've got technicians and the different hats that you're wearing in business.
Sarah: It's absolutely been the foundation of how I built my business. After that book then, yes, I think Profit First would be very high up there. The book that I'm reading at the moment is called SYSTEMology, which talks about putting systems into your business and being able to then not be the person that's relied upon completely to run your business. That's really the ultimate goal, right?
It should be! I did a presentation at a school a while ago around what my thoughts are as a business owner to a bunch of year 11 year 12 students. There were people from all walks of life, and I said you can be the bricklayer. But how long can your body let you be the bricklayer before you then have to start working at Bunnings. Nothing wrong with working at Bunnings, but if you want to be the bricklayer and not work at Bunnings later, that shouldn't be your plan unless that is within your plan.
Being a business owner means you can jump in and off the tools, and it also means that your income should be limitless. You can have people that are doing the work that you don't like doing. I tell people being a business owner is the best profession, the best thing that you can do.
Sarah: I have a very funny story to tell you. We were driving to school, and we had this very deep conversation about what are you going to do when you grow up? I'm a business owner and my husband as an employee, so one of my kids was trying to grasp what the differences actually meant. So Jaden was eight at the time, and I told him you could be an employee and work for a business which is what dad does. Or you can be a business owner, and your clients and your customers are the ones that pay you.
So I said, what will you do Jaden? Will you get money from the government? Will you be an employee? Or will you be a business owner? He looked at me very seriously, and he said, I think I'm just going to get myself a wife.
Thinking outside the box, that's great!
Find your freedom
Sarah: Running a business isn't for everybody; you've got to still have that passion. But you can make it anything that you want it to be. You're not stuck in the box of working for a particular industry or a boss. All the options can become as limitless as your passion and your imagination. That sounds really corny and cheesy, but it's really true.
I completely agree. For some people, having the flexibility to be able to do that in your own business is perfect. If anyone out there is wanting to start a business and they haven't made the decision yet, if you can't save money while you're in your current job I'm going to say you are going to have a lot of trouble doing that when you have to start from zero and work for yourself.
You have to be the person wearing lots of hats, so if you're not able to put some of that away and use that as a safety net, you may get in a lot of trouble. You have to have that drive and that passion to succeed no matter what. My wife Sarah was told by someone that she was never going to have her own business. It's not going to work. There's no money in doing what you want to do. She met me, and I said, do whatever you want to do, you can make money selling cupcakes, how is that different from doing hair and makeup?
That was two years and two months ago. She now has seven people working with her. So don't listen to other people. Listen to your heart, let it drive your success and make sure that you're passionate enough to go through and do that.
Sarah: I don't think you should go into business purely to make buckets of money. Because that will always be a slog, you'll always be chasing more money. Whereas if you go into business chasing your passion and you are driven, the money will always just come.
As the saying goes, if you enjoy what you're doing, you'll never work a day in your life. At business expos, you can see the people that are business owners and the people that are employed to sit there, because they're just on their phones. I said this to Sarah on our honeymoon, what is the difference between a holiday and working if you enjoy working?
The final word
I really enjoyed talking to you again today, is there anything else to touch on before we head off?
Sarah: No, I think that pretty much covers it. Just be mindful of where your money is at, and cash is definitely king.
I'm just going to add to that and say remember to check what you're paying for. It surprised me how quickly mobile phone plans change. I saw one recently that was $99 a year for unlimited calls on one of the major networks and I thought only a year ago, that would have been $30 or $40 a month. So keep your finger on the pulse with your expenses.
Sarah: With savings, some people think I can't save all of my money because it's devoted to my business or if I'm an employee, it's devoted to paying off the house and groceries. If you just put away 1% of what you earn during the week, you're not even going to notice. But have a look to see how much is in that bank account at the end of six months and then at the end of 12 months. It has been completely effortless. So then if you just very slowly, systematically increase that 1% you will have money there. Do whatever you want to do with it, but it's not coming out of your operating expenses money.
It adds up. Look to change your mortgage too. I changed our mortgages on our investment properties and saved $12,000 a year. Now I have $1,000 a month I can put towards something else, and I was just blown away by that. Remember:
Keep your finger on the pulse
Cash is king
Shape your clarity plan into your business plan
If you do these things, you're going to be on the road to success.
Outsourcing 101 with Zsofia Banyai Who out there is run off their feet and doesn't have enough time to scratch themself? We've all been there and know the feeling. If you want to learn how to outsource and automate your business, I've got Zsofia here from My Processes, and she's going to talk about how you can start outsourcing and build your team. To start it off Zsofia, what are some of the interview questions before you even get onto platforms that you can use to see if it's the right candidate or not? Learn more about outsourcing at dorksdelivered.com.au
Zsofia: Thank you for having me, Joshua. You must get your list ready if you will be in a situation where you will ask someone if they are the right fit for the task or if they have understood the task you will assign to them. You need to be clear about what you expect from them and make sure that communication between you two can work well. If you will ask someone "What's the colour blue?", you want them to answer back to you, "I know what the colour blue is." There are certain countries that I have had people to work for who would always say "Yes", but you'd end up finding out that they didn't understand a word you're saying. So, you need to have two-way communication to make sure that they completely and wholly understand the project. Zsofia: Cultural differences are an actual reality when you outsource. We have to work with people from different areas, but you just have to concentrate on the person you are working with, the data they are working on, how they work, how they think about the task and how they think about the duties they have to perform. Let's say you are ready to start getting these roles put into place, and you need to start outsourcing, but you are run off your feet. Where are some of the locations that you would go to to find someone online to be able to outsource, whether it be to the Philippines, Africa, India or somewhere else? Zsofia: Yes, you said it right. Philippines, Africa, India, too. I would mention Vietnam, which is a good time zone. They can work with Europe, Australia, and maybe even with the US, there is some overlap. So Vietnam is a very beneficial timezone. What sites to go to?
To find the different candidates, what websites would you say people should check out? Zsofia: So it's low hanging fruit to mention Upwork and Fiverr, but they do serve their own specific purposes. UpWork is more for ongoing projects, while Fiverr is used more for projects which have a set timeframe. If you need a task to be done like graphic design, logo design, or creating a few social media posts, Fiverr is where to go. But if you want to leverage the possibilities behind outsourcing, then I would consider having a second office. I have a lot of contacts with different second offices in the world because it's good to have this kind of growth connection that gives you the possibility to play with the time zones, hourly rates, and the experience level of the outsourcers. There are a lot of possibilities outside of Upwork.
The second office you are referring to, it's that where you'd outsource your entire team, or you've got someone who will be managing a business abroad? Zsofia: Yes, a second office can be a back office or a business extension. They allocate their people to different projects which they are lined up for longer-term engagements. What would be the advantages to second offices?
These different companies give people opportunities who are working from home to be a freelancer compared to a controlled office environment where they're still getting up, going to work and maybe have a manager. Is that correct? Zsofia: Yes, you are correct. The second office is more of a formal set up, but I give options to the people I work with. They can choose between a great freelancer who is doing a great job and a freelancer who does the same but also creates freedom for themselves. I like the idea to work with other entrepreneurial people who have this entrepreneurial mindset. I think that's very important, but that's not always the right fit. Try to find a balance between the two. A second office could be a great option if you need to make sure that there's a certain firewall or security policy in place. It could be easier to do that in an office where they've got a certain speed level of Internet connection. In this case, coming together into an office could be an advantage. Price Differences What is the price difference between outsourcing to a second office versus freelance, or are they about the same? Zsofia: It's about the same, but you can't really outsource random tasks to a second office. A second office is better if you have consistent workloads to be outsourced. How much guidance do you need to give an outsourced team? If people are just starting off, how much guidance do you need to give an outsourced team some guidance implementation? Zsofia: Constant guidance is key. Whether you are ready to outsource or not, you must document your process. You can record what you are doing on the screen and save it into Google Drive. You can update the process and redo it whenever it's necessary. You can provide the training documentation you recorded to the person you have assigned to the task. Providing one-on-one coaching is also relevant. You can schedule a call for 20 minutes, and that is a way of communication that enables them to ask questions to guide them throughout the process. How long should you take to train your outsourced team?
What I did before I started outsourcing is that I wrote down categories of what often needs to be done and who can do these tasks. I had a roadmap on exactly what I needed to document and also how important it was to me. How long do you normally put in place to be able to get to that spot?
Zsofia: It depends on the task, but in a month, if there was good training provided, they should be able to get up to speed. If the information given was less general knowledge, like something specific and had a particular type of spot, then I would be more patient and give it like two months.
What shouldn't you outsource?
Are there any tasks that you shouldn't outsource that you think should stay close to the business owner's heart?
Zsofia: Yes. You can visit my website for a free outsourcing guide. I would recommend not outsourcing any accounting or bookkeeping services or anything that is not financially worth it. Another example is to not outsource work that has a unique selling point. For example, if you are a coach, anything related to coaching can't be outsourced, but the rest that is related to administrative work can be outsourced. I started my businesses 13 years ago doing IT automation and IT support in Brisbane. I realised that I don't have enough time to do everything, so I started outsourcing the marketing part, which was the social media management, newsletter creation and lead generation. But the majority of the business is a lot of back of house operations that are not customer-facing. What are your thoughts on having people that are being outsourced for your business in customer-facing roles? This could be a support person or a receptionist or someone that's on the phone replying to customers via chats or emails. Are there any dos and don'ts?
Zsofia: For me personally, I haven't had that issue before, but it's an interesting mindset. You have to know your clients, and you should educate them very well about what outsourcing is all about because some clients might not agree with risking their business.
Why should I outsource?
One of the advantages of outsourcing your team is they will be available 24 hours a day around the globe without having to have people working the night shift. What are some of the other reasons why you should consider outsourcing? Zsofia: I recommend outsourcing tasks that you absolutely hate doing. If you feel you really hate doing something, find someone else to do it. Someone out there might enjoy doing your tasks so you can pass it on and in that way, your entire team will be more productive and effective.
How can Zsofia can help you
When I started the business in 2007, I was doing very little with my bookkeeping. I worked on an application that would streamline and automate my bookkeeping. This application doesn't exist anymore. I was more comfortable the moment I outsourced that task. Outsourcing gives you that ability to do your task efficiently. I understand you've got another course to promote? Zsofia: Yes. I have an online course about the benefits of outsourcing to your business and also the risks involved and how you can manage it. This course will help you to pick up the right tasks that you can outsource. The short training will help you to see the whole picture. I can map out the processes and look at the whole picture to identify what is beneficial to your company. This consultation package is usually $150, but it is included for free with the extra training.
The course is very cost-effective. You can't go wrong with having a bit more knowledge, so I definitely recommend jumping across and completely the affordable course that Zsofia has created. Zsofia: You shouldn't be the employee of your company. You should stop fire fighting and be the creator. Get help! I think that's the best you can do for your staff, for your family, for your company, for everything.
Is there a favourite book that you suggest maybe for people to read if they are looking to learn more about outsourcing or anything like that? Zsofia: You mentioned Tim Ferriss. The 4 Hour Workweek is definitely the book that can really, really change your mind if you haven't read it yet. A fantastic book. The 4 Hour Workweek and 4 Hour Body actually changed my life. We're coming close to being here. Is there anything else you'd like to cover off on that you'd really love to leave our listeners with to think about?
Zsofia: Set your processes properly in case something happens. A week ago, I had eye surgery, and I had to completely step out and be off-screen. My assistants have been taking care of my clients. Thankfully, the business went very well and had no issues. That's one of the biggest things I love about outsourcing, that you can have the peace of mind to unplug a little bit for any reason. But there are also risks involved, so you need to know what you are doing. I think it's really good to have someone who is knowledgeable about outsourcing and can really help you to set up the processes. I couldn't agree more. You covered a couple of things that are really important. You really change your business from being a job into an asset that you can sell by outsourcing because it becomes an investment. Instead of doing everything, someone can just love doing that one task, and everyone in the business can be happy. I really enjoyed this chat and as always, stay good and stay healthy.
How to Get Stuff Done in Your Business With Les Watson
Do You Need More Time?
Who has this problem where you think you've got enough time to do something, and at the end of the day, your list is hardly touched. I think we've all been there, and we’ve got Les here from Get More Time and he's going to be telling us about how to do exactly that. Les, what's the number one thing that you see business owners just failing to do?
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Les: Josh, great to be here. The biggest thing is procrastination. If you're taking longer than five seconds to do something, you're procrastinating. So I break it into two things. One is leadership. The other one is discipline. Leadership as a person to lead your own life, to get shit done, and the discipline to follow through on what you said you were going to do.
Shorten Your List
So a lot of people that I've come across will say they’ve got a list, but it's way too long, and I never get to finish it. This is a problem there. If your list is too long, you've got to lighten the load of the list for one. You should choose the top five things you want to get done today and stick with that. When you've done them, if you want to put a six, do it But apart from that, go easy on yourself.
So a lot of people don't live their life, they put it off to somebody else. The boss is doing it to me, or the clients are doing it to me. First of all, take responsibility for your life, lead your own life, and then have the discipline to follow through on what you said you're going to do.
A lot of people as you pointed out are they are their own worst enemy. I started monitoring what I spent my time on a couple of years ago, and I thought I hardly ever look at Facebook. I saw this piece of software called Rescue Time, and it came back and told me a whole bunch of cool data. I was spending a few hours on Facebook every week that I thought, I don't get that much value out of it. So if people are complaining they don't have enough time, what would be the way that you can have your ongoing recurring tasks as well as your milestone tasks to get you in front and start really pushing forward on that list?
Find a System That Works for You
Les: Do you have a trusted system? I always say it doesn't matter if it's a paper-based system or an app-based system. But if you've got shit to do, where does it live? Does it live in front of you, does it live in your pocket? Does it live in a planner? So, where's your trusted system? You need a place where you can take it out of your head and put it somewhere.
So what is your trusted system? For a paper-based system, you can pick them up from your general stationery shop. I have a six-ring binder with dividers. The front half has a calendar section and the back half as my areas of responsibility. These include my leadership roles, finances, and even fitness. It becomes a part of your system.
I became very particular with the way that I put everything into my calendar. I made sure to have a scheduling time and several different categories so I could see where things worked for me. Once I had that, I could see my work schedule and that balance of life, personal, business, and health. Are there any pillars that you would say people should focus on as an overall arching goal before they start looking at the macro and microtasks?
Les: You're across is. If you're doing that allocation of tasks, you don't get to the end of the week and think, I didn't go to the gym again. So allocating tasks is the major thing to think about.
One area that many ignore is are you taking time with your own personal finances? Schedule it. If you do that on a weekly basis, it doesn't have to be hard. But as long as you're actually dipping into that area to make sure you're across it, that's what matters.
Schedule a Check-in For Services You Pay For
I've got things I'll have scheduled to have a look at to see if there are any way I can be saving money and making sure I’m not paying too much for services. That might be a commodity type service, it could be an investment property, but just scheduling those things into your life to check up on can save you $1000s of dollars.
A provider that I was with was charging me $1400 a month, and I did a look around 12 months later where I could get it for $330 a month. That's a lot of money saved. I love having an overarching calendar and then diving further into it from there. But like you were saying, make sure you're using a primary system where there's clearly defined rules and roles.
Les: Absolutely. I'll come across people gathering notes on the back of an envelope. You could put it in Evernote, you can put in a Google key, you can put it in OneNote. So the opportunity to have a digital version of it is at your fingertips if you want that. You don’t need to go digital, just have a system in place and stick to it.
Moving Between Digital and Physical is Possible
I couldn't agree with you more. My general process for any hosted notes I have is simple. I put them into Google Keep and link them into Google Docs if there's something that needs to be linked there. For our appointment today, it’s in the calendar on Google Keep but interestingly, I still go back to paper, when I'm brainstorming, I find that there's too much distraction with digital. Then it gets transcribed across into the digital world once there's a defined process or something has been made of it, but exactly what you said, you can do it whatever way works for you.
Les: I've been coaching people for many, many years. Recently I went, what's the best method that I can take these notes? What I do is I take the notes on a piece of paper with a pen, and I take a photo of it. From there, it goes straight into Trello under a tab called coaching. It's under their name, I put a date on it, and close it. That happens in all of 60 seconds. When I go to meet with them in a week's time, guess what happens? I pull up Trello in their name and I can see what we covered last time. It's paper-based, but done in the cloud.
Prioritising Tasks
When it comes down to a productive use of your time, how do you make sure that what you think is an important task is actually an important task. As someone who is an engineer, I will spend 95% of the time planning and 5% of the time executing. How can you make sure that you're spending the time on the right things?
Les: Great question. I love doing a weekly review. It gives you an opportunity to get to the end of the week and you can ask yourself the questions, what worked this week? What didn't work this week? What can I do differently? If you're working in a team, you can do the same thing. But you can look over your diary and go, what are the actions that have happened this week that I may have missed or that slipped between the cracks. Then on the opposite, you can think about what are the actions going forward that I need to focus on.
So that weekly review is something that a lot of people that I work with, when they do it changes their productivity. Aim to do these three things:
Generate money,
Save money
Save time
If you can do them, you are absolutely perfect. For the prioritisation of tasks, it is slightly different, but the same on a day-to-day basis. If you were to slot them in, which are “A” priorities and which of them are “B” priorities? Don't put 30 things on your list. Put for tomorrow, what five are A priorities and which would be B.
How do you tell what is an A priority? If it doesn't get done, the brown smelly stuff will hit the round twirly thing. No one wants to shit hit the fan. So A's must get done and do the A's early in the day. From there, if you've got other things that are Bs and you get a chance to do them, great. If you don't get a chance to do them, then you can put them on to tomorrow, or some of the B’s going into tomorrow become an A. That's okay. Why? Because deal with what you need to do today. Let tomorrow be tomorrow.
Having Accountability
That's great advice. On the weekly review, would you suggest that it should be a self-assessment? Or should you have an accountability buddy? How do you make sure that you're being true to yourself?
For me, I'll bring it to the gym example. I had a membership to one of those 24-hour gyms. It didn’t have any classes, and I thought I'm going to get fit. Guess what, it didn't happen. After this, I went to a gym that had classes. I started going to the classes and it was awkward to start off with. But then I started talking to people, so when I missed one, people were holding me responsible and I felt kind of like I'd let the team down by missing one. I found that this has been a drive for me to continue to stay fit. Should you use yourself and self assess or bring someone else into the mix?
Les: I totally agree, accountability goes a long way to getting shit done. It really does. If you are beholden to someone to get something done and they are waiting for you, then you're more likely to do it. Whether it's fitness, whether it's getting a task done, or whatever. Accountability is great.
If you go to my website, getmoretime.com.au/bbf I will have a KPI or a dashboard that you can have. It really does give people an idea of how I structure my KPI’s in my small business. My general manager (who is my wife), and we come together at the end of the week to going through the work we did. I am accountable to her for the things on that list, as opposed to just trying to sweep things under the rug.
Parkinson’s Law
I have my Sunday beer in the spa and that is the time that I go through and reflect. What are your thoughts on Parkinson's Law? For anyone out there that's not sure of what that is, Parkinson's Law is that work expands to fill the time allotted. So you say it's going to take a year, it will take a year. So it's going to take a month, it'll probably take a month. Remember nights before you crammed in for the exam the next day, or the assignment that was due the next day? And for some reason, you delayed for six weeks, and then it all got finished the night before. What have you found with Parkinson's Law? And how much truth is there in it?
Les: Absolutely. I totally concur. I want to go on holidays, and I need to get all this shit done. Therefore, I need to get all this shit done. What do you do? You get it down. Now how is that you can do it prior to going in the holidays? But you meander through life in the other times? Can you set yourself to get stuff done in a timeframe that you actually choose for yourself?
For me, this is my book. which is available on the website. It was created because I was in a mentoring session and the woman said, you won't have enough to write a book. My wife said, “yes, you do”. So I said, in the next 12 months time I will have a manuscript. 12 months later, I had a manuscript and six months after that, I had a fully-fledged book. I ended up on the Today Show with Carl and Georgie. You go, how did that happen? I set myself a deadline, and I made myself accountable. The timeframe worked. Otherwise, you daydream and think someday I'll write a book. How many of us have ever said that? Someday I'll write a book. Well, I didn't, I put a date on it.
Make Some Changes and Make a Difference
Make sure you check out Les’s book, it’s called Get Back an Hour In Every Day and I can say that I have purchased myself a copy and it's great. Is there anything else you want to cover up on the last before we head off?
Les: It's been great, Josh. Hopefully, the listeners have gotten value because there's so much we can do, but rather than just to hear it, I'd really encourage you to do something with it and go to getmoretime.com.au/bff and put your details in. I'll make sure that I get you that dashboard so that you can take control and be accountable either to yourself or to somebody else.
Check it out and let us know what you think. As always, stay healthy, stay good and try to get more time back in your life.
Managing Your Team With Todd Pavlou
How to Make Sure That You Have Sustainable Growth
I've got Todd here from Facta and he's going to tell us how you can make sure that growth is sustainable and that the dynamics of your team stay as good as day one. So Todd, how do you make sure that introducing new blood doesn't destroy the old wood?
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Todd: Team dynamics are so flexible and ever-changing. Even teams that have been together for years and years, the dynamics will shift because people evolve and things happen to individuals both at work and away from work that have an impact. So team dynamics is something that is a constant no matter what. But when you bring new people into your team, it automatically changes the dynamics because you've got another cog in the wheel. With the budget changes and the government trying to stimulate employment, there are incentives there for people to be able to be employed. But there are also some unintended consequences to that where business owners need to be aware that as they bring new people in that they're introduced to the team in the right way so that the dynamics of the team don't become unsettled. Hopefully, those new people actually add to the team from a cultural perspective.
Does Business Size Matter?
Let's say one of our community members has got a cracking team of 10, or a cracking team of 20, or a cracking team of 100. It doesn’t really matter what the number is, but they are in a state of comfort. Everyone seems to be working enough, their churn rates are pretty low in regards to their staff turnover, and everything seems to be cruising along. Now, let's say you introduce 20% more staff on those numbers. Does the size of your business really matter a whole bunch as to how much it's going to change and shape up the way that the business growth has occurred?
Todd: From my perspective, whether you're a big business or a small business, you're still a group of people. The bigger your business gets, the more groups you've got within it, but the fundamentals remain the same. I think the key from my perspective is understanding that everybody's different. Everybody comes with their own experiences, their own culture, their own family history, their own work history. Everybody's a combination of their previous experience. It’s really important to understand that no matter how big your business is, no matter how small your business is, you need to know that the individual person within the team is still the most important facet.
So always keeping in mind that the individual is a person who brings their own strengths, weaknesses, areas for improvement, and abilities is key. When you bring a new person into the team, they're automatically going to adjust the feel of the team. There's going to be some people that are going to embrace those individuals and some that will be more standoffish. It's about bringing a new person in, and actually really focusing and spending the time to induct them and make them part of the team.
What happens in so many businesses is that an individual comes in on day one, and they haven't got their passwords, because the company doesn’t have a reliable I.T partner. They don't have their systems and processes in place. This means that automatically on day one, they're off on the wrong foot. So it's fundamental to long term success is making sure that you bring the right people in and induct them.
Profiling Your Team
It comes down to documentation and your processes. As you said, getting off on the right foot shows that you've got these things in place and there is a structure to your business. One of the things you want to make sure that you are doing is profiling. It only takes a few questions, and we've incorporated that into our onboarding process. Before someone joins the team, we know what type of person they are in a fun way. Using a profiling tool, such as Myers Briggs or DISC to understand if they will get along well with other team members is a little fun test. So would you say it's a sensible idea to start profiling straight at the start?
Todd: I’m a strong believer in having that profile at the very start. I think what's happened at times is that the concept of behavioural profiling has gotten a bad rap for reasons such as it's not effective to put people in boxes and it makes people feel inadequate, but my view on it is it’s all about how you communicate it. From our perspective, our business is all about building user guides for workplace relationships. So what we mean by that is that for you and I just to be able to communicate effectively, it makes sense for us to know a little bit about each other, and about how we tick so that we can adjust and adapt our communication styles to be able to get the best out of our interactions.
Too many of us rightly are comfortable with who we are, and we communicate in the way that we feel comfortable with. That's natural, right, our brains don't have to work too hard. But unfortunately, if we're very different people, we need different things to have effective communication. So often communication will break down because of the why. I've got an example right now with a customer that I'm doing some work with. They have two individuals in the workplace that are constantly in conflict with each other. It's got to a point now where it's unworkable, and we basically need a mediator to be able to keep these guys in the workplace. My view of the investigation is that most of this comes down to a lack of communication. It comes down to them seeing exactly the same situation, but in different ways because of the type of people they are and the way that they see the world. Now, if on day one they were given a little bit of insight into how the other person thought and acted, perhaps they'd have some more empathy and be able to actually engage more effectively.
They're all just tools to help us understand people further and it's about having the ability to relate to someone else. In a work environment, you have to spend eight hours a day with that person, sometimes longer than you're spending with your partner. It’s really important to be able to get along with people. You can also apply these tools to a business that's well established and still gain massive advantages.
How it Can Work
Todd: I'll tell you about an organisation that we did just that. They're an organisation with about 70 or 80 people spread across Australia. There are four locations with staff ranging from a blue-collar workshop guy all the way through to your accounts payable CFO. It was fair to say that there were some cultural disconnects, and they were communication breakdowns. I went in and did a full diagnostic. The things that came out of that was that there wasn't a clear process, and the training was insufficient for people to be able to do their job. But the thing that tied it all together was a lack of communication and breakdowns in communication. If people did a deep dive into their business, they'd see that process, training and communication is the root cause of the kind of issues that they might be facing.
So the first thing that we did to help communication was to get a better understanding of each other. We put everybody through the profiling tool we use, which is DISC. We use it because it's really, really simple.
It’s based on four behavioural types:
Dominance
Influence
Steadiness
Conscientious
They are all based on two different matrix lines. One is about how direct or indirect a person is for their communication, and the other one is about how open or guarded they are with their communication. So I like to use the ideas of whether they're either an open or a closed book, or they'll communicate with you like a hammer or communicate with you like a wet newspaper.
Once you can actually start to listen to how a person talks and how they behave. So we went through that whole process using this tool with this business of approximately 70 people. What we found is that when you put all the profiles onto what they call a wheel, you can see where everybody sits on that wheel. You can start to identify just by looking at this wheel where the elements of conflict can come in. So somebody who's very task focused, very fast paced, sometimes can rub people the wrong way, because they're very brash. Once we started to plot all these individuals, and started to join the dots on where the conflict points were coming from, we're actually able to share a data point rather than an opinion about where it might be the root causes of those conflicts can occur.
Knowledge is power, and once people understand themselves a little bit more, and then also understand how their behavioural style can interact with another, you can start to build that empathy, build that understanding and start to improve communication. That changed that organisation's mindset. It is really important to understand that it's not about putting somebody in a box. So for example, I’m a very high DI, so somebody who's very task-focused, fast-paced, and people-focused to a certain degree. But that doesn't mean I can't focus on the details, it just means it's harder and it's less natural for me to do so. When you are profiling from the start it allows you as a leader to understand where that individual strengths are, where they're going to get their energy from, and try to avoid putting them into roles or asking them to do tasks that they're just not made for. But if you ask them to do that for an extended period of time, they're going to lose energy, they're going to get tired, and you normally find that they're putting their hand up for more breaks and more holidays and more time away from work.
Finding Common Ground
It is the square peg in a round hole type situation. Do you find that before your profiling that there is a natural grouping within the profile? People who have just resonated and naturally pulled themselves together, you might see it during the lunch break where those people are hanging out together without being grouped into a box.
Todd: If you looked at it that way, it's the 80/20 rule, right? Birds of a feather kind of flock together. If you're going to spend your social time or your lunchroom time together, you don't want tension, you don't want friction. That normally will be subsided if you're with people that have like-minded interests and personality types, but there's always the exception, right? This is the thing about not putting people in boxes, if you've got commonality, and if you find common ground, you can engage with anybody. So really being mindful of who you are as an individual, your strengths, your areas for improvement, but then really focus on okay, how do I need to adapt with those around me to get the best communication.
How Good Can the Results Be?
I think what a lot of people are thinking is how does this affect the bottom line, and more importantly, the efficiency of the business. I can only imagine people are taking less days off if morale is high in the workplace. People are feeling more comfortable in the work that they're doing and feel that they can communicate with more people in their team without having to feel out if there is friction or indifference between them. What have you seen as a generalisation after a team has been optimised?
Todd: There's plenty of data and statistics out there, but I think intuitively we all know and we've all been in a workplace where it just feels right. There's low friction, there's high trust, and you'll bend over backwards to get to that organisation. Let me illustrate it with a point where you don't have that and you have low trust and friction. Most of it's based on a lack of understanding.
I was working with a customer where we had a manager, let's call him Bill. We had one of his team members, let's call him Phil. Bill and Phil worked in a cubicle setup and were next to each other. For two years, the manager would come in, and he put his head on his desk and literally physically put his head on his desk. For two minutes he would hope and pray that Bill would resign that day. Imagine that environment, you'll come in for two years, hoping that the guy next to you pulls the pin so you no longer have to engage with him. When you pull it all apart, it was a lack of understanding of where the other person was coming from. One was a very high conscientious type who was very good at using the database and was very focused on processes. On the other side of the wheel, Phil was not the system guy, he was anti-system. But he was hugely focused on the customer, building relationships, and building those bonds and delivering for his customer.
You put them together, and they are probably the perfect individual for the business. But what they both valued and what they're behavioural types gravitated to was completely different. The conflict caused massive disruption in so many ways, including with customers leaving. So you can measure this scenario in how many customers left because of this conflict. The amount of sick leave that was taken from both individuals was well exceeded and into the red. So based on average salaries, this was costing thousands and thousands of dollars. It was having a massive impact on those around them and their teammates. Can you imagine coming into work knowing that this tension and friction is there in front of you every day? Not too many people can just put that to the side. That was having an impact on their productivity. There are some hard costs there that you can measure, but there are also so many soft costs. These include what was happening to people's psyche, what was happening to their mental wellness, and just their overall health.
Put Complete Trust In Your Team
What you said around having a business, people love it your team is pulling together. With the COVID stuff that's happened, I can comfortably say we had a bit of a decline. I spoke to the staff about it and said we're going to have to chop some hours here and there. They said what do you think if you just dropped out pay but we just work through this and we come out the other side even stronger. It made me feel so amazing that I had a team that was there, it was so supportive it nearly made me cry.
We're working together like a team of unicorns and anyone can have that team, you just need to be able to understand how people work within the team. We have a hard discussion Friday, where once a month we go through and talk about what was something that someone did that you hated, or something that someone did that you really liked. It's good to be able to work out who they are and how to work together to be able to make sure that you are addressing the elephant in the room in the best way possible.
Todd: Question for you. Why do you think you've been able to lead your team to the point where they're prepared to sacrifice like they have?
We all believe in the vision is what I'd like to say. Why are we in business? Why do we do what we do? Why do businesses gravitate to us instead of another I.T company? What makes us different to anyone else? We sit down and we talk about that. Another thing we do discuss quite a lot is, what do you hate to do in your role?
Your Best Employees Don’t Need to Be Your Managers
We make sure that if you've got a fantastic engineer, that doesn't mean that now you put them in a position of being a manager. Instead, you can pay them more than the manager, and they can still be a fantastic engineer, if that's what they like doing. It doesn't mean that they need to go up the hierarchy of the managing ladder, you can still reward them in other ways.
Another thing to consider is how do people work with rewards? We have very financially focused people, while other people are very happy to see different words of appreciation and accolades that they're getting. So it's about understanding what that carrot is for them and working with them. My first contractor was 10 and a half years ago, and I was lucky that we work together so well. After that, I've gone through my bout of understanding how to find the right people. That's changed around our interviewing process. It's unique enough that News.com.au found out about it and interviewed me on my interviewing process.
It comes down to understanding the person before you put them into a role that you don't want to have them in, and then understanding what drives them. What's their success? Is it spending time with the kids on the weekend? Or is it spending time on a surfboard? Or is it building stuff? One of the big things is just having someone give you a truthful answer. Don't hire a guy who says, I just love working, you're going to get into trouble.
What To Do As a Leader
Todd: There's no cookie-cutter approach, everybody's an individual. You're looking to understand what motivates them, and then what environment you can provide so they can be their best. I'm a big believer that I can't motivate you, you can't motivate me, but what we can do in a leadership role is be able to provide the best environment for that individual to be able to find their own motivation and be able to reach their own goals. Unfortunately, it isn't common in a lot of organisations to have critical conversations, so many leaders shy away from that. I believe if they're better armed with an understanding of how is this person likely to react, how's the best way to be able to communicate with them, how's the best way for me to be able to get my message across with this individual, you go into those conversations with a whole lot more confidence, and nine times out of 10, you'll be able to get a better outcome.
We had one of our customers using our system to be able to plan a difficult conversation with a forthright and aggressive employee. By having the insights into what to say and what not to say and how to say it, they were able to get a positive outcome. In the past, they had conflict and negativity and hadn't been able to achieve that goal.
Use Their Motivations
That's what you want to have, you want to have a family of people that you can have outside of your family that you can communicate with and work with. Some of the things that drive and motivate people are using their own ideas. One of our employees, he said, I would just love to be able to use some software that we're using to build integrations. He's part of the open-source community and said he really likes giving back, so I said go for it. I told him to feel free to spend 15, 20% of your time being paid to make this stuff which he was very happy about. It's just about finding what that carrot is for the person and how they communicate what's important to them.
How Todd Can Help You
If you don't have these systems in place, you should definitely be jumping across to Facta and see if you can get ahold of Todd so you can have your business refocused. What would you say are some of the things they could expect to get out of having a quick conversation with you?
Todd: To me, it's all about the three key parts. For somebody to have a conversation with us around helping them you need to, first of all, acknowledge that everybody's different. Then once you acknowledge something, you can spend some time understanding it. Thirdly, which is normally the hardest part, is then learning how to act differently. That's the framework that we work on with our customers. It is a process, it is a journey, it is a commitment, it's hard to change your natural style, it's hard to change, but the benefits personally and for business is so worthwhile. Investing to understand the personalities and the behavioural types of individuals at work. The benefits are, as I said, personal and work-wise, but it's a task worth taking on, that's for sure.
Anyone out there, jump across, check it out, and you can't go wrong. What do you have to lose? It's just all the benefits. One last question before we head off. If anyone out there wants to be reading a book on something that could help out their process, what would be your favourite book around this?
Todd: Now I won't give you the DISC manual, because that's pretty dry. The one that I'd suggest that I keep coming back to is a book called The Culture Code. It's a book as the name suggests all about culture. It profiles organisations from high profile sporting ones down to some that you never would have heard from, and some of the commonalities that those organisations have. It shows you how they build a really robust, strong, independent culture that stands the test of time, and a lot of focus on how leaders create that culture.
Anything else you'd like to leave us with before you head off?Todd: The final message is just about acknowledging that we're different. Understand those differences. Then the hardest part is to act differently. You will see the benefits.
Tips To Reach Your Target Audience With Mike Maynard
Breaking through the virtual barrier to improve your business
You might be thinking now that a lot of us are working from home, how do we reach the right audience? Before COVID-19 you could meet people by doing lunch meetings and networking things where you might be able to find the right person interested in your product or service. We've got Mike Maynard here from NapierB2B, and he's going to go through some solutions and how you can find the right audience. So Mike, how would you go about making sure that you can reach an audience from home?
Get more tips on how to reach the right audience at dorksdelivered.com.au
Mike: That's a great question to start off with Josh. It's hugely challenging to reach people at home. Our clients who we work with tend to sell to big business, and almost all of the people they wanted to reach sat in an office and they could send salespeople to meet them. Now obviously, COVID has completely changed that. Even if people are working in the office, you still can't get salespeople out there to meet them. So what you need to do is understand what sort of media and what sort of information people are consuming at home and how that's changed from when they're in the office.
There Are Multiple Channels Out There
So it comes down to being in their social feeds, being in their news feeds and creating a strategy to be able to track down the decision-maker in the business?
Mike: We're seeing clients have success with different tactics. I think one of the things that's really clear, is that different audiences, different sorts of people you want to reach with your marketing, are actually going to prefer different channels. So absolutely social, for sure is bigger. You look at all the stats activity and social media is way up. Now, people are working from home, but equally don't rule out things. For example, the good old email newsletter. Great newsletters can actually be very valuable today, particularly in some industries where perhaps people aren't receiving the trade magazines they might have been reading in the past.
With social media, do you think the amount of noise is becoming a problem, or the message getting washed out?
Battling Against the Noise
Mike: Whatever channel you choose, you've got to battle against noise. I If you're trying to use email marketing, absolutely, you're still battling against noise and spam filters, trying to remove that noise. Unfortunately, sometimes that spam filter is going to think your messages are noise rather than signal. So absolutely, I think everybody's battling against noise.
We've seen a big move online, particularly from some of the companies who were perhaps a bit more focused on traditional media previously. All that's doing is adding to the noise. Now, of course, we have seen that some of the paid channels actually become slightly less competitive. So for example, if you want to advertise travel destinations on Facebook, now's a pretty good time globally, because there's not much travel advertising going out on Facebook. However, whether it's good for your business is a very different question. So it's not the case that everything has got more noisy and everything has got more difficult, but it's always the case that:
If you don't stand out and you don't add value, then people are not going to listen to you.
So I would forget about the competition and how much noise or not there isn't any one channel and work out how you can create content and information that's actually going to be of interest to the people you want to influence.
Focus On Your Target Market
It comes down to making sure that you understand your target market, making sure that you've profiled your ideal client.
Mike: Absolutely. So we're all about focus. I think today, it's not just about having your ideal client, but it's also understanding the individuals within that client. For example, let's say you're looking to market an IT services company. You might want to talk to somebody who's the I.T director, I.T manager, but you also want to reach the CEO of the company, and potentially even the finance director or the guy in charge of the money. All three of those people will have very different thoughts about what they want from an IT services company. So what you need to do is not just tailor your message for your ideal company, but also tailor the messages for each of those three people within it to make sure that they hear information that addresses their concerns, their worries, and makes them feel you're the right business for them.
That information could also vary depending on who you're talking to. It could be analytical information, it could be emotional information. Once you found out that you've got that, then it just comes down to the channels that you need to be able to talk to or find people on. There's lots of different places out there that you could be throwing your content up. Your target will probably be on LinkedIn and might have an Instagram account too, but, do you want to spread the message too thin, or do you want to focus?
Mike: You absolutely want to focus. I think you need to find out what really works for you. One of the interesting things is you can't always predict that, and we have companies where one has fantastic results on social media, and the other will have email as their primary vehicle for reaching people. Both of them will be doing great, both clearly doing the right thing. Yet, it's different channels.
For me, there's a lot of different factors that affect what's going to be the most important channel. There's no point marketing in a place where your audience doesn't visit. If your audience is never on Instagram, don't go to Instagram, it’s a waste of time. But if you're where they are, then it's about:
- Building a presence
- Building authority
- Building an approach that works for you, and also works for your customer
It's about finding a platform or a channel, that's going to make a difference for you. That's going to reach your audience and a platform or channel where you can actually contribute.
Going back to marketing with Managed IT services, you know that there are some companies with awesome podcasts, there are other companies that are not doing podcasts because they're much more introverted.
I can say over the years, we've tried many different things. It comes down to working with what works. One of the things we do that we find can help connect you with the right person is we send out postcards to our ideal clients. We found no one gets a handwritten card in the post. So that's one way that we've made sure that we stand out a little bit.
Current Trends In Online Marketing
With Facebook and any sort of online marketing, I've noticed a trend and I just wanted to see what your thoughts were. Do you think at the moment businesses are pushing it more or pulling back? What are you seeing out there?
Mike: I think there's a mix of approaches. We did some research amongst the industries we work in. It really was interesting to see that there was a group of people who were carrying on as they've always done, there was a group of people who were slashing marketing budgets and a group that were actually increasing. We saw the same with our clients. Some of that is due to how people approach marketing and where they see marketing as a cost or where they see it as an investment.
We have a Managed IT services client, who literally more than doubled their spend with us. When everyone's working from home, there are huge demands on I.T systems which I'm sure you know. Whereas we had other clients where they've cut back because their business has fallen.
Targeting Specific Accounts Can Work
If you are doing digital marketing and you are trying to be in people's newsfeeds, are you better off tracking down the decision-maker for the account as a marketing process?
Mike: I think the more focused you can be the better. So just sending out content and hoping it reaches the right person is clearly the wrong approach. What we're seeing is a lot of our clients moving to targeting specific accounts. So, LinkedIn is the primary platform for most people where you can target by industry, you can target by job role, and you can even target by company. You need a certain audience size, you can't literally target one person at one company when you do that. But you can build up really focused audience lists.
We're seeing people do the same thing on email, as well, I'm being very focused in my work on building their email list, and making sure they understand within that email list. Different industries might have different concerns, and the IT director wants to hear very different things from the CEO of a company. That's hard work and it takes time. This is one of the reasons why I do say that, that people shouldn't try and do everything. Just trying to spray stuff across almost all channels is the wrong thing. Doing one thing well is definitely the best approach.
How to Get Started
If you don't have an email list and no digital leads, where do you start?
Mike: It's one of these great questions that really needs to be answered with well, it depends. Where you start is your best guess as to what's going to give you the best return. Let's say you sell an engineering product. The big concern from all your customers is how to get prototypes of this mechanical engineering product. Perhaps you want to produce a lead magnet around 3D printing, for example. I would use that lead magnet across a number of different channels to see which one drives the most interest, because that's going to then start giving you an indication of where your customers are actually looking at information and looking for content.
There are all sorts of different ways you can do that. You can do that through SEO, you can do it through paid search, you can do it on social media, you can even do it through targeted ads. We're seeing clients using Google ads to target display ads on particular websites. The one thing I would say as well as if you don't have an email list, the one thing you probably do have is visitors to your website. So retargeting is like a poor man's version of an email list where you can actually target ads to people who visited your website. That certainly is a good approach if you know that people who you can sell a product to are actually visiting the website.
For anyone that's not sure what retargeting is, it’s where:
If someone comes to you, you can hide a little sneaky thing on their computer that lets you continue to market to them afterwards.
It's fantastic for some businesses, for example, if you're a florist and you want to send flowers out and remind everyone the week before Valentine's Day, “hey, don't forget your partner”, it's great to know that you're in front of mind, even if they may have not have done something with you for 12 months. When it comes down to retargeting, the costs are significantly more cost-effective and efficient than virgin marketing when you are marketing to people based on long-tail keywords through AdWords. It's definitely a great way to go about it
Understanding Your Sales Cycle
What would be an average timeline that you'd expect going from A to B to actually seeing some dollars trickle through for a business in the IT Professional Services industry?
Mike: That is so hard to say, but if we look at our clients, some of their sales cycles are pretty much immediate. They're eCommerce vendors, so they can pretty much immediately generate sales. But they've already got that email list. We have another client that makes baggage handling systems for airports and their sales cycle is 20 years. So 20 years from starting marketing all the way through.
I think the first thing you've got to understand is how long your sales cycle is in your particular business. In professional services, you can certainly generate leads very quickly using lead magnets and producing great content should generate leads pretty much straight away. Converting those leads that sales process is very difficult. It can depend on a lot of things. For example, in your business, Josh, where you're selling I.T services, if they've already got an incumbent company, then you probably don't really have an opportunity to get their business until the contract comes up for renewal. So there can be a sales cycle of anything from a month to a year, depending on how long is left on the contract.
Don’t Forget About Phone Calls
I think it's very hard to say how quickly you can get revenue because it's very dependent. But the reality is you can get leads. At the end of the day, marketing can do a lot of things, but you've just got to pick up the phone. even today, with people working from home, if someone's interested, you've got to pick up the phone and talk to them. That will ultimately start driving that sale.
Getting back on the phone is 100% something to be in front of mind, keep the personal touch. We use a lot of automation, we're always talking about automation, but I don't think you should ever automate the human connection. That's something that you should always just keep so you have that authenticity in your voice, keep the emotion, keep that connection with someone as opposed to just sending them just the newsletter.
Content Ideas That Work
A lot of people always use the term “I don't have enough time”. I think it's just that they probably don't want to spend their time on doing certain things, such as content creation. A lot of people don't like that. But it is one of the cornerstone pieces of a good digital marketing campaign. How can you get people out of that rut?
Mike: Since my business is an agency I probably should be saying everyone employ agencies, they're a fantastic solution. But that is not always the case. Sometimes you've just got to bite the bullet and do things slightly differently if you're trying to generate some content. If you're really not the sort of person that wants to sit down in front of a computer and type out a white paper, an article, or an ebook, it's actually very easy. Just record yourself talking about it, and get it transcribed.
I think one of the biggest challenges people have is getting that first draft of something down. So anyway you can do that, whether it's just scribbling, speaking into a microphone, or have someone just chat to you. You can transcribe it, and then turn that into an E-book or a white paper. All those sort of things make it easier to start. You can bring in an agency and they can make the quality of the text that much better and they can make the layout look beautiful, but the end of the day, if you don't start with something that's helpful to your audience, an agency is stuck, they can't do anything.
However pretty we make it look, it's not going to help that potential customer, it's not going to get them to pick the phone up to you. So find the way that works for you to get that first draft. Then keep editing and editing as it is much easier than writing that first draft, I can assure you that once you've got that first bit of information down, it's so much easier.
I always think the first five minutes is the hardest when it comes to any task you don't want to do. It doesn't matter if it's public speaking and you're talking in front of an audience of 20 or 2000. The first five minutes is the hardest. I used to hate making content, but I've fallen in love with it. Everyone out there that is looking for a client, as long as you've got a business that's out there to make a difference you should have a story that goes with that as to how you're doing something different. It shouldn't be driven by money. As soon as you start writing it down and you start talking about what it is and how your solution differs to other people, you'll start finding the people that resonate and become raving fans.
Mike: Just getting started is the key. I think people will find it much easier going forward, there's millions of tools on the market that are going to help you, whether it be creating emails, or whether it's creating E-books, there's tools to help you do that automatically. But the reality is, it's all about having a point of view. I can guarantee if you're in business, and your business is making money, you have a point of view. That point of view matters to somebody because you've got customers that value that point of view. We're seeing a lot of people struggle to get content created, because they feel that something written there's got to be 20 times better than something verbal, and often that's not the case.
Avoid Buying Spun Content
I've seen a lot pop up more and more recently is people that are using spun content. They purchase subscription content and make a few newsletters for your industry that you send out to your clients. They are vaguely about your industry, and my personal thought is knowing how much work goes into developing content and making sure my brand and my message comes through is that I don’t like this option. What are your thoughts?
Mike: I think the answer is people are not looking for you to be a trade magazine. They've got trade magazines for that, they've got other newsletters, they've heard this information 100 times. So yes, if you've generated your own content, is the quality going to be as good? Maybe not, but is the value to your potential customer going to be higher? Absolutely. It's not about getting something that looks pretty. To me, the great thing about digital, perhaps the one thing I think the digital has done to completely change marketing is that marketing is no longer subjective. I can tell you, we run tests with ads. We'll have two ads, and almost unanimously, both within the agency within the client, everyone will go, “I love that ad” but I hate that second one and we will run the two ads as an A/B test. The one that everybody hates performs best.
So subjective opinions, particularly your own subjective opinion, is quite often wrong. If you keep doing something, whether it's an email newsletter, or a podcast or a blogging, you will get better. I can tell you, we started our own podcast. Not only was I terrible in the first podcast interview, but actually I've managed to lose the recording as well. Every time you start, you know, you look back and you think, my first attempt was awful. Maybe it is, but actually, there are still people who think it's great.
Remember to Measure Your Engagement
I completely agree. Make sure you're measuring what you're putting out there so that you can see the results of your fruit. If you're going to the effort to make sure that you can see people are reading and clicking scrolling through and how long they're spending their session times on it. Whatever the content is, ask for reviews. This is something that people don't do, but ask your client. They may give you some feedback that you wouldn't have even thought about and give you information from a perspective of your client as opposed to what you think your client wants.
Mike: I totally agree. Also, the one thing I'd add to the measurement is to measure something that matters. One of the worst things about digital is that it's given people any number of different metrics they can use to measure their marketing campaign. We work with a small engineering company, and they're doing some email marketing. If you look at the click-through rate, there's a group of people that have fantastic click-through rates, in fact, they click on every single link in every single email. So measuring the click-through rate is crazy, because it's not a human doing it, it's clearly a spam filter that's looking at the email and making sure that there's no links that you shouldn't visit. Ironically, we found out for sure that one of these was purely spam, because we found out the guy who we were sending to was on furlough, and didn't even have access to his email.
It comes down to how you can measure whether what you're doing is generating either quality leads or opportunities, or ultimately customers. At the end of the day, as a business owner, I don't make any more money, if my click-through rate goes up 10%. I make more money if I get more customers. I think people really need to think about that and not get dazzled by some of the sparkly bits on tools.
Mike’s Book Recommendation
The metrics have to matter. I like his story there on the spam filtering, because that happens quite a lot. I wanted to ask you one last question. What would you say is your favourite book that influenced the direction that you've got in your business?
Mike: I'm going to pick a book that is a little bit different. I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography, “It's Not About the Bike”, which is interesting. Lance, I mean, he is a very interesting character. He's got clearly a huge number of character flaws and is certainly very imperfect. He wrote the book before the emission of cheating with drugs, so he's still denying taking drugs in the book. But he talks a lot about his life and his cancer treatment. There's a bit in the book that kind of talks about the people who survive cancer and the people who die. He said, there are optimistic people who survive, they're optimistic people who die. People who really look after themselves and survive, some of them died.
He really brings home the fact that you can do a lot to get yourself in the best position, but sometimes there's things you can't control. We could do everything right as a business, as an agency, and COVID could still take the business down. It doesn't make us a worse business. That's really influenced my thinking, all you can do is really do the right thing and then hope the circumstances make you successful.
Getting in Touch
Anyone out there that's looking to get in contact with Mike, visit Napierb2b. You can find out a bit more information about the voodoo that he does and go from there. Stay good and stay healthy.
How to Create Great Lead Magnets With Lenny Richardson
What do you need to get started?
With all the new fancy marketing tools out there it can be confusing working out the best way to engage with potential customers. I've got a fantastic guest today, Lenny Richardson is here from Affinity Agency and he's going to tell us about how to create lead magnets, how to make sure that you are collecting those leads, and how to follow up with them consistently. So Lenny, what is a lead magnet for anyone out there that doesn't know?
Learn more about marketing at https://dorksdelivered.com.au/
Lenny: So I would say the best way to think about a lead magnet is that it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. If you want leads, you need something to draw them in the best way possible. Some people refer to it as a bribe, I frame it to be more like a gift. So you want to figure out exactly what your potential prospect wants and give it to them for free to add value to them. You don't want to make it without any value at all, you want to give them some value. But remember, you don't have to give your entire playbook of ideas. Give them a taste, get them satisfied. Whatever that might be, that is your lead magnet.
Depending on the industry, but you might have something that lets them dip their toe in with your business to show that you are professional in the type of work that you're doing. That could be a white paper or a review of their infrastructure or something like that, depending on the business. How would you go about making a lead magnet?
Lenny: I try to think exactly about where they're hurting. Like I said, it'll definitely depend from industry to industry, but you want to know exactly what you want to get into their head and figure out what it is that they're looking for. Think about why they are coming to me for help, and try to give them a taste of what they might want.
A good example of this is I have a few friends in the dating industry. Their lead magnet was five or 10 text messages you can send to a girl during the COVID pandemic. To me it's a good lead magnet because a lot of guys are at home, they can't go outside, they're thinking the only way to get in contact with a girl is I can text them. So the lead magnet tells them what to say when they aren’t sure. It's right there. You get a taste of it and then they funnel you into their program.
Don’t Overthink It
I love that you've used that example, because I was in a long term relationship and then became single and I thought, shit, what am I going to do? I don't know what to do. I found that the process was nearly identical to that of just sales and marketing. You're just selling yourself instead of a product. So a lead magnet is all about just getting people to that next stage in the funnel to collect leads into a database. Is that right?
Lenny: Yeah, exactly. One thing I do want to mention is that I’ve seen people overthink it and over complicate it. So for example, I think one of the best lead magnets out there right now are ebooks. They are fantastic, very easy to make, and for the most part pretty digestible. But you have to really understand your audience and really understand who your target demographic and your target market is. If you have your lead magnet and it looks like a very detailed and heavy read, they probably won't download it.
I'm not that familiar with the tech industry, but if you're a company looking to help people fix their computers, your lead magnet could just be “Five Easy Steps to Fix Common Computer Problems”. Just something basic that someone will come across and say:
This solves an immediate problem I have
I can probably do this
This person added value to my life
So that company is now in my head. I can come back to them and use them in the future, hopefully, if all works out.
You are right. It doesn't have to be overly complicated, and it's very dependent on your industry. If you're trying to sell something to a university or something like that, you need to have white papers where you're going into heavy detail. Some people only want to stick to video, and anyone that's reading this on our website is clearly into text. So it's all horses for courses, and you need to know your audience find their pain point.
Solve Your Potential Customers Problems
Lenny: Definitely do some research and try your best to get to your prospect or potential consumer. Ultimately, I feel like if you have a business, the main objective is to solve a problem. At some point, you probably are aware of what problem they might have. But it helps to kind of get a little bit deeper and figure out exactly what ails them, what keeps them up at night.
So I also have my real estate license, my license is active, but I don't actively pursue leads or anything like that. But what I did in the past is that I had a small book, it's called “Don't Buy a Home Until You Read This”. As a real estate agent, people ask you a bunch of questions and I will take all their questions. The top five most common ones that they asked me, I put them in a book, and I self published it. It's a tiny physical book and that's my lead magnet. I can just say, if you're interested in his book, you get it, and then I get their information. That's an example of knowing exactly what the person wants. So you can survey people, you can ask them directly using sites like Reddit, that is always a good option.
Converting Your Lead Magnets
So let's say you've got an audience, or you hope to have an audience. You created a lead magnet. I've heard this statement many times, the number one goal is to get people off of the socials and into your database. So how do you go about doing that? And that's normal I guess, through a landing page or something like that, or how would you go about doing that?
Lenny: Once you have the lead magnet, you want to use a landing page or some way to get them into a database. Landing pages are simple and are very easy to make, but you can also get creative. So on Instagram, people are leaving their phone numbers in their bio and people can text it. After people text them it saves their details on a database so you get their information. There's a lot of ways to capture it, but I think the key thing is to make sure you get the contact information.
Products to Manage Your Database
Once you've got that information, it can be as simple as using an Excel spreadsheet or getting more organised such as using something like Active Campaign. Are there any particular tools you would suggest people check out?
Lenny: One of my favourites is MailChimp. For me, it has everything I need. If you do the free version, you can build landing pages, it has a CRM built into it, you can create campaigns, and once you pay for it, you can get a little bit fancy and do automations and behavioural campaigns.
Following Up With Your Leads
It's as simple as just asking your current clients, really, why do they work with you? How do you differ from your competitors? Find out that why and then from that you can dive in. One thing that I would like to know, how do you make sure that you're not pestering people once they are in your database? How do you make sure you're following up with your leads?
Lenny: Keep it simple. A lot of times I think people when they follow up, they think, follow up with the intent to sell. So every time they follow up, they're saying buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. I think that is where it gets annoying when you get four emails in a row and all four emails from Monday to Thursday are all trying to make sales.
Along with keeping it simple, you can use humor to add value. There's an email I got yesterday. and it said something like, you didn't register. You didn't read the following ebook. You abandoned me. I thought you were special. It basically made it sound like I was about to break up with them. It was just so funny. That was a good email because it's funny, it put me in a good mood. They're still kind of selling, but at the same time, they're not forcing it down my throat. So to me, that's a good follow up. Be funny and you don’t have to spam people with 1000 emails. I think statistically speaking in most sales, it takes about four to five contacts before you're usually able to convert a prospect into a customer or client. For the most part, you're not going to close the one on the first sale. So be patient, and just add value with your emails.
It's always the elephant in the room, I know that the end goal is not just giving away lots of free information, the end goal is obviously for them to convert and become a customer. I call it a P for P or product for prospects and lead magnets are very much the same thing. So for my I.T business Dorks Delivered I have a white paper that I will send out to different people very specific to their industry, detailing pain points for their industry. Then we'll try and think of something that's a little bit bigger that we can help them out with. That will be seen as the end goal is that we're looking to help them out with their support.
Can Scarcity Work?
You have to have that balance. You don't want to be emailing them every day. Do you have any scarcity involved with your processes or do you just keep nurturing them until they're ready?
Lenny: Both can work and the most simple thing would be to just nurture them until they're ready. Personally, I do like using a scarcity strategy or scarcity marketing, but only when it's legitimate scarcity. A good example is that I'm trying to run a case study for restaurants and gyms. I'm offering to do their Facebook ads for free to use a certain type of funnel. I'm being optimistic. I don't want too many people to be a part of this case study just because it consumes time. So that's real scarcity.
I think some people try to go a little bit above and beyond the scarcity. I've seen some landing pages where it has the timer that is five seconds away from ending, but I think a lot of people realise once this hits zero, I can still refresh the page. So it's not real scarcity, because I know that it's not limited. I love scarcity, when it's very legitimate scarcity.
Remember to Be Authentic
You want to have authenticity coming through in whatever the marketing material is that you're doing. You want to make sure that people become able to know, like, and trust you throughout the journey you've carried them through. Sometimes you're going to have people that just want a lead magnet and then disappear off and have no interest in doing anything else with you. As long as you are authentic and your genuine message is presented correctly, you will find customers.
Expected Conversion Rates
What would you say are some of your normal sort of conversion rates from sending out opportunities for people to fill in a form to get a lead magnet? What are sort of the numbers people are seeing out there in the wild?
Lenny: A lot of the time it comes down to why they aren't converting as well as they could be, and part of it could be the funnel. It could just be the funnel itself, it could be the copy, it could be even the image. It’s a good idea to look at and see where people are dropping off at wherever they're dropping off, try to identify what's going on and then fix it.
For me personally, I'm looking at a 10%, 20% conversion rate as a great success. I know for email marketing, if you get about 10% open rates, you're doing pretty good.
I have heard some people convert a lot higher, but it depends on your secondary and tertiary influences. If you only told everyone in your family about your business and they all use your product or service, you're going to convert quite highly in that pond.
How Lenny Can Help You
If anyone does want some more information from you on creating lead magnets what can you help them with?
Lenny: I have a free eBook that goes over the three steps we talked about here in a little bit more detail. I know they sound very simple and very basic, especially if you're in the marketing or business world, but from what I've seen, a lot of people do not do these things. It gives some examples to really illustrate what I'm talking about.
I'm looking forward to giving it a bit of a read myself. Is there anything else you would like to go through?
Lenny: One thing I do want to say with the emails. Experiment, and check your analytics. For example, if you're sending emails out, and you see a lot of people unsubscribing in hordes, you might be doing it too much, or you're probably making people angry. But if you see a pretty good open rate, you're probably doing it right. Don't change it up. So be mindful of the analytics. A lot of people think email marketing is dead. I personally do not believe that. I think email marketing works well when it's done well.
I've really enjoyed speaking with you, and if you're looking to get more information from Lenny, you can jump across to affinityagency.co and find out some more information. Everyone out there, stay good.
Finishing Your Tasks With Tony Guarnaccia
How do you make sure things get done?
As many business owners have, I've been in a spot before where you start a project, to find that you get halfway through the project and the psychology of the mind says, "let's finish the project, but you don't even really look at why you started it”.
I've got Tony Guarnaccia here who is the founder of ResultsClub.org to tell us about a special system he's got called the Results Loop. Tell me about how you make sure you don't make the final mistake of feeling like you have to finish something while you might be flogging a dead horse.
Get more tips on how to finish your tasks at dorksdelivered.com.au
Tony: Let me start with the story. Years ago, back then late 1930s. There was an epidemic much like we're dealing with today. It was a polio epidemic and so it impacted children where they couldn't walk. Unfortunately, my mother was one of those people. So at the age of just nine months old, she found herself with polio, unable to walk all the way up to the age of 14 years old. So growing up, I asked her, how did you survive? How are you actually able to eventually walk and wear high heels? But even mentally? How do you get through that?
What I always learned growing up that what I applied to business today is that you have to break things down. That really is kind of the impetus behind a lot of what I'm talking about, which is taking small steps. What my mother had to do to be able to walk was that the hospital first had her work with pottery to build up the nervous system and strength. Eventually, they had her swimming, building up more strength to the point where she was then starting to slowly walk.
Three Steps to Success
What I discovered from her and working with some of the best companies in the world, is that there are really three things that are necessary to have success.
Number one, you have to know what steps to take.
Number two, then you have to know how to take those steps.
Number three, you have to actually take the action and take those steps.
So that is really the formula I found that I applied to my system called The Results Loop, which we can talk about in a minute.
Resisting the Shiny Object
It's great to hear that we've got the medical ability to put your mum in a position that she is now. So often people make purchases of things, and they go, “oh, that's great”, but then the next day they go, “what the hell did I do that for?” Myself, I might buy something online and think it sounds like a good idea, but then the next day I realise I may have had too many beers when I bought it. If I was sober I may not have done it quite as quickly. How do you make sure the squeeze is worth the juice?
Tony: I love that saying because that's something I grew up with in business. I think it really comes down to business owners and marketers. They both chase the shiny object. They're looking at the latest thing without first looking at your overall strategy. Where I always start is with what you want to accomplish. So you start with the end in mind, what's your end goal, and then you reverse engineer it. Otherwise, the business is going in the wrong direction. It's something we've all done. How many of us have wasted money hiring the wrong people, placing the wrong ads, wasting ads, wasting time, wasting money, we've all done it. A lot of times it comes down to the decisions we make. A lot of times we make a quick decision, but it's not necessarily the right decision.
Not Everyone Should Be Your Customer
As you say we've all done that. I know when I started out in business doing I.T, I thought everyone could be my customer. So we had residential people, we had businesses, we had local councils, we had all sorts of different people's schools. I had a look at our marketing spending and what it was bringing in. After that, we cut out schools. we cut out local council, and decided to just focus on small to medium enterprises. But without having that data there, it wouldn’t have been possible to do that.
Finding a Balance
In The Results Loop, let's say I'm looking to go down a new path and someone told me about this cool strategy. How do you work out that balance between home and business? Or if you're starting out in business completely from scratch, and you've done the Boston Tea Party approach and just saying we’re going out on our own, how do you make sure that you focus on the right thing. Sometimes it's not necessarily the work in the trenches, is it?
Tony: No it isn’t. The good news is, I found that regardless of the company or the stage they're at, the same six factors apply. Those six factors are:
The market you're serving.
The products and services you're providing them, which I call offerings.
Your value.
Gaining new buyers,
The loyalty of those buyers
How to Get Quality Referrals
Josh: I've been inundated with too many customers before and then had to cut some of them out, but then some of the others have downsized. So how would you make sure that you got results that a referral system, for instance?
Tony: It depends on the size and the stage of the company. So if it's a startup, you really want to go around it in terms of starting with your markets and your offerings. So that's the best place to start if you're stuck. But if you're an established company, and you want to scale and get to the next level, it's always best to start with loyalty, which is getting people to buy more frequently, and getting them to refer you because that's the lowest cost per acquisition. So that's the first place to start.
The way I begin with referrals, and you would appreciate this because I know you're a data guy, is to start with measurement. So you want to see where you are having success today and where you're not having success today to least come up with some ratios. For instance, what percentage of my customers or give me referrals? How many referrals on average? Do they provide me during the course of the year?
There are all sorts of metrics that you can leverage to create referral systems. You want to take where you're at today, understand what those numbers are, and what the drivers of those numbers are. Benchmark yourself, and hopefully even benchmark yourself against others. After doing this you can then come up with systems to improve those numbers since systems give you predictability.
Great Referral Programs for Companies That Aren’t Sexy Can Exist
I love my numbers and love data. With referrals, I've always tried to make they are worth it. With my I.T business Dorks Delivered, our clients usually only contact us when something has gone wrong. I've always found that customers when everything's working really well, they love you, but they don't bring it up in conversation with others unless they someone else expresses it. How do you have some refer a non sexy professional services product?
Tony: Sadly, that's what a lot of our businesses are like in B2B, they're not the sexiest things necessarily. So what do you do? Well, there are a couple of things to look at. One, you can certainly get referrals from your clients or customers, what I always look at is joint venture partners as well. So who is in complementary businesses, and I would think of it in two ways, who comes before you, what kind of business creates the problem or the need that you solve? Then who do you create the problem or need for?
So for instance, if you're a marketing agency, I did this when I started, I focused on web designers because I wasn't doing websites at the time. I knew they create the problem that I solved. Once you get a website, you probably want to have it optimised. So that's one place to start, and I like to start there because they have more volume. So you might get one or two from your client base, but if you can leverage joint venture partners like that, there's a lot more opportunity.
For your clients, I would look at trigger points. So there's always specific trigger points that drive the opportunity for the referral. One is when you do a good job. So you want to make sure that part of your sales process or your customer support process is to ask for the referral at those different points in time. When people first buy from you, is a very good time to ask as well. But how do you actually do that? How do you make it easy for them to refer you? That goes back to the fundamental question of why someone would refer you. It's the same answer as to why they would buy from you, which is value, you have to provide value.
Providing Value
Tony: The way I look at any kind of lead generation is that there's always an exchange of value. So at the top of the funnel, when someone first comes into your world, you're exchanging, essentially, their time for your content. They're not giving you a lead or anything like that. A good example would be a podcast. So someone is exchanging their time about all things B2B marketing, right? Then the next stage is where someone's going to give you their contact information, otherwise known as a lead. Rhere's an exchange there, but a lot of times it's higher value content.
So for instance, I have an assessment, and what they get is they get a score, called the result score, in exchange for me getting some contact information. At the very bottom of the funnel is the exchange of money. Typically, it's money for an end result. So how do you apply this to a referral system?
You want to think about how can your client give you a referral and get value out of it.
What kind of value would someone get? Well, status. So if you have a company that has a lot of status, then a lot of people want to give that referral. Or, it might be even something that's helpful for their friend, because I increase their status as well. A lot of times in B2B, I suggest getting what's known as a referral kit. So it might be a book or something that's really tangible that's going to help somebody. So I would reframe my mind from not getting a referral. But really, how can I help my client help their friend to reframe your mind.
I'm glad you answered the way that you did because that is definitely something that has been working for us. Ultimately knowledge isn't something that people should be paying too much for. They should be able to get that knowledge and really understand who you are and a podcast is a fantastic way for people to understand who you are.
Consider Gifting a Book
Have you heard of a guy named Bob Berg? I was given his book many years ago and was told read this will change your business. There was a note in the book from who I got it from saying, now that you finish reading this, it's time that you give someone else the same enjoyment. So I went and bought 30 copies of the book and wrote the same note in the back. I found that it really just gets the relationship off on the right foot when they can hold something that is tangible after they've been dealing in the digital world. If they've already started to know, like, and trust you, and then you've given them something that’s helping their business out, that helps your business out.
Tony: That is one of the reasons why I have a book coming out for exactly that reason, because it's a great way for someone to refer me. They give the friend a copy of the book. One thing that is really important with B2B in particular, is a lot of times your success is relative to how much time someone spends with you. So podcasts are great for that, because someone's listening for 20 minutes. Imagine what it's like for a book. Someone's reading your book for two or three hours, they're really getting used to who you are, and building that know, like, and trust in place.
Remember: Don't Automate The Personal Touch
As much as I love automation and love data, don't automate the personal touch. It's something you should never automate. You're spending the time to talk to someone, if you're talking to them, listen to them and truly hear them. You've got two ears in one mouth, make sure that you are using them in that proportion and you'll build a relationship and you'll grow rather quickly.
So if people have gone through your different growth strategies, and there's now got their funnel full, where do you come in to be able to help people out? with making sure that your team's able to deliver on the results without watering down. How can you make sure that your team stays up to par and that they are doing what they're meant to be doing?
Tony: I've been fortunate to work at many different levels in business. Six, seven-figure businesses, eight and nine figure businesses, Fortune 500 businesses. Really, the difference is, the smaller companies have no systems or process. As you get to the next level, you start to have things more systematised. So a lot of times if people are not stuck with sales or marketing, it's an operational problem. That usually comes down to the systems you've created, the automation you have, or communication systems.
Standard Operating Procedures Are Vital
I started out as a solo guy saying I can do better than where I was working, and I went gangbusters. Then I realised I'm spending a lot of time doing bookkeeping and doing all the administration stuff that I didn’t like. My first contractors became full time staff members, then one of them sadly had a stroke and had to jump out of the role. It nearly killed the business because we're both working very hard. That's when I started heavily investing in standard operating procedures. This documentation made sure that the things that you can't automate can be followed exactly how you want by the meat in the seat. The same way, as Ray Kroc originally envisioned McDonald's to have a bunch of 15 year olds run your business.
Auditing Your Team
I understand that you do team audits to make sure that people are doing what they're meant to be doing. Tell me a bit more about how do you know if your team's doing the right thing to need to have an audit?
Tony: The first thing you want to look at is do you have the right people. You want to have the right people on the bus and in the right seats. Where do you start with that? That starts with you, meaning the business owner, or the executives. You need to define your core values, your mission and your purpose, and your big, hairy audacious goals, your vision, those kinds of things. If you have a compelling vision, people will follow you. So you want to make sure that they have the same value system.
In my company, I define six core values that kind of drive who we are, how we hire and the decisions we make. The way I think about it is, do they fit your core values? Do they have the skills necessary? Do they have kind of the attributes? You don't want to have someone who is very analytical running the sales team, it probably wouldn't be a good fit. So you want to make sure all that is aligned, and then you can really scale your team.
If you've got someone setting the team's energy, you need to make sure you have the people on the bus in the right seats. I like that. I've seen in businesses that we've worked with where a gun engineer has been put into a managing role to manage engineers and it nearly kills them. They enjoy being on the tools solving the problems, not solving people problems.
How Results Club Works
Tell me a bit more about ResultsClub.org. Let's say I’m trying to work out if Tony is the right fit for me, how's this going to help me out? How does it all work?
Tony: Results Club is a membership, a group coaching membership, where I answer people's questions on where they're stuck. What we do is every week is we hit on different topics. So one week, it might be HR, so we bring in an HR professional. What I love is sales and marketing. So that's what I focus on. You go on the call, and you can ask questions to the expert or me directly, and really get unstuck with whatever stage you're in. It's also a great place to network with like-minded individuals.
Sounds like there are multiple reasons why you want to be on there. It's going to be a stepping stone, it's going to be something that's going to allow for people to really get to that next level.
Tony: Absolutely. One of the frustrations I had, as I’ve grown businesses, is I don't have the answer to this particular question. I wish I could just call someone and get that answer, whether it's something technical, or whatever it is., I always wish I had a resource to go to. I thought, well, if it's not existing out there, why not create it? So that's really why I created it.
So people can use this as kind of like a soundboard to bounce ideas off of, or pretty much use them as the pseudo Board of Directors without any financial interest which is really cool. So the different walks of life people have been in, they could be anything from solicitors, accountants, and anywhere from around the world. How do you work out the collaboration partners?
Tony: So we'll have meetings where it cross-pollinates where you can ask people that are not in your industry because I actually believe that's where the greatest innovation comes from is looking outside your industry. Then we'll also have different meetings where it will be industry-specific where people can think with other people that do what they do.
One of the best things you can do is go to a conference that has nothing to do with what you're in and what you're doing to learn from outside your industry. I went to one on accounting geared towards practices that needed software to manage many, many books. I went along and realised there's a product here right now I can easily integrate. They're already paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month for their subscriptions and we can integrate this for 50 bucks. But everyone went, oh, this is just how we've been doing this. This is how it's done. It's just about being there to think about it and using that pencil in the spacecraft instead of the pen upside down to become an innovator. Is there anything else you'd like to go through?
Final Thoughts
Tony: Just to circle back on what we talked about the how and actually taking action, but just to circle back on the what because that's the area that's most often neglected. What I like to do is take people through a plan. So with The Results Loop I created it in such a way where it's a planner, it's a one-page marketing/sales/business plan. We really take the time to step back and examine what you want to accomplish in the next year is really worth the time. Most people don't do that.
I used to be a professional violinist. When I was learning really hard music, my teacher would tell me to slow down to speed up. As a young kid, I just wanted to blow through the hard stuff and just get to the melodies and be lazy. What I learned is really, again, small steps, break things down to slow, and that actually will accelerate your growth and so forth. Most people won't plan though, because they're afraid to fail. They don't want to take the time, they don't know how, but planning is really one of the secrets that I found for success.
When you think about planning, if you feel those butterflies in your chest saying you shouldn't do that, it's probably the thing you think you should do. If it feels like jumping out of your comfort circle, as much as you hate it, you should definitely do it.
You've got a nice deal running for people to jump into The Results Club at a discounted rate at the moment.
Tony: Yeah, you go there and this club, it's going to be $297 a month. Before we do that, we're going to have it for a period of $97. But right now to say thank you for having me. Honestly, it's only $1 for the first two months. So it's $2 to get two months, which is eight sessions with me and my guests were literally any question you have and where you're stuck in your business, I'll answer it.
How good is that. Two months, $2, it's less than a cup of coffee. That's pretty good. Sink your teeth in and it's very, very low risk, very low entry price and definitely jump across. I'm going to be jumping across and checking it out. Use the code Business Built Freedom, BBF.
Anyone that has enjoyed this, make sure to check out resultsscore.com or resultsclub.org and see what Tony has got to say and sign up, see what you get out of it.
How To Relay Your Message To Customers With Krista Ripma
How to make sure your message isn’t lost?
Josh: Who has trouble relaying their message and being the person that they want to be from their heart? You got into business for a certain reason, and most of the time that is emotionally driven for those young entrepreneurs that are trying to make a difference. Sometimes that authentic marketing doesn't come through with your message.
We've got Krista here from Authentic Audience. She's here today to talk to us about how you can get that message through in a way that resonates with your story, resonates with your customers, and ultimately gets you more sales. So, Krista, tell me, how do you make sure that your message doesn't get lost in the midst with the message of everyone else? That's also trying to make sure that they're authentic? and so on and so forth?
Get more tips on relaying your message at https://dorksdelivered.com.au/
Krista: Great place to start. So no one is you is the simple answer. So although there are lots of marketing and sales coaches out there in the world, nobody's me, so nobody's going to deliver my message in the same way that I am. So I think the first step is to ask yourself, what are your gifts, and these are the gifts that you bring into your business that you walk into a room with, that your best friend would say about you, and start from that place. So for me, my gifts are authenticity and truth. So I try and bring that into my business into my messaging and into everything I share, which sets me apart and makes me more unique and approachable. And I also think, sharing your why and sharing your story, your personal story and journey before you found x, whatever product service or anything it is that you're selling, your customer is you before you had this transformation. Get really, really specific in who you are and also who you're talking to.
Finding The Right Audience That Wants To Work For You
Josh: If you've got your message down pat, or maybe you need someone to see it from a distance, I found it difficult to see the forest for the trees. I thought I've got a great message. But, I've got that message from the mindset of an engineer from the mindset of someone who is very detail-oriented. So having an authentic audience, how can you make sure your audience isn't just talking bullshit? How do you make sure you get the right audience that does resonate with your message?
Krista: My first suggestion is to write a letter to your dream client or your dream customer. This is like the first thing I have anybody do if you ever come work with me. Regardless whether it's a session with me or a course, we always do this, and I have you write a letter to your dream customer, because they're out there. They need what you're selling. They're listening to other podcasts. Who do they follow? What books are they reading? What inspires them? What pain points are they experiencing, the more you can get in the head of your dream client or customer and talk to them. It's amazing how quickly they start to show up every call I get on. I'm still excited and surprised who shows up because it's like you're exactly who I was speaking to and you're exactly who I made this for.
Quality Over Quantity
Krista: So I think a big mistake we make when we're trying to grow our audience is we want quantity over quality. And really, it should be the other way around. If you have 100 people who are engaged with what you're sharing and buying from you, that's amazing, versus 10,000 people who aren't commenting, aren't buying, aren't connecting. So the name of the game is get specific, get really, really specific. And the best way to do that is talk to this person, write a letter to this person, create a mood board, whatever it takes to really connect to and be in service to your dream customer.
Be Authentic
Josh: I know for my customers, I'm happy enough to say that if any of them saw me at a pub, they come over to me and buy me a beer without even saying hello, they're like "oh Josh, here you go" and you've got that perfect relationship and they know your partner's name. I'm happy to say that we do have a fantastic group of listeners, the businesses that we work with. What we found in having that is their retention rate is huge and the churn is incredibly low, so we don't lose many customers. Because we do have that relationship and because we do understand their pain points, anyone in business can really start to see it. They and feel like hey, if they know me to this level of business, if they know that I'm building this house and the direction that my business is going and not just macro but micro details about each other, you can make the right decisions and know that you are going to be putting in better solutions than your competitor.
It’s Beyond Business Benefits
Krista: That's a really good point that you made. It's beyond just the business benefits, it's the benefits of you, of being in your community of being in your world. And I just can't stress that enough how valuable that is, the more vulnerable, the more personal, the more real you are. And then when somebody sees you, like they come on a call, or they use your services, or see you in the pub, they feel like they know you. I do think that the more we can authentically be our full selves, the more people will resonate with that. I just can't stress enough how beautiful that is, and what an important point that is to make. When you hide behind your brand it's impossible to have that relationship with your audience.
Don’t Hide Behind Your Brand
Josh: Perfect what you said there, hiding behind your brand. You sit there hiding behind your brand, we have a look at Steve Jobs. And the way that he was the ambassador for the brand, people loved Steve Jobs. He owned a portion of Apple versus some of the other massive brands out there, like who resonates the same way with Google. Or the same way with McDonald's or some of these other massive brands. And it's not that they're doing things wrong, they're still working in a way, that's fine. But when you go to contact Google support, you can't find a phone number. Facebook support, you can't find a phone number, any of these large companies can't find a phone number. With Apple, you're able to go into a store and speak to someone there and really get to know them.
How to Not Be a Copycat Business
Josh: If you've made an entry point that the other businesses weren't doing, how can you make sure that you don't end up with a copycat business that takes the same information? You've created the same content on the web, the same scripts, it's very difficult to sort of not just have those spun and changed into something else. And for anyone out there that's listening, spinning content is where you take someone else's content, adjust some of the syllables pretty much and then make it your own, put the sentences in a slightly different way. But how can you make sure someone doesn't have that same message so that from the outset, it appears as if you are the same? Or at least they're trying to compare apples with apples before they have that authentic relationship? How can you make sure that for us in Australia, the Hungry Jack's to McDonald's, or for you guys, the Burger King to McDonald's, how can you make sure you can have that differentiator?
Krista: You know, I mean, people can smell authenticity, it's crazy. I think just having that faith in our customers and in our audience that they know. For me, if somebody was trying to spin off my content, I would see that as a great sign, it means I'm doing something, right. And also, nobody's me. So you could take my script. You could have my talking points. You could have my slides, but it's not going to feel the same. And I think as a culture, we're becoming more and more conscious of who we're buying from and where our money's going. I'm seeing it in the Facebook ads, I'm running every day, like people really care, especially since COVID. This whole idea of spending and connecting and community is so big.
So I think that, first of all, if you are focusing on copying somebody else, or doing what somebody else is doing, you're doing a disservice to yourself and to your customers, and really into the world. I am very spiritual. I believe we're all here with a Dharma or a purpose. And it can be really easy to see somebody else in our industry doing something and be like, oh, I'm just going to try and do that. But that's not your purpose. That's not your dharma. And so to try and do that, or change your business model, or your strategy based on somebody else's, or their posts or their content is such a disservice. If you can just try and block out that noise.
One of my teachers says comparison dilutes your focus. Because when we're comparing ourselves, we're not focused on our work on our art, our flow, our process, whatever it is that we're creating. So for me, if I'm on the side of seeing somebody else trying to copy my work, I'm like, go for I. You're never going to be able to do what I can do and just own that. And secondly, if you're trying to work on somebody else's stuff, instead of focusing on your stuff, that's such a bummer, because you have amazing gifts and services that are getting lost in that process.
The last thing I wanted to say when you talked about Steve Jobs, I think that's such a good example. And I say all the time and people follow people, and then they follow brands. And so just how you introduced me, Krista from Authentic Audience, and I'm the face of it, I'm the voice of it. It's not me. Authentic Audience is a beautiful company with its energy and vibe of its own. But it wouldn't have the same energy if there wasn't a face and a personality and somebody being the messenger for that brand. So when you hide behind your brand, or you don't step forward and really own it, you're actually doing the business a disservice as well.
The Secret and The War of Art
Josh: As the saying goes imitation is the greatest form of flattery. And it's not a bad thing, if people decide to do that, it's a good thing. And it sounds like you would have read "The Secret".
Krista: I have, I've read The Secret. And my other big book that I tell people to read is the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, it's a quick read. It's a lot about resistance, and stepping into your art and like facing resistance, and overcoming that and really owning who you are, and working on your art and your purpose and your guests. And yes, The Secret, I read it a long time ago, but I feel like it really stuck.
Josh: When you were saying write a letter to your ideal customer, bringing it into your world and knowing exactly what you want. And having that hyper focus makes a huge difference. Knowing that these are the people you want to work with also removes the poo customers, so to speak, the ones that you don't want to work with.
Krista: Totally because they won't resonate with it. I just think energy is so real, especially in our businesses. And it's like if energy is too woowoo for you then like getting more concrete with goals and spreadsheets and getting really, really specific, like this is my dream customer. This is how many of them I want to reach this is how many sales I want to make. And this is how I'm going to go about doing that. So I always start with the goals. And then the very first action item that I have anybody do is write a letter to the person that they want to reach with these goals. And it's just it calls it in, it's like you have to put it out there. And the more you say it, the more you speak it, the more you share it, those people will just start to show up because they'll hear you.
The Right Customers Are Out There
Josh: That's exactly what we want. Like we want those correct people, anyone that says that they don't have enough people in business, or they can't find the right audience are probably not really thinking enough about who their right audience is. And a lot of the time and you'll hear this, everyone's my audience, everyone can work with me. And when you have that approach, I find that no one will work with you if you've got everyone working with you. It just dilutes your message and also makes you more commoditised. So if you are in a position, you've got that mindset and someone wants to start writing this letter, what are some of the attributes, you really want to make sure that they're having that hyper focus on like, I've undergone similar activities, where were we talking? Do they like golf or yachting? Or just you really go down to their hobbies? What does their weekend look like? Is that the kind of stuff that you'd suggest to go into the letter?
Krista: It really depends. There's somebody out there that needs your service right now. If they were sitting across from you, what would you say to them? I mean, it's as simple as that it's what pain points are they experiencing right now that your product service or offer can solve? And how do you want to deliver it to them?
The fiist thing I'll actually suggest sometimes if you don't know where to start with your letter is answering the four key questions that any business needs to be able to answer. Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? And what's in it for me, the customer? That's your pitch. That's your one liner. That's how you connect with people. And that's how you feel seen and engaged as quickly as possible as being able to refine those answers. So when you're writing this letter, it's who are you, you tell them who you are. You tell them what you do, you tell them why it matters, and you tell them what's in it for them. So that's always a good place to start, and then getting as specific as you can.
Also, my dream client is always changing, because my business is always evolving and changing. So the person I was speaking to last year isn't who I'm speaking to now. And so I suggest people do this almost quarterly to sort of set yourself up for success. I like to work in 90 day sprints. So every 90 days are, so I like to sort of revisit this idea of who I'm calling in to hit these specific goals for the next 90 days. It truly is amazing how it happens and how quickly it happens to.
Finding Customers When You Aren’t Outgoing
Josh: You have to have a business plan, but they evolve as well. And I think that you should be writing them both together, you shouldn't be neglecting one or the other thing, having the business plan to know what you want to achieve is just solidifying a dream and writing down so you can have actions to get to get to the future. Knowing the people that are going to be able to have you take those actions is all about writing a letter to know exactly who you're talking to. When you've got those items in place. How do you start if you have no knowledge on how you're going to find a customer, you've never done networking, you're possibly introverted type person? Where do you find the person? Or how do you know once you've got your letter written?
I know this is going to be a super difficult question to answer. So I'm going to go with this scenario. Let's say you've just finished university and you want to become own your own practice as a lawyer, or we can go with this scenario of the pie shop owner. How do you go about finding those people when you know you're a detail oriented person, very factual, but not necessarily outgoing and you need to go talk to lots of people. How would you find that audience?
Krista: I'm going to assume that you're a fantastic lawyer or that you bake fantastic pies. The product is everything, so marketing and sales can't make your product better, right, it can just get it out in front of the right people and position it in a place for them to buy. But it has to be good. So let's just assume that it's good. It's the best pie in town. There are five people in your world right now, just five people that if you reached out to them, it would change your business. Right now, everybody has this, whether it's an aunt, an uncle, a friend, a cousin, or somebody that you knew from college, there are five people in your world that if you reached out to them, they would be excited to hear from you and happy to help.
So I always start those there, those are your low hanging fruit. And just say, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm offering, this is what I'm looking for. What do you suggest if you're just starting from the very beginning? Get some beta testers. I have three free slices of pie that I'm giving away today, who wants them, like DM me, write me back if you want this free slice, or this beta test of whatever it is that I'm offering. So it's always about crawl, walk, run, you don't want to just hit the gas without testing without refining. And as my partner would say, it's get one customer and get one customer, take them through your journey and make sure that they're happy customers. So you take one person, make sure they're happy, they loved your service, they love your offer, the best form of marketing will forever be word of mouth. So you make one customer happy, you'll get three more, because they'll go tell their friends, they'll go tell their partners, and the word of mouth will start coming. What marketing is online, what I do is just kind of like digital word of mouth, right? But you still need that initial organic traction, before you start running ads or doing anything crazy like that. It's like, reach out to five people get one customer make it a success. That is way farther than most people starting out will do. You're already ahead of the game if you have one happy customer.
You Need to Be Sustainable
Josh: I think it also gives you the confidence internally to go, okay, I've done this with one person, I can do this with another. And as you said perfectly, I don't think people get into business, and I could be wrong in this, but I don't think people get into business to go, I'm going go make shit pies and be a bad lawyer.
Krista: I mean, I would hope not. I would hope not. You know, it's not sustainable. And so that's always like, when you're having trouble with sales or marketing. I'm like, well, how's your product? How's your service? Can we invest in making that experience better for people? Whenever I look at somebody's account, or website or service, I'm like, before we drive people here, let's make sure this is good. Let's make sure this is going to convert and what you're offering is super valuable, because it's way easier to keep customers then continuously finding new ones.
Josh: I completely agree with that. And when you look at costs of churn customer churn, it's huge. For us, we have some pretty cool offers for our customers or for our leads, where we say, look, we'll hack into your business, if we can't hack into business, we'll give you $1,000. And we think well, that's pretty good. But if we can hack into your business, we're going to have a discussion around how we're able to do that.
Krista: I love that!
Josh: It's a strong call to action that says we know what we're doing. And it has some elements of discrediting the current company that wins, because business owners that need to know they aren't in the game of knowing all that they need to know about technology, all that there is out there about technology, because it's not a requirement for them. That's why they hire the experts and making sure you're making great pies.
Lead With the Benefits
Krista: I love that call to action, though, I think that says so much like I feel something it's risky. And it tells me that you know what you're doing? And also, I don't need to know what you do. I just need to know the benefits. And I think that's a huge mistake. So many people are focused on the features like what's included, but not the benefits, right? So I always say lead with the benefits. And I feel like that call to action right there. That's solid. I have nothing to say about that. There's always something I have to say, so that's very impressive.
Josh: Only because you said that I'm going to tell you the other one that we use and that's financially backed up time. So we had to look at what our competitors were offering versus what we are offering and our competitors charges a flat rate per month for their IT support and you get unlimited IT support, we charge a flat rate. And we thought, well, that's not really a differentiator.
But then we said if you have downtime, we will pay you per hour until you go back up. That's not something anyone else is doing. That means that if your business is down from a technology standpoint, it's costing you money, it's costing you downtime, it can be costing you 10s of thousands of dollars an hour, depending on the size of the business. If we say look, we're going pay you per hour if you go down. And obviously that's a scalable statement, depending on the size of their business, everyone's pulling the ship in the same direction. We want to get to make sure we're offering the best support the fastest support the best solution so that you don't go down because we don't want to be paying it. It's not a very good business model for us.
Krista: I think it's great. I mean, and just the way you talk about it, it's so clear that it's authentic, right? And it's like, again, going back to that idea. Like, it's not something you can fake like seeing the way you light up about it. And you're excited to tell me about it. I personally find I.T very boring, but listening to you talk about it. I'm like, tell me more. That matters to people. When I teach my marketing fundamentals course, and the basics of marketing, it could be very boring, but I'm so excited about it, that it makes other people excited about it. And I think that's just a key point in selling and sales is if you're not excited, and you're not sharing and posting and screaming it from the rooftops how amazing your offers, why should anyone else care?
Josh: Exactly. And everyone has the ability, as I say, this is a cringy sentence. But with IT, we try to squirt some sexy on it.
Krista: I love that.
Josh: It's what we try to do. It's not a very fun topic. It's something that people will roll their eyes over at. But it's something everyone has to have. And everyone understands the effects that has if you don't have a great marketing plan, if you don't have a great sales strategy, if you don't have your sales funnels or pipelines reformed and refined. You're not going to be able to have said sexy squirted on your business.
So people out there that are probably thinking, ah, man, I want some sexy, or my business or I want to have a business, it's doing what what I wanted to be doing. But maybe they're a bit too scared. Or they might not have that creative mindset or flair to be able to really bring that laser focused message into place. I understand you got some strategy sessions, and also a course, tell us a bit about how that works.
Getting Help From Krista
Krista: Sure. So the two ways in which we can work together, I have a course called Marketing Fundamentals and that's the basics. So it goes through types of digital offers, a lot of people don't know, there's so many things out there, YouTube, LinkedIn, SEO, Facebook, like what should I be doing? How should I be doing it? So I break down all the types of digital marketing.
Then I go into mindset, and then I go into organics, and I teach you how to build a sales funnel. So that's the basics. If you have a good audience size, if you have a great email list, and you don't know how to launch, you don't know how to price you don't know how to create your offer, or you have an offer, but you're ready to get it out there more. That's where my Strategy Sessions come in. So I do a deep dive with you. We get on and we go into everything from customer journey, pricing flow, everything across the board goals. And then we hang up and I build you a custom strategy. if you do what I say it will work.
Josh: I've been in business for 13 years, and I'm still doing courses, I'm still doing refresher things, you can never know too much. Like as you said, you wanted to do something, let's say you're not doing much, or you're not doing much well through social media. So what do you go through Pinterest, or Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, or focusing on the AdWords strategy. There's so many different options. The only advice I could give is focus on one, not all of them. If you want more advice in that you should probably be talking to Krista there and jumping in and checking out what she has to say because it varies for every business to what the approach is. In today's day, there's no silver bullet that's going to help work for everyone. It's about working out exactly how it works for you.
Krista: Yeah, that's exactly it. That's why I created these custom Strategy Sessions because I know business is the same even if you're in the same industry or strategy, depending on your needs, budgets and goals is going to be totally different. So that's why I like to dive in with you and build something that's totally tailored to you. That's like with clarity, focus and again focusing on one thing at a time that is key.
Josh: If you have enjoyed what Krista has had to say make sure to jump across to Authentic Audience.co. Give us some feedback, and stay healthy.
All Things Franchising With Lance Graulich
Josh: Let's talk about all things franchising. You might have a cool idea, a booming business or want to get into one and I want you all to listen up. We've got Lance Graulich here and he is the expert in franchising around the world, the top 1%. So I'm going to ask you here, Lance, tell me, how do you know if you have an idea that's franchisable?
Get more tips about franchising at dorksdelivered.com.au
Lance: Well, Josh, first of all, thank you for having me from around the world here in Las Vegas. So look, I always talk to people when it comes to franchising, what is your secret sauce? What do you have? What do you have that other people don't? More importantly, what do your customers tell you that you have? Why are you good? And I always call it the secret sauce. Every business has it. Is it your people? You know, I was in a conversation the other day about Starbucks. Starbucks, the founder and CEO Howard Schultz will certainly tell you, it's not about coffee, it's about people. He'll tell you his culture that he built is the secret sauce to why Starbucks is so successful. So that's the short answer to start off.
Josh: Cool. So everyone needs to find their secret sauce, I guess is what it comes down to. And that sounds on paper easy enough. But I understand that like, obviously, you have the likes of McDonald's and these huge franchises. Is McDonald's the biggest franchise at the moment?
Lance: Well, McDonald's, Subway, those are two of the top right there in units. I mean, Subway has 15,000 just in the United States alone probably now.
Josh: Yeah, Subway recently has had a bit of a an upset with their direction. Is that fair to say?
Lance: You hit on something very important, because one of the biggest things that I talked to people about when they are looking into a franchise is you have to really like the leadership of the brand that you're looking to get involved with. Because, you know, this is a long term relationship. A typical franchise agreement is 10 years. And it's like dating, you know, you have that first conversation and you decide, is there going to be a second date?
So you talk about Subway. Yeah, there have been hiccups along the way. And that typically stems from leadership. As brands are growing, and in some cases, are not growing, all of a sudden, they have a period of time where they go negative. And, you know, the future is not looking so bright. Well, change of leadership means change of strategy. And the new strategy doesn't necessarily always take off as quickly as everybody hopes. And the franchisees isn’t in some cases, the ones that are high performing and doing very well typically are not going to be affected. It's the franchisees that aren't doing as well that, you know, could have the most to lose, I guess you could say at that point.
Josh: That makes sense. I guess it's just for lack of a better term, removing the dead wood or clipping the bush.
Lance: Trimming the bush
Josh: Trimming the bush, that's right. So finding your secret sauce, like, I would say that I've got a team of unicorns that work for me, they're fantastic, and they are the lifeblood of our company. I can say that when I started the business 13 years ago, and it was all me as a single one-man band in my parent's garage as it would be that expanded out. And one of the things I noticed with expanding my business was, I had a process in the way that I did things. And when I brought staff on, they would have a process and the way that they did things all that would be looking to a process and amid the training and that upscaling was quite a long process to get there.
One of the things that I've seen with franchising is documentation is paramount and procedural documentation so that you can stir and repeat and have your empire run by 14-year olds is a big key to success. If you don't have documentation, or if you're running a business that is heavily reliant on the professional services industries, where you need upskilled, university degrees and so forth, is there any reason that that should create more friction or less friction towards setting up and selling a franchise?
Lance: You know, since technology has become a thing, I think it was 2000 or so that Google really came out strong, might have been about 20 years or so. But as technology has come about, the franchise world has really gotten even stronger in my opinion. Technology is a major advantage to being part of a franchise organisation.
You remember the old Yellow Pages, I mean, in the US? You know, you wanted to if you wanted to find any kind of business, you would either call directory assistance, or you would, you know, open up the Yellow Pages and look for an ad on movers or whatever you're doing, you'd find the Yellow Pages. Well, now everything's on Google. So what do all the big companies do? It's all about SEO, Search Engine Optimisation. And the biggest companies is spending their most money there or so, you know, all the franchise brands will show up in the top 10 searches. If you're a lowly little mom and pop, good luck getting discovered when all the franchise brands are spending the money.
So look, I mean, the idea of a franchise is that anybody can jump into a franchise. What brands are typically looking for is they're looking for smart people. They don't care if they have any experience in the industry.
Let me give you a story. I got a guy. He has 19 franchise hair salons. He was a banker. He didn't even have a retail establishment. He did nothing about retail and hiring employees at all. He was a banker. Had some money. And he's a good friend of mine now, but I met him after he made this deal with another friend of mine who's a franchise consultant like myself. And what we do as franchise consultants, is we listen to what people want in a brand. They don't necessarily have any emotion attached to what the brand is because they don't know what the brand is, but they know what lifestyle they want to have. Are they going to operate it? Are they going to be a semi absentee owner and hire somebody? Are they looking to have a lifestyle where they don't work nights, they don't work weekends, etc.? What's their investment level going to be?
So in this particular example, this gentleman has 19 franchised hair salons and guess what, he has no hair, he’s cutting the hair of a customer. And on top of that he doesn't even know how to cut hair. Nor is it a passion or interest of his. So he followed this particular system, an amazing franchised hair salon brand. He nets, nets a million and a half US dollars a year from his hair salons and probably only works about five, six hours a week.
Josh: And he's not spending that money on cutting hair obviously, because he doesn’t have any.
Lance: He's saving his money on his haircuts. Absolutely.
Josh: That's great. So I guess there's two parts to it. So we got the franchise's for go getter investors really it's not about what the product is. It's about go getter investors and making sensible financial decisions, as opposed to buying a pie shop because you really love pies. Somebody went to McDonald's is looking at the numbers, not looking at how the burgers cooks so to speak.
Lance: Yeah, I mean, look, anybody can start their own business, you don't need to be in a franchise model. However, to do every single thing yourself, create a logo and trademark it and figure out what the prototype is. What size is just right for this particular business? Is it home based? You know, how do we do it? How do we get the name out there? How much marketing dollar in marketing dollars do we need to spend to get any traction that gets us any attention. There are a million different pieces. Now besides myself owning quite a few franchises and being very successful. I've created some of my own brands and been very successful and sold several of them. So I am a consummate entrepreneur, but I'm also lucky. I was brought up in a very entrepreneurial type family. My dad realised at a young age, my young age at the time, he said, you know, I'm pretty sure you're unemployable like your grandfather's, you better go figure out how to be an entrepreneur. You know, so you can start your own business. But if you can start with a franchise. You know, what I educate a lot of people on Josh is, you can basically get into a franchise as your first venture. And getting into any good franchise will teach you everything you need to know about business in general. And I see a lot of people do that, do really well. And then start to create their own concepts that they have a burning desire to bring to market.
Because look, if you have a burning desire to do something, the first step is to look at all the franchise brands and compare and contrast is there's something out there that’s similar to what I already want to do. Do that competitive analysis. And if there truly is nothing and you still think it's a great idea, then go for it.
Josh: There was a company just on comparing and contrasting. There's a company called Pita Pit. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Pita Pit.
Lance: Oh absolutely. I know the founder of Pita Pit.
Josh: Oh cool. We did a lot of their IT support work throughout southeast Queensland and I had a look at Pita Pit versus Subway in Australia. And I personally liked Pita Pit more than Subway. Fresher ingredients, slightly more exotic ingredients. You had more options with the way it was cooked. It became instead of just a sandwich or a raffle stuffing, an experience. Let's use that term.
Lance: More creative. Absolutely.
Josh: Absolutely. And then all the Pita Pits locally around here we had like eight and we're down to one now and it's ages away. And I had to look at why is that? Now I don't know if Subways done this everywhere. But Subway now started using similar ingredients, similar reps and they sort of looked at it, okay, this is what our competitors doing, wipe them out.
The reason I'm saying that when it comes to franchising, is it good to come through with a slightly different idea. I'm not going to say Burger King and McDonald's are the same company pretty much but they are, aren’t they? They really are. And you know who came first. But Burger King or Hungry Jack's, as it is in Australia is still doing fine. They're still doing very well. Is there any problem being, for lack of a better term again, a copycat type business in a franchise or do you have to completely reinvent the wheel? Or what would you say? Getting back to that secret sauce. What's the secret sauce that the Hungry Jack's or Burger King has that McDonald's doesn't or how do they differentiate from an investor's standpoint? And from the end consumers?
Lance: It's certainly a great, great question. You know, there was a book many years ago called Raving Fans. And I still think, you know, when I'm looking at franchise brands, I'm looking for who that customer base is, why our customers, use the example of Hungry Jack's or Burger King, why are some customers coming to Burger King versus McDonald's? Is it the product? Is it the convenience?
Some brands are definitively a destination. Starbucks in the early days was absolutely destination, they made a conscious decision that they were now going to be a convenience, and they started putting in Drive Thru’s. So all of those things, you know, part of my expertise in franchising also happens to be the restaurant space. So with this question, I would want more of a point of differentiation. I don't want to be another me too look alike type brand.
Now to your story on Pita Pit. I don't know the history in Australia and what might have happened. But sometimes you have operators that maybe don't perform for whatever reason, maybe there was a partnership breakup. And it was easier to not pursue Pita Pit, and there was nobody else interested in the market at the time. I could tell you there's a brand right now a friend of mine owns in the US, where he has quite a few of these restaurants. And he's incredibly successful by all standards with these restaurants that he operates. And I think he has eight right now, makes a lot of money. And he's very happy. He's got a great team. Interestingly, this brand has opened about 150 restaurants successfully, but they've closed 52 at this point. Those aren't exactly good numbers, would you say? I mean, definitely not.
Josh: One in three is not ideal, no.
Lance: But they're still able to sell franchises at a good pace. You know, the most difficult thing is getting to a new market, and really expanding in a new market and doing it effectively. So your customers can actually hear you through all the noise. And it's what I call competitive noise. You know, Starbucks, when they opened in Las Vegas, where I am, Las Vegas isn't that big of a place, about 2 million people and Starbucks literally open eight locations back to back to back to back in no time. Why? Because they wanted to build brand awareness quickly and get out and you know, have enough advertising dollars to share and spend for the entire market.
So there are different strategies. But the bottom line is, for me, it always comes back to you know, does your family like the food, because if you like the food, and you can be a customer, there's a chance that this brand can do really well. If your entire family doesn't like the food and nobody knows is going to be a customer. Probably a brand I'm going to try to stay away from. Fair to say?
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things on liking the foods that I found that just recently so only in the last 15 months or so Hungry Jack's and Burger King, before McDonald's released the Beyond Meat patties, the vegan options that then put them as a differentiator in the marketplace. Now I thought cool, okay. And that sort of made me think why hasn't McDonald's done this? And what is their connection to the meat production industry to have not done this? I thought cool, they've done this and then that instantly made it you if you're ordering Uber Eats or something like that. If you're ordering for a few people and there's a vegetarian or a vegan or something like that instantly, you know exactly the place you're going to be going because they’ve made that differentiator.
On that, when it comes down to things like Uber Eats, so I understand there's a lot of different ways that franchises can be modeled now Uber Eats isn't a franchise, but you still have solo operators that are going around getting a slice of the pie so to speak, whether or not an employee they're contracted to a larger business. Would you call Uber Eats and Lyft and Uber a franchise in a sense, or what would you say differentiates their model to a franchise model?
Lance: They're not a franchise at all. A franchise system one of the biggest keys so let's talk about its use McDonald's as an example. If you're going to become a McDonald's franchisee, McDonald's corporate, which is the franchizor, ZOR. The ZOR versus the ZEE, the franchizor has to exercise quite a bit of control over their franchisees to have a successful franchise model. And the documents you know, franchising is regulated in the US regulated by the Federal Government, the Federal Trade Commission, and there are specific documents you have to create in order to be a franchise in the US. And for that matter anywhere in the world, there are different laws depending on the country you're in, they might vary.
But the bottom line is this, you have to exercise a reasonable amount of control. So if you are a franchisee of McDonald's, you can't decide to purchase things from different vendors. You can't choose to have your employees wearing a different uniform, you certainly can't choose to buy certain, you know, menu boards or lighting or tables and chairs, you have to use only approved vendors. Now, if you can consider franchising the most rigorous control type environment, you know, you have licensing, which can be kind of loosey goosey, where, you know, you can license a certain product or recipe or name, but they can't control whether or not you serve hot dogs, for example, or change the uniforms.
And some of the companies you're talking about, you know, Uber Eats or what have you or Uber. I mean, they are major corporations that, you know, choose to run markets in a different fashion than a franchise would entirely. They're not following the same rule book or operations manual necessarily, the control is on a corporate level, but it's completely different from a legal setup.
Josh: Okay. If you've got an awesome idea that's scalable, and you're not looking to buy into, obviously a franchise, you're looking to franchise at your business. How do you go about picking your market? So just recently, we've got Taco Bell, and Carl's Jr. to Australia. And people are loving it. And it's going great. If you've got a product, how do you go about picking your market share? Where do you go about finding where you should be running a franchise? Because I'd imagine it's not always going to be best just to run from home base.
Lance: No, you know, the first step is always where have you founded the company? All great franchises, at least start a franchise brand, starts with one location. A lot of people have seen the movie The founder with Ray, you know, Ray Kroc, and the story of McDonald's, it's pretty true. As far as I can tell, I've read all the various books on it as well. But it all starts with one location. In their case they started in Southern California. Where did the first franchise take place? Well, Southern California, that's where they were. And they started expanding throughout California.
So it's all about proximity and franchising to start, although with technology, you can be worldwide in no time, it purely depends on the brand and how much support is required. So I would say if you have a business in Australia, and as I mentioned in the pre show, you know, I have actually talked to Australian brands quite recently that want to come to the United States. If you have a brand that's already successful, even if it's a single unit, by all means you could be ready to start a franchise. And that starts with a free call with myself to explore those options. We get on a Zoom call like this, and have that conversation.
So anybody, it doesn't, you know, some people say, Oh, you need five locations, ten locations. Look, if you have a brand that's successful period, doesn't matter how big you are, let's have a conversation. If you're looking to grow, that's an option, because to grow on your own, the way Uber has chosen to do, they raise money in the public markets, they went public, they raised funds. And it's not a question of better or worse, it's a question of the desire of the owners.
I can tell you in the United States, there's a lot to be said about private equity. Private equity is a huge topic. Private Equity groups control the money in the United States these days. And then the private equity groups love to gobble up franchise brands, because they're successful. That's why I do what I do. And by the way, Joshua, keep in mind, there are so many franchises because so many people do think of restaurants as being the preeminent franchises. And while I represent almost 190 restaurant franchises, I represent about 400 non restaurant franchises in every category.
Josh: If you are looking to dip your toes into business, as you said, this is an easy entry point jumping into a franchise is you've got a rulebook there, you've got sales guidelines, you've got call to actions ready to go, you've got logos, you've got websites, you've got all this information that I know after being in business for 13 years, takes a long time to get sorted and get set right. If you wanted to dip your toe in and go okay, let's see if buying a franchise is right for me and you're interested in taking a little bit of money out of the mortgage or saving up a bit of coin, what’s the palatable entry price that you could expect to dip your toe in again. Okay, this is for me. Now let's go the full hog and dive right in.
Lance: In US dollars, about $150,000 or less. I have quite a few franchises around the 100,000-dollar mark, home based brands that are phenomenal. And in some cases, it might be $100,000. Get a little bit of little office somewhere, a lot of great brands. So that's the answer. $100,00 and $150,000. And I have quite a few brands that are branching out. I mean, look, most US brands go to Canada first and then they look to eventually get to Europe, Asia, and eventually they'll get to Australia of course, like McDonald's for example. Taco Bell, as you mentioned, just got there, because they're pretty much full of the US at this point.
Josh: In the land down under it takes us a while to catch up, I think.
Lance: Running for the border.
Josh: If you're buying into a franchise, let's say buying into a taco bell or a home based business, you say you should have a backing of about 150,000 or be able to gain a position the bank is going to give you that that kind of money. Is that fair?
Lance: Yeah. I mean, look, there are opportunities throughout the United States, the Small Business Administration, which is of course, backed by the government, it's essentially a government backed loan will lend to everybody on franchises. I mean, if they're a good franchise, they'll lend typically 75%, 80% of the money that you need with a minimal credit score, it's not even a fantastic credit score. It's in the US, it's just a 680 credit score.
So Australia is going to have similar programs to simulate business and the Australian economy. You know, the challenge just becomes, you know, what are those brands that if somebody wanted to bring it to Australia, what are they? Because Taco Bell is not an inexpensive franchise, Taco Bell is not sizable investment, so is Carl's Jr, as you mentioned. Again, as I mentioned earlier, because of technology today, it's quite a few, very inexpensive high performing franchise brands that are easily duplicatable or replicable in Australia. And those brands, if they're not in Australia, now they're coming.
Josh: That's a pretty easy entry point really. Like if you had to look at the return on investment of buying a house with a 20% loan or 80% Elvia, and then you had to look at buying a franchise where you're getting the same amount of money sort of borrowed from the bank or whatnot. And it's sitting at 30 grand or something like that US obviously, as we're saying, but 30 grand, what would you say you see, and obviously, this is such a difficult question to ask, but what are the returns? So a house, you might get 5%, 7% every year if you’re doing well, 2% in worst areas, 0.5 in the middle of the cities.
Lance: This is one of my favorite questions, because I've actually gotten in arguments with accountants and attorneys over this, because sometimes they miss this. When you buy a franchise, you know, just like you're describing a house. So you make a big investment like a house. Obviously in the US, you certainly have write offs, mortgage interest, you get to deduct, there are various things that advantages to owning a house in the first place. And then you also have the equity that you build over time in owning a house. Well, a business is no different.
First of all, you have a tremendous amount of write offs when you own a business, and a lot of people forget that. Secondly, you do have the obvious equity that you have, when you own a business. When you sell a business in the US, especially a franchise, there's a secondary market for franchises, there are brokers set up all throughout the US, if franchisees want to sell, you know, you could sell for four times your cash flow. This is substantial upside. So if you got into a franchise that only cost you $100,000, and you create a substantial cash flow, which you can, I'll give you a perfect example, I have a franchise that cost $62,000 US home based. There's a gentleman that just sold his franchise that he purchased it for $62,000, seven and a half years later, he just sold it for $1.7 million US, he also made a nice income, about $500,000 to $800,000 a year while he operated.
Josh: So that's a perfect segue into what I was just about to ask. How do you make sure or how do you make sure you're buying a job or some franchise, you're buying a job, some of you buying an investment, some of you buying a spot to work with a known brand where you're doing something you love, so you might be a plumber, and you go, I'm going to operate underneath this brand, because I know that this is a going to bring leads to the door, I'm not going to have to do any of the other business stuffing around or the footer, I'm just going to be able to do the voodoo that I do.
In the franchise world, is there an easy way to differentiate between buying that investment, which is probably going to have a lower return, but you're forking out the money but you're doing nothing. You’re just sitting there set and forget the like, like stocks and shares or something like that. Versus buying a job, which is still a fine enough thing to do, because you're buying that brand recognition, you're getting your foot in the door very easily to get to do exactly what you want to do with a known brand with leads coming through. Is there a way to differentiate between those if you're going through some franchise broker or someone was to contact you? And I said, Look, I want to buy an investment. I don't want to buy a job. How do I work that up.
Lance: That's why people use me, I'm free. My advice is free. I get paid by the brands. So there's a lot to unpack in what you said. So let's take it in two parts. There's a validation stage. So once I introduce you to various brands, and Joshua says, Lance, I'm interested in this brand and this brand, set me up with a phone call. I introduce you, you have your first call, your second call and you go to especially these days, it might be a virtual type discovery day where you meet the team, tour their corporate office, even virtually if that’s the case usually has been done face to face, they've changed things up a little bit these days for expediency.
But there's a validation process, as you get to the end. Where if they really love you, and you love them and you want to do a deal, they say, well wait a second, Joshua, we would like you, here's a list of all of our franchisees, I would like you to call at least five of them at random, whoever you want to call. And I want you to ask him any question you want to ask him. Things like, you know, would you do it again? Are you happy? Do you make money? Do you have the appropriate support, marketing, etc., etc. And you could either see yourself in those people or you don't, and decide to move forward. So in the due diligence process, I asked you or my candidates questions like, again, what kind of lifestyle are you interested in having? Are you going to be the owner operator?
Because let me tell you, if you want to be a semi absentee owner, and absentee owner, I have brands like that. I have brands where you can be a complete absentee owner, and not do anything, it's a strategic move by the franchizor. They have technology and systems in place where you can do that successfully.
Now, there are quite a few of prospective franchisees in the US as an expression called the pipe dream that doesn't necessarily exist. And they think they're going to get wealthy from owning one little restaurant. That's not how it goes. Sometimes you have the individual franchisees that jump into one restaurant, and they might be successful, but it's a grind, and it's a JOB. It's not the dream that they wanted. So what I tell people is, if you only have money to get into one restaurant, you really want to do the restaurant business, go right ahead. But keep in mind, you got to get ready to get a second one, and a third one. Wealth is easily built in the restaurant business when you have multiples. You start to get five restaurants, you can net $80,000 a location, $400,000 US from five restaurants, that's substantial income. I's hard to do that when you're working for someone else. And now you get to write your own schedule. In my case, I work seven days a week in my restaurants, because it was working for myself. You know, what’s the old expression, you rather work 80 hours a week for yourself than 40 hours a week for someone else.
Josh: Yep, it becomes something you're interested in doing, especially if you're buying into something that you believe in and you're passionate about. So I understand you've got an assessment tool at ionfranchising.com that people can jump on to. Tell us a bit more about that tool.
Lance: Yeah. So, at my website, ionfranchising.com, there is a free assessment. If you scroll down a little bit, and it's quite scientific, it'll take you 10, 15 minutes to do. And it'll determine not only your current mindset based on your past skills, and your risk tolerance, comfort zone, and it kind of whips it all together and determines compatibility with what brands you're most compatible with is the best way to say it.
Then it'll give you a detailed report. It'll give me a detailed report, and I'll be able to guide you better. I'm still going to ask about 30, 40 other questions to roll it all together, because that's the way I'm going to help you best. So it's a great tool. It's free. It's right on my website. Now one of the big pieces I tell people a lot, Joshua, is my goal is to get people really clear, to give them the clarity to understand what their goals are. As much as I'm a franchise consultant, I'm really a franchise strategist. I help people develop their life plan and how they can most effectively be an entrepreneur. And my favorite expression as a result of that is clarity is currency. So clarity is currency is my general theme. Getting people clear so I can get to you know finding them brand that is absolutely perfect for them.
Josh: It sounds like there's nothing to lose only things to gain. More clarity for them, more clarity for everyone and definitely give me more clarity on how franchises work and the direction that things can go. And if anyone out there is keen we're going to be jumping in and organising to have another podcast on how to set yourself up and price your first franchise. Otherwise, did you have any other questions, Lance, or things that you'd like to go through before we head off?
Lance: No, Tony Robbins once said model success and that is what franchising is. So that's my final word of the day and you have been amazing and I look forward to round two.
Josh: I've loved doing it Lance. And if anyone out there has any feedback and comments, jump across the iTunes, give us some love. Leave us some feedback and stay good.
Cash Flow Forecasting With Louise Delaney
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. There is a gap in many businesses ad that's cash flow forecasting. It's too expensive not to have good cash flow. So I've got a special guest here, I've got Louise from Cash Flows For You. And she's going to talk to us about how you can better your cash flow and make sure you keep good records of that and make sure you know where you're going, especially at a time like now. So, Louise, tell me about your pain story and how you learnt those need in the industry to start cash flows for you.
Learn more about cash flow at dorksdelivered.com.au
Louise: Oh, hi, Josh. Thanks very much. Good question to start off. So actually, the pain that I felt was personal running my first business, which was a law firm, and I'm not a lawyer, I'm a business owner, and my business partner was a lawyer. And there was a massive disconnect between the work coming in and delivery and when we were going to get paid, and then the bills and how I was going to pay wages and practice subscriptions and all these things. And so the stress was real, and I wasn't sleeping and I went to bookkeepers and accountants, you know, who are very focused on the backwards view and doing the right thing with the general ledger. And I couldn't get the forward view that I needed, or the control of my cash that I needed. So I did some research and started it myself. And I swear by the 13 week rolling cash flow, which was originally a Keith Cunningham design, and is now a hybrid Louise Delaney design.
Josh: I know myself, you see people and you hear all these different ways that people try to combat cash flow. And even in a home sense, you got, okay, let's have one bank account for holidays, another bank account for personal fun stuff, and you might spend 50 bucks a week on yourself and then spend $100 a week on your holiday or whatever the breakdown happens to be, then all of a sudden, you get this crazy bill and you ah man wasn't expecting the car engine to blow up, the insurance to come through the whatever that happens to be. And I guess having good cash flow practice and good cash flow hygiene is all about understanding where that's going and where you're actually sitting. So you're normalising your understanding of how much money is actually coming in and going out. Would that be fair to say?
Louise: Yeah, definitely. And it look at the measuring business that most of us don't have when we start a business. You know, we measure our marketing, we measure our sales, but we never measure our cash. It's like anything. If you've got visibility of it, you know, you can stop stressing about it. It’s not running around in your head, you're not guessing. So when those unexpected bills come in, you're like, ah, didn't really plan for that. But that's okay. Because I know what my cash is doing. And I know how to manage that.
Josh: Yeah. And when you have that data, you can then make decisions, you can make decisions without the data. And I see just from an IT perspective when we go into businesses, the amount of waste that people have. They'll be spending something because they've been spending something and there'll be things with it, they might be on a phone plan for their business where they're spending $1200 or $1500 dollars a month, we went in, and at this stage, we hadn't started doing this as many, many years ago, I saw the bill sitting there on the table and because I'm your eyes wander, don't they? And then I had a bit of a look. And I said is that what you're paying? And they said, Yeah. I said, oh my goodness. Why? I’m like what is it doing? It has this working and I had a look and I said I said I'm sure we could do it better price for you than that. And I looked through and $200 a month is what it got down. And I guess always doing something the same way doesn't mean that it's always the right way to be doing that. And always just paying the bills as they come in, you have this haphazard approach, you're always trying to think, okay, on my net terms, right with the clients that I'm working with, or some bigger firms, like you'll have like three months before you get paid off, you do your work.
Louise: Yeah. And if you can see it, you can alter it. So if you've got low sales, you'd have a look down and go, where can I save some money here? And that makes you focus on those bills that you've always paid at the same rate and never question. So it definitely gives you eyes on the numbers without thinking about it from a spreadsheet point of view. It's more of a personal connection with how am I going to pay these bills? And where can I save some money just so you can get to keep more cash. So it definitely holds you accountable for where you're spending your money. It also highlights if you need to increase your sales to keep paying a $400 Telstra bill or is there a better way to do it. So it helps you to push towards making decisions, to get smarter with your cash.
Josh: As I said, in times like now, businesses, I'd say some are in a holding pattern, some are nosediving, some are skyrocketing, some, they're all over the place. It doesn't really matter what part you're in, if you're going up, down, left, left or right. If you don't have good cash flow, if you don't know where your numbers are, you don't know where your expenses are going, you can very quickly go backwards. That's something I've noticed with business owners that are bringing in $400,000, $450,000 profit to themselves a year. So they've got businesses with 40 to 60 employees, and they're bringing in a reasonable amount of money. But they're also spending a reasonable amount of money. I kind of put the analogy, like you've got your hands and you can't see this on the podcast you put your hands out. And if you grab it like it's raining money, some people hold them ready to hold that money, just in case there is a drought coming, other people hold them and the money just flows through their hands. And then when that drought comes in, they starved.
Louise: Yeah, you asked at the start was this and what was my pain, the other pain point was my business coach, and my accountant was saying, oh, look at this profit, look at this profit. And I was like, have you seen my bank account? Like, where is this profit, we can't spend profit, you know, it's a cash that's going to be, once you've got that foundation that's going to allow you to get to profit, if it's slipping through your fingers, as you just said, then you're on that rodent wheel, and you're never going to get past it to actually make clear profit. And so your foundations of your business grow. So you can make those decisions, and look, you know, whether you're going up in your business, or just trying to stay alive, you know, getting some control over even if it's a tiny little bit of money coming in.
In fact, that's even better. That's what happened with COVID, people stopped, you know, a lot of people didn't earn as much or didn't get as much cash coming into their business, but they also dropped all their expenses. So you know, it's managing what's coming in, and what's going out, and making sure you're setting clear goals for that money that you're going to keep in the business. Because if you haven't got a buffer, you know, or a goal, you know, like it might be to start a craft beer brewing company [hypothetically], just saying, maybe, want to have you know that on your goal is so you know why you're trying to retain cash in your business for the foundation for the next growth period. Or even if it's to get out of your business, to be able to present somebody with solid cash flow forecasting, then it's a great exit strategy as well.
Josh: I can resonate well with the craft brew story there for some reason. I know when I started out in business, what I did is I had about $1,000. I’m like okay, let's see what happens. I have $1,000 and at this stage, it was the side hustle working for Education Queensland. And so let's see what happens, where does this go. Put $1,000 in and pulled out $1500 and I said okay, cool, cool, cool. I'll take my $1000 back, use that $500 and make that $1000 and then that $1000 turn to $2000. Then before I knew it, I was working with Education Queensland and bringing in $4,000 a month doing this side hustle, as it's known, this side hustle. And then then it started just creeping up from there and up from there and I went okay, this is becoming pretty real. I thought what would it take for me to jump and this is what a lot of people, if they want to keep their security net of their own job, what would I need to jump? And some people go I just need 12 weeks and all we had to set up a million dollar business. You know, good luck. Don't do that. Get to a couple of conferences and talks to some business owners and some mature business owners first, but I had the business running as a side gig for three years and I'd saved up enough for all of the expenses for six months, even though the business was sitting on a recurring basis bringing in money. So I had a positive reoccurring income and then I still had six months of expenses, just in case all of that disappeared, and that was my safety net.
Louise: Well, why did you have that insight so early in business?
Josh: That's a good question. I don't know. I started my first business, wasn't the IT business, I started another business which is all around it's really boring, but making numberplate brackets, which was just a lighting loom and fixtures on number plates. And when I made those, the process wasn't very automated, ended up automating the process and seeing that I needed to have some money kept aside to be able to buy parts and whatnot. So I guess there's an element of that where I had all the responsibility for myself there. But I read every book that I could get from the government on GST and starting a business beforehand. So I did it the cheapest way possible in reading the literature that I could get for free. And then I just sort of had a look and thought, what would it take for me to make the decision? If it wasn't going wee? If something went belly up, how long would it take for me to get another job? Where is my risk level? And would I be comfortable in losing a certain amount of money? I’m like okay, at that stage was 60 grand.
I went if I lost 60 grand, how annoyed would I be? And my whole thought was, I've learnt the whole way along the journey. Although I would lose that money technically, it was money that I've only earned through the process and setting it all up. As anyone knows it's been in business for a while, that's a seasoned business owner, the passion you get in for business is a lot of times sideline from the other things that you need to be doing in business to keep the business running. And I'd learned all these other different things. So, okay, well, I've still learned a lot. And if I had to go to university to learn that, I probably would have spent the same amount of money. So that was kind of like the sort of thought process that I went through and I thought in case something goes really wrong, I could still go get another job. But if I couldn't get a job for six months, because there's a global pandemic or something, something really terrible…
Louise: You thought that I'm sure.
Josh: No, that wasn't, that wasn't on my radar at all.
Louise: You’re still very strategic, you know that, I mean, that's a strategic approach to business and managing your risk. So that's pretty impressive. A lot of us business owners, when we go into business, we might do the number crunching to get started. But then we stopped looking at it going forward. And you know, and in fact we’re fearful of looking at it, or we think that this is as good as it gets. So with that strategy that you used to start the business, it would be brilliant if every business owner could take a few weeks off, maybe go to Thailand or Bali every year, or maybe just Queensland, and do that same strategy planning again, and base it around your foundations for building your business, in particular for this conversation, your cash, you know, what's my break even.
Like, when COVID hit the first thing that my clients did was look at their numbers and go right to how long can we last? When do we have to start laying off people? You know, when do we drop out office space or ask for a reduction on our rent? You know, this was all before the government stepped in with Jobkeeper and things like that. But having that business plan and strategy, continually, as a business owner for working on business skills, on business tasks, it’s going to be, you know, the best roadmap through business, rather than just hoping to God it's all going to work okay, because then when COVID hits and you go or anything, you know, your key employee leaves, the price of something goes up, you know, you can look at your numbers and go, all right, well, that's only going to affect me for this time, I need to pedal harder and get more sales, and make sure that I maintain, you know, the momentum in my business, or even when to drop staff so that you can go back to just being you running the business, you know, because they were decisions we all had to look at when COVID hit.
Josh: Over the years, even though I've done some planning, I over planned probably of anything, more planning the execution. But if anything, what I've noticed over the years is every business has these problems. And I had a vertical that I was working with, that was working really, really well. And we thought this is fantastic. They were growing very, very quickly. And so we went and invested a whole bunch of money in new infrastructure and data centers in Melbourne and Brisbane. And then a month after doing that, having $80,000 worth of cash that just outlaid towards this infrastructure that was going to allow us to sort of 10 times our business growth, the whole thing came tumbling down. And I was like, oh, that nearly killed us. And then I've had the key employee disappear as well, definitely this silver lining now, but at the time, the breakup of business partners and things like that, which doesn't help, shit happens as it would be, it’s good to be prepared as best you can. But having that rainy day like for me, my risk threshold was six months. But what I learned was interest compounds interest, other people are going to smile or frown depending on what position or business they're in. But when you've got $60,000 sitting in your bank, and you're running a positive business, every day that that still happens, you've still got more money coming about, admitedly not much at the moment with the RBA rates, but it's something.
Louise: Yeah. But it's also emotional interest. You know, like, if you've got 100 bucks in your wallet, or 20 bucks or 500 bucks, you certainly feel a lot wealthier than if you've just got a card. [Absolutely.] I find when you start doing your cash planning is like saving in the piggy bank, once you start seeing, you know, your cash balance going up, you know, and I do mine on a spreadsheet or a dashboard. Once you start seeing that cash line go up, you get more efficient at how you use your cash, because you know it's not yours. It's the business and it's whether you want to stay in business for a long time or a short time or hit a peak. You get a bit greedy with your cash. But when you make decisions, you make them without the emotion attached to it. It's the numbers that are really blindingly obvious that are pushing you towards that decision.
Josh: Everyone has that feeling of dopamine release when they go oh I just bought something cool. But when you buy something on the credit card you have that and when you buy that out of your own cash, you have the same feeling. But a week later, or 55 days later, after the interest free period, you think, oh crap, then then you dive down. And once you become cashflow positive, there's a stress that’s lifted off your shoulders.
Louise: Totally, like I don't even run my law firm now with a credit card, you know, and it took me about five years, I always had probably 10 grand on that credit card. And not in the interest, I still paid it off bits and pieces, but I would have paid interest to the bank for having that. And that was, I didn't even need it, I used it because I was scared to use the cash in my business in case I didn't plan for bill properly, or there was, you know, extra taxes that you hadn't planned for.
So now I run that without a credit card. And I do have a credit card in my personal life but same principle. As soon as I use it. It's awesome to go and do the transfer to pay it off again. [Yep] you know. And it hasn't always been that way. I've been burned for sure using a credit card. But it's also nice when one of the benefits of cash flow planning is if you've got a 12-month subscription for something, you can pay it monthly or weekly or six monthly. And it's better for cash flow to do that. But psychologically, it's amazing to be able to go, I've got enough cash just to pay for that. And I'll take the 10% or 15% discount, you're going to give me for that.
Josh: I completely agree. All these discounts are out there ready to go and get them and on the credit card on interest. So I have a credit card and I pay it out each month. I'm like, woo hoo, I had a look, it was early this morning that my credit card issued. And it sounds like I'm making this up. But it's legit the truth. I had a look. And it was $18,000 on the credit card. I thought okay, that's, that's alright, because most of the business expenses go through it, and then just get paid off at the end of the month. And it said, if you make the minimum payments, this will take 98 years to pay off and there'll be $780,000 worth of interest. I was like, what the hell? I was like, why? My goodness, and that is straight up interest, compound interest. I’m only using the credit card now for purely stupid rewards points.
Louise: Now, I need to talk to you about that. This rewards plan, I have another client that is very difficult to do cash flow forecasting for because everything goes on the credit card. But she did it too, because of the Qantas points and all the rest of it. Well, I say maybe that should be revisited now. Just change the payment cycle. You'd almost say, well, you don't pay interest anyway. But a lot of people do, the money that you would save in interest just to get the points, you could just you know, you could probably buy Virgin at the moment, I believe.
Josh: That's right. Oh, definitely, if you aren't paying your credit card debt, get rid of the credit card as soon as you can. I don't know why, I'm still feeling stupid having it. It's annoying actually, because it's one extra thing, it doesn't sound like much one extra line to reconcile for the bookkeeper. One extra thing to keep in your wallet, it’s just one extra thing to get hacked. It's just one extra thing. It's just annoying. You might know more so than me, international fees. When you have these international fees, and you buy something overseas. So I've actually got two credit cards, I’ve actually got two credit cards, I got one for overseas purchases, that has no international fees. And looking at when I move that across it I have saved a couple thousand dollars for any of the software products we are buying overseas. I don't know how that company stays around but I'm okay with that it’s only a very low value credit card. So it's like $3,000 a month or something like that. With the primary credit card for the business, everyone's going to know my whole setup now.
Louise: This is a like a truth serum podcast.
Josh: It is, isn’t it? Hi, my name is Josh. And I've got two credit cards. The bigger business one, the International transaction fees, they're ridiculous. You know, if you get those on, if you're not using a credit card, if you're using a normal bank account with a Visa Debit, or something like that attached, do you know if that's just probably more of a banker question?
Louise: But my background is banking, but it's been a while and transaction processing actually. And I don't know the answer to that. But I do know that in my bank account, if someone is paying me from overseas, I get charged the international fee. And if I have to refund somebody to an overseas bank account, I get charged the international fee. So I imagine that it's just their processing fee.
Josh: Okay. That was definitely adding up on that credit card, which is why I got the second credit card.
Louise: I don’t know the way around that is, but now's the time to approach the bank and find out what the way around that is because, you know, as the consumer, it's in our hand to be questioning this.
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely interest to be saved across the board. That's something else, I guess with cash flow management, looking into things if you do have overdraft facilities or if you do have different things such as loans, whether they be equipment finance loans, or even your home loans and things like that. Some of the rate variance is huge. I had a look at for us again, I'm getting probably back to the personal loan stuff now, but I look and changing from one of the Big Fours across to one of the others that are just online only type lender, without bringing up names or anything, I was going to be saving $10,000 a year in interest. [Really] On a home loan, I was like that is pretty substantial. I was like that's a huge amount. And my current home loans are in the, like, mid low threes. And but with the big four verse. One of the online only is which were low twos. Yeah, both variable. So they're both comparing apples with apples, both with offsets, but with everything else. We’re probably slipping away from cash flow stuff now.
Louise: Well, it's making you look at it, though, isn't it? [Absolutely] Maybe cash is going because we could all use an extra 10k?
Josh: That's right. I looked at my bloody hell that's like, not that I'm going out to dinner every week for 10k a year. That's nearly thousand dollars a month.
Louise: Or you will own your home earlier.
Josh: Absolutely, that's right.
Louise: If you want your investment property for negative gearing they used to call it or tax reductions, then you go to one of the Big Fours. But if you want to get your personal residential property paid off quicker, go to one of the old shop around and find a better rate.
Josh: Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. I think you've definitely given a few tips here that are really awesome to do with cash flow, making sure that he's keeping on top of it being positive, where you can. Spending time to be able to have that cash flow. Even if it might take a few years to build up to a comfortable spot for you, can do it with a beer in hand traveling around Queensland possibly until the borders open up and then come to a spot where you go, okay, in a few years, I can now start buying things saving 10%, 15%, 20%, even 30% on some of the software out there, if you're buying it per year, and I know us we offer a pretty substantial discount on IT services if paid yearly, definitely worth thinking about. So if there was to be one book that you suggest anyone to read, what would be that book that would that influenced you or that should influence them?
Louise: Oh, aren't you writing a new book, Josh?
Josh: I am writing a new book on lemons.
Louise: On a serious note, I love the Keith Cunningham books. They're brilliant. And you said one book, but I am going to over extend that and say Barefoot Investor, Profit First from Mike McCalla, who has just written Fix This Next which I'm just reading at the moment. And really the foundation for me for getting your head around cash flow management when you don't have an accounting degree or your not a bookkeeper.
Josh: I can vouch for profit first and barefoot investor both fantastic books. Before we head off, is there anything else you'd like to ask all leave our audience with?
Louise: I guess the key really in the cash flow management and the motivation to keep doing it weekly, is to get clear on your goals, actually know the dollar value of your goal. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's 200 bucks, or another business of 2 million, whatever it is, get clear on your goal and then reverse engineer how you're going to get to that goal. So whether it's more sales, less expenses, double everything you're doing to get there quicker, until you know what your goal is or your comfort zone, your goal may be to reduce your risk. You know, if the industry changed that you're in and you got wiped out, or the industry got wiped out, you know, your goal might be to keep going for six months until you can change your direction of your business or get another job or whatever it might be. So that's probably the way I would get started with my cash flow and just get started. You know, until you start writing it down on a bit of paper or on a spreadsheet, just get started. And you know, really quickly you'll get excited about the results. And if they're not exciting results, at least you know about them and you can do something.
Josh: And if you haven't liked your results, jump over to cashflowforyou.com and jump across the book a discovery call Louise will be more than happy to go through what she can do to help you out and make sure that the results make sense and that you do have achievable results with micro milestones. One of the things I love saying is if you aim for nothing, you'll be sure to hit it. So make sure you've got some goals in place. It's very important.
Louise: Brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks Josh.
Josh: No worries if anyone out there has enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review give us some love. And as I said go to cashflowsforyou.com if you're looking to hear a bit more information about how you can better your cash flow better position become positive, and not just in your money but in your emotion as well. So everyone out there stay healthy and stay good.
How to Engage Your Target Audience in 3 Minutes With Cliff Coelho
Getting Your Message Across Quickly
Are you having trouble marketing your products? The biggest challenge to face when you are a marketer is how to reach your target audience effectively. The main goal of marketing is to deliver the right message to the right people. Otherwise, you will end up wasting your time and money. Remember that it is when you reach your target audience effectively that you can drive more product sales conversions. There are many ways to do this, such as creating useful and relevant content, leveraging influencers through social media, and using targeted advertising. Here our special guest, Cliff Coelho, a video marketing wizard from StoryDriven Video, shares tips on how to engage with your targeted audience effectively.
Learn more on how to engage your target audience at dorksdelivered.com.au
What is a video marketing strategy?
Cliff, how do you make sure that you get the message across in three minutes? Is there some special magic to it? Or what's the process, run me through it.
Cliff: One of the biggest problems right now that businesses are facing is that they're putting out a lot of content, regardless of whether that's the video or through blogs. And a lot of that content is ending up blending into each other because they're doing the same type of videos. For example, if you go on LinkedIn, it is about “how-to” videos, how to improve your customers' life, because that's what people think, that's what businesses think that the ideal customer needs. But unfortunately, all of it blends into each other.
So the way to get someone's attention within the first few seconds is by identifying the story that they've already created about their pain point, first of all, in their own minds, and then putting your value proposition forward. So that would typically be what marketers call as the hook.
The key is understanding your audience really well. If you're running a B2B service, for example, you don't have to just understand the business impact of that problem that your audience is facing. Someone is struggling to get leads, and that's affecting their sales. That's not the only impact; there is another level of impact, which is the emotional level as well.
As humans, we are conditioned to think and make decisions emotionally. It's only after the decision has been made by emotion that the justification happens through logic. That's where once you've done that, then you're able to put your value proposition forward, what your solution does for someone. And that's the flow that normally goes. So you start with the hook, you get their attention within the first 10 seconds, because that's how long you have to really get someone interested basically, to listen to the most stuff about what you do, and then go into the emotional engagement and then lead to the logical justification if that makes sense.
Make the Most of Your First 10 Seconds
So my understanding is the first 10 seconds are critical. So it's about making sure you've got that hook and you know your customer, is that fair to say?
Cliff: That's absolutely spot on. It's basically understanding the hooks that work with different segments of your audience as well because one hook that works with someone who's not aware of what their problem is. So if you're selling weight loss, for example, and the person maybe you're selling a ketogenic diet or something like that, they might not know what the thing that is causing them to gain weight. So for them to understand you cannot sell them a ketogenic diet straight away, you have to educate them first about the problem.
There's no need to waste time talking about why you need to get into that kind of diet if you already know what it is. It’s about creating as many hooks based on the impact on your target audience and the emotional response that it is leading to.
Attracting Different Market Segments
You brought up a good when you said that it's not about necessarily generating loads of content and hoping for the best. It's about having a few core videos that allow for you to understand what that business is, what their sales process is like, and how to become someone that they like and trust.
So if you do have different market segments, how do you make sure that you, you have the same quality message?
Cliff: You need to have a message that resonates with all of your market segments. The way we do that for our clients is we start off with basically giving information upfront, giving value upfront, through what is called as an empowerment video. So the concept of the empowerment video is based on the fact that it's not just giving information for the sake of giving information, but it's around changing people's beliefs about something that gave them hope that there's a better way of doing things. Because when you start a business, the reason should be because you saw that the existing solutions were not working, or you had a vision for something better.
So through the empowerment video and the benefits of video marketing, even though you're giving information, you're changing their perspectives in the sense that you're telling them. This is what you thought so far, that this was the only way.
Why is Video So Effective in Marketing?
You don't need to always make videos just to stay relevant. I've used practically just one video in my business right until a couple of months ago. The more you create, you've got a better chance of having more reach, but that reach doesn't necessarily mean conversion.
So just because you can get your message in front of someone doesn't bring them any closer to doing business with you. So you need to create that change in mindset, in that perspective, in that belief. That belief comes from that emotion that they have associated with their pain point or their aspiration. So once you're able to change that, then you can send them further down the funnel, where you're educating them more about your solution, about your brand, and creating that connection to your unique story. So then empowerment video does that. It educates the audience in a way with the intention of changing their perspective towards the problem or aspiration that they have.
Overcoming Your Doubts
I started off in the garage of mum and dad's as a teenager who was a bit overweight, and I saw ways that you could automate businesses better than what they've done in the past to make them more efficient. I specialise in IT support services, but what I found is that I needed to be able to talk to people and have the confidence to do that. And I said I'm going to make a YouTube channel, so I went and bought two Sony 4k cameras, $8,000 worth of camera gear, five different lights, green screens, display monitors and all this gear. It didn't film itself. I bought all this stuff, but I still didn't have the confidence to be on video.
I had to overcome my personal belief that I had to lose weight to be able to be set in stone online. If there are other business owners out there that are going okay, I know I have to have video, I know videos the way, how do you have people overcome their own belief systems?
Cliff: Pretty much all of my clients have the same issue where they don't really feel ready for the camera yet. Even the professional public speakers feel like they have to get everything right in one take. But that's not the case, because I'm capturing authentic conversations rather than putting a script in front of someone and making them read of it. It's pretty much like the conversation we're having right now. It's just that I know the elements that I'm looking for in that particular video.
For business owners to be making the videos themselves, this is something that I struggled with, but what I've accepted is that first of all, yes, I need to work the platform. Secondly, video is no longer a nice to have; it’s a necessity. When it comes to confidence, all I would say is that your first video is going to be bad. It doesn't matter how good you are at video, even if you're a presenter, your first video is going to be bad, your first ten videos are going be really bad.
I went and re-recorded the first 12 episodes of my podcast. You've got that ability to do that.
Cliff: You can do that and just delete what you don’t want. There is power in publishing, and that's one of the major benefits of video marketing. It's not about looking good in front of a camera, think of the problem that the customer is facing. Will they benefit from what you have to share with them? And thenthe emphasis is not on you anymore; you’re just thinking of them. I can talk about technical ways how people put a picture of someone they know in front of the lens, just off the side. That kind of looks a bit strange, because you're looking slightly off-centre, like a zoom call or something.
Just Start Making Videos
The first step is actually doing it and publishing it. Even if you think you didn't come off amazing, the message is strong and powerful. When you think it will solve a problem for a client, and possibly change their perspective on something, you should publish it.
Once you do that, you're letting go of control. That switches something in your mind. It's like, the worst that I thought could happen has happened. I've put this out there. And you realise people are mostly very supportive. When someone puts themselves out there, they'll be like nice video, thanks for sharing. That becomes like a self-fulfilling feedback loop where then your next video gets slightly better; you get more feedback. Sometimes you might not get feedback. It's like a lot of content doesn't really get anywhere, but at least you're learning through a process.
The path that seems the hardest is always a path that you should be taking. If you don’t want to be on video, that's exactly what you should be doing. You definitely grow as a person. Maybe in your recorded video, you might look stupid, but you would have learned more. That's what's important, and it also shows authenticity. We're not all TV presenters. We don't all talk in a monotone voice. We try to make things fun. You can't go wrong with video at all, in my opinion.
Different Videos for Different Leads Are Important
Earlier, you mentioned cold, warm, and hot leads, is that three different videos through the journey in a more linear fashion as opposed targeting three groups of people?
Cliff: The environment would be for cold and warm leads, so it covers the vast majority of the audience. For hot leads, it's a retargeting video, for example, like a 30-second one, just showing someone comparing prices or features. You do a retargeting video, where you put an amazing offer in front of them, and they take it. So that's outside of these three videos. These three videos capture the bulk of your audience, which is the cold and warm.
How Cliff Can Help You
If someone comes to you with a minimal understanding of video, you're able to hold their hand and walk them through the entire process. You're just going to do the voodoo that you do, and they're going to cruise along and just be comfortable as if they're talking to a maid at a pub, is that the way the process works?
Cliff: Pretty much it. I do a deep dive with my clients a week before where I identify their message. I condense that message into what it needs to be without telling them what it is. They are not creating expectations in their head, because I found that the more options I give them, it's more confusing, the more they get inside their own heads.
It's a conversation where I identify the things that draw people to do business with you, the things that people already like about you, and I capture those things. On the day of filming, I give them very clear instructions on everything in terms of branding, clothing, and they just have to be that present and have a conversation with me. I use a multi-angle camera, so we can cut as many times as possible. The typical interviews last about an hour, which I condense to a three-minute message.
If you're able to have a beer or socialise at a pub, you're able to have a professional video made telling your story about what it is you do in business condensed down to three minutes for all of your prospects and leads. Have someone there that can take it and massage it into something that's going to be a masterpiece that you'll love for years to come.
Cliff: Definitely.
If anyone is looking for more information on how to book this and get their business in a position where they've got more visibility, I definitely suggest getting a discovery session booked with Cliff. You can do that by jumping over to https://l.dorks.com.au/storydrivenvideo; you’ll be able to jump across there and connect with Cliff on LinkedIn to start seeing some of the cool work that you've been doing. Cliff: I’d like to say that this is an amazing thing that you are doing, this initiative of connecting local businesses, encouraging people to do business more locally.
Absolutely. I'm doing it purely out of the love of what I do, and to get to know more wonderful people around the area and make sure that their message is heard by other people so that we can build a better and a stronger community. So that's what it's all about.
Are there any other questions or bits and pieces that you'd like to leave before we finish off on the episode for today?
Cliff: I would say just start making videos yourselves. Give it a try, do it yourself. That's the first step and making progress is actually trying and treating it as something that you need in your business rather than just a nice to have because it's no longer nice to have.
How to Measure Your Online Marketing Campaign Results
Today, we're talking about measuring your campaign results, and you might be thinking like, "What does that even mean? What's a campaign?" Well, in its core form a campaign is anything as simple as just a link, a URL to a webpage that you might send to a few people, and you want to see how many people have clicked on that. So measuring your campaign results could be just putting a link in a description for a Facebook post, and then people click on it.
Get more tips about measuring your online marketing campaign at dorksdelivered.com.au
Is Your Audience Engaged?
But the problem is a lot of people put a lot of Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts and all this good jazz up, but they don't really know how engaged their audiences are. You can see some, obviously, high-level stats with Facebook where you can see the engagement, but you can't necessarily see if they've clicked on that link or possibly even filled out the form or whatever the call to action is after they've clicked on the link.
Use UTM Codes
There's a cool little piece of code that you can put at the end of your link called a UTM code. Now, what a UTM code is, it's a snippet of simple code that you can add to the end of a URL to track the performance of campaigns and content. It can help you see where visitors have come from, say Google or something like that, along with unique identifiers to work out which person has clicked on that link. I nearly guarantee the next time you look up in your address bar, and you have a look at a URL, if there's a whole bunch of crazy digits and codes after the name of the website, there's a very real chance that that is a UTM code, and they're using that to find out where and what marketing is working for them.
They Work On Most Platforms
Most platforms allow you to use UTM codes, anything from ActiveCampaign through to MailChimp and things like that, and there's other tools that you can plug into to your computer to be able to use UTM codes, even in places that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise. So Bit.ly Bit dot L-Y, and a bunch of other different URL creators can let you track how many people click on different things, where they're coming from, and where they've gone, the geolocation, so maybe they're calling in from Queensland, or maybe they're over in Pakistan, who knows, but you'll be able to tell this.
The Final Word
If you're not using UTM codes, jump onto it and start using them now to be able to work out how valuable your time has been in creating different things. You'll be able to see if a certain campaign's worked better than another campaign and make sure you're not just spinning your wheels, hoping for the best, throwing something at the wall and seeing if something sticks.
Leaning Out Your Business With Crista Grasso
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land, we've got a special guest here from leanoutmethod.com, we've got Crista Grasso, and she's going to be talking today about why you need to lean out your business to level up.
Learn more on how to lean out your business at dorksdelivered.com.au
So how do I know if I'm running a lean mean business machine or not? How do you go about knowing that you're at that right spot, you need to lean? Or how do you know the health of your business?
Crista: So honestly, it usually comes down to do you have way too much going on? You're constantly overworked, you're constantly overwhelmed? Or do you feel like you're always focused on the right things, things tend to be flowing, not that you don't have issues, because you know, you always have issues in business, there's always the unexpected things that come up. But you have a really high degree of confidence that you're always working on the right things that are actually making a difference, the things that are adding value for your customers and profitability for the business. And you have that really clear alignment to what your strategic objectives and goals and vision are for the business. If you're in that space, you're already well on your way to lean. If you're more in the place that a lot of businesses are, where there's just a lot going on, you're not quite sure if the things that you're doing or the things they're actually going to make the difference are actually going to really drive that profitability or be things that your customers are really looking for. That's when you know that you have a real opportunity to lean out.
Josh: Okay, I got a lot of great things to ask. So I know dad's always said to me, prior planning prevents piss poor performance. And it sounds like a lot of this comes down to making sure you are planning out for things like that, would that be fair to say?
Crista: Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of strategic planning. And I always add a lean flavor to that. So that you're combining that strategic planning along with lean practices. So you really are just getting super crystal clear on what are those things that are going to make the most difference so you can focus there, and just eliminate all that noise and waste in the system.
Josh: So I'm a big fan of lists myself, I love writing things. And I'll have a brainstorming day, normally with a cheeky beer and sit down and just write down. Okay, where is my business, where do I want it to be? Where's it going? And having an engineering background, I do a lot of planning, I do 90% planning, 10% execution. So sometimes I'd say I probably plan too much, then sometimes miss the reason why I was planning, that's a problem for me that I'm trying to overcome. But for others out there, if you've written a list of 100 things that need to be done in the business or ten things that need to be done in the business, how do you work out the one that is going to be that golden nugget that needs to focus?
Crista: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you love planning because that means you're a lot better off than a lot of people. So here's where I think you really want to start with business, I think it's so incredibly important that you get really clear on vision. And I consider a vision, a next level vision is where you're looking at three different facets. You're not just thinking about where you want your business to be in the future. You're also especially if you're the business owner, you're thinking about your life and lifestyle and making sure that your business in the design of your business, your model actually matches that. But the third facet that a lot of people don't consider that I think is so important, is when you think of your vision, you're also thinking of your clients and your customers. And so what are your customers going to want from you and need from you at that point in the future? Just like where is your business going to be at that point in the future. And I think when you start there, and then you take that, and you break that down into some near term goals. So you have goals for the next 90 days, and it gives you a lot of clarity on Am I focused on the right things? And am I focused on the right things right now? Because that vision where you look at that next level of vision across those three facets, it gives you that kind of directional correct look at things where you don't always know everything that's going to happen. You don't know now those projects that you're going to be working on, there's things you're going to do in the future. But you at least always know if the things that you're choosing and making decisions on are directionally correct if you have that clarity and vision.
Josh: I guess it's about prioritising a vision and that balance really to make sure that the reason you got into business is achieving those goals, if that's the vehicle that is doing that. Like I know myself I started my first business, my first legally registered business, I started 17 years ago, when I was doing sort of a little side hustle before that. And this business has been around for 13 years. Prioritizing is important, balance is important. And I definitely know that I was a bit out of whack to start off with an over focus on business. I didn't really look at family clients and lifestyle. And you brought up a good point. It sounds like it's definitely all about balance. Is that right?
Crista: It is, yeah. And so I believe so fully in sustainable success. And I think that when you think about when you first start a business, just like you described, things tend to be out of balance. The nature of that startup emerging stage of business, is that you're saying yes to everything. You're wearing all the hats, you're naturally overworking. It's a bit overwhelming, but it's also really exciting because you're building something new. It's very high energy right. And that's great, but that can't sustain. Once you move out of that emerging stage, you know, your product market fit, you know, who you serve, you know, what your core offers are, you know how your business actually makes money. At that point, you really do need to focus on leaning out and focusing much more on that balance and in that sustainable success and sustainable pace. And so what are all those facets of your life that are important to you aside from your business? And how can you carve out and create the space for all of them and build a team to surround yourself so that you can achieve that balance and maintain that balance.
Josh: In achieving the balance and maintaining the balance, I would say, I'm a big believer that change is as good as a holiday. But I think a lot of people do not necessarily feel that same way. And they might be like, oh, look, I've been doing what I've been doing for ages, it's kind of working. I've got enough money to have a boat, and enough time to sometimes go out on it, and sometimes see my family or whatever the kids names are. I can't remember now, because I haven't seen them that often.
How do you make sure someone becomes comfortable leaning out? Or what are some things you just see all the time? Is it like process things that you're saying people are just spending too much time on repetitious tasks? Or what are some of the core things, if you had to list five things that people are always making this mistake on? You go in there and go, oh, what are you doing? Why haven’t you automated your bookkeeping? What are the things that you see as the five things that relate to most businesses?
Crista: Yeah, sure. So the first one, I will say is too much. So doing too much, offering too much, it's people especially if they don't have that real clarity is sometimes they have way too many products and way too many offers for way too many different customers, and it can be really confusing, it's hard to know what the business is really known for. And that in turn, ends up creating too much work for the team as well as for the business owner. So it's just too muchness, it's waste, right? And so that's probably number one. Number two would be not focused on the right thing. So it's not just the quantity, but it's the things that you're focused on. So a lot of bright, shiny object thing. Oh, let's try that. Let's look at that, but not really considering is this the right thing, and is this the right thing right now? I think even having that strategic plan is probably the third, a lot of people have a vision. And a lot of people have a list of mile long of things to do. It's not super common that those two things connect to one another. And they do need to connect to one another. When you're trying to figure out what it is that you need to do, you need to make sure it's in support of the vision and goals.
The next one, which is four which builds off of that, is you need to make decisions on what you're going to do based on the capacity you have. And what I see so many people doing is they just have this big list of stuff to do. They know going in they're never going to get it done. But it's just the list. They basically work until exhaustion, then they pick up the next day and do it all over again, instead of reverse engineering and saying, here's the capacity that me and my team has, here's what we can realistically do. Let's just commit to this. And then probably the fifth that I would say is avoiding sunk cost, right. So people have started something, even if all signs point to the fact that it's not what customers want, it's not something that's going to drive profitability, because they've sunk time, effort money into it, they finish it anyway, and continue to work on something that's not actually going to make a difference. And if anything, it's actually gonna hurt the business from a profitability perspective. And that's time that could have been spent on something else that would be more value add.
Josh: The paradox of choice is a real problem for people. If you have more than three things, especially if you have more than three offerings. I know myself, Oh, jump into the shops. I’m the lucky owner this week of what you'd call an RV or a caravan. I bought that I'm going to camp trying to fit it out with different things and I'm going, right, there's too many choices. So generally, I kind of stuffed it. Well, solar panels I put on it, I'm not going to put any solar panels on it, it's too much choice. And that's as someone who's wanting to spend money to better something. And I definitely see that businesses need to make it clear and concise as to what your service offerings are, and remove some of that paradox of choice. And when you're coming into cost cutting elements, another thing that is very hard for people to do, especially if you start a project, people like seeing that come to completion, it's just human nature to want to see that finish, even if that's not something that when once complete is going to be profitable.
When I first started a business, I bought a book called The E-myth by Michael Gerber, which is great, and started writing out mission statements and business plans. And every couple of years I go back and review those and I think leaning out and making the decision. Obviously, mission statements and business plans have to come very, very closely in line with leaning a business, yes? There's lots of lots of different methodologies in leaning out your business. As your mission statement or business plans change. How does that reflect a business that you've started leaning at? Or is that just make it more focused? Or if you have to pivot because there's a global pandemic, hypothetically, that would never happen. If that was to be the case, how do you go about making sure that if you've got sniper vision and your business plan, your mission statements, everything's laid out and you're absolutely pulling the right direction? Do you think that brings clarity or disparity if you have to pivot?
Crista: Yeah, so it's interesting. One of the clients that I'm currently consulting with, they had to stop all manufacturing big, huge major manufacturer in the US. And obviously, because of COVID, they couldn't have people in house, so they had to stop manufacturing. So you would think that they would have had an absolute tank in their quarter and their performance. But they pivoted, they produced masks and they produced all of these other things with a really small, tight crew, where they kind of revamped everything. But because they were very lean, that they knew exactly what their capacity was, they knew exactly what the capability of their plants were, they were able to pivot and adjust and do what they needed to do in order to not only help out which they wanted to do, it's a family business, they're very big on helping, but also they actually were profitable at a time when you would have thought they wouldn't have been since they had to shut down manufacturing.
So I think lean can actually really help you. But you do have to pivot and you do need to be willing to make those shifts and make those changes. I think you just need to always go back to what is that long term vision? Where are my customers? What are they going to need from me? And just to make sure as you're pivoting and making those changes, it's still in line and directionally correct.
Josh: I love the way you've answered that. It's perfect. I can say that myself, over the years in business, being pushed towards a hard wall gives you one direction to go and that's forwards. And you definitely see when times become tough, you work out what is the most important thing, why you're in business. And it's sad that businesses have to sometimes make those very snap decisions in a pandemic like we are currently in. That's right, anyone in the future that’s listening to this, we’re in a pandemic. It's definitely better to be able to have the forethought hindsight and time to get a workout and plan strategically. And that's I guess, where you can come in and help businesses out to have that ability to see into the future without having to be at that spot where they have to make these hard decisions, get rid of key employees and make sure they can focus on their business and pulling the right direction. So the lean out method allows you to focus and plan before you need to focus and plan and be running a profitable, fantastic business without being pushed towards a hard wall. Is that fair to say?
Crista: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the thing that I see so many people do wrong with planning is they're overly prescriptive. And they try to plan too far into the future. And I think plans are so critical. And you absolutely do want plans. And that's why you want a long term vision, you want a 90-day plan. But I also think that you need to look at what are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. You need to allow some flexibility and getting there. And certainly, this year has proven that any prescriptive plans that you had probably got thrown 100% out the window. But it doesn't mean that you can't still achieve your goals or still achieve those outcomes that you are going to if you're willing to be flexible and pivot, and still make sure that you're directionally correct.
Josh: All right. So you said the 90-day plan, how long term should you be looking at? Should you be going, okay, I know that we've had people come on the show before talk about exit strategies and things like that. And when you get into a business, you should know your exit strategy, you should know the vehicle and what it's bringing away where you're going with it. And so they're talking sometimes, five years, ten years, twenty years into the future, what do you want it to look like? I know myself, I had a sort of a bit of a real moment, I thought, what I want to be remembered for at my funeral, and then work everything back from there. So when you're planning, the core objectives you want to get to see and achieve and be able to see those milestones and wins, and those champagne moments would be in those 90 day, I guess you'd have a detailed 90 days and then do sort of step back and still into the future a bit further. How long term do you need the vision to be?
Crista: Yeah, absolutely. So I always say from a vision perspective, you should look as far into the future as you can. And so when people are first starting a business, sometimes they either have this big grand vision, or they have a very small vision. Like I just want to make enough money to never have to have a nine to five again, right. That was my very first business that I ever had. That was all I wanted. My vision today very different now that I have such a big company in. So I think that you just want to look as far into the future, as you can see, but at this stage, I'm absolutely thinking and looking in terms of ten years. But I'm looking again at outcomes and results in what I want. I'm not looking at specifically how I'm going to get there every month for the next ten years. And I think that's the key is you need to know where you're going. You need to know what's important and why it's important. And that lets you make the right decisions in the near term and tactically do the right things, because you're wrapping it in that longer term strategic plan.
Josh: Okay, that's fantastic. I know with the plan and that that should also be not just a plan for you in the business, it should be a plan for you and your personal life, you and your wife or husband or whatever the case may be. Like I know we've got a massive whiteboard and I wrote off at the end there $1.5 million house, two jet skis and all these different things that I wanted to have at the end and then I wrote where I am. Knowing what your goal is let you make sure that you can then work out and if this is something that you want to retire with or have financial freedom knowing your goals. And your steps beforehand, let you know what you need to do to get there. And that's important. It's writing it down and just knowing that's what it is, is that achievable? Is that not achievable? If it isn't achievable? What do I need to change to make it achievable?
Crista: And that helps when things get tough, because like this year proved right, sometimes things just do not go according to plan. Sometimes we all have seasons that are good and bad in business. And when they're not so good, it's really nice sometimes to have that very clear vision of what you want, and what you see. Again, as you said, not just for the business, but also for yourself, because that helps you stay motivated, that helps you push through, that helps you keep pivoting and being innovative. At times when you are probably internally saying, boy, it would just be so much easier if I did something else. So it does help.
Josh: It's like you're reading what I'm about to ask you. Anyone who is listening, Crista is not. I just wrote if your business is in its infancy, how do you balance your life? So how do you know that you need to be able to have those elements? How do you know what you should be focusing on? Like, if you know that you want to achieve certain things? And you go, okay, look, maybe you're single and you I want to achieve these things, and I've got a 90-hour week, and then for whatever reason you're at a barbecue and then the love of your life comes into your life? Oh, can't focus on that. You should not be spending 90 hours a week and visitors probably not very healthy either. But you can't necessarily you need to be out of balance everything. How do you make sure that you're balancing without pushing your goals further into the future?
Crista: Yeah, so I have something that I call the time pie that I recommend everybody creates. And the reality is, we all have 24 hours in a day, right? The great equaliser, everybody has 24 hours in a day. You knock out the essentials for sleeping, eating and taking a shower and all that kind of stuff, and you're left with however many you have, right. And you have to figure out how you carve the rest of that time up. And you have to figure out what's important to you. And I always tell people look at it from a work day and a non-work day.
Even as business owners even though we tend to have every day be a workday, we still have some days as more non work days, and look at what you want that balance to be. And then what I think you need to think about is, I think, a balance at a macro scale, as opposed to a micro scale. What that means is not every single day is going to be in balance. Not every single week is going to be in balance. You're going to have periods where you're launching something, where you're doing something where you maybe have something in your personal life, and things are going to be out of balance, which is fine. But you want to look at that macro scale and try to swing it back. So if you had too much going on in your business, and you were doing the 90-hour week that you mentioned, then you really do need to carve out time for personal.
In the example you gave where you meet somebody, right? There's all these things in business that you feel are critical and you must do and while you're working the 90 hours. And then you all of a sudden realize you could have actually run a leaner business. Usually, well maybe I didn't really need to be doing that. I can create time to go on a date tonight. And so sometimes it's fun to even put yourself mentally in those types of scenarios, to say, what would I cut if this thing that I want so badly personally came up. And sometimes that's a good indicator of things that aren't actually as important as you think they are in your business.
Josh: That example that I gave actually is very close to heart for me, I met my partner just over two years ago, and I while I went okay, I'm going to focus heavily on this. I love it, I live to work, I really enjoy it. And she said you're never gonna retire. I said, guys, technically I am retired, I said, if I'm doing everything that I love doing every day, and I can choose to do the things that I love doing. And there's only a small amount that I don't, then I said I kind of living the dream, but when she came in and I found that she was part of my dream, I went okay, well I've got to go to see what I can do there and definitely worked out how to rebalance that.
Something else that I found though that was interesting was a dear friend of mine was saying that you need to sharpen your soul and sometimes going away and taking away a break away from your business allows you to sharpen your sword to be able to continue cutting down the trees as opposed to working out hard out continuing to cut it down, your soul becomes blunt, and then you just become working more and more. I went away for three weeks and only came back just recently and coming back on you know what there's so much that I that I haven't done during this time period that it became monotonous routine that I don't need to do that anymore. And just you're able to claim that out just by not doing it for a bit you realise you didn't need to do it.
That could be something as simple as maybe you sit down and watch TV at a certain time or jump onto Netflix, and yeah, it’s not that important. So I'm not actually enjoying that as much as I would just having a sneaky one and have it cool or whatever it is. So, I found going on holidays definitely makes your business more efficient. How can you convince someone to do that though, if they are in that 90-hour week back and they go I can't possibly do this. How do you convince someone or have someone see the light?
Crista: I have this happen all the time. So I actually back pre-COVID actually started a planning retreat. So people would come out to this luxurious location and we would plan their business and it was basically committed days to work on their business, but I did it intentionally to encourage people to take the break. And I mixed in just enough business, so they felt like they were getting in what they needed to, but also gave them a great opportunity and a lot of space. I always encourage them to add a day on the front and a day on the back. I would always say you're going to want time to think and reflect, and people would just come home so relaxed. But what I do outside of that, since these days, there's no in-person retreats, what I always encourage people to do when they're working, which I think is a really effective way of working is working in focus blocks. So when I help people work in focus blocks, I have them carve out focus blocks for self-care and for relaxation, and for recharging. And so I say use this concept for everything, and this week, I want you to commit to a minimum of a two hour focus block for self-care. Next week, I want you to do a minimum of a four hour focus block for self-care. And they get really into working in the focus blocks, and they find they actually get much more efficient anyway, so they have the space for it. But using that concept, that's almost like a time management thing that feels very businessly to them, usually will let them create the space to do it. And then they start to see the benefit from it. And it just kind of snowballs.
Josh: That's cool. Like you said, you were very sneaky for them to see without saying come on holidays, come on, we'll look at the books, we'll go through everything a little bit. But that's good. It's a good way to sort of introduce that balance. And also, if partners are invited it gives them the ability to see their partners in the environment that they're in. And I like that. I know that you're familiar with the tomato timer and things like that 25/5 whatnot timers, I think that's an invaluable tool to make sure you are focusing and then shifting focus and focusing and shifting focus. And so there's definitely a lot of ground that was covered here. And for anyone out there that is listening, we've got a fantastic master class at leaner method is running there. And it goes through a bit on how to actually get your business tell me how does that work? Or what people to expect in the master class?
Crista: So I truly believe that in order to level up your business and take it to the next level, you do need to lean out. And so in the master class, I walk everybody through, it's very interactive. And I walk everybody through how to do that. So how do you actually lean out your business? How do you level up your business? How do you combine both to really get results that are sustainable? So it's multiple days, every day we go through an activity, people have homework, this is one that you got to show up and work for. But it's good because it's for your business and each day's session builds on the prior day. So by the end of the masterclass, people have their next level vision defined, they have their 90-day plan defined, they've created their time pie. They've started to look at how they can achieve more balanced, they have committed to working and focus blocks and carve out what they're going to be working on in focus blocks plus a whole lot of other things. But really, I take you through everything that you need to think about how you can lean out your business and what it's going to take to level up your business.
Josh: It's five days, you said yeah?
Crista: It's five days, and I toss in some bonus stuff, too. So it's usually about nine days that we're together.
Josh: Just getting back to the time pie. Five days, isn't that long for the amount of value they get from that on the time pie. So many people I talked to, like, how long are you on social media for a week, and they got in, a couple of hours. And then I'm going, how often are you doing this a week? How often do you do that a week? I installed a couple of different tools, Manic Time is one of them and Rescue Time is another. I thought how often am I actually doing this stuff. And I'm on Facebook for two and a half hours a week. And I thought well, that's okay enough like that. That's not terrible. And that's including messenger and stuff like that. But I can still cut that down. So I've tried to cut that down to an hour. I've got other friends that install it that they've found out, they're on there for 15 hours a week. And I thought how many people get I don't have the time to do this. They don't have the time to do that. I said if you if you're doing things, and you don't even know how long it's taking to do that. If you're on Facebook for 15 hours a week, it's definitely not going to bring as much value as jumping into the master class and finding out what you can do 15 hours of Facebook a week, that's only a month of Facebook, you're going to swap out to add significant income and level up your business. So I definitely suggest you go across there and check it out.
A couple of final thoughts. One question that I had for you is what is your favorite book that people can read and just really get this influence inside going, okay, this is what I need to be doing? And what was that book that changed your mindset?
Crista: Oh, gosh, there's so much but I would say if I recommended one book that's really in the camp of lean, it would be the one thing. And so it's really just about focusing really, really, really great book. Gary Keller wrote it I want to say it came out a few years back.
Josh: Is there any other questions that you had for me or any final words that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Crista: I would say you know, if you don't already have that next level of vision, make sure that you create that. Come up with a 90-day plan that's in alignment with that. And most importantly, make sure the things you do on a daily basis actually are in alignment with your vision and your goals. Because usually people find a lot of things that they do on a day to day basis aren't actually the things that are going to move you closer to what you envision for your business. And that right there is the quickest way to lean out your business and get back some of that balance is just eliminating those things that aren't in alignment.
Josh: Definitely good advice and again, getting back to when I started. I was a fantastic technician, a shithouse business owner. I definitely needed to focus more on the hustle side of things. Anyone that does want more information that leanoutmethod.com/masterclass, we'll put a link in the description. If you have enjoyed the episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us a review. And you guys choose the content and direct the path of where we go. And I've loved having you Crista and thank you very much.
Crista: Thank you so much for having me.
Making a Foundation for Growth with Jeff Chastain
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. I've got Jeff Chastain here from Admentus. And he's going to be talking to us about a few different ways that you can make a foundation for growth with something called EOS. So tell me a bit more about the process and what EOS is for anyone out there that's listening.
Learn more about building a strong foundation for your business at dorksdelivered.com.au
Jeff: Sure. Well, thanks for having me. EOS is really just a, it's honestly just a simple set of business practices, business processes that work for entrepreneurial-led organisations to kind of instill that foundation, what you're talking about, it's still kind of that basic process in place, because honestly, most entrepreneurs that come into business, they've got a great idea, they've got an idea for a solution, a product, something like that, they take it to market, but what they don't necessarily have is an MBA and know exactly how to go structure and build a business. They go out to market, they hopefully have something that's viable, that a customer wants to go by, they've got it sold. And then we're kind of at the stage of, okay, now, what do we do are we actually going to grow up and treat this like a real business and scale out people, scale out systems, things like that, so we can move forward.
If you look at all the business statistics and stuff like that three to four year mark, when a lot of small businesses failed, it's really that stage where the entrepreneur, their core team has basically kind of hit their limit of they're trying to do everything themselves and getting frustrated that okay, things just aren't working quite as well. And they lose traction, the business saying, okay, when we first started, it was really easy change really easy to adapt. Now we're here and it just feels like the business is stuck in the mud, we've kind of lost all sense of fun of direction here. And that point, they just say, hey, we're bailing out and starting over. Whereas an operating system like EOS really comes back in underneath their successful business really that they built to that point and says, okay, now let's solidify the foundation underneath it. Let's actually get everybody working together with the same vision, get everybody performing the same way. And just really kind of reinvigorate that business going forward.
Josh: Okay, so what you said there pretty much you need to create structure within the business to allow for growth and to allow for everyone to pull the ship in the same direction. Because if everyone's blowing wind in the sails in the same direction, the ship will move forward, as opposed to creating turbulence. So how would you go about moving to a structure where you have the systems in place when most people are going off their feet their busy as. Everyone's complaining, they have no time. So how do you go about introducing something that takes up time, that will save you time, if you need to get over that hump to be able to get there, what's the process?
Jeff: It's a longer journey process is the way we look at it. With a lot of things you'll go out and visionaries especially go to a weekend conference, or read a book and come back into the office Monday. And here's all the new ideas we're going to go implement. That kind of stuff honestly never works, it never gets the traction. Whereas EOS is really implemented as a very phased process where it will actually start working right off the bat with individual tools to say, okay, go back in tomorrow and into your business, let's start on just this one tool, just these two tools, and start kind of building that piece by piece into your daily journey, your daily practice your daily work right there, and really build it in over time. It's a longer implementation process. But it helps take, okay, everything that you're doing today, all your ideas you're doing today, now, let's map in a little bit of structure. Let's map in some new processes. Let's figure out okay, what are you doing today in your sales process, for example. And let's go take and document that at an 80/20 kind approach from an entrepreneurial standpoint, and really get just that little bit in place to where now everybody on your sales team is using the same process kind of a thing. So it's little pieces that you can build into time, and it's not a complete turn right right now with the entire company and expect everybody to stay on the track.
Josh: Getting back to my ship analogy, you can’t turn a ship on a dime, can you? Or a five-cent piece if you're listening in Australia. So what kind of tools would you say you're looking to implement or would be something that you that you go into and you get, okay, 80% of the people are having this same problem because they haven't implemented X, Y, Z or haven't reviewed this stack?
Jeff: Oh, one of the keys that we really look at first and you kind of already touched on it is simply just looking at the company vision to say, okay, this entrepreneur, this leader has his idea of, okay, where are we trying to get to as a company, but I forget where it was, was a Forbes study or something not too long ago that went in and did basically a study on all those thousand something different employees of a company, and they said basically one in four had some idea of what was going on in the company, that they understood the direction of the company, they understood where they fit, etc. And if you look at it and say, okay, if you've got Sally sitting here working in your operations department, and she's just there to go in and punch a clock, nine to five, in and out kind of a thing, versus you've got somebody over here on the other side that is in tune with the company vision, they're excited about, hey, this is what my job is. This is how it contributes to the company. This is how where we're going as a company, and this is how I'm helping to facilitate that. That type of employee is going to be a lot more productive for you.
And obviously, if you can get everybody in the company with that mental attitude, then to your earlier point about blowing the sales, okay, yeah, now we've got everybody on the same page, because that's really the key is to say, okay when most people look at vision they're looking at, okay, here's our core values, our core focus of being honest, integrity, all the kind of buzzwords that they go stick on the website. And honestly, forget about at that point, it goes and collects dust out there on the About Us page, and really what vision should be, it starts with that but it goes a lot deeper to say, okay, our vision X, Y, Z IT company here, who are we trying to serve? Are we trying to serve a different certain market? And why are we trying to reach out to them? What makes us special to go reach out to that market? What are our key differentiators for reaching that market? So that way, it's defined at a company level. And so when marketing is putting together their pitch, sales knows what marketing is doing. Sales can go out and use those same three key differentiators right there and their sales pitch. And that way, the support team, the IT team, the operations team, whatever this delivering the service knows exactly what they're supposed to deliver. Because if marketing goes off and sells one thing, sales, goes off the rails and sells something else, operations just kind of sitting there left saying how in the heck are we going to deliver this? And everything's a mess at that point.
Josh: Yeah, and unsatisfied customers are never a good thing to have. And that then makes the whole system crumble down. Like I know, for us, when we first started out 13 years ago, the direction that we went was like a lot of people that haven't read enough personal development books and decided to jump out there with a gung ho awesome attitude, knowing that you can do better than some of the other people out there decide to get the clients charge a lower price. Wrong move, Josh. What are you doing?
Jeff: That works for a little while.
Josh: That's right. I'm gonna go back and select teenage Josh, what's he doing? Idiot, read a book.
Jeff: Yeah, you had to start somewhere.
Josh: That's right. So when we did that, we had incredible growth, and we bought someone else on and we're both sitting on 150,000 a year. So we're both pretty happy before turned 21. So we're both pretty pumped, if I call myself Batman, and he's Robin. When Robin had a stroke, and Batman had to pick up the slack. Batman didn't have enough time. And he say to do that he was too busy saving lives. So that was nearly the collapse of our company. And that came down to all processes at that stage and growing on a price. And when we decided to change that around, exactly like you're saying, create that differentiator. So now the businesses that we work with, we guarantee that they will have the uptime that we've agreed upon. So depending on the business, that could be businesses not down for more than 30 minutes, or for an IT problem not down for four hours, if it's a smaller business or something like that. And if they go down that guarantee means we pay them per hour at the agreed rate while their business is down. So we want them to be up and running as quickly as possible, because there's no money in us paying them while we're fixing the problem.
Jeff: Sure, sure. Yep.
Josh: It just realigns the way and make sure that our offerings and what you're saying there perfectly with the team. You want to make sure your team's pulling in the same direction. We figured as an IT provider and solutions provider to make sure that we are pulling in the same direction as them. And if we're charging people per hour, when something goes down, they're already upset with us, and then we're whacking them with a big invoice. So they just get more upset with us. And we found that the less skilled, less experienced IT companies would take longer to fix the problems therefore earn more money. And we went this doesn't make any sense. What is going on with this world? Why are we doing this? This doesn't make any sense at all.
So we changed the model and then let's flip it on its head, let's have them be paid when things go down. That's one of our differentiators that we try to push through in our marketing as well as through our sales. But you're exactly right. You need to have that thing that we differentiate it isn't price because it's very easy to see the differences between that and that doesn't help businesses out. Getting back to what you said you said is Sally's in the business that may just want to do nothing but clock in. And it did sound like you want to create a latest mentality throughout the whole company. We have ever been looking at a problem, finding a solution and bringing that to the table for everyone to review and look at as opposed to just being a meat in a seat, so to speak.
Jeff: Definitely you want to you want to empower your team basically give them give them a reason to come reason that they want to be there a reason that they feel like they're contributing, and also basically have that almost honesty, integrity, kind of openness in the company such that regardless of what level of the company Sally's at, if she sees an issue, or has a problem, or whatever, she feels comfortable raising that and everybody's going to take it seriously kind of a thing.
While, you've got to have the structure in the company, and obviously reporting structure hierarchy, stuff like that. You've got to be real careful not to make that too rigid, especially in a small company that say, okay, well, you're at the bottom level, you can't do anything, just go do your job kind of a thing. You want to encourage that growth, that leadership model there to say, hey, no matter what your role is you're contributing this is how you fit into our long-term strategy, our long-term vision, this is where you are. And really, I said, empower them, make them feel like they're part of that so that they can contribute, they feel like they've got a worth and value in that company.
Josh: I know, Dad has always said, if you can think of a way a problem can be solved. It's better to have that solution be found by a staff member. And they will then take ownership over that, and they'll cradle that and that'll become their baby, as opposed to even if you know what the solution can be just jamming that down someone's throat doesn't necessarily have people care for your solution. But if someone finds that, and then they take that ownership, and they take that pride in what they have found, that they brought to the table, and everyone wins. It's kind of like inception, you need to try and put that idea into their head, if you've got the idea, or work together and have people just started to spring up ideas and have moments.
So we do a half Friday. And normally at the moment, I'm not drinking any beer for six weeks, but we only have a few beers and have a beer meeting, and go through how can we have done this week better? What was your favorite part? What was your least favorite part? And is there any new tools that you've seen out there that could help? Was there any special compliments that you had from clients? Was there any particularly difficult clients? And then we go through and work out how we can phase that. And then we do a difficult question section, which is where we reflect on each other? And we say, oh, look, I didn't quite like the way that you said X, Y, Z. Or you could have approached that question that you asked me in a less hasty way, or whatever the case is, just to make sure that you do have a better team, a better family that you're working with. When you go into businesses, what are the families like? How is the structure that disparity? Is it sometimes like, is there more strength in one arm than there is another say, for instance, they've got a fantastic team, but not a very well defined vision? Or is it all over the place?
Jeff: Honestly, I'd say family is the right term to describe it with, because you can obviously have some families that are really tight, well knit together and enjoy being together, working together. And you've got other families that you better not put them all at the dinner table because they're going to be yelling and screaming at each other. Yeah, picking whatever, whatever the discussion is politics or religion, or whatever, they want to go at each other about kind of a thing there. You see it all in both kind of thing. And a lot of times, that's really, it's a culture really, from the top of the business.
I see most of the time, that okay, are you going to have that entrepreneurial leader, because if you look at entrepreneurs, the journey, most of the time you've been talking about, okay, you and your partner starting off that business, at that point, you start growing out, start growing out. And the question is, are you going to be able to hand off one of those hats that you're wearing to your new teammates that you brought on? Or are you going to kind of pull and tug on the hat at the same time, they're trying to take it sit in their back pocket and say, make sure you're doing this this way, make sure you're following these steps kind of thing, writing over them. At that point, you're not instilling any kind of trust or any kind of confidence in your team. They're sitting there looking over their shoulder all the time, saying, okay, am I about to get beaten over this kind of a thing? Am I about to get called out in front of everybody, because this didn't go exactly the way the owner would have done it kind of a thing? And when you've got that kind of mentality with that owner, not being able to delegate, not being able to hand things off, and it just cripples the entire staff right there from an attitude perspective, because honestly, everybody's sitting there saying, okay, I'm basically ducking the entire time saying, okay, who's going to be the next one to get on his radar? And being glad that okay, sorry, it's your turn here to go be in the spotlight, not mine kind of a thing. And it's like bad attitude. I've seen that in too many companies where the owner is all frustrated himself or herself saying, okay, why is the company not working? I'm having to get down to here in the weeds and do all this stuff. It's like, you got to realise that okay, delegation is one of the key points of being a successful leader.
And then really, where really the EOS comes in is, okay, yes, is delegation, but you've got to have the processes in place. You've got to have the numbers, the metric stuff in place where if I've got a documented process for how we're going to handle a trouble ticket in an IT business, I can hand that off to my IT support team over here. And as long as my numbers, my dashboard are correct here to say, okay, all tickets are getting handled in less than 30 minutes or whatever our metrics are for our business. Then as a leader, as the CEO, I can step back and actually relax. I don't have to go stand over that IT tech and sit here and watch the stopwatch. Okay, are you getting done here, you got five minutes left kind of thing. Because I can see the metrics. I know everybody's following the process. And I don't have to worry about that anymore. And that's really the key with these businesses as you've got to be able to systematise the business, you got to go put those processes in place. It's almost kind of counterintuitive to say, we've got to put more structure in the business, we've got to put more framework more processes in place, so that you can relax and have more fun. But most people would look at that and say, wait a minute, more structure means rigidity. I take the creativity out of my business, I take the fun out of my business. And it's actually just the opposite.
Josh: We call it elastic documentation. And in where I'll be the first to say I'll create our documentation internally, and I think you have owned that hat so to speak, it's only fair that you write down how you've managed that hat and how that has worked. But once that's being created, it's then up to the person or team that has received that hat to then modify it and change it and tweak it as time goes on. And as processes change, as you might find a better way. Because ultimately, I'm just one person that's walked one direction, but the path you've walked in your life, Jeff, is different to my path. And that's means that the input that you would have would be different. So we make sure that everyone knows that this is the documentation and how it can work, not how it should work. And make sure to have elastic documentation. And as you're saying, delegation is key. Absolutely. You need to be able to let go and let that bird fly than hold its wings and hold it back. Because if you’ll just tire it out.
Jeff: And really the key with especially when you're talking about documentation, because too many times I'll see a company say okay, we don't have enough capacity, we need more resources. So they'll go hire somebody in. And it's like, well, jump in, go, Good luck, go figure out your own job, almost kind of a thing. So when you've got these processes and stuff, like you're talking figured out, you can go scale out your helpdesk support team, because you've got documented processes where somebody's gonna step into that role, know exactly what they're supposed to do on day one, it can be productive there rather than spend the next three, four months trying to figure out what their job is or reinvent processes, reinvent things figure out, okay, previous guy walked out the door and basically took all the knowledge in his head with him. And now what am I supposed to do in my new job? And we're sitting there as owners paying them to flounder basically, having that kind of system. Again, that kind of structure in place for those people just facilitates that scale and just again, adds economies of scale, right there.
Josh: Coming back to that first employee, I was talking about, we both just worked together enough to learn how to do it. The second employee after David was Alex, and it took seven months before he became profitable. And I went this is terrible, especially like I had read the E-myth by Michael Gerber. And I thought, okay, I should know to do this, but I got caught in that. Don't have time to do it. So I haven't done it. And so I'll just keep doing what I'm doing until that's done. And then I'll never have time to have any fun, which sucks. Yeah, but the moment you have these processes in place, like the E myth, sort of discusses, McDonald's is run by 14-year olds. It's a multi billion dollar business, it's ran by teenagers, really old enough to know how to read the documents that you've got in front of them. And it means that you've got something to lean back on for KPIs, for everything. Every business should have their processes documented. And sometimes it's a lot easier to say than it is to do.
Jeff: Definitely is. And one key point about McDonald's or any kind of place like that, if you go in there as your 14-year-old and say, okay, you're going to be a new line cook. They don't hand them a six-inch-thick SAP manual that says, Okay, here's every single little detail about every single little thing you need to know. They've got a laminated sheet there that says step one, step two through step six, this is what you need to follow right here. So to me, that's where a lot of people get stuck when we talk about processes. It is like, okay, where do I even start, and I'm going to end up working for months building out this huge thing. And then nobody looks at it kind of kind of a system, whereas EOS really pushes the 80/20 approach to say, okay, we're going to document the top 20% of exactly what you need to know from a high level to go figure this out, rather than dive down and build that entire SOP manual kind of a thing there that nobody does. It doesn't matter that it's 100% perfect right up front. Take a quick pass to say okay, this is what we do every time. This is the high-level points, and we can always go back and refine it agile kind of process but still just make a quick pass at it and get started, rather than sit there and say, hey, there's no way we can spend months trying to figure all this out, you don't need much, you just need something quick to get started. And honestly at that point, let the people doing the job right now fill in the details as needed. But even still, I would say, don't even, it's not worth their time your investment to go build that huge manual, you don't need all those little details. Just make sure you've got the flow to where somebody can sit down and figure out okay, I can take these six steps and go cook the hamburger, I can do whatever I need to at a high level right there.
Josh: Keep it simple, stupid, I think is the case sort of mentality. And keeping it simple. I know if you bought up earlier going to different day seminars and things like that, that they tell you, this is how you change the world with your business just implement this one little thing. And one of them said, I document everything, everything has to be documented. I document where the coffee filters have to be purchased from. What seat I want in an aeroplane. And I've got 120, whatever it was, a lot of procedures just around the way that I travel. And I thought, holy shit. I left going, why oh my goodness.
Jeff: At that point, you hire the person on and is still take some six months just to go read all that. Yeah, it’s still why?
Josh: It's just too much I went My goodness. And I thought he must have a huge churn rate in his business. Because if you've got a VA, and they're used to booking tickets for you, and they're doing what they're meant to be doing, they already know your preferences. You've told them once, they know. If there is, sound like getting away from the documentation thing, but it gets to a level where it's you don't need to know that on the plane, you're going to be ordering this drink first, followed by this many drinks if it's this many hours long flight, it just becomes too much.
Jeff: It's definitely too much. But at the same time, there's a balance between it because for whatever reason, even if you want to scale out, it's not that you lost your VA, you just need to add a second VA. She doesn't necessarily or he doesn't necessarily know all that and having the quick high-level points to say, okay, we prefer this airline, or we prefer middle level seats, mid seats instead of aisle seats or whatever. It's just a couple quick bullet points there to say, Okay, this is what our list of preferences are, it doesn't have to go down to the point of okay, we want a third aisle or third row only, not fourth row kind of a thing and all that kind of mess. It's just okay, here's the couple quick points that we just know, anytime we go book travel, here's the quick set of preferences that we need to follow. And that just makes that new VA that comes on board, their job, they’re onboarding is so much easier, because they can just say, oh, we need to book travel. Here's the five or so pieces of data that I need to know when I go book travel.
Josh: I agree completely. The way that I kind of worked at any process that we do in business, whether it be making documentation, or creating systems comes back to something that my brother told me many years ago. I was in my bedroom as a young teenager building electronic projects. And I said to my brothers and oh look up the one remote control turns the lights on, turns the fan on, turns the TV on, turns DVD player on, turns the computer on, does everything with the one can control.
Anyway, so I said I'm going to make it to this remote control can also unlock the door and then with an actuator open up the door and then close the door as well. So that sounds pretty cool. And he's an engineer 14 years my senior. Yes, that sounds pretty cool. So he said, how long that's gonna take you to make? Oh, well with these parts, I have to make the PCBs and everything I said it's probably gonna take me 100 hours 100, 120 hours programming everything else. Okay, cool. Cool. How many times could you have open and close the door in 120 hours? Yep. Okay, I get it. Yep. So the door was never automated. But the lesson learned there was if you're going to be telling someone something more than once then document it. If you're going to be telling someone, something many times 100% documented. But if it's something that's just very quick, and you're not going to need to do that process, the same in business, we went automate something unless we know that it's going to benefit the masses of people. And that's what it comes down to being sensible, and maybe just writing a list of what would you suggest that maybe a list of 10 or 20 things of processes? Get five things that they do on a daily basis and try to write those down. What would you say is the magic number?
Jeff: I don't know there's necessarily a magic number, but it's definitely just even hitting a one or two kind of a thing to say, okay, let's just look at this at a high level. But what I would take from what you were just saying, supposed the door was already automated or whatever, you wouldn't want to write the process that explains exactly how the motor turns and that electrical current comes on to this motor, and then it swings 35 degrees and it pushes here. It's like no, the process says press the button. That's all the process needs to say kind of a thing there. So you got to be careful with that's really what I'm trying to get at is how deep you go. All they need know is press the button right there if you need to go in or out kind of a thing. You don't need to know how it works. You don't have to no all that kind of detail at that level. Yeah, to your point, it's, it's really just a matter of, obviously one keeping it simple like we talked about, but really just getting started is the biggest thing.
With the EOS implementation, it's actually typically almost a two-year journey that we look at from initial start to really calling mastery at that point of all the tools and the processes. And it's just literally, it starts out actually month to month, but then goes to more of a quarterly basis. But the idea is just to start doing something, getting one or two of those tools and start getting some muscle memory basically built with that. And that's really where you got to start with any of this stuff, it is just okay. Again, keeping it simple, but just get started with something. Pick up a piece and move forward with it.
That's really the whole premise behind the system, it’s just simplicity. Because even going all the way back the first we were talking vision, at one point, I was working with a branding coach on one company I was working with, and I got this huge document on all the different logos, the color styles, the fonts, everything was all laid out, it was just this big old thing here. It's like, okay, this is just the brand that doesn't even talk about anything else. And when we talked to a company about establishing your vision, it's not again, some master plan that you got to bring in all these consultants on it’s literally two pages. It's eight questions that we go through, it's two pages. It's entrepreneurial, keep it simple, keep it basic, because again, same as the process is if you get in too deep, you start getting too big. Everybody freezes up and nothing gets done, or else it gets over-done and it’s never used kind of a thing.
Josh: Well, I think there's going tp be a lot of listeners out there that have heard a lot of what we've been talking about, and probably looking at ways to get this implemented. And at least some consulting. I understand you’ve got admentus.com/resources, there is some bits and pieces such as a quick 20 question checkup?
Jeff: Yeah, there's actually three different things on that page. The EOS system itself is built around six different key areas that we say, okay, if you strengthen those six key areas, basically all your issues fall into those buckets. So that's where that checkup comes in is, like I said, a 20 question checkup, they're just kind of measures how strong you are. And those those six key areas. And we'll actually utilise that through the implementation journey to say, okay, here's where we started, here's where we are now kind of a thing to other resources on that page are actually. Two of the EOS books, there's a whole, honestly, a whole library pretty much about EOS, but the traction book, literally lays out the entire system. You've got all the tools in that one book right there. So if you want to just pick up the book, read it yourself, go through it yourself, more power to you kind of a thing. The difference really is that I build myself or it was more of a coach and facilitator, I'm not a consultant, I'm not going to come in and do EOS for you. My role is to come in here and be that third-party working with you on that book. So we're still working from that book from those materials. So you can very easily if you're just curious right now the first chapter’s free up there on that website slash resources, grab the traction or the Get a Grip book, either one right there. And then other resources, simply just if you're curious, or you got questions about any of that, just send me an email at admentus.com/ask. And I'm always open for questions always opened up to help anywhere I can there.
Josh: Cool. Well, we'll make sure to check this in the description there for the podcast over on the blog for us. And so everyone can definitely jump in there. I'm actually looking at jumping into doing the organisational checkup. Why not? Why not? It's only 20 questions. What's the harm?
Jeff: We're going to get another set of data point for you.
Josh: Exactly. Well, I've only got one other question for you. And that is, you've probably already answered the question, to be completely honest. But if there was to be one book that you think that anyone should be reading to be doing better in their business, what would that be? I think I already know the answer.
Jeff: You're looking at two of them right there. It really is. It was because honestly, I've been doing I've done a number of businesses myself, I've been doing this kind of stuff for 15 plus years, too many I wouldn't want to count at that point. But it's it really was almost just a complete lightbulb moment when I first saw Traction, because I've been through so many businesses, getting frustrated with clients just you've got to get the foundation the business together. Because we were talking earlier about technology and stuff like that. It's like it doesn't matter how good the technology is, if you don't have the foundation there, and it just really hit me when I was first introduced to Traction. I'm not trying to sell I really do and it's not even my book, it's somebody else. Gino Whitman's the one that wrote it kind of thing. I don't get any credit on it. But it's still it's just that from an entrepreneurial standpoint is just one of those books that just really the lightbulb kinds of content comes on. And the other book is called Get a Grip and it's right there in parallel. But basically what that book is a fictional in quotes, narrative about actually implementing EOS into a technology company, or all type of companies. But still, it's one of those that Yeah, we didn't write this with any one particular person in mind. But sure, yeah. But yeah, if you prefer more of the fictional side, then the technical implement the tools side, but they complement each other really well right there. I've read them both multiple times, and like I said first chapter on both. I was free right there on the website. But honestly, those are the two books that from a business perspective I'd be diving into pretty quick right there.
Josh: Sweet. Well, is there any other questions that you had for me?
Jeff: I don't think so at this point. Like I said, technology's always kind of my thing I just I know exactly where you're coming from there all the all the terminology and everything. But it's a fun world. But I just try to emphasise especially now being on this side of it, there's like, okay, it's a great tool to help improve productivity, help make things better if you got the foundation laid right, and getting that foundation is really key, because I've seen too many times trying to implement technology to fix underlying problems. And it just can't do that really.
Josh: We definitely find you have technology problems, then you have people problems, and you shouldn't be trying to fix people problems with technology. It's been fantastic having on the show there, Jeff. And if anyone has any questions, you can definitely jump across to a admentus.com or ask at admentus.com. Is that correct?
Jeff: That's correct. Yep. Or you can email me anytime.
Josh: Awesome. Sweet. So definitely jump across there. If you have liked this episode, head over to iTunes and leave us some love. Give us some feedback. And everyone stay healthy out there in podcast land.
How to Work Out If You Are a Leader With Tim Spiker
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. Are you a leader, a lagger or a micro manager? I've got someone here to talk to you all about the best ways to work out what it is the voodoo that you do in your business. With Tim Spiker here from The Aperio, and he's going to go through what it is and how to work that out. So Tim, tell me, how do you work out if you're a leader, lagger or micromanager? How do you make sure you're doing the right things? And you're not being under spoken, over spoken, I think or any of the other ways that you could be?
Learn more about leadership with Tim Spiker at dorksdelivered.com.au
Tim: I want to share a little research to start this off. But I know when you start to talk about numbers and research for some people, you know, their eyes glaze over and they say, just get me to the punch line. But for other people, it provides some background so that we know that I didn't show up on the podcast today and made up some ideas that I thought were true, it's going to be ground. So if you don't like numbers, hang in here for about, you know, 90 seconds and we'll get to the punch line.
So here's the story about how that research happened. I was working for a small boutique consulting firm, and we had people for a week at a time on the west side of Pikes Peak in Colorado in the US to do leadership development with them out of doors. And we gave them a number of assessments. And we had enough assessments and our clients were asking the question, is there any connection between personality style, natural abilities and leadership performance? And because we had all that data, we could run the numbers and look for those statistical connections. And so we did, and I was excited to get the answer. And my colleague, Vanessa Kiley, she crunched all the numbers and I went into her office one night, what did we find? And she said nothing. She found no correlations between personality style, natural ability and leadership effectiveness. But I turn to go out of her office that night, I remember it vividly. And she said, but we did find something. This is a great part of statistical software, it will look where you're not looking. So we weren't looking for what we found, but it's going to look for any correlation it can. And what it found is within our leadership assessment, we had eight different areas that were being measured. And what she found is that just two of those eight areas were driving almost 70% of the variability, and two out of eight, if everything is equal, that should be 25%, and it was almost 70%. And then years later, we had 10 times the data points with 20,000 data points at that point. She ran the data, and that number went up to 77%.
So the issue was, is that there were just two areas that were driving over three quarters of a leader’s effectiveness. And many years after I left the firm. I was looking at those two areas, and I said what is unique about those two, and this is the punch line. So if you don't like numbers come on back with this now, here we go. Here's the punchline. Is that those two areas were about who the leader was as a human being, who they were as a person. The other six that we were measuring were about what a leader does. And that's when it clicked with me, that three quarters, or 77%, if you want to be really technical, but three quarters of our effectiveness as leaders comes from who we are, not what we do.
So, if we want to be the very best leaders that we are capable of being, doesn't matter what you're talking about a leader at work or at home or in the community, we have to work on becoming well developed human beings. And we could talk about those two categories that were the big ones, but that's the main punch line. Three quarters of your effectiveness as a leader comes from who you are, not what you do. So we have to work on who we are.
Josh: Okay. So what does it mean to then be that leader? How do you find the who?
Tim: So I'll give you some really specific examples here. So we can make this actionable for everybody. But the two big buckets that were the drivers were a category that we want to call inwardly sound. And another category that we want to call others focused. So if you think about, I'll just ask you, you know, Josh, if you think about a boat, if I were to say, hey, we've got a really sound vessel here, what are the things that come to mind for you, when you think about a boat, that's really sound? What kind of characteristics does it have?
Josh: Sound vessel means that it's has a high level of integrity.
Tim: Yeah, keep going. Yeah, keep going. Let's brainstorm a few of these. So that's a great high level of integrity in the vessel. What else?
Josh: Yep. So high level of integrity. A sound vessel, if you're talking and that that is already has the prefix that we know we're talking about a boat, is that right?
Tim: That's right. Yeah. Go with the boat.
Josh: So if you know it’s a boat and you've got a sound vessel, I always say that it's a high level of integrity. Yeah, that's probably the most of it. Like, besides thinking about them, you know that it's going to be able to achieve the objectives that you put forward through. So if you own a boat that was not a sound vessel, it might be leaking, it could be having issues across water or whatnot. You're smiling at me like I've given you the answer you want. What’s going on?
Tim: Yes, you may have given me the answer I wanted, but in fact, and gave the answer that everybody gives, which is, I can trust this thing. Like this thing is sound, it's going to get hit by waves, it's going to get hit by surf, who knows it might even get hit by a fish. But ultimately, this is a well constructed vessel that can take a beating, and still be stable. And this is what when we talk about being inwardly sound, it's exactly that.
I was doing an interview a few weeks back. And we were talking about this concept of being inwardly sound. And the person who was interviewing me said, so what you're telling me the person is not a dumpster fire as a person? Like, you know what, that's probably a fair description. But the idea of being inwardly sound is that I'm secure in who I am, comfortable in my own skin. I'm not looking to my followers to validate me every single second of every single day because I'm so insecure. You get somebody who's self aware, they understand strengths, weaknesses, here's where I excel. Here's where I need some work. You got somebody who's principled you use the word integrity that falls into that category. Is this a principled person who I can trust? You got somebody who's relatively, you know, they're an emotionally healthy person. They're not swinging up and down with every move. I mean, we are living and leading in some very turbulent times right now. So you know, unprecedented is the most common word I think I hear these days. Do you want a leader who is wildly swinging back and forth with all the ups and downs that are going on in the marketplace right now? Or do you want somebody who's got a steady hand? Of course, we want somebody who's not emotionally being blown all over the place. And you want somebody who has a sense of purpose. So these are the things we kind of talked about. What does it mean to be an inwardly sound person? And these are the things then that we have to work on. This is the part of our message, the part of the research, frankly, that is a little bit out of the norm.
And, you know, I went to graduate school for business, and we did not talk about this in graduate school. We talked about finance, we talked about marketing, we talked about some organisational behavior, but we didn't talk about how sound we needed to be as human beings in order to lead well, in order to provide that stable foundation that others can trust. So, that's half of the equation on the inwardly sound side, so you want to jump over and talk about the others focus side or do you have a question on inwardly sound?
Josh: That makes sense. I was interested to hear what the Yin to the Yang, maybe or hopefully another cool boat analogy.
Tim: Probably won't be with the boat this time. But others focused means that when I roll out of bed in the morning, to go and read in the places where I read, that it is not about me. Endeavor is not about my ego, the endeavor is not about my bank account, my next promotion, that I am here to steward something. You know, I love that word, because it means that I don't own it forever and ever, I'm here to be a caretaker of it. I'm here to move it along. I'm here to move the people along, you know, that are under my charge, that I'm here. I'm not here as the leader on high to be served, but actually I'm here to reverse that role. I'm here to bring up and train up and be about the people that I'm leading, not just about myself. So the things that we talked about there where we encourage leaders to do significant personal work, it's about being curious. So this isn't like, I don't have all the answers and I'm willing to admit that. We talked about being empathic. You know, my emotional state’s not the only one that matters in the organisation. We talked about being attentive, which I'll say on that one in particular, and more and more, as the world gets more and more distractible more and more easily, you know, easily moved. And you know, when you, on your podcast with Oscar Trimboli, he talked about the art of listening. He talked about, you know, not being distracted. With technology, it's actually becoming easier and easier to stand out as a leader if you'll simply give somebody your attention. I mean, it's kind of a sad state of affairs, but it becomes a strategic advantage.
And then the last two bits in there are a Greek word Agape, which means to selflessly care for others, and it's got an unconditional nature. So it's not about how you're behaving, it's I'm going to treat you with dignity and respect regardless of how you treat me. And then finally, an idea that lots of people are familiar with, but it's kind of elusive in the human condition, which is humility. And so when you combine those things, now, you've got a leader who's not only inwardly sound, but they're showing up not for their own gratification, not for their own enrichment, but they're showing up so that others in the organization and the mission can move forward. And when you bring those two things in combination, that’s 77% of leadership.
Josh: That's amazing. So I know myself I started off thinking 13 years ago when I start a business, am I doing the right thing and I was the only cog and the only person in the business so it's easy to lead yourself, you'd think. You have to have a little bit of discipline to not jump onto Netflix or the like that are some of these other distractions, but as the business has grown, you brought up Oscar earlier and definitely being able to listen and hear is very, very important as opposed to just being present, I guess, with being present in the now and hearing exactly what someone's saying and understanding where they're coming from to be able to shift what you're doing.
And I guess, from what you've been saying with being a leader, you did touch on it a little bit earlier, being leaders doesn't just stop at work, it's about being a leader at home as well. And I'd imagine being a leader isn't just about a hierarchal change between yourself and other staff members, as much as it can also be a shift in focus between the family of the business and the way that you speak and deal with clients. Would that be fair to say?
Tim: Oh, yes, it's 100% true, because when you break leadership down to its most core components, it's a relationship. It's a relationship between the leader and those that he or she is leading. And so when you start to think about what creates great relationships, anything that's going to create healthy relationships is also going to be a huge addition to effective leadership. So going back to those two things, if I am a stable, sane, safe person that you can count on, and then I add into that, that it's not all about me, that's great for any relationship. And so whether you're talking about work or whether you're talking about at home, I'll say one of the most gratifying things that we get through experience in the work that we do with leaders is we pause quarterly, we go through a variety of those things that we were talking about, the makeup, you know, what does it mean to be inwardly sound and others focused? We pause quarterly and say, hey, let's take a step back from the mosaic of the last 90 days. And let's take a look at what we've seen, good and bad. And I get to hear amazing stories.
And I will tell you probably in the neighborhood of 25% to, you know, probably 35% of the stories that I hear from our clients don't come from work, they come from home. One of the reasons that's gratifying it's not just because we're, you know, helping to make a contribution there. But, you know, families, it's weird to talk about families in a bottom line, because it's obviously very different than a business. But there are some bottom line things that we're after in our family just happens to not be finances. And when you see greater effectiveness and greater health coming into the family, you see better results, just like in a business. And what our clients begin to understand for their own betterment and for the betterment of the people they're leading, we come at it through the context of work, because we're able to show a measurable bottom line impact in work.
But the truth is, if we're going to work on who we are, we got to work on who we are. Like, this is not my work self that I'm working on, it is the whole of me that I'm working on. So whether that most obvious first bit of progress happens at work or at home, we don't care, that indicates progress for the person as a whole human being. And that's going, if it shows up at home, it's going to begin to show up at work and vice versa. So we love all of that progress, because it's helping people lead more effectively, regardless of how they measure their bottom line.
Josh: How do I know? Or how do we, do you have some tool or ability to measure to understand or is it how well I am leading or other people are leading that are listening at the moment. And the reason I asked this is, I find that people are always talking about being happy on Facebook or probably the ones that need to tell everyone that they're happy because they obviously don't feel happy. Does that make sense? So how do you have a sincere self reflection on if you are doing a good job with leadership or not? How can you find your who and make sure that that who is able to be understood, so that you once you understand that that's something you want to have changed, you have to understand it to be able to change it and then migrate from that spot in your mind and your mindset and your belief systems through to the new spot that you want to be and the goal that you have? How do you work out that transition? Or how do you find out where you start out really?
Tim: Yeah, in the Google age where the search, the search box wants to finish what you're typing before you even put it in there, I have a very wildly unpopular answer, which is it takes three things. And we're going to talk about depth community and time for us to really grow and who we are. And I'm going to start with the last one, it takes time.
Think about the analogy that we use with our clients with our leadership model is that of a tree. And I want you to think about the biggest healthiest tree you can imagine. I mean, I'm now thinking of some of the trees that I've had a chance to see in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney, they're right next to the opera house. Those are some of the most magnificent, amazing trees that I've ever seen in my life.
Josh: Ah, we can be friends!
Tim: Good, good. I'm glad. Josh How long did it take those trees to become that big and that strong? It took a while. [Yeah, absolutely] There was no little matrix blue pill that the tree was given. And magically, you know, it came up. So the disappointing news for many people is that there's no tip or trick for becoming a well developed who. It takes work and time. And if I could make that different for people, I promise you, I would. Like I would wave the magic wand. But that's not how humans develop. That's not how life works. So the first part of it is understanding to really work on who we are, it's going to take time.
It also takes, and we'll go back to the first part now, it takes depth. We have to be willing, and this is the scary part. And I'll just put it out there because there's a lot of people be like, you know, if I can't do it quickly and easily then I don't want to do it. But what have we ever done in life? That was a great value that was done quickly and easily, like almost nothing. On the depth part, we have to be willing to pull up the rocks and look underneath. So we're not just looking at our outward behaviors, but we're looking at our motives and we're looking at our perspectives.
And we have to be able to, you know, it's not just a question of how do we come off to other people, but you know, if I'm working to be more others focused, and part of that is becoming more humble and part of being humble is an eagerness to give acknowledgement and recognition to other people. Then one of the things we want to do is, is take a look at that over the course of, we usually use about 90 days per subject and to say, I'm going to look at myself through the prism of humility, and see, do I get excited about giving acknowledgement to others when I could kind of hug it for myself? If I don't get it excited about that, look, that doesn't make you a horrible person. That just means you have space for growth, and we all have space for growth.
So welcome to the human condition. We all have ways in which we can grow. But that pointed focus over a period of time, in this case, I'm suggesting 90 days for each one of these subjects, that's what we do with our clients, is to really look deeply and I mentioned that you pull up those rocks and say, what really is my motive? What really is my intent? Am I just trying to look good? Or am I actually trying to be, in this case, for this example, am I trying to be a more humble person, a person who is willing to you know, here's another thing, look at any 90 day period, and ask yourself, how many times have I said, I'm sorry, or I was wrong? You and I both know people that cannot put those words together. You know, they they get there. They're like, you know, can't say I was wrong. I can't say I'm sorry. Those are indicators that we have space to work on. So you know, you know one activities I could just keep track of that for 90 days. How many times did I say I'm sorry, how many times again, what were analysing is the condition of our hearts. We're analysing the condition because what happens is people want to bring the whole of themselves on board for people that are that are on board for them. And so this gets back to the others focused idea.
So let me hit on the last thing here community. Let's say I want to get healthier. And I'm going to start a workout practice. And I say, hey, Josh, will you be my workout partner, my workout buddy? And you say yes. And the alarm goes off at five in the morning, and we're supposed to meet at the gym at 5:30. If I know you're going to be there, my chances of showing up go way up. Way up. Some would suggest as much as five times up.
And this idea because this is hard work, and because it takes time. We need people around us on the journey with us that are willing to tell us the truth about ourselves in a way that won't break the relationship, and who are also willing to be a little bit vulnerable and share about their journey as well. So imagine that you had a group of three or four people and say, hey, we're going to work on being more humble over the next 90 days, we really want to become that, we're going to trade some stories and how we're working on that. And we're going to travel in this way together to encourage people because it's hard. It's not easy. It takes time. We're going to see some stuff we're not proud of, let's do this together. You find that people have a much greater follow through on the inner development of who they are, when they have community around them. So I would say those are the key three things that we involve with our clients and all the work we do. But people don't have to work with us in order to apply those three things, you know, you can go do those things on your own. Depth, community and time are essential if we're going to work on the core of who we are as people.
Josh: What you said, their own community pretty much comes down to accountability, doesn't it or not?
Tim: Yeah, that’s part of it. There's also learning element. Yeah, you get to learn from others as well.
Josh: I know. Just only what you're saying with the gym membership. I was a member of a gym for six years. And weirdly when the card set in my wallet, I didn't lose any weight. The moment I changed gym.
Tim: That is strange.
Josh: I know. I was paying the same price, I changed gyms. And when there was a class to go to and they're expecting you to be the class, you've been speaking to people in the class and you have in the nicest way possible have some fun competition, you don't necessarily go hey, I'm going to do more reps, I'm going to say sorry more times in your or whatever the case may be. But you have to okay that person that there is this you're looking at their body types about the same as mine. They're about the same fitness as me.
Next week, I want to make sure I'm a better person, you definitely have that community and that feeling that definitely grows. I could totally see five times as a very achievable number because you have that and that's really cool. Definitely, with being able to build that into your business, and do you have much pushback from different people within the business structure that might be old fogies, dead wood or otherwise, that they're not really interested in applying and becoming that new person that is interested in being in the back of the warehouse or the number push or whatever they're doing the Voodoo that they've been doing for 30 years, or what do you do with that?
Tim: You know, not nearly as much as I would have thought, honestly. Occasionally, you get somebody that can't get over the hump of how they've thought previously and how they've oriented. What I've seen many more times, is people who are open to the research. And I think it's really important to remember that that's where this comes from. And it's not only research that I got to be a part of with this group.
A few years ago, Harvard Business Review published a really telling article from a consulting firm called KRW. And what they were measuring was positive character qualities of executives and executive team. They wanted to look at the financial performance. And what they found in that study was nearly again, the five times in a company, I believe was 4.8 times return on assets from the highest rated executives and executive teams on characteristics. And I'll find that in just a second from the lowest. And so what they were measuring. This is really interesting in terms of the parallel, they were measuring integrity and responsibility, remember those two together, and they were measuring compassion and forgiveness.
When somebody said somebody is measuring compassion and forgiveness from the executive suite, really, somebody is actually doing that research. I was blown away that it existed. But think about this for just a second. They're measuring executive and executive teams on those four things, integrity and responsibility, that's about being inwardly sound. Compassion and forgiveness, that's about being others focus.
So the words in the research was a little bit different, but it points in the exact same direction. And so, there's other works. David Byrum, who is a consultant who works out of Sydney with Human Synergistics. They have done longitudinal studies. They have over 2 million data points. They've been around for decades, and they're cut across all cultures, any demographic split you can imagine, they have found this exact same trend in their work. They call it constructive styles. But it's the same content. And so you look at these various pieces of data. And when you start to look for it, you're going to begin to see it everywhere. And that is to say, back to your question, do people really push back against that? Once they understand that there's research behind this, and not somebody saying I had a dream and therefore I woke up one day and decided this is what leadership is really about. We weren't even looking for it. We were not looking for this. The statistical software found it.
There's other places who have found similar stories. And I'll just put this as the sealer for it. If you want to go around and ask people who is the best leader you've ever followed personally, and they do that thought process and then you ask this question. Why is that person on that list? Why does that person come to mind? If you listen to the answer, the vast, vast majority of what people will say it when they answer why, you're going to hear them talk about who that person is, as a human being. I have never had somebody answer that question by saying, you can't believe how great he was at Microsoft Excel. Never. Not in the history of that question. And what's even more amazing is rarely in the business space do people even talk about profit, they immediately start to talk about the quality of the human being that was the best leader they've ever followed. So when people look at the data, and then they start to look at their own history, and they see alignment, I think many of them become open to the idea, then they start to do it, then they really see how it has worked and has been working and it's working whether they're aware of it or not. It's working all the time around them. It's a question, are you going to go ahead and embrace the fact that gravity exists or you're going to ignore it? And, of course, we want people to embrace it so they can move the leadership forward.
Josh: Cool. So don't we ask the question around this time of the podcast around what's your favorite book? But I think you've got a bit of an interesting answer to that one that I think I already know what the answer is. Tell me about your book, unless it's not your favorite.
Tim: Well, hopefully, I've got some other favourite books. But, I'll take you up on the question anyway. So the book is called the only leaders worth following. And what it does is it outlines the research. So that's the first part, let's understand what we're talking about. So it goes into greater depth of the themes that we've been talking about. And then it spends the rest of the book diving deeply into these various realities of being inwardly sound and others focus and how they play themselves out to create a more effective leader. And so ultimately, we want to give people not only the data, but also the anecdotes. I think we need both.
I think stories help us understand data, data helps us understand stories. I think we need both. But that is the idea of the book, to help people understand the research and then see it in real life stories and begin to think about what are the things that I need to work on? What are the things that I need to do to become a more effective leader? Now there's a different readership for the book in addition to that, which kind of the title handset which is, you know, the only leader worth following. And if you're somebody that says, Look, I don't even know that I'm interested in leadership as something that I want to do. But I bet you're interested in choosing the right leader to follow. I bet because leaders have a profound impact on our day to day experience they can make life really, really rewarding and fulfilling, even when the work is hard. They can also suck the life out of us. And that's not just the work life, they can suck the whole of life out of us. And so to really help people orient towards how they evaluate the leaders they want to follow, that's another quality, that's another way that this book can be put to use. So the only leaders worth following is about unpacking what we've been talking about what we call the who, not what principle, it details the research on that and then digs deeply into it so people can really understand the truth of that 77% about leadership.
Josh: What we're going to do is we're going to make sure to have a link there so that people can check that out on your website. I definitely think that sounds like a very good quality first step towards going down the path of leadership and finding out your who. Who is the leader that you look up to, Tim?
Tim: Oh, my goodness. Well, there are a lot of leaders that I have looked up to over the years, and I've been very blessed to, I've been very blessed to be around some really exceptional leaders. One of those leaders is my father. My father, started a business. And I kind of watched him about, you know, one of the great lessons I learned from my father, fell into that category of humility. I would watch him interact with the top people around him, and then I would watch him interact with the cleaning staff, and it was identical. He didn't treat them any differently. And I learned, you know, learned about humility from him. I think probably for the rest of my life I'll be striving to get like halfway on that scale to where my father is. He's definitely significantly more well developed in that arena than I am.
I played basketball collegiately and I played for a Hall of Fame coach here in the States named Gene Keady. He was another person who was really sound person, a quality person. And I know perhaps not a lot of folks in Australia will have heard of Gene Keady, but he's a great person to follow. Now, I've got somebody in Australia that well, not technically in Australia, but I'm going to say a name that the business community in Australia is going to be familiar with, who was very, very well known in Australia, and then recently has in the process of leaving his current position that is a bit controversial right now. But I'm going to name out this person because he has been an incredible leader in my life and he is a great example of these two things of being inwardly sound and othes focused. And that is Mike Kane, who is in the process of finishing up his post at Boral.
Now, you know, I've read all the things that are in the Australian papers about Mike, and I know Mike personally, and he's been a huge influence in my life. And I'll just say that there is so much more substance than what is reported in the paper. So I'll just, I mean, perhaps the listeners aren't shocked to learn that there's more to what's being written in in a paper whose goal is to sell ads. So I'll say that. But Mike Kane had an incredible run up at the start of his time.
I understand that some people watch the stock price have Boral in the last couple of years and they have some questions. And I get that around the strategy side, but as far as somebody who I would personally run through a wall for because he is those two things of been inwardly sound and others focused, Mike Kane is near the top of my list. Even though you’re going to ask me that question. And I realised that there are a variety of opinions about Mike right now flying around in the business community, especially in Sydney. But I will tell you, he is a first-rate leader.
Josh: Different leaders for different reasons. Your father is a big figure, you've got Mike Kane there as a business figure as well as then health fitness and recreational stuff. I like that, I didn't know what you're going to say. So I was very impressed with that. Because when you said it earlier, it sounds like ooh, who would be my leader, I don't know
Tim: Well, think about that. That's worth thinking about.
Josh: I thought dad definitely, Nikola Tesla, not Elon Musk, the car guy. I'm like, no, he helped the world in so many ways with the technologies that he created. And his name wasn't even really mentioned or heard of for another 80, 90 years. And the money that he had, he died in poverty. He wasn't lavish with the money that he got, and he didn't want war. And so you'd go to several countries and give them the same presentation. So he was funded by lots of countries that no one had a different, more unique approach to be able to jump into war.
So I thought Nikola Tesla would definitely be up there for me and that's as high level humility. And dad has always been there to teach me very much what you're saying. It doesn't matter who they are in business, everyone's at the same at the end of the day, just blood and bones. And we need to be able to have that knowledge that everyone's here for the same amount of time. We all live the same way, and they be there and everyone has a story and it doesn't matter who you're talking to, you should not talk down. You should make sure you're always there and present to hear what they're all about.
Tim: I'll encourage you with this and maybe some folks who are listening, maybe they've done this, they started to do this exercise with us as well, who are the best leaders that you've ever followed? And you begin to think about for many people and family members and coaches and teachers at young ages are folks that especially influences earlier in our careers, as you think about who those people are, and you begin to maybe even make a little list of the whys. Why did that person make it on your list? I'll encourage you to do something that will bless you, the listener, as well as the other person is call them up and tell them, write them a note. Tell them that I was asked this question, and you came to mind and here's why. That kind of stuff in life is priceless. Don't miss that opportunity. You will never be sorry for letting somebody know that they came to mind, that that person came to mind when they were asked who's the best leader you've ever followed?
Josh: I love that. That's fantastic. And when I started the podcast many, not nearly two years ago, I thought, who would I like to have on the podcast? And I thought of the people that really changed my mind and changed the way of my thinking. Are you familiar with Bob Berg from the go giver?
Tim: I'm not. I'm not.
Josh: Bob Berg from The Go Giver. Fantastic book that I read that goes through and describes how to make sure that you're giving more than you're receiving and you're doing the things the way that business should be done. And it's not all just about numbers. And the other one was by a guy named Dr. Larry Little,
Tim: You did have him on the show?
Josh: I did. I had them both on the show. I reached out to them, and I said you've impacted the way that my life has worked, and the way that I've done business, and I've bought your books many times as gifts for clients because the readings have truly influenced me in the direction that I've gone and I thought I'm going to ask them like they're not gonna say yes, they got better things to do with their time. And they both said, sure, I'd love to be on the show. That was my American accent. And it was fantastic.
Tim: I'm not even going to try an Aussie accent because it would be awful. It would be awful. So, you had them on and they both came on and you got to do those interviews.
Josh: Both came on both go to do the interviews and very, very blessed to be able to have them on the show and be able to hear one on one what they were all about. And I thought, no way would this Nikola Tesla is going to be harder to say I really like his leadership skills, I have to do some ulterior method.
Tim: That would be a creative interviewing process. If you think about what Dr. Little talked about. He talked about servant leadership. And he talked about the question of why are you leading and that leads us right back to that others focused piece that we were talking about earlier. He He's on to onto that part of it that's so very important. So yeah, I'm not as familiar with Bob Berg, but Dr. Little's interview with you, yeah.
Josh: If there's anyone out there in podcast land that's keen to hear a bit more information, Tim has been nice enough to give us a link, theonlyleaders.com. If you jump across there, he's got a fantastic opportunity for you guys to have himself and his team deep dive in with 20% off for your digital journey through them. Is there anything else you'd like to go through on that offer that I haven't quite covered off on there? Or do you want to jump into a bit more detail on what they're looking forward to seeing in that?
Tim: Yeah, well, you know, in the internet space, you have to be very clear on what the website is, right? So in terms of, you know, you punch it in to the search, you're like, oh, I hope it's available. I hope it's available. So what's really important about what you said is the only leaders, you got to get THE, and so theonlyleaders.com. And you mentioned the 20% off we take leaders on what we call journeys. You can imagine given what we've talked about, I keep talking about how hard and difficult and challenging it is.
So we thought, well, let's just call it what it is. It's a journey. And it's challenging. As we take leaders on that, we do have the 20% off there for your listeners. So what they do is they would put in a promo code there. And if you put in the BBF, for the name of your podcast, then that will lock in when we get those digital journeys ready to go. And then also, if you're not interested in buying anything, we certainly want to be of help regardless of whether somebody's buying something. So you go to that same website, you can sign up to get a free copy of our study guide that goes along with the book. I suppose now that I say that then I guess it's only valuable if you buy a copy of the book, but you would also receive other free material that we're putting out as well. So there's opportunity to just sign up to be a part of the email list and get some free information, free content from us that we're producing as well.
Josh: Tim, I've loved having you on the show. And is there any other questions you had for me or our listeners, I can only answer for me though.
Tim: You can only answer for you. Well, you know, I might just go with a rhetorical question that parrots back with Dr. Little says, and that is if you're a leader, why are you leading? I mean, and that is, and I mean, to me, that's a question to think about. What is the purpose of my leadership? Is it just to enrich myself? Is it just to make money? Is it you know, what is it? Is it just some of those things? And look, there are people who are successful at making money, successful in their businesses without having kind of a profoundly positive answer to that question. However, what I would offer as we close out and think about that question, for all of us to think about, why am I leading, is that if we're not able to get to a spot in our life, where the answer to that question has something to do with others, we will never truly know what our full potential was.
And I don't mean that in like an esoteric out in the universe kind of way, I actually mean that at the bottom line. Even at the bottom line, you'll never know what your potential was, so long as you're only in it for yourself, because we don't get that discretionary effort out of people. if we’re there for ourselves, they're well aware of it. No matter what words we use, no matter how we try to cover it up. And so why are you leading? Yes, perhaps there's a fulfillment question that lives within that question. But there's also hey, what's possible? What could you and your family or your organisation, what could you see if the answer to that question was, well, part of the reason why I'm leading is for the sake of others, for the sake of what they get out of being under my leadership.
So it's tough to answer those questions honestly, because we want the answers to be really, really nice. And really, really positive. But we have to be honest with ourselves if we're really going to grow and develop. So I put that question, the final question is perhaps not one to answer today, but to sit with maybe for the next couple of weeks. What if you were to take a piece of paper and just put it somewhere where you saw it repeatedly that said, why am I leading? And you put a little energy into thinking about that, and challenge yourself to think about being more inwardly sound and others focused.
Josh: That's brilliant. I'll be having a bit of think about it myself. I've got a quote wall that that I have there and that'll be getting added to it so that I can make sure to continue thinking about the who and the why. That's really good. Anyone out there that's been listening, if you have enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback, and stay healthy, stay good. And thank you very much for being on the show. Tim.
Tim: Thank you. Really, really great to be here with you.
Planning For Growth With Blair Ann Verrier
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. We've got Blair here from Enrich Bookkeeping Solutions and she's going to be talking today about change, planning for growth and how to become a business warrior. So Blair, tell me what is the first step that people need to be doing when it comes to planning for growth?
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Blair: My advice on planning for growth is anything to do with budgeting, and making sure you understand the cash flow of your business. So what's flowing in and what's flowing out, and the timings around the flow of the ins and outs.
Josh: Okay. So would that be say for instance, hypothetically if I'm running an IT company, instead of having supplies that we're working on a cash basis, we move to an account basis, we could then times the bills so that we're not always I guess in arrears, so to speak with buying a product that comes out of our account that then gets shipped off to the client. And there might be like a net 30 terms or something like that with the client that then waits 30 days to pay, and then we're sort of sitting without that money. Is that kind of to sort of help out with those sort of situations?
Blair: Yeah. So the sooner you can collect money from your clients, and the longer you can pay your suppliers, it’s going to help the cash flow of your business.
Josh: When is the right time to do that? Like, I know that when you first start out in business, you don't necessarily have any proof of dealing with businesses. And when you have different suppliers and things like that, they might say, give me some trade references, for instance, how do you sort of jump in there? What's the step? Are you just having a cash account and then showing them that you do have some throughput before moving across? So how do you manage that?
Blair: Yeah, look, the earlier you can implement that in your business the better your cash flow is going to be earlier. Some businesses will offer accounts straight up. But it may be for a smaller amount than you need in your business. So, you know, you may have part of it cash part of it on credit until you've gained that credibility and trust with that supplier. And if you've got suppliers that maybe won't do it, shop around and see who will, and have the conversation with the supplier about, you know, how long will it be until we can look at a trade account? So is it three months, six months, 12 months? What, you know, is their general rule in their business that they're looking for? That way you know you're working towards.
Josh: And that's always just as simple once you know that just chucking me a calendar and having another review in three or six months, whatever they say, I guess.
Blair: Yeah, yeah.
Josh: One of the things we noticed when we put in accounts, I was in my teenage years and I didn't have a credit card or any sort of cash reference. And I guess to them they would have been red flags. So it was difficult to get the first account for me. But what I did find out in shopping around exactly as you said, I found one supplier that was happy to have a cash account. And they also had very, very good guarantees at the speed that they will get things out. They said we'll give you a cash count after three months or six months, can’t remember what it is now, we did work with them and what they would do is drop ship the items so that's when they have the item is in their warehouse and they'll send it straight to your customers if it's come straight from you, which means it doesn't have to bypass through you to speed things up. We found that was great because it meant that they weren't waiting for the money to go from our bank account to their bank account, and back in the day, it's a bit quicker now for a lot of the big four banks now but back in the day it was overnight, then and then they would see it, they’ll reconciled it and they'd send it out and that's normally by the time they've done that it was two or three days before the customer saw it.
The moment we got the account in place. We noticed that if we place the order eight o'clock, it was at the clients at 11 o'clock. So it improves the customer satisfactions. This supplier in particular wasn't the cheapest supplier around. But the ability to get the products out quicker was more important to us than saving $5 or $10, here and there. So we found that having that relationship and having the account was great just to increase the customer satisfaction, even if it means you're spending more. Is there any other ways that you would look to I guess, when planning for growth, you said cash flow is very important. Is there any other things that you think would be those Cornerstone, milestone type items that people should definitely be having on their to do list to look at?
Blair: The budget is important because the budget, I guess sets the path for where you want to go. So you're going to plan in your budget for that growth. So then it's going to show you when do I need to start looking at hiring new employees, or do I need office space or bigger office space. So you're going to see that you know, your budgeting, you can budget you know, up to five years in advance. So if you're doing that you're going to see in advance what you need to do in your business. And you can plan for that prior to then all of a sudden, oh, I need two new employees yesterday.
Josh: On the employees, that's something that I've learned the hard way. And I think a lot of people out there, a lot of business owners, for lack of a better term, start off as cowboys, cowgirls and try to work out what am I doing? How am I doing this? How do I step in that direction? And before the episode started, actually, we're talking a little bit about people that kind of think they know it old but have a lot of advice to give but no experience of where that came from. When looking at these I guess different monster moments looking back retrospectively, which is great. I have a look, and I go okay, before I got employees on I should have been planning for documentation and planning for our systems and infrastructure to make sure that the IT support that we'll be able to supply to our customers was top notch before already working at 120% capacity and then bringing on some of that, take that 20% while still having to then train them up, which was very stressful. Definitely put some pressure on the family.
Blair: Yeah, that's right. And even, you know, when you are just that sole operator, getting the time to do that stuff as well, like you get so bogged down in working in the business, that often working on the business gets forgotten about. But I think, you know, if you are planning to grow your business, you need to allocate time each week to be working on the business.
Josh: I completely agree. We get stuck in the trenches. And it's just what happens. Again, like as I said, most business owners, they start off as cowboys and cowgirls and it just comes through. A lot of people just have this brain fart and go, I'm going to be a business owner because I can do this better than where I'm at. Or I want to have more flexibility. Or whatever the case is, and very rarely do they think that they're going to be working more than they're working. Secret. Everyone works more than 40 hours a week if you're a business owner. But it's something you enjoy doing, which is good. Unless you've stopped enjoying doing it, then stop doing what you're doing.
But the big difference I think between learning to work on the business to grow your business and working in the business is the differentiator between the business owners that own a job, and the people that own an investment. I'm definitely not slacking on Avon and some of the other bits and pieces out there when people say I own my own business. I sell Avon or Tupperware and things like that. That's fine. I wouldn't really say that that's it's earning a job more in my eyes and I think you're going to be retiring and selling off your share of your ownership of Tupperware or Isagenix or whatnot, and that's where working on the business is growing your business. That's where the investment is. It's money now versus money later.
Blair: Yeah. It's about also like don't feel guilty about spending that time on the business when you know, you're not working on clients or income producing for right now, because the time you spend on the business now, like you said, produces income in the future.
Josh: Yeah. And I think one of the other big things that I found when we were in our growth stage, I don't think we ever really get out of that. So it's just a cycle. And a mindset change is the mindset and the people aspects of that. So we had the first contractor, and I thought that he's great, he's fantastic. And then he started getting rather sick and had a lot of health problems. I thought, oh no, what I'm going to do. I can't run the business without him. And then I got someone else in and then he moved down to Coffs Harbour. And then oh no, what I'm going to do when they're working for you.
You need to make sure that they are working and doing the best things for the business and you are pulling everything in the right direction. You want to have reliance safe, but you don't want to have them have the knowledge that you are completely reliant on them because then they've got more cards than you have. And then you kind of stuffed, you sort of push yourself into a corner. What’s been your experience with businesses that you've worked with when it comes to sole operators when they go from being a solo operator to the first full time employee, it pretty much doubles their workforce. It's pretty significant as opposed to someone who has 100 employees that gets another 10 employees, it’s only 10% more workforce. It's not anywhere near as drastic. Have you found people manage that sort of growth and having to have that management aspects of their business?
Blair: Yeah, I think a lot of business owners aren't prepared for that first employee. I think sometimes it happens quicker than they expect it to happen. Like their business may experience growth quicker or all of a sudden, they just wake up and they go, you know, I can't work keep working 80 hours a week and not having a day off. And so they look at hiring and that you know, they're just talking out off on sea. And then they're bogged down with hundreds of resumes and trying to decipher through who is the best fit for their business and they don't really have a good HR or hiring plan, you know, and I think sometimes without that plan, and if they do get a good employee, they just get lucky, probably more often than not, they, you know, get someone who's not necessarily the right fit and they're starting again, or that person like you’ve experienced and then, you know, again, you're starting again looking for someone else.
Josh: I don't think it's any secret for anyone listening to the podcast for a while that I love automation, I hate repetition. And the thought of hiring someone, and although I sound extroverts is a learned skill. Anyone can learn to do this. I definitely love my alone time. But the thought of hiring someone scared the hell out of me. I'm sort of putting food on their table and their family's table and it's became too much thinking about it alone. Oh, this is scary.
So the first full time employee I had the HR guy come in and go through. And as I was asking the questions he was looking at the, I guess, the psychological responses and body language that the person was showing when these questions were being answered. And that's something that I went who, at that stage I hadn't even really thought too much about having to look at someone listen to their answers. Look at their body responses. Did they look away? Did they look to the right or do they look to the left? Did they close their hands or did they open their hands if you reword the question three different ways was it answered three different ways or the same way? And so I was thinking far out man, there is a science behind this. And I was so happy that I did, because the person I bought on, Alex was great as the first full time employee, as I said just family stuff and he had to move down to Coffs Harbour, but it was something that I was so happy I did that. That was a stress that was removed. That comes down to I guess what we touched on a little bit earlier about cowboys and people giving advice when it’s not warranted advice. You're talking a bit about a bit earlier about GST and the right time to sign up for GST. You want to let our audience here a bit about that?
Blair: Yes, as I mentioned earlier, I saw on Facebook on one of the business pages, I'm a member of. Someone who had asked about when is the right time to register for GST? They're in business. They're have not met the threshold requirements yet, but wanted to know should they register anyway. There was a lot of people commenting, you know, giving their unqualified advice, and one person commented and that they had registered prior to needing to. And if you use an online bookkeeper such as QuickBooks, it's really easy, which I found was quite an interesting comment to make. Because QuickBooks is not a bookkeeper, it's software.
Josh: It’s like comparing a screwdriver to a builder. You don't need a builder to build your house, go and buy a screwdriver. It'll work. It's the same thing. They’re just going to use a screwdriver anyway. The fact that you bought a screwdriver and a hammer and you think you’re going do something with that when you didn't buy nails or screws. It's kind of just like, what are you doing? It's, I thought, yeah, we see some of these situations and it just blows my mind. Have you heard of the Dunning Kruger effect?
Blair: No.
Josh: So the Dunning Kruger effect. And this is a big, big problem on the internet, it's a cognitive bias, where people think that they are smarter, more capable than they really are. So it pretty much means that people with a lower ability, don't have the skills needed to recognise that they're incompetent. And so they think they know everything, and they'll go and express that to everyone but the more they learn on the topic, the deeper they find the topic is, the less confidence they have, even though they're now more experienced. Does that make sense? The smarter you are at a certain topic, the less confident you are until you've been doing this for years and years and years. And I think that the biggest problem I have on these like Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and other online forums is people give this advice and they go I've been a business owner for six months. Use Zero, use MYOB, it's easy. You don't need a bookkeeper. Just don't worry about it. Don't worry about depreciation schedules or anything else or how that even works. It's not even something in it. Just make sure the lines line up. The chart of accountants, not something important to you at the moment. It's just go and buy the screwdriver and build the house.
Blair: Yeah, yeah, I did find it to be an interesting comment and show that obviously a lot of people don't really understand the value of a bookkeeper and the value to their business. Because it's not just about inputting information into an accounting software.
Josh: No, the first person that I had that came into my business after myself. So in 2007, before I started the business, I got all of the different books that I could get from the government on GST and tax and everything that I could possibly learn about how things would work. The Queensland Government, well, just generally, the Australian Government has a lot of resources available. Now, it's probably all online, but back in the day, not so much. And these resources I read cover to cover and all these terrible examples of Sam and Sally going through and buying a certain amount of apples and whatnot.
But the end position was I knew more about it, which is good for business owners to know about it. But it still scared the hell out of me. And so the first person I bought in was a bookkeeper to help me out and that was in 2011, I think, 2010, and two years after I set up the trust, and I hadn't done any returns. I was freaking out, I'm like, they're going to send the police here, I'm stuffed. I don't know if I've been doing anything right or wrong, or backwards or upside down, and I thought I’m just going to be completely stuffed and I was freaking out. Anyway, I got the bookkeeper, and she's like, no, it’s so good. We'll get through it. And it was like to fix up the previous two years maybe wasn't much, like $1,000 maybe 1500 dollars. And this is again, rewinding around a decade so adjust for inflation, but oh my goodness, I could sleep better at night. Now, I could have sat there reconciling lines, but it wouldn't have helped me out in the situation that I was in.
And the second blunder that I've had is know that your bookkeepers doing what they're meant to be doing. And they have the qualifications and they're associated with the appropriate governing body. So say you're Zero certified and you’re CPA in bits and pieces, because the bookkeeper that I had after the first bookkeeper, the second bookkeeper wasn't looking at the invoices. One of the main suppliers that we had moved over to And we'll then claiming GST on something that we weren't meant to be for a number of years, racked up like a $30,000 GST debt that we weren't anticipating on. Yeah, so definitely don't go do it yourself far out.
Blair: Yeah, I know. Like I've got clients who do sort of the bookkeeping side of it themselves. And then every quarter, I check their accounts and lodge their BAS. And I don't believe there is one of those clients, that's when I do the checks. I don't have to fix something that's wrong. Mostly incorrectly classified GST. So you know, claiming GST on things they shouldn't be or vice versa. One of the biggest ones that affect most people is Telstra. So, Telstra does not charge 100% GST on their invoices. I haven't been able to work that out yet. But they don't show that.
Josh: Interesting. Wait, what parts are they not charging GST on?
Blair: So if you have a look at your Telstra bill, your GST will not be 10% of the total or one-eleven. Yeah, it's usually a little bit less and most business owners just claim, put it in, you know, 500 bucks to my Telstra bill this month, find the GST, $45, and it's not. It might be $30 that they should have claimed.
Josh: Far out. That's that's a big one because that's like, not a small company. People know of it.
Blair: Yeah, so that's probably the most common one. The other ones would be insurance. People not claiming the right amount on insurance because obviously there's a stamp duty component to insurance that there's no GST on. And yeah, people don't realise that. So Yeah, it's not just about putting the information into the system, it's about ensuring that it's correct, but also making sure that it's been allocated to the right part of the chart of accounts. And that all your accounts actually reconcile, that's going to make your tax accountants job a lot easier at the end of financial year, is if everything's in the right place and reconciling.
And like you said, making sure your bookkeeper’s qualified. Like, as a minimum, you want your bookkeeper to be a registered BAS agent? Anyone who's not a registered BAS agent, legally, cannot do anything to do with GST, FBT or single touch payroll. Alright, so chances are they will ask you for your paper BAS form that you've received from ATO so they can fill that out for you. That's a huge red flag. They lodging STP under your company's name rather than under an agent's registration. A lot of things business owners wouldn't realise. And it's something that I tell people a lot is anyone can wake up tomorrow and decide to be a bookkeeper. There is nothing governing them from not doing that.
So Mrs. Jones, who's done the books of her husband's building business for the last 40 years. And now all the kids have left home and she's a little bit bored, can wake up and start advertising bookkeeping services. And business owners don't realise how easy it is for someone to do that.
Josh: That's terrible. Well, it's great for Mrs. Jones but it’s terrible for every other business that she's working with.
Blair: That's right. And often, you know, like, I hear people say, oh, but I can get someone to do it for $10 or $20 less than you down the road. And I'm like, okay, see you in 12 months, when they've messed it up and it’s not right.
Josh: Yep. money spent on the right thing saves a lot of money in the future, being cheap is very expensive.
Blair: Yeah, and a good bookkeeper will save you money at the end of year with your tax accountant. Like people think they're saving money by not using a bookkeeper. But then it gets to their tax accountant at the end of the year and it's wrong. And the accountant needs to fix it. Most tax accountants are charging anywhere from $150 an hour up. Whereas you're paying a bookkeeper half that.
Josh: Circling back to what we're talking about planning for growth, you can't plan for growth if you're doing your own books. It's a task that you're able to outsource to a professional that can hold that screwdriver and build that house for you, build the infrastructure out and make sure it's working. And as you said, if they're checking on the pulse and doing some reconciliation, that's fine, but it doesn't make them a doctor. They're not going to hear a flutter in your heart that you guys will pick up on. So I think anyone's foolish for not engaging in the services of qualified people to look after the items of their business that they're not qualified to be doing it. Tell me a bit a bit about your book. You've got a book called Business Warriors?
Blair: Yes, last year, the book was launched first of June last year. So I was a co contributor of 11 authors in that book, so I've written one chapter of that book about my journey in corporate world as a female and, you know, some of the stuff I've seen and experienced. I believe the accounting industry is a bit of a men's club, and considering like I did a little bit of research, when I was writing my chapter around the evolvement of the accounting industry, and found that, you know, way back when that industry started, they didn't actually let women be accountants.
Josh: I could see that. Yeah, definitely.
Blair: Yeah. And it wasn't until the wars came and they needed to send them into war. They were like, well, what are we going to do? We've got no men to do the work. So they then started letting women do the work. But they weren't allowed to call themselves accountants, even though they were doing the same work that men were doing.
Josh: Really? What were they called?
Blair: I think, like, just clerks. Like, yes, something along those lines. I kind of feel that's where that men's club started. And the culture of that just sort of continued. Probably, obviously, nowhere near as bad because we now let women work as accountants and 49% of the CPA membership are women. So there are a lot of female accountants in the industry now. And we're allowed to call ourselves accountants or we're allowed to be CPAs and CAs, and, you know, part of these governing bodies that originally we were never allowed to be a part of. We were not recognised in the industry.
Josh: The IT industry, similar, very, very male dominated. Now, the majority of the managing positions in IT, 55% women, so it's really good. It's good to see sort of this change. My sister is an engineer. And when she was working for different businesses, she was the female engineer of a team of 100 engineers and things like that. It was good as she saw new blood coming in and empowering that there is sort of a bit of a change here. I still can't believe like some of the shady paths that we've come from.
But if anyone out there is looking to have a fantastic bookkeeper, definitely jump across to Enrich Bookkeeping Solutions and give Blair a holler. And I'm sure she'll get to talk to you about all sorts of things from how to grow your business and better your business with your numbers and make sure that if you bought into some advice that you've seen on Facebook, you can do your numbers yourself, it'd be probably a good idea for her to at least give you an audit and then see where you're at.
So, if anyone out there does have any advice or would like to leave a review, jump across to iTunes, give us some love and stay healthy and stay good out there in these interesting times.
Using Strategic Planning to Recession-Proof Your Business With Kathy Bowman Atkins
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land, we’ve got Kathy Bowman Atkins from Lattitude group who's going to be talking today about how to recession proof your business via strategic planning. A lot of people have felt a bit of pressure of recent with some of the different evolutions that have been happening around the globe and pandemics and whatnot. And this is by far one of the most relevant podcasts episodes that you should all be listening to.
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So, Kathy, tell me, what is the step one, what is step one when it comes to strategic planning, especially in a time when there's 100 other things that you juggling?
Kathy: Well, step one for strategic planning, whether it's in crisis time or good times, is to get the leadership on board. A lot of people think you know, it's hired this consultant, use this process, you know, XYZ, you know, elements, cover these things. If you don't have the leadership on board, the owners and so forth, and they're not behind it. I don't care who you hire, how good they are, how good the process is, you have to have the leadership on board. That's step one. And we talk to business owners and leaders about that very thing, Josh, when they talk to us about helping them. We have to get their commitment or it's a no go.
Josh: That makes a lot of sense. So you want to obviously make sure that you have the planning and you have the right model there. So when you are bringing that into place for full leadership. If you've got a business where you've been running it for many years, and you think that you're a leader, but you may not notice the signs of micromanagement, and you think you've got a healthy team and a lot of people don't change things because they're not aware that they need to change things. How can you see the telltale signs that maybe you're running, running a business, wearing suspenders and using the fax machine or you’re living in the 1980s, early 1990s? And maybe you need to change the way your mindset is, how can you sort of start to pivot that without destroying the relationships you have in the business? Or the way you're working?
Kathy: It's a really great question. And we've done that more than once. And we feel like that that's one of the things that people hire us for. It's not just to pump out a strategic plan is to tell them the hard truth, tell them the things that they need to do to make the progress they need to. So the way we do that is that there's a few ways that we do that.
When we begin, we talked to key players in the business, not just the owners, not just what we call the sponsors, the people who have hired us, who've signed on the dotted line, okay? We want to talk to people across the business, okay, at every level in the business. So we conduct interviews with those folks. And we conduct interviews with all of the leaders individually, all the people that are going to be directly involved with the strategic planning process, because the truth of the matter is, no matter how open an environment, how open a culture that a company may have, or may think they have, there are things that the owners and the leaders don't know that people in the organisation can tell them.
We're pretty honest brokers. And it's very important to be authentic. So we can develop trust and rapport with folks pretty quickly. And by the time we get ready to even put together the process for that strategic plan, that we have the tools, but there's certain customization depending on the company, we have a pretty good idea of where the big warts are, quite frankly, where the big problems are in the company. And so we go and sit down and talk to people and even leaders and say, Hey, here's some things that we've heard, here's some things that we're going to need to work on or you're going to need to work on to make this work. We're willing to work with you, we can help you, but you have to be willing to do it. So we have to have those honest conversations up front to make that happen.
Now, what we have found over time, which is really interesting, Josh, in the early days of doing this, when we would come across that situation, my business partner and I, one of us in Canada that first would look at the other and say well we need to do this, but we're probably going to get fired today, you know, they're probably going to let us go. And it's not happened yet. Because people, for the most part, really appreciate that now you don't walk in there and tell them how lousy they are, etc. Because that's not the case. You know, these people have done a lot right to, you know, to form companies or to become leaders of companies. And so we're telling them in in a way that keeps the whole what they need to do. I mean, we've literally had conversations with business owners who started a business and ran them 20 years and said, if you don't step aside, and let us help your new leadership, you're not going to achieve the things that you say you want to achieve for this company and for your future, etc. And it's happened. So, you know, that's the way we do it.
So, most of the time, it happens just from that upfront due diligence that we do and talking to people, Josh, and honestly, but as we get into the process, you know, by that we work with companies, we absolutely develop strong relationships with these folks, and I think that's really important. We really get ingrained in those companies. So we know what's going on. And we have that kind of trust. So that as those things come up, we can apart, you know, deal with them, and talk to them about them. So that's what's really key, in my opinion.
Josh: S o you brought up a lot of good points there. For you and any of your listeners out there. A lot of what we do is around trying to find inefficiencies in business. So we do that for allowing them to automate tasks or create procedural documentation that allows them to have systematized tasks that betters their processes. We do it definitely more with a technology twist on it rather than anything else. And we find people that are dead wood in the business, and a lot of businesses big businesses or businesses that have been around for a while people get lazy if they haven't had KPIs to it to adhere to. And you end up having this issue with dead wood. How can you pivot that deadwood or does it come down to sort of a bit of a hard truth?
Kathy: Well, there's not a one size fits all answer to that question, Josh. But there are multiple answers and all of which can work. I'm gonna start with the end in mind. And the end in mind is if someone is deadwood, you have to resolve that issue and you have to resolve that issue and keep people home. Okay? There's no benefit to doing that in a way that demeans people, degrades people, etc., etc. So, we take a look at, okay, is it a capability issue? Is it an attitude issue? Is it a fit issue? In other words, that they don't fit where they are? Could they fit somewhere else? And whatever that issue is, we look at what are the answers? Is there a way to help them to change that attitude to find that path? What's in it for them to do that, to make an attitude change? And if none of those things are possible, then it's about sitting down and having the honest conversation And, you know, I find nine times out of ten that people want to have the honest conversation that says, You know what, this is not working out. We don't see a good place for you here, we don't see you being happy here. Okay? Being your you know, your best and highest use, you know, reaching your potential here. And so you know, we think it's you know the right time for us to part ways. We'll help you in any way we can, you know, to transition out of this, but that's the best thing for everybody. And if you do that way, keep people home and treat them as human beings and as people not objects of the business, nine times out of ten, they end up saying you're right. Occasionally they don't but after the fact they do, I mean I say this all the time through the years I have walked plenty of people out the door, unfortunately. And I still get Christmas cards from many of them. I still go to lunch with several of them because it was the best thing for everyone. And that's the end that you want to get to, what's the best solution for everybody.
Josh: I completely agree, you should be treating your team like family instead of assets or liabilities. I'm happy enough to say that I have a team of unicorns and it didn't happen easily. But in the latest situation that we've had with the pandemic, we've managed to have had some of those hard conversations around what direction do you see this business going? How do you feel should be going with you? And with the intention of other reducing hours or standing people down? And it was a very, very difficult conversation to have with people that we've been working with for years. And their results in the answers they gave to us brought a tear to my eye, I'm actually getting a bit teary even thinking about it anyway. But they said we want to do anything possible to better the business and to put the business entity advantage even if it means we're working full time, but we're not working for full pay. And one of the employees even said that they're in a position where they don't need the money, particularly, they're happy to work for free until we can get out of this hole. And I thought that's a fantastic team where we were all running in the same direction. We're all pulling in in the same direction, everyone's blowing wind in the sails to get us to the same spot. It made me feel good. And it really came down to the attitude of the team. And I think what you're saying there about that, it's all about shifting attitude and making sure that everyone's goals align with the business goals. So I'd imagine there's a few different bits and pieces that you guys use to sort of test and allow for people's emotions and their characters to come out. So do you use the same sort of tools when trying to align the staff and leaders and everyone's mindset with the same common goals?
Kathy: We do. We've used Myers Briggs, we have used this and a couple of others. And it just depends on what the situation is in the company, you know, and what the culture and the nature of the organization is. Finding the right tool. There's two things finding a valid tool, all assessments out there aren't valid, and finding the one that fits the culture, that organisation. And the third one is, you know, being a facilitator or consultant that knows how to debrief that and to help them to use that appropriately. Because that's important too. You just can't do a Myers Briggs and hand the report out to everybody and say, okay, there it is.
Josh: What do I do with this? Everyone needs to be sharing their results, they understand the emotions of how to talk to people. There's a book that I read called the five love languages, unless you're really close to the stuff probably not relevant. It still lets you to understand how two different parties are talking and communicating together. And I think that's really important, to make sure that if you're dealing with someone that's talking in a for instance, I'm not detail oriented. If someone says the job is finished, and this is and you've been out to achieve the objectives of what the original goal was set out, that's awesome. If they spent 10 hours doing the doing the spreadsheet and I've got the number out that I wanted at the end, awesome, but I don't need to know every single formula, the pivot tables, and everything else to it to achieve that. But some of the staff love telling me all about it. And so of course, of course I'm going to sit there and make sure that we're all lining in that regard, because you don't want to sort of just offset all their hard work and say, I don't care. Okay, good, I got the number, cool. And then you walk off, it sort of completely deflates them. So it's, I guess, about understanding how to communicate with people. And I guess, again, coming down to attitude.
Kathy: It is, and, you know, this really ties into something that you and I talked about. I know that our staffs talked about in booking this, you and I talked about a little bit before this, how that strategic planning ties into this topic. You know, we all should be as business owners and leaders looking to put together teams that have aligned goals and values, correct. I mean, that's what really makes it work. We can think differently, we can process differently. But if we have aligned goals and values, having that kind of diversity of thinking and approaches is really powerful for us. And for a business, it's the same thing. Having a strategic business plan gives us that roadmap for everyone to align around. Okay? And know what they are applying in a you know, their own goals, how that ties to the company's goals, the direction we're heading. And how that helps everybody in the mix. Helps you, helps me, helps the company, the owner, whoever it is, and I. And so that's part of where, you know, strategic planning for business is just as important as having individual goals for all the individuals in the business. And, you know, having the KPIs, the key performance indicators or the metrics to manage too, you know, to see how we're doing. So it's kind of the same concept on a business level.
Josh: Okay. So when you say strategic business plan, a lot of people I know will say I've got a business plan or a freak out of it. I know myself, I'm great at making a very simple thing over complicated. When I was younger, many, many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, I was developing something in my bedroom, which allowed me to open and close the bedroom door with a remote control. So I clicked the remote controller unlocks the door, opens the door, let someone in, click another button that closes the door and shuts it and my brother said that would take you 120 to 150 hours to build that. He's an electronic engineer. I said yeah. And he goes how many times could you have got up and open and close the door. Yeah, okay, that's right. I've automated something that doesn't need automating. And that's sort of what my first sort of aha moments with automation.
So how do you make sure that you're focusing on the right things, you don't overcomplicate it, I know some people say a business plan to start off with doesn't need to be longer than half a page. But obviously, to really dive into some details, and ours is 16 pages long for the basic business plan and 70 for the longer business plan. But again, as I said, I go to too much detail.
Kathy: But that's an excellent question. And this is where a lot of people fall off in a table with regard to strategic planning. You know, the key to strategic planning, we have tools and processes that we use, they're tried and true, and they're good, but they are a framework. What's really important is understanding upfront what the owners want, okay? They put in the sweat, equity, etc. They're here now, they want to get here and based on their business, their culture, okay, their values, what they're trying to accomplish their goals, right? Putting together the plan that's right for them.
A lot of times people say, oh, you know, we're going to talk about processes, right? And you're going to bring in a list of processes, you know, 20 processes and try to cram down our throats? No, that's not the right thing to do. We're going to sit down and look at it with you, and you know the business better than we do. But we have a tool to be able to say, what processes should you have? Now, what are the key processes you should have in the business? And do you have them? If you have them, are they working or what needs to improve about them? That's pretty simple. At the end of the day, Josh.
Now they're having the right tools to get people to do that. So we're starting with that. So we're looking at things that way. And we have a process that starts up here and says, these are all the things we you know, this big funnel, these are all the things we need to work on. There's processes and their systems, right. And there's some people issues, and there's equipment issues and you know, all kinds of things. And then we start whittling that down through our process that says, what's the most important thing? You know, what are the biggest obstacles? And we look at that through, you know, internal assessments and external assessors.
So that all sounds very complicated, you know, but we do that with tools. People do a lot of work up front, so that by the time we walk in, in two days, we come up with a comprehensive strategic plan. And I don't care what size the company is, for a 12-month plan, which is what most of the detailed plans are. Now we look out five years just say Where do you want to be five years for most businesses, so we know what the long haul is, so to speak. But we do a detailed plan for most of the time for 12 months out. And we look at that company and say, you know what, we really don't want there to be more than eight goals for the company for that 12 months, because then we get a flight we have to flush those goals out into who does what by when what role the steps to achieve that. So that gets big enough, correct?
Josh: Absolutely.
Katy: And the other thing that we do, rather than handing people some big book to put on the shelf to collect dust, because that's what generally happens, we do two things. We give them their plan on one page, okay, and all of the relevant information about that plan that everybody in the company should have and be looking at, and understand it and understand how what they do ties into that.
They have one page that they can look at, and it can be their barometer, the rudder, whatever you want to call it, any day, anytime making a decision. And then behind that, we use project management software, we set up a portal for their company, where they manage those goals and action plans. And we meet with them every month. So we insist that if they want to work with us that they have to agree to our change management accountability aspect of this. In other words, we're not going to go through this whole process and put it on the shelf.
We're going to have a schedule meeting every month and we're going to look at this plan. We're going to use a signal light approach, what's working, what's not, we're going to make adjustments because I can tell you the minute that he drives on that proverbial plan, something's going to change. And we're going to make adjustments, we're going to look at the financials, and see how that's going and where we need to make adjustments. So we're continually doing that change management. So that's how you whittle it down. That's how you manage it.
But that's why you need leadership. As I said, right at the top of the program, if people if the leaders inside the business aren't making sure that everybody knows the strategic plan and monitoring it and executing on it appropriately adjusting it is not part of their job, guess what? It doesn't happen.
Josh: So, from what we've been speaking about so far, if I was to sum up in one sentence, a strategic plan is about accountability, timelines, infrastructure and goals, tying them together with small tested improvements, monitoring it over time. What else would you add to that to make that more true? Or how did that sound?
Kathy: That’s really good. Would you like to come to work for us?
Josh: Hahaha. We are just a small flight away. Yes, we'll jump on and get that happening. That's the elevator pitch, I guess, on the strategic plan. So, that's cool. Okay, so that that makes it very easy to break down. And you did speak quite a bit about tools, and a lot of people that are going to be listening to this, they're gonna be wondering, okay, what tools can we use? So, if you were to pick the top two tools that anyone can jump into right now, to gain more visibility into their business, or to start heading in the right direction, even if that's making up a back of handkerchief example, of a strategic plan, what tools would you say they could jump into and check out?
Kathy: Well, you know, the very first thing is to figure out, this isn’t a tool. This is, you know, where's it that you want to take your company? Now, what's your purpose, what is it you want, what's your vision? Where do you want to take it? You have to know where you want to get to, in order to figure out how to get there. So if you are doing the back of the envelope thing, as you mentioned, you don't want to hire someone, you don't want to go through some big process. We have a lot of great processes, but there's one that you can't go wrong with. And that's a SWOT analysis, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, okay. It's probably the thing that covers most elements of a business, if you do it well in a single process. Now, we have a lot of other processes that focus on things, but that one is tried and true. And it can cover a lot of ground.
Josh: Most people should be pretty familiar with them, if you're not. What are you doing? Get into it! I think this is kind of like a should be a clear cut answer. But what size of businesses should be looking to strategic planning? Should this be something that they're obviously looking at the start before they've even turned over $1 when they're looking to throw it to the boss and say, now I'm going out on my own or is this something that they should be waiting until they've got some structure in place?
Kathy: Well, every business even as they're looking to start up, they need a business plan. They need a plan that says, okay, what do I need to start this business in terms of resources? Okay? And to start it up with the resources and get me through the first couple of years. The kind of strategic planning that we do, which is with established companies, we're not really working with startups so much at all, quite frankly, Josh, that's a little more comprehensive. And that can range from having one strategic planning team that has some folks across the business and is pretty comprehensive. Okay. We will get strategies too. Larger companies where we do something with an executive team and then we cascade down through different organisations and they do their own strategic plans to support the company, goals and direction. So it depends. So everybody should be doing some planning.
You know, we started this talking about recession proof strategic planning. The thing that is to make you recession proof is to do your planning upfront. It is strategic to have a plan. So that's one thing. Now how strategic you want to be in that planning process is a different matter. And that depends on where you are. So, you know, a good way to think about that and wrapping this up right now we're breaking things down into six months. Okay, module so to speak. Most people don't know what's going to happen. So we got to survive for six months, we have to get through this. Okay? And that's really pretty much a cash and opportunity exercise. It's not very much strategic from the standpoint of what our strategy is, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And so we call that emergent strategic planning.
Then there's the next six months, which is resurgence. Okay. So we've survived, we've gotten through this. How do we now start, you know, going back up? What do we bring back? When do we bring it back? And what does it look like? What lessons did we learn from all of this, right? And so we're putting that in a six month chart. And then we're talking about a six-month chunk of convergence planning. What that means is, people are going to start figuring out what the new reality looks like. Or they're going to make their assumptions about what it looks like and we can get more strategic and start looking a little bit further out. And taking advantage of these lessons learned and what the new realities are.
Josh: Emergent strategic planning, I guess it's all about when things change. To make sure your emergent emerge from crisis and out to be stronger, would that be fair to say?
Kathy: Yes, our mantra to everybody right now. Thank you for reminding me. We're saying to my business, and to every business, you had better come out stronger as people and as a business on the other side of this than you did going in?
Josh: Cool. Well, I definitely think this is more relevant now than ever before. And for anyone out there that is listening and thinking, man, this sounds like too much. I've already got too much on my plate. There’s so many government incentives that I'm looking at or new stimulus packages, and I just want to keep myself with a head above water. And there's a place you can go. And Kathy Bowman Atkins from Lattitude Group has a fantastic offer here for one hour consultations. Would you like to tell us a bit more about how that can help small businesses?
Kathy: Well, it's interesting, you know, people call us up and they say, Okay, this is where things are now. And I might say, what are the biggest obstacles? You know, top of mind, if we could only cover one thing in this hour? What's the biggest thing that is bothering you that that we could help you resolve? So we start there. Now generally, what happens is we can cover two or three things at an hour, you'd be amazed at how much ground you can cover. If they don't know, they’ll say, you know, I'm just really paralyzed. I don't know what to do. Right, then we start asking them some questions. Yeah, have you availed yourself to all the resources that are out there? Have you looked into them? Do you know what's out there? Okay. Let's make some assumptions about the worst possible case, okay, for the next six months, and that's what we have to look at, what is the absolute metric or two that you have to manage to over the next six months? For some people, it's pretty simple. Cash flow. I have to be able to maintain positive cash flow.
Josh: That's mine.]
Kathy: And so whatever we have to do, that we can help them to say, okay, in order to accomplish that, what are the steps we have to take? And what metrics do we have to be looking at all the time, because in this case, volume is going to be your leading indicator. In normal times, it isn't always your leading indicator. We're going to wait for the volume to materialize before we make moves like, you know, bringing people back because that we've had to lay off for certain vendors are no different things that we've put on hold. And that's the way we're doing it. So it depends, but those are the kinds of things that you do. So there's all kinds of things that can happen. We know … we need to know how to tap into these resources. Okay, we need to know how to furlough people, or what's the best approach to take. And we can, you know, we can help them with all of that.
Josh: Well, anyone that's interested to have a consultation with Kathy, we're going to be putting a link in the description here for the podcast, as well as on the blog. Keep an eye out for that. And I think you're going to find that in one hour, you're going to completely revolutionise the direction of your business. Totally worth your time. And one thing I want to sort of say, in closing to ask you in closing is if there was to be one book they would say is your Bible, so to speak, is going to be the first step towards better leadership and strategic planning. What would be that one book that people should read or one resource that people should be listening to? Whether that be a news outlet or something like that? What should people be tuning into?
Kathy: Gosh, there are many Josh, but I will tell you my go to book and it's not a new one. But I think in terms of leadership and self development, which is the key to all of this, it really is the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And that book goes way back, but I'm going to tell you, it's tried and true. And if people will adopt those and make those habits as leaders, it's really significant.
Josh: For anyone out there that obviously is listening you can't see next to my bed, but it's sitting next to my bed right now. And, I've picked it up for a second time and rereading through it. So it's definitely worth its weight in gold. And it's a reasonably sized book. So that's saying a lot, it worth its weight in gold. It is. That's right.
Well, Kathy, it's been lovely having you on the show. And is there anything else that you would like to cover off on before we pathways?
Kathy: The only thing that I would say is, you know, even as a company that prides itself, and myself on being, you know, a strategic planning guru and all that kind of thing and you know, a purist when it comes to strategic planning. And I think all the businesses have to think about this no matter what business they're in that may be passionate for you. Right now you have to think about what's realistic and what can really help people. So you know, we're doing these six months module strategic planning things in a day or you know, prep for a week and then go in for a day at the end day and making them very reasonably priced. And we've never been a company that our value proposition was priced. We're not, you know the low cost option. But you know, you've got to remember where people are right now. And I think that's key for business leaders and owners right now.
Josh: I completely agree. We've released a new product range that we're calling the dollar IT club which is focusing heavily on helping businesses out in the time of crisis, not putting more pressure on a saw that they've already got there. And I think that building and nurturing that relationship at the start will build a bigger and better things and show your worth.
Kathy: Exactly!
Josh: If anyone has enjoyed this episode. Make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love. Give us some feedback. We'll put all Kathy's details here in the in the episode so you can get in contact with her, and stay healthy and stay good.
Kathy: Thank you so much, Josh.
Avoiding Financial Blunders With Tracey Bissett
Josh: G’day out there in podcast land, we've got a fantastic guest today, we’ve got Tracey Bissett from Bissett Financial Fitness. She is your PT coach to financial wealth and we're going to be talking about entrepreneurial blunders and what to look out for to stay profitable. So Tracey, let's say hypothetically, I've just started my business. I'm going to be a millionaire in 12 months. That's what we all think, yeah, we're all going to be a millionaire in 12 months and we're going to be retired in two years and there's going to be a Lambo parked out at the front. So what do you think is the first thing we should be looking at to realise that is probably a fallacy?
Learn more on how to avoid financial blunders at dorksdelivered.com.au
Tracey: Well, a few things. So the first thing I would want you to look at is to make sure as owner, you are fully accountable for the financial position of the company, which means you got to look at those numbers. You don't have to do your own bookkeeping. You don't have to do your own accounting, but you certainly need to get it done properly and look at those numbers monthly, and make sure you know what they're saying. So when most entrepreneurs go into business they're super passionate about their product or their service they deliver. And financial matters are not necessarily part of their education. So if that's not your strength, you want to learn as much as you can, certainly outsource the doing but make sure that you can make decisions based on your numbers and take full responsibility for it.
Josh: I can absolutely resonate with what you're saying because I started the business 13 years ago and I have an engineering background, which means I love attention to detail and I love seeing a product finish. I'm not great at marketing or I wasn't great at marketing the products at that stage. So I would have likened myself to the at that stage, the kidneys garage of mum and dad's that the cure for cancer that has it sitting on a shelf to then find out something some other cool project to work on. Probably something that lights up.
So that was that was me and I found that I started looking into books in bits and pieces. Those were few different government publications that came out around GST and tax and the business activity statements and I read all this stuff and it was kind of like reading a terms of service with a credit card. It's quite thick reading if you don't know what you're doing. And I read it and then I came to a spot on it, you know what, I can keep reading as much as I want but I'm not going to be able to be as good as the people that are out there that are doing this day in day out the people.
The personal trainers are generally pretty fit people and yourself, I would say if you're if you're there doing the financial fitness, you're going to be pretty fit in exactly what you're doing and pretty experienced. One of the best things that I did was deciding that I didn't want to wear that hat anymore and giving it off to someone else to wear. But what my question is, sometimes is a bit of a gray area and I know I had this trap, which is you've got a bookkeeper, you've got an accountant, you can then sometimes have a financial advisor, and then a business coach. And then you've got yourself with your own ideas and it becomes a bit blurry as to the lines as to whose responsibility is what. I know some people will say all my receipts are in a shoe box in the back there I give them to the bookkeeper once a month, and it's up to them with whatever happens next, I just keep doing the voodoo that I do. So how do you make sure that there's a clear cut and defined line? Or is that something that the entrepreneur needs to learn or they need to define and then pass out to everyone else?
Tracey: Yeah, I would say for the owner, they should be defining the accountabilities. Bookkeeping is pretty much data entry if your bookkeeper isn't overly knowledgeable, necessarily, but all of the things around accounting you want your accountant to check out the chart of accounts that your bookkeepers filling in the numbers into. So you would rely on them. I don't think a Chart of Accounts is necessarily anything of business owner necessarily needs to know. But the overall responsibility lies with them. And so when I'm working with clients, sometimes I find that because the knowledge may not be there, then there's a little bit of an intimidation to even ask questions. I don't even know where to start when I'm going to talk to my bookkeeper or my accountant. So how could I even tell them what to do when I don't know what they're supposed to do?
So I encourage people to be curious, to be open, ask lots of questions, you get answers that help you understand and just recognise that they're there to do their role. They should help inform you about what they're supposed to be doing and what they would expect you to be doing. And if you're not seeing the numbers on at least a monthly basis, you need to speak up and say, you know, I need to see those to be able to make good decisions and run my company. So be curious, be open, don't be shy. A lot of people tend to not want to ask the questions because they feel like they're going to ask them wrong. And that's okay, you're learning. And the only way you can learn more is by finding out what you know and what you don't know. And finding better ways to ask the questions.
Josh: Well, you don't know what you don't know until you know, you know. So that's it. I remember back in school, I was sitting in class, long story, but I missed out on a month of schooling. And I came back and everything that we're talking about in maths had changed. And they weren't talking about the gonna just use very simple terms, they weren't talking about plus ones and plus twos that though we're now talking about parabolas and matrices, and I'm going, okay, this this became very different. I don't want to put my hand up and look stupid in front of everyone. So to sit there and feel stupid and not do as well in the class is what I could have. And that's something that just hearing what you said that was very soothing and going, okay, it's okay to there's no stupid questions. It's okay to ask a question. It's okay to advance your knowledge. Don't feel like you're a lesser person by not knowing. It's natural to be very good at some things and via walking the path of learning the others. So, yeah, it's refreshing. And as I said, soothing hearing that and something that people can focus on quite heavily and they get a new idea.
You get a new idea and you go, okay, I want to invest my time and energy into this, this is going to be amazing. It's going to be life changing for everyone. And how do you do a SWOT analysis on that new idea, taking into account the numbers and making sure that you're not investing too much? And I guess it comes down to like risks and all sorts, and where your risk profile sits with you, how do you make sure that you're not investing too much in a new idea that isn't proven? If you've already got a business that's up and running? Or you're looking to start a business?
Tracey: Well, that's a great question. And certainly, it's easy to get distracted by new ideas that may build on what you've already got, and may actually detract from what you have. And so, I think you want to do a quick analysis in a relatively short amount of time to figure out if it's worth pursuing farther. As you mentioned, there's a lot of elements you are going to look at because you are going to do this SWOT analysis. So maybe there's someone in your company who knows the market really well, they've got to research that.
While they're researching what you're going to offer for your product or service. They should be checking into what are the competitors charging for that because that's already Really important data point that you need to know. Then you need to find out what is it going to cost me to deliver this product or service? And then is there other overhead I might need to bring on? Am I going to need more team to do this? Or am I going to need more equipment? Am I going to need other tools to be able to do this? And so, then you can compare what the value is that you're bringing to the market, what the price you think you can sell it for? It's okay to be higher price than your competitors if you're offering more value, there's nothing wrong with that, and you need to be confident enough to charge that price. But when you see what the price is against how much it costs you, is it going to be profitable?
Josh: Yes, that's a big thing I see. You'd see it even more. A lot of people have a cheap focus, people feel that their clients are going to be money driven and look at the dollar reduce, as I would call them, rather than focusing on why the competitors charging more. Have they done more research than then potentially you have when you come up with idea.
Tracey: Absolutely. And we form views about money when we are little kids. So however we felt in our family, it stays with us. And we can certainly change the way we feel about money. But if you always felt like you needed to kind of ask people or kind of play with people to get money, you're probably going to feel like that when you put your product out in the market, and you may not charge as much as you should. Because if you know you're offering something value, you should be asking for the right price. But making sure that you are going to make money on your products and services, depending what you're selling, you may need to hit a certain volume of it before you become profitable. And that's part of your analysis too. Because if it's going to take you three months, but all of a sudden, if you can hit to that point, all of a sudden then the cash is going to pour in.
If you can weather that three month period, and it won't harm your existing business, then that sounds like a good thing. But if you're never going to make money on it, maybe you need to pivot the idea, and there's no shame in rejigging an idea. Maybe turning to a different customer base, maybe adding or modifying the product or service to make it profitable, because you can only cost cut to a certain extent, at the end of the day, it's got to be the sales that actually makes it profitable.
Josh: That's a big thing that you've just said. So a couple of things I'd like to touch on there like sales. Sales is its own thing. And that was something I was very scared of when I first started, I'm not a salesperson. sounds gross. I don't want to be a salesperson, I want to be a great business person. And if I have a great product and a great business, then people will work with me. And that statement is true to an extent.
Tracey: Once they know about you, they have to know about you in the first place.
Josh: That's exactly right. And then you need to have an understanding that if it’s going to be around people to know about you, then there has to be a path that you're following that is on a linear growth path because it's not going to be an exponential growth if you're not going to be marketing and going out there and sort of with the megaphone spruiking the brand and the promise that you have there and your ideals. A big thing that I've seen people sort of discount for things without even really looking at why they're discounting or what the reason is, or the motive is they're just like, I'll give you money off if you work with me. And that can sometimes be the wrong step into the relationship. What other sort of do's and do nots have you seen people focus on?
Tracey: I've seen people setting their price based on what they think without doing any research. So you do need to validate it in the market. And as I said, if you are offering something of more value, if you have less clients, but they're paying you more, that's just as effective as a cheaper thing with more clients. It all starts with what does the client need? It has to always be about what do they need. Because if you've got something of value, then they're going to want it.
Like you said, you've got to market it. And you've got to speak in a language that resonates with them, not why you think it's great, but how it helps them and solves their problems is really key. And what I find though, is a lot of entrepreneurs, they get so excited about their product or service, but they don't take those moments to look at the cost of delivery, and so they end up losing money on everything that they sell, and then that can impact everything else about the business because then you're tight on cash flow if you're running at a loss. You may have struggles paying your government remittances, you're going to have struggles meeting payroll. As an owner, you're probably not going to get a consistent paycheck if one at all. And then you may be letting down people in your family because you're not able to give them the things that you promised them you were going to do when you started your own business and we're going to make a million dollars. So it all kind of ties together and it leads to lots of stress, lots of anxiety, lots of tension, and then it really just distracts and detracts the owner from doing what they do best, which was why they started the business in the first place. So we don't want money to be an impediment to them achieving their goals.
Josh: Well, I think you've touched on a few different things there and that is one of them I find like what do you think when it comes down to people say you've got to add value, you got to add value, and this is a big thing that's turned around a lot. Everyone's like, I add value. 15 years, 20 years ago, when you'd have a product, you'd have a look at a product, you'd add a margin. And then that would be the product. Now people are talking a lot about adding value, which as far as I can understand, my understanding of that is you package multiple products that can sometimes be intangible appear as if there's something that is going to be helping someone out is a value add.
I guess now I'm using the term value add, you should never describe something with that word, should you? That's a big no-no. You have all these different items that are intangible bulk items that you can give to lots of people that people see and go, Okay, this is going to be a better reason to work with you. It could be something as simple as KFC have an app and if you've been using it, it gives you a little discount or something like that. Yeah, okay, cool. I've got a that's, I guess, a value add, but it's giving you a discount for using the app multiple times. They're not using the discount just because they've gone, okay, you've become a more loyal customer, he's a reason to continue purchasing the chicken or whatever from the meals from them.
So I guess my question is value versus margin, how do you make sure that you determine the appropriate value. And this is something that I think is huge with the Cloud Computing software at the moment. Everyone's moving there, the application that would have charged $100 for up front or $1,000, for up front, into a model where they're charging $10 a month or $100 a month. And so they're seeing you're getting these updates. But you're never ending this suffer. And there's a whole bunch more can control of what you can do with this software. So how do you determine value versus margin?
Tracey: I view it from the perspective that you're looking at. So the value has to be perceived by the client. So you can tell someone it's all value added, and it has this, this and this, but if they don't see that, that doesn't hold any value. So especially like what you're talking with the software, like you do have to figure out how much does it cost us to make this in the first place? What were all our sunk costs for R&D? How many times will we have to sell this stuff to break even and then to make money. And at what point does it become feasible? And can we get to that many subscribers, because a business is very valuable from a business standpoint when it has regular recurring revenue.
Certainly, it makes it more saleable. It makes it a good acquisition target in the future, if that's something that people are interested in. But I really start with the basics, how much does it cost to make this and something like software, there's probably years of development that have potentially gone into it that gotta be recouped. So you've got to figure out from the numbers, what does that look like? And then it's from the client perspective, what's the value? And that value piece is kind of the profit, I would say that you're building into what you're charging. But making sure if I'm charging $10 a month, how many subscribers Am I going to need to be profitable? And what happens if I don't? Is this still a good endeavor? Then obviously, I would think because everybody's gone this way. They've found a way to monetise it and make it profitable, but the delivery method of how this happens, that's just some of its marketing. Some of its kind of just the packaging the new format for how it gets to the customer versus being perhaps more value, If maybe more convenient. I don't have to now put a CD into my computer to get the program. I'm just going to use my phone or download it from the cloud.
Josh: That makes sense. And you bought up a couple of points earlier when we're talking about having this new idea and it does come down for a business owner. So it's not all about you. It's about how does that impact your family? How does it impact your mental health, which is a big thing, making sure that you are staying mentally healthy. When you go on these crazy endeavors and I'm wanting to say comfortably there's been periods of time where I was pulling 100, 120-hour weeks and I did that for about six weeks before I realised that something's going to break. And we had to remove a bunch of clients because of the way we're running the business.
It was not going to be able to be something that we didn't see it growing the way that it did. Then I didn't have the time to train anyone else. So I was sitting there in this the golden shackles, as I call them, the jail that I created for myself, and I had to make the decision to cut a whole bunch of clients out, the old 80/20 rule. The clients that were noisier even though profitable, they were noisier clients that we went can’t keep with them. So mental health is a very important part of all this and your debt versus profit can play a big role on that with your family and with your mental health some businesses. You see them all the time, these huge businesses like Uber that sit there running in debt for year on year and Tesla running in debt. The first profit obviously you always want to be trying to run a profitable business but that can sometimes mean that you're running a business that you're not really taking any risks or you have a very low risk profile and that could mean that your growth isn't as quick but it also means your full might not be as quick or am I just talking out my ass? What are you what are your thoughts on having a business that is running profitably or is running with debt? Or when's the right time to consider increasing that overdraft or changing around your position to be pulling $100,000 or a million-dollar equipment loan to buy something that you think is going to work? How do you wage that? Or how do you work that out? How do you make sure you're making the right financial decision?
Tracey: So a couple things. First off, it totally starts with a business plan, which includes a very detailed and well thought out forecast. So it's okay if plan is to lose money for three years, and raise enough money initially or have it to fund three years if that's what it's going to take because some ideas are going to take longer, you're going to need the scale and the mass to make it profitable. So start with a well thought out business plan. I know a lot of business owners don't necessarily like to start there because they're enthusiastic and want to just jump into the business. But you need to know what those expectations will be. And then secure enough money, whether it's your own resources, whether you need to go to an investor, banks are kind of challenging for startups without a track record. It's really hard though probably get you to borrow personally. You can put the money that into the business. So start with a plan, know realistically whatever come up with tack on probably at least another six months, eight months because things don't unfold as you expect. So know that things take longer, they cost more.
Josh: Absolutely. I have a rule of 10 for myself, whatever I think it is, I times it by 10.
Tracey: Yeah, well, if it's been your experience and then do it, it's the way it works for you.
Josh: It makes it at least I'm not getting annoyed that it's not being achieved in the right amount of time.
Tracey: Yeah. The second thing I would say is absolutely critical as soon as possible to establish credit in the company's name. So even though you may be getting the money right away through personal means, or because you put your personal guarantee, get those credit cards, set up overdrafts, even if they're very small amounts, set up lines with suppliers where you can start building up the credit because as the company grows, you want to be able to grow the company that the credit that the company has. And you can't do that if you go later and try to get a big amount of credit when they don't know you and there's been no track record for the company. So those two things are really key.
Then based on your forecast, when are you going to make profit? If you're tracking according to your milestones, so if you thought maybe in a fictional example, maybe it's going to be nine months, we're going to start being profitable. If things are all trending that way, and the profit starts coming in, then you have some decisions to make with the profit. And we're going to take that out, am I going to give it to myself as owner, or am I going to reinvest in the business? Certainly, if you're going to be looking for financing, you've got some more growth plans and growth is super hungry and the fuel that it needs to eat is cash. So for you to grow your business, it requires that reinvestment of money.
Bankers want to see you being in money as well. They don't want to be the only one who's injecting into this venture. So you will be profitable, you can then make your investment and it's appropriate to take on debt at the levels that you can pay back. So if you're taking on debt that needs to be repaid over a couple years, lenders are going to be looking for a track record where you showed that you had the capacity, that capability to pay it back. So be thinking about it in those terms. If you aren't going to be taking a higher risk proposition, you probably do need to look for some kind of investor who's willing to take that risk of potential loss. Because banks aren't going to take that risk with you. That's just not what they're set up for. Their shareholders don't tolerate that. That's not their mandate.
Josh: I remember 2007, when I started the business, 2011, I went to the bank and said, I said 2007, I started the business as a side hustle, as they call it, a side hustle, side hobby thing. And it was 2010 that I got rid of my, what I'm going to call the buffer income, the income that was solid, repeatable and from another employer. And it was half 2011, started 2012. I went to a bank and said, I'd like to buy a house. I've got this 20% to 25% deposit, so a sizable deposit. And for that stage, a lot of people my age really doing a 5% deposit and things like that. And the bank said, okay, we've got some good news. You can borrow money for house, but only $40,000. And I said, well, what else am I gonna get in Australia for $40,000? It can’t even buy a bedroom. That's nothing. It can’t go any far out. And I already had credit cards and everything set up. But that was a that was kind of a bit of an eye opener for me. And I went okay, I should have probably bought the house before I got rid of the job. When I had some sort of income. Yeah, that was a one of my financial blunders. Oops! But after getting the first one, the second house was easy, which is good, I guess.
But I wanted to sort of touch on buffer incomes. So when you're running it in debt versus profit, like you said, you obviously have to have some sort of a rainy day fund sitting there. And if you're doing that, what would you say is a sensible amount to have or get part and part of the same question? If you're starting a new business and you're looking to go out on your own and you think this is gonna be great. I'm going to quit my day job so that I have 40 hours a week to spend towards this business. I found that's a fallacy, probably going to be spending 40 hours additionally to the 40 hours you're spending with someone else. You’re probably gonna be spending 80 hours a week for quite a while to be able to have the wheels start to move. The train takes a long time to gain the energy to get the momentum it requires to move from place A to place B. So what do you think the buffer income should be? And what are the catalysts or the aha moments that you see when you go okay, it's time to get rid of that security net that you have of your employee.
Tracey: Yeah, the buffer, that reserve you're going to have whether you're starting up or you're going into kind of an uncertain period, it really depends on what your run rate is. So how much are your expenses every month? And you need to know that number. If you have a big team and you know, you've got to make payroll, you at least want to have three months, maybe six months buffer so that you know you can pay people and keep things going in the organisation.
So really depends on the business, some are more intensive in terms of the amount of money you got to pay out every month. If you're doing a lot of stuff on your own, you can get by with less. So building that business plan at the beginning, doing that forecast will quantify that number for you. I think I can totally agree with what you were saying. I mean, I was a banker for a long time. And I used to think I worked a lot. My last job before I left the bank, I was doing 60 to 80 hours a week in the office. And then I thought, oh, I'll just work for myself and I'll have more work-life balance. No, that's not how it works. So you're building, you're building and you've got to learn all these things you don't know how to do.
I don't think entrepreneurship is necessarily for everyone. So what you were saying like how you started it on the side and you had your job. I think that's a good way. Number one, you've got to test your idea. Make sure it's something that the market wants, not just something you think is fun, that you want to bring into the world because you got to make sure you can actually make money from your idea. That's the goal. So make sure that your ideas sound. Make sure you actually like being an entrepreneur. So by testing it on the side gives you that, because if you can't sleep at night, because you're worried about your next sale, maybe you do need to have a full time job, because that allows you to sleep at night and have less anxiety. But if the thrill of it and chasing down the sales and all the marketing and all the moving pieces gets you excited, and it's going well, you're going to know where that trigger point is. Keeping in mind, whatever that amount you figured out initially.
Do I have that? Do I want to maybe have a little bit of extra because certainly everybody who gets into business sees that things cost more, takes longer. Initial expectations usually aren't enough. So make sure it's for you and then build up the money before you leave that full time job. And just on the point you mentioned about getting the house, certainly, you want to make sure you pay yourself regularly on a salary to some level from your organisation. When you are running your own business, we've even seen it now with government support here in Canada with the pandemic. A lot of entrepreneurs were shut out because they did not pay themselves a salary. So you're having trouble personally, when you go to try to prove your capacity to repay a mortgage to the bank, if you're not getting a steady income, because they don't care about the cash inflow from the business. If it's not documented, and they can't see the history, they're not going to be that likely to give you those personal loans as well. And so you've got to think about the business and the personal picture together.
Josh: I learnt that the hard way as I said, it delayed the purchase of the house by a couple of years, and had to be a not a top tier lender, I guess, I don't know, a B-class lender or something like that. And it worked. It was fine. And then a year later, we just refinance.
Tracey: But you would pay more, you would have paid more in interest being with the B-lender.
Josh: I did. I did. 2% more or so which is quite a sizable amount really. But I thought I'll get gets me in a place and gets me happy and set up and have a bit of solidity. But the income and that the aha moment for me was I looked at what I was earning in my day to day job, and I thought, okay, I'm spending a lot of time on the side hustle and it took two and a half three years before I switched off the day job, but it was when I had them on parity with the money that I was able to draw from the business. It was when I went okay, I'm now comfortably covering my debts, but six months of a buffer and I'm pulling an income that's on parity. It wasn't going to be absolutely gangbusters, walking out being Mr. Money with the cash coming out of my pockets. It was just on parity on one end it's had bigger legs to go further than what I would have in the job that I was in at the time. So that was how I thought would be the best way to go about it. But you bought up the current situation we've got with the pandemic. And sometimes when you forecast things, forecasts go wrong and you have these external events that impact you.
There's a big airline in Australia. Ansett Australia was huge. And then some mismanagement led to it disappearing and then short of it, it was purchased by Richard Branson turned into Virgin Australia now and now it's going underneath a similar sort of overhaul, it's gone under administration. And they've obviously got some pretty, pretty smart cookies there that have still fallen by this pandemic. I guess you can't always look out for everything. But there's certain things you can look out for. When forecasts go wrong or when you need to pivot your forecast because of external events, how do you go about doing that? Making sure you're getting the right advice and you're not stressing out and putting your head in the sand like an ostrich as it would be?
Tracey: Yeah, absolutely. And so couple things, you don't want to be highly leveraged all the time, because that gives you flexibility to potentially take on more debt in the future if you need to, for some unforeseen situation. Building up your cash reserves, so that you do have something. And then taking a hard look at your business and seeing just what I offer right now is that still going to be viable in the new normal that I think is coming? If it's not take action, maybe you start doing some tests of some new products or service and see how people reacting to it. But don't just wait.
If you wait for a long time, you may be then out of business. And in my experience, as a banker, I've seen businesses go under in as quick as 90 days, because they weren't getting the cash flow. They might have been having sales on paper, so great sales, but if nobody pays you, it doesn't really matter you're going to be done for and if you're already maxed out on debt, there's limited room to refinance and the company limited ability to go out and get more debt.
So I've actually been talking to some entrepreneurs now saying, if you weren't able to do well, or make money when things were going well, should you really take on more debt right now? Because how are you going to do your business better when we're in a more challenging time? So sometimes you have to ask yourself the hard questions. If you're uncomfortable doing it, maybe you're going to have that talk with your accountant and get them to get back to you.
But being an entrepreneur means you do need to ask yourself hard questions so that you can, number one, take care of yourself, because you don't want to be so stressed that you get ill and then have a heart attack or blood pressures through the roof. You want to make sure that you're there and you're continuing on, whether it's this company or it's another company, you can't be so tied to the one organisation or the one product that you lose sight of making plans and doing the right thing in the moment. And certainly this is unprecedented. And nobody could have forecast the wide-reaching effects. But from the crisis in 2008, we know that companies that had less data at that time who had cash reserves, they were able to survive and persist. And then get out of it okay, others folded because they just didn't have any options.
Josh: To continue on what you're saying there, take all emotion out of it. It's your business and you've been putting all this stuff into it. You got to look at very analytically, and get all emotion removed. I'd say that'd be fair to say?
Tracey: Yeah, absolutely. And it's really hard. I mean, it's your baby, your baby. You created it from nothing, but sometimes you need to say bye to your baby. And if you can't do it, you need to at least have the knowledge of how you feel. And no one go out and talk to people you trust and respect that you feel have good judgment and ask them for their unbiased opinion. Maybe it's in the form of market research, you've got to test some things with your clients, hey, in three months, do you think you'll still be interested in this kind of thing, or you won't have any disposable income to buy it anymore. So get fax, and get other people to help you. The other thing you were talking about mental health with entrepreneurs, it can be very lonely to be running a business on your own as the one who has to make all the decisions. So it's super important to surround yourself with peers, with mentors, with coaches, people who are farther along than you in the journey, people who are in the same place so that you have a support system to get the help when you need it. Because you can't solve every problem alone.
Josh: I'm going to say exactly that, eagles fly with eagles and you're the product of the five people that you're the closest with that surround you. So it's a very important to make sure you do that, and that'll allow for stratospheric growth.
Well, Tracey, we've covered a lot of ground here on different blunders that new entrepreneurs can make and what to look out for to stay profitable. And I've really enjoyed going through this with you. Is there anything else that you think we should cover off before we get to the end of this episode?
Tracey: One thing I want to highlight is that a lot of times when I start working with entrepreneurs, they tell me they don't know anything about money. They don't know anything about their financial statements. And they really don't know about the numbers. And I learned very quickly that that is not true, and they learn that too, because if you've been in business for any length of time, you actually know how to manage cash flow. You may not do it efficiently, eloquently, you may not talk about it the way that I do, you may not be planning for it, but if you've been around for length of time, you're doing it and you should give yourself credit for it. So I'd like to make sure we're building those wins as working together for you. So the name of my company, financial fitness, I really like to come at it from a positive standpoint. If we talk about financial illiteracy or you’re financially illiterate, that's really negative. But when we're talking about fitness, we're starting wherever we are. And we're just going to build on it. And we can learn every day and become stronger and flex our muscles with repeated learning. So anybody who's got a business out there who's listening today, know that you have skills that maybe you're discounting or not giving yourself credit for.
The last thing I would say is if anyone's been inspired today, I have a free gift for your audience so they can keep going on their financial fitness journey. So it's a money needing agenda, which you can download at cashcoach.biz, and that will help you get focused on getting started and taking that next step. So you can get your money needing agenda, cashcoach.biz.
Josh: Well make sure to check a couple of links there in the description as well as in our blog articles for everyone else to jump on to that fantastic offer. And I've got to say I love the idea of financial fitness, the way that you position yourself as a personal trainer for finance, because it's very clever. It's something that I know myself, you, everyone does this, you are going to lose some weight. And then you go out there and you go, I'm gonna be Arnold Schwarzenegger in six weeks, I'm going to have that six weeks abs or whatever. And it's two weeks and you're like, I can't do this, this is terrible. This isn't me at all. And it's because you have these huge goals, you think this is gonna be great, I'm all fit already. And then it's just about batting small bits off until you realise if you've already been as you sort of said there, if you've already been running a business for a while you already have that financial information that's required. It just you might not be calling it gross, net and profit. And anything else you might be calling it different things and transferring it in different ways and not calling it drawings and whatever else. But it could be and I might not be calling it the right thing. But it's about knowing that you just have to have a change of language and have someone to hold your hand there and over a course of time, get those financial abs.
Tracey: Yeah, absolutely. Build your financial acumen and your confidence in yourself. So you do it one day at a time you consult with people who can help you but it's just how what can I learn today that's going to help me run my business better so I can get to the goals I've set.
Josh: Cool. Well, everyone jumped on to that office. It's fantastic offer and Tracey, it’s been lovely speaking with you. And if there is anyone out there in podcast land, please jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love. Give us some feedback and everyone's stay good and stay healthy.
Buying a Business With Carl Allen
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land and welcome to Business Built Freedom where we build your business and you get to hear other businesses and how business owners have built their businesses up. So today we've got a cool guest on Carl Allen and he's going to be talking to you guys about how you can grow your empire through strategic acquisition and being able to finance your acquisitions without investing any of your own money. So Carl, tell me when is the right time? When's the right moments in your mind where you have that aha moment, I've got to invest and use other people's money? How do you have that mind shift from pulling dollarydos out of your own pocket to grabbing it from someone else's?
Get more tips about buying a business at dorksdelivered.com.au
Carl: Sure. So Josh, first of all, great to be on the show. Thanks for having me. So what's really interesting is most business owners, you know, don't know the process of what I'm going to talk about. So most business owners will start a company and then their only way to grow it is to do it organically. So more customers, more leads, more products and services. They might do some JVs or affiliate marketing with other people. But they typically don't go down the route of, you know, what can I double my business in a day by essentially acquiring another company. So if you've got a $500,000, or a million dollar business right now that's profitable, and it's taken you five years to get to that stage, it might take you another two years to double it. But if you go and find another business of the same size, you combine it with the business that you already have, and you use other people's money to close that deal, then you can effectively double the size of your business and save two to three years of your life by hustling to grow it organically.
And the process is really simple. You know, there's tons of deals out there there's loads of businesses that are for sale for you know, for a lot of different reasons people want to retire, they get bored, frustrated, sick, in a burnt out, you know, run out of ideas. And they decide it's time to sell their business, the business that they've built, and they've made successful. But what's really interesting is people think if you want to buy a million-dollar business, you've got to cut a million-dollar check, and you don't. You can actually get that money from other people. So the first place you can get the money is from the seller. There are some sellers and you might find this strange, they will sell a business and let you pay for that business over time. It's called seller financing or vendor financing in some countries. So that million-dollar purchase, if the business is really profitable, you can pay for that business over time using the profits that the business is generating. The other methods you can use are those trillions of dollars globally of acquisition financing. So if you find a strong business that's got, you know, a healthy balance sheet and it's got great cash flows, then you can use those as leverage to go and get a bank or an investor to give you financing. So you can buy that business, and then you might pay for half of the business up front, the closing payment using that financing, and then pay for the other half of the business, paying the seller over time.
Then there are in some instances where you can actually go and sell pieces of that deal to an investor, to an angel investor or a venture capital or private equity company, who will, they'll partner with you in the deal. They'll co own the business with you, but they'll give you a ton of cash flow so that you can go out and bolt these acquisitions on. Because the bigger you grow your business, obviously the more profitable it's going to be. Businesses, and for the most part are worth a multiple of their earnings. And that multiple increases, as the earnings increases, so it compounds. That's why a small business might be worth three times its earnings. Yet, a public company might be worth 30 times its earnings. The bigger the company, the bigger the profit, the bigger the multiple, the bigger the valuation.
So the bigger you scale your business through acquisitions, the more it's going to be worth so that when you sell it, the higher your net worth and the more money that you put into your own bank account.
Josh: So you've got a bunch of fantastic points, and I have been frantically writing notes here. So ultimately, I guess the metric everyone should be looking at isn't what is something worth its time, because you can have a $500,000 business send it to a million, a million to a 10 million, but it's do you want to have the old not able to use that money and be in a restricted into it in a sense? Well, you know, you're not skydiving or whatever it is that people enjoy doing nowadays. If you're not able to enjoy that wealth, what's the point if it's going to take that long and time, something you can't get back? So, in trying to find a new business, would you look to something that's a mirror business, something that's nearly exactly the same as yours. So you're pretty much buying into the database and staffing systems. Or a Ying Yang, so it's giving you opposing services where they're noncontradictory. But you kind of own the supply chain. What's the process?
Carl Lewis: It is all of the above. So if you own a business, then there are three types of acquisition that you can do. So if you own a software company, for example, then you just go out and buy a competitor. So you can go out and buy a company that does very much the same as what you do. So what you're doing with that is you're just doubling down on your market share. And obviously, you're going to get economies of scale if you've gone from being a $5 million business to a $10 million business. There are a lot of economies of scale when you double. The other thing that you can do is you can buy into your supply chain as you've described. So let's say you own an engineering business and a big part of your cost base is acquiring raw materials and other components. You can go and buy that business because then you're doubling down on your margin. So rather than giving a huge part of your margin to a third party, you're keeping that within your own business. And then you can leverage off what that business is doing with its customers.
But the smartest type of strategic acquisition is when you buy a complementary business, the yin and yang that you talked about. So let's say you own the software company, you could go out and acquire an IT services company. And then you can sell the software to your IT services customers you just acquired. You can sell the IT services that you just acquired to your existing software company. And then as you bring the two companies together, there's a boatload of financial synergies that you can generate. So you're saving probably on premises. So rent, property tax, utilities, maintenance insurance, all the administrative overhead. You only need one financial controller, one HR person, you can consolidate your marketing budgets. So what happens is when you do that combination, it's a one plus one equals three on the revenue side, because you've got the software revenue, the services revenue, plus the cross sell. And then it's on3 plus one equals five on the profit side, because as you're scaling the revenues on the top line, you're stripping out all this duplicate cost. So you can 5X the value of your company, just by doing one simple bolt on acquisition.
Josh: Alright. So if I decided that, hypothetically, I've got an IT company that I'm running and I'm looking to grow this company, okay, hypothetically. Now, if that was to be the case, what would be the next step to using other people's finances to grab a bolt on? It sounds very much like If what you're saying is like a nearly like a joint venture type arrangement where there’s the same client base with his non competitive things that you're doing with each other. So if you were to be buying into the company, how do you go about having someone else say, you know what, that's a great idea. Here's some coin and what's the buyback period? Is that something that's just an overhead?
Carl: Yes. So the first thing that you got to do, it's a three stage process, really. So the first thing that you've got to do is you've got to clearly articulate what the perfect business is going to be for you. Because in your situation, the type of business that's going to move the needle in your empire is gonna be very different to the type of business is going to move the needle in my empire. So you ask yourself those kind of high level questions, you know, what type of business strategically is going to make me do a big leap in terms of the size and scale of my business? Once you've determined that, then it's all about deal flow. It's all about deal origination.
And there are four primary ways that you can originate deals. So the first one is you can go public with Business Brokers. Obviously, that's the easiest method on the one hand, because you know the business is for sale, they listed it with a broker. But it can often be the most challenging because Business Brokers tend to hype up the valuations of the businesses that they're trying to sell. But Business Brokers will get you a big strong source of deal flow. My personal favorite is to leverage one's network, whether it's via social media, or your human network, because what's interesting is only 20% of business owners that decide to sell a business, actually list it with a business broker, the other 80% it will get passed through their network. And when you're a business owner and you decide to sell, you tap into your inner circle. So you'll talk to your accountant, you'll talk to your lawyer, you'll talk to your wealth manager, you'll talk to your bank or an investor that's tapped into your business.
So what I coach my business owner students is how to build those deal intermediary networks and how to leverage them. Get deal flow. And not only does it give you access to deals, you're building relationships with people that once you find a business can help you close that deal. The accountant can help you with the due diligence, for example, to make sure that the business is doing what it says it's doing, and it's in a good place in a good state. And then your lawyer is required to help you paper that deal, to create the legal documents that you need to sign to transfer the ownership of the business from the seller to you, the buyer as the new owner. So once you've got the deal flow, and you've obviously been to see the business, you've talked to the seller, you've got all the information, and you're confident that this business is going to do for you what you think it is, then it's all about financing the deal.
So it's all about structuring the deal, so that it's a win for you and it's a win for the seller. And in most deals, you're looking to pay some of the money at closing and then some of the money over time in seller financing. And then once you know how that is basically going to work, then working with financiers to give you the capital to be able to do that. It's actually the easiest part of the process. There's billions of dollars even in Australia, there’s trillions of dollars in the US, but there's billions of dollars even in Australia, available from bank’s finances and investors to go into the right deals.
And, you know, my simple message to people that want to do this is don't go and buy distressed businesses. Don't go and buy businesses that are instant trouble because you're just in inheriting somebody else's headaches. You want to buy a business that's cash flowing, that as soon as you buy it, and you integrate it to what you've already got, its earning’s accretive, its earning’s positive from that very first day. And what's interesting is, the more the profit, the stronger the business. Yeah, the more valuable it's going to be, but actually, the easier it is to raise the financing.
Josh: Okay. So if you are the seller, I guess and you said is a seller financing or as you also described vendor financing what is short of the seller being distressed or getting out of this part of their life and moving into something else? What is the advantage to the seller and being a put into a seller financing position or selling the business? So why do you see people selling businesses? Or is there a plethora of businesses being sold? I know a lot of businesses, especially with the whole pandemic thing that's been happening, they haven't even considered a broker, they've just gone I don't have any value to sell here. And so they've just closed down and that also interests me, like how many businesses decide I don't think people want to do what I'm doing or I know I can do what I'm doing. I would rather just see it die rather than have someone else kill it, I guess.
Carl: Yeah, it's crazy. There's always value in businesses. You know, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? You know, there might be an IT company out there who thinks what you think that, you know, my business isn't worth anything, maybe I closed it down. But for you, you know, that could be an amazing source of new cash flow because you can integrate that into what you've already got. And you're right in what you said, the number one exit strategy for most small businesses is actually to close the door and turn off the lights. And it's such a shame, which is why we have other dealer origination methods outside of going to brokers. So one of the other methods that we teach our business buying students is the concept of a direct approach. So how you can leverage free business information databases, you know, generate a list of businesses that strategically are going to fit what you're looking to do. And then we approached them.
So we approach them and we say, Hey, you know, here's, you know, I'm Josh, I own an IT company, and looking to scale my business through acquisitions. I've been studying the marketplace. You know, your business is very appealing to me and you tell them why, so you do a little bit of research or you can outsource that to a VA, you might like their customer base, they might have a really cool process, they might have won some awards, you know, whatever it is, whatever reason you like that business, and how it's gonna move the needle for you, you know, you'll bring that into the conversation, or you'll bring that into the email, or you'll bring that into the letter that you might send them.
And then once you've done that, then you start to connect with them, you know, to build some rapport. So there's a really cool couple of hacks that we teach, where we go find them on Facebook, for example. And we look at who they are, do they have a family? What sports are they interested in? You know, do they drink beer? Do they drink wine? Whether they go out for dinner, whether they go on vacation, and then you drop some of that stuff into the conversation. And what you're doing is you're instantly building a relationship with somebody who once they know you like you and trust you, then they're going to be in a much stronger position to potentially want to sell their business to you. And they're thinking of it from the seller side, you'll sit there thinking, I've got this business, I don't really want to work in this business anymore. I don't think I can sell it because who would buy it, maybe I just close it down and liquidate my balance sheet, sell my assets, pay off my liabilities and then just take home the cash that's left, and then all of a sudden you contact them and say, hey, you know, I'm Josh and I'm looking to grow and I really liked your business and you're very complimentary about it. Feels like you know, you've got to know them and what's going on for them and what they do. You know, if I was that person, I'd be like, Dude, come see me. This is amazing. Come see me. I'd love you to have this business. Do you think it's going to really help you? Let's see we can work something out. And then what you find is the more distressed the seller, not in terms of their business, the more distressed they are in terms of their psychology, the bigger component of the deal that they are prepared to put into seller financing. And then, you know, the most common question we get asked about that is, well, what's the risk to the seller if you do the seller financing type deals? So you're not paying them much money at closing, you're just paying them over time. You know, you absorb their business and carry on and make trillions of dollars in profits.
What's to say, you're not going to pay the seller? And what we do in most cases, is it's written into the legal agreements that if we don't pay the payments that we're contracted to make, then the seller just gets the business back. So it keeps the seller, you know, highly de risked in that deal process.
Josh: Okay, and obviously the buyer very engaged to achieve the objectives.
Carl: Yeah. And so it's very different if you're buying a business for the very first time. So if this was your first deal that you were doing and you had no leverage, then clearly, it's only the performance of the business you buy that's going to drive the cash flow for you to pay for the deal. When you own an existing business already, and when we talked before about all the cross selling that you can generate, and all the other cost saving, you know, you might buy a business that’s doing half a million dollars a year in cash flow and your deal as you're going to pay $250,000 of that to the seller over time. If you combine that business with what you're doing, you're able to multiply that where it's generating a million dollars a year of free cash flow, even $2 million a year of free cash flow. So the percentage of that money that you're paying to the seller is a fraction of what is now being internally generated.
And sometimes in a deal, you might have to include a little bit of that upside, because the seller might think well, okay, you're buying my business for a million dollars, and you know, you're going to make $5 million dollars out of this if you do it right. And obviously you're gonna have to do all that work. You know, I want a little bit of that as a bonus, so I want 1,500,000 for the deal, not a million. But I'm prepared to take a lot of that money as an urn out, or as a bonus payment or as a contingency payment for how you're going to scale and really explode the value of my business once you've acquired it.
So all that comes down to kind of creativity in your deal structure. And, you know, we've been talking for hours if I was to walk you through it in detail, which is, which is why we have some free training available for anyone who's really interested in this and wants to understand, you know, what are the eight steps one needs to go through from a blank piece of paper to closing a bolt on acquisition and combining it with what they already do.
Josh: Okay, and I understand that if people did want some training and bits and pieces, you've got a link that people can go. It is trainwithcarl.com/bbfreedom, is that right?
Carl: That's absolutely right. Yeah.
Josh: You guys have heard it. So trainwithcarl.com/bbfreedom if you guys want to have some of that training to see, and I'm going to be jumping They're checking it out. I think it sounds awesome. And I think that hearing about the way that you can structure these deals to make sure that it's a win/win for both parties, some of them sort of feel like they're losing out is sounds really cool. One of the things you actually brought up earlier was an approach that I think a lot of businesses should do. You've got all this information available online. I'd call it stalking. But that sounds weird, but it's not stalking if people have publicly made the information available to everyone else. If you are researching and finding information and seeing are these the target customers or target acquisitions that you're looking for, what would you normally say is the timeline between picking up the pencil and doing the research to the hammer going down on the sale? Is that sort of a day, a week, a month, 10 years?
Carl: So it depends, right? It depends on the size of the business, the complexity of the business, the amount of due diligence you need to do. I've done deals in a day. I've done deals that have taken me six months. So the average is typically about 90 days. If you look at the process of closing a deal, so first of all, you've got to decide what type of business you got to buy, then you've got to do some deal origination, then you've got to go and have meetings, then you've got to do a little bit of analysis about the numbers they'll give you, the type of business, then you've got to make an offer, then you've got to negotiate that offer and get to terms and deal points which are mutually agreeable and a win/win. And then you bring in your little micro deal team, your accountant and your solicitor, your lawyer, and they will kind of hammer out and fine tune the details. They'll do the due diligence, they'll draft the legals, as part of that, then you're raising the financing. And then you're putting together your integration plan. So that as soon as the deal documents are signed, you can get to work and integrating that business into the one you've already got.
So bear in mind, most business owners, they've got other things going on that you know they're running their business already. They're probably looking at other deals. They've got families and all these different things. So on average, it's about a 90 day process, but it can be much faster. But again, that depends on the type of business, type of seller, and what else the buying business has got, you know, going on. If they're rolling out a brand new contract, or there's a whole ton of other things that they're doing in their business to grow organically, that can slow down the process, but on average, it's about 90 days.
Josh: Okay, so with that being 90 days, I guess, like obviously, that that's if a business is about to is they ready to sort of hit the hammer already, sort of that's not a front from inception perspective, I guess you haven't sort of planted the seed and they've gone maybe I should sell the business or something like that. Or I guess something I hear all the time is every business is ready to sell. It just comes down to the finances and the dollerydoos. So is that you contacting cold calling, contracting a business out of the blue that has at that stage no interest in selling to 90 days and they're like where am I?
Carl: It’s the numbers game. So it's like sales, you know, you got to build a pipeline of prospects, some of them are gonna be ready, some of them aren't. You might contact a business, who's had no interest in selling, but then you have the conversation with them. And you trigger various emotions in their mind whether thing, you know what? This has happened for a reason, maybe I should sell maybe I should go and do something else, or you'll be contacting people that are already having those conversations and, and, you know, they don't know where to start, you know, because most people that own businesses never sold a business. About 98% of people that own businesses have never gone through a sale of a previous business. So they don't understand the process or they don't understand the emotions of the process.
Josh: Or its like they just entered in a divorce.
Carl: Yeah, it's interesting, and it's really a game of psychology in a lot of cases because if you take the typical business owner, you know, they started a business say 20 years ago, and they've run that business for 20 years, they've spent more time in that business than they have with their own family. And often, it's like saying goodbye to your children. You know, I know when my son emigrated to your part of the world, my son, Ryan, he moved to Australia when he was 14, so nine years ago now and he's 23 now. You know, when he when I felt like the seller of a business, you know, my child was leaving me to go off to pastures new. And I was highly supportive of him making that move, and it turned out for him phenomenally. He's an Australian citizen now, by the way, and he lives near you in Brisbane. He's a great guy. When he left I have the same basket of emotions that most business owners feel when they sell a business. They want it to go to a good home, they want to know that it's going to be looked after. They want to know that it's going to grow and it's going to carry on, you know, being successful. So it really is an emotional relationship process. And, you know, sometimes you might find the perfect business and it might take six months for the seller to come round to the concept of selling it. But because it's a numbers game, if you have enough quality shots on goal, if you play in the hands of cards, then you know you're going to laser target those sellers that they are ready, they're just waiting for somebody to have that conversation with them. So it is a numbers game.
Josh: I imagine like your training goes into how to as you said 98% of everyone has no idea what they're doing. Everyone had those butterflies in their stomach when they saw the hot girl or hot guy or whatever at school and they went, oh man, I'm going to go talk to them, and 98% of people didn't because they freaked out. And I guess my question is the training of people will freak out about potentially selling their business but as a training sort of put your mind at ease a bit there and put you into a spot that you can say okay, this is how I strategically go about doing this, or is it a helping hand to or getting you the confidence to do that?
Carl: Yeah, so it's definitely not a helping hand. What I do is, it's an implementation system. So it's not a helping hand, it's not theory. It's not just a bunch of training videos, kind of a how to guide. It's an implementation system that's been tried and tested over thousands and thousands of deals in lots of different parts of the world. And you know, in Australia, you know, I've personally bought and sold multiple businesses in Australia. So that system, our deal maker, while society system is the implementation engine for any small business owner, or even any want to be business owner to go and buy a business using other people's money. And one of the other things that we didn't talk about yet is if you buy a company, you don't necessarily have to run it. I own nine different companies. I don't work in any of them. I spend about an hour a week, one hour per week in my businesses. I have general managers in my portfolio businesses running them for me. And yeah, I give them little pieces of ownership, they’re my partners. I want them to be incentivized to do the right thing. So I'm an owner/investor. I'm not an owner/operator. There's a really, really big difference. Yeah, I'd say about half of that. So I coach and mentor about 5500 people all over the world to do this. And they're all doing deals every day, in all different countries in all different sectors in all different sizes. And I'd say about half of those students are buying businesses to operate. And half of those students are buying those businesses to be owner/investors. And there's no right or wrong way.
If you want to be an owner/investor. The benefits are, number one, you can buy businesses anywhere in the world. So I own businesses in Australia while I was living in the UK. It's a bit of a journey. So obviously, it takes two days to get there. So I'm not going to commute to that business every day. And it means you can own multiple businesses, you don't have to stick with one. If you own multiple businesses, then you don't have to work in every month. It's like getting an executive salary from every single position you own and you stack them. You know, there are benefits of, I guess, being an owner/operator or a business. Some people just like running a business. They like being there everyday. They like that tactical day to day, you know, working in the business. And then there's a hybrid, you know, you could still work in, you can still be in your business every day, but you know, but work on your business. Be the guy that sets up the strategy, be the guy that's all about the planning, be the guy that's all about building those high level, needle moving relationships, and then let your team do the day to day technical, tactical work that execute the plan and the vision that as the owner, you've set up. So there's no right or wrong way. But, yeah, it's all about doing deals. It's what the Wall Street guys do. That's where I grew up. You know, I spent the first 16 years of my career doing large mergers and acquisitions for Wall Street investment bank and for big corporates, and that's where I learned the process.
And the mechanism we use, Josh, it's a fancy banking term, it's called an LBO leveraged buyout. So some of the largest companies in the world have been bought and sold through a leveraged buyout model. And a leveraged buyout is you find a business you like, and you just by using other people's money. One of the largest leveraged buyouts in history, massive American company called RJR Nabisco. It was bought for $25 billion in the 1980s. There's a great book about it called Barbarians At the Gate. A must read for any wannabe deal maker. That business was bought for $25 billion. The guy that bought it didn't spend $1 his own money. He’s packaged that model down for the small medium enterprise. It's the same process, just on a much smaller scale.
Josh: You stole my final question, which was what would you suggest someone to read to further understand their knowledge of what you do and that's, you've explained it. So make sure to read barbarians at the gate. It’s fantastic. I've really enjoyed having you on the show. And if anyone does have any questions are the popping through on the reviews for us on iTunes, or otherwise jump across to trainwithcarl.com/bbfreedom for more information and to get some training underway. Before we close out there, Carl, has there been anything else you'd like to cover off on?
Carl: No, I think we're good and I'm happy to come back. If you want to do a part two. I think there's a lot of extra stuff we didn't dive into. We've got some Australia connections between us. So, yeah, if the listeners really resonate with this. They want us to go deeper on some of the other issues, then I'm happy to come back, dude.
Josh: Absolutely. Well, I'd definitely be interested to do that. As I said, like it, you've got a wealth of knowledge there. And I think a lot of people will be very interested in hearing this, especially around this time, where I think a lot of people might be sitting on the fence is what zombie businesses is the main goal coming out in the cracks around the place. So I think there's a really good time to be considering this with different people's mindsets shifting. It's kind of like if there was to be a new year's resolution. It's kind of like we've had three months to think about it instead of one night. So I think we're going to be seeing a lot of changes very, very good, good information. So if anyone is interested, make sure to jump across to trainwithcarl.com//bbfreedom.
And yeah, otherwise, go over to iTunes. Leave us some feedback. Give us some love and everyone out there, stay healthy and stay good.
What To Do In a Financial Downturn With Justine Lalla
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land! We've got a fantastic guest for you. We've got Justine from JPL FM, which is JPL Financial Management. They do some pretty cool stuff with books around the place here. And we're going to be talking about what to do with financial management in a downturn. So we're all experiencing a bit of stress, regardless of what industry you're in. There's only a few at the moment that are really thriving, and I have strong feelings that they may be seeing the downturn in the future a little bit further on. Justine, tell me what would be the one thing that you need to keep in mind when facing a downturn?
Get more tips to overcome financial downturn at dorksdelivered.com
Justine: I think you need to keep in mind your cash flow and your budgeting. During a financial downturn, you should always have a budget that's always a good idea and during a financial downturn. You should have some sort of contingency plan or contingency budget.
Josh: That's very good advice. I know that we had a bit of a talk offline before we jumped into the episode. Without pointing fingers and saying names, you did say that some people need to have the fingers shaking at them saying what are you doing and get your books in order. That's a huge thing. We've got so many different opportunities are in a fantastic country here, where there's opportunities everywhere. And there's probably stacks of businesses that are not able to get them or they're definitely putting you under the pump because they don't have their bookkeeping in order.
Justine: Yes, yes. So due to COVID-19 and all the grants that been offered by the government, the cash flow boost, and Job Keeper, we're finding a lot of small business coming to us trying to get the books in order now because they haven't done so in the past, which is quite surprising. Obviously, in order to manage a business well, you need good information. So you need the records in order. And the only way you can plan for financial downturn or any sort of planning is good information, good bookkeeping, information that you can rely on and make good decisions in the future.
Josh: Yep. Well, I think it's all data in, data out. How far behind was the worst? And then how far behind is the average?
Justine: I've seen some go as far as a year behind. I know there are more than that behind. Thankfully, they haven’t for me. But yeah, it could go to a year behind. Thankfully, none of our clients are in that situation. They're all up to date. So, everyone was able to benefit from all of the subsidies and grants.
Josh: Cool. That's good news. Because Yeah, it's a this is it. There's a new one every week. There's one that just came out the other day for another $10,000
Justine: Yes, the Queensland Government grant.
Josh: Yeah, that's right. And far out. I thought the wave was over. I thought everyone had caught the wave or not.
Justine: Yeah, it's really good that there's so many out there. Obviously, you need to have everything in order. And you need to know what is out there. So you can benefit from all these things. So it's good to talk to a professional that can advise you what you can actually apply for because you don't want to miss out.
Josh: Not at all. Exactly. And we just say the more waves coming in as time goes on.
Justine: I would say with those grants, utilise it efficiently, you know, make the most out of it in your business.
Josh: So, obviously, talking about financial management a downturn with these grants that come through there, what do you think their mindset should be like? For instance, some people will be like, okay, like, let's just use these grants. And this this will allow us to just ride the wave through and then everything will work but we don't know what's on the other side. Versus other people which will be like reduce everyone's hours, stand people down, remove any excessive expenses or expenses that we can absolutely that are not must have parts that absolutely run the business and then still get the grants so that you can ride the wave a little bit longer, even though it might have crippled your business for a longer period of time. What do you think is the best way to approach that?
Justine: Yeah, good question. So in terms of these grants and these cash flow boosts and everything that you can get at the moment, I think that should be tied to your contingency budget or plan. And you should factor that in as to how you're going to boost your cash flow. How are you going to get your business back on track once everything starts opening, and how you can then put your stuff on to increase hours until your business is running back to normal and your sales are hitting the usual numbers that it should be. So those grants and subsidies should be factored into that contingency plan. You shouldn’t just get it and then squandered all in one go.
Josh: Okay. That's good advice. I'd say like you said that a lot of it comes down to your team and the management of where your goals are with where you're going. We faced the problem internally, I can't say that we got away scot-free, we've had a downturn. And that's because the businesses we rely upon had a downturn, and sadly, two of them that were running 40, 50 people businesses, one of them the other ones 50, 60 people businesses went down to three and five and then another one that was also quite large went down to nothing. They've gone bankrupt officially now out of business, very happy to say that our team has stuck with us. And we've held together like a tight family. I've had even some of the staff say, look, although I know you're saying we should be at 80% they still have to work the full hundred. One staff member said, Look, what can we do here and he said, happy for you to not pay me for the next two months and we can just work something out after that. And the environment and the way that you bring up your team and you talk to your team will definitely help with the situation.
Once you've got the grants, would you be saying hold on to them, hold on to the money or pivot your business or think about that idea or accelerate at some bit? Some people have been spending heaps of money on marketing to use it now to be able to put their business forward. Some people have been pulling back completely and saying, let's just remove every overhead and just sit here until something happens.
Justine: Look, it's gonna be a little bit different for every business. And depending on where they are with sales, I know a lot of businesses have started doing a little bit of sales, which is good. A lot of people have this stuff only on job keeper, some of them have staff working a few days a week. So it really all depends on what your expenses are like, and what sort of revenue you are expecting. I think those are the factors that you should look at first before determining what you could potentially do with that extra boost of cash. It's great to be able to use that to increase your cash flow so that when something arises, you are able to pay for that. If a business is going to benefit more from increasing staff hours, like you said marketing that all comes down to the business and what kind of business that is
Josh: Like it's just shifting risk really just working out what is the best thing that you can do with the money that's come in.
Justine: Yes. And it's really important to utilise those funds efficiently. And during an economic downturn, you want to make sure you're using it in an area where you're going to see some sort of benefits, you know, it's gonna make a difference in your business.
Josh: For us internally, we decided you know, everyone has those products and those things, they go, oh, that's nice. And you buy into it, and then God, we don't really need that. And so, we've trimmed the hedge, so to speak, we're now in main machine and although some of those things, that's a really nice report that we're getting once a month, and we went, is it worth $600 a month for that report? No. Get rid of that.
Justine: Yeah. I think during this sort of time, you should look at your nice to have things or must have things and wait.
Josh: Yes, absolutely and, and start cross checking everything. And this isn't just for business. This is in your own personal life. I looked across the properties that I have, all of the insurances, I looked across the insurances for the cars and made sure that I wasn't paying too much. And just making a few phone calls, I think was an hour total time on the phone. I saved $1,000 a year. And I thought that's pretty good.
Justine: Yeah, that’s awesome, that's excellent. Even your electricity bill means companies that call and seek out the best rates. There's so many areas that you can decrease costs, if you spend some time analysing your numbers.
Josh: Yeah. And if and as I said, it doesn't take that long to do like a some of the data center and expenses that we had, we rang them up and we went from, for one of them is $600 a month, which dropped down to $400 a month. Another one was 1400 dollars a month that was dropped down to $800 a month. Yeah, I thought, well, this is great. And it doesn't take long. And we've had customers come to us, and ask us and say, hey, look up, we're not doing not doing well, because of this situation, what can we do? And everyone's in the same boat. And we're all here to help, really. That's one of the great things about this, this beautiful country we're in. We're not full of arseholes. There's a few of them. But generally speaking, we're here to help everyone and we want only what's best for everyone.
Justine: Yes, definitely the same with us. I mean, we've offered our clients some discounts to get through these tougher months because obviously, the flow on effect to everyone so when we can help with definitely trying to do that.
Josh: You're in a fantastic position, I guess in where if they want help with some of these different grants, they get money. If they get money, you can get paid. So everyone wins. If they don't get it, it's kind of a free money you're getting paid for on the results really. You have a bit of a different way of billing people as well, which I very much like. Would you like to tell everyone about that?
Justine: Yes. So we tend to charge our clients a fixed weekly or monthly rate, which entails a variety of services that they require for their business. So you can choose whether you want to pay for that weekly or monthly. And with that, there's no additional cause for any phone calls or emails or any questions that you may have. I don't think you generally contact your accountant if they are charging you per minute. We like our clients to, you know, ask questions, know their numbers, learn more, because if they don't learn any more, and ask the right questions, they're not going to do any better. So we want them to succeed, which is why we like them to ask questions. And most of our customers love that model, because they know there's no surprises in the cost, they can budget for it effectively. And there's nothing additional to that.
Josh: I love it. And a model that we went to for it for the exact same reason you've just said that actually. So in 2011, we noticed a bit of a problem. So 2007 the business started out. 2010, we’re still charging people per hour. And then we noticed that as we were getting problems fixed faster and faster, and using better technology, we're getting paid less and less, and the business was less profitable, the more experienced the staff were. And I thought this doesn't make any sense. So there's these cowboys out there charging the same price. And in one instance, there's a job we got finished in 45 minutes that had someone else already work on it for 10 hours. And I thought, how didn’t they do this in 10 hours, it was a simple problem. And then I thought, we've got to change the model. It's the best thing we ever did, because it gives us a reliable income. And it makes sure that our customers have a known expense, as you said, and it means that when the receptionist calls up and says, hey, we've got a problem, this isn't happening. It gets looked at with the same level of detail than any of the C level people.
Well, before the C level people call up and they don't have time to get that problem fixed with a receptionist even though it might be costing them a couple of hours a day or something because things are loading slowly or things aren't working as efficiently as they could. And that ultimately is costing the business heaps. If you're in this financial downturn, and you're looking at a way to change around how your business is working, this would be a great time to sort of brainstorm around that. You're there as a soundboard for different things like this, is that right?
Justine: Yes, yes, definitely. We work on a range of things for our clients. And it all depends on the services you require. Our key focus is, you know, management of your business. So cash flow, budgeting, making sure you have good reports at the end of the month. So wherever they are variances from your actuals to your budget, you know, we sit down with the owners, and we go through, you know, the reasons why this may be occurring. And then we look at ways you know, like you said, where you can call up a few places like your insurance and reduce things. These are areas that we advise our clients on.
Josh: There’s something I’d love to see and maybe you guys do this is if you have multiple people that are in the same industry and then you went, hmm why is Dorks Delivered spending, I don't know 30% of their income on marketing where other IT companies are only spending 10%. And why is Doc's delivered revenue X and Y when they've got this many customers? That'd be great.
Justine: So we use a benchmarking for our clients. So our budgets are looked at against that benchmark. And then, at the end of every month, when we do your monthly reports, we look at your profit and loss against those benchmarks and try to work out why is there such a variance. So there definitely are benchmarks that you can use and use that for your budgeting so that you know what other businesses in your industry are doing in terms of their percentage for wages against sales, cost of goods, for example. So it's very, very good and efficient to use benchmarks, I think in your business.
Josh: I don't know what other people are spending I don't know for 20 percent’s right or 50% is right or whatever else.
Justine: Yeah, you need the industry benchmarks.
Josh: I know that it's working.
Justine: I think you get an idea of what the benchmark is around those spin. Just to give you an idea.
Josh: Yeah, that'd be good. You have to send me across something for IT, and we'll see where we're at. So fixed fee for accounting. Did you start the business doing that? Or is that something that came about afterwards?
Justine: We started the business doing that, because I know that's a little bit different from what other people are doing. And whenever I have worked before, prior to me joining the company, an accounting firm would have done the work. And when I saw the bills that these companies were receiving from these firms, it was quite shocking. So I thought that I'd like to do something different and my target market is small to medium sized businesses. And I think this is a much more affordable way for them to use our services. And every business needs to have good financial management. And so, this is an area that we love helping them in. And I think the fixed fees works well with small to medium businesses.
Josh: I completely agree. If you know that you can ask the question whenever, you don't feel as uncomfortable about asking it. My first accountant, sorry for listening, Mr. First Accountant. I knew when I walked in, the clock was ticking. As soon as I went grab that mentos off his desk and we're talking, the clock is ticking.
Justine: Don’t you feel stressed when you know that clock is ticking?
Josh: When he's like, Josh, what do you do in your spare time?
Justine: Oh, does it matter right now?
Josh: I’m like nothing I do Nothing. I do absolutely nothing. I have the most boring life ever. Let's just talk about what I'm here for. Cos he’d be like oh, yeah. So how's the family? I got this new car. And I'm going I don't care so much. It stress me, because then I wasn't asking the right questions. I wasn't saying I should my business structure be like this, I would say, what is the fastest way that I can get away from you and stop talking to you. I didn't build a great relationship.
I noticed that when I was talking to customers, and I talked to them and computers load, things load, things take time to download or whatever, and you're talking to them. And you can see them looking at their clock looking at the computer looking at the clock, and I'm going, ah, this isn't good. This isn't making them feel happy. And then that's when I'd say something, look why we're waiting for this. I'm not charging, I feel more comfortable. That's not a very good way to run a business, is it?
Changing across to we call them continuity plans, because we want to keep their business continuity. And so a lot of people call a managed IT service plans. We thought what does that even mean? Continuity agreements where you guarantee their uptime, it's simple, you continue, you have a business continuity, and you guarantee that in your plan. The only problem that I found in changing to the model, two problems. The first one, if you ever see any of your clients at a pub, they're going to buy your beer, because you have built that fantastic relationship up. So that's a good problem to have. So I don't see any problem with that at all. The only other thing I would say, and this comes down to again, the position of where I was at in life, and how about outgoing I was at that stage. When things are working, customers would be like, what are we paying you for? And when things are broken, they ask what are we paying you for? And so that came down to making sure that you had the right reporting in place, and you had the right metrics, KPIs to make sure that everything was pulling everything in the same direction.
But overall, as long as you've done that, it's a very, very good way to make sure that in a situation like now, if you are running a per hour ad hoc type business, you very well could be getting no hours and that could very well be giving you no money and that's a big problem to be in.
Well, I've really enjoyed speaking with you. And is there anything else that you'd like to go through for any of our listeners that are out there to, in regards to JPL financial management?
Justine: Oh, well, I think the piece of advice I could give businesses out there is to manage your cash flows, manage your budget, make sure you have numbers in place, you know, plan for this period of downtime. Make sure you know what your numbers are, you know what your expenses are, cut costs where you can. Talk to a professional, get the most out of your government grants and everything that the government's offering at the moment. So utilise that efficiently. And yeah, hopefully we'll all be back in business full swing pretty soon.
Josh: I completely agree. And anyone out there that is listening and wants to have more advice, or wants to have Justine go through your numbers in your books, jump across the JPLFM.net or JPL financial management, we'll put a link in here so you can see where to go from there.
And yeah, everyone just stay healthy. Stay on top of your books. Don't let things go behind. And I think, pay yourself don't not pay yourself and then not be able to get some of these grants and make sure you're talking to someone that can give you the right advice and set the right wind in your sails to guide you to where you want to be.
If you have enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love. Give us some feedback. And yeah, stay healthy.
Niching Your Business With Bryn Harwood
Josh: Who out there in podcast land has been told to niche or even micro niche. It's something that we have drilled into ourselves, you need to do this thing. And I've actually got a special guest, I’ve Bryn Harwood from Tradies accountants in Brisbane. And he's gonna be talking about the process and some of the past, where he's been and where he's gone and what the future looks like. So, Bryn, tell me a bit about where you came from? Like, what was your original business venture?
Learn more about niching your business at dorksdelivered.com.au
Bryn: Thanks for that, Joshua. Well, I started out as that generalist kind of accountant, so you know, suburban kind of firm doing 30 different industries and doing tax returns, doing company tax returns, doing a whole bunch of different kinds of things. And then one stage through the career I decided that it's kind of hard trying to really understand every different industry because you already know so much. So when you’re in general, it's really hard to give advice, specific advice to business owners because you kind of, there's only one of you. So what I decided was I was going to niche out. I looked at my database, and I had a fair few trade business owners. So I had some kind of builders, plumbers, electricians, and I liked working with those owners that had good businesses. So, at first, I thought, well, for marketing, what I'll do is I'll name it trader’s accountant, but it was still part of my original firm. So that's kind of the premise on how I started the idea of niching and how I kind of got into it.
Josh: Okay, so it's kind of like a bit of a sub brand underneath the original umbrella. And then you had the, I guess already clients are already resonating with that brand. And naturally, you'd have to learn more about what they're doing and how their business works and the different tax advantages and equipment finance things that they're doing and whatever else, and that just allows you to build out the brand from there. Is that right?
Bryn: Yeah, exactly. I started with the sub brand, as you said, and I actually labeled it -and this isn't a joke- I labeled it GFC Tradies Accountant. And that's not a joke. That's how I started. Obviously, I didn't consult too many marketers, I just came up with it, maybe a few too many beers. And then everybody said to me, why are we putting GFC in front of these? Like, what are you trying to tell us?
Josh: Fortune tellers, not accountant at all.
Bryn: Exactly. It wasn't a great marketing pitch. But to be serious with it. What I realized really fast was that it's more than just marketing. And I think if you're going to jump into a niche, from my experience, you have to jump fully into the niche. Try to hold on to your original database and then have a separate database. From my experience, and other people might be able to do it differently and it might work, but from my experience, it didn't work. And the reason for that is you kind of alienate your older clients. And then the new clients are kind of wondering why they're the older clients, so why they’re the other brands. So, I found a real disconnect. And it's almost like you've got to reach that moment where you're confident enough to say, I'm going to fully jump into this niche, and that's all I'm going to do. Which is the hard step because if you've got 100 clients on your books, you might have 30 clients that have one industry, and 70 that are in another industry that you still make a reasonable revenue. But for my experience, if you want to go into it, you need to get rid of the other 70, otherwise, it's just really a marketing campaign and you can probably just create a landing page, and do that if that's what you want to do.
Josh: So, we haven't, I guess niched the same way you have, but I understand exactly what you're saying. So when we started our business back 13 years ago, we were the IT company that did everything. You call us up, there’s a problem with the VCR. Well, I can fix that for you. I'm not even kidding. I was fixing people's VCRs at that stage, not really the same task to fix someone's TV once and that was going back in the days. It was a big cathode ray tube. So your big fat TV. So I'm always the person who did everything that knew nothing, I guess, or knew something but not enough about everything. Then as things progressed onwards, I saw a bit more of a trend and Dorks Delivered, the original brand as it started, became an IT business. And then we had business efficiency experts that did all the automation stuff. And then we had asked about marketing, because it became too cloudy to see what it was that we're actually doing. And someone came to us and they said, we want to have our business marketed online. We want to have our LinkedIn marketing automated or something like that. And we'd go, yeah, okay, we can do that. And they were like, oh, we had no idea. You could do the names Dorks Delivered, and sound anything like marketing at all, and I'm like, Yeah, okay, we got to sort that out.
There's definitely like you're saying about the GFC. I'm like, I can't bring up the business name of someone that I know that just changed business names, but if they move the space character, just one spot, it sounds like a type of operation that you get to remove puss from your body as opposed to an awesome IT business. In making that transition, you said 30% of your customers was sitting in the trading sub business banner. When you made the transition to jump out on your own as a trader’s accountant, did you find that there was less friction when it came to marketing, and the overall message was more easily heard because the tradie would come to you going I know you know what I need to have done?
Bryn: Exactly right. I think that's probably the main reason you'd go to a niche is for that. But what I've learned is we've hired, you know, some really exceptional chartered accountants, and some really exceptional team members. And when you're just in one industry, you realise that the advice that you can start to give is actually really invaluable, you know, so we have knowledge on VBA. We have knowledge on QBCC, these are regulators that work in the trade space. We've worked with associations like the Australian Shopfitters Association, and through that we've worked with a fair few different shopfitters where now we're at the point where we can quickly look at a set of financials and see what's wrong with the financials, like quickly see what's wrong with the business. So we can understand, you know, things like contractors and the business models.
And every industry is different. You know, we've had people come to us that, you know, wanted to set up a medical practice or that were in different industries, and we actually tell them when. So I've actually referred them to other accountants, and regularly do that now, like I will regularly say, we're probably not the right fit. And the reason is, is because what we do do, we do extremely well. And that's the only thing we do.
Josh: Yep. And I think like, the big take home there for me is when someone has something wrong with their books, you can see what's wrong. You can see if they're spending 20%, 30%, 50% higher on their staffing costs, and they're spending 50% less in their marketing costs, and they're wondering about where their money is going. You could probably more easily drill down and say, hey, you need to sort of maybe consider taking a course doing this and dropping down some of these people's pays. Why are they getting paid so much? Is that a discussion that you could have?
Bryn: 100%. It’s like, we can look at it and say, look, these are the risks. You know, if you're in the trade space, and you set up like this, this is a risk down the track, these are the regulators in that space. These are where the risks are of your company. This is the way you'd want to set your company up if you're doing XYZ, and then also just, you know, look over the financials and kind of say, look, you know, charge out rates for these, you're probably losing money there, you’re probably not as efficient as you should be here. You know, your GPs is other people in your field. So, you know, we have that real specialised knowledge now, and I mean, it's only probably been three to four years, but that's only going to increase because every time we hire people, they're only dealing with shopfitters, builders, contractors, that's all they're dealing with. So we know that industry inside out. And I think that is a big advantage with doing all these that I've done.
I've talked to different business owners that have been worried about niching because I've thought, you know, then I'm going to be reducing obviously my size, like my client database, like it's going to go smaller. But I've always had the philosophy that you almost go inch wide, but mile deep. So no, we have clients from Melbourne, I did a webinar the other day, I had clients from Western Australia on there, clients in Sydney. So I believe that actually the trade business owners in Australia quite large, and that'll haven't actually reduced my overall client. I've increased it. But you've just got to think, I think pf it actually.
In saying that, I'm not saying that everybody needs to niche. I've got some good friends that are partners and other accounting firms. And that said, why does every guru say we've got a niche, we don't have to, we can be accountants, and I think that's fine. I think there's a space for generalist accountants, and they do a great job. And you know, if their job is to do tax returns and financial statements, that's what their job is. And I think that's fantastic. I wouldn't encourage everybody to go and say, I'm going to go niche, look at my database and do it because I don't necessarily think that it's necessary to grow your business. It’s probably looking at your capabilities within and saying, you know, what can I focus on? What can I serve as externally?
Josh: Yeah, and it comes down to what your end goal is, I guess. You can own a fish and chip shop and make a lot of money, and you can own McDonald's and make a lot of money, but they're very different things that the business owner is undertaking. One's buying a job, and one's buying an investment, it depends on what you're looking to be doing. Buying a job isn't a bad thing, if that's what you want to do, if you want to have that flexibility.
Bryn: 100%. I speak to clients, you know, and that's one of the first things I say, what do you want? What do you want to get out of your business? Like some clients want us to work on the tools so I don't try and work clients off the tools if they don't want to do that, they might want to work on the tools, ran a crew of five people, you know, turn over a million dollars and have a couple hundred grand profit. I don’t believe the guru's and I don't listen to a lot of influences and say you know, niching is the only way to go for accounts and you need to have your own niche. I don't think you do need to have your own niche, but my advice on niching would be or from my experience, my experience share would be if you're going to do it, jump in 100%, don’t put your toes in learn the niche, speak to the clients and then start to get that extra skill. And it's not a quick process, you're not going to do it in six months, and then say I'm a medical expert now and I know everything about dentists. It might take you four years, until you really start to cut your teeth on it and really understand the industry. So you need to be patient.
Josh: Have you heard of the Dunning Kruger effect?
Bryn: No.
Josh: It's a cognitive bias. It's where you start doing something. Okay, for instance, we'll talk about beer brewing offline beforehand. You might brew one beer and be like, I'm a brew master. I'm amazing. I can do everything. I know everything, and then you bring your second beer and go, oh, that one's stuffed up for some reason. And then you brew your third beer and you go, okay, now one was alright, maybe I'm going ok again and then you start mucking around with hops, and then you start doing other bits and pieces that didn't work or that did. Then then all of a sudden you realise it's a really, really deep subject. As you said, inch wide, mile deep. If you don't know how deep something is, the Dunning Kruger effect is this feeling that you've got a you've… a false feeling that you know everything about something. And interestingly, when you actually do know everything about something or close to it, you have this lack of confidence around the topic because you know how deep it's gone. And that's exactly right. So when you start jumping in there, and then being able to answer those questions that would, again, remove a lot of friction from sales. because somebody's like, oh, what would you do with XYZ? And you've got bang the answer straightaway for them.
Bryn: 100%. And like, I'm still talking to business owners on things, like I'm still sitting in a board meeting or sitting with a builder. And they're saying, actually, we do this because of this, and this is how this happens. And I go, oh, wow, I didn't know that, you know. I find myself sitting outside in shopfitters presentations with you know, Pythor or one of the products that I use and go oh, wow, that product’s amazing, that actually shows the shop before they're built, I never knew that you could do that. So you know, even I've been in use for a while I think continually learning and sharpening that industry that you're in.
Josh: Getting that industry knowledge, though, as well like being told about this new cool thing you think why is no one else told me this, it gives you a fantastic piece of information, a nugget of information that you can then talk to any of your other clients about, then you become that authority.
Bryn: That's what it is. Like, I sat with a client the other day, and they were using a kind of generalist accountant and he sat with me for 30 minutes. And say I'm really happy with my accountant. But essentially, in 30 minutes, you've told me more than I kind of knew about the accounting, and he has a general accounting team. But he said, in 30 minutes, you’ve told me more than I knew over the last year and a half. And that doesn't mean I was going to change him. But it was just the fact that actually knowing the industry, knowing the software's he needs to use, knowing where the pain points are going to be. And knowing his next steps, like you know, if you only go to 10, these are steps. If you want to go to 20, these are the pain points you’ll have. That's the advantage you'll get from niching, but you have to be patient, it will take time to get there. And the marketing around it isn't instantaneous, like if you just go out and say I'm the medical doctor, no medical accountant. I mean, there are a lot of people in the niche space and a lot of the big firms have their own specialists in different industries as well. So there is competition, a lot of competition, and probably the same with IT. I mean, I've heard there are IT providers that just do pubs and there are IT providers that just do retail, which probably isn't a good space to be in right now, unfortunately.
Josh: A great segue actually. Niching, luckily, I'm not in a single niche, but we do have a lot of shopfitters, and obviously they rely heavily upon the retail industry in the growth in the retail industry. And we have automotive businesses that we work with and we have people in the financial sector, so I'm lucky enough to say that we've got our eggs in a few baskets. But there is businesses that don't, and you haven't micro nation and you've diversified enough that it’d be very unlikely that you have the entire industry disappear. But if you have done something like I don’t wanna say silly, but it's not silly. But if you have done something where you're only focusing all of your efforts on to pubs, for instance, so servicing gambling machines and things like that. What do you do when everything shuts down, when hospitality disappears? Where we've put in a spot where you thought there was an industry that would never die, people keep eating, people keep going out and gambling and then you're told sorry, shops are shut for the next three months or more and nothing you can do about it. How did you make sure you didn't fall into that trap?
Bryn: To be honest with you there, I was just lucky. Like when I went into it, some of the due diligence I did at the start was to look at the industry and kind of say, well, trade based businesses most likely aren't going to be outsourced because they don't really have robots that can go and put plaster up, go and do your electrical work or go and do your drains, so a lot of them are very nearby. So I thought automation was probably not going to kill that industry. So that was one of the things, and then the construction industry is a massive industry in Australia, obviously, I think 20% of employment comes from the construction industry. So it's a very big sector. But in your point, the Black Swan effect you know, none of this would predict that there's going to be a pandemic, and that’s gonna knock out a lot of industries. Fortunately for me, trade businesses were an essential service. And that wasn't by design, that was by luck. That's meant that a lot of my clients haven't suffered, although the shopfitters in particular have suffered, as you said, because they’re linked to the retail industry. But to answer your question, if you do niche, I think you are taking, you are almost part of that industry now. So the same risks they have, you have. So if you have a range of different industries, you're diversifying that, and then if the sun go down, you are as deeply impacted. For me, some day with some of the things I looked at, and I kind of thought to myself, well, if we ever get to the point where there's a robot that can come to your house and do your fix your lights and do your plumbing, we're probably at the point where none of us have got jobs. The accounting’s gone as well at that point. I’m like well, that risks are probably can’t mitigate.
Josh: So I'm in a great industry, obviously, IT, because I'm the guy fixing the robots. But the good news is they're never gonna take everyone's jobs, because moments before you think they're gonna be able to accomplish the tasks, you'd have to turn them on and off again. I think it's kind of like when you look at the car, the car killed those horses jobs, these horses had quality jobs and now we're getting new shoes all the time and that this bloody car came along and stunk up the place, but you don't really look at it like that. That is a horse that is automated. It's a car, it's just an automated horse. And there's so many different metaphor vehicle, there's certainly other vehicles like that that have just automated the process. The calculator automated the abacus. Excel automated the calculator. It doesn't remove jobs though. I think it just shifts your focus to things that are more important.
Bryn: Exactly. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Like when one creates another industry creates from that, and I think, you know, in the accounting space, I think you know, there's a lot of automation happening. We use Hub Dock, some people use Receipt Bank or Hub Dock or one of these programs and that basically puts copies straight into the system. There's a few different programs that now sync to your job management software and put your APs or your purchase orders to match the bills and they put them straight into the system. What I found with that is this still uses behind that, because there are still people that have got to sit there and make sure it matches and press the buttons and make sure that happens. So, I don't necessarily think, and there's still a very big space for strategic accounting, and I think they're always well, you know, I think in my lifetime, there probably always will be a place where you need actual advisors. So that automation was a little bit of a risk, but I guess I looked up, and I guess every business owner out there is probably looking at that risking their business to some degree.
Josh: Well, if you're not automating, it's again, if you're running a fleet of sports cars and horses, it's not going to work. You need to adapt and change with the times. Automation has been around us for years and years and years. It's just it's become a bit more of a buzz term lately. I think like, when you look at checkout chicks and checkout dudes, jobs that have been automated by those little telling machine things. If their job, if it can be automated with a machine that's that big, it means whatever that we're doing was not going to be advancing their life in the future anyway, it was just having them sit there and earn some money in a brain dead job you could do with a hangover, and I'm getting ready to get some fire word, I just said then, but if you can have a machine that does this, that doesn't remove jobs, all it does is as you said, shifts the focus of the jobs to the people that are generating the software, entering the codes to make sure that it can be done, making sure that every item is weighed appropriately, and making sure that the one person is actually looking and doing everything and I'd imagine, it's the way with the all industries it's going to happen.
Bryn: I think so. I think like from my experience now when I'm dealing with builders or shop fitters. contractors, like, the biggest thing we're teaching them is it's all software, these jobs now are all software already. Like, if you're a shop fitter, and you're not using software that can track GP real time, then you're going to get burned by other shop fitters because it's amazing now, the technology like everything sinking, everything's linking, and you've got people that can see the GP on every shot that you're building at one time. And that's probably where I'm seeing the good entrepreneurs in those fields are really, really taking off. And the ones that are still on the old based systems are struggling, wondering how the quotes are coming in so cheap. You know, theres something wrong with the industry because people are taking things below cost. It's not necessarily the case. It's because these other businesses are more efficient, exactly. And they do that for people like you, like your companies that come in and look at where the efficiencies are, what systems they can use, how they can automate processes, and yeah, the clients that I work with have been doing that differently have a long way ahead above the other. The clients and on to starting to slowly kind of die off, if that's a good way to put it.
Josh: As you said, you've got to be ready to adopt, you've got to be ready for the future. And if you got to be niching, you've got to be ready to make sure that your eggs are in multiple baskets or in a basket that is capable of some level of contingency should risk such as the pandemic come available, which brings me to my next point. So I've looked in going, okay, how deep do I want to niche? How much do I want to look into it? This is silly Josh engineering mind going into gear and I think okay, I'll look through the census data, I'll look at the growth data. I'll look through the data of the population and what different areas and sectors are doing whatever, and then try and work out where the growth pattern be from there. So you are fortunate that you had a number of trade types of clients already working with you and then you build the business upon that spot. Did you look into the census data or the growth?
Bryn: We did actually look at a bunch of different figures like how many trade businesses there were, the size of trade businesses, we did do a bit fair bit of due diligence in regards to that. And I think, you know, factor, that kind of point that you're raising around a niche is that you are kind of taking that risky industry. So you want to do the due diligence to find out as much information as possible as you can about the industry. And I think you could go further and micro niche, like, you could be a plumber’s accountant, you could be, you know, you could be an electrician’s accountant, or you could go that far into a micro niche. And then I guess you really want to look at that industry.
Lke one of my mentors actually said to me, my good friend said, the best entrepreneurs in the world aren't the best entrepreneurs, they pick the best industry. And that really resonated with me because I thought about that for a while and he said look at Elon Musk, for example. He's picked renewable energy. And where's everything going in the next 10, 20 years? It's renewable energy, like people don't want the pollutions out of hand down. It's cheaper and proved it's cheaper than coal now. I think PwC, can have their reported that it is actually cheaper to use renewable energy. And so back to that point, I think the best entrepreneurs actually look at the industry they're in and it's not by luck that they end up in any race that makes sense. It's being able to look ahead and see well, where are things going? Obviously, right now, maybe, and, you know, maybe the retail industry, bricks and mortar is not where you want to be. Because no matter how good you are at retailing, right now, if you're not running an e-commerce business, maybe that's not the space. But maybe if you're running an e-commerce business right now, you're Amazon, you're riding the right industry. And I don't think these people, I don't think people like Bezos or Musk, these people. I don't think it's by luck they've ended up in those industries. I think they have looked forward to going what's going to be the biggest thing in 10 years’ time? What industry is that going to be? How people going to leave? How are people going to behave? What are the things people are going to do? And then they focus their services around that.
Josh: Yeah. And before everyone thinks that they're obviously not fortune tellers, but I think there's probably 100,000 other people that have tried looking into the future, and then they just bet on the wrong horse. And we don't know about them, because they bet on the wrong horse.
Bryn: I would have never known that trade services was going to be an essential service in a pandemic. I never looked at that. And I read the Black Swan. I actually read the book. I went through it and I thought, well, how can you predict a black swan? I could never have predicted that, and that was luck. But some of the factors that I went through in that was that I thought that they couldn't be automated. I thought there was always a space. New houses were being built continuously in Australia. The construction industry has always been a booming industry. We are still like under supply of houses even to this day, there's an under supply of houses in the Brisbane market, maybe the Sydney and Melbourne market as well. So if you look at those factors, I think there's going to be a lot more houses that are going to be built. And there's going to be a lot more big construction projects like intercity rail. You know, in Melbourne, there's lots of projects that are being done there.
Josh: It’d be different for living in a city that was 3000 years old, and you could knock down buildings, you had all these different restrictions, it'd be a different scope or we're in a faux landscape, beautiful land down under that we can't really be complaining too much. Even in this time of unknowing, we're in and I'm going to plug Australia obviously, we're in the best country in the world. We've got the best health care, we've got the lowest death rate mortality rate from the pandemic, and we've got all these different grants and everything else that's coming through that's helping businesses out, like I can't complain. I'm pretty, pretty happy with where we're at.
Bryn: You know, in Australia like you say, we’re in the place to be. I mean, we've got obviously the mining industry, it's going to continue, we've saved a lot of money. I think we're well ahead GDP per debts pretty low here. You know, they've got the money to spend on the population. And pumped money into construction, which is probably the best move. I know all the governments have now announced all these massive projects. And I think that's just going to get people in jobs and going to keep the economy kind of moving along as we come out of the back end of this. Just on a personal level, we went out to the coffee shop in the weekend. And, you know, as soon as I opened it up, and we were at a coffee shop, and we're at the shops, and we're spending money, and I think that's what people will do, you know, they'll go back and support local businesses. So I think in terms of tourism, I see people traveling, you know, domestically now. Go to Northern Territory, go to Townsville, go to Cairns, you know. You can't really go to Asia or Europe or anything like that maybe for the next however long that's gonna be, but we can go and have a good holiday at the Great Barrier Reef.
Josh: All the overseas listeners hear that, you can't even come see our beautiful place, not for a bit, but it's pretty good. For any of the tradies out there that are listening, you've obviously heard a bunch of advantages to working with Bryn’s fantastic business. It'd be worth jumping across the tradiesaccountant.com and checking out the voodoo that he does, and booking in some time to make sure that you're doing everything that you can be doing to automate your processes and make sure that you're getting the biggest bang for buck in this time of the pandemic. So, before we head off, Bryn is there anything else you'd like to go through, we'll cover off on?
Bryn: The point of the podcast today was around niching. And I just say, you know, if that's something that you're thinking of doing, I think the main experiences I gave is, like I've said earlier, head into it, and do it. Research the industry thoroughly, try and although you're not Nostradamus, try and predict what's going to happen in the next 10 years and try and kind of have some something's weather, collect as much data as you can, and have the data almost make the decision more than the intuition to some degree and then speak to other people that have done it. You know, if you're an IT guy and you want to go and niche into the trade space or something like that, come and speak to me or if you're you know, whatever you're wanting to niche in, speak to other people in that industry, and get to know as much as you can. That would be my main, probably three kind of points to share with the listeners on how to niche if you want to niche. But I would also say to that as a caveat on the end, don't listen to the influencers because you don't have to niche.
Josh: Terms and conditions apply. I agree. And that's why I want to get you on the show because we have had people that have been very against it and we have had people that are very for it, but I haven't had anyone that's actually walked the walk and talk the talk and you've got a biased opinion, obviously, you're running a business that has niche, but it's still good hearing the journey that you've come on, how you got to where you're at and what you've seen is some of your advantages of doing that.
Bryn: Thank you for having me on. I've enjoyed it thoroughly and I've enjoyed the beers that we've had.
Josh: Oh, now everyone knows we've been having sneaky bees. Oh no. Oh, no. I've loved having you on as well, and if anyone else has anything to say, leave a review, jump across to iTunes. Give us some love and give us some feedback. Everyone else out there, stay good, stay healthy and look forward to talk to you again soon.
Business Asset Protection with Jason Popelier
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. I've got a fantastic guest, he’s going to be talking about asset protection and how to change the model of your business to make sure that you are considering things you have between the items that are bringing you in money, the items that are costing you money are definitely separated, as well as not just from the accounting perspective, but also from a bit of a twist on it, bringing in insurance and all sorts of other things into it. So, I’ve have Jason here from FWO Chartered Accountants. So, Jason, what is the number one reason that you'd want to make sure that you are considering when reviewing the model of your business or making sure that you get a change? When do you go from sole trader to company to then having several companies or a Trust Company to make sure that you have asset protection? How do you know, when's that aha moment?
Learn more about business asset protection at dorksdelivered.com.au
Jason: Good question. The thing that I always start with any of my clients or new clients or potential clients are their goals. To start with, I don't really care what their structure is currently, I start with what they’re trying to achieve? And their current business structure (makeup) currently enable them to achieve that? I ignore what's been set up in the past because there's a lot of businesses out there who have the wrong entities, or have the right entities but they’ve structured it in the wrong way as well.
Imagine a business that has higher risks, let's say the construction industry. Even though most of my clients are professional services, I have quite a few construction clients and they have millions of dollars' worth of equipment. There's a lot of businesses out there who look at the costs of setting up or maintaining two entities and decide to hold all assets all under the same entity, they want to save costs, technically the do but at a cost of increased risk. Realistically, it's not that much more to set up a new entity, especially when you consider the cost if you actually lose everything. These businesses have to maintain a minimum asset level for the licensing rules and the minimum assets are set on their turnover. But you can imagine that if something went wrong, and the business essentially got tanked, and it was out of their control, because they were a subcontractor to a bigger guy who deliberately withheld cash flow, it happens a lot, especially in the construction industry. if withheld for five months, they will essentially have to go into either voluntary liquidation or forced liquidation because they can't pay some of their subcontractors or staff as well. They will lose everything. And the other person just goes, great, one less creditor to pay. If they had structured the situation a little bit differently, let's just say they had a warehouse that held the equipment, they could have that in a separate entity, which is its own legal entity. Those separated assets can be protected in that sense. To cover costs and replacements, the trading entity can have, in normal terms, a cross charge for leasing of those assets and facilities. The difference now is those same assets are not subject to the same risks of the trading business, even if they’re ultimately still commonly owned.
Looking at the types of structures, the reason you would have a proprietary limited (company) scenario versus a sole trader or partnership structure scenario is a sole trader (and partners) are liable to their share or the entire project, depending if they're partners default. Limited, by itself means that there's a limitation on liability. You automatically have less exposure than operating by yourself or in partnership. Then if you use multiple structures that are limited in their own rights, then there might be a further set of layers for protection. I went on a bit of a tangent around protection after what goals they're trying to achieve.
Reviewing a client goals and objectives. If a client wants to retire at 50, actually let's go up to the new norm, retired at 60 because you probably realize the same as myself, by the time we get to retirement age, we'll probably be 75 or 80, so let's be realistic.
Josh: If doctors can increase it, the amount of time we can live, the retirement age would just be 10 years prior to that. Pretty much.
Jason: E xactly, and people will work longer, there's technology we can utilise as well in addition to medical advances. So, it might be a little bit later, but let's just say the goal instead of retiring at 50, is now 60. Because the 60 is the new 50 in terms of retirement age. To get there, we need to decide what that looks like and there is a combination of superannuation in there. We need to protect that in some sense, this may be around your investment strategy, to not be too aggressive or to have a balanced fund, depending, and the closer we get to retirement, the less risk we put into our investments. Talking about risk and protecting that, one of the greatest assets for business owner is the business itself. And it has the highest potential to create the most value out of any asset they are other than themselves, right? So why don’t business owners give more consideration to risks?
We forget that we, as a person are our own greatest asset. No one else can replace us. And a lot of people forget that. You can actually insure that as well. But if you're in control of your own business (instead of being an employee), it's co-related. So there has to be an element of your business, essentially making up that retirement age, and that goal. And we look at that and go, okay, what is your business look like? And how can we de-risk that particular business or set of businesses, as people might have a portfolio of multiple. Referencing an example ... there was client I worked with a couple of years ago. They had about 26 entities that were trading, so you can imagine if they trade in over 26, we're talking the group that was 100 plus entities. Little bit complicated.
We had to slice and dice and put appropriate levels of protection while grouping into pools because of those 26 trading entities, only about six or seven of them were actually making real decent money, but you got to look at each business in its own right, not as a big pool. Breaking down a business, you look as each and challenge, how can we achieve these goals? Start with an element that you've got to focus. Look at what products you have and how you have an advantage in the market, why people want to come and work with you. And this could be around branding and protecting that. Also consider elements through technology, and how do you protect those items or services? This is when cyber security would come into place.
Josh: For me to understand, I guess any of our listeners, I guess that would mean like, if you have a house and you chuck security cameras on the house, and an alarm system is going to reduce your premiums. And similarly, if you have a business that has a bunch of IT equipment, and then you decided to make sure that you had someone else that was taking a level of accountability. Like for instance for us, we charge a set price per month, and then we guarantee their uptime. If they go down, we pay them while they're down. So we guarantee they're up. Now, so that in a sense kind of sounds like an insurance policy, but we make sure they have certain levels of protection, they have certain types of antivirus, they have certain types of networking monitoring. So if you have any of that sort of stuff, that would have to reduce the premium sound when you're looking at cyber insurance, is that right?
Jason: Exactly, there's always an element. But yeah, it's a contributing factor. And if its contributing factor is significantly more, the more risks you have, and the more people you have in your business the change in risks you have to consider. So, you can imagine the risk that are reduced down for a 10-person practice or whatever it might be, versus 100 would be significantly less. And it also depends on the nature of the business and everything else as most insurances would factor in.
Josh: If we look at like toll, toll recently, and in Australia was under a bit of heat with their hack and it came through a phishing email, for anyone out there that doesn't know what that is, is when someone sends an email pretending, they look like someone else. And then they asked for some coin and they sometimes do it, it might not be like, hey, send money to this Bitcoin address, I have your nudes. That's a very common one, but a lot of the time be more like, congratulations, you've just qualified for a business bonus, as long as you just fill out this form, and it comes from your director, your KPIs had being met appropriately, or whatever it is, and it looks quite legitimate if they've been doing something that's been a targeted attack. With toll hack, what could they have done differently? And what can we learn from that? From your perspective, what could they have done differently to remove the immediate problem as well as the overall not being hacked? Or at least having something there to fall back on?
Jason: Good question, and what I’ll do is give you an example for part of that using what I do myself in my own business, because it's easy to explain how you've mitigated your own risks. A lot of businesses aren't taking cyber threats too seriously and that's just ridiculous. Australia is at a high risk in Cyber because of this. In my practice, we started with a quarterly, it's about biannual now, review of the cyber risks and everything that's involved. We've got a cyber risk manual and what's expected. And we also run systematic tests that we don't tell the staff.
Josh: Phishing simulators and stuff like that?
Jason: Exactly, phishing simulators. Exactly. We essentially have sporadic phishing emails sent to staff just to see what they do. And it's disappointing that I would say a high percentage maybe 10% - 20% would actually fail sent phishing but what that enables is a conversation with that person and identifies that they need further education around these risks.
Josh: Do you give training and stuff like that after that's been found? Like you're obviously analyzing and have the data to be able to see this person could done whatever they didn't from there, yeah?
Jason: Exactly. I might do part of the training myself. Some of my team will do part of it. I also educate my staff to obverse how I sound in my communication. If it doesn't sound like how I communicate in my words, isn’t logical in what I'm asking, is what I’m asking out of the business norm and if it is then don’t respond etc. Worst case, if they’re unsure, get on the phone and speak to me or speak to the Practice Manager. And it's about that education. It's about how many steps we can put in place to make sure it doesn't break or fail. So that's something that a larger organization definitely needs to do, they definitely need to assume that their staff will make mistakes because they are human, and test those mistakes to see who is making mistakes and at what levels and where you might need to educate. Because you can imagine a phishing simulator around cyber can globally be applied at a very low cost, at a very low cost compared to the impact.
Josh: Sent to thousands of emails.
Jason: Exactly, exactly. Compared to the impact that that one failure could potentially make. Using a recent example with TOLL. Their huge mistake cost millions upon millions upon millions of dollars. So that would be one of the key cyber takeaways that just gobsmacked me that, a dozen, a dozen major cyber hacks, right, it gobsmacked me actually that an organization like TOLL hasn't implemented something like that. But at the same time, it doesn't surprise me because the larger the organization, the more things get lost and the slower things move. There's also an element of embarrassment as well as it goes up the chain. This kind of embarrassment is actually not as bad as some of the Scandinavian countries which are very chain of command minded where they want to follow suit from the top, and they're not encouraged to identify errors and mistakes, which is why Volkswagen got themselves in a bit of a heat and it's also on.
Josh: This is on the carbon monoxide output on the vehicles.
Jason: Exactly. Which they actually knew about years ago but no one ever explained it because it was going against what the top dog wanted to do. You can even trace this type of mentality to why Nokia phones failed.
Josh: I'm pissed off, I can't change my phone cover anymore. It sucks!
Jason: T he good old Nokia phone that you could throw against the wall and pick it up and put it back together and it still works.
Josh: And last five days on a battery.
Jason: Exactly. But going back to the issues, there's an element that you have to address from a culture perspective. You have to encourage reporting if there are breakages to report. This means people don't get penalized for reporting, if they are then they won't report. that's a key thing. From a cultural perspective, TOLL could have done better. From a systems and operations, TOLL could have done better. How you handle the media, also TOLL could have done better. So, to de-risk a situation, there are specialists who organisations deal with and predominantly PR, but they might have a mix or organisations who help you identify risks of certain conversations and everything else. You know, one of the scenarios that we saw that was highly impacted in Queensland, especially southeast Queensland, was Dreamworld with the impact caused by a lack of maintenance and then everything else that followed.
Josh: You're talking about like three years ago. Yeah, yep. Yep. So anyone else that's listening in overseas that happens to be here, Dreamworld, local theme park that had a bit of an issue with a lack of maintenance and some of the processes, it might have just been a few series of unfortunate events paired with lack of maintenance and lack of training, but there was a rough River Rapids ride that flipped over and it killed four parents, wasn't it? Is that right?
Jason: Yeah, i t killed four people. There was a brother and sister you know, a mother or something and a father. It shouldn't have happened. The ride flip diver and essentially crushed them and it was a very tragic event. Looking back and reflecting from a risk point of view, there were risks everywhere in that scenario. We're talking about a listed company here too. There was a risk where the head of group was essentially bleeding cash out of the business from a daily basis that maintenace wasn’t allowed/maintained. They should have just cut off the couple of failed businesses. They weren't even treating the business itself as a separate business unit. In relation to the media, I know for a fact the PR company that they initially engaged resigned because they (Dreamworld) wouldn't follow their advice. And this is the same risk that TOLL made with the media. They actually engaged but they chose not to listen, and then their PR company decided to eject as fast as they possibly can, because it's a reflection on them as well.
And there was a number of highly critical issues when speaking with the media about certain aspects. Giving themselves a bonus of millions of dollars a week later from the incident, just a bunch of really … really bad decision making. For you and me speaking, Joshua, and all the listeners would just go what? How stupid can you be … and this comes down to a bit of greed. So, there's a range of different factors.
Josh: Do you think they had like a certain level of god-factor like they've put themselves above what they think is the rules and the law and they've sort of put them into god mode? Why do you think that they made the decisions? Because that way in our boat at some stage, if you at the theme part, I don’t know most of our listeners don't know the theme park, but they must have had some level of normalcy in their life, most people to go okay, how do I look at this and understand that it's going to turn to this. Surely, there's got to be a certain time or a spot where you think, okay, this is your shit decision. What happens? Like what do you think through that hit? Obviously, this isn't obviously what you do. You're not a psychologist, but like, what do you think happened?
Jason: I could probably draw on some of my education as well as some of my consulting from corporate finance days where I actually put a value on who (people) to keep in the business from a culture perspective, and this comes back to the business norms. A culture is set by business norms. You (as an owner) might say this is our culture, these are our values, but if you don't practice them, then the people inside the business set business norms. And although we might be very highly surprised these sorts of decisions are made, to them (the culprits), it's only a little incremental difference compared to what their normal it might be. It can explain a lot of things with, you know, some of the famous collapses and really corrupt things in the finance world that occur, including Enron in the US. We kind of look at Enron and go ‘how the hell were these people able to essentially destroy people's lives’ and hold a state (in the USA) ransom for their electricity? This comes back to what their business norms are. If you get encouraged or rewarded for making decisions, that sets a new norm.
Heading back to the Dreamworld accident and lack of any maintenance program. They cut the maintenance program to save some cash. The person who just created some extra cash as a reward, the board gives them some of that cash back and as an addition to this reward, they also get promoted. This now sets a shift in the expectations of the business. And the more this type of action occurs, the more normalised it becomes. And when something serious happens, the review the normal in their heads and say ... well, this is the normal, this is what is expected in my world. Everyone else is in my world. So, the impact is not going to be that great. And then they get surprised that the community essentially smashes them for their behavior. And they're like, but I'm just doing what I've been doing for the last however many years, and I'm entitled to that money. And it's just because these business norms that the culture is so disconnected from the community.
Taking another slight side tangent, as business owners, we need to engage in the community. There's almost an element of obligation, not just for Australian owned businesses, but for businesses and across the globe as well. Businesses actually survive because we (the people) allow them to participate in the business community for particular cultures.
We need to make sure that those types of cultures are engaged with the community and that they’re giving back to the community. The more that you (as a business) shut that window and just focus purely on a couple of variables around money and greed, and other things as well, the more disconnected you’re going to be and the higher risks that will bottle within the business. And that applies across the board. I've seen these issue sit in start-up businesses and they actually have a higher impact on culture and the community when compared to a larger business. If the culture is bad, is actually easier to transform larger businesses culture than a smaller business. And the mid-range businesses have the greatest impact because they're still somewhat nimble, but they can transform. This is just an element of risk in a business itself, and cybersecurity is just another component, while key person risk is another element.
Josh: It’s a big one for me actually. When I first started my business, I was the key person, and getting key person insurance for yourself as a business owner as a fuzzy income, let's call it a fuzzy income. If you're reinvesting your money, you could be earning $10 or $10 million. But if you're reinvesting the whole load into your business, and you have no income, then what are you worth and where do you sit with your insurance, and so it becomes a bit of a fuzzy income. And the key person, you can't really get key person, you can correct me, but you can't really get key person for yourself when you're doing this with your income because you're investing into something that you can see as someone who's going to be working.
Jason: You can actually insure the key person if they are the business owner; you just have to understand what impact they have and what price this equates to. It’s the same for anyone in a business, you can insure any key person … it’s just a matter of cost.
Josh: Okay. So see if I ran a business and I was like a Pty Ltd registered and set up myself as the employee, and I'm just making up a scenario now, but let's say I earned $85,000 a year $80,000 a year just underneath the next tax, that’s $70,000-ish. I mean, I tell everyone, I don't know if that's exactly right now and if you're listening in the future, it might be changed. Anyway so $90,000, if I'm under the $90,000, I say I'm earning that, I'm paying the tax on that but I'm earning nothing, okay, I'm actually earning nothing I'm just able to pay the tax. And then I have some big issue where … and the key person in the business collapses. If the business never actually turned over but paid the tax what is the insurance yet?
Jason: Well, you have essentially lied on your application. In this case you're not actually insured, even though you're paying for insurance, and best case they might just refund you.
Josh: So the insurance is against the money that comes, not the money that you've paid tax on.
Jason: No, no. You have to be truthful on an insurance policy. And if you're not truthful, they can deny the policy itself. if you're not actually earning that, and the business can't pay that about, then your key person insured amount and what you've actually said is a lie. There's an element that if you're taking out insurance, you got to be truthful, because if you're not truthful, they can deny the insurance, and there's no point of taking out insurance in the first place. That's a key thing for the listeners. Separate to that, you've got to define what type of insurance and what risks you're trying to alleviate.
Josh: Yeah, of course.
Jason: Looking at it, there's business disruption insurance, which is if something outside of the norm that disrupts the business, but you've still maintained all the key people, that's business disruption, noting this excludes pandemics. But that's when the government would step in. And we're lucky in Australia that we have a government that can support us versus other countries. .
Josh: Bloody Oath, Mate.
Jason: That's it. That's it. We're just lucky to be Australians.
But separate to that, a key person insurance is if … let's just say, Josh, you run an IT business, right? You run at least at an IT business. You also have other businesses, but let's just focus on your IT business. Your family essentially owns that business with you, right?
Josh: Yep. My emotions are impacted, and their emotions are impacted by my business. So absolutely, we're all together in this.
Jason: That's correct. But there's an element that your family owns that business. What happens tomorrow if you were in a car crash, and you died, unfortunately, what would happen to your family? If you've got life insurance, they'll get the life insurance, but nothing else. That’s a risk in itself, right. Hopefully your insurance will cover everything your family needs to survive without you to some degree. They can't replace you, but they can at least financially survive without you.
Josh: If I'm a workaholic. That's all I am, anyway. So, it's fine.
Jason: Yeah, well that's it, that's it. Imagine now there are other people in the business, right. We’re now talking about other livelihoods, not just yourself, you're just the owner. You could be an employee, but you're the owner. What happens to them? They essentially lose their job.
Josh: Our business right now have 12 employees, for instance.
Jason: Exactly. So, all 12 employees are pretty much stuffed, right?
Josh: Absolutely.
Jason: To some degree, the business will just completely explode. If you had key person insurance, an element maybe protected depending on how its shaped. The business could survive because it’s protected. But then the issue shifts to who owns the business after. Does the executor of your estate get involved? if it's a sole owner situation, the insurance proceeds inject into the business may help the business survive until they are able to find someone who has similar skill sets. The business may not be able to survive in the same sense, but it has the ability to survive.
Now, imagine the same situation but with two partners. So key person insurance is more to insure the person and business disruption is more to insure for the outside of norm that might happen that's not a pandemic or force of nature or something like that, right? Which is highly unlikely. Except in Australia, apparently, we've had floods, fires, droughts, and Corona Virus. Exactly. All in the last decade.
Josh: Jump into the Old Testament and look at what's going next and read it forward. It's just crazy, isn't it?
Jason: Exactly, exactly.
Jason: I’ve seen in situations after the fact. Not in my case, because I always made sure my clients actually got these sorts of things lined up or else, they won't be clients for too long. And that's just, you know, you either want to follow my advice or you don't.
Josh: You’re there for a reason. If no one's listening, what's the point? It's the same as me, like, people aren't listening to the advice we're giving. What's the point of having us here?
Jason: I’m there for a reason. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So where I'm going to lead into is by selling insurance. Let's just say you're still in the business but you bring on another partner, and you are 50∕50. Something happened to that partner, and it's worth money in the business and they're 50%, but their estate essentially holds a 50 percent ownership of the business and you can't legally make decisions to some or some decisions because you need voting rights and there's an equal voting right to make a decision on some instances. Day to day you might be able to still operate, but you might be subject to being shackled for bigger decisions or essentially shaping the business where it needs to go or just continuing to operate. I've seen a scenario where an ex-wife from six years ago and I got involved after the fact of essentially-
Josh: Divorced for six years, done, legally done.
Jason: Legally done. I got involved to essentially sort it out. I'm sorry, I apologise to the listeners, the shit fight that essentially unfolded. An ex-wife who should have been removed from the estate, challenged the estate and essentially tried to control the business to get as much money as she could. If they had proper buy-sell agreements in place, what would happen is the business would be valued at arm's length, then a chunk of money would exit to the estate and the business would just operate without that partner as if they just got ejected from the business. In this scenario, the business could survive, and that is an element of risk when you have business partner, or multi partners. Think about whether something happened to your fellow partner/s, what would the impact be on the business, would it survive? This is your asset as well as their family's asset.
Josh: I can say comfortably, my business has been running, when you pointed it out, it has been running for 13 years. And over the 13 years, I had a partner for a while and then not to my want, that all felt fell apart, as a lot of our listeners already know. And when that happened, did that impact the serviceability of our clients? Absolutely. Did it impact the quality of the return on work? Absolutely. Now, would I have been a better person had it then not happened? Absolutely. It all comes down to what are you doing in your life and how does your life affect the business and when you are a business owner, they can absolutely affect.
If you guys have been interested in this and you've loved it, make sure to jump across to iTunes and leave us some reviews and we'll speak to you soon. Stay good.
Staying Efficient in Business With Sarah Stein
Josh: Gday everyone out there in podcast world. We've got Sarah from Miss Efficiency. We're going to be talking today about how recession-proof your cash flow through efficiency in business. Sarah actually wrote a pretty cool white paper on how to remove paper from your business, which, I guess a bit of an interesting way of looking at it. So Sarah, in business, people are freaking out in business at the moment. If you're still in business, hopefully, what would you say is the number one way to stay efficient, and make sure that you keep your head on the right numbers?
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Sarah: So Josh, I think it comes down to the systems that you put in place, and that is, a lot of the time it's the technology that you put in, but there are lots of other things outside of technology that you can do as well. So you know, there's so much technology out there, it can be very overwhelming and we can get overwhelmed with the choice. And then you can get overwhelmed with, you know, jumping at the next shiny thing all the time. So constantly, you're putting new things in place just because it's new and does some whiz-bang thing. But what you might have had already. I think we all are. And I have to pull myself back and think, hang on a second, do I actually need it? It's like anything like, do we need it? Do we need the new car is our current car doing exactly what we need it to do? And it's still safe and you know, it's the same with the technology in your business. So I think when thinking about the systems that you want to put in place in your business, go right back to basics, and map it out on paper. Map out what your objective is like what you actually want to get out of it. And then once you've got that mapped then you'll know which technology to put in place because your map is going to be your guide. So I think there are a few key ones. There's a lot of personal preference because a lot of technology does the same thing. You've got your MIB, Xero and QuickBooks, for example, like I prefer Xero. But there's pros and cons with all of them.
So I think to have really good accounting software in place, and then something really good to keep track of your workflow depending on what your businesses and then something to keep track of your customers, and your leads, and, you know, CRM, if you like so that you can keep in front of everybody. So to answer your question, map it out, and then decide what you need. And then, you know, it can evolve and grow from there. It doesn't mean that because you've decided on this today, that's how it needs to stay forever. It just evolves as your business needs change.
Josh: You're talking before about do you need this card? Do you need an upgraded car? Is this car fine? I'm guilty of being fooled, I'm going to use the term “fooled” into selling a perfectly good car to make sure that the image that I was representing was what was required by the business and it made no difference at all. No one cared about my car whatsoever. I dropped out a perfectly good car that was perfectly functional, the four-wheel-drive that I still have now is still perfectly fine and functional. But oh, man, what a ripoff. Just coming back to like what you need in your business. And what is the tech that would be good to check out. You told me the different accounting packages, obviously. You touched on some bits and bits about leads versus customers and stuff, which we'll talk about in a bit. But what is the good tech to check out?
Sarah: I would say talk to your bookkeeper or your best agent, but you know, you've ruined that, you've ruined that. I think in this instance, cars aren't really our forte. But I think definitely talk to the people who are experts in using it. Do some research. Don't do too much research online because there's too much information. I know if I go online, yeah, there's just too much and it's too overwhelming. And it's like, that's all too hard. I'm not going to do it. Talk to other business owners that you know. So I had a phone call today from a client who was with a friend of theirs who is in a different business to them. So all my clients are on Xero and the friend of theirs was on MIB. And he was having trouble and he was thinking about converting over. So my client got me on the phone, we had a three-way conversation and you know, I could give them some information about MIB and Xero and a few other bits and pieces. So talk to other business owners that you know who are friends because they have a vested interest in it. So they are going to tell you the truth. And it's good to get in You know, other people's perspective, like how we would use Xero for my existing client would be different to how we would have used it for this other business owner.
So definitely do your research. But I think, also come in prepared with the knowledge of what you need. So coming back to my scenario before about mapping out what you need. Think about what your current processes are, and evaluate what's manual, what's electronic, what's taking you the most time, what's the thing that you push around your desk the most before you realize, you know, you actually have to do it now. And then think about what your workflow is, what you would like it to be if there's something that you want to be able to do that your current systems don't allow you to do, to have a really good idea of what your needs are. So then when you talk to an advisor, they can say, okay, well based on that, this is what we would suggest to put in place, and based on what your needs are. We have a conversation with people to try and find out what they are currently doing what they would like to do and where they see their business in a few years’ time because maybe what's going to work for them. Now, that might not work in five years’ time. So if we don't think about the bigger picture, you might be doing the wrong thing.
So do some research, educate yourself have a clear idea of what you want to get out of the system. And then you can have a really good conversation with an accountant or agent who can help you then put it into place.
Josh: That makes a lot of sense. And I know that when I started the business, I decided I'm going to learn everything and I'm going to be the person who wears all the hats and develop the software that worked exactly as I wanted to. I hated the idea of bookkeeping myself, and so I learned everything I could about it, so that I could try and do it in an automated way. I ended up just spending too much time making this software instead of working in the business. Fast forward 12, 13 years we've got fantastic options out there like Xero, mostly online products that do 95% of the reconciliation. And as long as you've got the good bookkeepers in there that can make sure that when there is an anomaly, they're picking up on that and striking that out and making sure that they bring the attention to and fixing it. And we're in a better world now than when I first started building all this stuff out.
One thing that I have found, though, is that we introduce into our software stack a better way to manage inbound leads and making sure that we were able to see if people were interested in our services. We’re making sure we're able to see what stage they are at, which is a very different kettle of fish to a lot of the managing an existing customer that's already spending money with you that you're making an invoice and doing service with. When it comes to that, do you differentiate? Or do you see a reason to differentiate between prospects leads and customers?
Sarah: So when I first started my business, I was a very good bookkeeper. And I had to learn that I had to be a better business person, because it didn't matter how good I was at, you know, bookkeeping. If I was a crap business person, then I was going to have a crap business. So I had to learn all of these things very, very quickly, and it was a very steep learning curve. And I'm by no means the expert. So, I don't really differentiate leads and prospects. I just think that either clients or soon to be clients. And that's it. And I am quite, I don't know if basic is the right word, but I like to keep things simple. Because we were super busy and we're highly systematised and you know, there's a few of us in our team, we want to make sure it's easy for everybody to follow. And I think if you over complicate things, that's where, you know, cracks start to show. So we use a program called Active Campaign. I can't remember what the other is called. It's like the monkey is the logo. MailChimp. Yeah. So that was great. But all I did was send out the occasional newsletter, and it probably did a lot of things that I didn't do, but that was my failing rather than MailChimp’s failing. But then I moved into Active Campaign and I love Active Campaign. And as part of my onboarding process, like I have quite an extensive onboarding process, but Active Campaign drives a lot of that for me. So everybody goes into Active Campaign, I've got a download from my website. So once you download that, their information goes through. If people book online appointments with me, it goes through Calendly. Again, that automatically filters through to Active Campaign. So I think it's really important to capture a lot of this information, but it's really important to use the automation to do it for you, so that you can concentrate on the gold nuggets.
But one of the things that I do so I send out regular communications and with the recent COVID events, I was sending out lots of information because I'm conscious of not bombarding people with too much information, but during that period, there was a lot of stuff to get out. So I was sending just about an update out every couple of days, just about, and I got so many messages back saying, this is amazing, thank you so much for sending it through, it's really nice to be able to have this information come through and we don't have to, you know, try and find it and work our way through. And these are comments from people that aren't even my clients, you know, so that was really great.
Josh: The beautiful thing about that, like if you're producing that without like it, you're producing that and throwing bloody Aussie accent and I understand what you're blooming saying as opposed to some of the legislative legal crap you read on some of the government, nothing against the government websites, but you just read it you go, okay, why did Betty bend. Some of the examples I'm reading, this makes no sense. This is too hard.
Sarah: I think they try to make it so simple. They actually overcomplicate it.
Josh: Oh, absolutely. I had a look, and I read the sentence twice. And I thought, okay, I missed the comma on the first time, and it completely changed the meaning of the sentence. And I bought that to my account. And I said, How do you interpret this? And this was on one of the cash flow stimulus things. And he interpreted it in the polar opposite way that I did. And we ended up coming to a conclusion that yes, he'll do some more research and find out the answer for us like, you're exactly right. It can make it more complicated than what it would be helpful.
Sarah: Yes, yeah. But one of the really cool things just coming back to Active Campaign, which is one of the things that I love about it, is when I get a new client. So in the old days, I would send them an email because I'm very much a word skill. I will always say the name up before I pick up the phone, although COVID has changed that slightly, but in the old days, I would send a new client an email that was, if they'd printed it out, it would have been 15 pages long with all of the information that I thought that they needed to know. And you know, realistically I know that they're not going to read that, because who has time to read a 15-page email seriously. So one of the things that I've done in Active Campaign is part of, you know, a few other programs that I've got linked together when a new client comes on board. I haven't onboarding automation that triggers through Active Campaign. So as soon as they get the tag on their contact, if you like that they are now a client. This automation automatically triggers and it's basically that 15-page email drip feed out over a number of weeks. So it's not too much information for this client to read. And, you know, the very first email is basically saying welcome. And that's it, you know, it's like a couple of paragraphs, and that's it. Then the next day, they'll get one saying, this is what you can expect next. And that's it. Just, you know, there's images in it and it's nice and pretty and easy to read. Then a couple of days later, they'll get one that introduces them to the team. How they should communicate with us. And then three days later, they'll get one that shows them how to set up receipt bank. Within this time period, I'm working in their file and have set up receipt bank. So it's all really nice and seamless. And so it gets the information to the client that I need them to see. It gets delivered to them in a format that's easy for them to read. And it's just keeping those touchpoints. So the I think there's about 10 emails that they get delivered out over the course of six weeks. And by the end of it, you know, we might have done the best, we've pulled everything together. It's just a really nice introduction. I think that's the way that I intend for the relationship to be so that's how it starts. And it's setting some really nice groundwork at the beginning of the relationship.
Josh: Similar to what you said actually on this. I started off the same. I was fantastic at I could cure cancer for computers. But if that said on the show, it's not going to be any benefit to anyone. So I had to become better at marketing and better business in that sense. What you've said there, you've increased the amount of touchpoints, you've decreased the friction on them not reading the email saying I'll do that later, because it's too long. And I'll tell you right now, I've got two emails sitting there. He said, he's attached a Word document, he said, look on page four, section three, that's a bit of thing is going to be most interesting, but make sure to read the whole lot first. And I was like, ah, I've got other stuff to do. You've removed the friction, which is great. You've increased the touchpoints, which is great. You've built these all in an automated way, which means you're not sitting there having to do this or group it to them. Out of interest did you build it all out yourself?
Sarah: I’m a bit of a control freak. So I did do it myself. But I'm super proud that I was pregnant and I've had the baby in the end of it. There was this baby. It's like, yeah, look what I did. So it was very, very cool. I really, really enjoyed doing it. and it was completely outside of my comfort zone, but Active Campaign is amazing. I mean, they're American based. I think they have some, some support people in Australia, but they were just awesome. I did have a couple of little triggering issues. But I got onto the support team, and they helped me and that was just, it works brilliantly. So I've done a few of those now. So yeah, and I love Active Campaign.
Josh: You're preaching to the preacher, okay. Not a half years ago, and we started using Active Campaign thought it was absolutely the best thing since sliced bread. And it has just never ceased to amaze us. Every single part of it's amazing
Sarah: But some of your listeners that might be thinking, ah, that's just too hard. Or they might jump in and think, oh, you know, it's really, really complicated. It's really not. I'm someone who deals with technology every day, but I have my little comfort bubble as well. And so when I first started with Active Campaign, it was way outside my comfort zone. The person that put me on to Active Campaign, I said, you know, I'm a bit of a technophobe. And he's like, what do you mean? You are the biggest propellerhead I know. And I'm like, so funny but he would say that. But I didn't know it. I just was a little bit patient with myself and kind to myself, you know, I can work this out. And there are hundreds of people that will do it for you. If you want someone to maybe just build the bones of it for you. And then you're good to run with it. Yeah, I did it myself because it's a bit of that control thing. I think it's great and like I said, this heaps more that I could do with it, but this is working for me at the moment.
Josh: I think it's something everyone should be having in business. It is a lifesaver for us. My partner Sarah, her whole business is set up completely in Active Campaign. This podcast sounds like a commercial for Active Campaign. But her business, hair and makeup business from start to finish is completely Active Campaign. People come through on her website, she's able to see if they've clicked through from AdWords, she is able to see where their sources are, if they fill out a form, once they fill out the form and then sends them a welcome email and then a would you like to get a quote and then they fill out a few bits and pieces since them off a quote.
She's asleep watching and then they've already got a quote they've already got a tentative date in mind, she has a quick phone call with them, make sure that they're all happy to understand what they want. And there's nothing out of the ordinary that they're looking to get to this special day. Then after that automatically sends across into her calendar takes all the payments and sends out for review emails in bits and pieces later. She's managing a team of five staff, the meat and gravy that the most of it is all Active Campaign. So I think it's great and it's definitely a tool that makes businesses more efficient. I'm really happy to hear you using it. Something that when we talk to businesses a lot of time they're like, oh, what's Active Campaign. Oh no, we use MailChimp. It's fine. And from your perspective, when you took the leap, how would you for someone who is using MailChimp without throwing dirt at them, like, how would you say the differences between the two products? They're both great products, but they’re both different products.
Sarah: Okay, so I think it's like doing your accounts in Excel and then going to Xero. You know, they both give you the same outcome. They both do the same thing, you're tracking your expenses or whatever, but there's just, you know, it's just a lot prettier. It does an awesome job, it’s easier for you. There's less grunt work. And, I enjoyed it, I didn't mind MailChimp, it was easy for me to use, but literally, all I did was send newsletters, and I didn't do it very regularly. I was pretty useless at being regular. I didn't track any of the reporting. I'm pretty sure it does do some automation, but I didn't know about it and didn't know how to do it. And I was probably on the free version. So I didn't see the value in it, maybe if I was paying for it, I would have worked harder at it. So I don't think actually, it's an issue with MailChimp, it was a totally me issue. But then when I moved to Active Campaign, I just noticed all the bells and whistles that may or may not be in MailChimp. I think making the move to it, it had a mindset shift for me as well about okay, I've got to get serious and I've got to do this.
So I've been in business 18 years, I moved to Active Campaign within the last five years. So it just goes to show that you don't have to have all of your ducks in a row within the first year or two. And, they're constantly moving anyway. You know, sometimes I'll make a big change to my business or you know, there'll be a big shift, and there often is at various times and I often referred to myself, as you know, a 15-year-old startup or an 18-year-old startup Because it seems so new now because we've made such a big change. And it doesn't mean that necessarily you were doing things wrong before. It just means your business has changed and you've evolved with the way that you do things.
Josh: The Excel versus Xero analogy. I'm going to use again if that's okay with you, that's amazing, that's perfect. In my opinion, MailChimp is fantastic at making campaigns or newsletters. It's not fantastic at allowing for touchpoints and customer attention and interactions and seeing what they're doing on your website and how they're working with you and tagging and then integrating into other systems, and Active Campaign has its campaigns. And if you're comparing the two, Active Campaign’s campaign module versus MailChimp is what I'd say is about the same but it's just there's so much more in Active Campaign versus MailChimp.
But if anyone is interested actually in checking out a little bit more on how some of this automation can work, Sarah has got a little gift for you. And that's if you jump across to Missefficiency.com/book, you can jump on there. She's got the ability for you to check out how to save up to five hours, is that right of your workweek?
Sarah: Yes. So there's a free download on my website, which gives you the tools to be able to, say, five hours a week and your business. It basically comes back to systems and technology. And, that's all it is. I think you can be, anybody can build a great business that I think the fundamentals comes down to people, technology, and the systems that you put in place.
I've actually written a book, and like, it's not a download. It's an actual book, and it's all about systematising your business. It's called “Wow, I'm in Business... Your Journey From Overwhelmed to Organised”, and I did write it based on an experience that I had with a client. So one of the other programs we use is Dropbox, which you there's lots of other programs that are similar to that. That's just the one that we use. But I had a client, that's still a client, they own a pub in Central Queensland. And they've had it for a while. And the client rang me one day during the week and said, You know, I'm completely overwhelmed. I need you to come and just sort things out. And we'd already put in place Xero and you know, a few other bits and pieces and I'm like, Oh, okay. She says, you just have to come. So she booked me on a flight. And the next Friday, I was heading up there, and I spent the weekend there. They live about an hour and a half from the airport. So she'd come and pick me up and I had known her for a long time. She came and picked me up from the airport, and we were driving out there. And I could tell that she was super, super stressed and just wasn't herself, because I would always see her in Brisbane and you know, she's bubbly and bright, and yeah, I could tell that she was really, really stressed and overwhelmed. And anyway, I spent four days out there, and I didn't do a great deal.
So they've got a pub, a restaurant, a bottle shop and some cabin accommodation. We already had Receipt Bank and Xero. So I put in Dropbox so that she would have a place to store her information. I developed some forms for her staff so that she'd have employee packs. I developed some forms that could be used for bookings and accommodation. So we couldn’t put too much technology and because the internet up there is not always that great. So, I just did a few bits and pieces like that. I didn't think it was anything too major. It just seemed like common sense to me. But then when she was driving me back to the airport, she got out and she looked like a different person. It was literally like this huge weight had been lifted off her shoulder. And she told me, I'm so grateful to have you here and to do all of this stuff for me. I'm thinking, you know, I didn't really do a great deal but you know, and then as I was on the plane coming home, I'm thinking, you know, the transformation that I saw in her mindset and her presence and physically just within a few days of me doing something that I thought was kind of easy, got me thinking. By the end of my fight -it was about an hour and a half- I had basically written that book in my head. I was to take that overwhelm away and remember why you got into business in the first place, reignite that passion, because you can't put two systems and great things in place, if you are feeling burdened and bogged down.
So the first thing that the book talks about is reigniting that passion. And then we can talk about putting systems in place. There's lots of templates and bits and pieces that you can download from the website. But it was kind of life-changing for me as well because I sort of took for granted how easy it is for me, but it's not always easy for other people. But it's the same effect if I turn it around if I go into some buddies business where I'm needing help, I'm completely overwhelmed, but it's really easy for them. So yeah, that's what the book is about.
Josh: Well, I definitely think if anyone is interested in the book sounds like a great story that's I know I'm in the process of writing another book myself. One of my friends said, if you think reading books, try writing a book. What you said there is actually really, really good. Sometimes you have the knowledge and you take it for granted that everyone has that same knowledge and you've got these hidden gems that you help people out and they just overly grateful, and sometimes I felt I thought people were being like, taking the piss.
If anyone is looking for a bookkeeper who goes above and beyond and is 100%, not your ordinary book make sure you contact Sarah, Miss Efficiency, she's going to be able to help you out. And as you can already hear from a wonderful knowledge, she's stubborn enough to stick in there and make sure that she's putting in the right solutions for you. Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to go through before we finish off on the podcast?
Sarah: We've probably touched on some really good stuff. Maybe we'll save this for another occasion. But I think cash flow would be the next conversation to have that can take your business to the next level. And particularly in times like these, you know, who would have thought there would ever be, you know, a pandemic in our lifetime. If that doesn't make you realise how important good financial literacy is, then nothing will.
Josh: Probably save it for another time for the moment. It's own episode in its entirety, I think. But I really appreciate you coming on the episode and giving our listeners a bit of a view into the things that you do.
Sarah: Thank you for having me.
Josh: If anyone has any questions, make sure to jump across to miss efficiency.com.au, and leave us some love. If you have any comments and reviews for us, make sure to jump across iTunes. Leave us some love. Give us some feedback. And everyone, stay well out there with the COVID around the place and stay healthy.
The Business Data Revolution With Emily Ridley
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. I've got Emily from Emerge Advisory and she's going to be talking today about the data revolution and is your business ready. And it's probably one of the more interesting times that we've been living for anyone that's alive, in the amount of things that have changed, with pandemics, and businesses closing down or accelerating and going all over the place. So I guess, Emily, tell me a bit about what you can do to make sure that your business is ready?
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Emily: Hi, Josh. So it's really all about using the tools that available already and using them to your best advantage. So having the right tech and having the right app stack is absolutely crucial. So it's about finding out how you want to do your business. And there will then be a system or a process or an ease to make that digital and bring it to a wider audience, and using remote circumstances that we've all, you know, enjoyed recently and making that happen, but making that work for you so that you're getting the best out of your business and your best business is going to your clients.
Josh: Yeah, that makes sense. So like, I guess, I know myself when we started out in business, we're using QuickBooks, and I'm not going to say that any products better than another, it was an application that I wasn't comfortable using. And I'm in the IT field. I wasn't comfortable using SSL. There's too many bells and whistles and things that I can click in here that are going to do something that they shouldn't. And a lot of the time you have this stuff with it using for years and years and years. And now we're not using QuickBooks, we’re on Zero. But we used to suffer for years and years and you might not be using it properly or to the best of your ability. And I know that a couple of packages that were introduced to would be now 18 months ago, two years ago, Receipt Bank, I thought is an amazing way of speeding up your process for any of your bookkeeping stuff that people should be using if they're not aware of it, and then obviously making sure that you've set up their appropriate rules and reporting so that you have that information coming out of Zero, if that is the product you're using, or whatever the product you’re using. Tell people a bit about Receipt Bank and other tools that you know that might be useful for them to consider if they're not to make sure that they are embracing the data revolution as they should?
Emily: Yeah, sure. So Receipt Bank, Hooked Up, Easy Bills. They're all very similar applications. It's a matter of finding the right user interface for you. Zero now owns hooked up. So it's now free in most business subscription. So it's that minute in itself is an amazing way of wanting to adopt a service. And basically what that does is it just takes all the legwork out of doing data entry, particularly for you spend money transactions or your accounts payable. You take a photo or you forward on an email. It goes into the system, the software I use is OCR, it actually reads that receipt. So it understands the day the tax implications, the vendors, and it will then on the first instance, it will ask you where to code that in your chart of accounts integrated with your accounting software. But it's machine learning, and it constantly wants to follow what you do and how you spend your money. So it will learn it. Caltex, for example, is always fuel and it will learn that. Telstra is always telephone and it will learn that. Aegon is always energy bills. And so as you take the photo, that seamless data entry then goes all the way through into your accounting software. You pay your bill. Now if your bank account and if you use an accounting software, my own Zero, QBL now, that's got live data bank feeds, it will just find a match that transaction. So your actual input into our case in that transaction where it needs to go is as in depth as taking a photograph and then pricing okay, at the other end of the software, it's quick, it's efficient, it's easy, and it gives you more time to spend on your business rather than in your business doing all the stuff that, you know, traders hate to do bookkeeping, that's essentially what this is.
Josh: It’s digitising their shoebox of receipts that they given at the end of the month. I'm pretty pedantic with the way that I still do stuff. But I'd imagine that you have these half failure receipts in their car inside on their hot dashboard, and they're all stuffed, and it's easy just to jump onto it and take a photo of it.
Emily: It really is, as you put in the keys in the ignition of your vehicle, snap that photo and it's as quick as that. And then you can throw that receipt either in gold box or even better, you can throw it in the bin and completely accept digital copies that don't fade and they don't get coffee spilt all over them and they don't get lost. Yeah, it's a really efficient way of having all year, and all your accounts in order, particularly at this time of year when people are getting everything together for the end of tax time.
Josh: I completely agree and everyone should be jumping onto that.
Emily: Actually, it's free if there's software's built in. There's some amazing services out there. And like I said managing your accounts payable is just one but there's also for managing job management. Again, for traders there's Tradify and service may, which will do your task management, your staff management, your time sheets, and your invoicing all in one place as well. So it means at the end of the day, all your jobs are done, and they're in your accounting software, you don't have to finish your day of work, and then come back and sit down and do your bookkeeping. You can actually sit there in the garden with a beer or watch the footy when it's back on TV.
Josh: Perfect. Having that time to yourself should be time yourself and a lot of business owners when they jump in there, they think oh, I'll have to work 40 hours a week I could do this bit I'm going to be earning more money, and then then they realise that they have all list of administration stuff that is zero dollar tasks, they're sitting there doing an entering stuff and it just takes them a hell of a lot more time than what it would have otherwise. So these little hints and tips definitely helped. We've got a lot of clients using another product called sim Pro, which is a fantastic product, not that I'm plugging their brand, but I noticed that when you're going through the different ones, I was like, oh, that's one that we that we use quite a bit. With the data Revolution, the way that data moves between systems has changed a lot over the years. And I've noticed more and more now as people are using Zero, I can set it up so that that invoice automatically sends to Zero when they send it to my email so that way, it can be transcribed without even have to go through services such as hub dock. If you've got somebody sends you an invoice doesn't integrate with Zero directly, you can pretty much do anything with hub dock, even if it's a multi page invoice and whatnot. Is that right?
Emily: That is correct. Yeah. So and it's a filing system. So unlike receipt bank, where the invoices come in, they're dealt with and then they go to archives which then becomes its own digital shoe box really, inside of a hub dock, every Telstra invoice will go to the Telstra folder, every origin invoice will go to the origin folder. Both systems have what they call a fetch service now. So if you have an online account for origins, Telstra, and some of the really big suppliers that you use on a regular basis, it will actually go and get those invoices and statements for you. So you don't need to upload them at all.
Josh: I'm learning stuff everyone guys, that's awesome. I'm going to be making sure to set that up. Because sometimes, it's just … the time that you spend is taking it from one system to another and it can be quite frustrating. How does that work if your suppliers overseas or you've got a non-GST items, or what would be a good for instance, just a software subscription service for a company server in America, is that something you just set the rule up once? And they have to go through email or is the fetch service purely Australian Base. So how does that work?
Emily: So the fetch service was actually started in Canada, hub dock was originally a Canadian company. And so there are a huge number of global enterprises on the firm that range from European base, to Asian base, to Australasian and yeah, and the Americas as well. So it's incredible the amount of scope that you do have, certainly all the big hitters that you'd expect around there the global entities because one it's machine learning and two, actually the OCR, they actually reads the receipt, it picks up whether or not it's GST, or whether it's nil value GST, so if you're in Australia and you've got an invoice that's got VAT on it or New Zealand GST, it will pick that up and bring that in as a nil balance, because it understands the difference between what's required in Australia and essentially what's not a GST code.
Josh: That's cool. One of the tricky ones that I always know I end up doing manually is when I get the car. They have to break down this the stamp duties and offices instead of the CTP elements and everything else, does it deal okay with that sort of stuff?
Emily: See, if you set the roll up once so that your department of Main Roads comes in and you want to separate that one line item into two line items. So you've got your GST component, your GST free component so that it adds up the amount payable. Once you set that at once then yeah, it will read it at rego but it is difficult for in the first instance because there's always two numbers on it. It's asking you do you want to be six months or 12 months? So generally, it would still flag up and say what exactly what do you want me to do with this but it will try and preempt that as much as possible. So essentially, you're just an answer it whether or not you want to split. So we will split the invoice into two components but because you've set the rules to do that, but it will ask you which figure is the final closing figure, which one's going to match your bank statement, essentially.
Josh: Cool. Well, we're talking about integrations. Obviously, that's what we've been touching on a lot. And like the eight year has a whole bunch of different rules and regulations and bits and pieces. And they have built a few really cool integrations with Zero that has been helping out with a lot of like the job keeper stuff with some of their calculators just help make everyone's life a little bit easier. What have you seen that they've been doing lately that have really been helping with some of their integrations to the way that the systems work?
Emily: With the ATO? [Yeah] As much of about the ATO on a regular basis. The ATO has done some amazing things, the unimaginable things. And in the last three months, it's system software programs that just did not exist and weren't on anybody's workflow to exist at any time. And now they’re here. So the job keeper lodgement process is about as simple as it can be in order to be effective. Today’s the first of June so we're now able to lodge our may declarations. I've already done 19 today, so I've sent them out, I've got them back signed using electronic signatures. And I've just digitally entered that into the ATO portal. So it's all launched and confirmed. Now my clients can expect to receive their payments in about four or five working days from there. That in itself is a long, long way from where we were just even seven weeks ago when we were trying to work out what the legislation around job keeper was. So the fact that they're they're taken on board advice from accounting software providers such as Zero and it also from you know, the taken advice as well from industry.
So I know Matthew Addison, who is the director for the Institute Certified Bookkeepers, for example, the ICB had an awful lot of say, and an awful lot of to kind of relay messages from what it's like to be the end user trying to manage these workflows, trying to manage this legislation, trying to get this data from our clients to the ATO as quickly as possible to get this money move in and be where it needs to be. So yeah, what we considered was a luxury 12 or 13 weeks ago is now going to be, I feel, part of our everyday new normal. This just allows for a huge amount of new data, new business calculations, new information. Every business owner in Australia, I think this becomes the beginning of a new revolution. And like I said, for the new normal, and I think at some point, every business and every industry is going to benefit from it. I think the opposite here are amazing. What we can do in a tiny amount of space and how much data we've got available tools to do that.
Josh: You hit the nail on the head there when you're pushed into a spot that you have no other place to go but forward. They've definitely done wonders with the time that they've had. And I think it’s shown a lot of people how they can work remotely and how they can achieve big things. Like I'd love to say that all businesses always keep their books up to date. But I think you would know better than me that that's a big fallacy.
Emily: Yeah, it's not realistic at all. But it can be so much easier than some businesses allow themselves to believe. It can be so much by bringing in automation, by bringing in systems and services that help rather than hinder. By taking away a lot of data entry or duplication. A lot of businesses can be more up to date than they realise, and a lot faster. And they can use that information in ways they've never been able to use it before. I think it gives a huge amount of opportunity for now for businesses to explore things that they never thought that they wanted or needed, but what they're going to see is essential in a very short amount of time. Things like budgeting and cash flow forecasting and data management and making those decisions with that it's all possible without too much disruption to your day to day work in life.
Josh: I think ultimately the big thing that's going to have changed with this is businesses that might have been getting everything in just by the deadline are now being rewarded. To make sure that as you pointed out on the on the first of each month, while job keeper is available, everything is ready to go reconciled and on point so that they're making better business decisions and with enough repetition over time, that should become conditioned to be ongoing past when the job keeper disappears, hopefully. Is that what you think's going to happen? Or do you think people will start to slip off afterwards?
Emily: No, I don't think people will start to slip. I think because having this information in this real time data in this world today is knowledge, and I think knowledge is power, and it gives you the power to manage your business in a in a whole new light and a whole new way. I think that compliance is a sidestep, it's something that is going to be available to you to do much quicker. But for me, using that information to your advantage, not necessarily the ATO advantages you know it's data that's it's your business, it's your livelihood, it's your growth and your development. And you can absolutely do some amazing things if you have that knowledge and you have that power.
Josh: We're going to make the right decisions and you're able to see how much am I buying of something? What am I doing with something? How efficient is the team? How efficient is my buying power and make better decisions? Is it a good idea to maybe set up an account I know myself? One of the things that have come to light for us over the last few months, we've had an account with two major IT suppliers in Australia, and I was looking through only because we changed bookkeepers and I was looking through, and I went, we've got a lot of transactions here, that's from the same company. And so we've made the decision to set up accounts with a few different companies. And that will now mean that there's less bookkeeping, less backwards and forwards, faster response times for our customers. But it's only after really having that data to be able to see that and be able to make that decision that will ultimately give a better customer experience for our customers because they're not waiting for credit cards to clear the audit things instead of the way out straight away. And it means less reconciliation, so better experience for bookcases and easier for us to sort of rummage through everything. So it can't be anything bad happening from this change. And it's just about everyone getting ready to do it. For a lot of people in through the state of depression, we've got businesses that we work with, they're at 450% at the moment versus when they went into COVID.
Emily: That's an amazing story and quite an extreme perspective. But I do believe that though, I think that from a bookkeeper and accountant perspective, I'd, again, never been busy and never done so many hours on the phones with the ATO, catch up legislation, do the data entry that's needed for all the new compliance around shopkeeper and cash flow and boost and other stimulus packages. But, it's, yeah, so it certainly has given a rise to like a new normal. And what you were saying though about the data that you've got access to so with the date to the transactions that you've been able to see you can actually see there in real time what you're spending with those suppliers, which gives you, you know, power to negotiate terms. It can, you know, a five cent save and goes directly into your back pocket on your bottom line for your profits and that money is much better off in your pocket than in your supplier’s pocket. So it's huge what you can do with a tiny little bit of information and how far that can take you. It's an amazing concept that I hope to be able to offer to an awful lot of customers moving forward, to sit down with them and say, this is the data you have, and these are the opportunities that you have with that-
Josh: It’s data in, data out as they say, you can't make a decision if you don't have good data going in. And you do an amazing job at making sure that people are having the best quality data going into they can make the best decisions with their budgeting, forecasting and making sure that they're doing the voodoo that they do well and are able to continue doing that and as you said. I can see some trends, one of the ones that my partner saw was, she has a hair makeup business, was if she was to purchase all the items that she purchased over 12 months, just the core items that she's purchasing quite regularly in one bulk amount and they're all things that don't have a shelf life, she would have been able to have a 15% advantage. I said well that sounds like a good idea. As long as they're not things that are going to sit on the shelf for 10 years, you're never going to use them but without data, you won’t be able to see that, you wouldn't be able to make that decision. So where do you think the data revolution is going? Where do you think businesses are going? We've always had these huge changes over the last three months, and there's going to be more changes. What are the things that businesses should have in place that already exist? And where do you think it's going? It’s the doozy question.
Emily: It is, isn't it? I don't know, to be honest, I don't know where this is going. I don't know the end of this is, I cannot know what the end of the internet is, and I don't know, you know what the end of the universe is. I know that the opportunity is immense. And I think that there is a huge amount of opportunity for development, for growth, for profit increase for every industry out there based on the back of this. I think that the digital revolution is absolutely going to change permanently, the way that we work and the way that we interact, but what's going to be more important than any of this is then that human interaction at the end of it. We're going to want to talk and know the people that we're dealing with, rather than just having an ether of mindless data and send out things like you know, like your accountant will send you out your financial statements at the end of the year, which is just pages and pages of numbers. But without having a conversation about what that means and what you can do with that information, it's kind of lost its purpose. So, where do I think this is going, I think this is going to bring those closer together by making us work further apart. I honestly do believe that. But I also think that Australia is going to be a big player in the global economy on the back of this. I think that we've got more power than we realise. We don't really have the internet speeds that we need, but we're getting there slowly. And I just think that we've got more voice that we believe that we have, I think we just need to be a bit more confident, a bit louder about who we are and what we can do with the data that we have. I think we've got some amazing tech out there that might just be a little bit lost because we consider a small Big Island and a small fish in a big world.
Josh: I think what you said there encapsulates it perfectly where automation does not mean not personalised, don't keep it robotic, keep the bits automated that you don't like doing and then the bits that you do like doing and making sure that you have that face to face time, you're able to use the data then see what people's numbers are doing. One of the things that we noticed in our business, so we do set price IT for everything and give unlimited support, and guaranteed uptime from that IT support each month. What we noticed when we started putting these in place was customers weren't having things break. So this was sort of what are we paying you for. And so you need to make sure that you're you had that relationship and you were still going and seeing them and you're making decisions with them on where the future of their business was going, and it let you have those better conversations because there wasn't fires that you're putting out. And that has definitely had the people that we're working with we've built better relationships with because they're also not look looking at the clock going, oh, man, you've got a pointing on my clock, anyone who's listening. He didn't, they're not worried about how much they're paying you per hour because they're able to sort of see the value that you're adding to them, and you're actually sitting down and listening. And so definitely, don't keep it robotic, just wish you've automated it, make sure you keep it personalised and keep that relationship because that's ultimately all we’re in business for is to work with people we like working with.
Emily: Absolutely. And it's that makes a good business a great business. And also the same way we charge up front fixed fees on everything. We don't have an hourly rate for anything at all. We're very open and honest about what we charge and we base our charges on outcomes. So what is it that the client gets out of it is how we manage our pricing around that.
Josh: That’s definitely a really good model. We're nearly at the end of the podcast here. Is there anything else that you'd like to cover off on?
Emily: I don't think so. Just recapping what we've said, it's just a really good time as we're, you know, moving through the COVID process, I guess as to as to what the outcome of that is actually going to be and what the new normal, essentially it's going to like at the end of this, I think it's just a really good opportunity to look at systems of businesses or processes and look at the changes that you've already had to endure over the last seven to 12 weeks and see where that can take you in the future, which I think is a really exciting opportunity to do that.
Josh: I think we're all walking in this game together and, and looking forward to see we get on the end. If anyone is looking for someone that's going to be able to give them some more advice, definitely reach out to Emily at Emerge Advisory. She's going to help you out and go through any of the details. Make sure you've got that data to make those decisions.
If you have enjoyed this episode, jump across to iTunes, leave us some love. Give us some feedback, give us a review and stay healthy and stay good.
This Is How Website Redirects Work
What are website redirects? Welcome to Business Built Freedom, where we squirt some sexy on very, very common business problems. Getting back to the topic, what are website redirects? The easiest way to explain it is kind of like when you move house and you redirect your mail from one spot to another, and that is in its simplest form. You get your mail, instead of going to one spot, it goes to another. Now, does it get there as quickly as it would have otherwise? Absolutely not. It needs to go through a couple of other handling things, and sometimes that costs extra money and all sorts. Website redirects are no different. So if you've got a website and you've got a single page that you're looking to move to somewhere else, maybe it's your About Us page, instead, you're calling it About Me, or vice versa, or Contact Us is now Contact The Team.
Learn more on how websites redirects work at dorksdelivered.com.au
No Redirect = Website Traffic Lost
If you do that, and you don't put in a redirect, just like that example with the post, you're going to lose visitors and lose traffic. What's worse, is if you've had that page in place for any length of time, Google and lots of other search engines will have done something called "indexing". This means that they have popped that into their search engine, so that when people search for you and they look at a page to get in contact with you, they have that information in front of them and it links through. If you don't put in a redirect, you're got to lose lots of traffic. And we see it all the time. People will go and get a new you beaut website made, and they won't put in any redirects.
Without Them You Are Starting Over
And it's kind of like starting all over again, instead of just moving your business address from one spot to another, without leaving a note on the door saying, "Hey, check this out," and updating Google My Business, et cetera, you're instead having people kind of just go, "Oh, they must be gone." And then starting all over, trying to find that traffic again, instead of using some of those existing clients, and existing referrals, and existing traffic to build your brand in the new location.
They Speak to Search Engines
So getting back to the question, what are website redirects? Website redirects are a way to tell search engines, if something has changed in your website, where to look for it now. The other thing that's really important to do, if you've got a bigger website, or on your website, you're talking to different, not necessarily talking, but referring to other pages, so maybe you've got a blog or a news section, or something like that, and you say, "Oh, if you really like this, go to the Contact Us page," and blah, blah, blah. If you then change it to Contact Me, you need to change all those internal redirects.
Real World Example
This is where it gets interesting. I'll use an easy example again. So if your business is in Brisbane, and then you move your business to the Gold Coast, and someone drives to your old Brisbane based location and you've put in a redirect, awesome. So they get to your Brisbane location, they drive there, maybe they're they're coming from Logan and they drive to Brisbane, and it takes them, let's say, 20 minutes, 30 minutes to get there. They get there, they see the note on the door saying "We've moved down to the Gold Coast, we're at Mermaid Waters," or whatnot. They then have to drive all the way down. So what that does is that actually affects that user's experience. Now we're talking about things in the real world instead of online, but the process is exactly the same.
That user's experience now being delayed, and they've gone from being at home to driving past where they need to go, in coming to Brisbane, because that's what they thought they were meant to do. And they've gone from Brisbane, and they've come straight back all the way down the M1, and headed off to the Gold Coast at Mermaid Waters, or whatnot. So they've spent a lot of time now in real man's terms, if they drove to Brisbane, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and they came down to Mermaid Waters, 45 minutes. We're talking 75 minutes or so. It sounds like a long time, but in a web sense it's not that bad. The difference instead of 75 minutes might be something like 750 milliseconds. And you think, "Ah, it's nothing. What am I worried about?" But it is something to be worried about because it's slowing down your user experience and that's what Google search engines are all about, the user experience.
User Experience Is Key
You get rewarded for having a better user experience. Experience, experience, experience. So if you, instead of putting that redirect link in, if instead for all of your own internal pages, you update those links to the latest, real links, you're always better off doing that, because it's going to save lots of time, lots of processing time, and better user experience, and ultimately better your search engine ranking, which is going to bring more traffic and more happy visitors.
The Final Word
So what are website redirects or how to website redirects work? Quite simply, that is 0.1 spot to another, use them where you can, but just make sure you understand what they're there for and how they're working. Now, if you have enjoyed this, we'd love to have you on the show, you're our ideal guest and our ideal listener, which means what you have to say and what you have to hear probably wants to be heard by other people. So if you'd like to jump on the show, jump across to podcasts@dorks.com.au, and send us an email and we can have a look through getting you on the show. Otherwise, go over to iTunes and leave us some love. Every bit helps. And I hope you all stay very well in this interesting time we're living in. Stay good.
Finding Content For Your Podcast
Thanks for connecting in and welcome to episode two. If you're just tuning in now, you should probably jump back one episode to hear how to do the nitty gritty technical hardware stuff and software stuff to get your podcast up and running. If you've listened to that one or have no interest in it, then jump into this one, which we're going to be talking about how to get content for your podcast.
Get more tips on how to find content for your podcast at dorksdelivered.com.au
Check out AnswerThePublic
There's lots of great ways to do it and it obviously depends on your industry. One of my favourite ways is to jump onto a website called, AnswerThePublic, and just type in a couple of keywords there. So you might be in the beauty industry, or you could be in the IT industry, or you could be in the manufacturing industry or accounting industry or whatever it is. You might be selling pies. If you jump on there and you're write, beef pie recipe, it's going to come up with a whole bunch of stuff that's relevant to those keywords. So don't type that in if you're in the finance industry. It's not going to be very relevant for you at all. Type in some bits and pieces there and it's going to come up with these awesome word clouds and ideas. And it's going to show you what people search for around those words on Google as well. So maybe people don't search for beef pie, maybe they search for Shepherd's pie or something like that. And if that is what they're doing, and they're more likely to be searching for Shepherd's pie, then you're going to be better off making a podcast around Shepherd's pie and the impact it has on society, as opposed to beef pie and where's the beef or something to that effect. So you're able to see the results and then work out where you're going to be finding your content from there. So that's step one, and that's a great step to start with.
If you're doing this as a brand new greenfield opportunity, so something you've never done before and something that you want to do, but you have no real information about it. It happens a lot. There's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect where you think you know lots and you don't, or you know lots and then you think you don't. Either way, it can stop you finding great content, and AnswerThePublic helps out there.
Make a List
For anyone who has an established business, who already knows a bit of the content and they want to make, the best thing to do is ask your clients, ask everyone, say, "What would you like to hear a podcast about?" I actually make a list. I've got an application on my phone called Google Keep. And as soon as someone asks me a question that I need to answer, and I know I don't have a resource to show them, create the resource. It's very quick and easy. It's as simple as holding a microphone near your mouth, talking for a few minutes about something you're already passionate about as you would have spoken to that client. The only difference is you're doing it into a microphone where you're then going to edit it and be able to use that content many, many times, over and over again.
So being able to create the content around what your clients are asking is fantastic, because you know you're answering questions that are relevant. And if one person's asking it, it's very likely that other people are going to ask it as well. And that then allows for you to build your authority and show new potential prospects, what the stuff is that you're doing and how you can help them out. And you might answer a question they didn't even know they had. So it becomes a pretty cool sales tool, making content around the questions that other people are asking.
Think Outside the Box
The next step is a bit of an interesting one. It's so you know you can, but should you, type step. And what I mean by that is if you have the idea of creating a podcast show, that's fantastic. But don't just be that person that goes, "I'm going to make the latest drunk talks podcast episode show thing where I sit down in the lounge and just talk to my mates when I've had a few beers." I'm sure people will love tuning into it. You're right, they will. But you've probably also just ripped off someone else's idea. So think about what's already out there and make sure you're not just creating new replicated content. You're creating new bespoke content, which is what you really want to be doing. A business that we work very closely with, Perfectly Beautiful, started podcast called Wakeup With Makeup.
They did this because they saw the need. There was no one out there that was doing podcasts around makeup, that people could listen to on their way to work or on a jog in the morning and things like that. There was heaps and heaps of stuff on Instagram. And sure they're on Instagram as well, but they understand that that's not going to be as successful as being the owner who owns the space of podcasting around the nation industry that you're in.
The Final Word
Think about what's out there and how you can have your own flavour and twists. And it could be something as simple as having a true blue bloody Australian accent and talking about things and ending the words with cobber, or it could be anything. But have a think about how you make things unique. If you have enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback. And in all these interesting times that we're living in, stay good.
Setting Up Your Own Podcast
G’day beautiful people. We're going to be talking today about how to make a podcast. It's kind of like inception, I guess. You're on a podcast, listening to a podcast, wanting to be understanding more about how to make your own podcast. We're going to start with the simples.
Get more tips on setting up your own podcast at dorksdelivered.com.au
Get a Good Microphone
To start off with, you want to get a good quality microphone. A Rode smartLav+ mic in Australia goes for about a hundred dollarydoos, and it would be by far fine enough. If you're lucky enough to have one of those phones that still have a headphone jack, whew. You're in. You're ready to go. All you need to do is just plug this mic in, and download a couple of cool apps. It's going to speed your process up. Otherwise, if you don't and you only have a USBC port, or whatever Apple is calling their latest port nowadays, you're going to need to get just a small adapter to plug that microphone in. You don't want to go with any of the other stuff. This is a good quality microphone that's been tried and tested for years. I've travelled all around the world using it, and it works really, really well for the price. If it breaks, you're not too worried. You got to go buy another one. Don't go buy a $300, $400 microphone thinking that you're going to be having the next big podcast and then think, "Bugger. I've invested all that money into something that I don't need."
Just Start Making Episodes
Start. That's the biggest thing, learn to start. Start. Procrastination will slow down your progress. Just start and see what happens. That's how this podcast started, and it's going really, really well. To start, create a podcast. Have a good quality microphone. Download an application on your phone that records the audio, where you can set the bit rate. I'd be suggesting 44 kilohertz or above 48 kilohertz is fantastic. If you're able to set that and record in an app that allows for it to transfer straight to your computer. That's great. For Android devices, it will send straight up to Dropbox and go into a folder which you can then have Zapier or other things hit off from that to then trickle through to everyone else, it makes the process quite easy. Now, you know how you're getting the words out of your mouth into the phone in a good quality way, and then from your phone onto the computer.
You Can Edit It Yourself
The next step is editing. When it comes down to editing, free is always best in my opinion, you can get some great tools out there. I'm saying that with an audio engineering degree behind me, being very familiar with pro tools and the like. Audacity is going to get you out of trouble 99.9% of the time. Audacity's going to be the way to go. Very easily chop and change, and look at YouTube videos that are out there on how to use Audacity. It's simple, it's quick, it's easy, and it's free. Audacity would be the way to go to edit the video, edit the podcast.
Use Libysn to Host Your Podcast
Once you've done that, you then need to have a medium to be able to upload them to. There's, again, a few different free sites out there. This is one that I wouldn't be skimming on, but we use a site called Libsyn. That's Liberated Syndication, and it's set at $5 US a month or something like that for the entry-level pack. It's very, very cost-effective. It gives you unlimited data storage just limited to how many episodes you upload a week. And on that, when you're uploading the episodes, uploading them as MP3 CBR, which is the constant bit rate, 128 bits per second. It's going to be more than fine for 99.9% of the audience. If you know what that means, those bit rate settings, then you might get down into more detail. But otherwise, those settings are going to be fine. It's going to be CD quality or so, and it's going to sound great.
You've now got your episode. You've now got a platform for them to go on. You need to think about how you're going to be promoting that out there. Libsyn does some great stuff in way you're able to have the episodes sent out to different networks, such as Spotify, and iTunes, et cetera, and you're able to integrate those very, very quickly and easily. Libsyn ... great tool for that. And it gives you some promotions, and you're able to have that integrated into Twitter, or Facebook to be able to send those instant notifications when something comes out onto their walls for any of your possible listeners.
The Final Word
I've spoken about a lot of the technical information around how do you get it from your brain and then out. And I've said it very, very quickly. If you have any interest, we can definitely dive further into how to do this. We're going to jump into episode two, which is going to cover off on how to find content, and content that that works for your audience, and how to niche. If this has been of interest, let me know. Jump across to iTunes, give us some love, send us some feedback. And everyone out there in podcast land, stay good.
Keeping Your Business Sane With Brad Bulow
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. I've got Brad Bulow here and he's an account advisor from Summit Villa and he's here to talk to us about some of the cool things that you can be doing with your books to make sure that you're keeping your mind sane. The last thing I'm going be doing is going insane in the membrane. There's lots of ways to do that with all these different things that are punching out with the government with job keep, the job seeker, all these other different things that are going on it can be lost in in translation, absolutely without having someone there to translate it for you.
Learn more on keeping your business sane at dorksdelivered.com.au
So Brad, tell me what have you found to be the biggest nightmare when it comes to this COVID crisis?
Brad: Josh, what I have found, and thanks for that introduction and trying to make a camping thing sexy might. What I have found with the COVID-19 crisis, Josh is that clients live in Today, they're not living for the future. They're lacking some planes. They're lacking some clarity. They don't have that board chair. So there is panic. It is a tough time for business, but those that are resilient and those that have the foresight and can move and be agile, will survive and will thrive. But I think it's the also the way the government has been, it's been great the government have released some stimulus packages that are there, an asset to help businesses, but I think it's just the understanding of these packages, what's the eligibility criteria. Am I in, am I out, will be eligible in a few months time, I think that's what's created the most, the biggest uncertainty and for our clients, it's just, I suppose, leaning on someone to trust and hopefully, at some of the other that's been our function, we have developed a package and a probably to help clients through the job keeping process. and I suppose it's for a client, it's for a small fee. It's a massive value add that they can receive. So I think it's just all the information, all the propaganda, all the noise, all the noise is really just creating a massive disruption for businesses. But stimulus is there, it's there for short term bridging gap. It's something that we can't rely on forever. And I think the good businesses will still thrive and come and still be around post COVID. Those that probably were precarious pre COVID-19 one, maybe see it through, which is sad, but which is reality.
Brad: It's about three weeks of saving Josh, and that's the average Australian I suppose if you're a wage employee or whether you do run your business, it is quite scary. And I think, you know, there's a lot of … I think the first industry to really be hit with, so the hospitality, accommodation, restaurant type businesses and who do employ the tourists, a lot of casual workers, I think within days there were a lot of screams in that sector of people that would not be able to pay rent, would not be able to feed their kids. That is scary. But I think that comes down to sort of the financial literacy education that we probably need to be diving more into at schools and even at adult level as well. But it is quite scary and businesses don't have the ability to sort of see it through if the client doesn't pay the bill, or something bad happens.
Josh: We don't know, you don't know. What you said there about learning things at school. Oh, my God, if I'd learnt half of what I learned at school, but swap that out for half of what I've learned after school, I would have been in a significantly better spot. People aren't taught anything about money, economics, how things work, the fractional reserve, how and why banks exists, how and why debt exists, how and how things work, what inflation is, no one knows anything. All I know is that thing over there is nice and shiny. It's got a iPhone with a new number, the other end of it, so let's grab that. Even the other ones kind of maybe nearly working, let's just grab that
Brad: Definitely Justin, I can't recall too much of those triggered normal trail calculus sessions I had in grade 12. And I don’t think I deal well in all of them but yeah, right. It's about a textbook and I they don’t tell you so much, a little bit loaded the stuff you get to sort of went on the run. And I think the fundamentals of accounting, and debits and credits, I think it is lost than children and even young adults in business today, you know, the foundations of what makes a good business, what makes a bad business and not living just today, but living for tomorrow as well it’s important. My brother has a business called umbilical tronic college, which is an RTO, which offers program cert twos and threes for in schools in business. And he's got he has his programs running in about 100 schools in Queensland. And I think a lot of those more of those type of courses, a lot of those sort of practical skills. And I think even going back to the Masters I think is the people doing masters, I think which was notoriously known as the veggie mess as opposed to being messy, they probably learned more. So we're dealing in basic maths and dealing currency and money and stuff. Those are people that have the common sense and are probably doing okay. But yeah, understanding in numbers is really important because I can tell a story about your finances and about you how you're tracking.
Josh: I was one of those suckers that did math to be messy. So I can tell you all about it as the same parabolic equation matrices and, and shit that no one cares about.
Brad: Exactly, not not a few bad. Yeah, bad results in those days as well.
Josh: We deal with businesses from all from all walks of life, and we deal with some really, really smart, poor people, and some really, really stupid rich people. And now I've said that I can't say anything about what they do. But know that it comes down to your drive and action to whatever the carrot is at the end. I didn't do well at school either, I get Op 19 so anyone that's listening outside of Australia, that's 19 out of 25, one being the best. Not great. A couple of years later though, I did one of those after education material entry point, uni exam things I came up with OP two. It's a good improvement. huge improvement. Right? So, that's, that's great, but you can't always like hold on to those numbers for any of our younger listeners and shit, okay, I didn't do what I wanted to do and now where I'm at. But what I've learned being in businesses, you need to know where you're if you're a high risk or a low risk investor and how you sit with your finances. Make sure you're very very in love with your cash flow is really important. Make sure you understand your numbers, your forecasts, how long do you have until the day when you're selling something of your own or something like that just to keep your business alive? If your business isn't … you're not meant to be feeding your business your business is meant to be feeding you, and I think it's going to be a big wake up call to the COVID thing with heaps people that are going to be going shit okay we we had a great business and now it's just turn to shit either because the industry's changed because commercial real estate stropping or will be significantly older remote workers. I think it's going to be a lot of people waking up to situation
Brad: Yeah, I think you're spot on there, Josh. To me, I think it with businesses and it's often not what this is as far as often an opposite bad businesses, it's cause the people running them and I have you know, we will have clients that might be in maybe lower sort of socio economic jobs right now they might be gardeners or have a lawn mowing business where their earning capacity is probably a lot lower than someone who might be a medical specialists or someone who sells properties on the coast. It comes down I think a lot of the times is personal budgeting as well. You know, I could see and working out what is success and what is wealth to the individual. Is it more time with a family? Is it more money in their pocket, is it more time to exercise? Is it you know, having a having a fleet having a having a bit of bulge in the stomach. But it comes in how you define success obviously some of the happiest people aren't the most wealthiest people but they feel fulfilled because the kids are they've sending the kids to school the kids are doing well sportingly they're living happy lives and I do see some of the more some of the sometimes more miserable people or those that are earning great money but not in careers that they like. Yeah, so I think it's really comes down to fundamentally gone back to those pieces that fall is know your limits. Know your earning capacity. If you if you want to if you need to earn 200 grand a year, don’t buy franchise that cleans windows or scrubs carpet, don't buy into the drinks it's not going to work out for you. But also going back to your point to Josh it's about not throwing all your eggs in one basket as well. It's about diversifying, If you're in a business have a backup plane, if something goes wrong with your core function. Similarly our business we do have a similar accounting and taxation is like bread and butter, but there will be there is the threat of offshoring. There is the automation, there is sort of the risk of AML Compliance fees reducing but it's about having a back up plan. For us that was Yeah, we can help clients more holistically and other consultancy services. We have an HR company, we have a well planning business. It's about if something goes wrong with something I've got a backup plan and the same thing comes to those people invest. If you've got a million dollars to invest, don’t throw it all into stocks. Yeah, yeah. When maybe you bought a property, maybe you diversify your share before it cross 2025 blue chip stocks. Don't put your house that you've worked your whole life to own outright, don't put it on the line to buy that restaurant. Because it feels like a good idea.
Josh: Don’t do anything on feelings.
Brad: Exactly. And also the gut tells you can't can tell you whether something is right or wrong. But yeah, seek advice and know who to trust about these things. But don't Yeah, I think it just comes down to one know your limitations from a skills and qualifications perspective. And from a financial perspective and to disdain for on the line for one little idea that you think might workout. I agree with you Josh as you said earlier you worked hard when you're young you built some discipline, you've bought a few properties at a young age which gave you a good base to grow and take opportunities and risk when they come. I think that's the same in life today. Don't leave it all to luck. Don't stop focusing on your wealth when your days are numbered when you can't work as hard or as as agile as you once did. I think it's all about planning and it's all about having a back up plan and that's the biggest thing about this COVID-19, which I think it's rise today. Have a back up plan that had that war chest had that ability to to change direction
Josh: T he time is now absolutely if you want to action something action and now like you have Ray Kroc started investing and really turned over some dollars when he was 55 that doesn't mean waiting for your 55 and be like something awesome is going to happen. But are you familiar with Parkinson's Law.
Brad: Not hundred percent but if give me a 15 second Crash Course.
Josh: So Parkinson's Law is the amount of time and I'm probably quoting this terribly now. But the amount of time you have available will pretty much become elastic with the amount of work that you absolutely have to complete. So if you have the assignment due the day before, and you've been used to being been sitting on the desk for six weeks, and you go, shit, I'm going to create this in, you're guaranteed to get it done with the time that you've got available. But if you started six weeks ago, it would have also taken you six weeks. So it's just fills up your valuable time. And I think when you look at time, what I like to the way I look at money, and my time is I look at whatever the action is about to take, is it saving money? Is it creating money? Or is it saving time? And if it doesn't tick any of those boxes, it's not a task that I do. There's a caveat there.
Brad: 100%. You got to look at yourself and your own well being. And that's one of those things my bill I think the old saying is they're busy people get things done It's 100% you’re right. And then you write if you sent yourself an hour to, to do that one thing you will take it for later. But if you gotta get four things down now you'll fit it all in. Yep. I think planning is important on one Oh, yeah, go to my desk and there are the post it notes there is the paper frittering all over the place, doesn't mean I'm not playing and I don't know where things are, but it's still not obviously a great safety bloke. But I think have you three things that you want to do on a day in take them off. Everyone loves a sense of accomplishment now that they've gone to work and they've got a few things off the desk even if only takes an hour You know, it's done.
Josh: And I think literally taking or putting a line through it is more important than having it written on your computer Notepad or wherever else and then deleting it. Seeing that you had some progress I'll go through books that I like a business plans from like that every two years. I've revisit the business plan like every business owner, yeah.
Brad: Yeah, hundred percent is basically one page but have it
Josh: Yeah, exactly. You just have a SWOT analysis, your mission statement, it's enough. And I looked through, I achieved all those goals. I've achieved all those goals and I have a look Regional goals are like far out they've morphed and that's what it's about like again talking before we jumped on onto the podcast about setting your plans and knowing that you needed sort of just hit the ground running, don't wait until it's perfect.
Brad: If you sit around and wait for the perfect you'll never it'll never get off the ground you know and it is about me in business myself I will sign earlier Josh that you know, I know I've made plenty mistakes or have learned from them. I've made some of those mistakes a couple times but yeah, my biggest priority is probably you know, having a great idea or having a what I think is a good plan but not having the right people steering that ship or working with you to achieve that ultimate goals and it's about communicating to the people that matter what those got that goal is as well so they can all go on the journey with you but everything, you need to plan for anything in life, you know, when you wake up tomorrow and go this I've got to take on a hot stock, it might go okay, but it may well not. Like most things that work out well, you got a long term perspective, a long term plan, anything that seems nice and shiny and apparently guaranteed quick win often doesn't work out. So 100% right, Josh, it's about planning. It's about giving yourself time. But it's not waiting for that perfect day, that perfect storm because opportunity presents itself and you've, you know, sometimes you got to think on your feet and take it.
Josh: Anyone in business that's getting out in business today and goes, I'm going to be a millionaire in 12 months. Just stop what you're doing right now. And don't quit your job. Don't quit your job. That's something I've seen so many times that comes to us. Okay, we need to get website, online presence. I want 200 leads coming in a week
Brad: And I want to see another cryptocurrency overnight success as well, because that's where I've sort of fallen low false, doing that. Yeah, it can't be easy ways to make to make money. And look, some people are fortunate that there's a lot of people that fall into that trap.
Josh: Absolutely. Oh, what I was saying about the Parkinson's Law just circling back a little bit. You have this amount of time. So Parkinson's Law is more about time, but I think it applies just the same to money. I think that people that have more money that comes in somehow find a way to spend more money. And people that are living on a lower income, somehow managed to still get by and sometimes have nicer things than that's a higher income. So if you have someone down the coast property developer that's bringing in $200,000, $400,000 a year for themselves, and then they've got this car and it seems like they seem to somehow have nearly the same parity in expenses. And then if something goes wrong with them, they fall hard as opposed to someone who's like owning, I don't know, 50,000?
Brad: Yeah, I think early 60,000 is the average median.
Josh: Yeah. So early, early 60s to the early 60s. Seems like those people are still getting along. Still going fine enough. You know, I'm saying from no evidence, no citations perspective, just he said the pub talk but you see people's books and you see what people do. Would you say that that kind of correlates
Brad: I think it 100% does, Josh. Now when it comes down to people's personalities and their profiles, how they are raises children, but I think the younger populace of today are a lot more into the consumable spin. They want that first house to be the house that their parents have worked their whole life in to retire in. I think people visit and we do have constant you know that modern collectively a couple modern $300,000 $400,000 a year and have no savings have no have nothing to really show for show for their hard work and their toil because they are living in the moment. I think a lot of it comes down to discipline. Maybe it might need yet man you gotta have multiple bank accounts or different investments where a percentage of pay falls into each week.
Brad: But you're right earlier Josh said you gotta hold don't leave things to light when it comes to investing. The whole power of compounding, you have does work out that direction. $10 in you know, $10 invested today reinvested over, you know, over the next you know, 30, 40 years. I'm not smart enough to work it well that will be but more than $10 it will. It's about discipline. It's about making that little bit of sacrifice, and I think people can quite easily do that. Whether they sell a shock, forcing into superannuation, any discipline is better than a discipline, even if, yeah, worst case scenario, we're putting that X amount of dollars into that term deposit. Wanna do 1.6% right now. And yeah, which might only sort of match inflation. So I'm not saying that's an investment strategy worth adopting, but it's better than doing nothing. And in time, that might mean it might turn into a managed fund, it might turn into a deposit or a property, it might turn into a chair portfolio might turn into an investment in the business. It's about discipline, and if you get it right, yeah, I mean, if you can, that in any set 10% you save can become 15%, can become 20% that you actually recycling and putting into investments your return will be a lot much better. Yeah. When you get to that age, and if you sort of leaving in the last five years to make things work
Josh: A couple of things actually on that, what do you think about the government's super pullout scheme?
Brad: I'm not obviously not a fan. I think you're just stealing for yourself, I think it should be a last resort, superannuation is there for retirement I think they had made some of the conditions to loosen easy for people and tempting for people to take. But the flip side of that from a social conscious perspective understand there are people out there who can't feed their children or really don't know where the next dollar is coming from. Well, I get that from a hardship provision it's better than taking that money than the nasty fallout which could happen on that side. I'm not a fan. I would much rather see our clients in particular use other sort of stimulus measures that are out there whether it be job sake, a job keeper. The cash flow boost is a lot. There's a lot of stuff out there, which hasn't hit every button but I'm hoping most people have had some sort of financial support, but I am, I think the superannuation one was a necessity, but I'm not obviously a fan of that because that's somebody that you’ve worked for, and you're going to be paying and you are technically paying for
Josh: That's completely fair enough. I agree completely unless you absolutely have to. It's better just to sort of keep doing thing.
Brad: And I don't think it's also just to it's an education around super, I think not many people look at their superannuation funds as a real investment until they do get closer to that retirement age as well. And I, you know, obviously, I do have a wealth planning business, I will not declare conflict here, but I think it's about acknowledging supers for a lot of people. superannuation will be the biggest asset that they will build outside of their house and it sort of their personal successes and triumphs. So something we spoke about compounding before and the difference that you might get from a standard fund that might give you a 6% return of a life. Yeah, well for the investment as opposed to maybe the average IC return which is either 9% it will make a difference in retirement as well. So I think there needs to be better education around superannuation. It's not just something that employers putting on habits in doing and not care about, yeah, it is an actual real asset and you're only taxed 15% on money that is invested in superannuation, contributions, early tax of 15% going in as well. It's a good low tax environment and it's something we shouldn't be playing with because it is it is that that is your rainy day investments. And when you do retire, we don't want to be living on a $400 a week government pension. So if it's still around, jury's out on that, if you want that goal of being self funded bowl, yeah, treat that super as a real asset and try not to touch it
Josh: Will government give me like advantages to chucking additional coin in there you could put 1000 in a match 500 or something like that?
Brad: There is the government co contribution it has it used to be 1000 4000 entities, it is probably phasing and in terms of the monetary benefit, and it does only apply to people who will sort of allow middle income salary but yeah, the government is obviously has made superannuation enticing investment vehicle due to the low tax rates and, and I you know, when in saying that I have been disappointed in a lot of us that they have sort of reduced the concessional contributions capped at $25,000, where it used to be a hell of a lot more. So it is harder to get money into super so you haven't, once again, I sort of get into back into that argument that yeah, if you can avoid dragging money at a super please do so. I'd much rather someone borrow some money from a family member to get them through this little crisis than draw money in which they had no intention of contributing into.
Josh: This is this is a different problem. This is this is a money problem than a business problem. The problem that I've had for many, many, many years is I've looked at what I've been earning and I've been benchmarking what I've been earning against what I had been earning, or what I've been saving against what I had been saving, not knowing at all if I was sitting in a good position because I'm cashflow positive, or what the average spreaker is doing around the place. Is it sensible for a business to be sitting cashflow positive? Sounds like a stupid question, but I'm sure many businesses out there are not. And is it sensible for a business to be borrowing money or investing your own money and is it, I guess that comes down to the risk assessment? What are you what you're investing into?
Brad: Josh, it comes down to borrowing, borrowing can be a powerful tool, if you're obviously using that borrowed money to invest in the right type of asset. Also, you don't want to have high interest bearing debt, things like credit cards, pawnbroking lines. Withdrawals once again, can work. But once again, it depends on what you're using that withdrawal for. If you're going to get a return on that investment, whether it be bought, you know, use net redraw to buy a property comes into that investment. Positively good, can be good, and generally it’s good I'd rather possibly deed property than negatively geared property, even though your tax benefits might be less, you're hopefully still going to be ahead but also comes down to what is that asset as well. You might have a positive geared property that you might be getting a 5% return on investment on and have minimal debt on that is actually ground value as well. That comes down to what is the income return? Yes. But is there a capital growth return on that investment as well? And some people might tell me the last 10 to 12 years Depending where you're investing your money in terms of property, there probably has been a flat property market.
Brad: I think we're talking earlier, Josh about our first properties that we bought and I bought my first property when I was 21 in the sleepy town of Brasil, Ipswich and paid 83 grand for my parents … my wife. Now Carly and I were crazy. doing such a thing. Yeah, like spending that hundred $50 a week on the loan repayment. We were out in probably earning, I don't know, $100 could bond but it was the best decision we ever made because what it created and the property market moved. We've built some equity and build a good foundation where we can sort of continue our investment journey as well. So I think although we're not going to get the massive jumps in property prices once again, it comes down to discipline, but it comes down to using debt for the right reasons. And the end of the day, Josh using redrawn on your timeline to keep pouring money into a business which isn't growing, which is stagnating is going backwards. I don't think it's a sensible thing to do. Speak to your advisor and work out well. Is it worth putting good money after bad as well? Sometimes borrowing can be good, but it's a case by case scenario.
Josh: So if you if you're in a position where you had a business and it's a no we're talking about low margin businesses stuff if you're turning over 100K and you see it's good and it's after all your expenses, maintenance and all your equipment. And I'm just using this is a nice simple example. But if you have $100,000 business and you Okay, cool, it's sitting there positive everything's good. You're more than capable to go to the bank and go and grab five more lawn mowers, five more right on zero 10s hedge, yep whippersnappers, whatever you whatever you got to get, and you could then have stopped with five and then you have the debt but you got your short term debt to then grow the business obviously you do it more organically and just smash on 500% increase in your business. But if you go okay, it's already working. It's already good. Does that come down to like the risk per se
Brad: Yeah. And I'm speaking to earlier today, just before we got caught up and I'm a massive advocate for behaviour profiling. We as a business off of that too. Well, cons as well and I think it's worked amazingly well for me as a decided and I myself personally what my behaviours and my personality profile is what things motivate me, what things stress me. I think it does come down to the individual but it also comes down to what you want and aspirations are as well. But for some people not employing staff and working to your own you know working to your own accord not having any risk in life. You can still be happy and earn hundred thousand dollars a year and you know me obviously hopefully they structured in a company or somewhere where they're paying minimal tax on that hundred thousand dollars, Josh, but at the same time they people do want to grow they've got an expanding family they want to you know, get the kids into a job or a business they and their wife might not work so they need to sort of put some additional funds into the family budget, maybe on another you know, on another round or on another machine might be a smart thing to do but I think a lot of it comes down to as I said before an area where I've sort of you know probably have fallen in the past is putting too much faith in people. Or not telling me to put in pretty much faith or trust in people's is picking the wrong person for the job, you know.
Brad: So there might be another area you want to invest in, there might be another sideline component you want to add to the business, but have the right person, have a person who has a complementary style to you, has the same ethics and morals as you and someone who's not going to create just more headaches and more problems as well. So I think a lot of it comes down to having the investment. Is it the right investment for me, is it part of my values? Is it part of my overarching plan, but secondly, is that person someone of credibility and someone I can work with, and trust. Most often, I've seen people expand a business and the business goes south pretty quickly, because we've got people who don't have the same values as them and people who are, I suppose, not loyal and not sticking to the business but sticking to themselves and just, yeah, and then let that business down. So it often depends on the person depends on what their goals are. But often there's someone in as you mentioned before someone's earning 100 grand a year with minimal fuss and minimal complications. Feels a bit wrong to say but often they'll probably be better off sticking to that, sticking to that plan and, and a country is full of successful self employed people or people might only have one extra additional employee. why have the stress? Why complicate it
Josh: I completely agree I learned many, many years ago, they're all going have the biggest IT company in Australia. I don't want that. I don't want that. Cool to say to pub, I guess.
Brad: Yeah, it feels good for a minute, but not good for your blood pressure. Probably not good for any relationship you're in as well. But we define success differently. A number of great businesses that have grand or normal size and normal scale and almost reputation, but often they've had good people. And you can't get there just on your own.
Josh: No, and even if you've got good people I think that you can have if you're really great at mowing lawns, it does not mean that you're really great at managing people. You could have a high IQ and a terrible EQ, and then you're not going to get a mission understand people's problems, and that then means that you might have the best business but not the best person
Brad: Hundred percent Josh like said it's often use the old trading scenario they do even a fourth year finish they tried ploy works out there. Yeah, they're too expensive so they got to go around and become a contractor and then they got to around GST registration, they got to start watching their own bears, you got to start keeping an accounting file. They got to start sourcing their own insurance, they need to need to work out what's the best mobile phone deal? What software do I need to run my database? It’s all these conversations come to us and you start to think about technology. You start to think about mobile phone technicians you start to think about bookkeeping support, accountants, insurance companies, it's messy and who do you trust? Who do you turn to? What referrals do you take on board? You can complicate your life pretty quickly and look, anyone is a massively successful and created a huge wealth has probably gone through these complications and thrive, but some people just haven't got it and they make up and they set up. And I think it's important that one, know yourself and know your limitations before you sort of go on a journey that could end in tears
Josh: Think of that way you're going to be and you're going to enjoy that work. And if you're not, probably don't walk that road.
Brad: Know yourself, know your limitations, know what type what it takes for you to burn out, and we will have our limits and we're all wired differently, doesn't mean you're a failure it just means that you're better at other things than the person next to you.
Josh: Albert Einstein said if you measure the success of a fish's ability to climb a tree, you'll think fish is stupid forever. It's been great talking with you. And yeah, it's been it's been great having on the show, and if anyone is interested in talking to Brad, we'll Chuck a link in here to his website so that you can see a bit more information, maybe get your books, and maybe make sure that you're doing the video that you should be doing. And the last question I've got for you is if they had to read something to put them in business stance after they've just had this whiplash from COVID, what would you say they should be reading? Doesn't have to be an exact book, but what should they, what resources should they be utilising?
Brad: There's a lot of resources out there, Josh, and I'm not I'm not going to stick into one book in particular. But for me, it's about anything that makes you unique or different. And I know as an accountant, I'm not going to go and read textbooks on accounting or tax but I'm going to read other books that might help me in other areas that I think might be beneficial clients and give me a competitive edge. So might be around things like leadership, how to influence people, different types of selling strategies. So I'm not a massive reader, or do you like yeah, my little quote, so little bursts of inspiration. So I think it's just about knowing you as a person and just being an interesting person to converse with and just learn about the world. Read the paper, buy the fin review, just read different this read different things on myself if I'm like three kids at home and I work long hours, so it's often fall asleep after five minutes. Well, so I think, right things that inspire you, read things that motivate you. But yeah, I think just be aware, just be aware, just be aware of what's going on in the world.
Josh: But just don't use Facebook as a source.
Brad: No, exactly right and just yet, just be someone who's buried and has multiple interests on it. It just means you're going be able to relate to a lot more people and make life a lot more interesting.
Josh: So well, Brad, it's been great talking to you. And if anyone out there would like to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love. Give us a review and any feedback you have. That'd be great. Otherwise, stay healthy out there in the COVID crisis and look forward to tuning in soon.
Brad: Thanks Josh.
How to Stop Spam and Increase Leads Part Two
Anyone that's just tuned in, it'd be probably sensible to jump back an episode to hear what we're talking about and this to be super relevant. So you've decided that you've got too much spam, and now you want to get rid of it. You haven't just started up your business, you've made a few mistakes, and you want to make sure that you're able to overcome those issues. We've got some good news and some bad news.
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As You Become More Successful More Spam Will Come
The good news is, the bigger your company becomes the more spam you're going to get. It's just inevitable. As more and more people know about you, you're going to get more haters. Thats just how it goes and it has been like that for years. Know that if you're getting more spam, you're making more traction and you're making more waves. If the spammers are seeing you, it means that everyone else is seeing you as well. Your message might just need to be critiqued, massaged a little bit, to make it a bit more relevant. That though, is not going to get rid of your spam. To get rid of an inbox that is already inundated with spam because your email's already been taken, harvested, and sold off to possibly dozens or hundreds of other places, which will then turn to hundreds and thousands of other places until you just open up your inbox and every morning got 300 offers of enlargements, Russian brides, or both if you're lucky. You'll have the weapon and something to do with it.
Chance Your Email Address
Anyway, if that's the situation and you're trying to overcome that the best bet, you're not going to like hearing this, but the best bet is just to change the email address. If you're using info at whatever your company name is dot com, then you change that to inquiries. If you're using inquiries, change it to questions. If you've already cycled through to, I'm sure you can find something else. You can be creative with it, don't stick yourself in a hole. There's always enough ways you can just change the email address. That's something that doesn't cost you anything except clients that already know it.
Consider An ATP Service
If you're in that spot then what you need to do is look at what is called an ATP service. Now, an ATP service, standing for advanced threat protection, can remove email spam. The way that it works is kind of like anthrax. If you're receiving something in the post and you don't know what it is, and then you open it up and you get this stuff on your hands, it's too late. It's too late, the damage is done. When you have these viruses, and bits and pieces being sent into your network, and then you're having your antivirus protect them, it's kind of like being at a brothel, wearing a condom, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best. It doesn't always work out. Things break, and you don't want them to. That can be life changing, and I think we can all gather the parallels I'm eluding to here.
If you're able to stop the whole situation from occurring, divert the risk, and have it somewhere else, that is what ATP does. ATP simply, advanced threat protection, grabs your emails before they get to you. They sort of run them through the dishwasher, they have a bit of a look, scrub them clean, and then shoot them off to you. If they think some are a little bit dubious, they go, "Hmm. We'll hold these for a few hours, and then send you an email telling you about them that you can then click through and release them if you think that they're important."
ATP = More Security
It's an incredibly valuable tool. One of the other things that they do is that they look intelligently, using AI, at how many emails of the same kind have been sent. So I'm sure everyone has received one of those "you've been hacked" emails. What this would have done if you had this in front of your business, is it would have gone, "Hmm, 10,000 people have just received a very, very similar email talking about looking at naughty, naughty things, and here's your password." It would go, "That doesn't sound right. We're not going to have people see this, we're going to block that out. Then we're going to tell them this is in quarantine," of if there was a virus attached, not even release it.
It just means that you've got an extra level of security. It's like an airlock before you get into your business. You know that things are going to be quarantined and protected. There's always things and ways that people can get through, but this is definitely something that will help you through that situation. So, using ATP would mean that if you've got an existing email account, you can't change it, you don't want clients to be affected and have to learn a new email address, this would be the way that you'd go about doing it. This would be a better than nothing solution. You put that on all your email addresses.
The Final Word
So by following these few instructions, we should be in a spot now that you're current inbox, whether it be the global one that was on your website, has now been removed. You've got people contacting you through a form, which is awesome. Now you've got more quality information, and you've got less spam, less viruses. You're now at a lesser risk for anything occurring on your network and within your business. If you've been listening to this, you've been able to gain all that knowledge between the two episodes in only about 15 minutes. I hope you've enjoyed this. If you have any questions make sure to drop us a line or leave us some love on iTunes, with a review or something like that. Look forward to talking soon. Stay good.
How to Stop Spam and Increase Leads Part One
How to get less spam and more inquiries. All right, so we've all been there. We've started up a business and we've been sitting there, looking at our inbox waiting for something to come through and nothing comes through. So you wait a bit longer, you do a bit more stuff with your SEO and then you wait and nothing comes through. So you go to a couple of breakfast networking meetings and you try your best to see where you end up. You get a few leads, but then you notice spam starts coming through. You might be checking out the rankings of your website and looking at the quality scores and page rank scores and whatever other metrics that you're trying to use. You notice you're getting more spam than inquiries and you're thinking, why is this? Why do the spammers love talking to me?
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Dos and Don’ts
So, I'm going to go through a few different do's and don'ts with your website. Number one, if you're jumping on your website and you're having a bit of a look around, a lot of people think let's make it nice and easy for people to email me and I'll put in place an email straight up on there. So they have info at whatever the name of their company is .com.au and they have these spammers that will crawl through this information, find these email addresses, and then just start bombarding you with things that you don't want or you shouldn't want. Russian brides are fine if you're in Russia, but I'm not going to be buying one off of an email. Although Viagara seems great to buy off an unsolicited email, I'd probably go to my doctor if that was needed hypothetically. So one big rule, do's and don'ts for websites. Don't put your email address up there if you don't need to have it up there. So that's a don't.
Being Easily Contactable is Key
Here's a do. Do make it easy for people to contact you by having them fill out a form with one of those annoying am I a robot tick boxes. If they tick the box that they're a robot, they're a robot. Luckily most robots don't know how to tick that box. So it's just going to be humans ticking that. So you end up in a spot where you're getting less spam coming through and it's also more orderly. If they're all coming through the same single page, you can then reformat that instead of just having their email address that they're typing in and having a message, you can refine that a bit further and get other details out of them that you would not have otherwise got if they were just sending a normal email. So you're making this better for you, which makes you at an advantage to servicing them better. That also means that you're going to be getting less spam. So that's a do. Make sure you have an easy ability for people to contact you all over your website.
Easy Access to Your Website
Here's a don't. Don't make it difficult for people to get to your website. If you're selling a product or service where your main market is in Australia, make sure your web hosting provider is in Australia. Don't host it overseas. If you're hosting it with Wix or someone like that and the server's in Louisiana or San Francisco or wherever it is, that is going to be fantastic for anyone that's accessing that server from over there and anyone accessing your website on that server because they're going to be able to see your website really, really quickly. It's kind of like a road. As much as we'd like to think that the speed that we drive along the road could be unlimited, we have caps on it and in the digital world that happens as well.
Think About Website Speed
So if you want to drive from Brisbane to Sydney or even from Brisbane to the Gold Coast. Brisbane to the Gold Coast is going to take you 40, 50 minutes. If you look at that from an IT perspective, we'll call that 40 to 50 milliseconds. So it's going to take 40 to 50 milliseconds if your website's hosted on the Gold Coast and you're in Brisbane. Now, luckily with IT stuff it could be hosted in Sydney and it would still only be 40 to 50 milliseconds if you're on a decent provider. Now, let's rewind back to that scenario where you might be over in San Francisco. To get the data going all the way over there will take maybe 200 to 300 milliseconds. I know you're thinking, all right Josh, 200 to 300 milliseconds. What? It's going to take a third of a second. No one's going to notice it, but it is noticeable because it's kind of like me asking you something. If I ask you something and I say, "Hey, what's your name?" Then you respond and you say, "Oh, my name's Jason," and I go, "Okay, no worries Jason. What's your favourite colour?" Then you tell me what that is. Each time there's a 30 millisecond delay. You can't notice it a whole bunch when you ask 10 questions because then it comes to 300 milliseconds. If you have a 200 millisecond delay or a 300 millisecond delay and then you ask 10 questions, it's now pumped up to three seconds because it takes that delay for every question.
Limit Questions
Now a question is anything on your website. One photo, the computer that goes to see your website has to click on that and open that one photo to show your client in the browser. So that's one request. That's one question and then if you have a bunch of texts, that's another question. So you can easily have lots and lots of "questions" coming through. Most of the time there's about 150 or so on a poorly built website or more and on a streamlined website, 30 to 50 elements. So 30 to 50 elements would work out to be 1.5 seconds for those to load on a site if your hosting provider's in Australia. If it's overseas it could be 15, 20, 30 seconds. It all depends. So that's where hosting within your own country is a very, very good idea.
Host Where Your Target Market Is
Don't host outside of your country if your main target market is within the country. Now I'm going to have IT nerds telling me this is slightly wrong and I understand obviously with the different protocols, HTTP2 et cetera. It's slightly wrong, but it's the easiest way to explain it. So as a cookie cutter example, that's how it works. So to recap, don't host overseas. Don't have email addresses up and available all over your website. Do have a contact form for people to be able to easily fill out where you can get granular information. We're going to go through another do. Do make sure on the home page of your website. So that's the first page someone sees when they type in www.yourcompanyname.com.au. When they type that in, do make sure that you've got an ability for people to connect to you and you've got exactly what the problem is that you're solving that differentiates yourself from your competitor.
So if you're selling vegan pies, on that home page right at the top before they have to scroll and do anything, and that's called before the fold of the page, do have a message there that says exactly what you do. So for that example, save the animals and eat consciously or something to that effect that's going to resonate with your clients and then have a button there saying order your pies now or find a store near you or something like that, or call us here or whatever the call to action is. Make sure that's there because the moment they've seen that, if you've grabbed them and you need to get them within the first three seconds, which is again why it's so important that your website loads quickly. Once you've got them and you've hooked them, they'll then start looking around the rest of the site and they'll look with more engaged interest and intent. That's what you want.
The Final Word
So overall, these few tips will give you a website that means you're getting less spam, a website that's getting more inquiries, and overall a better message and better quality of inquiry. I hope you've enjoyed this. You might be thinking, all right so we're doing this. That sounds good. What if I've already stuffed up and now I need to backtrack? That's a very good question. I'm going to leave that to the next episode. I hope you've enjoyed this, and if you have, jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us a review and stay good.
How to Restructure Your Business With Tim Wilshire
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. We've got an awesome guest for you, we've got Tim Wilshire here, who is a networking number cruncher who podcasts people's perspectives. We've got him on to talk about how to restructure your business and when the right time is to do that. So Tim, first question, how do you know when to do that? I know you've come across businesses that are started as sole traders and other businesses are looking for asset separation and all sorts of stuff. How do you know when the right time is?
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Tim: Okay. Thanks very much, Joshua and hello listeners. But as far as restructuring is concerned, obviously, one thing that I've done plenty of over the last 20 years at my business is restructuring our clients from one structure to another. I guess, like a lot of the answers to questions these days, the answer is, it depends. Okay? You're probably hearing that quite a lot, this is the new 2020 thing, it depends.
So it depends on what the different situation is. So if they're in the wrong structure to begin with, and it's not expensive to change them into the correct structure, that's usually a good time to restructure. So let's say they're a sole trader, let's say they've been going in business for a very short space of time and income is starting to come in the door, something that may potentially sell one day, then you can no longer be a sole trader anymore. It doesn't make sense to stay being a sole trader because number one, you're not protecting your assets. If you've got assets in your own personal name, all of a sudden those assets are at risk and the more at risk, the more risky behaviour that you're doing, the more at risk those assets are when you're a sole trader, so that's definitely a time to look at structures.
If you're not out of the sole trader structure, get out of that particular structure. And there are two alternatives that we sort of look at, whatever the structuring is, do you want to try it as a company or do you want to trade as a trading trust? Or a combination of both types of structure as well. So that's one, I guess, time where it's quite common when it comes to restructuring. Another time might be, okay, I'm in the trading trust at the moment, but I'm basically making too much money and it's no longer viable, unless I've got a company structure. A company structure meaning, I can type my money and I can grow the business. So, a trading trust structure may no longer be applicable to those circumstances because, selling the business because you have less options. If you're in a company structure, you've got more options, easier ways to add and subtract business partners, shareholders, et cetera.
If it's a trading trust, usually good for a smaller operation, up to a couple hundred thousand dollars of profit. Once you get beyond that, a company is certainly worth considering. So that's another time to consider, okay, what's it going to cost to restructure from that structure to that? What are all the processes that I need to do? It doesn't make sense to do that. So that's probably the two main ones you're sort of looking at changing structure because of the circumstances, the current structure don't fit what you're currently doing, and your medium to long term objective.
Josh: And when you say trading trust, a discretionary trust and trading trust are the same thing?
Tim: Yep, yes, exactly.
Josh: Cool. So, you then have cascading setups where you have trusts that own companies, which I think you touched on a little bit there. And then you have companies that are sitting by themself and then you have some people that have multiple companies and asset companies, asset protection. Why would you have that?
Tim: The larger you get us as an operation, the more it makes sense to. I'm not saying complicate things, but the more it makes sense to just do things that are going to protect yourself in the best way, shape or form. What you do see from time to time, not for every client, obviously, but once the clients get big enough, they might have one entity that's the training entity and then they might have another entity that basically looks after all the assets. Those items also, you might be paying staff. How do you pay staff in the most tax effective manner? And why would you do it, not in the trading company? Separation, if you're big enough, certainly justifiable. You just got everything in one trading company basket and you're growing and growing and growing, to me, you need to review that structure and you need to say, okay, well, what can we do to better utilise what's going on there?
So certainly if you've got clients that are big enough that are turning over more than a couple of million dollars a year, really need to review their structures and say, okay, well, are we in the right sort of structure? Is there something going on that we can do a bit more separation? Can we protect our assets better than what they are? The moment it's all in one basket, and that company goes down, then what? What's the plan of attack if that were to happen? If you've got another company over here doing something, important stuff, whatever, you might be able to drop one or the other. So it just gives you a few more options. Yes, it's more of a cost. Yes, it's more of an administration to be able to manage more than one, but at least you're doing things. Separating and separating the risks.
Josh: Okay. And you've talked about going forward, bigger, better, or potentially more complication and more administrative overhead. Is there any times that you would be pulling that back in? Going from a company structure and then going back to a sole trader or something like that.
Tim: You never go back to a sole trader, unless you're not really running a business anymore. But you may sort of downsize your operations in it, if you've got too many different structures. And I'm thinking of a client right now who had way too many different things going on, different trusts. Once you stop using that particular trust, you can close it down, sort of get rid of it. So obviously if it's not getting used, get rid of it. You should be able to probably get rid of the different things that aren't getting used properly. Obviously if your sales are coming down, you're sort of downsizing the business, getting rid of staff for whatever reason, because you're downsizing the business. And then do you need that if there's no staff? I mean, all of a sudden you don't necessarily need that.
Josh: Who opens the conversation to the structure? Is this something that people should be already aware of themself, where they're talking to their accountant about it, or does the accountant say, "Hey, look, you've turned over a million dollars as a sole trader, something's not adding up here. Let's look to restructure this." Or is this something that they sort of need to jump on their own steam? Or maybe they're listening to the podcast to work out the answer. But who should be opening up that conversation?
Tim: I think us, as accountants and advisors, should be opening up that conversation with our clients. We've got to be proactive, we've got to see where the opportunities exist for those clients to get things right. And we've got to take advantage of those opportunities. So get the clients to think that they need to take advantage to get those opportunities.
Josh: For us, I started off as the transitioning periods, as you've said, is pretty much what we did. So when everyone was 14 and nine months old and they were off getting their McDonald's job, I was getting my tax file number and registering my first ABN number. So as a sole trader, I started off just on 15 and continued through as a sole trader for a few years until I had the trust and then the company trusts and then the company trusts and then another company, to have asset protection. And then another company again, which was around some of the different grants and advantages that you can have that are pushed out to companies that are not trading as a trust. You can optimise your tax with multiple businesses and structures, but what would be the reason you'd want to have more than one company? If not for asset protection or a government grant or something like that.
Tim: Why would you have more than one? Obviously, if you've got more than one business operation actually going, you want to separate them in different trading locations. There might be one location here, there might be one location there, it doesn't always make sense to put them in the same envy. That way, if things can be sold separately, you want to be able to treat them separately. Every different division of the business, you probably should have it in its own entity. And you should try to steer away from grouping them together as well. The reason you don't want to group them together is, it's definitely more messy when it comes to returning your tax. Also, if you've tried to group GST, that's messy. And also if you're grouping them, then you're losing out on some benefits sometimes as well. A good example is the government's recent cash flow boost. If you've got just one company, then you're only going to get one lot of cashflow boosts. Whereas if you've got two companies, you're going to get more benefits rather than just one.
Josh: Fair enough. And you did touch on something there about if it's being sold. So when it comes down to exit strategies, if people are looking to sell their business, when's the right time to restructure. When is the right time? You don't want it to look like you've cooked the books or changed the books around or done something funky. You want to make sure there's some historical evidence there that the business is profitable, that everything is going as you would expect it to be. When is the right time to restructure if you are looking towards an exit?
Tim: You don't necessarily want to restructure until it's no longer useful. So it doesn't make sense to restructure too soon. So make sure you get to what you're trying to do before you make that choice cutting these off.
Josh: So, the main reasons you'd restructure is risk mitigation, tax optimization, and to allow for things to be sold off more easily or divided out. Is that right?
Tim: Yeah, I guess all the reasons that I've sort of gone through. Growing, make sure you're structuring correctly, protecting your assets. You need to minimise tax, exactly what you said. And when it comes to the next step, you get to another step, keep reviewing. What's the benefit of bringing in another entity? And everything else that we've sort of discussed there as well. Are we running more than one business operation and can we separate them out? I see clients that shove three different car washes into one entity. They're all at different locations, it doesn't make sense.
Josh: I'm going to say something that I think a lot of people, maybe even yourself, are going to disagree with. Companies are generally pretty straightforward to set it up. There's not too many things you can stuff up. If there's one company and then there's another company, the company as the Pty LTD, decides the division of shares and the amount of directors, et cetera, et cetera. The actual company itself, is a reasonably straightforward container.
Tim: Well, I guess it's very easy to set companies up, yes. Making sure that it's set up right still requires a bit of skill. Who are the shareholders? The shareholders are a very important part of the company and how those shares are owned are very, very important. Putting mum and dad as a shareholder is not always the best way to do it. So is setting up a trust to own the shares, a better option? That's usually what we'd recommend. We'd say, look, you should want more flexibility. It's not owned by you as an individual, it's in the trust. Then we're talking asset protection 101, as far as making sure that things are done right.
Josh: When it comes down to a trust though, it seems like there's a bit more of a grey area than a company. It seems that whenever I've gone to a bank or any lending Institute, they hear that you're running under a trust, they seem to think there's more complication. How come trusts inherently appear to be more complicated than a company?
Tim: I mean, with trusts, once you sort of whirl into it, it's probably not as common. To some, it may not be as complicated as what you may think. So obviously it's a great structure. We're talking about protecting assets, we're talking about planning the long term beneficiaries, kids, children, that all make sense to find out about what all the particular roles are. You just need to know what those roles actually are in a trust, and a lot of people don't know about that unless they read it. So once there's a bit of understanding, then you say, well, this is not as bad as what we thought. But again, it's complicated because it's obviously different to that of an individual sole trader, different to a partnership, different to a company. So I guess that's the stigma behind it, that it is more complicated. Just requires a bit of understanding in order to make it not feel as complicated as what its outward appearances would suggest.
Josh: Were they more open to abuse in the past? Or has that been sort of tightened down a bit?
Tim: Self-assessment is obviously huge. So, there's a lot of trust given to people to do the right thing. And when it comes to trust, there's no exception. So just because you set up a trust, doesn't mean you're going to get an audit or anything like that. Obviously, the audits flags are going to arise if things just don't match up or add up when the ATO are looking at the back system. The government from time to time, have said they don't want trusts, but they've never done anything about that. The labour government, before the last election, tried to make some fairly drastic changes. I guess that's where we are with that at the moment. It's not like it hasn't flown under the radar, but they haven't done anything about it.
Josh: What would be the advantages to not having the structure, where you have a company and then a trust and instead, you're just running solely as a company?
Tim: You're talking about the shareholder situation and also the difference between having a trust as a shareholder and having an individual as a shareholder. So, the biggest issue with having an individual as a shareholder is, company makes money, makes a lot of money, it pays all its tax, there's only one person that can actually end up with that dividend. If they want to declare a dividend or get forced to declare a dividend in some cases, then that goes to one person's particular taxable income. And that could really jump their income quite high, depending on when and how they have to deal with that situation and the profit and all that sort of stuff.
Whereas a trust, at least you got more flexibility. You've got the flexibility to look at the rest of the family group. Can we allocate that dividend to somebody who's on a lower tax income? It makes sense. Three or $400 you spend extra to set up a trust. It's worth it because, yes, you might have to do some dividends and you might have to split that and do another tax return but at the end of the day, it will more than pay for itself.
Josh: So if I was to be a single bachelor or bachelorette and have no one that I can distribute anything to, have no business partners, I own 100% of the shares, still having it through a discretionary trust, would still put an extra level of protection there.
Tim: It does protect the amount of assets that are attributed to yourself because it's a trust that owns the company. That means that, that's not a personal asset that belongs to you. Whereas if you were the only shareholder, whatever the equity in that company, is effectively your asset. If the trust has that there, then if it's not your personal asset, so it usually can be helpful in things like bankruptcy.
Josh: Okay, cool. Well, I think anyone out there that's still scratching their head and has a bit of confusion, definitely make sure to contact Tim Wilshire. He'll be able to bring some clarity and hopefully leave you with the aha moments on how things should be set up. If you want more information or want to hear more about what Tim's doing there, jump onto his podcast from the Valley. We're going to chuck some links in there so that you can check out the website, check out his podcasts and find out what you're doing wrong and how to restructure your business.
Tim: Appreciate you doing this, Josh. There's something I just wanted to finish off with. In 2020, and as it was in 2014 or 2015, if you're going into business with somebody else, set it up as a company. Yes, the shares held 50/50 by different trusts or what have you, but if you go into business with somebody else, make sure it's a company. It just allows a lot more flexibility, allows a lot more growth. It sort of ticks off all the common goals that two partners going into business should be looking at when they go into business together.
Josh: If you were having a Pty or LTD and you had a couple of business owners, is there a restriction or any complication if you had one of those business owners that were not from Australia?
Tim: We have clients where company's are wholly owned by overseas companies, it's always possible. What's required is, the operation to be here at the central management. So the central management being in Australia, one of the directors must be an Australian resident. That's the requirement. The shares can be owned 100% by overseas entities, or 50/50 here.
Josh: That's good to know. Hopefully anyone out there that is thinking about their structure, has had that aha moment and is thinking a little bit more about it, how to set it up properly and yeah, jump down to you guys to get it all sorted.
Tim: Thank you very much.
Josh: Cool. Well, anyone out there in podcast land, if you've enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay healthy. Stay good in this COVID climate.
Improving Your Business Process Flow with Pip Meecham
Josh: Good day everyone out there in podcast land, I've got Pip here from ProjectBox. She is an absolute wiz-kid when it comes to any automation around your business and process flow, and making sure that your systems are working the way your systems are meant to be working. So Pip, tell me, how do you know when a system is broken and how do you know when to fix it, if you've always been using a broken system?
Learn more about improving your business process flow at dorksdelivered.com.au
Pip: That's a really good question. The way you know it's broken is customer complaints, frustrated staff. There could be a host of extra time issues, which then all comes back to frustrated staff as well, at the end of the day. Any kind of bottleneck, generally, you will notice things are starting to go wrong, but it can take some time to kind of pick up on that as well.
Pip: Something could break and then six months later you'll finally pick up on it. It can take a lot of time without having someone come in and look at how you're actually doing things to pick up that things are any kind of different, if that makes sense.
Josh: Yeah, that makes sense. For me, my big rule that I tell all of my staff is, "Have I asked you once?"
Josh: They say, "Yes."
Josh: I said "Have I asked you twice?"
Josh: They go, "Yes."
Josh: "Okay. Then I don't have to ask you a third time because you've already automated it."
Josh: If you've had a problem come up more than once or you think that this situation is going to come up more than once, then template it out and automate it. You're saying, complimentary to that information, you would also make sure that the user experience, not just repetition more so the user experience isn't broken.
Pip: Yep, and most people don't think like you. Most people don't have that trigger to go, "Hey, we've done this three times." Or, "Hey, this has gone wrong."
Pip: Or anything like that, they just keep going with what they're doing, and there's nothing to really trigger that until something big happens, which could be a customer complaint or someone within the team saying something. It's a really tough one, if you're not systems tuned, most people don't pick up on it.
Josh: It comes down to people continue doing what they think they're meant to be doing for an extended amount of time. Not knowing that what they're doing isn't what they should have been doing.
Pip: It's rare to find people who have that kind of continuous improvement mentality to go and actively look for things. I actively try and break stuff all the time but that's my mentality.
Josh: Yep. You're a hacker. That's exactly what a hacker does.
Pip: I'm a breaker, not a hacker. I don't get in, I just break it.
Josh: It can be both. You and I are very similar in that regard. We try our best to work out what is the best way to achieve something the fastest, most efficient way.
Pip: Yeah. A to B.
Josh: Yeah, and automation doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of code with loops and all sorts of other stuff that has an input and an output. It can be an input and output, but it can also be just a procedural document that allows for you to know when a staff is following something, very similar to how McDonald's work.
Josh: They go through and they create an ice cream, a burger or whatever it is. And when you get it, whether it be in America, Canada, Australia, it's always the same crappy burger, but it's the same burger. And it's being made by a different 14 and nine month year old child or teenager, but it's the same burger, the same process. That's just come through repetition and the document that they've read, and knowing that this is the way that it works, this is the most efficient way.
Pip: A lot of people don't think like that.
Josh: No!
Pip: There's so much decision fatigue in business where people wing it all the time, and they lose a lot of time because they're doing that. Whereas if you've got a straight out, set out processes. First do this, then do this, then do this. Automation kicks in to do some of that for you. It's so simple and it's so streamlined. Whereas other people are just weighed down because they're so overwhelmed on what to do next or how to do it.
Josh: I'm going to talk on behalf of all the bloody Australians out there and say, this is the best time to be looking at your processes. Everyone's in lockdown. I'm sure everyone's working 120% of what they were before. That's why Bunnings is full of people, because no one's actually working.
Pip: I can hear so many hammers and chainsaws around my neighbourhood.
Josh: Me too. I'm like, "Yeah, everyone's really working hard guys. Are you all labourers at home?"
Josh: Anyway, everyone's working at home and they're working on the house, which is great, but you should be working on yourself and on your business. This is the best time. When everyone goes, "I don't have enough time for that."
Josh: Bang, this is enough time for that. You've got the time to do it now and this is the perfect time. They should be engaging in people like yourself and seeing what you can do to help them out. And as you said, there's always room for improvement and I'm not going to say what I do is right. But it's going to be better than not doing it at all.
Pip: The problem is as well, is that people get so caught up in their own business that they can't see it, outside. What they're looking at-
Josh: Can't see the forest for the trees.
Pip: Yeah. They've got tunnel vision, like there's nothing else going on except what they, used to doing, what they know they need to do. Whereas I would come in and something that I kind of love doing and it's really wrong, but I love going in and pulling people's processes apart, and looking at the ripple effect that everything has on each other as well.
Pip: Because everyone always talks about, a lot of people are changing technology at the moment because of everything that's going on, they're going, "Right. We're going to use this. We're going to implement new tools to do this. We're going to do this and blah, blah, blah."
Pip: They look at that as a single element and they're not thinking about what's happening before and what's happening afterwards. So people are putting these new things in place and they think it's fantastic, but stuff is still falling over because they're not taking into account what's going on around it. The ripple effect.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. The butterfly effect, ripple effect. It comes down to a big thing that people don't do enough. I started doing it 13 years ago, 14 years ago and then didn't realise how much of an impact it's had, but business plans. Why are you in business? Why do you exist here? What do you want to achieve? What are you going to achieve in one month, one year, five years, we've all heard it.
Pip: Hate it.
Josh: I started writing them. I'm like, "Uh, this is stupid."
Josh: Then I wrote it and then thought, okay, let's see how this goes. Then I've looked back on some of them and I thought, wow, I've got so much more maturity, growth, direction. And some of the things that I thought were really important then, are no longer important and some of the things that are important now, I would never have thought I was even going to be doing.
Josh: But being able to look back on what you've been able to achieve, lets you see the growth that you've done. That's the same, when you create these processes that sit there and can run autonomously or be running by someone else that's not you. You're able to have these processes running and then look at them from a distance to go "Hmm, how else can I tweak that?"
Josh: While you're not sitting there being the driver. If you're always driving around, you're never going to be able to really see the sites out the window.
Pip: It's being able to remove that connection.
Josh: That's right.
Pip: Cut the heartstrings.
Josh: Absolutely, as long as that's what you want to do in business. I will say, straight away when I started my first business, I was the main driving cog and I was the person that did all the things in business, and I earned all the money and I earned all the debt. it was interesting, and good and bad. But overall, I didn't want to be the cog. I wanted to own the cogs. I wanted to have the systems, have the process to be able to step back.
Josh: That's not for everyone, if you read any book on business or any masterclass, that's what everyone apparently wants, but there's businesses that we work with. One in particular, he's a cartoonist and he's big driving motivator is he just loves drawing. He said, "It's a lifestyle business." Now, to be fair, his wife's in a lovely position where she's earning enough money that he could have that decision. So, lucky boy.
Pip: Yeah, but I get it. People always ask me what I want to do with ProjectBox. I don't ever want to stop actively getting into people's businesses and looking at their processes. I legitimately love that stuff, as geeky as it sounds, and people look at me like I am just stupid and crazy, and I'm off with the fairies, but I love it. I get this sense of, it's like a thrill with huge endorphin rush. When you go in and you help people piece this stuff together. I don't want to lose that, but I also want to be able to grow the company.
Josh: Yeah. It's always about the balance. You need to make sure that you've got that interest. As I said, why did you get into business? Work at why you're in business, and this is, you brought this up earlier, probably not everyone's mentality, but when I first started Dorks Delivered in 2007, I thought, okay, I want to do this right. I've now got a trust and I've got a company, I've got all this stuff and all these structures.
Josh: Let's make sure that I'm getting rid of any of the tasks that I don't like doing. And I thought, what do I like doing? Hate doing bookkeeping, hate doing invoicing, hate doing the car logbook. I thought, this sucks, so I created a process. I created an app back then, or was it a web based app. It worked on the Symbian mobile system for anyone that's out there that cares.
Josh: It allowed for you to jump in there and see, as a technician, I had contractors working with me, they'd be able to enter where they're going and would work out their home address to where they're going, the amount of kilometres, how much to charge and how much to put on that invoice.
Josh: They'd then get there and they'd type any prices and it'd automatically work everything out and then click submit or come up with a PayPal and they could get credit card details straight through their phone, right then and there, and this is 2007.
Josh: So I built all that out and it was because I hated all the invoicing stuff. You could take photos and attach invoices and attach expense records, all sorts of things like that. You could do all that. I built this because I hated doing it. Now, not everyone's capable of building it and totally understand that, but that's why you bring in professionals that can help you out.
Josh: The actual process of building it took me several hundred hours. Now, if I looked back and thought, would it have been more beneficial for me to have just learned how to do the invoicing and just done that and in a repetitious way? Possibly, but it wouldn't have been as fun, would it?
Josh: And I've learned so many more skills and that's kind of what you're getting at. You get to learn. You're always growing, expanding and being in business is about being able to delegate. Whether that be in a digital sense through scripting and automation, or through staffing and process documentation, it's being able to delegate to grow your business.
Josh: If you had to pick the top three things that a business owner should be considering with the way their business is set up and what they should change, what would you say they should be? And how can they achieve those for, let's say we're in lock down 'til September, yeah?
Pip: Yeah.
Josh: I think that that's probably likely. So what would you say, how can they do those between now and September?
Pip: Yep. The biggest one is how information is flowing from one system to another. So no double data entry, too many people, literally they'll get it in one format and then be copying and pasting it into other programs. Stupidly time consuming and massive room for human error as well, because someone has to do that. That's a really big one.
Josh: Yep. If you're using a pen, remove it. Stop using a pen. Stop having customers fill out forms with a pen.
Pip: Definitely another one, try and go digital where possible.
Josh: Absolutely.
Pip: The number of people who are still doing it, there is a place for pen and paper. As much as I'm very much a digital person, when I am holding process mapping sessions or the brainstorming creative stuff, I have a roll of butcher's paper. It ends up running down my hallway and I'm literally dragging my computer down the hallway on my hands and knees filling out this paper because that's how I work there. It's really quick for me to draw arrows and then it gets turned into obviously digital [inaudible 00:00:12:31], the paper goes away. Sounds like a waste but I know that that is how I work best.
Josh: I love that because I'm on computers for hours and hours, not because I have to, because I want to. I could spend 18 hours a day on a computer just working because I love doing it. You have people like Gary Vee say, "Work harder, work smarter."
Josh: Well now what? I'm like, "Well, just do what you love doing." And I genuinely love doing it, but I also love the feeling of paper in my hands. And I've got a big whiteboard inside the house, like a four and a half metre by three by two metre whiteboard. I'll write up with my partner, Sarah, any of the new processes that we're going to be going through, any of the if-then statements we're going to be popping into any of the automations and make sure that we've written that out because it's easy to modify it and it changes your perspective. And get this everyone, it removes all those, how many times have you had a push notification from Facebook while you were dealing with butcher's paper? You don't have any of that.
Pip: It's no distractions.
Josh: No distractions. How good is that? It's great.
Pip: Yeah. But it brings out the creativity as well. It's like going back to that cave person thing where we're drawing on walls. Obviously, there are some people that entirely a hundred percent digital is going to work for them. Most people, that's not the case. I know people who will still take their to do list and then send it to a VA to transcribe it into a project management tool because that's how they work.
Pip: They just can't get on and do it, so they've delegated it to somebody. Yeah, get digital where possible. The next big one, and this sounds really stupid, but clean out your computer filing systems. I'm generalising here, but a lot of people it's like going to the supermarket where all the shelves have been knocked over and everything's been stirred together and trying to find fish in the fruit and veggie aisle. It is, looking for medicine and it's down in the freezer.
Josh: And after a while the whole process stinks.
Pip: Yeah. So it's taking time to sort out where everything is stored so that if a client rings, same with like your CRMs and project management tools, give everything like a cleaning over. It's a really good time to be doing that now, so that you should be able to find anything within about 10 seconds. No longer.
Josh: Yep. I did a podcast a few months ago on defragging your filing cabinet and then your computer, or something like that. That's probably a cooler name than what I called it. But people do, we go into people's systems, I'm not going to say who it was, but I went into someone's system, they had two monitors and they had about 500 icons now.
Pip: On their desktop?
Josh: On the desktop. Anyone that has two monitors, if you've ever tried to put 500 icons on the desktops, you'll notice they don't fit on two desktops. So he had icons that he couldn't even see, they were on his two desktops. And you can't scroll up and down on a desktop, so they were just in the abyss.
Pip: And for a lot of people, those computers die and all of that is gone.
Josh: Gone, and they use these obscure systems where they go, "Okay, let's have this cloud of files that store on the right hand side of the desktop."
Josh: Then you do a Windows update and then everything rearranges to automatic, and then you go, "Oh no! This is going to take me days to fix up my icons."
Josh: Just fix it up now, you've got this great opportunity. That's great advice. That's a really good one actually.
Pip: Yeah, nothing should be on the desktop.
Josh: No. Well, you haven't seen my computers yet but I've got eight icons and it's the things that I use commonly, and use all the time.
Pip: And there's shortcuts. So the original files have safety elsewhere.
Josh: Somewhere else.
Pip: Stored properly, with just shortcuts. And shortcuts is a great thing too, because most people will just copy the file, so there's two copies. So I update one and then they'll go to move it and not realise what's going on and go, "What file do I use now?"
Pip: And end up with three, four, five, six or 10 different copies. So creating shortcuts, it's something that not a lot of people take advantage of.
Josh: Shortcuts are great and I'm not going to get into heaps of detail on shortcuts, symbolic links and other bits and pieces of IT, but shortcuts are great. People should be using shortcuts. And in a filing cabinet, traditionally, you have things sectioned and it could be A to Z, but most of the time it's warranty information, ATO letters, bank statements, all that.
Pip: Categories, yeah.
Josh: Your computer systems, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. The way that I like to do it is, what would you share with your mum? What would you share with your partner? What would you share with your business partner? What would you share with your staff? What would you share with your nana and what would you share with the world? And then make sure your hierarchy has things in those categories and then from there then have projects inside those.
Josh: For me, I've got family, personal, business, the three main ones. Then inside personal, it then stems off into different year categories for photos and things that used to go into your personal, it goes to photos. And then it has different years that these photos were taken inside each year, it then has different events for each of those years. And so if someone said, "Ah, do you have any photos from my 21st from way back when?"
Josh: You'd be able to go, "Yeah, no worries."
Josh: Click, click, bang, done. I had someone actually, and I've been a bit of a stickler for organisation for quite a while. I had someone say, "Oh, remember we did that school assignment on moths?"
Josh: And I said, "Yeah."
Josh: Said, "Oh man, if only I could see what my assignment looked like then."
Josh: Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a tricky dude. I happened to have acquired his assignment through the school systems back then, so I gave him a copy of his assignment.
Pip: Wow.
Josh: He's like, "What the hell? How'd you do that?"
Josh: And I'm like, "Yeah, no, it's pretty weird, eh?"
Josh: Having a hierarchy that works for you and the reason I say that those different categories to start off with, like the personal, and then the things you'd share with your nana or your mum and things like that is because if you are using different tools like Dropbox, you can then say, share this folder out to whoever, and it doesn't matter. And you know it's not going to have personal stuff.
Pip: It gives people a great place to start because half the problem with this stuff is just getting started instead of looking at it going, "Oh my God, I've got like 10,000 files I need to sort out because they're all sitting in my downloads folder."
Josh: Yep. The first five minutes is the hardest.
Pip: Setting up that initial structure and then just, yep.
Josh: Setting up the initial structure, and this is something I would've done on butcher's paper or would have done on the whiteboard. You just write it down and go, "Okay, that makes sense. Okay, that's sensible."
Josh: And then you look at and go, "Okay, who's going to have access to what? If I give access to this folder, everyone has access to that."
Josh: Obviously I'm talking a bit into the security stuff as well as just the organisation, but I just find if you start with security first and then organise around that, it'll make your life very easy and harder for people to break into your stuff.
Pip: Definitely.
Josh: As things become harder and harder.
Pip: I guess my final one would be reviewing the tools and the software that you're using. Use the time to go in and look at all the individual platforms and work out if there's any overlap, because quite often we sign up to things or people recommend things and we don't really do a lot of research around it. So more often than not, the tools are capable of doing more than what you think and you can actually condense those down, or you can start to get them to talk which brings us back to first point.
Josh: Yep. I would agree completely that and tools evolve even after you build them, they evolve over time and you look at some of the things and you go, "Man, that never did that before."
Pip: It's really knowing and understanding exactly what that tool is capable of doing.
Josh: It's going through it, having a look.
Pip: Hey, you can't break stuff.
Josh: Exactly. Just have a muck around then. That's great advice, especially as I said, while everyone's at home, hopefully with a beer in your hand, hypothetically we are having a beer, possibly, unless you listen to this at 7:30 in the morning, then we're definitely not. But it's a great time to be doing that and be jumping in and making sure that your systems are ready to go gangbusters.
Pip: Exactly. So that as soon as things take back off again, you're ready to go. Holes have been plugged, you know what's what, you know what's happening by when, by who and how.
Josh: Yep. And the cutovers, if there are programmes that you don't have to get rid of, you can't get rid of it because one thing does something really well and then another thing. We use ActiveCampaign internally. We're using another IT programme called ConnectWise, up until recently and ConnectWise did email marketing very poorly, but it did ticketing and invoicing really well, which ActiveCampaign didn't.
Pip: That's like I said to you before, I use ClickUp for my sales dashboards because I couldn't get the data out of ActiveCampaign, But it's knowing that I could do that and understanding that.
Josh: Yep. And that's where having a document on what the cutovers are, at least let you know where data is meant to be stored. The flow of data is very important. Knowing where your master, your primary, your truth data I guess, where you'd say this is where everything is pure. And then if people have entered dodgy records or transcribe things incorrectly somewhere else, then you can start to work out where the other stuff is.
Pip: Go back.
Josh: The last thing you want is if you've got five systems that you're running, as I've heard, or in a lot of American talks, "the silos of chaos."
Josh: You have all these silos and you just can't control them and can't manage them and just everything gets out of sync, and then it gets out of whack. This is a great time to be bringing in people, especially like people from ProjectBox, that's able to look at your systems, integrate your systems and make sure that your data is staying the same between all of them, and you don't have any overlaps with your processes, and you're running an efficient shop because ultimately you don't know what you don't know until you know it.
Pip: Yeah, exactly. The number of people that I've met or that I've done work with, who you ask the question, "How is this bit happening?"
Pip: And they look at you and they're like "What do you mean? I know how that's happening."
Pip: I'm like, "Cool. Lay it out for me. Tell me what's supposed to be happening at every step."
Pip: And they either can't or we start talking, they're like, "Oh, well that should be happening." Or "I wish it could do this." Or, "Someone's supposed to do this."
Pip: What they think is happening in their head is completely different to what is actually happening. Now a really good time to be looking at that stuff as well. And for the businesses who is super busy right now, this is the time where they will probably start to notice where those holes are.
Josh: Yep, absolutely. It's interesting times, businesses are either crazy or quiet, or crazily quiet. I think there's a lot of good take-homes there. People need to be jumping in, making sure their systems are good. Their filing processes are good, and that you are engaging in people services. So if people did want to jump in and get a hand throughout South East Brisbane, or what is your reach with ProjectBox?
Pip: So South East Queensland, Northern New South Wales, but because of what I do, I can do it remotely. So realistically, anywhere around Australia and New Zealand as well, I've got quite a few clients over there too.
Josh: We're going to chuck a link down there to ProjectBox so you can check it out. Is there anything else you'd like to cover off, other questions that we haven't gone through?
Pip: No, I'm pretty sure we got it.
Josh: Yeah, cool. I've loved having you on the show and if anyone else has any feedback or bits and pieces, I'd like to say jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some comments or a review and everyone out there stay healthy, stay well and start automating. Catch you later.
Enhancing Your Business With Madeline Clift
Josh: G'day everyone out there in podcast land. We've got a guest here from Level Up Chartered Accountants called Madeline Clift, and she's going to be going through some awesome ways that you can enhance your business methods and processes with the help of technology. So Madeline, a quick question for you. What would you say is the number one thing that businesses can implement to make sure that they are able to enhance their processes?
Learn more about enhancing your business at dorksdelivered.com.au
Madeline: It's real listening. It's a weird one, but that's probably the best one that you can do, make sure you're listening to your staff and your clients. The first thing we've done was making sure that the business runs smoothly for ourselves internally as a company ourselves, even though we're accountants helping other businesses, is we ask our staff what they want. We make sure that they can do their job to the best of their abilities, and it's really paid off for us, especially during this scary pandemic time.
Josh: Yeah, it is definitely a time of unknowing, isn't it? And I think you're on the right page there, where you say invest in your staff is very, very important. We were given two ears and one mouth, so use them in that ratio. Listen twice as hard as you're talking.
Madeline: Exactly.
Josh: That's very, very good advice. So start by listening and making sure that you've got the processes in place to get rid of the deadwood, I guess, would you say? How would you go about making sure that you do have a team of unicorns?
Madeline: Team of unicorns, that's a funny way of putting it. We call them wizards actually, funnily enough.
Josh: Oh, wizards.
Madeline: Yeah. We'll have to tell them that they were referred to as unicorns.
Josh: Yeah. Or ninjas. Sometimes I call them ninjas as well, but yeah.
Madeline: That'll work too. Yeah, so our internal wizards, the first thing that they said to us was that they actually love how simple it is to work away from home if they need to. A lot of the guys have kids. This was long before pandemic time, but the guys were like, "Oh, I'm really glad you guys just gave me a laptop that sits on a desk with two monitors, because I can go home and work if I need to, if my kid gets sick for the afternoon," things like that. And because we invested in them right from the get-go, that wasn't an initial cost for us when everyone had to start working from home. Everyone was already ready to go. They took their laptops home and they even stole, basically, half of the monitors that we had floating around the office, so that they were even more set up at home. Everyone's working with two screens. Everyone's super comfortable. And that was just from that simple thing of listening. It's really already paid off for us when it comes to the stressful times. We know our IT provider, again, was really stressed out just trying to provide laptops for the week to get other businesses sorted.
Josh: Being ahead of the curve there's really important, and it'll pay off in significant quantities, I think you'll find over next few months and years. Because it means that your commercial overheads from a commercial real estate perspective can be kept a bit lower. Which means that your footprint, that you're putting your carbon footprint, if people are working from home, is lower. Your time wasted between traveling is lower, which means people have time to spend with their family. They're spending less time and money on maintenance for cars. It's by far the most sensible way to go.
Josh: And we started the business 13 years ago in mum and dad's garage, where all tech startups start. Went from there to a bricks-and-mortar building a couple of years later and had the staff coming in there. And then, same as you guys, have gone and went, "This is stupid. What am I doing? We're going to other people. We're very, very rarely having anyone come to us." And I thought, if they want to come to us then they're probably close enough to have them come to the house and have a beer on a Friday afternoon anyway. So that's the approach that we went, and I think a lot of businesses are going to be adapting that.
Josh: And one of the things that I found, actually, after we started going through the remote workforce, this is probably now 2013 or so, we found it took a little bit of refining and adjustments for people that were used to coming into work. And we put in systems and practices to make sure that we had different KPIs, that we're able to manage around that. What would you say would be a method that you guys are using to be able to monitor and manage your staff to make sure that they're not having a few sneaky looks at Facebook? Or maybe they are. Maybe you've got that written in their agreement.
Madeline: Technology-wise, we've actually already got a monitoring system in place. The guys know that they've got ActivTrak on their laptops. So if they're ever doing something they shouldn't be, like installing Bitcoin to try and make money, it flags our IT subsidiaries. There's one method, I suppose. We make that clear so the guys know that they can't be stuffing around.
Madeline: Second one, which we're quite lucky for because in our industry, we have to report billable hours. So everyone has to put in a time sheet for what they're working on. It can be done simplistically, like you can say, "All right, for the first three hours this morning, I'm going to be working on this client's data. So I won't be free, don't talk to me." But then we've actually got the time sheet logged in there and saying, "Okay, well, they've actually done all of the work papers. They've done the end of financial year job for the entire client and all the individuals." Things like that.
Madeline: Even for our admin staff at the moment, them working remotely, they're doing time sheets per hour. They're much smaller slots, but they're still actually putting in, "Okay, well, I actually spoke to this client for half an hour on the phone." It may or may not be billable, but they've at least put that time sheet in. So at the end of the week or the fortnight in the pay period, the director and myself are able to go through those time sheets and double check, "Okay, well, actually, you've worked a 12-hour day." Funnily enough, I find that more of the staff are spending more time, realising, because they're not doing anything at home, they're actually doing more work, which is really funny. But we're really lucky.
Madeline: Yeah. Time sheets and actually the software tracking systems are probably the best bet, I would say, for most business.
Josh: Cool. And so I guess we have two different models of clients. The majority of them, we charge a set rate per month where we just give them unlimited support, which works great for the clients. And then we guarantee their uptime to make sure that they're not. If they have downtime, in fact, we pay them. So we don't want them to have downtime. So we make sure they don't have downtime. So we're fighting for them to be up as much as possible and to be as efficient and utilised as possible. So that's the model of payment that we have for our customers.
Josh: But for our staff, we have a similar model where we have hours that are measured, and then KPIs, which are normally on the efficiency of the work that was accomplished.
Josh: So say if you have a client that's bringing in $2,000 a month, for instance, and that client calls up 10 times and the hourly rate, or the amount of time that client is spent on, if that was say a thousand dollars worth of time, the staff pool bonus is 10% of the difference. So they'd only get 10% of the money remaining. So it's in everyone's interest to make sure then it works, don't go down, and they stay up as much as possible.
Josh: Then that's a sort of the big metric that we found because we put in place a program assistant called ObserveIT, which lets you see all the screenshots and keyboard logs and activity and things like that. And then we built a couple of other bits and pieces ourselves so that we can see if the sort of traffic and how utilised each PC is and if one's running slightly slower and all that sort of stuff. But when it came back to it, we just needed to make sure that the staff and the business were steering in the same direction, was the big thing of making sure that the reasons why businesses are working with you are bred into the culture of your business. So then it sounds like you guys are doing pretty well the same thing, which means you're a step ahead of a lot of accounting firms out there. Hats off to you.
Madeline: Yeah. I don't like to toot my own horn, but we think we've really taken it to a different approach, I suppose, than a lot of the boutique accounting firms in the past. And then even at the moment, we've found other firms that are roughly the same size as us, the way they approach, I suppose, how they treat their staff, the hierarchy in the office, they're all 50-year-old practices. They've upgraded maybe the technology. They know how to use Xero now, which is great, but all of the rest of their systems and their processes are just stuck in the last century.
Josh: We were using QuickBooks. It was about 1,000, $1,500 or whatever it was, back in 2007 to 2013. I hated it. I hated it so much, but it was the only system that our ERP solution integrated into, and smile from ear to ear the moment we moved across to Xero. You guys would use XPM as well, I'd imagine because you're a practice manager?
Madeline: Yes, we do. We use both. Then again, a third system, monday.com as well, just for tasks and scheduling. Yeah, that was even simpler to use for our staff. Pretty much all of our systems are cloud-based. We don't want anything not to be on the cloud because we actually feel that that's more secure for us. So there's nothing wasted and paying for installing systems. I think the only thing that we pay for a subscription for is a PDF-editing software system.
Josh: That's not too bad. As long as you've got the security behind it. I'm a big advocate for the cloud as long as it's been set up correctly. And that's another thing, a lot of people sort of just hear lots about it on the internet and read about it. And then Yellow Pages, even we're doing big campaigns about it, saying, "Everyone needs to move to the cloud," and I'm like, "Yeah, okay. That's cool." As long as you know your data is secure, encrypted, and isn't going to be attacked.
Josh: My goodness, the number of solicitors and accounting firms that we've seen that have vulnerable data that's out there that we've been able to find, show them and they've just gone, "Oh my goodness, how'd you get access to that?" Or, "You shouldn't have access to that." And I'm like, "I know I shouldn't." I said, "And there's other people in there that wouldn't be telling you that they've got access to it." I said, "We're one of the good guys to help you guys out."
Madeline: Our biggest expenses as a business actually are the people we employ to do our IT and I'm happy to speak their name, which Connected Platforms, and our actual staff. Those are the biggest costs for us as a business. Staff that we employ and how much we pay our IT company to manage everything that we're doing on the cloud. So those are our two biggest investments that I think are the biggest payoff, really.
Josh: Absolutely. That's a differentiator with a lot of businesses. Some businesses look at staff and some of the other required services, such as IT, as a liability and an expense, where really it should be an investment. It should be something that you're sitting there and your Connected Platforms hopefully sits there with you on there, as like a virtual CIO or CTO to talk about how they can leverage new technologies, and what's your exit strategies for the business, and how are you going to be going along with that to make sure that your practices have built up around that? I would completely disagree with what I just said if it was 50 years ago, but nowadays, you can't run a business. It's kind of like saying, you want to run a business without electricity. It's like, yes, it can be done. Is it the most efficient, easiest way to do it? Absolutely not. IT is definitely where people need to be investing their time and money. IT automation and marketing would be our biggest expenses internally.
Madeline: I think it will change, depending on industries. For example, we have a lot of clients, where their IT isn't obviously their biggest investment. It might be the equipment that they're using. Because they might be that kind of industry, where they're actually like earth moving or something like that, that's quite a big investment, earthmoving machinery and things like that.
Madeline: Then secondary to that. It's always the people that they employ. They need to trust their staff. They're moving those million dollar machines around and things like that. So I think those two are pretty integral, regardless of the industry that you're in.
Josh: I agree, obviously you have set up costs and bits and pieces. If you've got, as you said, earthmoving equipment or any sort of industry-specific equipment, it's going to have a big cost. But the good news is, I guess it's also equity sitting there in the business that if shit hit the fan and they had to start getting rid of staff, the equipment they could sell and it's going to give them something back, hopefully, unless it's completely depreciated. What have you guys found that are things that many businesses or accounting businesses can put in place that removes staff overheads and things like that?
Madeline: Training in those systems, I think. The biggest problem with accounting, I suppose, is you've got a lot of young people coming out of university who, a hundred times work and study, then you're really trusted and really, really knowledgeable accountants in their forties and fifties. There's a definite gap there where you've got people who are incredibly tech savvy and just want something done and know that they can get it done quickly. And then you've got people who are used to looking at the Tax Agent Master Guide, which is a book bigger than any Harry Potter novel. They're going, "Check this index against this," and they're going, "Well, I could just Google it, mate," where like, what's the term or phrase kind of thing, like, just so we can make sure that we've got the ruling right if we want to make changes. So training and investing in those staff is the biggest thing that's kind of, I suppose, saved us, especially during this pandemic.
Madeline: I know that other businesses that we engage personally have just absolutely had to shut down, apart from their few youngest employees who have to run the show at this point because they can work remotely. They figured out how to use the laptop and remote login to the systems. Things like that. Their older employees are just like, "Well, what do I do? I sit at home and do nothing?" It's like, "Well, I can teach you how to, I don't know, use Slack or something like that." Like a direct messaging system, that like, if you're struggling with Facebook Messenger, going to be a problem.
Josh: A degree in Google is what I refer to that as. People just need to know how to search for what they need to find. You don't need to know absolutely everything. You just need to know how to use the tools that you've got to be able to find the answers, and the tools can be people or it can be your search engines or documentation systems and the like.
Josh: And documenting your processes is great because it allows for you to level up. It lets you level up. You can easily chuck in more accountants and they can read through the on boarding documents. If you have a new business that you're working with, there can be on boarding documents for them as well. And off boarding documents, if you are downsizing or a business is no longer working with you, it makes everything more straightforward.
Josh: And the way I would relate it is the biggest business that's operating or one of the biggest businesses is McDonald's and it's run by 14 and nine month year olds.
Madeline: Yes, step one, step two, step three, press the button. It's all automated. Yeah.
Josh: Exactly. And so getting those processes in place is super important. What do you normally use to create the documentation? Is that something that you're doing with the likes of video recordings or text-based things or both, or situationally, are you putting people into a situation where you can have them learn to become the teacher?
Madeline: Yeah, actually funny, you just said that, just last learn to become the teacher. That's probably pretty much the best thing, we want to level up the staff that've spent years in the office because once they can write their own processes and teach someone how to do it, it's... I have two 18 year olds in the administration team, reception and administrative assistant. They're sitting there telling the 40 year olds, "Okay, this is how we're going to use this process."
Madeline: It gets rid of that hierarchy as well, because you've got an 18 year old teaching a 35 year old how to use a program, but we're not using kind of like recording processes because everyone's an individual in how they teach. Everyone's, I suppose, an individual on how they learn. So there's no one set way of learning. I think we've discovered that a lot, just through focusing on the individuals in the office. It's one-on-one, 100%, but we document what needs to be done.
Madeline: We use another program called MyGlue. So that one's again, referred to from our IT company. They use it for a lot of their internal processes and you can step out what you have to do for on boarding a client, like the step-by-step processes with that. We document the basics, but it's really a one-on-one experience. Yeah. That's why the business has basically quadrupled in size over the last year and a half. Just on that one-on-one mentoring, it's just that keeping to the basics in a PDF document.
Josh: Talking about MyGlue, that's a, I think it's a part of another product called IT Glue.
Madeline: Yes, it is, sorry, yeah.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So when you said MyGlue, I'm thinking, I'm pretty sure it's IT Glue. It's a fantastic tool. We have the same family of tools that we use internally, and having that documentation there, as you said, not everyone learns the same way. We've spent a lot of money to have multiple ways for people to learn, videos of onboarding of new staff, as well as then screen captures, as well as then videos that they can watch from a screen recording, as well as in the text document. So you can then have your own internal research to be able to look it up and find out something.
Josh: The biggest thing is to start with something. Having something's better than nothing. Having a process there and being able to write yourself out of the business is really important. You don't want to be sitting there working day in, day out, as the business owner. You want to make sure that as long as you're not in a position where you can become redundant, you want to be able to make yourself redundant.
Madeline: Exactly. It's funny. Bring it back to you were mentioning the DISC profile before. And a lot of accountants being just one type. We used to do the DISC profile on all new employees coming in, but I no longer bother with that because I want that personality that's able to speak to clients and isn't just really process-based. It's just like, "Well, no, I just follow the process." We go, "Well, that's not being an innovative creative accountant." We don't want you to absolutely defraud the tax office or anything like that. But there is ways that you can be innovative and help the client in that business advisory way as well. So if it leads back into that we don't want to be that typical accounting firm where you're just following a step-by-step process and individualising it to every person and employee, making sure that they fit in.
Josh: I think it's important to be personable and not be like what the industry says. Like I'm a, as I said, I started in mom and dad's garage, but that doesn't mean that I'm not the guy that jumps up on stage and talks to everyone about how they can better their business. It's about making sure that you are the thorn in the bush, if everyone else is the bush. So be the one that stands out and be refreshing.
Madeline: Yeah. We're definitely not your typical accounting firm. Really accounting is a secondary, I suppose, skill that we want you to have if we're hiring you as an accountant, we actually want you to be able to talk to us and have a meeting with us and want to work for the company because I'll tell you what, the amount of offices or typical, even real estate agents I've worked in too where you walk in and it's sort of funeral tone to it. Because there's no sound. It's just a quiet receptionist sitting there that goes, "Hello. How are you?" And speaks very professionally.
Madeline: In our office, when it's open, when there's not a pandemic on, we've actually got a dog. Usually in the office, there's always music playing. People are welcome to come and go as they please, if they've got appointments with work and stuff like that, the office is just where they can come to work. But there's definitely an open-door policy as well. No one has their own office except the director. If they need a private space, we've got those areas. But we're basically a big team where you can yell out across the room and go with someone, so and so, about this, "Who's handling that?" So it's definitely not your typical accounting firm. We don't want that. That's what we're trying to avoid.
Josh: Well, it sounds like you're the Google of accounting firms. If anyone out there in podcast land's looking to level up the way that their business is running and make sure that they've got someone there that they can give you advice as much as they can give you without being a financial advisor, I'd definitely suggest checking out Level Up Chartered Accountants. Is there anything else that you'd like to cover off on, Madeline, before we finish the podcast?
Madeline: Don't be surprised at how young some of us are. If you are interested in coming into the office and seeing how things go. We do have people that are experts, been in the industry for 20, 30 years. But Drew himself is in his early thirties, me myself only just turned 30, I'm pretty much the captain of the ship. So yeah, we've got a lot of young wizards in there, and that can be scary, I think, for some businesses where they they've known their industry, it's been the same way for 20, 30 years. And we don't disregard that. We know that it's your business kind of thing. We're just going to make sure one part of it runs smoother because we've taped up, we've leveled up so we can hopefully level up at least one part of your business and maybe it'll flow through to the rest.
Josh: You heard it from the head wizard's mouth. And I think that's absolutely appropriate because when I started in business, we were dealing with much bigger businesses. When I was in mom and dad's garage 13 years ago, as a... Far out, was I, 19 years old at that stage. I was talking to these businesses and they're looking at me going, "What could you possibly know?" But people just, at the moment, anyone gave you the... Open up their ears, and that's circling back to what you were saying earlier. People need to listen more than they're talking. The moment they were able to listen and they went, "Oh geez, this person knows what they're talking about."
Josh: I know myself, I was a few years ago, sent over to Vegas to do a presentation in front of three and a half thousand IT businesses about how we automate some of our internal processes. And I was freaking out because I'm thinking, Oh no, I'm like nearly 30-ish. And these people, when I'm looking in the audience are like you said, 50s, 60s, 70s. And I'm going, they are going to think just I'm a wally. They're probably still talking about punch cards. Anyway, I get up there and I start talking. And first minute, you see people's eyes sort of like not really paying attention. Second minute, everyone's there taking notes and writing down things and you could see their attention. I went, "Awesome."
Josh: It just takes a couple of minutes for people to see the change and the benefit that you can have. And it's refreshing, I think, not doing things the same way that people have been doing it for decades. It's good to have some fresh blood in a business, to be able to push that along and have that experience, have some of the nomads in there, the grey-haired nomads, but also have some of the younger whippersnappers that are going to be able to break out, change, a difference.
Madeline: Definitely. Yeah. We've found a happy medium, I think.
Josh: Sounds good. Sounds exciting. And yeah, if anyone out there does want to have a discussion with Madeline, definitely jump across to levelupca.com.au That's levelupca.com.au, and you can check out what they've got on their page there, and probably even be able to book in a session to jump in there and meet the team and pat their dog.
Madeline: Yeah. He's Chewy, he's lovely.
Josh: Chewy. Awesome. Well, I've loved having you on the show and look forward to seeing how everything goes after this COVID situation. If anyone has any questions or has any reviews or feedback, make sure to jump across to iTunes and leave us a review, give us some love. Everyone out there, stay healthy and stay good.
Niching Your Business With Kirsty-Lee Roberts
Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. I've got Kirsty-Lee here and she's going to be talking to us about niching and the current position of Australia's financials. So Kirsty-Lee, tell me, what drove you to niche into the trade and construction industry.
Learn more about business niching at dorksdelivered.com.au
Kirsty-Lee: Hi, so I took on a business coach and it was an online program, and in there they had discussed a lot about how, if your message is targeted towards every business, you'll likely not to be speaking to any of them. They're not really going to go ahead with your services because you're very generic. So I had decided to test out my message being focused towards building and construction, because that's where my background comes from and I'm very passionate about it, and it also means that a lot of my clients are all kind of similar. They're all in the building construction trades, sole trader area.
Josh: Cool. We see it all the time. Definitely have the sniper approach, not the shotgun approach. And we hear it spoken about a lot and a lot of us hear, "Oh, we got to do this. We got to do this." And then we don't, or we think we will always try to, and then we just fall back. But one of the big things that I found is when niching, it's not about turning away business, would you agree? You'd still work with other businesses?
Kirsty-Lee: I do have quite a lot of clients that are outside building and construction. I just feel like building and construction is, I guess, where I'm meant to be, that's where I have the most knowledge. But I do take on, say, restaurants, mechanics, they're quite similar to building and construction anyway, makeup, artists, things like that. But it's just something that I just feel really passionate about, and I know that those building and construction and trade space businesses really need that help, so if I can provide that specialist help to them, I can help them overcome the problems that I've seen in many businesses that are quite similar.
Josh: A lot of businesses, they do the voodoo that they do well, but not everyone's a bookkeeper, not everyone's an accountant, not everyone's an IT person. You can't wear all the hats, so it's good to get to nice and then you know any of the certain products and programs that they might use, like, I'm sure you've come across simPRO and things like that. It's good to know how the data is being looked at and how they would like the reporting done. I find when you're niching, it's about getting your message clear on your website and all your marketing so that the businesses that you're talking to go, "Okay, you are the right person for me." And it makes it very difficult for them to compare apples with apples because there's apples and oranges, there's someone that does everything, which means they probably do nothing well. And there's someone that does something very, very well. Would you say that your experience has been the same?
Kirsty-Lee: Yeah, most definitely. So the differences between, say, restaurant to building and construction is restaurants are very hard to cashflow forecast because their sales are the sales that they get on the day. So it's very hard to predict, I guess, what their sales are going to be the next day or in a week's time, in a month's time, whereas building and construction, a lot of the work will tend to go over a longer period of time, smaller operators might have jobs for a day or two. Large operators might have jobs that go for 12 months. So with those larger jobs, you've got your progress claims, you've done your quote, so you kind of know what's involved. You can kind of forecast for the next 6 to 12 months of funding, or not so much what funding, but what monies they're going to have coming in from clients, what expenses they're going to have, because they've quoted all those works.
Josh: That makes perfect sense. And people think a lot of the time, when you niche, people think, "Oh, it means you're just good at one thing," but I like to liken it to, I guess, a doctor. You go to see your GP and your GP will talk to you about any of the different elements that you have. But if you went to see a specialist, whether that'd be a dermatologist or a gynecologist or any of the other ologists, if you went and saw one of them, you would know that, they've at least studied the same things that your normal GP has and then they've just specialised further, so they're as good as someone that can manage any and all the books as well as being better in a certain area. Would that be fair to say?
Kirsty-Lee: Yes, most definitely. I went into a building and construction business a couple of years ago and they were focusing on manufacturing at the time and they had just started going into installation of a particular product. And I remember I was there for maybe three or four hours, and I had said, "Can I have a look at your copy of your last BAS? I just want to see what you were claiming on your BAS kind of thing." And then the minute I picked it up and I went, "You're not claiming fuel tax credits." And they're like, "Oh, what is that? Are we entitled to that?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you've got machinery on site. You should be able to claim for your fuel tax credits for what you're using the machines for." And that they hadn't been claiming it about, I think it was about two years, the period that they could have claimed for. And that was worth over $40,000.
Kirsty-Lee: So if you're going with somebody that is maybe not experienced in the field, you could be missing those little things. It would be quite similar to me going somewhere that makes wine, I would have no idea about wine tax credits, and I wouldn't pretend to know. I can research it and find out the information, that kind of thing, but if I was looking after a wine business, that could be potentially something that I missed.
Josh: Yep. That makes perfect sense, and knowing those little niche things can, as you said then, it could be a world of different. 40 grand, that's a lot of money and that's something I think a lot of people should be considering. People build these awesome relationships with businesses, and one of the things that we we strive on is we tell any business that works with us. We say, "Don't just take our word for it. Go and take advice. Go and get an audit or an IT audit or a security audit or take advice from other IT companies, and bring it back to us or sit down with us at the table and we'll talk about what their findings were," because we know a lot about technology, but as you've just pointed out, there could be certain things or certain parts that we go, "Okay, we've missed that because there's some very specific pieces of software that would be great for their industry." And everyone grows by doing that.
Josh: And that's something, I guess, is good for any business too, is just to get a second opinion. We ask our clients to do it, and we think everyone should be doing that just to make sure that they can see what they're doing and what they're doing is right. As opposed to continuing to do what they've been doing and not wanting to change. And in changing this company, you're talking about, saved 40 grand. That's a decent whack of money by having someone else's eyes go over their books.
Kirsty-Lee: Yeah. Most definitely. It's something that if I come across something in a client's books, I might say to the accountant, "Hey, what do you think of this? Or I'm thinking we do something like this regarding this particular issue. What are your thoughts?" Just to run it past them, because when it comes to bookkeeping, I'm not the only person that has to look at your books. You've got the business owner, but then you've also got the accountant at the end of the financial year. So whatever I do affects both of those people so I need to make sure that both parties are going to be happy with the work that I've done.
Josh: Yep. You're kind of the middle man where you need to be able to represent the information, and I'm sure some of the stuff that you get given is chicken scratch and you need to polish it off and make it look amazing.
Kirsty-Lee: There's a lot of shoe boxes with receipts that might be faded or barely readable.
Josh: Receipt Bank. How cool is that? I'll be the first to say, when I started up my first entity, which was just myself as a sole trader, this is going back 17 years now, I was doing everything myself and keeping care of everything myself and I read multiple books on making sure I was doing everything right with the GST and then I got to 13 years ago where I then set it up with a trust, the company, and I went, "Okay, this is getting way too confusing." But I was too scared to submit it myself because I don't want to stuff up, so I just didn't for two years. End result, I was losing sleep and freaking out. I'm going, "I'm going to have the government knock on my door. They're going to find me. I'm going to be stuffed." I had QuickBooks, but I had done no BAS lodgements and it was shoe box accounting, absolutely. It was terrible.
Josh: I went and spoke to a bookkeeper and she said, "Don't worry about it, calm down. It's not that big of a deal. Just go through it and we'll get it sorted." It cost a few hundred dollars. They went through... And again, just the timelines on money positions, this is now 11 years ago. It costs a few hundred dollars. So it'd be a lot more now, but cost a few hundred dollars. They went through and said, okay, "Everything's sweet, it's all been submitted." I went, "Oh my goodness, the stress is gone." And that's what it's about, I guess, removing the business owner from the equations of things that they're not that great at, and putting people like yourself in their shoes, where they're able to use your knowledge and use them to the advantage, get $40,000 worth of savings, and know that they're in safe hands.
Kirsty-Lee: And it's even something like the ATO. I still get nervous when I call the ATO and that's what I do on a daily basis. So as a business owner, if you're worried that you haven't got your BASes submitted and you haven't quite found a bookkeeper, accountant yet, give the ATO call and explain your situation, and then more than likely going to give you an extension to be able to get everything organised and bring everything to date. Because they're not out there to get the people that are trying to do the right thing or trying to bring their books up to date. It's those people that are deliberately not submitting it. That's the people that they want to go after and that they want to get.
Josh: I'd liken that to back at school. One of the things that I wish that I did, although I do have the facade of someone that's an extrovert now, I can promise you at school I was definitely not. And one of the things I always wish that I did was ask more questions in class instead of sitting there feeling stupid. I never called the ATO in the two years that I hadn't done anything, so I'm like, "I don't want to tell them, because I don't want to get in trouble, because I don't know what I don't know and I don't want them to know that I don't know what I'm doing and then they'll be like, 'Oh, now you're going to be audited. Now you've told us.' And I'm like, 'Oh, so don't tell them.'" And then I was just freaking out more and more.
Josh: As I've found out more recently, the ATO are there to help you, as you said, not there to hinder you. They want to work with you, and that was great advice.
Kirsty-Lee: It's always one of those things that you get clients coming to you and they're freaking out and they go, "I haven't submitted a BAS in two years," and it's like, "Okay, one step at a time. I'm going to contact the ATO. I'm going to get that extension just so you can sleep a bit easier." And there's a very real possibility that once you submit a BAS, you're probably going to get a fine. So you just prepare them for that and go, "Oh, they'll probably send me a fine." I think the last one I saw was like $440 for not submitting on time. But then I've had a number of clients that we've submitted late or we've had to call up to get an extension for reasons outside their control and they haven't received a fine. So it's just one of those things that I think you've probably got to be a little bit unlucky for the ATO to give you a fine. If it's your first occurrence, they're probably not going to fine you. You're probably not going to have an audit. But that being said, the ATO might one day just start auditing everyone. We have no idea.
Josh: Yeah, it's up to them. But I have found overall my dealings have been pretty good. I can't complain too much. They've been very lenient when I had some financial stress due to a breakup. I had expressed my concerns with them. They came to the party quite well. So I was happy with that and that was just one less stress at an already tense time. Getting to the point of you niched your business, and now we've gone into a spot where with the current pandemic and health of Australia and on a larger scale, the world, we've got businesses that are either booming or busting. And one of the patterns that I have seen is that some people have niched, but they've done it in a way that has resulted in them having all of their income gone because all their eggs are in one basket. And there's obviously good ways and bad ways to niche, and you're dealing with a single category of business, and I'd imagine when they go gang busters, you would be riding the wave, and then when they're not, you'd be feeling that pain as well. Have you noticed any of those ups and downs at this stage?
Kirsty-Lee: I'm very lucky that the way that I've niched, it's a larger range of businesses. I haven't just niched to one particular area. I'm not a bookkeeper just for shop fitters. My range of niche is quite broad, so I think for somebody that has niched to those shop fitters, it would be very hard because nobody is fitting out shops at the moment. So I think there is a way that you can niche and do it successfully to your target market that isn't going to hurt you in a downtown. Say for me, a downturn would hurt me if building and construction stopped. And we're very lucky at the moment that building and construction is still at this essential service during these times.
Josh: Yeah. Niching, I think, is sometimes as an example of saying before, don't be the keeper just for dermatologists. If you're the bookkeeper just for dermatologists, you're going to be in strife for it. If you're the bookkeeper for people that are just doing hair and makeup, can say straightaway, that industry is not going very well at the moment. It's about diversifying, but also niching, making sure that you're not pushing yourself into a box too much, your services and skills going in the right direction, but you're not so directed you're only talking to a single person with a single skill set. You're able to still broadly work with anyone in the construction industry, which is really cool.
Kirsty-Lee: And I'm very lucky too, at this time, that I have clients outside building and construction. I have a couple of restaurant clients who I was a bit concerned when the shutdowns happened and a lot of them have been thriving because of the takeaway side of things has gone up, so they're actually turning over more than I did before. Everyone's stuck at home, ordering food out.
Josh: What do you think is going to happen to the commercial real estate and businesses? When they've made that decision to pivot from being a sit down restaurant, and I've seen businesses in Tenerife and all around Brisbane that have been higher class, nice restaurants, running an upper class business, and then they've gone to doing takeaway and they've still kept some of that class there and things like what you're saying right now, they're making more money now. It would be very difficult, I think, for them to go, "Okay, economically, it's not as viable to reopen the restaurant." It has a bigger footprint. It has more insurances and they're then bringing in less money from it. Do you think businesses will change their mindsets and that this will be a big turning point or big aha moment for a lot of businesses?
Kirsty-Lee: Not necessarily. Say those larger prestige restaurants that people are ordering from, they got their names from being this magnificent restaurant that you go to and you have this wonderful sit down dinner. If they went to just takeaway, they could be compromising the quality of the food, the vibe that you get from going there, so they've losing all that. But I feel like some other businesses that may be office based businesses, they might choose to have more flexible working arrangements going forward because during these times we've proven that it can work. So provided the productivity's there, there should be no reason why businesses aren't able to offer those options.
Josh: I completely agree. And over the last 13 years I've grown from a garage business, then we got a storefront and we thought this is great, and then we moved into Brisbane, and we thought this is fantastic. And we did all the, I guess, in quotation marks, "traditional steps" for a business to grow. And then I went, "What am I doing? Why am I driving into business? Why am I getting all the staff to come into the same central spot, deal with traffic, deal with toll roads and parking and all the other stuff that comes with it, to sit down and then connect into other people's systems?" So it was back in 2014 that we started a remote workforce, and that worked out to be good and bad. When 2016 came around that I decided, well I didn't decide, I guess, I found that we had the systems in place to be able to monitor the KPIs and make sure that we're able to see what people were doing, and the KPIs change and adjust over time as well. It's not like they just stay the same.
Josh: If you, for instance, were looking at what a mechanic was able to do, and how many cars they're able to service when they're working from a shop, and then you moved into becoming a mobile mechanic, obviously the number's going to be very different. And that's the same transition, when people start working from their homes, it's not going to be as... You're not going to be able to use the same KPIs and the monitoring and things, and you really don't want to micromanage either. You want to make sure everyone's still has that same ability to continue to work. And it's not for everyone. I've had staff that can't work remotely and they've told me, they said, "Look, I know I'm not as productive when I work remotely."
Josh: And we sat down and tried to work out how to do that. But I still think any which way we look at it, it took two years for us to find the sweet spot, and we have an environment now where they can work from home or they can work remotely or whatever they want to do. Overall, we'll see massive shifts and the software to support these new ways of business working will evolve and we'll see more abilities for people to have that monitoring, create those KPIs and make sure that all the businesses and strive with a significantly smaller carbon footprint, which can only be a good thing. For you, do you go on site as well as do things remotely?
Kirsty-Lee: A lot of my work is done remotely. I do meet with clients to discuss their financials. Usually one or two days a week I'll try and get out there and see as many them as I can. I don't really have any that need me to work in from their offices, which is very lucky because we've put those systems in place so that they can work anywhere, I can work anywhere kind of thing. So I'm very lucky that I do get to work from home, but even back in the day, when I had an office job, I hated going in there because people would be talking and they would distract you, I'm very much like, "Just leave me alone so I can get my job done."
Josh: Yep. I'm the same. I find the most productive time slot for me is between 3:30 to nine o'clock in the morning.
Kirsty-Lee: 3:30, what are you doing at 3:30?
Josh: No rest for the wicked. 3:30 to nine o'clock. Very few businesses are up. Very few people are distracting me and I'm able to just get heaps of work done without phone calls, telemarketers, emails going backwards and forwards, any projects and bits and pieces that need to have any loose ends tied off on, I can get finished. In answer of your question, I've got a YouTube video called The Mirror Mindset, and it's all around the person that you are inside and making sure that when you see that person in the mirror, then they match up, but most of the time they don't. I also go through some the eating and health habits that I changed, and I have very little sleep now compared to what I used to and still seem to work on a high level of efficiency, which I can record through all the different remote monitoring and the KPI tools that we've got implemented. Is there anything else that you'd like to go through that you think would be really great take homes?
Kirsty-Lee: Yeah, don't leave your ATO issues. Definitely get them sorted because you will sleep much better once you've got them sorted and you're not worrying about the ATO being on your back.
Josh: Cool. I completely agree. And I know the stress and if anyone that is listening out there is looking for a second opinion on their books, it'd be very, very good for you to jump across to kraccounts.com.au, we'll put a link here for you guys to check it out. Speak to Kirsty-Lee and see what she can do for you guys. '.
Kirsty-Lee: Thanks for having me.
Josh: No worries. I hope you've enjoyed this, and if anyone has any comments or feedback, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love and give us some feedback and everyone stay out there, stay good, and stay healthy.
Why Are Smart People Smart and Dumb People Dumb?
Why are smart people smart and dumb people dumb? It's a statement that doesn't sit strongly with me, does not sit well with me at all, because I believe everyone has the same ability and the same drive and the same motivation to get to where we go. The main difference is the way one person thinks and works could be very different to the way that you think and work. Albert Einstein once famously said, and I'm probably going to quote this wrong now, "But if you judge the intelligence of a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you'll forever think the fish is stupid." That is a very smart way of thinking about things. Fish are very different to monkeys and you want to make sure that you're talking to someone the way that they understand what you're saying. You're relating to them on the same level as them and that does not mean on a lower level. It just means on a shifted level in a way that they understand.
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Compounding Knowledge
I'm probably digressing from what I wanted to talk about here. Knowledge compounds. Just think about that for a moment. Knowledge compounds. When you learn something, your mind, once that's become ingrained, allows for you to see different similarities and ways that, that skill or that information can then be used in other places. So imagine if you didn't know how to, to read, write and speak. It would limit the amount of other things that you're able to do. You wouldn't be able to go through and drive a car because you wouldn't be able to read the signs. You wouldn't be able to tell someone when you're hungry very easily through, I guess what would be considered the standard method, so you would be limiting yourself. But by learning that the core basic primary skills that allow for us to start to communicate with other humans, you can then start compounding and building on that and that goes for everything.
Thinking For Yourself
When you start learning more mathematics and more things about history and more things about everything, you're able to use that information in side cases and you think, oh man, I don't need this mass, when you're at school possibly. And then all of a sudden you go, actually I do. The more you learn, the faster it compounds on itself and it makes everything else easier in life. So I would love all of you to go back and have a think about how you worked at school and did you do your best and if you had done a little bit more, would that have meant that you could have learnt a little bit more now and would that have made your process faster?
No Such Thing As a Dumb Person
So there's no dumb people and there's no smart people. We all have the same amount of hours. Everyone complains they don't have enough hours. So that's something we all have in common. The major difference is if you're able to teach yourself to learn quicker and that comes just by learning, it compounds on itself, you're able to up skill quicker. Like the matrix kind of I guess to a lesser degree. When you have Keanu Reeves jump in there and he gets plugged in and then he knows origami. I'm sure that's what he learnt. Anyway, the ability to learn and have that compounded upon what you're doing makes everything else easier. If you're able to teach yourself to read a book in a day, a book in four hours or something like that, you're able to absorb all that knowledge and then instantly be able to get yourself further ahead and further in front of everyone else, if you continue doing everything you're doing today, you can be guaranteed to have the same results tomorrow.
Change Up Your Life To Improve Learning
Change up the way that you're approaching a situation if you want to have different results. So think about what it is that you want to achieve. How would you go about achieving that? Look at it as the future. Think of it as the dream. Once you've got the dream, once you've got this feeling, this ambition, work out the steps beforehand, that's then your plan. Once you've got those steps, look at how you go about executing each step and then mark one off at a time and now it becomes your reality. Knowledge compounds on knowledge. Success compounds on success. Money compounds in your bank. If we had great interest rates it would compound a bit quicker, but at the moment, money compounds in your bank. The more that you can do now, the more benefits you're going to have later.
The Final Word
So think about what it is that you're doing and is that a task that's going to make you a better person tomorrow? Is watching the latest episode of Orange is the New Black or Game of Thrones, is that going to leave you at an advantage tomorrow? Playing that new expansion pack of that game, is that going to leave you at an advantage tomorrow? And then look further ahead. Is it going to leave you at an advantage in 12 months time, in 10 years time? And if you don't care and you're happy with where you're coasting along, that's totally cool too. But just think about what you want to achieve, what your objectives are, and if you want to achieve those and get through those, change around the way that you're doing it, and look at the things that are taking up time that are getting in the way of that. That includes listening to podcasts.
Creating Awesome Teams with Zoe Routh
Josh: All right everyone, we've got a fantastic guest. We've got Zoe Routh here who's going to be able to talk to you all about how to better your business. You might be in a position where you're worried about possibly a looming recession, or maybe you're not, maybe you are. Some businesses we have been working with have gone from 30 to 50 employees down to three to five so it's scary times. But Zoe is an expert when it comes to building relationships and making sure the relationships you have with your teams and with yourself are on point. So Zoe, tell me a bit about what you do.
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Zoe: Hey, Josh, welcome. Thank you. Welcome to your show. I'll welcome myself to your show. What I do is the people stuff in leadership. So as you said that story, some people have gone from 50 people down to three. I'm like, wow, that's very scary. So the kind of work I do is to help leaders manage that kind of process for their people. Not necessarily the massive business decisions around cutting expenses and stuff, but how you actually manage the effect on your people, those who stay and those who go.
I'm obsessed with helping people enjoy their work and where they do it and who they do it with. And I'm kind of like a navigator, if you like. I believe that leadership is like a wilderness and that you can learn to read the map. So my job is to give you the tools and resources to help you read the people's stuff and the leadership landscape, so you can get to where you want to go faster, easier, and quicker.
Josh: Cool. That sounds like all the things people need to know, obviously. The big things I guess in business is that your mindset plays a huge part in it. And as you said, people changing from having a 50 person business to a three person business is huge and that can definitely change around the way the relationships and the ecosystem that you would have created over the organic growth or even accelerated growth of a huge team. So would you say there is something in particular you should focus on more than other elements as a priority?
Zoe: In that particular scenario you mean? If you're downsizing?
Josh: Yeah. If you're forced to have relationships with four dozen people, not forced to have relationships, that sounds terrible. But you've got relationships with four dozen people and you have to make the decision of who's staying and who's going and making sure you're pulling the ship in the right direction and making sure you're doing the people's stuff right. How can you make sure that you're not stepping over your toes and collapsing into a heap?
Zoe: Well, there's lots of, I guess, to do. I mean, first of all, its terrible news for the business owner and for the people. Especially if you didn't have a plan necessarily to do that, like it wasn't part of your strategic intent and circumstances are dictating that you have to let people go because of financial constraints. That's pretty shocking. So I think a lot of, first of all, a lot self management around that and a lot of stress management techniques will have to come into play so that you can show up as a leader, calm, cool, and centred and compassionate. I think that's the really big piece.
So no leader wants to tell their staff they don't have a job anymore. Because we feel for the impact on the people that we work with and the knock on effect it'll have on their families. So showing up with care and compassion is the first thing, first of all, for self, and then also for the person that you need to sit down and talk to.
I think the next thing to keep in mind is from a mindset point of view, is that as leaders, we always have a responsibility to people, not necessarily for them. Now, this comes with lots of little caveats around it. As employers, obviously we have responsibility to provide a safe workplace, to treat people with respect and consideration, to follow all our duties and responsibilities and legal obligations. And yet we can never know the impact of such an event on somebody and we tend to catastrophise that it'll be the worst thing ever. Whereas it's interesting, is that oftentimes these kinds of events can be a trigger for something amazing for that person. We just don't know.
In any case, we are not responsible for how they receive the information and the event and what they do with it. We are responsible for how we deliver the message, how we look after them, how we set them up for success in the longterm. Do we offer them counseling? Do we offer them a platform so they can get their CV up and going? Do we offer them career coaching to help them transition? There's a lot of things that we can do to support and do well by people.
I think the other important thing that people often get wrong is that in a crisis, sometimes we just tend to batten down on the information and don't want to let any of the information leak out because we're afraid of large spread panic. This is kind of what happened in China around the coronavirus. Its like, "Don't tell anybody anything, we just got to control this thing." And it was the wrong thing to do because the whole thing morphed anyway. And I think when signs of economic downturn are threatening, I think one of the things that's important to do is communicate, communicate, communicate. And that applies across the board in any context, whether it's crisis or whether it's general business as usual. As leaders, we can never communicate enough. I think people always fill in gaps in information with their own made up stories. And the more we can do to downplay that, I think the better. So that's a hand full of things. So self-manage, show up with compassion, be supportive around your people, and don't take ownership necessarily for how they're going to react because that's the part you definitely don't have control of.
Josh: Yeah. And everyone's not on necessarily the same wavelength or underneath the same stresses or seeing the other side. They might just be looking at it as, "Why did you choose to get rid of me instead of someone else?" As opposed to a, "This is the only thing that can be done."
There's different businesses and different people that we've had on the show about recession proofing your business, some people are talking about, "There is absolutely no chance of a recession." And then other people are saying, "It is absolutely going to happen, it's just when." And then other people are saying, "We're already in it now." So people that are not affected currently, if you've got a team and you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing by them in staying productive and making sure you're having the right relationships or the hard conversations, what would you say is the best way to change your round the ecosystem that you've got that might've been working and it might've grown too quickly for you to manage that or something has changed? It could be a life circumstance has changed, your relationships.
Zoe: I've always been on the edge of leadership in difficult circumstances for a long time. Even when I first started working at summer camp in Canada and I was a summer camp counsellor, I just turned 17 during staff training. So I was young and tasked with a lot of responsibilities. Composure really is all about being fully present in the moment and it's about experiencing emotions without having them drive your reactions. So I liken it to putting your emotions in the passenger seat, so we're reactive when we let our emotions drive the show. So I think composure and that capacity for composure is the ability to have emotions, to experience them and not let them choose the direction in which we go, not choose our reactions. So we may be like the fellow whose whole personal world is crumbling around him. We don't disconnect from that necessarily, we learn how to feel things fully.
This isn't an awareness thing, it's a focus thing. So what I mean by feel things fully is that you pay attention to where you're experiencing this drama in your body. And if it's stress, some people experience it differently. It might be in their chest, might be in their throat, might be in their stomach. It could be a sense of volcanic overwhelm and so on. And no matter how much we meditate, how much we do mindfulness, all of us will have an emotional response or reaction to the situations around us. It's how we actually process it and metabolise it.
So the first technique is deep self-management. Deep connection to self is like, okay, this group is hitting the twirly thing. Things are not going well. I'm experiencing a rise of stress, breathe through it, connect to the body and just purge your body of the energy of that emotion. So that's the first technique, if you like.
And taking a leaf out of Brené Brown's book, it's to acknowledge what's there in the room. When you do that deep self-mastery piece first where you sit and process and breathe and acknowledge, you can show up to your team and say, "I've got some challenging things in my personal world at the moment that are quite distracting. And at the same time, this is what we need to focus on." So I think you can acknowledge the stuff going on, acknowledge that it's having an impact and say, "We're still in charge. We can still move on this thing." So I think that is a way to present chaos to your group while staying centred. If you as a leader are broadcasting stress, anxiety, and chaos, people are going to have that as a major ripple effect and it can really derail the people around you.
So deep self-mastery in terms of awareness of your emotions, breathing through it, purging the energy of that emotion and then naming the emotion. Actually, without saying, "I am stressed," you change your language a little bit and say, "I am experiencing stress." It sounds like such an easy tweak and such a simple thing, but it's incredibly powerful. It gives us a little space between the emotion and the nature of our reality so that we can say, "I'm a human being. I'm bigger than my emotions and this is the one I'm experiencing right now. I'm experiencing frustration.
Josh: I was going to say everyone has all the emotions at some stage in their life and understanding it, acknowledging it, and then making a decision to take that onboard and then moving away from it, I guess.
Zoe: Yeah. I love that. So putting it in the past tense is a nice way of trying to unplug from it, I guess.
Josh: Yeah.
Zoe: So getting it out by receding to the passenger seat. And something that you can observe. Now it's like, there's this thing that happened and I'm a witness to it, as opposed to a victim of it. Let's not be pollyanna about this, sometimes you do have to make really tough decisions, like cutting your staff by multiples. And I think to help people with that, because they're all going to go into survival mode, is you can bandy them together and start to lead strategy. And before you have to make the final cut, I think you can incorporate people into the decision making process around that. And regardless, sometimes we have these very unplanned crises that are short term and some of them are very big unplanned crises that are longterm and it's possibly the coronavirus is one of them, possibly the recession is one of them.
What I encourage my leaders to do is to not just be optimistic saying, "Yeah, it'd be right." Is to do some scenario planning around this and that is okay. Let's look at some of the variables that are at play here. What are some possible drivers that could create different potential worlds? So, okay, let's do one. One scenario is coronavirus takes over the world.
Josh: Yeah.
Zoe: One extreme. Other one is coronavirus extinguishes quickly. And so you have this pole and then you have another one that might be the recession. So recession accelerates, recession retreats. And so you map out these different worlds based on that. And then you ask yourself, okay, which is the most likely, which are possible, probable? Which ones do we want? But to be realistic, what's likely? What's possible? And then you create action steps you can do right now that can either prevent the fallout of those particular effects or it can mitigate it.
So that no matter if scenario coronavirus accelerates and takes over the world and recession accelerates, which is kind of like we would call that world pandemic disaster or something then what are we going to do?
Armageddon, thank you. So we have Armageddon. As a team, what are we doing now to look ahead for that? And I know you've written a white paper about some of the things that people can do around that, if Armageddon comes up and that make sure your cash flow is really done, minimise expenses and so on. Those are some examples of some of the things you can do as a team to mitigate this. And then you go, okay, if this, then that. So if we reach this threshold, this is what we're going to do. These are the things we're going to put in play.
And then we can also ask the question, what's the opportunity in this? What's likely to happen if businesses shut down. So like in my case, in my business, doing leadership training. So what's the opportunity in that? Well, the opportunity might be we pivot a little bit and we start offering support for how to deal with a crisis, how to do leadership in a crisis, as opposed to the deeper work that we do on how to lead change, how to lead culture and so on. Then we just focus on that one particular piece and we're in service to our clients in that particular mode in that moment.
So I think that's how we can be Pollyanna ask in terms of there's a silver lining to any crisis, but we have to be proactive with that as opposed to reactive. It comes back to the emotional self mastery piece too. We don't want to be reactive in our emotions. We don't want to be reactive in our businesses either as much as possible so that we have enough resources and resilience to handle what gets thrown at us, whether it's a fire in the kitchen or a meltdown on your mobile phone or whatever. You have redundancy built into your systems.
Josh: Yeah. Couldn't agree more with that. The ability to pivot and look at the opportunity in a crisis before the crisis, or at least build out scenarios is very sensible. We had a look and thought, okay, when the fires were happening. So what can we do to help businesses out? I mean, it's all we've got. A lot of automation with the way that our business is set up and we thought we'd be able to supply a service that other IT companies can't. And it would cost us a 10th of the price. And we thought, well, any business that's affected by the fires, we'll jump in and help them out. And I thought that that's helping them out, pivoting the mindset and it's creating a feel good story as opposed to just a standard boring generic, which no one should ever have marketing.
One of the big things that we're huge advocates for is automation in your business to improve productivity. So look at the processes. If there's any element of repetition, I say that twice, if there's any element of repetition, if I say it a third time, I'm going to get it on the recording because I don't want to say it again. And that's how it works. If you have to say it more than twice, or you have to do it more than twice, there should be a standard operating procedure. There should be something there so that your staff and the team are following it in the way that we want you to have that process works and, or it's automated with software.
Having productive teams means that the quality of the work that your team is doing is much more beneficial to the business and that in turn I found means that there is a downturn. All the grunt work that can be automated, has been automated. And you've just got a very, very lean machine with the employees that would be very, very difficult to get rid of because they're all core parts of the business. How can you make sure that they are happy and willing to embrace change and go in that direction?
Zoe: I love this question because it's the big juicy one. And it's a lot of what my clients are struggling with. Because they know that they have to make these big changes to respond to all these massive environmental factors and systems factors and global factors that are creating a demand for a new direction. And I think a couple of things we need to keep in mind is that uncertainty is one of the things that puts people into unproductive defensive survival modes. And so anything we can do when we're leading change to mitigate uncertainty is really, really important.
So even if you don't know what the future is going to be, you tell them what you do know. You explain it over and over again with the communicate approach. So uncertainty is a big thing to mitigate. Sense of belonging is another piece to ensure to help people feel like they are safe. So we're tribal animals and our contemporary tribe is the organisations in which we work. And so anything that you can do to maintain the sense of belonging. So the tribal rituals, which also helps reinforce a sense of certainty. The things that you do on a regular basis that identify the sense of tribe is really important. Other factors to look out for if you're leading change is make sure that you are aware if the change is being imposed on them. Because again, that will put them into unhelpful survival threat and you need to communicate as much as possible the rationale behind the decision. Incorporate them into the decision as much as possible.
I think when it comes to leading productive teams, whether it's through a change process or not, there's five things that you need to really take care of as fundamentals. One is purpose and having a clear line of sight to the purpose of your particular role and the organization's role and contribution to the world is really important because that will help guide you through whatever structural assistance change you want to introduce. It's like, this is what we're here to do in the world. This is why it's meaningful to all of us. And unless you have that resonating, it doesn't matter. People are going to get disconnect from whatever message you tell them. And the other framing part of this.
So there's five parts. There's a front wheel and the back wheel. The front wheel is purpose, the back wheel is results and being really super clear on the results that you and your team are producing in the business. So what are the things that are going to happen for your clients and your customers and the business as a whole once you do the magic process of your work and being really clear about that and measuring those, because those are your key outcomes and that's how you track whether or not you're being successful. So those are the two, front wheel and back wheel. The gear is in the middle. There's three of them and you alluded to one of them. And it's part of the big gear in the middle. It's structure.
So when you have really solid structures, including cleaning up redundancies and processes like that, including who reports to whom, which helps downplay some of the tension you might have around fairness and ego and all that kind of stuff, how decisions are made. Clarity on feedback and how you can raise issues. All those kinds of structural things are really important gear in the middle of your productive bicycle.
Another gear is skills. Do you and your team have the skills to have difficult conversations? Can you give each other robust feedback in a way that's supportive collaborative, where the relationship is never in question but the ideas can be challenged and the two are separate. And in fact, when you do challenge ideas or situations that you know that the relationship is never threatened. In fact, they can strengthen. So the skills and communication and interaction are really, really critical. And then the fifth piece, which is the third cog is understanding and valuing and leveraging the strengths of a team member. So if somebody is really good at data analysis and process, put them on the job related to the change. If someone's really good at communication and enthusiasm, put them on the job of communicating what you're coming up with. If someone's really good at risk mitigation, put them on the job so that you don't have to rely on yourself to do the whole thing but you leverage those pieces of the puzzle.
So that's the overarching strategy I would use to make sure that your team is humming and thriving, whether it's going through a change process or not.
Josh: Once you've got a humming thriving team, I guess one of the key metrics that you to be able to do is, which you brought up there was making sure that you know what their core skills are, and I guess where their interests lie. And would you do that through profiling Myers-Briggs type settings to better understand the best way to communicate a certain problem to them or a certain situation to them? Or what would you-
Zoe: I love that you've raised this because there's any number of instruments that you can use, profiling instruments that help unpack different patterns of interaction in humans. And I use a number of them. DiSC is a really easy one. So that looks at behaviour preferences, how people like to operate at work. And it's simple to understand, simple to explain and easy to put people through that profile. And you can see what the strengths and challenges are of the team and it highlights culture as well. So that's one. Any of those resources are really useful and there's an important quote by a gentleman whose name I forget, and he said, "All models are useful, some are flawed."
Josh: Yeah.
Zoe: That means no model is perfect. Any map that you use to map the territory of humans is going to be helpful. And we've just got to remember that none of it is didactic exact representation of the human beings in flesh and blood in front of you. We are all very complex. And yet some of those map reading tools help us make sense of each other and helped us to see patterns of interaction that can help unplug some of the people's stuff, tensions that happen when you bring humans together and they get a little bit messy.
For example, this week, I'm doing a work with a group of eight professionals and they're all quite strong personalities, and they've got a lot of tension in their team. And I know one of the key things that they've got going on apart from having different strengths is that they don't have their structures in place for their team. So we're going to do some of that middle gears of the bicycle work with them. We're going to look at the structure of their team. We're going to refer to their strengths and look at what's happening there and where the conflicts are happening and then we're going to do some work on skills. How do we actually raise issues with each other without feeling like we're stabbing each other in the eye? I think it's really important for teams to help understand each other a little bit more.
Josh: From my understanding, you're shooting up to Brisbane very shortly, and you're doing a bit of a tour around with some of the stuff that you're doing.
Zoe: Yeah. So I'll be in Brisbane. I'm talking on the future of leadership and I'm looking to launch my amplifiers program in Brisbane. So I'm looking to build a cohort of leaders from across sectors who are interested in the changing world and how we need to respond differently as leaders to manage things differently. So we can't continue to operate the way we have been doing as leaders if we're going to contend with all this crazy complexity. So yeah, that's what I'm heading up to Brisbane for. And I'm working on my fourth book as well. So that's kind of a big project over the next couple of months. So yeah, those are the main things I'm looking forward to meeting you in person in Brizzy.
Josh: Yeah. I'm very excited. What's your book about?
Zoe: Yeah. Kind of dropped that as little seed, didn't I? My fourth book is about people's stuff; you, them, us. An advanced handbook for the tough stuff of leadership. So that's my current subtitle I'm working with, but yeah, it's about people's stuff and it's about how we engage with each other and how we see each other and ourselves and the world in order to deal with the complexity that we're finding ourselves in. So yeah, it's a bit of a fun, little book that's on its way. So I send out the first chapter this week to my editor. So yeah, a bit of activity now behind the scenes getting that stuff done.
Josh: Oh, I know. When writing a white paper and then finding references to it, it's nothing like writing a book and then the love and enjoyment you get for reading a book after you've written one is completely different, isn't it?
Zoe: Yeah. You know what, I have not read any of my books once they come out in book. Like, I'm done. So much work has gone into that. I don't sit down and read it. I might pull out a few pieces, but I'm like, "I don't want to sit down and read it from beginning to end." I don't know if other authors are the same, but I definitely couldn't sit down and read it.
Josh: Do you have any other questions you'd like to ask me before we jump off?
Zoe: Yeah, sure. Since you threw the tables back over to me.
Josh: Let's do it.
Zoe: What are you most excited about?
Josh: I'll do a plug here. As per the book “Composure”, I was looking and thinking, what is my 10 year plan and what would be the word that would encompass that for me? And that would be completion. And it's not that I don't complete things, it's that I manage to do a lot of things all at once. And instead of having 100 things completed 1% a week, I'd like to complete 100% of things every two weeks. My personal life, I would like to have less of those interruptions that are completely out of my control. Did I answer your question?
Zoe: Yeah, mate, it does. And I recommend if you haven't read it already, Cal Newport's book Deep Work.
Josh: Okay. I have not. So Deep Work, I have to pick it up.
Zoe: Yeah. It's all about rigorous focus on the things that matter.
Josh: Cool. Well, I've written a page of 680 different things that I know need to be done in the business and I've prioritised the list of prioritise those items. They create money. They save time. They save money. Then any of them that have a higher value then man, I think, okay, these are now in the ... they've made the touch list and then I prioritise those into categories of who can fix them, who can't.
So I've probably spent about three and a half years writing a list. It wasn't that long, but it was definitely more time than, I guess, what normal people would put into a list that I know exactly the direction in that regard, but I'd definitely be interested.
Zoe: Yeah, it's a good one. You'll enjoy it.
Josh: Cool. Well, anyone that would love to hear more from Zoe go to Zoerouth.com and you can probably check in an inquiry there, say, hey, check out some of the cool stuff. Grab a couple of books. There are very good reads and very light reads I found. It wasn't one of these books that was difficult to turn the page. I'm not just saying it because she's listening. It was quite good and relaxing. There's something that I was getting a bit out of. It had the emotional ups and downs which I wasn't expecting. It was good. I thank you for coming on the show. Anyone that would love to leave any feedback, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love.
Zoe: Hey, thanks Josh. It was a real pleasure. And I mean that genuinely.
Josh: Thank you very much. I'll talk to you soon. Stay good.
Updating Hardware When Data is in the Cloud
Has the cloud changed how we update our hardware? It's a great question that we're asked. People seem to think that because all their data's in the cloud, they don't need to upgrade their computers and they can just use the cheapest, dirtiest piece of thing that they've ever seen. The truth is, you can't, if anything, it needs to be more powerful than before and the reason is, with all your stuff in a traditional sense, when there was a server that was hyper-powered super duper and it allowed for any of the things that needed to be done, that is where the processing house was and then what would happen is the data would shoot through to your computer and your computer would just be a display for it really. So it didn't need to be that powerful. What's happened now though, as more and more things are moving to the cloud, is all those data warehouses, all the processing is done somewhere else, but they want to get it to your computer as efficiently as possible because the bottleneck we've got is our internet speeds.
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Internet Speeds Really Matter
When everything was on your own local network, it was going at what's called a thousand megabytes, which doesn't really matter. Just imagine it's an aeroplane going at a thousand kilometres an hour. We then moved everything from that location into the cloud, especially in Australia where the average internet connection speed might only be 25 to 40 kilometres an hour, relatively speaking. It means that things are actually 20 times slower and just a boot. If you look at the total cost of ownership of cloud infrastructure versus owned infrastructure, it's more expensive and it's 20 times slower. So it's obviously a bad problem to have for these businesses that want to own your data and keep it all in the cloud. What they've done is they've made things as efficient as possible so when they send the data from their location to your location, they want your computer to do what's called rendering and changing it all around to have it available and be seen as easily as possible on your computer.
You Need More Resources
But that means your browsers are using more and more resources and there's more and more things happening in them than what were just happening there before with cat videos. So, you need to have significantly more resources because in a sense, all of your computers now are actually little mini servers that are displaying and rendering and doing all this stuff on their end points. So if you want to make sure that you've got a good experience, you really need to make sure that your computers are specked up more than what they were before. Where possible, your internet needs to be specked up more than what it was before. Going to the cloud does not save money at all. Regardless of anyone you speak to, I'll always hold a stance that it will be more expensive. But you've got the benefit that it is also more flexible, so it's more expensive, but it gives you the flexibility.
Working From One Spot All the Time? Consider Investing in Infrastructure
If you're running a business from a single location where everything can be held and done in a single location, there's no reason why you possibly need that flexibility if you know you're going to be there for the next five years. It's going to be significantly cheaper still now to buy into your own infrastructure. Having said that, the cloud infrastructure gives you that flexibility if you want to grow from five years of business to a 500 years of business, you can do that and the scalability can happen in a few hours as opposed to having to plan forward these 500 users. So for certain edge cases it is an incredibly valuable platform to be building and leveraging your business from. But as a generalisation, it's better to probably stay on site for a lot of things, coming back to that same analogy, things are going at a thousand kilometres an hour instead of 25 to 40. Now use that in Australia as the example because over in America, the internet connection you can get there for 89 Australian dollars over there is a thousand kilometers an hour, it's a thousand megabytes versus in Australia to get that same internet connection, you wouldn't be seeing much change as of today out of a $1,200 plan per month. So it is not only a little bit more expensive, it is significantly more expensive. But we want to have all these toys and we want to be able to do all this stuff in the cloud. But you need to work out what is efficient for your business and what's sensible for your business. Most of the time it's a hybrid of the two.You think about the bits that could be a bit elastic and constantly on the up and down and then you put those into the cloud and then you think about the bits that are more static and then you keep those on premise. So you get the best of both worlds in a hybrid environment.
The Final Word
So, an answer to the question, do you need to change how you update your hardware? Absolutely. You need to be investing more money in those desktops to be able to have the same functionality and usability that you would've had in the server desktop environments that have a workstation, cloud environment. So, have a think about that. And if you have any questions, jump across to iTunes, Leave us a review, give us some love and stay good.
Amazing Marketing Automation with Avon Collis
Josh: Everyone out there in podcast world, we've got a fantastic guest for you today. A lot of you've heard me talk about automation and how great that is for your business. What a lot of you don't know is how to implement that or what that can actually do for your business. I talk about it and I definitely get everyone else to go out there and do some research on it. I've got Relevate here and one of their main, main guys here, which is Avon. And Avon goes through all of your emailing processes from start to finish, any of your online campaigns and helps you set it up in a completely automated way. So, Avon, what would be the number one thing that someone should be looking for when automating their online email campaigns?
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Avon: Keep it human. I think everyone goes automation, it's a bot, it's something that's going to do this wonderful thing for me, but at the end of the day, you're basically just trying to... You're dodging work yourself, talking to all of your customers and having the system do the same. So if you can have it do the same now, one mistake a lot of people make is they try to make a bot sound like a human, when everybody knows it's a bot. So part of keeping it human, is acknowledge it's a bot, make it kind of quirky and funny, but it's still a bot. And then in your marketing communications, just realise that they're going to know, they're going to be able to figure out that this is automated or it's not correct.
And keeping it human means to me, not trying to talk or sound like a human, but just trying to understand the human process that they go through. So you might change the... Like if someone gets to two emails that are irrelevant to them, they'll often lose focus or change their mind about you. If you can have a number of... The messaging evolves intelligently with where the customer is at, then that's a very clever way to go.
Josh: Cool. I agree completely. You should never automate the human elements. Automation should be around making sure that you've got a process that works. So the process that works, in my example, would be when the Model-T Ford was developed, that had huge amounts of automation although it had a huge amount of people still doing bits and pieces, it meant that there was a process to go from start to finish to make a car. And that start to finish process had a document that was around it. The same as McDonald's has a document that follows the process, although they might have a machine that automatically flips a hamburger patty over and tells you when the chips are ready, so you don't have to stand there with a timer yourself. It still means that there's an automated process, but they've got the people there to make sure the processes don't break. And that can be that it's the people that are reaching out to make sure that when you're at a certain stage in the funnel or a certain trigger has happened, bring people into the equation. Would that be a fair way of understanding?
Avon: Yeah, but I would also say it goes the other way too. Like the process is there to make sure the human doesn't break.
Josh: Yeah. No.
Avon: I'm sure you've had staff where you go, all right, this is the job, you do steps one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. And then they forget to do step three, or they can't be bothered, or something goes wrong. So automation helps to increase the success percentage of all the little things that go on in the business that make up the end result. The other thing too is once you've mapped that process out, you've basically got a fixed target that you can make changes to. So if you need to speed it up, slow it down, you've got a baseline from which to modify, add processes in, remove steps if they're no good and you can pull stats and data, where ordinarily, you kind of had to go on gut feel if you were doing it yourself.
Josh: Yeah. So once you've got those processes and steps in place, if it's not working, the beautiful thing is you can then critique it, massage it and allow for to work and refine it and split test it and do all sorts of cool stuff, yeah?
Avon: Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. One of the big misconceptions around automation is that they think automation is always the system will do everything. Well, generally not, sometimes the system will get everything ready for the human to take over at the right point. And you might, say for example, with an email sequence, you'll know that you might get a harder close rate when emails are six days apart, instead of seven days apart. Being able to make that small change and have that data and do those split tests can have a massive impact on the way that the human actually feels on the other end of that. So at seven days they might generally feel that you're not following up fast enough and maybe at five days, they go now you're in my face too much, but at six days, it's just right.
Josh: Yeah. The sweet spot.
Avon: Yeah. The sweet spot. And you've just got to figure that out over time with testing.
Josh: And when you go through email marketing campaigns and setting this stuff up, there's a lot of different tools out there and there's some that masquerade around as something that they're not and I've tried my fair share of ones that do not do what they say they're meant to do. You open up the box and it's just a bunch of parts, not anything that's going to be to help you build something. It's kind of like a broken Ikea cabinet or something like that. So when I've spoken to people about email marketing in the past, they've gone, "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I've got MailChimp." Now, what would you say to someone that has that sort of attitude?
Avon: So the definition of a campaign is a series of processes that have actions that lead towards an ultimate end goal. Now, in MailChimp a campaign is a single email. So, by definition it doesn't do what it should do in terms of having a campaign with an end result. And the end result might be someone walking in the door view of your business, making a purchase, making an inquiry of some kind. So, you can't expect to throw a newsletter with a whole bunch of stuff at someone and then have them go fall over themselves and go, "Oh my God, I have to buy."
Josh: Yeah. You have to build a relationship first.
Avon: And you're talking about platforms that say I do this or that, I've been really frustrated with GetResponse. Now, some people say, "Oh, I want to just get the cheap software because it doesn't cost me much." Well, actually it ends up costing them more in development time for me to build out all of the stuff, because in MailChimp you haven't really gotten much in the way of automation. In GetResponse we have to build the email somewhere else, then go back to where the automation is and then link it up manually. So ideally like I prefer to work in platforms where you can go step, by step, by step, drill down into what the email is, go to the next step, drill down to what that is, go to the next step and you can see the whole picture. So I understand what was going on a [inaudible] life cycle story for that one customer and this is that campaign thing coming. I had to print out every email, put them up on the wall and basically make a-
Josh: Make a flow chart.
Avon: Yeah. Like a flow chart, like a Beautiful Mind all around the [inaudible] room, just so that I can understand the journey the customer's going to go on, because the customer understands the journey they are on and if it's a crap one, they won't buy.
Josh: Well, Beautiful Mind, one of my favourite movies. Perfect. Anyway. Yeah. And you don't want to have to go to this trouble to be able to build something out there and being cheap is expensive. A lot of the time you think about what it is that you're doing. If you're trying to bring more leads in, and if that's for the B2B space, that could be a changing, putting an extra $10,000 a month into your pocket or more, probably more. When you're looking at like the B2C space, that could be a revenue of a product that it is sold in quantity and bringing in a significant amount. But either way, you've got either very, very high quality leads that you're wanting to make sure, there's few of them, but you want to make sure they have a great experience or significant amounts of lower value leads that are going to be experiencing the journey and overall, it could be summing up to an amount of money comparable.
So you want to make sure that the journey is right in critiqued and has been refined and thought out. And it's also a tool that you're not jumping between, I've read and [inaudible] from this one, but I've read stories about people moving from say, MailChimp and it sounds like we're picking on MailChimp today, but moving from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign, or moving from ActiveCampaign to Ontraport, or whatever the case is and when they've done the move, their send quality scores go down a whole bunch of other issues occur because of the different mail servers that are then sending it out to you. They need to build up your rapport with the mail servers and, I guess, what I'm saying is it would be sensible to go for a tool that's going to work with where you want to be, rather than where you're at now. Would that be fair to say?
Avon: I think that's a really good way of putting it, I might actually steal that.
Josh: Everyone, it's on a recording.
Avon: Yeah. Look, I think that really sums it up quite well. A lot of people sort of, they do that I want the cheap thing right now, but then the migration costs can be massive.
Josh: Ah, huge.
Avon: Definitely lose data in that, like all of the connections, the lead store value, there's stuff that just does not export. And then the other problem is once you do move everything over or even if you don't move everything over, you start bringing up things like Zapier and like a Lead Page thing or you bring together 10 tools to do one job, where there's another product that does it all in one. And you're trying to duct tape all these things together, links get broken, data gets lost. I heard of a guy who had a subscription product that wasn't linked up and it wasn't operating properly and he lost a million dollars in revenue.
Josh: Yeah. No, that's not nothing, that's a being cheap is expensive, getting back to that isn't it. Far out.
Avon: Very, very much. So, yeah. The two things you said is being cheap is expensive and buy for where you want to be, not where you're at. That's probably two nuggets of gold that anyone could pick up and should absolutely hold close and use that when they're making a decision about the platforms they're going to buy.
Josh: Yeah. And I guess for the majority of it, now I'm just using a blanket statement here, we're not talking generally that big of a sway between the product costs.
Avon: You spend more on yourself, as a business owner you should at least value your time at 200 bucks an hour.
Josh: Yes. Exactly.
Avon: And if you're not charging that out, you need to value it at that. And the other part is that when you spend three hours working around something with a $20 piece of software, the trade off is software was 20 bucks, that three hours cost you $600 in productivity. You opening the business, finding new employees, finding new clients, all that sourcing.
Josh: You're exactly right. So we invested heavily 2009 in our first, it's actually, I lie, 2007, I went we need a CRM system. And so being the dork that I am, I thought let's just build it from scratch. I want something that's going to do exactly what I want it to do. And so in 2007, I built from scratch this beautiful system, worked on mobile phones, worked on the back end, it was a Symbian operating system, worked on a web browsers. And it allowed for any of the techs that were working with us to be able to book their time in and then it would look at the kilometres that they drove to wherever the client was from their, at that stage, home address.
So it then meant that it would work out their kilometres per hour, how much it was charging, it was doing all their log books. It was doing everything for them. It was a brilliant piece of kit. And I built this and it worked great, but the problem was, it got to 2010 and it'd been working really, really well. But the amount of time that I was spending on maintaining this as new APIs came out from Google and everything else, it was more of an overhead.
Now, if I sold that on to 10 other tech companies, I'd be probably not sitting here talking to you right now, I'd be doing something completely different. But it would have been a tool that we were selling instead of the service of IT. So the decision was to get rid of this tool, buy into a tool that's going to work for our business. Now, the one that we bought into cost us $870 a month. That is more expensive than most of the CRM tools that are out and about there. And I can say it was the single best decision that I ever made.
You have a look at $870 a month. Let's make it round numbers, at a grand. We'll call it a grand a month, $12,000 a year. Find an employee that works 24 hours a day for you, seven days a week for $12,000, that doesn't get pregnant, doesn't get sick, doesn't go on holidays, doesn't ask for pay rises. It does all this cool stuff and keeps all of your customers happy. You're not going to find it. And I justified it to myself that way and I have had not looked back.
Avon: I tried to justify it another way, because a lot of the times people just get caught up in the fact that it's software. And they're like, "Why should I pay for it? It's a thing." Think about it this way, a book keeper, so for me I don't mind doing some of the books, but there's sure as hell someone else that's better at it, that does it in half the time. And they might charge me 50 bucks an hour, but they'll do in two hours what takes me five or six. Just because they are good at it. And if you can apply that theory across over to the software, then that helps people to equate it in their mind a little bit more.
And you hit the nail on the head. Yeah, 800 bucks is a lot, but you it doesn't get sick, doesn't get pregnant, doesn't whatever, it doesn't forget tasks and having your existing staff spend 50% less time doing the admin on a job, just the admin time alone of those staff could be a $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month. Think about how much [inaudible] these people.
Josh: Exactly.
Avon: People are highly expensive, in Australia, in 2020.
Josh: Yeah. I agree completely, meat and seats costs stacks.
Avon: Meat and seats, I like it.
Josh: Yeah. So it costs stacks of money and you want to have them as efficient, as optimised as possible.
Avon: Yeah, so this is probably a bit of win, but it is bloody hard to be a business owner or an employer of people in this day and age. Such a litigious environment, if you don't have a 1,000 processes written out, documented out today, then you can be hung, drawn and quartered and next thing you know, you lose your house. So people often don't want to hire or they don't want to have these industrial disputes. So, software again, the last few times I've thought about hiring someone I've just bought a new piece of software.
Josh: When was the last time the rate to super went up for software? It's just makes sense. Software, especially if you engage someone, I guess, without tooting our own horns, like yourself or like us, that can look laterally at a problem and look at a way that this could be achieved differently. I had someone that was there editing and doing everything they could possibly do with podcasts for us and they were spending 30 to 40 hours a week doing that.
And that was when we're doing three to five podcasts a week, so a fair amount of time. I went through a process of automation, so having an audio engineering background sort of had a couple of really cool bits and pieces that we could do to auto level out and do all sorts of other bits. Short of it is, we brought that down to six hours. So if you're able to use automation, now we still have six hours of people time. But at six hours of time they're doing, it's not the repetitious stuff that is mundane and doesn't add value to their life or to your business. The automation took a month of my time and I think, well, a month of my time, that's a lot of time, but it's only four weeks and I did that 18 months ago. So it's not that much time relative to how much has been saved, even when you look at what your time's worth per hour and that's what you need to gauge.
If you could do it in a month. Awesome. If you can't engage someone's services that can and get and get things sorted in a way that works for your business and save you guys time. Removes liabilities. And when I say it, I don't mean firing people, but I do mean if someone up and left, where would that leave your business? So just removing liabilities.
Avon: People don't like boring, repetitive tasks, that's the thing that people hate. So if you get rid of that, if you automate it, then you free people up for the more high level tasks and then their jobs become more fulfilled, they enjoy what they do, they feel as though they've got some personal growth and they want to continue working for you in a positive way. Maybe designing a new product or coming up with a new idea, all sorts of things.
Josh: Yep. Well, for anyone that is listening here, if you jump across to Relevate, I'm going to put a link here, is there any certain page they should maybe jump onto so that you can-
Avon: It's actually under development at the moment. So why don't you jump onto my personal page, avoncollis.com. Then you'll at least find a little bit about me. Relevate, when it's back up and running, it will be relevate.com.au.
Josh: Cool. No worries. Well, I love having you on the show and if anyone has any feedback, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay good. Talk to you soon.
The Art of Listening With Oscar Trimboli
Joshua: So, we've got Oscar Trimboli here today. Depending on your dialect and he's joined us both on the YouTube channel as well on the podcast. So if you are watching this on YouTube, welcome! Congratulations! If you're not and you're on the podcast, well jump across to the YouTube channel and vice versa. Now that the formality is out of the way, Oscar, tell us a bit about what you do.
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Oscar: G'day, Joshua. I'm actually looking forward to listening to some of your questions today. I'm on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world. So I spend all my days teaching organisations, leaders, customer care teams, sales teams, people who are accountants and lawyers how to listen, and most people aren't conscious of the cost of not listening til they lose a great staff member or they lose a great customer because they haven't paid attention and they haven't listened, so the cost of not listening is project over-runs, projects over-budget or worst still projects that come in on time and on budget but they don't deliver to what people were actually asking for in the first place. So, Joshua, all my day's spent absolutely obsessed with the commercial cost of not listening.
Joshua: That's cool. I know my dad always used to say, "We're born with two ears and one mouth and use them in that ratio", so listen twice as much as you're talking but I understand you've got a different ratio that you work with, is it the 125-400 rule?
Oscar: Yeah, I think if we understand the neuroscience of listening that we speak at 125 words a minute, we can listen at 400 words a minute, so we're programmed to be distracted before we even begin. In fact, for some of you, it's happening right now. You've already got bored with me and you're thinking about something else. So you might be distracted by something during your commute, whether you're driving, or on a plane, or on a train or on a bus.
For most of us, what we need to get better at with our listening is simply to notice when we're distracted. I'm not a perfect listener, far from it but what I do notice is I notice faster than anybody else when I'm distracted in the conversation. Most of us turn up to a conversation with our own radio station playing in our head. We're tuned into our own frequency, so we're not available to actually listen to the other person, so if you know that you can listen at up to 400 words a minute, try and notice sooner rather than later when you get distracted, jump back into the conversation, focus in what's being said.
Joshua: Cool. I know that I guess you don't know what you don't know until you know what you know and that's a big part of what you're teaching. People are born thinking they can listen, but obviously that's not the case. As time's going on, we're getting more and more distractions throughout our world. I know in the digital world, you can comfortably have 300 to 500 distractions a day just through advertising, let alone hearing your wife yell out or your kids yell out saying, "Dad, come do this" or "Help me out with the dinner" or something like that. "Take the bin out" and you're meant to be doing something else and focusing.
So, dive a bit deeper I guess into how you ... what's the process there that you go through? We're getting a bit of rain here so if you can hear that on your end, we might have to move location. But yeah, what's your process to keep in check and make sure that your finger is on the pulse and your focus is on the primary ... not on the rain, that was perfect timing by the way. The distraction of the rain. Very clever.
Oscar: Well, Joshua, here's something we all need to know, listening's our birthright. At 30 weeks, we can distinguish our mother's voice from any other sound outside of our body. At 32 weeks, we can distinguish Beethoven from Bon Jovi from Beiber, so we can access music differently yet, the minute we're born, in fact, it's the moment we're born, the minute we scream is the definition of when the time goes on our birth certificate.
So, we come into the world kicking and screaming and making noise and we spend the rest of our lives thinking that's the way we need to communicate. Now communication's 50% speaking, 50% listening. Most of us don't get it in that proportion. We kind of go one way or we go the other. So, I would say to everybody, "You are a deep listener. You just have to unlearn all the things you've learned since you were born about making sure all the attention is through your speaking".
For a lot of us, we struggle with listening to ourselves. Most listening literature will teach you focus on the speaker. They're the most important person. That's handy information but if you're coming into a conversation and thinking, "Oh, I've just hung up the call and I'm thinking about the last call" or "I'm thinking about the next call" or "I'm moving from meeting to meeting" or "I'm jumping in the car, and going to make a call, then I'm going to make another call", we have got a whole dialogue going on in our head and we're not actually available to listen because we can't process their frequency because we're blocking them with our own internal radio station.
So, 86% of people struggle with distractions when it comes to listening. Just getting focused on the speaker, that's not their issue. They have external distractions, whether that's rain in the background for you, or a thunder storm with someone I was interviewing once in Florida and there were lightening bolts you could see in the back window and they were an expert on presence and they did a beautiful job of ignoring the lightening bolts. They were so loud, you could hear them through the microphones.
86% of us struggle with a conversation already in our heads so we struggle with a combination of internal distractions and external distractions. Joshua, if there's three tips that really make a difference for everybody I work with are these three tips: switch your phone off, switch your laptop off or switch them into flight mode. Take off everything that buzzes, beeps and dings.
If you can do that, you'll increase your listening productivity by 50% immediately, just doing that, but most of us are addicted to our devices. It reminds me of a story when Peter, a vice president from Microsoft back in 2014, I was hosting a meeting. He'd done a 24-hour flight from Seattle to Sydney and I was hosting him with 20 other CEOs in a hotel room in Sydney and he sat down and I'd just finished introducing him and he stood up and I thought, "Gee, the introduction wasn't that bad, Peter. C'mon".
And he was running a big business, he had about 30,000 people in his organisation. He had $10 billion in revenue, so the guy's pretty busy, and what he did was he stood up, he apologised to the room and said, "I'm really sorry, the most important thing I can give you right now is my full, complete and undivided attention". And with that, he took his cell phone, his mobile phone out of his top pocket, switched it off, went over, put it in his bag and sat down. Now, Joshua, what do you think happened for the 20 execs around the room when he did that?
Joshua: Very similar action. That would have been a repeated action with all of them doing the same thing to make sure they're giving the same level of respect that he'd just shown. Would that be fair to say?
Oscar: 17 out of the 20 people did exactly the same. I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to the other three and say they put it in flight mode or silent mode, or something like that but we're all listening teachers, whether that's teaching our kids how to listen or we're teachers in schools. Kids are watching us on how we listen. So how we turn up and how we role model is really important when it comes to listening.
When I speak on stage, a lot of people come up to me and go, "Hey, I'm really good at listening but my boss is terrible. What tips should I give my boss?" And I always say, "Just be a good listener for them. Role model great listening". Or parents will come up to me and go, "My kids don't listen to me. How can I teach them how to listen better?" I said, "You already are teaching them. They're just copying you".
Joshua: Yes.
Oscar: "You're their listening teacher". So, if there's one tip for the parents out there, bend down to your kid's eye level or if you can't do that, lift your kids up to your eye level and that will completely transform the way your kids listen to you. If you travel and if you're calling your kids or your FaceTiming your kids, same story. Don't stand up and pace and walk around the room while you're talking to them. Get your eye down to your eye level. That might mean sit on the bed in a hotel room. It might mean sit on the floor in a hotel room, but the very act of doing that brings your eyes to their eye level and there's a lot more empathy for what they're saying and how they're saying it.
But, if we're distracted, we can't do any of that. Now, back to the group, "Peter's permission group" as it became known, I asked the execs, after 45 minutes, Peter went to the next meeting. I had a half an hour debrief. And they all commented on the quality of the conversation.
You see, normally those conversations are not only dominated by technology on the table but they're dominated by technology in the conversation. And the reality is, everybody commented on the quality of the conversation. Now, Peter's permission group, that group of CEOs still meets about every six months and that's, what are we up to? Five years down the track. Now they get together, they have a bit of a giggle, mostly it's between five and eight people. They've all moved on to different jobs and things like that but they all have a giggle because when they start their meeting, they all go, put their phones off and call and say, "Thanks, Peter" and have the conversation.
Joshua: Conditioned response.
Oscar: There's a bit of a ripple effect there, but for a lot of us, we might turn up to customer meetings with a phone, buzzing in our pocket even though it's in vibrate mode versus the minute that happens, you're going to get distracted.
Joshua: Absolutely.
Oscar: You're going to move your mind there. For me, it's really simple, the minute I walk into the lobby, I switch my phone off, put it in my bag as I step towards reception. I take three deep breaths and when they offer me tea or coffee, I always ask for water for me and the people I'm seeing. Water, hydrating the brain because listening is a difficult task at the best of times. A hydrated brain is a listening brain. The blood's 26% of the blood sugar in the body. "Well done, mate, drink your water". It's only 5% of the body mass but it consumes 5x more, 26% of the blood sugars in the body. So, if we can help it out. And then simply breathing. Three deep breaths for 10 seconds each, you're going to completely transform your orientation.
So before we even begin listening to anybody else, Joshua, it's clearing the space in our own mind and being available to listen. That's critical whether we're parents, whether we're teachers, whether we're CEOs or business owners or whether we're in sales, all those things matter.
Joshua: I can say that, hearing what you've said, we use a tool called RescueTime on our computers, which let's you put your computer in for a spot where there is no distractions, you can't go to certain sites, you can't do anything, you can't be like, "I'll just check on the notifications on Facebook", "I'll just do this" and it blocks out any of those distractions. It still allows you to use some cloud tools if you're not in a position to be able to be in full flight mode.
And it's fantastic. It shows how utilised you were during the day, how distracted you were during the day and that's something that we use internally and we do talk to our customers about using. 'll say a story. I was in a job interview where we were interviewing someone in Melbourne and resume looked amazing. We thought, "This guy is the guy that we want" and he was in a setting no different to what I'm in at the moment, outdoors, on his deck, in a nice setting.
I'm talking to him and I'm asking him the interview questions and I'm making sure I'm asking him fair questions, so we normally start with five or six boilerplate questions, so we can see how each them answer those and then we move onto more detailed questions that are more granular and personalised to that person.
It was obviously a hotter day, so he had a couple of beads of sweat on his head and we're like, "That's fine. That's not a worry" but he had this one fly and it was buzzing around and kept buzzing around and kept buzzing around and I could not concentrate on anything he was saying because of that stupid fly. I'm looking going, "I've got to listen to what he's saying but can't he just get rid of the fly? He's just got to get rid of the fly?" And I knew he did not have a fair interview because I was so distracted by the fly on his head and it made me sort of really understand how can you ... I felt like saying, "I'm sorry, can you just remove the fly?" And I thought, "No, I don't want to say that, it sounds really rude".
I know myself, if I'm talking to someone and I'm right engaged with it and then I get off the phone and then my partner comes into the room and she says, "Hey, can you help me out with blah blah blah?" And I'm like, "Hold on, I've just got to digest everything that was said before I can focus on what you're saying, purely out of the respect".
I don't know if I's drawing three deep breaths for ten seconds but I definitely take a moment out, a moment to chill before I jump onto the next thing, so I know that a couple of things I'm doing but how can you make sure that people are bringing in the information that you're saying, they are listening, from both perspectives they are listening. What are tell-tale signs that someone is not listening and you should maybe cut the conversation short or expand upon that from the speaker's perspective as well as in from the listener's perspective, making sure you are listening and you're not just waiting to speak?
Oscar: So there's a big difference between hearing and listening. Listening is the willingness to have your mind changed. The difference between hearing and listening is the action you take as a result of something you heard. I want to come back to the job interview.
Oscar: I want to come back to the interview that you did and the fly during the interview. And I want to talk about the difference between rude and productive.
Joshua: Yes, okay.
Oscar: If you put yourself in that candidate's shoes right now, what would have been the most productive thing for you and for them, in that moment?
Joshua: For me? To have taken a pro-active approach and said, "Would you be able to sit somewhere else or get rid of that fly, please?" Because the meeting was more productive and fairer on him. From his perspective, he would have been well aware the fly was there. I don't think I come across as a big scary person but he obviously didn't ... I don't know why he didn't remove it. But I probably should have brought it to his attention, I guess.
Oscar: Listening is all about progressing the conversation, so in that case, it probably wasn't a great example of listening because you're completely distracted by the fly. For some of us, that fly is actually inside their own mind. You got an actual fly in your case but some of us hold assumptions really tight and it stops listening taking place so, in that moment, we could have simply said, "Wow, I sense it could be really frustrating for you right now with that fly. I reckon this interview will be more productive, if we make a decision about what we're going to do with that fly" and then kind of leave it to them. You're going to have a laugh about it. All of a sudden everything's a bit more relaxed, but I think, even though you continued that interview, you probably wasted all that time and his.
Joshua: Absolutely.
Oscar: As you said, he didn't get a fair go. So I want you just to think about, was it more rude to continue than it was to interrupt?
Joshua: Yeah, that's very true. I would say it was probably more rude to continue and waste our time. We've only got that time once on this earth, so probably more rude to have continued. I was not sure ... I was thinking where are his management skills that if he can't manage a fly on his head? And there's a lot of things going through my head that had nothing to do with the interview and I was thinking, how can you ... he's got to be able to control this and it's true, I should have interrupted and said it, as you said, in a very passive way that allowed him to rectify the situation, at least bring light to it in a light-hearted way and-
Oscar: Hey, if you're living in Australia and you're outside at this time of the year, there's a pretty good chance that there's going to be flies around you.
Joshua: I rude.
Oscar: Yeah, but rude could be slightly tempered down by us simply asking a question. "Hey, that fly seems to be frustrating for you. How do we want to handle it?" Which then could have prompted a question, "Have you ever had a customer like that? And how did you deal with them" kind of thing. You could make light of it. So, there's four villains of listening when we think about what are the villains of our listening behaviour. There are four villains. The easiest way to remember them is they're the "dils" of listening, the dramatic listener, the interrupting listener, the lost listener and the shrewd listener.
Joshua: Okay.
Oscar: So I want to spend a bit of time talking about these and then Joshua, tell me, which one of these you get really frustrated with. Which one of these listening villains frustrates you the most? Think of the worst listener you can think of right now, Joshua, and see which one of the four they might be. And for you, listening right now, the same thing. Think of the worst listener you can think of while Oscar goes through the dramatic, interrupting, lost and shrewd listener.
The dramatic listener loves your story. They love it. They listen intently, they listen for emotion, they listen for detail. The reason they're listening is to simply saw, "Oh, wow, you think you've got a tough boss, let me tell you about my boss. My boss is the worst boss. Here's the reason why". "You think you've got a tough merger happening right now in your organisation, I had a really tough merger. Oh, it was so terrible".
My favourite was Kathy who went to her boss and said, on a Monday morning, "Hey, can I have some time off, my grandmother's passed away. The funeral's on Wednesday". Twelve minutes later her boss finished and all her boss was saying, "Oh, I still haven't gotten over the fact that my grandmother passed away. It was an awful funeral. It tore me apart and I had this really important relationship with my granny, she was like my second mom". And then Kathy just said to her at the end of the 12 minutes, "So is it okay if I go to the funeral on Wednesday?"
Joshua: I shouldn't be laughing. That's terrible.
Oscar: Yeah, but a lot of us kind of know these dramatic listeners, they show up in social situations, they show up in the workplace. You see, listening is situational and it's relational. As you said earlier on, you listen differently to a doctor than you will to an accountant. You'll listen different to a police person, to a school principal, for example. And you'll listen differently to your children to your parents as an example. The next one is the interrupting listener. We love the interrupting listener.
Joshua: Actually, I know someone like this. Sorry, sorry, I had to do it. Go ahead.
Oscar: If only that was original, mate. Everybody does that when I talk about the interrupting listener.
Joshua: I bet.
Oscar: We love the interrupting listener because they're obvious, they're overt. The interrupting listener, the minute we draw breath to say our next sentence, they're in. They think it's their commercial break to give you the opinion you fully haven't articulated right now. And they're genuinely trying to help. They're speedy, they're pacy, they want to move things further forward faster, but what they miss out on is that they're not actually listening to the fullness of what everybody's saying.
And here's the next bit of science I want people to get connected with. I speak at 125 words a minute, but I can think at 900 words a minute. So, there's a 1 in 9 chance that what I say the first time is what I mean. So I go to the doctor probably too much, Joshua, at my stage in my life my good friend, Dr. John, he sees me twice a year and it's all preventative, thank goodness. But if Dr. John said to me, "Good news, Oscar, we're going to do surgery and you have an 11% chance of surviving", I'm asking for a second opinion.
Joshua: Absolutely.
Oscar: At 11%, not good odds for me, but all of us, everyday take the first thing that people say as what they think, because we don't understand the 125/900 rule. There's 800 other words stuck in their head. And if we just paused, if you know someone who's an interrupting listener, you'd love them to pause and work with silence if they'd just waited and said something as simple as, "Tell me more" or "What else?" Couple of really simple three-word phrases, then what happens is these magic code words come out, Joshua.
Particularly relevant if you're in a sales situation, people will say things like, "Mmm, well, actually now that I think about it a bit more, the most important thing we should discuss is ...", "Now that I've thought about it a little longer, um, the critical thing we need to focus on is this", "Now that I've thought about it a little longer, yeah, we need to actually speak about my boss".
Whatever it is, saying, "What else?" or "Tell me more" just gets those other 800 words out and that's what the interrupting listeners miss out on. Now, you role modelled the lost listener beautifully when you were talking about your dad's example. The lost listener is kind of trying to figure out where do they fit in the conversation and they just drift along in the dialogue. They are distracted by internal distractions but the other thing a lost listener can be is distracted by external distractions, laptops, mobile phones, other things that buzz and beep. It could be visual distractions in a coffee shop, for example, or it could be something else that's distracting you externally. So that's the lost listener.
Sometimes they turn up to a meeting because they're invited and they're working out in the first 10 minutes, if I just listen, I can figure out why I've been invited to this meeting as opposed to them simply saying, "Hey, before we go any further, how would you like me to contribute to this meeting?" And then all of a sudden the lost listener's found their position.
The last one is the shrewd listener. The shrewd listener does a lot of this, they stroke their chin or they put their hand on their cheek. They listen intently. They tilt their head to the side, they give you lots of good, "mm-hmm"-
Joshua: Indicators.
Oscar: "Mm-hmm, tell me more". If you were reading the subtitles or the captioning for what's going on in their brain, now this shrewd listener is disproportionately represented in sellers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, anybody who takes a brief, market researchers, advertising agencies, anybody who's got to ask questions for a diagnosis. What's going through their head is, "Really, that's your problem. I can think about three other problems that are going to come up that you haven't thought about but I guess I'm going to stay here and listen to you drone on because I'm an expert in my field and I am so amazing I'm going to pretend that I'm listening". In fact, Joshua just did it right then.
Joshua: I did, didn't I? I was going to say, you're familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Oscar: Yes, I am but is everybody in the audience familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Joshua: The Dunning-Kruger effect is when someone knows, and I'd love for you to correct me if I am saying it incorrectly, but when who knows a small amount about something, they become overconfident in the belief that they know everything about everything and so they start learning a little bit more and then they have this lack of confidence around how much they know and it takes a very long time to build up a level of competency and experience to a spot where you're able to talk about it and you feel comfortable talking about it. Would that be fair to say?
Oscar: Yeah, that's a pretty good summary.
Joshua: Cool.
Oscar: And I think for the shrewd listener, what happens while they're pretending to listen and telling themselves how awesome they are and anticipating the next three problems, they're forgetting to listen to what actually is the first problem. They're kind of diagnosing a problem that the person mightn't have because they're trying to explain just a lower-order problem there.
For a lot of us who are sellers of anything, we're all in the business of selling ideas, whether we get paid for it or not as an example. If we're not careful, we can lose the person we're engaging with because whether we think we're giving a beautiful engaged face and giving lots of good "ah-hums" and "ah-has", humans instinctively know with no training whatsoever whether you're really listening or not. And one of the things that is riveting for me is the statistic that says 86% of us think we're above-average car drivers.
Joshua: Right.
Oscar: 81% of us think we're above-average IQ.
Joshua: Okay.
Oscar: And 83% of us think we're above-average listeners. Statistically impossible. Only 50% of people can be above the average and the reality is most of us don't know what good listening is because we've never been taught. Only 2% of the population has been taught how to listen effectively. So, I'm curious, Joshua, which one of those listening villains frustrated you the most? Was it the dramatic listener, the interrupting listener, the lost listener or the shrewd listener?
Joshua: Pretty hard to one because I think it's situational. If I'm doing a presentation on stage and I see the, "mm-hmm, mm-hmm" okay, "mm-hmm" it's hard to know if they are actually listening, if they're judging you, if they feel they know more about it, or if they're incredibly engaged, so that frustrates me because I'm thinking, "Am I saying things?" Because when you're up on stage, or you're doing a presentation to 10 or 50 business owners or whatever it is, you can pivot the situation to be more relevant to everyone, if they're able to give you feedback on what you're saying. And when they're sitting there doing that, I find that that frustrates me in that situation.
Oscar: And you pointed out that listening is situational and it's relational. People listen differently in different ways, so at home, I'm the lost listener, and at work, I'm the shrewd listener. I'm forever going, "Wow, you really are struggling with listening, aren't you? You're really struggling with distraction". You know, in my head, I've got these sophisticated five levels of listening, listening to yourself, listening to the content, listening to the context, listening for what's unsaid, you know. That's how Yoda would talk about listening.
And then finally listening for meaning but I'm not listening to their problem because I'm a shrewd listener. When it comes to home, I hear all the stories that your dad tells. That happens in my family, with my in-laws, with my out-laws, with the extended family, I can tell you a lot about 13A Orchard Road in Johannesburg where my in-laws grew up, I could paint a picture, I've heard so much intricate detail about that place and sometimes I just get lost.
I'm far from a perfect listener. All I know is when I'm distracted, I'm able to get in a conversation faster. The other thing I always say that people are quite surprised, "Hey, Joshua, forgive me. I got distracted, do you mind saying that again?" And if I say it genuinely, rather than three times in a row, what they normally do is they nod and smile and as one human to another, they know that they've done it themselves, and they go, "Yeah, sure, let me explain that" and they probably explain it in a slightly different way. They've thought about how to explain it a little bit more. One of the responsibilities for the speaker when it comes to listening is to be interesting.
Joshua: Yes.
Oscar: So tell stories and use statistics. Don't do only stories and only statistics because 50% of people have preference for the big picture and pictures and 50% of people have a preference for details and statistics. So, if you can mix that up, you're going to be an engaging speaker along the way. You'll in fact remember nothing of what I've said today, only the story of Peter and Peter's permission club.
Joshua: Well, I know myself, I have an engineering background so I love numbers and statistics, but everyone else doesn't.
Oscar: Exactly.
Joshua: You need to be aware of that and make sure you are gearing to the ears that are to be listening and making sure that that is information they're ready to receive and potentially the words that they're feeling within, you said, the 900 words that they're feeling are words that are relevant or words that are possibly going to be having them ask a question about instead of having just sit there-
Oscar: And drift away.
Joshua: I know myself at school, one of the worst things that I ever did was listen intently and having no clue about what they were talking about. I was sitting there in class and I was sick for around a couple of weeks, had a couple of weeks off and so I jumped in and, I'll make up this part of the story because I can't remember exactly what the subject was.
Let's say we were talking about matrices or quadratic equations in mathematics, and I jumped in and I went, I don't want to look stupid. I put my hand up because everyone else is listening intently and I don't want to put my hand up and look like an idiot, so I'm just going to sit here, in my silence, trying to listen as much as possible but not really understanding what they're saying at all, and that is something where I should have put my hand up and said, "Hey, while I am listening or trying my best, I'm hearing what you're saying, I'm not really understanding it, it's not sinking in, it's not relevant to me and therefore it is coming in and disappearing. And that is something that, especially, like you're saying in meetings and things like that, if people are in there and they're asking questions, ask questions at the end or ask questions when you don't understand something to make the person ask, "Can you remove the fly, please?"
Oscar: Yeah, please.
Joshua: So that it is relevant. The reptilian brain, you'd be familiar with the reptilian brain?
Oscar: Mm-hmm.
Joshua: I described the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'd love you to describe the reptilian brain. I'm going to go into a couple of details about that.
Oscar: Yeah, well the reptilian brain is the most primitive part of our brain. It's the bit that connects from the back of the neck into the skull, right into the most elemental parts of what it means to be human, and in this part of the brain, is the part of the brain that deals with fear, it deals with emotion, it deals with our survival instincts, it talks about fight and flight.
Unfortunately, it overrides anything that happens in the more modern part of the brain which is literally towards the front of the skull, the pre-frontal cortex where the majority of the listening function actually takes place, so you will completely be overridden if you're in a state of fear or you don't want to be participating in this conversation. Fear will override your ability to listen and literally short circuit your listening capability. You will check out of the conversation, if you're not feeling like this conversation is a conversation that's productive for you.
Joshua: You've touched on exactly where I was going with it. With making sure your conversation is relevant and see it doesn't have to be necessarily as you said, "I'm scared of someone", it could be scared of not knowing. So, for myself, you can't see how much I'm talking with my hands underneath here but there's a lot, there's a lot of talking going down here. As I was saying, a bit of the Italian coming out in me.
The fear of not knowing, or myself in a technical position, if I said, "Oh, look, you need to upgrade the fibre connection because it's not going to allow for the data to be pushed offsite with the speed of the rate that you've got because the input/outputs per second are not going to cope with the calls you have coming in from your SQL database to be able to have the data backed up incrementally, it should be sent off to be sent offsite" and someone goes, "Hold on" instead of just saying, "To have business integrity, you really need to have a faster internet connection" which can mean exactly the same thing in shorter words. You can have a discomfort and that can create fear. Would you agree with that, with the way that people are listening and the way that the words are spoken?
Oscar: Yeah, a lot of that comes up actually when people ask "why" questions too early in a relationship or too early in a project or too early in a conversation, whether I've spoken to telephone-based suicide counsellors or FBI hostage negotiators, the quickest way to get a reaction from people that's fear-based is to ask questions about why.
Now there may be a perfectly neutral question to use so, "Why are we here today?" But you've got to remember the first time you ever heard somebody say, "Why did you do that?" was probably between three and five, you spilled some milk, you smashed a glass and your brain codes, when somebody says "why", I've done something bad, it's an issue.
Now you can ask those questions without the pretext of a why question but assume many people early on in a conversation, in a relationship, in a discussion, in a sales opportunity, in a project ask why-based questions, why-based questions will tap really fast into the amygdala, that's the part of the brain that's connected at the back there to the most primitive part of the brain, and you're not going to get a productive conversation, as opposed to, I can get exactly the same answer if I was to say to somebody, "So, how long have you been thinking about this problem, project, system," whatever the case may be.
And all of a sudden you can ask exactly the same question in a how-based orientation and they're going to start to speak from the front of their brain in a relaxed state and they're literally going to describe a story, "Well, we've been thinking about this for three days, three weeks, three months, three years" who knows? And then ask them to fill in the details then that will become a productive conversation. And the reason it becomes productive is you know the back story. Coming back to Joshua's story at school, the reason he couldn't join the dots, he didn't have the back story of that one little bitty information he missed out on because he wasn't there four weeks before because he was ill.
For a lot of us, we make so many assumptions because we don't know the back story and again something I'm quite famous for in a conversation is, "Look, I'm really sorry, I feel like I've joined the conversation half way through the movie. Can we just go back to the beginning because I'm missing out on how some of these characters are connected". They all smile and they're all happy to tell me the story and yet in telling the story, they start to discover different things they hadn't thought about because they go back and then they go, "Oh wow, actually ... "
And a lot of the times they'll tell you why the project started and maybe why it was a result of a failed project. And all of a sudden, we have a much more interesting and productive conversation. I was talking to a person who ran an advertising agency only four weeks ago, and we were having this conversation, and he did this, he smacked himself in the forehead and he said, "This just happened to me, Oscar. We have re-briefed, briefed again, we've seen the client three times since we signed on the dotted line and what we thought was the project, in fact has changed three times in only two weeks. If we would have asked for the back story, we wouldn't have wasted all this money that I can't charge the client for because I didn't ask these questions at the beginning".
He said, "I'll breakeven on the job. It's hardly worth my while but if I just took a little bit more time to ask that question at the beginning, it would have been a different outcome for me" and I said, "You know what? It would have been a much more different outcome for your client as well because, they're getting a bit frustrated with briefing you three times as well because they thought you weren't listening. Now I know you were but you just sometimes got to ask for the back story even if you feel like it might take a bit of skin off your finger in that moment or take a bit of your reputation away because you feel like it's a question you feel you should know the answer to. Sometimes the experts in the industry ask the simplest questions. So, sometimes the simplest question is, "Hey, when did this project start?"
Joshua: I think we've all been in a situation like that. I myself listened to someone and they said, "We need to have our server migrated. We need to this, we need to do this" and I went through and "Okay, okay, okay, cool, yeah, we can do that". I didn't ask why they wanted to migrate it, what was the end result, what was their ability, this was years ago. But what was their end result. What was their want to get out of this project?
The server migration, we charged them 30 hours. It took 120 hours to migrate everything. And we said, "Well, we're not going to charge them that. We said the price, that's the price. So, we're sticking to the price even though it was costing us money to do it, we thought, it's principles, we're going to give it to them what they said".
At the end of the conversation, we sat down and went through everything. They said, "Oh, you migrated that. We don't even hardly use it" and I was like 80 hours of the time. And we went, "All right, okay, ask more questions. Understand what is important to them and make sure that you are using that information so that there is, well, as you said, "more profit in business, more relationships built". They were happy, everything was migrated but we would have been happier if we didn't run into the red so much. I know that you've got a new book coming out, is that right?
Oscar: Oh, we're up to book number three now, so Book #1 is called Breakthroughs: How to Confront your Assumptions. Book #2 is Deep Listening: Impact beyond Words. Book #3, The 125/400 Rule. My wife says it'll be engraved on my tombstone, I say it so often. There's a whole group of resources for those of you listening, if you want to make progress as a listener, if you want to get the deep-listening playing cards to have some fun with you or your team, if you want to use the deep-listening jigsaw puzzle, if you want to access interviews with FBI hostage negotiators or the world champion sniper from 2012 and they teach you about how to focus when you can't be distracted. In your mind right now, Joshua, please tell me your description of the world champion sniper. What do they look like?
Joshua: What do they look like? I would imagine not what they look like in a movie. I'd say that's over-dramatised. Probably quite an analytical type person I'd imagine would look. The word frail wouldn't be right but if we had a look and we generalised two different types of IT people. There's the energy drink IT person that lives in their mother's basement, sits quite large. Then there's the vegetarian IT person that has no muscle mass whatsoever. I would have said probably the no muscle mass type person that's sitting there.
Oscar: How tall?
Joshua: How tall? Above average, I'd say.
Oscar: Above average height? Man or a woman?
Joshua: Okay, again, all my information coming from movies so probably a man, I guess.
Oscar: And which country would you get them from?
Joshua: Most politically correct answer would be America.
Oscar: Well, here's the reality. Christina is from Sweden. She was the 2012 world sniper champion, and for a lot of us, we've just learned a huge lesson in assumptions.
Joshua: Absolutely. I thought their army was just ... I thought they couldn't have because they have these tiny knives, the Swiss Army knives. They can't. That's fantastic, okay.
Oscar: So, we interview a whole range of people like high court judges, air traffic controllers, palliative care nurses who are listening at the end of people's lives on how to interact between doctors and the family and a person who's passing away. So there's a whole range of listening experts that can give you one to three hacks on how to listen during the episodes. Check that out. So if you visit listeningmyths.com, you can get access to all that information. If you want to take the 90-day deep listening challenge, you can visit listeningmyths.com and do that too.
We're just about to launch the assessment that can answer 20 questions and find out which one of the four listening villains you are.
Joshua: I'm going to be taking that test because as you were going through the different villains I was trying to think who am I? We will put a link down to your podcast as well as to some of those awesome resources people would have a look at.
Oscar: Look, you've given me the greatest gift of all today, you've given me the gift of listening to me and help me on the quest to create a little bit more on this journey towards 100 million deep listener in the world. So, thank you.
Joshua: Well, thank you Oscar for being here and allowing us to do this. I've learned lots. I hope our listeners have learned lots and I'm looking forward to reading your next book when it comes out.
Oscar: Yeah, pop into listeningmyths.com, Joshua, and you'll be added on the journey there as well.
Joshua: Awesome. We'll put the link to that below. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that I could listen in on along with our listeners before we jump?
Oscar: Look, if there's one book I could recommend for everybody on the journey to improving as a listener would be Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a book about habit formation. It's one of the best written business books I've read in the last 35 years. It's very clear, it's very explicit and he breaks down habits into their most atomic elements, their smallest elements to make you successful. So, if you get a chance, James Clear, Atomic Habits, it's a book I spent a lot of time with because one of the big struggles for people is listening is a skill, it's a strategy, but ultimately it's a practise. You're never going to get perfect at it but you want to make a little bit of improvement along the way. So my recommendation to you and all your fans that are listening to you is Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Joshua: All right. Okay, cool. Well, it's been lovely having you here, Oscar and I'm looking forward to reading the next book, jumping into James's book Atomic Habits and speaking with you again soon in the future.
Oscar: Well, thanks for listening.
Joshua: Thank you and stay good.
Forecasting Your Business Numbers with Leschen Smaller
Josh: Good day everyone out there in Podcast Land. We've got Leschen here from Element Business and Accounting Solutions and she's going to be going through talking about some things that are on everyone's mind, which is forecasting with your numbers. What are you doing in your business? How come so many businesses have collapsed? Where have they gone? Why didn't they save for a rainy day?
Learn more about your business numbers at dorksdelivered.com.au
Josh: So I guess, I want to ask you a quick question and that is, what would you say is the benchmark number? How do you work out how much is the right number? Or how do you work out your financial projections and budgeting? And I know I've asked you a mouth, which you can answer in an elevator pitch, but tell me a bit about the voodoo that you do and how you can help.
Leschen: Well thanks for that, firstly. We operate on a 13-week cash flow and getting those projections for when your cash is coming in and when your cash is going out, it's certainly really important and it's been highlighted through this whole COVID crisis thing. So normally businesses might save a little bit for a rainy day. I think we were talking about that before. You might have six months' worth of working capital to see you through, but this crisis came out of nowhere and I think people have forgotten what it's like and they have forgotten that cash is king. So they need to go back to the planning. And the easiest way to get your breakeven is just to average your monthly expenses for the year and that should give you your average balance that you should have per month. |And you might have three months capital up your sleeve or six months. Six months is actually a luxury, most people can cope with three.
Josh: So, that would be a little bit industry-specific depending on what you're doing. Our listeners can be anyone from doing yard maintenance stuff to hairdressers and people running a multimillion-dollar fortune 500 company. So what would you say is a benchmark if you don't know what your expenses are? What should you save to start up a business to be able to make sure that you're not going to collapse, I guess or what would you use as your safety net if you can't have that safety net? So to speak.
Leschen: People say that expenses are unknown but they're not. You know if you're a gardener, you're going to need fuel. You know how much it is going to be to repair your mower, your car, buy a trailer. And so, you need to have at least half that amount up your sleeve for if something goes wrong. But having said that, if you've got people that are just going into a business and they're starting up a business tomorrow, they're not going to have given that any thought whatsoever. Which is fine when they're on their own but as soon as they get employees, whole different ball game.
Leschen: And then I think you've just got to be a lot more conscious about the money you're spending. And so using this 13-week cash flow, you know what customers you have, you project when they're going to pay you. You know what expenses you have and you put those into your spreadsheet and what it enables you to do is, say you had to pay... Say you had a repair and maintenance that you needed to do but wasn't essential. You can move that out a week on a week that you're not going to get too much income because maybe it was a public holiday or there's a public holiday in there and you couldn't work or you were ill or something has happened that has not allowed you to work for a certain period. You just move your expenses out and you can... It's a really robust tool to help you manage your cash flow.
Josh: Okay. And so with the 13-week cash flow, I guess you keep saying the 13 weeks, I'm going to ask you a few more questions about that, but is that something you should be considering personally as well as in business? Because obviously you've got your personal expenses, you got your business expenses and if you're the owner, they very much overlap a lot of the time.
Leschen: I would prefer you keep them separate but 100%. I mean, if you're a sole trader maybe, keep them together, but if you've got a company or something, then definitely keep them separate.
Josh: Yeah. I was just thinking if there's a person listening to that isn't in business, this still really, really relevant for them because they could still be put out of a job, they could still be put out on the streets and they still have, depending on the stage of business, in baby formula or golf clubs to be buying.
Leschen: Both, yeah. Oh God! Yes.
Josh: I guess, you need to make sure that you're forecasting and doing those things where you can and have that cash available to you. That's from a personal sense. And then getting into a business, if you're running a business where most of our listeners are, you want to make sure that you have 13 weeks. So how did you get to 13 weeks? Where did the magic number come from? Why not 12? Why not... I don't know if you remember Something About Mary thing where he said, "Seven-minute abs."
Leschen: No.
Josh: It's like, "You can't do your abs in seven minutes!"
Leschen: Because four's too short, eights kind of in the middle. So 13 weeks kind of encapsulated... Who likes 12? I mean 12 beautiful number, I have to say as an accountant but then 13 is odd, so 13 just works.
Josh: It makes sense, I guess. The average amount of wakes in three months I guess would be probably-
Leschen: I was going to say it's probably about 13, yes.
Josh: Yeah.
Leschen: You would be surprised at what... We use it in our business.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leschen: And we might shift around payments if we think, for some reason, that... So, for now, clients are paying slowly, right? But we still have wages to pay, we've still got rent. So if we have a discretionary spend we will move it from one week to the next.
Josh: Yep.
Leschen: Based on what we know, where our income is, or what week our income is going to land or cash our cash is going to land in our bank.
Josh: Okay. That's actually brings up a very good point. So when you're starting up a business, and obviously depending on the scale and the size of your business, some people, they're net terms are nearly instant, they can sell a pizza and they're being paid in 15 minutes, but then depending on the level of business you're in, like for us, we have net terms that vary from anything from 15 to 45 day. Some people have, I think things are even higher than that. If you're in business and you want to make sure you have that cash flow, what is everyone else doing out there? What are the net terms and how much does that affect the bottom line?
Leschen: It's so important because there are some things that you can't do much about because there's legislation around it, but again, I'll use us as an example, I'm quite transparent about what we do. So, we normally, for a client, we'll do your compliance work and then we give you a big bill, not that big, but we give you a bill at the end of the day for having done it.
Josh: Acceptable bill.
Leschen: Yeah, correct. Of course.
Josh: Yeah.
Leschen: But then we're going, "Why are we doing that?" We would hate it if we went to you say, Josh, and went, "Can you provide us a service and then at the end of the year, give us a bill?" That would be a big bill. Right?
Josh: Yeah.
Leschen: But you might change it to monthly and that's what we're thinking about. So it's smaller chunks. People can absorb the cost a little bit better. People know what's coming up, they know when it's coming up, and people can then plan their cash flow a lot better. So people can do the same in their business if they've got something that they can start billing over a year or three months or six months, they should think about that. Because also then, for you, you've got a regular cash flow coming in.
Josh: Oh, I think it's a fantastic idea. That's a big model that we're a huge fan of. So about 10 years ago we changed from being a per hour model to a per month model. And we give unlimited support for everything that we do and we're always available on the phone to talk to anyone and it's so much easier because you remove that resistance. Before you'd go into a business, you'd tell them what you're charging per hour and they'll talk really, really quickly. And I know I'm guilty of it. I'll go to my accountant and he'll be like, "Oh, so how's the family?" And I'm like, "Crap, am I on the time or not?" I don't know-
Leschen: "Don't ask me about my family now!"
Josh: Exactly. Ask me later when I know I'm not on the clock. And you start freaking out and we saw that that gave a lack of quality service because we'd go in and the receptionist would say, "I've got this problem." And the business owner said, "Not important." And I'm like, "Well that's not very cool." And so, charging a set price per month gave everyone that same thing, and I'm not going to say that this happens, but depending on your industry, when you have the likes of gyms that have popped up, these 24-hour gyms that are not doing much at the moment, but that you have this card sitting in your wallet. Isn't it weird how you don't lose weight with the card sitting in your wallet but the money still comes out?
Leschen: I have a gym that I donate to.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. You help fund their loans.
Leschen: It's a great model that they have.
Josh: Yep and so that's where I'm like, "Okay." So I don't know what you guys charge, but let's say it's $2,000 to do a returns for a Pty LTD something once a year or something like that.
Leschen: Yeah.
Josh: I'm just saying a ballpark number, but if it was two grand, that gives people the opportunity to go, "Ooh, shit, two grand, that's a lot of money. Maybe I should look around for next year." Where if you divide that by 12, all of a sudden, even if it was $200 plus the overheads of the additional bookkeeping and administration, and you go, "Okay, $200 a month. $50 a week, it's just coming out..." I know it's there. I know I can call you anytime. I know this is going to be done. I don't have this big expense and it's a much easier model and it's easier for everyone.
Josh: But people... I'm going to use one of those terms like they do on the news when you say, "They said this is going to come." When they don't actually have any references. I mean I'm going to do one of those. I'm going to just say people freak out when they get their rates notice or their insurances too or whatever their case is in business and you go, "Oh crap. Here's an eight grand invoice that I wasn't anticipating at all." But if you're able to amortise that into smaller chunks, you're able to see the outgoings more easily, predict for that and forecast for that, for a lot of people that don't really use many forecasting applications and things like that.
Leschen: It’s simple.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. What do you suggest if you are new to the game and you're wanting to get a bit of an idea of, "What are I expenses next month?" Did you have any tools that you could suggest that you could do that in a live way?
Leschen: Well, we use Zero a lot, but accountants love Excel, and I'm going to sound like such an accountant now, but Excel works wonders. Why make it complicated? You should know when your next bill is coming in. You should know when your rates bills are coming in. When you'd go into business, that does need to be a little bit of ownership about what you're doing. So yeah, if you're new in business, you're going to sign up for insurance. So you will know what that bill is and so you just put it into your little Excel worksheet and in the week that it's due and just have your weeks across the top and you just work it out like that.
Josh: Yeah and that's easy enough. And most people don't, and I'm going to say the thing that all accounts hate, I love Excel, but if you don't have Excel, anyone out there listening in Podcast Land, use Google Sheets. It's the poo version of Excel. It's free. It's not as good.
Leschen: I was going to say the same thing. Isn't it?
Josh: Yeah, oh, it's okay when it gets down to.. For most uses it's going to be the same. Just when it gets down to some of the more complicated things that you're doing between them.
Leschen: It's not complicated at all.
Josh: Exactly, somebody can sit down there with a beer, hypothetically, and then go through and do that so that's really good advice. And when, I guess, looking to find out all your numbers and going through all your numbers, we've got a bookkeeper, we've got an account, and then I'm the business owner and a lot of people have that same sort of Three Stooges or Three Musketeers depending on how you feel about it. Where do you say is the best way to understand the cut-over between accountant, bookkeeper and business owner when it comes to responsibilities to create these documents, to know when things are happening? I'm not going to pick on any industry in particular, but some businesses sort of go, "Oh, no mate. I just do what I do and put everything in the Share Box and it just bloody gets sorted out from there. It doesn't, hey?" And then there's other people that have their finger on the pulse and I would be more closely aligned with that, myself. But I don't know if I'm... I don't want to think that I'm stepping on my bookkeeper's toes and they go, "What are you doing?" Or if the book is just meant to be there for reconciliation. So where do you say the cut-over really sits nicely to just know where your responsibilities lay as a business owner when it comes to things like this?
Leschen: So if we start with a book, it's like a... What's the analogy with the cookie? Or making a sausage. The bookkeeper starts at the beginning, they input the data into your software package, say it's Zero or MYOB or QuickBooks, whatever it is, and then your accountant reads it and checks, is how I would probably put it because if I had to input anything into Zero, I would probably break it, but I could probably get my way around it, sort off, but I would not be anywhere near as efficient as a bookkeeper.
Josh: Cool. So from an accountant's perspective, you're into the P and L's.
Leschen: Yeah. I want to tell you how you're going, why is your marketing so high this month when you only budgeted X or why is your rent percentage of income so high? Those are the conversations that I want to have with you. I want help you interpret your numbers so that you can go away and go, "Right, okay, this is what I need to do." We're going on our plan traject trajectory or we need to change.
Josh: Obviously, in the analogy of making the sausage, if the meat is rancid or the bookkeeper's not doing the job that you thought they were meant to be doing or something's wrong, let's say I just walked off the street and I was decided, "Let's start a business." Can you tell that the bookkeeper's been doing something a bit wrong? They've been claiming GST free expenses instead of other things where they shouldn't have been. They haven't got the appropriate tracking codes and things like that. Or can you go, "Maybe I should tell the business owner, this doesn't look a hundred percent kosher."? Or how deep do you get into it?
Leschen: Yes, it depends how much you want us involved in your business. So we prepare a lot for clients. So it's at that time we review all the data and we go, "Well, this has got GST on and it shouldn't." Or, "Hang on a second, this insurance has GST on the full amount but it shouldn't. So can you give us the invoice?" That sort of thing. So we can certainly run a preliminary eye over what's in your books but it's not going to pick up everything but it will certainly pick up the majority of things. So we can definitely help from that perspective.
Leschen: And then from a bookkeeper's perspective, it depends. We would always go back to the owner going, "Oh my God we had to reconcile your bank account. Why is it not reconciled? The bookkeeper should do that every time they come to your place." Or we would go, "Well no, we had to do 50,000 adjustments to your file." But it's just a two-way communication because we do like to work with the bookkeepers as well. And the good bookkeepers, we have a really open dialogue with so that they can ask us questions. Because the last thing you want is the bookkeeper and the accountant at odds with one another.
Josh: Butting heads, yeah.
Leschen: All three of us... Yeah. Because they get very protective of their work or the accountant gets very protective and it's not a good relationship. So you need the owner, the accountant, and the bookkeeper all to be on the same page, it just works so much better that way.
Josh: I can say, comfortably, you're 100% correct. When I started the business in 2007 I read four or five books on bookkeeping and accounting and thought, "I can do this."
Leschen: Oh my God. Were you having-
Josh: Easy.
Leschen: ...trouble sleeping?
Josh: Ah, so 2007, start of the business, 2009 I went, "I am freaking out. What have I done? This is terrible!" And I got a bookkeeper and I'm like, "I need you to help me. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want the government to come and hurt me. I haven't submitted anything two years." And they said, "Look, don't freak out. It's all right. You're not the only person that's ever done this." I'm like, "Yeah but I don't even want to be any of the people that have done this." I don't want to be in the naughty chair. What am I doing? Anyway...
Leschen: Just fix it!
Josh: Exactly. So she went through it all, got it all sorted and at that stage we were using QuickBooks, got it all sorted and, oh my goodness, the weight off my chest, that was fantastic. That's something that I said, I went, "Okay, I shouldn't have been freaking out about this." The good news is though I read enough into it to understand enough about the numbers and so I definitely think everyone should... As you said, the business owner needs to take some responsibility when it comes to knowing what expenses are coming up and being aware of that. And I 100% agree because being able to do this, I was able to more easily diagnose and understand things when I was going in for an expense or going in for a loan or something like that. I understood where and how that would work and how you could better map out the chart of accounts or general ledgers. And that was great.
Josh: And that, for me, definitely made the line of a bookkeeper versus a business owner a bit fuzzy because I'm like, "I don't want to step on their toes. How much am I meant to know and do?" But at the same time I think more knowledge can only be a good thing, but just know that there's other people that do what they do professionally and better, so I don't necessarily jump in. I wouldn't be expecting business owners to go and do security assessments on their companies.
Leschen: Well, I was just going to say, my philosophy is you go and do what you're good at.
Josh: Yeah.
Leschen: I will help you interpret your numbers until you understand them, because I do like to get to a stage where you do understand them but I'll help you interpret them. I'll help you along the way, but you go and build your business and build what you're good at or do what you're good at because I wouldn't have a clue about IT. So it's just having those people... I think we're in a world where no one is an... You can't be a generalist. You can't build your business and be good at IT, your accounts, your... What else do you need? Legal. You can't be good at all of that and you don't have time to do that.
Josh: It already bothers many business owners, including myself. You're kind of still expect it to be the salesperson, the marketer, and whatever the thing is that you're good at and it's still like, "Aw man, I had to learn to become..." It sounds like I'm extroverted at the moment, I assure you, I love a quality month alone with a book.
Leschen: Sure.
Josh: I realised in business, if you're not the person able to talk, your messaged doesn't go anywhere. You can have the cure to cancer but if it's sitting on your shelf and you don't have a voice to tell anyone about it, you shouldn't even have it.
Leschen: No. If it's sitting on your shelf and you're at home trying to do your bookkeeping, instead of getting the word out there, or you're struggling with your bookkeeping and it's taking you a week to do instead of two hours, like a good bookkeeper or something like that. What a waste of time. What a waste of opportunity.
Josh: Absolutely. And we've only got time once, don't we? So you don't want to be-
Leschen: That's right.
Josh: Spending your time doing crap.
Leschen: It's the one thing you can't get back.
Josh: Exactly right. So there's books out there that I have read and I'm sure other people who've read like The Barefoot Investor and stuff.
Leschen: Oh yeah, I haven't read that one, but yeah.
Josh: What would you say, if people are looking towards forecasting or people are looking towards some sort of material to not necessarily tell them, "This is how to do something." But just tell them how to make sure they're doing the right thing? Forecasting's awesome, the split of expenses can sometimes... My family are either teachers, business owners or engineers, all of them, my grandparents, everyone. That's the trifecta that we've got there. And dad was an engineer. So doing all of their operations and bits and pieces.
Leschen: Oh, bite your tongue!
Josh: This isn't just for that business it's for other businesses that he's worked with previously, but how much people generally spend on marketing, generally spend on the people in the trenches to get the work done. And I've always had a lot of trouble with that because I've sort of thought, "Well, if you want to get your message out there, your brand out there, you need to be spending money on marketing. "As much as when I first started my business, I thought like a lot of people, people will come. Rome wasn't built in a day but you build it and they will come and it wasn't the case. And that's when I learned to start talking more. Do you like review if you see some weird patterns, if you went, "Oh, that's weird that they're spending 60% of their revenue on marketing and 20% on business meetings and only 20% on staffing. That's a bit of an odd mix."
Leschen: We'd certainly be having a conversation at that point in time. But it also depends on where a business's at. And so, part of our job is to, I guess, listen and we might have these set things in our head and go, "Yeah, wow, 60% on marketing. That's really high." But there might be a very valid explanation for that. So we'll play devil's advocate and make sure that strategy, I guess, is robust and that the business owner has thought through all the pros and cons. And if it's good, it's good. And if they go, "Ah, yeah, I could probably get an employee that would do..." It's all those types of conversations. So all in all, we just strike up a conversation around it. Everyone's got a filter through which they make decisions, whether there's $0 in the bank account or a million dollars in the bank account will affect how you make your decisions. So we're just trying to make sure that all decisions are made at an even keel.
Josh: What was it that I saw? It was a presentation that I saw in the past and they said, "The decisions and the ways that your mind works when you're backed into a corner will be incredibly different to the ways that would work when you're thinking clearly."
Leschen: Never a truer word has been said.
Josh: Yeah.
Leschen: I agree.
Josh: So I would say every business has gone through some hairy bits. And if you haven't, you're going to, it's just inevitable. You're not taking enough risks. Yeah, that's cool. So if you are looking to make sure that you're keeping your cash flow in the right spot, what are some of the things, I guess, you can do in regards to say commercial property you might be leasing and things like that?
Leschen: So right now,in this specific time, if you're starting to worry about cash, you should be speaking to your landlord.
Josh: Just for everyone listening it's at the COVID time we're talking. People listen in five years time, it's the COVID time we're talking right now.
Leschen: 2020 it'll go down in history.
Josh: Yep.
Leschen: Yeah. In this COVID time, because there's specific legislation now for it, you should be speaking to your landlords and see if you can get some relief around your rent. You should be speaking to your banks, see if you can defer payment. And at the moment they're not obviously I'm saying you can go payment free, but they're just tacking it onto the end of your loan. But it gives you a little bit more financial certainty now, just do it because your stress levels are going to sky rocket and you're not going to be able to think clearly unless you relieve some of your cash issues. And if you can, go for Jobkeeper if you haven't already.
Josh: Yeah, jump into it. They've extended that haven't they? Just recently.
Leschen: So they've extended applications until the end of May and you don't actually have to have paid that $1,500 per eligible employee until the 8th of May. The major banks are funding those so if you're a customer of Westpac, ANZ, NAB or CBA, you can actually go to them and they will do a short term over-draught sort of thing.
Josh: Bridging loan type thing.
Leschen: Yeah, correct. And at very reasonable rates and that will help you fund a lot of that. So I would be getting on the phone ASAP if you want to do that sort of thing.
Josh: That's awesome advice. So Leschen, is there anything else that you'd like to go through that you think I haven't covered off on, that you think would be... Questions or information that we should be given to our listeners?
Leschen: Look, if anyone has any questions, happy for you to get some notes and I'll shoot something through, but stress is a big things so look after yourselves and have a clear mind as much as possible. Yeah.
Josh: Cool. It's been lovely having you on the show here. I'm going to chuck some links in the description here for Element Business and Accounting Solutions for anyone that's interested in jumping across there and hearing a bit of the voodoo that they do and how they can help you out if you are a bit or you're not sure that you're getting the right advice or if you want anything to do with forecasting and want a bit more information there, make sure to jump across and talk to a wonderful team. And everyone else out there, stay healthy and in Podcast Land, if you have enjoyed this, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and everyone stay good.
Covid Created Customers With Julie Bannister
Josh: All right. Everyone out there in podcast land, I've got a cool guest for us today. We've got Julie Bannister from BforB, and she's been doing some special stuff with businesses for a number of years and several different flavours, and overall, she helps businesses grow and thrive. And who wouldn't want to grow and thrive at a time like now? So Julie, tell me, how would you say we could best take advantage of the current pandemic?
Learn more about Covid created customers at dorksdelivered.com.au
Julie Bannister: Hi Josh. Well thank you and thank you for having me on the podcast today. I think obviously we all are online because we cannot meet face to face and that was the whole part of our business. It was face to face business networking. So we had to pivot. I think that's a trendy word just at the moment.
Josh: Isn't it?
Julie Bannister: It is. I feel a little bit bad saying it, but we have had to change and we've had to go online. So that is our only option. That's everyone's option is to be online and really to support each other. But I think we all have to realise that it's not the end, it's not that we won't come out the other side of this pandemic, and it's not that we can't also grow in this time.
Julie Bannister: So I think that is one thing that we really need to be aware of and for everybody to be aware of, and for us to think of ways that we can, and I've seen many of our members of BforB, and other business people just looking at how they can maybe take things online and sell their product online or doing other things so that they can stay afloat in this time and then come out the other side and thrive.
Julie Bannister: So we've got lots of things that we're doing. That's one thing that I think we all need to be looking at, at this present point of time.
Josh: Absolutely. Changing around the way that you do business is incredibly important and making sure that you're ready for the boom. And I think this is for some businesses, has come as a complete shock, to other businesses, they've seen this as a bit of a kick in the butt to start doing things a little bit differently. And it's all about just making sure that you're ready. And there's just been a breakneck speed that we've seen people do some of these changes.
Josh: I guess what you're saying and I'll bring it to an analogy I'm very fond of which is comparing success to a Chinese bamboo tree. So the Chinese bamboo tree you can plant and for the first five years, it grows only very, very small amounts. And then on the fifth year, in six weeks, it grows 80 feet.
Julie Bannister: Oh my goodness!
Josh: I know.
Julie Bannister: We've got bamboo in our backyard and it's been there for about four years.
Josh: And using what you said as an analogy, I think all of us have some bamboo in their own backyard and one way or another.
Julie Bannister: Yes.
Josh: It's about working that out now and harvesting that and planting the seeds now because people right now isn't the time to bury your head in the sand. It's the time to be building relationships and helping people out and making sure that when things come good, you already have that groundwork done. You already know who you know, like and trust and you've already built those relationships up.
Josh: So that you can then move forward and move onwards and upwards.
Julie Bannister: Definitely.
Josh: So anyone that's looking to start a business, this is the most ideal time. And I can say that with a lot of confidence, knowing that Dorks Delivered would start in 2007 as a bit of a side hustle, another one of those words that everyone overuses.
Josh: And it was 2009 that we had the, I guess, mini-recession in Australia and the global financial crisis. And that was our time that we absolutely boomed. I gave up my day job, turned that into my full-time gig and I've never looked back.
Julie Bannister: Wow. I didn't know that Josh. I've talked to you a lot, but I didn't know that. Yes, interesting.
Josh: Yeah, and I think this is the best time that people should be growing businesses. People shouldn't be closing and they should be pivoting them wherever they can and making sure they're taking advantage of the huge amounts of time that people have available.
Julie Bannister: Yes, definitely.
Josh: So an example I'll use, my podcast has been running now for a bit of time and the YouTube channel has been running for a bit of time.
Josh: We have over 100 videos in the YouTube channel published, I think about 120 podcasts and about 180 recorded. But I was only looking this morning at the dashboard for where we're sitting. So the podcast, just looking at it right now, the podcast, the difference in traffic between February and March increased to 30% more listeners.
Julie Bannister: Wow.
Josh: If we have a look at the YouTube channel, it's increased. The watch time has gone up by 47%.
Julie Bannister: That is amazing.
Josh: 47% for the month, just ridiculous. And the view count's gone up by 10% and so I think what we can take home from that is, going up by 10% means that I've got 10% more viewers or customers, but the current customers having watched 47% more of my content has shown that they have enjoyed what we're doing, but they just haven't had the time to look at it in the past.
Josh: That's where you've got people with more time and what you guys are offering, which I'd love to make sure everyone else knows a bit more about that, but what you guys are offering is going to mean that they can build those relationships with that available time. If they have available time to watch my stupid videos, they definitely have available time to build relationships.
Julie Bannister: I must say that videos, very entertaining. They're not stupid, they're entertaining. Sometimes I'm not quite sure why you said that, and why you say some things, but they are definitely very entertaining.
Josh: I'm going to say something I'd normally never say, but I was told many years ago, you can have something that's boring. You can have a boring topic or something that people don't give a crap about and someone said, "They can give a crap about, you just have to roll it in glitter." And I'm like, "Okay, no worries."
Josh: So you take a boring subject like IT and stuff like that, and you roll it in glitter and that's what the YouTube channel and podcast is all about.
Julie Bannister: That's what you definitely do.
Josh: That's right. So you've been running something called BforB in one form or another for quite a while and BforB connects people together and builds those relationships up.
Julie Bannister: Yes.
Josh: So tell me about what you're doing now for people that are looking to grow their business.
Julie Bannister: Yes. Okay. So just to go back a step, you mentioned when you were talking Josh, that building the relationships and that's the core essence of networking and business because you need to build those relationships to actually get, as everybody says, the know, like and trust, so that people will want to do business with you.
Julie Bannister: And that's what we do in networking. So now that we can't meet face to face, what we're doing is, we've gone online and obviously, the meetings are free to join in, and we're actually launching in a number of different areas. So we're launching in regional Queensland, we're launching in New South Wales in Sydney, and building extra groups near where we are here in Brisbane and Adelaide, and the Gold Coast.
Julie Bannister: So allowing people to join in, in the already established network with our formatted meeting structure, it's formatted and it's professional, but it's friendly and casual if you can have that all in one. And you've attended some Josh and you understand that that's what it is. We like people to have fun when they're there. So currently, we're allowing people to take advantage of that and we're offering free membership, well we're saying three months at the moment, but that may have to be extended.
Julie Bannister: We're saying the hopeful, three months, this nightmare, we'll be out of this nightmare and we'll be back to life. But that may need to be extended. So that free membership will be extended for however long we're in this situation and allowing people to join in with our network. And we have some larger meetings where all of the members all over Australia connects.
Julie Bannister: So that would be people's opportunity to connect with everyone. But it's allowing people to build the relationships now and when we've got the time, as you mentioned, then when we come out of this, those relationships will still be there. And from that, hopefully, referral business can start happening for many, many people. Wonderful, I'm just so excited about it.
Julie Bannister: I was sharing with my coach the other day and we got so excited about what we can do for businesses at the moment. And as you mentioned, Josh, people who are not even in business, it's a great time for people to start thinking about that.
Josh: Absolutely. We've got an abundance of time.
Julie Bannister: Yes, yes. Everybody's got a lot of time. And there's such an opportunity for everyone in this situation and this is the way that we feel that we can help people, help our current members as well because they get connected with other people and we're all hurting at the moment in one way or another. We're all coping in one way or another and all differently. But this is, I believe, a great opportunity for people to be building those relationships now for the future.
Josh: Fully agree, as you've pointed out in different words, but your network is your net worth.
Julie Bannister: Yes, definitely.
Josh: And creating a good network and talking to people right now is the best thing you can do. Those without a voice, won't be heard. And if you're going to just sit there in your sorrows, it's not going to build your business or your mindset, or grow yourself personally. So jumping into a group, as you've very, very generously pushed a free reason. There's no reason, there's nothing to lose, if they just want to spend a bit of time building up their relationships with people now.
Josh: When everyone comes back, as I was saying with the bamboo tree, as soon as everyone kicks back into gear, things will be striving through and thriving for them and their business. So it's sensible to set the groundwork now. Sow the seeds, put them in the ground, even if it's not five years, if it's five months that we're in this a pandemic for, it would mean that in five months' time you've hit the gas pedal and you're absolutely cracking out goals. So we'll make sure to put a link towards that because I think that's very, very important and that people do jump onto that.
Julie Bannister: There's one thing else that you touched on is that, some of us, and I know even in the last couple of weeks, I've wanted to put my head in the sand or go back to bed and put the pillow over my head and forget that anybody even exists.
Josh: I had a talk to my mate, Jack Daniels. We're sweet. We were pretty close.
Julie Bannister: My challenge is that if I get too stressed, alcohol doesn't do me good at all. So that's not my answer. But I think we have to not be tough on ourselves because realising that some moments in the day will feel a bit like that and other moments will feel, no, I can do this. So we really do need to acknowledge that and get connected with people so that we can all pull each other through all of this and not be too hard on ourselves, I believe.
Josh: Absolutely. Being able to sit down and just, if you want to do it with me right now, Julie, I think it'd be good. Just take a deep breath, and take a breathe in, and breathe out. And then just know, and recollect yourself, and recollect your thoughts and your position. Feel comfortable about where you've come from and this is something that I always try reflecting on every three months, every year, every five years, I go back and look at each of the different business plans that I've made either from the start of the year and go, okay, what have I achieved?
Josh: What have I been able to achieve? What have I been able to climb out of? What's been the driving motivator and those things and go, I can do lots. I can't believe how much I've done and be excited about those things and then go, okay, how can I, in a time like now where people are thinking we don't have the resources to do things, we don't have the ability to go and see people.
Josh: It's a time where you just need to pivot your mindset and think about how resourceful we have the world at the moment. Being able to do things such as Zoom. We have the ozone layer that's clearing itself up at the moment. We have a huge amount of benefits that are coming from this. Now there's going to be a whole bunch of fallout from that as well and what the world looked like when we went in is not going to be what it looks like when we come back out.
Josh: But knowing that you're still here fighting the fight and you have a game plan and way to position your business, it gives you something to drive towards and thrive towards. Like your kids at Christmas time when you tell them to be good and then say Santa's coming. Like, "Oh, I'll be good then." You just got to have something to work towards and know that you can create that sparkle in your eye and your family's.
Julie Bannister: Yes. I think the gem in that is, or the key point in that is being connected with other people, whether it's your family, but I think business people, we are a little bit different and we can't always talk to our family members about the challenges or the stress that we're feeling in business. So being connected with business people, is really important in any way you at the moment, I think. Yes.
Josh: Absolutely. You're exactly right Julie, and we need to have people being connected with their businesses and what they're doing and also understand that your business and your personal life are two separate things and building relationships in business can help you out personally as well as in business. That's very, very important to make sure you differentiate the health of your business and the health of yourself.
Josh: I paused everything to do with Dorks Delivered and I paused it for three days as I went through the personal approach and game plan as to what we would be doing and how we'd be making sure we're okay personally. And then once I was confident with the results, I then started looking at the vehicle that brings us the success that we've got in our lives.
Julie Bannister: That's very interesting. I didn't know that. That's another point I didn't know, but I also didn't even think of doing that. So that's a very good point Josh.
Josh: Well I think it's knowing that your family is going to be healthy. I'm a bit of a forward thinker and I'll plan for the worst and hope for the best and that's what everyone should do. Nothing out of the ordinary. I didn't go do some bulk buying or anything like that. I don't have a room full of toilet paper.
Julie Bannister: I hope you've got enough though.
Josh: I've got a mango tree at the back.
Julie Bannister: Ooh.
Josh: But yeah, just the normal amount that fits under our sink and that we'd normally buy and just knowing that we've got our water bottles filled up. I've got CB radio set up to mum and dad if something was to go wrong with the phone networks or internet or something like that. Just knowing if we have a complete blackout type situation, that you can still talk to your loved ones and where you're at with your mindset and your finances and that.
Josh: That's something that I'd definitely suggest everyone doing is just having a look at what the government is putting on the line for businesses. There is quite a number of things we went through and we could see that if you were to be in an 800,000 to $10 million turnover business, you'd be pretty comfortably able to find about $350,000 worth of advantages from the government at the moment.
Julie Bannister: I haven't added that up. That's interesting.
Josh: Yeah. So that's the numbers that we've got too and we've been talking to any other businesses, and this was something that I went through and spent a couple of days just looking at all the different literature that's available online to see what any of the different stimulus packages include and don't include, and make sure that you're aware of them before you start stressing out thinking customers are leaving and this is happening and that's happening.
Josh: Just take a moment to collect yourself, see where you're at and see what is actually available out there and you'd be surprised at what businesses are happy to help out with and in a time like now, as I said, it's about building relationships. One business, we spoke to them, someone that we buy things from, so a vendor for us and we said, "Look, we need to know, are you relaxing any of your terms? You've pretty much presented us with a bill for $3,000."
Josh: And he said, "No, if you don't like it, you don't have to stay with us." And I said, "Well, at the moment we would love to stay with you, but it's an auxiliary product that we weren't using with many customers." And we said, No, we're going to have to cut you out." And he goes, "We've had 30 cancellations this month. I don't know what's going on." And I thought, "Well you're an idiot then."
Julie Bannister: He needs to open his eyes and ears. Definitely, wow.
Josh: I said to him, "We'd be more than happy to utilise your products more than what we have been. We definitely see value in your product. If you give us some marketing material, we're happy to promote your product to help us help you out with this situation."
Josh: And he said, "Oh no, I don't have time for that." I went, "Ah well, if you're not going to invest in your customers, you're not going to invest in your relationships. You're not going to invest in your business." It's fair that businesses with that mindset will collapse. And that's again, another thing that I found in going to the BforBs was, it's not just about the business, but you have a whole bunch of other advantages where you have keynote speakers and you have people come to these groups and they talk about the importance of doing certain things in business.
Josh: Whether that be setting up your business in a certain way from an accounting perspective or creating videos for promoting your business or whatever the case may be. Automating and bringing back your life, which I'm a big fan of.
Julie Bannister: We do have our guest speakers and that is a great value add. And just recently, we've been having a lot of speakers talking about the different packages that the government is offering and a lot of people are doing this, but we're still giving support around your mental health and things like that. But overall, we have guest speakers who talk about marketing, sales, IT, accounting, mindset, all different topics that can help people in their business.
Julie Bannister: So yes, definitely, that is a great value add. And as you mentioned, it's not just about business, the friendships people make in BforB is just, it's so valuable, you can't put a price on it. And another value add that a lot of people receive from being a member of BforB is the confidence that you build because little by little, so you might be asked to do a one-minute infomercial and that's very frightening to a lot of people.
Josh: Absolutely.
Julie Bannister: Yes. And then we'll ask you to do a five minute, and then a 10 minute, and many of our members who've joined and was so scared to do a one-minute infomercial, are actually doing 25-minute presentations now. So it's a confidence-building and within a very, very, very supportive environment. Yes. So that's one of the biggest benefits I believe.
Josh: You were talking about some things, new things that you learned about me today. One of the things, I can't remember if I've told you this or not, but I was severely bullied at school to a spot that I wasn't able to walk and I was very introverted. I was the guy that, I'm going to call myself wicked awesome at chess. No one challenged me to that because if you're challenging me, you're probably better, but I was the guy in the library playing chess.
Josh: That was my hangout. I was not confident to talk to people. I was not confident to be in the spotlight whatsoever. I was overweight and it was a battle and it was a time where something clicked and I realised that if I have developed the cure for cancer from a computer standpoint in managing and automating businesses, but I'll have that sitting in my garage.
Josh: No one has the advantage from that. I'm sure someone has got a cure for cancer and it's just sitting in their garage and they don't have the voice to be able to speak, and speak and talk to people about it. And things like BforB, and being able to come outside of your comfort circle.
Josh: Proud of me knowing about BforB was put onto a roadshow to talk to people about IT. It was a five-day roadshow. The first day that I did that roadshow, I recorded it because I was going to put it up on the web for people to have a look at. I watched it. I nearly threw up. I was like, oh my goodness, that's terrible. I can't believe I've done that. I've got four more days of this with no audience engagement and I've gone, oh this is terrible. This is so terrible. I was going to call in sick. I've never wanted my mum to write me a letter to say I can't come to school so much as a grown adult.
Josh: I was thinking, I'm freaking out. I watched that same 30 minute video, maybe 10 times that night and I'm writing down what did I do wrong? How did I move my hands? I didn't like that. I look really nervous. How can I fix this? And I wrote down and critiqued everything. The Tuesday, I did the presentation and everyone loved it. They stood up and clapped. They gave me a standing ovation.
Josh: I thought, oh, this makes Wednesday a lot easier. That's not to say I didn't watch it still, but BforB gives you exactly that power to be able to... It doesn't matter if you're a scared little mouse and you sit down. It gives you the growth to be able to talk and to know that other people are in the same boat as you. You're not just the only person that's feeling that way.
Julie Bannister: That's exactly right. Yes, and that's actually the thing that rocks my boat in BforB is watching people grow and getting that confidence. The referrals, yes, because we need a return on our investment. That is still very important. But that confidence building, it's grows the person and the business. So that's so important.
Josh: Yeah, well, Julie it's been great speaking with you and is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we finish this one up?
Julie Bannister: We have some online meetings. As I mentioned before, we have our BforB regular meetings at the same time that we used to have our regular face to face meetings. We've got monthly networking, which is open to everyone to come on and we have a guest speaker with that one and I can share the link with you, Josh if you feel that's appropriate.
Josh: That'd be perfect. Absolutely, that'd be great.
Julie Bannister: Yes. And we do have our daily business, every business day from 10 o'clock till 11:30 where people can just come in and chat with us. No formal meeting, just connecting with people. So yeah.
Josh: Cool. Well Julie, I'll make sure to make sure that all of our listeners out there in podcast land get those links and are able to really have a compounding growth for their business over the next few, hopefully only weeks, probably months, but likely, several months. But we'll see how they go.
Julie Bannister: Definitely. Thanks for having me.
Josh: No worries. And if anyone has enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, give us a review, and everyone out there, stay good.
Helping Yourself With Bob Burg
Josh: So we've got Bob Burg here today, and he's an absolute legend in his field. He's changed the way that I do business, he's changed my life. He was one of the first self-help books that I read. And ultimately it's something that I always talk to, a massive influencer for me. And I talk to all my clients and make sure that they go and read, number one The Go-Giver. They need to jump into that, that changes the way you do business. So Bob, tell me a bit about The Go-Giver.
Get more tips from Bob Burg at dorksdelivered.com.au
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/GS2jTHebvHA
Bob Burg: Well it's a business parable. So it's a fictional story based on all tried and proven principles. And there's a lot of stories within the story that actually happen. But the actual work is a work of fiction. It's co-authored by John David Mann who's a fantastic storyteller and writer. I'm much more of a how-to guy. And it's a story of a guy named Joe who's a young up-and-coming, ambitious, aggressive salesperson. He's a good guy and he has good intent, but he's very frustrated because he hasn't reached the kind of success he believes he should have by this point. But he really comes to learn that the big problem, his focus is really on himself when it comes right down to it as opposed to others. And what he learns through the story, is that when you can shift your focus off of yourself and onto others. Being focused on creating or what we call getting exceptional value to everyone you meet, you realise that not only is that a more pleasant way of conducting business, it's actually the most financially profitable way as well.
Josh: I have to say I completely agree. Having read your book, it would have been now, I couldn't even say how many years ago. It was many, many years ago I read. I started off with The Go-Giver and I thought, this is amazing. Jumped onto The Go-Giver Leader, jumped onto Sell me More, and then Endless Referrals, and The Success Formula. I nearly have the library.
Bob Burg: Wow, thank you. That's a great compliment.
Josh: I can say your teachings are amazing. And the way that that was done in The Go-Giver was a very light, easy read in my opinion. It related to lots of people and it wasn't something that you... You pick it up and you just wanted to read, you didn't want to put it down. It wasn't something that was hard to read.
Bob Burg: And that goes to John, that's his writing skills.
Josh: It helped. And especially in my naivety when I was first starting out in business, being able to read something like that and go, okay this sounds good. And knowing that there is good ways and great ways to do business, as opposed to the ruthless cutthroat methods that seem to be fictionalised in movies.
Bob Burg: Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons there was appeal for the book, for the message. Because most human beings, they want to feel like they're making a positive difference in people's lives. And so I think what the book said is basically, yeah you can do business that way. Not only is it can you focus on bringing value to others, and not only is it going to have you feel good about yourself, not only are you going to make money doing that, but that's actually the more effective way of doing it than focusing on yourself. Because you think about this, and I often will say this in a joking manner when I speak at a sales conference. One of the first things I'll say is, "Nobody's going to buy from you because you have a quota to me."
Josh: Yeah, exactly.
Bob Burg: Right? They're not going to buy from you, right and we all laugh because we all know that's true. No one's going to buy from us because we need the sale, right? They're not going to buy from you because you need the money. And they're not even going to buy from you because you're a nice person. They're going to buy from you because they believe that they will be better off by doing so than by not doing so. And that's perfect, it's the only reason why anyone should buy from you, or from me, or from anyone else. And the neat thing about that is what it does is it makes it so that sales person or entrepreneur who can place their focus on that other person, placing that other person's interest first, doing what's in the best interest of that other person and being able to communicate that. That's the person who's going to be more successful both in the short-term and the longer sustainable term.
Josh: Well I can say, the proof is in the pudding and I've made my business on the pudding that you gave me.
Bob Burg: Oh, okay.
Josh: So yeah, it worked out really well. And as you said, it should be straight-forward but it just doesn't seem to come by nature. And I know, I myself I'm very technical. My background's technical, my skill set's technical and I was the technician that decided I've got something better to give to the world. And excuse the French, but scared shitless when it came to trying to sell or talk to people about it. And your books described it perfectly, don't sell. Just show people what you've got to offer-
Bob Burg: Well, here's what it is. It's not that you're not selling, but we define selling differently right?
Josh: Yeah, exactly.
Bob Burg: Because when you think about it a lot of people say, well what's selling? Selling is trying to convince someone to buy something they don't want or need. Well that's not selling, that's called being a thief. So what is selling? Well selling, by definition selling is simply discovering what that other person does want, does need, does desire and helping them to get it. The Old English root of the word sell was sellan, which literally meant to give. So, when you're selling you're literally giving. No, someone might say, well wait a second isn't that semantics? And I say, well I don't think so and here's why. Let's say you have a prospective customer in front of you and they want to know why. Why they should do business with you, why you're the solution to their problem, why that... Well, so you're in a sales situation, you are selling. So my question would be, when you're selling what are you giving? I suggest you're giving that person time, attention, counsel, education, empathy and ultimately extreme value. So when we look at selling that way, now we see that it's really something good that we're doing.
Josh: You're helping everyone ultimately, unless you're being a thief as you said.
Bob Burg: Oh yeah, sure. And that's not selling, that's being a thief.
Josh: That's right. As long as you've got a good product, a good mindset, and you believe in what you're doing, and what you're selling, and what your message is I find that your customers become your best salespeople.
Bob Burg: Oh, absolutely. They become your personal walking ambassadors.
Josh: Correct, yeah. And it's an amazing concept, so anyone that hasn't read The Go-Giver definitely needs to jump into it. It's a must-read, it needs to sit on there on the shelf as one of the first books that you read next to E-Myth and other classics. And in fact when I first met my partner Sarah, she'd started a first business as the first set of... Backstory, met her on Tinder. I would have rather met her in a nicer way, but we live in the age that we live in. So, met her on Tinder, and the first time we caught up together she had her folder there and I caught up with her. She didn't know if it was a business meeting or a date. And I was talking to her about different ways that she could better her business. And if I don't say so myself, quite the gentleman opening the door and so on and so forth for her. And I said one of the first things you need to do is read The Go-Getter, and this copy that I've actually got here now that we've been together for a while is signed by me saying, To all your success, Love Josh.
Bob Burg: That's great.
Josh: So this is actually the book that I had for myself and I gifted to her. And it's come straight back, although that sounds a bit corny it's exactly the message that you're giving, you give, and it comes back to you. And it comes back to you in... I gave her a book and I got a life partner. How good's that? So it comes back to you significantly more than what you give out.
Bob Burg: Well that's awesome. And I never thought of my book going along on a Tinder date, or business opportunity or what have you but I'm glad it did.
Josh: So here you are. You're obviously an invite to the wedding.
Bob Burg: Definitely, exactly.
Josh: Yeah, just a little thank you on that one. And the opportunities don't stop when you turn off your sales cap. It's always on if you're passionate about it good things always come your way.
Bob Burg: Yep.
Josh: So tell me about what happens after the book, when someone's read the book what's the next steps they can do to find out how to better themselves and adventure onwards past he one-way literature.
Bob Burg: Well application is always really key. And that's why in the story itself Pindar, the main mentor told Joe there was really only one condition for his mentorship. And that is that he applied those laws. Every day, that every time he learned a new law he would apply the law that day. It didn't have to be done perfectly and it wasn't a matter of figuring out exactly why or why it wouldn't work or what have you. Just do the thing, right? Just take action on it. And so we find the feedback that we received from a lot of people, bless you, a lot of people do that. A lot of people will take one law and say, okay how do I apply this? How do I do this? And then they'll work on that. I always think that's a great way to start. So you ask yourself, how do I bring value to another human being? And when you think about it we have to really understand what value is, what it means. A lot of times I think people maybe confuse price and value, and those are actually two different terms. For example the law of value says your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. But you think about it, that sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy. Give more in value than I take in payment, aren't I going to go out of business?
And so we simply have to understand the difference between price and value. So what we know is that price is a dollar amount, it's a dollar figure, it's finite. It simply is wat it is, it's the price. Value on the other hand is the relative worth or desirability of a thing, of something to the end user or beholder. In other words, what is it about this thing, this product, this service, this concept, this idea that bring with it so much worth or value to another human being that they will willingly exchange their money for this. And be glad, be ecstatic that they did while you make a very healthy profit. And so when you automate for example somebody's business, and do this in a way that... What's the value you're providing? You're saving them time, you're saving them energy, you're saving them from making needless mistakes, you're making it so that they're going to make more money in their business. So I guarantee you that whatever it is you charge that person, they're getting much more in value than what they're paying. But you're making a very healthy profit because obviously with your cost of goods sold, and rent and everything else you're selling the service for much, much more than what you're having to pay to support it.
And that's why in a market-based economy with every sale there should be two profits. The buyer profits and the seller profits because each of them come away better off afterwards than they were beforehand. So, that's the law of value. It's not a matter of, some people might think The Go-Giver, does that mean you're giving away your products or services? No. Does it mean you're not making a profit? Of course not. As a Go-Giver you're going to make a much higher profit because your focus is going to be on the value, the experience, everything you proved that other person, right? Not low-price, when you sell them low-price you're a commodity. When you sell on high-value you're a resource.
Josh: Well that's it. Too many people, there's a podcast we did a few weeks ago on apples versus oranges, how could they possible be the same price? When people are comparing apples with apples, and as soon as you are comparing apples with apples you commoditize your business, and then the only thing you can fight on is price. And that's where you need to be able to bring that value, bring that change. So you've got value, price and cost.
Bob Burg: Yeah. And here's the thing. So when you look at the price, and I think the cost is pretty self-explanatory. The price is self-explanatory, right? But when we talk about value, that can be both concrete in terms of when someone saves a certain amount of money, when you help someone make a certain amount that's fine. But there's so much more to the experience itself even, that's conceptual in nature. But here's what we've got to really understand, that value is always in the eyes of the beholder.
Josh: Yes.
Bob Burg: So what that other person feels is valuable about your product, or service, or doing business with you or what have you. Not what you think is of value, or what you think they should think is of value. It's about what they do. So if we're going to say to somebody, okay so how do you practise the law of value, right? Well the first thing you do is ask questions, and make sure you discover what other people find to be of value and then you go from there. Because it's not a matter of just doing things that you think are of value to others, that's fine. But what you feel is of value may not be what they feel is.
Josh: Right. And then there's this disparity between your service offerings not being seen as valuable.
Bob Burg: Stand-by, right?
Josh: Yeah. So it's a very valuable lesson. And I know that you're big on authority building and influence, and I think that is something that could bring out a lot of value to people. Something that can show people your worth in mass without having to necessarily having to spend time as a commodity. You're able to put a resource in front of people or it's able to come about in front of them where they can see the things that can benefit their business and benefit their life. How would you go about starting off becoming an influencer?
Bob Burg: So I think it's always a good thing, I'm always a big believer in defining terms so that we're all facing the same direction. So when you think about what influence even is, on a very basic level influence can be defined as simply the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. So by definitely that's [inaudible 00:24:47]. Now that's the definitely, but I don't believe that's the essence of influence. The essence of influence is pull. Pull as opposed to push, as in the saying how far can you push a rook? And the answer's not very, at least not very fast or very effectively. Which is why great influencers don't push, right? You never hear people saying, wow that Tom or that Nancy, she is so influential. She has a lot of push with people. No, she's influential she has a lot of pull with people. That's what influence is. It's pull, it's an attraction.
Great influencers first attract people to themselves, and only then to their idea. So how do we do that? So the law of influence says, in the book the law of influence says your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first. Well what does that mean? We're not talking about being self-sacrificial, or being a martyr, or being a doormat. But no, here's what we mean. Like this person who utilises pull in order to influence. That person's always asking themselves questions such as, how does what I am asking this other person do, how does it align with their goals, their wants, their needs, their desires? How does what I want this other person to do, how does it align with their values? How am I making their life better? What is a problem of theirs I am helping them to solve. And see Josh, when we ask ourselves these questions thoughtfully, intelligently, genuinely, authentically, not as a way to manipulate another human being into doing our will, but as a way of building everyone in the process. Now we've come a lot closer to earning that person's commitment as opposed to trying to depend on some type of compliance which is push, right? That's pushing ourselves or pushing our will and so forth.
Josh: So say you're a small business, you've just started out and you've got just yourself. You've just read The Go-Giver and you're thinking about how can you change your methodology from being a push. I'm sure you've seen some of the pyramid schemes that are out there that have generally more push than pull from a sales perspective and they're trying to get you to on sale certain products without mentioning brands and bits and pieces. There's lots of them out there and that's always a very push, and their sales training has all been very push. How would you change someone from a push mentality into a pull mentality? And how would you change around their processes to allow for that to come to fruition and be noticed by, either their existing customers that have come about probably through getting sick of saying no, and they've finally said yes. Or how would you then change the mentality of their customer base or do you think it would be a bit more of a situation where you'd refresh the customer base? Or I guess how would you change your mindset from the 1980s this is how I'm going to be pushing something onto someone, to the 2020s soon to be. How would you change their process?
Bob Burg: So I would say regardless of the field, if it's sales there are certain people who do it through push, and the good ones, the sustainably successful ones do it through pull. The ones who do it through push, and have been successful, and have been successful for a long time. They have to continue repeating the process over, and over, and over again with new people all the time. It's exhausting, it's very, very dificult. You can do it but it's very dificult to build a sustainable business that way. The ones who do it through pull regardless of the business, regardless of the industry. These are the people who typically are able to really develop a wonderful referral base, and as you were mentioning earlier people who are out there singing your praises, right? What we call personal walking ambassadors.
So I think it beginning with the initial conversation. And let's say you meet someone somewhere and you're at a business social function. And you just say hello, and you say your name, and they say their name. And you ask them what they do and they tell you what they do. And they're going to probably give you some elevator speech, right? I send high-end copying machines to business that need to blah, blah, blah, right? And so forth because that's what most people have been taught to do. So you want to listen respectfully when they do it, but then when they ask you what you do which they'll probably do. My suggestion is to rather than do some elevator speech, because remember right now when this person first meets you they really don't care about you, and don't care about what you do. They care about themselves. So my feeling is just say the name, say whatever your company is, whatever you do. I'm an accountant with so-and-so or whatever. But then you're going to go right back to asking that person questions about themselves and about their business. So I have questions I call feel good questions. And those are questions that are not salesy, they're not prospecty, they're not intrusive, they're not invasive. They just make this person feel genuinely good about themselves, about the situation, and about you.
And remember when you're focusing on them you're taking the pressure off yourself. You don't have to be that person who has that clever pushy line and so forth. So the first feel good question that you could ask is simply, how did you get your start or how did you get started in the copying machine business? Or selling copying machines or what have you. Or you may say, how did you get your start in the office products profession? For a little bit more elegant. Whatever it is that person does, asking them how they got their start is a fantastic way to immediately communicate value to them. Because again, value is much more than just money. It's making the person feel important, feel good about themselves. And how many people ever ask this person how they got started in their business. I guarantee no one, their own family probably doesn't ask that person. And here's you who they just met, and you're asking them basically to tell you their story, and they're going to appreciate that.
I would follow that up probably with another fielded question such as, what do you enjoy most about what you do? You'll probably segue into it by saying, wow you must have had some fascination experiences. What do you enjoy most about your work? Or what do you enjoy most about what you do? Again, it's a feel good question. There's no pressure attached to it. Now when you've begun to develop a little bit of a rapport with that person, I would then suggest asking what I call the one key question that will set you apart from practically everyone else that person has ever met, and that question sound something like this. Gary, how can I know if someone I'm speaking with is a good prospective customer for you? And think about what you've done when asking that question, right? Unlike other people who are just again trying to sell their product or service right away, what have you. You have actually said to this person, not in so many words, but what you've communicated is I want to help you. I want to add value to your life. I want to make your life better.
Josh: You give something to them, yeah.
Bob Burg: Yeah. And they're going to really appreciate that. Now, at the end of the conversation you've got their business card, you can follow up with a personalised hand-written note which is so much better than a text or an email. Even though those are always good, but after you first meet someone there's nothing like a personalised note or card to send hand-written just saying it was great meeting you. If I can ever refer business your way I certainly will. And you've not established a connection, you've now established a relationship with this person that you can then begin to build on however you do it.
Whether it's by, then you connect with that person on social media. Whenever you can refer that person to someone else, or if you know that person has an interest in antiques and you find an article on antiques. And you print it out and you send it to them and say, hey I came across this and I remember you love antiques, thought you might find... All these things you're doing, you're just creating that relationship with that person. And this does not have to take a long time, it doesn't. And what happens is when you do this consistently, okay. And you do this over time with new people on an every day basis you start developing so many people within your new sphere of influence that you've always got someone who's at that point where it's ready for you to approach them about either doing business with them directly and/or referrals.
Josh: What you're saying there you need to make sure that you are genuinely listening to people. You're not just hearing them, you need to be, lack of a better word, involved emotionally in what they're saying, and listening to what they're saying, and actually action from that information. You don't want to be just hearing them and then, oh yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. You like remote control racing. That's cool. Okay, moving on. You need to be ready and engaged to build that relationship if that's what's important. And ultimately in business it is the currency that is the most important, building relationships. All ships rise in high tide, especially relationships.
Bob Burg: Yep, sure. Yeah. As we say, and several of the mentors told Joe in the story, the golden rule of business, of sales, of networking what have you is simply that all things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to those people they know, like and trust. There's no faster, more powerful or more effective way to elicit these feelings towards you from others than by, and again as you said genuinely, right? Genuinely and authentically, and moving from that I focus, or me focus to that other focus where you're really looking to, as Sam one of the mentors advised Joe, make your win all about that other person's win.
Josh: Yeah, 100%. It is all about the other person, and it should always be about the other person. And when people say... All the things that salesmen say. I'm not closing enough, it's all a numbers game. All this other stuff, there's always someone out there as you said that's ready to build a relationship, ready to be heard, and ready to have their story heard. And building those relationships when the time comes will come. If you're being a pushy person it's all about the numbers, and you're trying to change your three percent conversion to a five percent, or a five percent to a 10 percent when you're calling up. It's a yuckier game with a lot more negativity. It's a game that you have a lot of friction towards building the relationships, as opposed to genuinely building relationships.
Bob Burg: Oh yeah, it always comes back to how you do it. If you're doing it with the, how do I serve this person? You're going to have a lot more success than if you were saying I'm going to talk at this person and try to get them to buy. Again, it's not that doing it the Go-Giver way is self-sacrificial. No. It's more practical doing it that way. Because again, are they more likely or less likely to buy from you when they can tell that you're focused on them as opposed to being focused on getting their money.
Josh: And I've got to say that the solutions that you're putting in place, you've been listening to them. You understand their problems, you understand their stresses, you understand their pain points. You're able to then focus on that and make sure that you're removing those problems, not just explaining that moving to this solution is better for your business. You're hearing their problems and saying, well maybe this isn't better for your business.
Bob Burg: Right.
Josh: And that's fine as well.
Bob Burg: Absolutely, when that happens that happens.
Josh: If you've still got a perfect person there that you've been talking to, building a relationship with. They know the solutions that they offer, they know the things that it does, the things that it doesn't, the bells and whistles. And that then allows for them to then refer other businesses on when they see that there is a better fit for you, and they hear other people's problems.
Bob Burg: That's right.
Josh: And that's where you have your compounding effect of growth and it's really a beaut feeling. So I've been very excited. As I said, The Go-Getter changed my life. Changed the direction, and not just from a personal relationship perspective that I brought up earlier, much before that. So yeah, again thank you for that one.
Bob Burg: My pleasure.
Josh: I've read different books. There's one, I hope I'm not quoting the wrong name here. If I am I'll correct it with the title. I think it's called Sapiens, and it talks about how many relationships a single person can have in their life and build out from that. And they talk around the magic number of... That's weird.
Bob Burg: That's Sapiens.
Josh: That's the one.
Bob Burg: Yeah. And he talked about the tribes back in the hunter-gatherer days were typically about 150. And that's the number, David Burkus writes about that too in his book. And yeah, I'm just trying to think of the person... Durham's or Dunham's, I can't think of what law it is. But it's that he's the person that came up and he documented that 150 per person.
Josh: For anyone that's watching this, that wasn't staged there. You've got hundreds of books behind you, what are the chances the one on your desk-
Bob Burg: Well the funny thing is, a good friend of mine had referred Sapiens to me about two years ago. And I always have so many books on the list to read, finally I was speaking in I think Colorado maybe a couple of weeks ago and I got that at the book store, I saw it at the book store. And I was looking for it, I was hoping to pick it up. And I started reading it and I really haven't been able to put it down. I'm about three quarters of the way through now, it's fascinating
Josh: It's a fantastic book. With building relationships, and obviously all different businesses have... I guess you brought home exactly what I was bringing up in the book. And that's the rule of 150, maybe 200 people. And if you are in the business of selling items that... If you're in a business where you need to sell more items and not say a B2B business and profession industry like myself. If I have 50-70 businesses that I'm working with I'm happy as Larry, and I can comfortable have those 70 relationships. But if you're selling something that is a lower priced item you need to have a significantly higher ratio. Maybe it's 500 to 1 or something like that, and you still want to have those relationships built. And you want to have the authenticity with the relationships, but knowing that you can't necessarily have the closeness, and as they talk about the different circles of relationships that you have.
You have your close intimate relationships and then it goes out from there. How do you make sure, how do you keep the authenticity? Would you suggest people using different databasing programmes to write down notes on people. To make sure if you don't talk to them for two years and then they come back to you and they said, Larry I really loved the talk that we had at the business conferencing meeting from two years ago that you can barely remember because there was too many beers flying around. And what would be the best method to make sure you are bing authentic. Would you say, Larry I'm glad we had a good chat but don't remember, what'd you say? As soon as you get home, as soon as you get back to the office write down what you remember about Larry and make sure that you can have a refresh?
Bob Burg: Well I think the key with technology is to always use it to help with your authenticity, you know what I'm saying? So in other words it shouldn't be that it's about the technology, it's not. It's about the human relationship when you can utilise technology to do that. So I do want to write down what I talked about with someone and review it every so often because I do want to know, okay? But if something comes up where I happen to see that person or what have and they bring that up, and it's really not something that I do remember. No, again it depends on the contexts. Usually I'm going to say, you know what my gosh. I love you, love talking with you but I don't remember exactly what we talked about in that conversation. If you have that kind of relationship you can do that. But if it's going to hurt that person's feelings because that person maybe whatever. Well no, I'd probably just say, always love talking to you and that was great. Again, sometimes I think we go too overboard with being literal in some ways. You always want to be honest, but you also always want to be kind and tactful as well. So when technology can help you to authentically keep in touch with another person, absolutely. Totally we utilise that.
Josh: Cool. That's perfect. So that's something that I know that myself, I write down as many things as I can remember about as many conversations that I had with people. And that could be whether or not they liked Chivas Regal or a dog named whatever the dogs name is.
Bob Burg: Well then that's good. Because if they like Chivas Regal, and that might be something you mights end them sometimes on a special occasion. If their dog's name is Checkers and you want to be able to remember that their dog's name is Checkers when you speak. If you can remember it just because you remember it, that's great. I love animals so I tend to remember people's pets names. But that's not everybody, and there's other things about people I don't remember. And in that case you need that reminder. So no, I think all of that is great when it helps to further a relationship and it's authentic and genuine, of course. Utilise the technology.
Josh: As I said, I think technology is perfect to be able to help people out. But as you said, do not overcome the personal touch. Don't use technology to be personal, use technology to get rid of the repetition. But use yourself and your power that you have, your voice that you use to build those personal relationships.
Bob Burg: Exactly.
Josh: And that's what it's about. The cavemen had different tools that they used to achieve their objectives. And the time has changed, the chairs we sit in are different, the offices have air con in them, but we use a different set of tools to achieve the same objectives which is awesome.
Bob Burg: They're just tools, exactly.
Josh: Well we're getting very close to the end here. I wanted to ask, is there any speaking events or things that you do either around the states, or within Australia or down under that are coming up anytime soon?
Bob Burg: Typically at this point I travel a lot less than I used to. At 61, I just don't want to be travelling all over the place, so I limit my out of state engagements to about 20 a year now. And I try to now keep it within the states. And those are my corporate programmes that I do, but we also have public seminars that we do usually in Orlando because it's easier for people from Australia, and Singapore, and South Africa, and London and so forth to get there. And so we hold them in Orlando, which is really only a couple of hours drive for me up the road. But Orlando because it's Disney World it's easier for people to get into. So our next one is actually in late January, it's called Endless Referrals: The Go-Giver Way. We limit those to about 50 people, so it's over two days and it's very hands on. So those are the ones that will be the public ones that we'll be doing from now on. And I have so many great mates in Australia, and if I could beam myself there I would do that in a minute. But the long flight, I just don't travel well anymore, so.
Josh: Well I've [crosstalk 00:46:15].
Bob Burg: I stay pretty close to home.
Josh: It took me two weeks to get over the jet lag when I last entered The States. I know this is pretty bad, but give me your favourite Aussie accent. Your best Aussie accent.
Bob Burg: Oh, let's see. Hey mate, lovely to see you. Love all my mates down there, and we'll have a good time no worries, no worries.
Josh: That sound pretty good. I don't mind that, that's good.
Bob Burg: We love Australians, we love our Aussie mates so it's always a neat thing, and it's always a joy to connect with any of my friends from the beautiful land down under.
Josh: Well I had the opportunity to head over for three months last year so I was travelling all around the place. And I'd have to say it's like you're travelling to different countries with each state that you go to.
Bob Burg: Oh, it's amazing I know.
Josh: Where Australia is in my opinion more so not as diverse. You have parts that are definitely greener and parts that are more tropical, but overall the accent doesn't vary a whole bunch. The people mentality, that doesn't change a whole bunch. Except for obviously things such as you go into the middle of the city in New York, and you go to Sydney and there's the hustle and bustle. People aren't as friendly, but that's just the nature of the beast. And for anyone who does want to head to any of your opportunities that you've got either in-person or any of the content that you have, you've got the Go-Giver movement, is that right?
Bob Burg: Yeah. General website is Burg B-U-R-G.com. The two day workshop is Endlessreferrals.com, and we also have Thegogiver.com. So we've got content all over the place there.
Josh: We'll chuck some links down below, all the appropriate places depending on where this gets seen. You can jump across there and have a bit of a look. And I'd like to thank you for coming along and talking with me. And we've got this beautiful summer day in paradise here, that's why I thought I'd head outside. Is there anything else that you'd like to cover off on before we jump?
Bob Burg: No, this has been a lot of fun, very enjoyable. And I wish everybody who is watching and listening, I just wish you a fantastic 2020, may it be your best year yet.
Josh: Thank you very much Bob, and I appreciate you coming along.
Bob Burg: Thank you.
Computer Backups During Covid-19
COVID, computers, and copying your data out of the cloud. We're in unreal, crazy times at the moment, and it has to be said a lot of people are regretting their move to the cloud. A lot of people are loving it as well because they're going, "Huh, you know what? Sweet. I'm in the cloud, this is great. I can access everything from home." It is good.
Get more tips about computer backups during Covid-19 at dorksdelivered.com.au
Internet Speeds Are Slowing Down
The problem that we've got is the loads that we've seen on the internet over the last few weeks haven't increased by 10 or 20%, haven't increased by 30%, it's increased by about 300%. And that means that we've seen the likes of Office 365 yo-yoing up and down, G Suite yo-yoing up and down. We've seen lots of core business services going up and down. Things that wouldn't happen if business owners spent the money on business-grade internet connections and kept their infrastructure local.
Get Localised Copies of Your Data
Having said that, if you have made the decision to move to the cloud, it'd be a very sensible idea to make sure that you've got localised copies that you can set to schedule to download at night. So whether that be through Dropbox, OneDrive or anything like that, make sure you go out, buy bigger drives, and have everything copied locally. That way it's going to be much, much quicker when you go to open up that document.
Backups, Backups, and More Backups
If the kids are home now for the next few weeks and you want to make sure things are staying nice, and quick, and efficient, these are things that you need to be keeping in mind and doing. So, try to keep a localised copy of the data that you can where you can. This is going to become even more important over the next few weeks as we see internet outages and blackouts across Australia, and also on an international scale. Keep your data local and make sure you have backups. If you don't know where your remote workforce is backing their data up to, find out. See what you can do to see where the files are going.
The Final Word
If something goes terribly wrong and your IT company blows up and disappears, where do you go to get your data back-up? Where do you get all of your information? Have a disaster recovery process and policy in place so that you can prevent these kinds of situations happening. If you've enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, give us some love, and some feedback, and let us know what your thoughts are. Stay good and stay healthy.
How to Set Your Pricing With Courtney Deagon
Josh: We've got a very special guest for you today. Who here hasn't had that problem, that question, how do I price my item? Is it on what it's costing me plus a percentage? Do I look out into the wilderness and see what my competitors are doing, or do I somehow come up with some other equation?
Get more tips on how to set your pricing at dorksdelivered.com.au
Josh: It's always an interesting one and there's a lot of psychology into it. And I'd like to introduce Courtney here, who's going to talk a little bit more about how pricing works and why it's super important. So Courtney, tell me, what's the one thing you should never do when it comes to pricing?
Courtney Deagon: Wow, Josh, that is such a big question. What's the one thing you should never do when it comes to pricing? One of the things that I always talk about is not just relying on your costs to set your price. And I know that it's such a common thing that's taught, especially to smaller new business owners, because it comes from cost accounting. It makes sense logically to calculate our costs and add on a percentage.
Courtney Deagon: But in more cases than not, this can actually lead to business burnout and not having pricing that's profitable and even good for your business or your customers. The truth about your pricing is that your customers are going to pay, they show their willingness to pay and their willingness to pay doesn't change depending on your costs. Your customers don't care about your costs, they care about the value of what you do and what you provide.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so how do you make sure that you put the right value on that? Does that come down to the psychology, the message, or is that making sure that you're jumping into the why, or how would you start working that out?
Courtney Deagon: Yeah, so the first thing that I would always encourage people to do is just to get to know your customers more. I love to tell people to be insatiably curious about their customers. When you take the time and effort to get to know people, that means a lot to them as well. That can increase your perceived value to them and their willingness to pay.
Courtney Deagon: And what I often find working with my clients is usually the thing that they think people value the most isn't the thing that the customers value the most. And so they get in and they talk to them and they find out, oh, I thought this feature was the thing that they really wanted and valued. But actually it's this thing over here that I don't even talk about. It's just something that happens to be a part of my experience of working with me.
Courtney Deagon: So, that's always really interesting, seeing that happen to businesses where they discover what the clients really value. When you know what your customers really value, you can then package your offerings, and price your offerings, and organise your marketing in such a way that it's so much more clear to your audience what you're selling. So much more clear to them what the value is going to be, and they're going to have a much higher willingness to pay for what you do.
Josh: Cool. So I guess like you're saying, just cut through the fodder. Maybe you've looked at your client base and they happen to be full of similar sorts of people that love either going to high teas or playing a game of golf or whatever it is, it may be both. But whatever it is, if you're able to find that you're then able to gear that message and make sure that the value of this thing and the relationship they're going to be building with you, is already getting off on the right foot. As opposed to saying, I'm selling pies, and you're a pie store, saying you're selling environmental pies that are eco-friendly or vegan or something like that. It means it's not going to apply to everyone, but vegans are going to be like, "Wow, that's where I want to go." Is that what you're saying?
Courtney Deagon: Absolutely. So you touched on it before in terms of the psychology. It's really important to understand that people, I feel are going to make decisions based on their perception. And perception does not map evenly to reality. You can think of the difference between an actual map like you see on Google Maps and actual reality. They're both very, very different.
Courtney Deagon: Even if you try to create a reality for your marketing and advertising, the customer is still going to come up with their own perception. It's really, really important then to make sure that you understand what kind of value they're looking for, what kind of things might turn them off? Because it could be something that you're saying, it could be something in your wording, it could be something in the imagery that you're using.
Courtney Deagon: But the most important thing is to take off that hat as the professional, because we know so much about our skill and about our product or service, we know so much about it, we know the impact it has on our customers and their lives. How happy it can make them, how much money it can make them and so on, our customers have no idea. All the customer knows is that they have this problem or they have this particular outcome that they really want to achieve. And what we want to do is we want to communicate the fact that we can help them meet that outcome. It's not, "Here's my product, buy my product." It's, "You have a problem. This is a solution you want. I can give you that solution. Here's how I do it."
Courtney Deagon: So you start with the value first because that's what's driving the customer to you in the first place. It's not your product. There's a quote that I love that Mark Simon always says, where he says, "Nobody cares about your product." And it's a bit harsh but it's so true. No one really cares about the product. If you buy a drill, it's not because you want a drill, it's because you want a hole.
Josh: Yeah, I like that one, yeah. On pricing and making sure... So let's say you've got your message, you've got that down pat, and you go, okay, I know what the product costs me. I know at least have to charge this much. And you're thinking, how high can I go? How do they perceive the value? And I guess, I'll liken it to something that I have a lot more input on actually.
Courtney Deagon: Cool.
Josh: So Heineken, more recently have released a zero alcohol beer. Now the zero alcohol beer, for a six pack, is going at the moment in Australia for about 16, 17 dollars for a six pack. Now, if you have a look at what a Peroni or a comparable beer would be, the beer would be maybe 20 to 21 dollars for a six pack. So call it a five dollar difference. And if you went for a less imported beer you'd be able to get it even cheaper than that. But let's work on a $16 and $20 for roundish numbers.
Josh: The alcohol tax that they're paying on that $20 for that person, is getting significantly less money. The price that they're getting for that 16 it's huge. The margins are significantly more, given that they don't have to be paying any of the alcohol taxes or anything else that are going through. So, how do you think they came to the conclusion of $16? Would you say it's because people want to have that healthy, perceived look, the ability to have a beer and go for a drive possibly, or how did they find that magic number?
Courtney Deagon: So I would say for a company like Heineken, they probably know a few things that I and many other pricing people don't know. They have access to the big data that I would love to get my hands on. I would love to say that Heineken took a completely value based approach, but I wouldn't say that the second. I would say that a large company like them, it would have been a mixture of prior sales data, the amount that they've been able to get for other units before. It would also depend on what geographies it was going into. They would have run some kind of research or focus groups I think. Big companies like that are huge fans of running that R&D stuff.
Courtney Deagon: That's how I think they would have done it and I think that they probably would've balanced it with the profit margins that they're going for. But even then that's not really value based pricing because it's not about what they think the customer is willing to pay, it's just what they think that the customer might pay in order for them to get some kind of arbitrary target profit margin per bottle per six pack.
Josh: The calculation of it, obviously as you said, they've got a lot more data than what we could even imagine. They had spreadsheets printed over the bed sheets.
Courtney Deagon: Oh yeah.
Josh: I thought, just from my perspective, I went, "Ah..." And just for the record, I'm all about the alcohol beer not the non alcohol beer.
Courtney Deagon: Okay. Fair enough.
Josh: But I could imagine the person that would be drawn to that would be, okay and no calories, or less calories. It's got about 30% less calories. So, okay, slightly healthy for me, slightly cheaper on my pocket. If you're looking at maybe millennials that might be interested in not having, because it sounds like everyone else wants to have a hangover. That's not what I'm going for.
Josh: But millennials might be a bit more health conscious about what they're doing and what they're putting into their body. They might then be more geared towards that, but also they seem to be more financially incapable versus people that have a mature income and have had a career for a number of years or decades. So I think that, I don't know, I thought that that might be how they've geared into that box to say $16 would be cheaper than getting a hangover.
Courtney Deagon: I would like to think they have a really smart advertising person. They're Heineken. Because one of the other things is that a 0% alcohol might also make people think that it doesn't taste as good. So that could be another reason for the slightly lower price because they want to make a distinction between the product that they're offering there and other products that do have the alcohol in them. So, that could be another thing. Maybe I'll email Heineken and see what I can do. I would not be surprised if they came back and said, "No, we can't tell you that."
Josh: Because there's lots of things that you look at and you go, "Oh..." Especially when it comes to the software as a service market, which I'm sure we're very familiar with. You have a look and you think, oh okay, it's only going to cost $5 more a month for me to have a logo on a page. That's costing them nothing at all. But people are going to pay it because they want to be able to have their brand on things. If it's a form of-
Courtney Deagon: They've still got the value.
Josh: Exactly, and so it's very, very smart the way that that's gone. Again, the cloud, the way that the cloud has been manipulated to make everyone feel like it's going to cost them less money. It doesn't. The total cost of ownership is significantly more by a factor of 30% or more over a five year period. And so you're looking at, okay, well that is, it's costing more money but the perceived value is high and you have less infrastructure. It's interesting. How do you, short of having a huge audience to be able to test, if you're just a green field company going out, where do you start?
Courtney Deagon: You can ask friends if you have honest friends, put it that way. Honest friends, ask them because they usually are pretty trustworthy. You can use companies like Conjoint.ly. That's the one that's in my mind at the moment, who do actually conduct market research. And I think with Conjoint.ly you pay per data point or something like that.
Courtney Deagon: But there are companies out there where you can actually get outsourced market research. Also, even if you have a decent sized mailing list, things like surveys, talking to customers who've used your product. If you can have even 10 or 20 or more one-on-one, half hour, hour long conversations, asking really, really good questions, that will give you a huge amount of value.
Courtney Deagon: But running surveys and having some statistical good questions in there next year for Conjoint.ly, questions that are specifically related to help you figure out the willingness to pay of your audience and how much they value it. But really a mixture of surveys and having those one-on-one conversations with people who have used your product, who aren't friends or your mom or your cousin and all that, is a really, really good idea. And the more people you ask, the better quality information you're going to get as well. That is a really good place to start.
Josh: I'm going to ask a question. I know a lot of people are probably thinking, asking, at least it's in the back of their mind discounting. Discounting-
Courtney Deagon: Uh-huh.
Josh: Never discount your product, don't do it. You're discounting your product, you're discounting your business, you're discounting everything, you're going to get discounted clients. Then there's the build a discount into the product itself to sell them at a high price and then drop them down in price.
Josh: And there's a whole bunch of different ideas and mentalities around the way that it works. Sell a cheap product or it will come across as a cheap product and people are going to think that you're only going to get cheap clients and... What is the best way to make sure you position yourself accordingly, or is that very industry specific? Should you write in a discounting percentage?
Courtney Deagon: Yes, I would say it's not industry specific because every single industry, whether you're B2B or B2C, your customers are humans unless you're a vet, I suppose. But even then your end customer is a human. And humans perceive value in very, very similar ways. There are some psychological thinkings that are common to all humans regardless of what industry you're in. So that would be the first thing I'd say.
Courtney Deagon: I generally tell people don't discount unless you know how to use a discount properly. Because most of the time companies don't use discounts very well and they use them in such a way that, like you said, it damages their branding, it damages their pricing integrity. It can make customers very unhappy. It can have the opposite effect to what you want it to have.
Courtney Deagon: There's a difference as well between internal discounting and external discounting. So external discounting is where you post publicly that you're having some kind of discount sale. So say you post up on your website, we're having a 20% off sale of all of our subscription services. That's an external discount.
Courtney Deagon: An internal discount might be you email your mailing list or customers who've just bought something, and you say, "Hey, thanks so much for being a loyal customer. We would love to thank you by giving you a 5% discount off this product or this service." Or something like that. So it's internal. It's limited to a select number of people who may have bought with you before, they may be leads and you're trying to generate a deeper relationship with them. But then again, I would also mark that with an asterisk of, it really depends on what kind of perception you want to create for your brand and what position you want your brand to have.
Courtney Deagon: If you want to be a high end, high ticket service or company, discounting might not be the way to go, and I would use different wording like adjustment. So, as an example, if I'm constructing a proposal for someone and they have a very, very limited budget, I'll say, "That's okay. Let me know what your parameters are and I'm happy to do an adjusted proposal for you." So it's not really discounted, but I'm using different language to indicate that I'm not a company who discounts. I'm a company who will make adjustments and change what I'm offering so that I'm giving you value, and then we can come up with a price that's fair.
Josh: Okay. So if you were to be looking to adjust the price, if you adjust your whole system, you've changed around from trading time for money to trading value. Okay.
Courtney Deagon: Mm-hmm.
Josh: And you're going through this transition, you're trying to do this for your business and it doesn't matter, I guess, if you're a plumber or you're selling cakes. Whatever the process is, if you're going through that and you've got people that are used to the previous system, how do you go about changing that for them and having them introduced to that if they're already very comfortable with the previous system?
Courtney Deagon: Yeah, so every transformation starts with language. I coach people on being able to change their language around the way that they talk about their business, the way they talk about their business model, their marketing. Everything, as well as pricing as well, and how they think about it. And then as they start to tell their customers about, "Hey, our business is changing. We're doing these great things. It's really exciting." You want to talk about it in a way that you're being transparent about how it's going to benefit them, and be really clear about what the potential changes are.
Courtney Deagon: When you're bringing in things like guarantees at the same time, more transparency and less risk for the customer, it doesn't become a scary change anymore. It becomes, oh my gosh, they're transforming their business into something that's going to be better for me as well as better for them. Here are all the things I'm now going to get from that. I'm going to have less risks. I'm going to have value guarantee of price, and guarantee of other things like that.
Courtney Deagon: And it also teaches them what to expect from you, as well. And it shows them that you're dedicated to having a better business so that you can give them a better experience. And that just increases the perceived value even more.
Josh: Right. I know that we went through a transition a number of years ago where we were charging a set price per computer, a set price per server. And then we thought, let's change this model and just charge a set price per staff member. And it makes it simple for everyone. Like, okay [crosstalk 00:15:47].
Courtney Deagon: Absolutely.
Josh: Straight, easy. Then if a guy came, okay, we're getting another server. That's going to cost this much more. So that's another overhead. It's an ongoing thing. If they're getting to a spot that they need three or four servers or something like that, they've also increased their staff head count. And so it makes it nice and simple.
Courtney Deagon: Absolutely.
Josh: So there's a bit of psychology that I've read on the number seven. Have you heard about this stuff? Why do you want to have a 9997 drive away or something like that. What's up with that? Why do people want to end in sevens?
Courtney Deagon: So I mentioned that Mark Simon before. He wrote a thesis on price endings. And you can probably google that and find it and read it if you wanted to. When you think about our brain, we're being bombarded by information all the time, right? I'm looking at you, but I can also see in my periphery the window, and there's some things over there and my phone's there. And there's a lot of information coming in at my brain at the same time, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Getting the Most Out of Your Remote Workforce
Today we're going to talk about how to efficiently manage your remote workforce. You're all happy and home and hose that you've got everyone working from home and you've noticed that they aren't quite meeting their KPIs, or maybe they are, or maybe you didn't have KPIs in the first place. Whatever the case may be, we're going to go through some really handy ways that you can measure your staff's performance on a keyboard stroke, phone call, or whatever the KPI metric that you want to measure is. One of the first things you're going to want to put in place is a tool called RescueTime, or ManicTime, or Hubstaff, there's a whole bunch of others out there. But these tools will let you see your current staff's activity and their screenshots, the applications that they had open, and how well utilised they were. It can break down things and show you what your staff spent their time on, whether that'd be in your core applications or on the likes of social media, Facebook, YouTube, or just jumping around Google cat videos.
Learn more about how to manage your remote workforce at dorksdelivered.com.au
Get a Time Tracking Program
Make sure that you have RescueTime put in place. You can get a free trial and check it out and see how it all goes for you. It's going to give you visibility and eyes on their PC and on their phone to see how long they're on the phone calls for and what it is that they're doing. I know this sounds like 1984 George Orwell, big brother and all that stuff. But know this, while you are looking at what they're doing, most of the time you're just looking at reports of what they have been doing and that can let you increase their efficiencies and find better ways to be able to manage and maintain the workflows that they're doing. It's not all about just looking at what they're doing, it's mostly about working out ways that you can make their work more efficient.
Keep Up With Good Mental Health
Now that you've got eyes in disguise on all of these PCs around the place and phones, the next step is to work out a way that you can continue good mental health in collaboration with your team. The best way to do that is by making sure you have regular check-ins with Zoom meetings. Have them informal. We do a friyeah meeting where we sit down with a beer or your beverage of choice, and just talk about the week. We talk about our favourite bit, we talk about our least favourite bit. Overall we just make sure that we know that each of us are there for each other. We talk about anything and everything that might be on our mind. These are things that really help build relationships and help build the ecosystem that you want into a fantastic thriving environment.
The Final Word
Between these two items, you're going to be well ahead. Lightning, lightning... well ahead and... Between these two helpful hints, you're going to be light years ahead of your competition. I hope you've enjoyed this and if you have, jump across to iTunes, give us some love, send us some feedback and give us any tips or tricks. If you have trouble implementing any of these things, give us a call. If you are in a COVID crisis, we're happy to help you out for free. All we ask is that you jump across to our GoFundMe page for Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital, RBWH. You donate towards their cause and we will offer you free IT support. If you have enjoyed this, again, jump over to iTunes. Stay good.
Running the Numbers With Drue from 4Front
Josh: Good day everyone out there in podcast world. We've got a special guest here, Drue, and he does some pretty cool stuff. And actually, you know what? I'm going to get you to tell me what you do, the voodoo that you do, and how that's impacting businesses around Southeast Queensland?
Get more tips from Drue Schofield at dorksdelivered.com.au
Drue: Yeah, thanks Josh. Nice intro. I don't know that we're that exciting.
Josh: Aww, come on.
Drue: But that was a very exciting introduction. We're accountants. Look, no, all jokes aside, we think we're quite personable people. Yeah, we're accountants. We're a full-service accounting and advisory taxation business or service. We deal mainly in the small to medium business space. We do self-managed super fund administration and advisory with our SMSF clients, whether they are still working, building businesses, contributing to super or they're self-funded retirees, and we also do quite a bit of work with property investors and developers, making sure they're structured well and giving them advice along the way, whilst being in a position to help our clients leverage our network.
I spend a lot of time, personally, networking with allied professionals and pretty much anyone. I just like to be a conduit for business and people that are doing things and have ambition, and if I can connect you, or one of my clients, or someone with someone else that they need to talk to, to solve their problem, then that makes me really happy.
Josh: Cool. Okay. So I guess you covered a couple of things there that spiked my interest. One of them was the podcast worldwide audience, in Australia, we call a small to medium business, I would have said, five to 200 employees. Yeah? Would you agree? About that?
Drue: Yeah, about that. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Where in America, anything less than 200 is small, it's backyard mom and dad shop, isn't it?
Drue: Yeah, they seem to have a different view on business over there. Unless you're over 250 employees or whatever, they don't really even count.
Josh: A blimp. Nothing.
Drue: To a degree. I mean, I had some association with businesses and professionals over there when clients needed to utilise services in the U.S. and Europe as well. But yeah, certainly, everything's bigger and better in America. Sometimes.
Josh: So one of the things that I've noticed when I've been talking with you versus other accountants, in bits and pieces that we've spoken with is, you seem down to earth, to the point, and humanable.
Drue: Oh, thanks.
Josh: If that makes sense.
Drue: Yeah, yeah.
Josh: Less robotic.
Drue: Yeah, yeah. Look, accountants have a bad stereotype. Look, I like to think I'm the new wave or part of the new wave or the new age of accountants.
Josh: I'm not helping the IT look!
Drue: No, you look very trendy, except for the glasses that have no lenses by the way, for people out there. But no, they look really good. I was offered to wear some, but I chose not to. I'm a contact lens wearer, anyway.
Drue: Look, we are. We're approachable. I don't know if fun loving is the right word, but we enjoy what we do. That said, we're serious. We give serious advice and sophisticated advice to people when they need it. We're succinct, we're to the point, we remove jargon. If a client doesn't understand what we're doing, we just go over it again and again until they do. Hopefully, not too many times, and usually not too many times.
We usually get it on the first or second go, but we're not here to preach to people, we're not here to talk down to people, we're here to educate people. And if clients don't understand what they're doing and getting themselves into, you can bet your bottom dollar, that's where there's going to be problems, so we want to avoid that at all costs. We have those full and frank conversations without fear or favour. The clients know what they're doing, why they want to do it. We get a good understanding of that, and then we give the advice tailored to that particular situation.
Josh: I think you listed four F's then. And I guess if everything's going right, you don't hear a fifth one.
Drue: No, that's right. We won't talk about the fifth one. There's enough doom and gloom out there today and we don't need to feed any more panic or doom and gloom, I don't think.
Josh: Not at all. So I can see a lot of similarities in what you guys do and what we do. We try to simplify technical problems. We try to make sure that people are able to understand and assimilate with what their end goal is. And we use technology as the fulcrum to achieve that. And in a non technical, gobbledygook, terahertz and gigaflops type words, we try and make sure it's all human understandable, readable stuff. It doesn't matter if you're a mechanic or a doctor or whatever it is, or anything in between, you're able to work out. You know there's a problem, we can see that there's a solution, and we use, as I said, technology for that.
Josh: So one of the things, I know, when I first started out in business, was I was scared shitless about doing the accounting thing and doing it wrong. So I went and bought a bunch of a bunch of books and got any of the different government books that I could get on GST, and I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to read those, their ...
Drue: I've read them all.
Josh: They're exciting, aren't they?
Drue: No, they're not.
Josh: No they're not. So I'm reading all this stuff, and at that stage I was at uni reading all these books on GST and BAS, and everything else, when I'm on the train to uni. It wasn't fun and it didn't make me feel any better off, because I guess it's kind of like me trying to pretend I'm a doctor or pretend I'm a mechanic, when I'm not.
Drue: Sometimes it's good to just eat the sausage, Josh, and not know what gone into it.
Josh: Exactly. I agree.
Drue: If you use that as an analogy. Not that we don't explain what goes into it.
Josh: I like that. That's good. I've always said, "You can teach a man to fish and he'll have food for life, but some people just don't like fishing."
Drue: That's right.
Josh: They just don't.
Drue: Some people don't like fish either.
Josh: Exactly. So that's getting a professional to do the voodoo that they do, is better than you trying to do everything and wear another hat.
Drue: Yeah, it's crucial. I can't underline, underscore, bold, italic, asterisk enough that it's crucial to get really good advice. Whether you're just starting out in business, or starting out doing a development, or considering setting up a self-managed super fund, or whatever the case may be. Or you've been in business for two, three years and things are going well, or you're an established business, I can't stress enough how important it is to get accurate, timely advice, from someone that wants to be a key partner in your business.
I mean that's our tagline. "Your key partner in business," that's who we aim to be. I believe we achieve that all the time with all of our clients. We want to see businesses survive and thrive, and grow and flourish, and do really well. And if we can be a part of that journey and connect them to good people and give good advice, then again, as I said before, that makes us really happy.
Josh: Cool, cool, cool. And I think that's important there. Key. Good advice. And knowing what's out there, one of the things that I found out about years into business, was the R&D grants in bits and pieces.
Drue: Yeah, sure.
Josh: Do you guys work with those?
Drue: We do a little bit in that space. Those things become more technical and more specialised. What I'd rather do more so than try to do it, is we've got people we work with, people we will then refer our clients to that are specialists in that area. And then I guess that's another thing that is a benefit of myself and 4Front Accountants. If we don't know something, we're not afraid to put our hand up and say, "Hey, we've got a rough idea about this, we know enough to be dangerous, but it's now time to go and talk to a professional."
Josh: Yep.
Drue: And the other thing we'll do there in that situation, is rather than just push the boat out and say, "See you later, hopefully, you hit land," we'll make the connection with that person, and if needs be, we'll attend the meeting and facilitate the process. So again, we want to be your key partner, our client's key partner in business. We'll really hold their hand through that process.
Drue: And R&D is a really good example. Whilst we know enough about it, again, to be dangerous and how it all comes together, there's specialists that we work with and that's all they do. R&D in grant work. So R&D is research and development. Sorry, I'm using an acronym and I should explain it.
Josh: I should have as well.
Drue: That's all right. Not a problem. It's easy when you're a professional and you're working with ABCs and one, two, threes, and EFDs, and ATOs, and ELDs, to just rattle things off. But yeah, R&D, research and development. And whilst I'm there, a little plug for the current government and preceding governments, that someone had the foresight to bring that sort of thing in, because that's helped a lot of our clients tremendously. And I'm not even joking, millions of dollars.
Josh: Absolutely. It was a game changer for us.
Drue: In real cash.
Josh: We've already been developing products, already been developing integrations into LinkedIn that can speed up the process to find new clients. We've developed these different processes within businesses to be able to integrate phones in bits and pieces, and we were already doing all this stuff, and then someone told me about it and I went, "Oh shit, this exists? This is a thing? Why isn't this spoken about more?"
Drue: It's an often overlooked or ill-considered thing, it feels like the ATO and the government's always here to do things to you, but when you're a small business person, within reason, it does do things for you as well. I mean, we'll probably touch on it later, but the government's just neutered some stimulus package that's aimed mainly at business and it's actually really good, and it should get things going and hopefully quell some of the fear and panic out there that business owners have.
God, I've had three phone calls today and two emails last night about it already. So we're actually sending out a communication and a newsletter form that summaries things clearly, succinctly, no jargon, so that clients have one source. So 4Front Accountants clients have one source to go to, look at, and say, "Okay, great, now I understand it." And we'll get more phone calls and that's fine, we'll explain it.
Drue: But going back to what I was talking about, things like the R&D concessions and grants, and those sorts of things, governments are there to do things for business, not always to business.
Josh: Yeah. And that's something that I was a big mindset shift that I had around 2016, 2015, 2016, when I started going for the R&D concession. I didn't know it existed, already been in business at that stage since 2007, so I'd been around for long enough that I should have heard something out there, but I hadn't. That was kind of a, "Oh I mean all this wasted money," but I went, "Well, I'm not going out of business." All this potential. And it's only one of the things that I've seen out there. Like there's advantages to employing, there's digital business grants and bits and pieces out there. There's a whole bunch of different things where the government is giving out a whole bunch of money.
Josh: There was a programe which I was involved with a little while ago that would subsidise the hourly rates of IT staff, and all sorts of things like that. And I just went, "Wow, this is this cool stuff. How didn't I know about this?" And it's just everyone has that predefined thought, belief system that they're out there to take and not give.
Drue: Look, it's a symptom that we see with clients all the time. They're too busy doing it, doing it, doing it. They're stuck working in their business and not on it. And that's the sort of focus that we try to shift, and a mindset we try to change with clients that, "Hey, you need to work on your business and not in it." We've got the tools, the expertise, and the advice and products to actually help clients work more on their business and not in it. And things like that come up all the time.
Drue: Now it's quite possible that your accountant that you're working with at the time knew about it and didn't tell you or may not have known about it at all. But I can assure people listening that at 4Front Accountants, there are the sorts of things that we've got a finger on the pulse with. Again, we're not experts, we don't understand those things, but we're certainly aware of them. We find out enough about it. I certainly do read about it, and I know my people at 4Front Accountants do as well. We read about it enough and know enough about it to be dangerous, and then to know who to hand that on to, so that we can explain that situation to that particular expert, and then guide our client in the right path, with the right person, so that they get the result that they want.
Josh: And that's what you want to get with anyone in the professional services industry. You don't necessarily want them to be the one stop shop. You want to them to know the shops you can go to
Drue: You can't be all things to all people. And when you do, you will fail, immediately.
Josh: Yep.
Drue: And you shouldn't be. I mean, there's specialists in every field. I mean if you've got a problem with your knee, you might start at the GP, but you'll soon be referred to, potentially, an orthopedic surgeon. The GP isn't going to be there, but he's developed a relationship with that person to know that's the best orthopedic surgeon for your particular problem. I mean, we're the same. We're not solicitors, we're not finance brokers, we're not financial advisors yet. We're not R&D grant specialists or whatever the case might be, but we've got a really good network and we spend a lot of time building relationships with the people that will help our clients, so that we can continually prove our mantra or our motto, tagline, that we are your key partner in business.
Josh: That's really important. Just knowing that you've got that one point of contact and that-
Drue: It's terrific when people come to you and they say, "Drue, I need this," or my business partner, Carmine Decorso, they might go to Carmine and say, "Hey Carmine, we need this," and we'd say, "Yep, sure. We know someone. We'll give them a call now. We'll connect you. If you want us to come to the meeting, we can do that as well."
Josh: Yep. So where would you say you sit with businesses? Do you start at anything from bookkeepers and all the way up, like a CFO type level?
Drue: Yeah, we do a lot, I mean I guess our core competency is compliance work. When people think of accountants, they think of people that will do financial statements and tax returns to a solid, accurate level. They'll complete those income tax returns to a point where they're not paying a dollar more or less tax than they should. And if they're lucky, they might get a little bit of business advice.
Drue: Now, we kind of turn that on its head a little bit, insofar that we recognise and realise the compliance is important, and certainly we feel our clients don't pay a dollar more or less tax than they should. And we work really hard to make sure that things are done properly, correctly, and legally. You certainly don't want to do anything that's illegal, nor do we. Where our point difference is, we do sort of act in that external CFO type arrangement, where we like to work with our clients more often than once or twice a year. We do that through something we've termed our Board of Advice programe, where we sit down with our clients quarterly, and I like to call them 90 day success cycles, which I believe is a McKinsey & Co term, the management consultants. So again, shows you the literature that people at 4Front Accountants are reading.
We're not just reading the boring textbooks. Whilst they are important, they're not terribly exciting, but we've got to go through them. I'm more interested in things that are going to help our business clients survive, grow, and thrive. But yeah, we run our Board of Advice program with most of our business clients or as many as we can. They see a lot of value in that.
Drue: So what is the Board of Advice program? As I alluded to, we work in quarterly cycles with our clients. We run to an agenda. We focus on the financial performance of the business and we do some business analysis around that on quarterly numbers, usually comparing the current quarter to the same quarter this time last year. And then the December quarter that we've just finished with our Board of Advice clients now, it's really interesting, because you've got six months of data this year, and you've got six months of data from the previous year, so you can really have a really good snapshot of where the business is at. Sometimes just comparing this quarter this year to this quarter last year isn't enough. Likewise, comparing the 2019 year, we've just finished it, to the 2018 year, doesn't really tell you a lot. It's a little bit too far in the past. I always tease clients that we're not here to write history with them, we're here to make history, and that's what we really try to do.
Josh: I guess one of the things that I've always thought is, "Man, okay, you'll have a good quarter, you have an awesome quarter, and then you'll have a bad quarter." And when you've been in business long enough, they can't all be home runs, can they?
Drue: Sadly, not.
Josh: No. Well I think you can't enjoy the good without the bad, so it really lets you appreciate the good.
Drue: Your sweet and savoury.
Josh: Yeah, that's right. So I think and I see a lot of people around the place that are, "Oh my goodness, you wouldn't believe what happened, the line was so long at the shops." Well, there's kids starving in Africa and you're worried about the line at the shops.
Drue: They're probably buying toilet paper.
Josh: That's exactly right. So you have a look at these things and you think, "Okay, you need to get a bit of reality check." And I think the best thing to do is to have the bad times so that you can appreciate the good times. And not necessarily, I'm not wishing anything upon anyone that complains about mundane and first world problems, but yeah, you definitely need to have the bad ones. But if you have a bad one, sometimes that could be something that's spread further than just your business, and a lot of people are worried about a recession and things. Nevertheless, the data that you have, that you can help businesses out with, you mentioned forecasting. Are you able to see trends across the businesses that you work with?
Drue: Absolutely. We see stuff all the time.
Josh: So if someone said, "Oh, I've had a bad quarter," and you go, "Look, I understand. We've got five other businesses that are in the same sector as you that are also feeling the pressure." Is that something-
Drue: Yeah, it is. I mean, we're growing, we're growing all the time. And we want to keep growing. We've got fairly big aspirations as to where 4Front Accountants will land in my lifetime as a business, so the more clients we have, the more data we have. Now, obviously everything's confidential so we don't share other people's information, but we can talk about things generally.
Drue: So we're seeing that with particular trade's clients, or we're seeing that with medical professional clients, or we're seeing that with
Josh: Retails.
Drue: Clients in, yeah, retail, whatever the case may be. You get a general feel, you work with enough clients, you just end up with, as an accounting firm, you end up with a natural cluster, because if you've got an accounting business like we do, you're dealing with a lot of different businesses all the time, and we're almost solely business these days, which is the path we want to keep going on. So you see little clusters.
Drue: It's really important, though, to not have a five week view of things. You need to have a quarterly, that 90 day success cycle view of things, or that six monthly, one year, three years, five years. Now, the further you stretch out, the harder it is to plan.
Josh: Otherwise, it gets a bit wonky, but at least you're walking it.
Drue: You can, but you've got to have a plan. You've got to have a plan. So one of the things that's really important, I think, for clients is to do some forecasting, and then you give yourself some measurements or some numbers to measure your current performance against. Like you said, Josh, you're going to have bad quarters, and that's just how things are. It might be because of seasonality, it might be because there's a hereto incurable virus sweeping across the world, who knows? But it's important to take a longer term view of things and look at your business and say, "Okay, is there anything that's fundamentally wrong with the business now?"
Most business people will have a gut feeling, that's why they are entrepreneurs and that's why they are business people, they tend to go with their gut. Perhaps more. It's sort of an intuitive thing, but I think probably harking right back to the advice piece I was talking about before, you can't underestimate the power and the value of good, succinct, solid, financial advice, sitting down with your accountant or your advisor. We're becoming more advisors than accountants these days because of the number of clients that are starting to take up our Board of Advice program.
Drue: And if you do it in a logical, methodical way, with some structure, I mean all our Board of Advice program meetings that we have each quarter run to an agenda. We talk about the financial analysis of the business, sure, but there are other things that come up as well. They become a bit open slather, we like to look at whatever clients are comfortable talking about, and that sway into personal issues as well, which means you've got to have a whole subset of other networks available to you. That might be psychologists and psychiatrists or other healthcare professional people.
Josh: You're offering counselling, nearly.
Drue: Well not quite.
Josh: You're not wanting to but
Drue: Well, look, unless you're in business, you really don't understand and appreciate how much it really becomes part of your psyche, and it becomes your identity.
Josh: Absolutely.
Drue: And we've had clients, unfortunately, that have had businesses go under, where we haven't been appointed as advisors quick enough, and we haven't been able to make changes early enough. And it's really sad. And sometimes these aren't young people, sometimes these are well established people in their 30's or 40's or 50's where industries have changed and they've been left behind. And that's really, really sad.
Drue: Now in some instances, there's probably not much you can do, but I think if you had the chance to get to them early, maybe run this Board of Advice program that's quite structured, which is almost like a mini board of directors, the way we run it, given its got an agenda, and it really does add a bit of corporate governance and accountability, which is important. It's something that I think is lacking more generally in the small business world. People sort of get their hammer and level, and off they go, and they're a builder, or they take their-
Josh: All the cowboys out there. They try their best-
Drue: Yeah, they are. I guess there are Cowboys out there and they do try their best, but they may not have appreciated the advice that they could get off a good accountant and business advisor. And I like to think that if our clients, and future clients, start to work with us closer with this Board of Advice program, the amount of accountability adds is tremendous. And it's going to get good results, because we're spending that time to sit with our clients and we're their professional sounding board. They can throw anything they like at us. We'll have our own insights and our own observations, which we can give advice around and make changes. And I've done that with clients recently.
Drue: I had a plumbing client recently that is new to the firm, and he reported a $20,000 loss last year, and he couldn't work out why. I sat down with-
Josh: I bet he pulled that coin from out of his house or something like that, or a personal asset, or that's, I guess, advice that you'd be giving.
Drue: Yeah, so I've sat down with him, looked at the numbers, and he said, "Okay, well there's a $20,000 loss here." Yeah. And the businesses is now in lost territory again for the last two quarters. On a quick analysis, I've worked out that his GP, his gross profit line is wrong. So he didn't have the right numbers in there. Once I put the right numbers in there, whilst it was still bad, it made the data more realistic, and it told a better story.
Josh: So gutter in, gutter out.
Drue: That's right. So the issue in this particular, and this is a real life example here, in this particular client situation, he was having an over reliance on subcontractors and labour hire, and we feel he wasn't marking up the materials he was buying enough. So we did just a quick little "for example" calculation of if he replaced this person with this person and this with that and perhaps got rid of some of the labour hire and some of subcontractor at work, and replace that with a more permanent workforce, and then changed the markup he was putting on the cost of sales, we were able to turn it into an $86,000 profit.
Josh: Yep. Huge.
Drue: Massive turnaround. That's a $106,000 turn around. Now it's easy to say, "Oh yeah, that's great, Drue, but that's all theory. You may not get that immediately." But if you change your mindset, and you're working with your advisor or your accountant each quarter, and you're looking at those things and making that the most important thing, I always say that which is measured is that which is achieved, you're going to get somewhere near it. You might not get to the $86,000 profit the first year, but gosh, you might get $20,000 profit or $30,000. Going to be better than a $20,000 loss, surely.
Josh: You can't turn a ship on a dime.
Drue: No.
Josh: It takes time.
Drue: It takes time. And I guess the Board of Advice programe we're running, it's really helping clients to see the power of accountability and meeting and taking advice and acting on it.
Josh: I agree. It's something that people need to have. And this is something ... I was talking to someone else earlier on today-
Drue: And if you haven't worked out, I'm pretty passionate about it.
Josh: I've noticed. Yeah, yeah.
Drue: Well, I want to see people do well. I mean my parents were small business owners and-
Josh: Yeah, what did they do?
Drue: Builder. Dad's a builder. Had some really good success over the years, but I think he could have done better if he'd had, perhaps better advice, more frequently. And I really think any business, whether you're really successful or you're moderately successful or you're doing okay, will benefit from better quality advice more frequently.
Josh: Well, I found, when I first started out in business, my uncle at a company that he was running for many years, and engineers or teachers is pretty much everyone else. So I always thought you can do anything you put your mind to, but that was misinterpreted as you do everything that you can and you put your mind to. And so that then meant when I became a business, started, I'll put in my prepubescent voice, "Let's start a business. I'm really excited to see where this goes." And then I went, "Shit, there's a lot to do." And so I had to become the marketer, the salesperson, the manager, the entrepreneur.
Drue: Chief cook and bottle washer.
Josh: Exactly. Exactly. All and everything of the above. So I slowly, slowly worked out that this isn't for me. And then went, "Let's stop this and start employing the right people and having the right people do what they enjoy doing," and do what brings you the money in. So that was a great shift and I've never looked back. Having the right people there to give you the advice though, and make sure you are making the right decisions is important.
Drue: I think it's critical. It's critical to the success of success or failure of a particular business or enterprise. It just really is.
Josh: It doesn't matter the size of your business either. I think it's critical straightaway. We go into people's networks a lot and we see problems and problems and we go, "Oh, why is it set up like that?" Or, "Why is it done like that?" And it's just because the advice that they were given was they thought they know, liked, and trusted that person, trusted the advice, and it was just poor advice. And so for all of our clients that we work with, we say, "Look, we want you, every six months or however often you feel necessary, get another IT company in here and see if we're doing the best job for you." And that gives them the full input and knowledge that we're fully transparent, we're very confident in what we're doing, and we know we're doing right for businesses.
Drue: The fact that you're prepared to frank your ability with that, I'd imagine no clients do that, because they know that you back yourself.
Josh: Very few. And one of them said, "Oh, who would you suggest?" And I said, "That kind of takes away from the point of it, doesn't it?"
Drue: Yeah, that's not independent. If you're suggesting someone, it's not really independent.
Josh: Any professional services that they have that they're employing in their business, whether it be financial advisors, accountants, solicitors, IT people, anyone that is doing something that you can't touch and feel and know that the product is good and the outcome is good.
Drue: Intangible.
Josh: Yeah, intangible products or intangible services, you need to be able to have someone go in there and make sure that Oz behind the curtain is pulling the right strings and doing the right thing for you.
Josh: So we had someone come to us about a month ago and they were asking us if we could help them out with some of their LinkedIn marketing stuff. And I said, "Yeah, we can definitely do that. We can go through the process and do the voodoo that we do." And I bought the pricing, he goes, "Oh. Okay, we'll have a think about it." And I thought, "Oh, 'have a think about it' means you're probably going to check out someone else. That doesn't matter.
Josh: Anyway, he called us back a month later. So just the Monday just gone. And said, "Josh, I need you to review what's going on with my LinkedIn." I had a look and he went with this company to go through and market him on LinkedIn. And I thought, "All right." And I had a look and they were doing nothing. They bought a $50 product. They took his scripts, and they were using this $50 product to automate the messages that were being sent out, and then charging them $1,500 a month to try and make new connections on LinkedIn. And I said, "You are absolutely been being taken for a run mate." I said, "This is terrible." I said, "The product they're using is this ... " and pointed it out here. And I said, "This is what they're using. It's $50." And that's $50 U.S. I said, "But that's $50. And then you've shown me what you've given me and all of this information, they've just entered that, copied it out of your document into these fields. Then they've just set the days of when they're going to send these messages to people."
I said, This is terrible. You're really spending $1,500?" He goes, "I feel sick." I said, "Maybe $500 if they're managing everything and they're doing a phone call." For what they're doing, I said, "They're on selling a product with 30 times mark up, 3000% mark up." I'm like, "That's ridiculous."
Drue: Vaporware.
Josh: Yeah. And anyway, what I'm getting at is it's always important to have someone there check out what's going on. I myself have had only a couple of bookkeepers over the 13 years we've been in business, and when I got the second bookkeeper, she went, "Oh man, look what the first bookkeeper's been doing," and I thought, "Oh, well that's probably what you're going to say anyway," but it's good just to have people double check, just to make sure that your work is aligned.
Drue: Yeah. It can't hurt.
Josh: Right. What's the hurt in it? Nothing, yeah.
Drue: Look, very rarely do we have clients do that, because they're confident in what we do and how we do it. Now, I will say often I have meetings with prospective clients. It probably starts out as a second opinion meeting, but once I start talking about what we're going to do and demonstrate that, it soon becomes a first opinion meeting, because they've become clients, which is nice.
Josh: Yeah. But that's what you want.
Drue: Absolutely.
Josh: And that just shows when you think, obviously without knowing the relationship-
Drue: And it doesn't mean their advisors aren't good, it just means they're not as good as us.
Josh: Yeah. Not on the ball enough or not keeping in contact enough. And that's imperative, like relationships. We're all about automation and everything that we produce is all around automation and uptime for businesses, but we'd never suggest to automate the human touch. Now we're sitting here having a podcast together, doing an interview together.
Drue: In the same room.
Josh: In the same room.
Drue: As humans.
Josh: We can high five.
Drue: Yep.
Josh: That was terrible, let's try one that makes a noise. There we go. And when you look at, we could have done this over Zoom, we could have used technology, we could have done all these other different things, but that's a start and end, and then there's nothing there. And I think the world is becoming too digitised in ways that they should be humanised.
Drue: Yeah. It's not as organic. Our Board of Advice meetings, we have a handful, occasionally, that are done on a Zoom or a Skype call, but for the most part, I like to do them face to face, either in our office or in our boardroom, which is all kitted out and nice and comfortable and easy to have the meetings there, or at the client's premises, more than happy to do that. But I prefer and okay, yeah, it would be quicker, it would save me half an hour, 45 minutes each way in a car. It would save the client half an hour, 45 minutes each way in the car. So okay, you'd pick up an hour, an hour and a half. Big deal. In the overall scheme of things, more than happy to go to a client's premises and meet with them or their home, if that's where they're comfortable doing it. I don't mind.
Drue: But the important thing is they're in the flesh, eyeballing each other. It's seeing body language, seeing expression.
Josh: You can feel the emotion.
Drue: And they can see, I hope, sometimes our passion or my passion for what I'm trying to do and where I'm trying to help them get with their business. And I can see their passion or their frustration or their concern or fear or panic or jubilation that they've .... We've had an action list that we set last time and they've done it all and they'll say, "See Drue, I did it all. You didn't think I would, did you?" I'm like, "No, no, I never said that." Or where the labour a point, they look at something and they say, "Well look, we didn't get this action point and here's why." And we can sit there and we can talk about it. I don't think we will ever, ever technologize, digitise, or supersede, the human to human interaction.
Drue: No.
Josh: If we did, the UN would be done completely via video link, and there would be no need for everyone to fly into Brussels or wherever they do, and have a face to face meeting.
Drue: No G20s, none of that stuff.
Josh: It'll be all gone.
Drue: If you think about bigger businesses with business deals, they still fly to Japan or to China or to the U.S. or to London, wherever it is, and they sit down. They might break bread and have a meal together, but they sit in the room and they sign the papers. And there's no need to do that usually, but there's a real human need or craving to be in the company of other human beings.
Josh: There's something there that you can't feel otherwise.
Drue: Yeah.
Josh: When you do it over the phone, you can hear tonalities in voices, but you can't really feel the impact of that person being there. It generally doesn't go longer than the, "Okay. We've started, we've had a small amount of banter. We've spoken about it. We've concluded. We've said bye." There's not that, let's get to know the real you moments that you get when you talk and catch up with people.
Drue: It's like a 5D factor, I think, I call it. So not 3D because 3D's easy on the video, and we all know about 4D now, but 5D's you're in their presence, without trying to get too spiritual, you can feel their being. And it's really good. And that's what we want with our clients. We want them to see our passion and feel our passion, and we like to see theirs and feel their passion for their business as well, because that's their livelihood, that's their thing. And as I said, toward the start, that's their identity sometimes. So they're really proud of that and we want to bask in that pride as well.
Josh: Well, I guess we've been going through a few bits and pieces here, and I'd like to finish up and ask how would people go about contacting you and make sure that their business is going in the right direction and they're not freaking out, their numbers are doing things wrong. How can they get that second opinion that might turn into the first opinion?
Drue: Look, the best way is to send me an email or give me a call. If you go to 4Front.net dot.as, or to Drue, and that's D-R-U-E.schofield@4front.net.au, or find me on LinkedIn. More than happy to have a conversation, cost and obligation free. We can sit down, we can talk about what you're doing, how you're doing it, what your expectations are, where you think there might be some potential gaps in the advice you're getting now, and we can give you the cut of edge, and then you can see whether you think that's something that appeals to you and that you might see value in. So yeah.
Josh: A yachting term, I love that. I love that. I'm a bit of a keen yachtie myself. Is there any questions that you'd like me to ask or that you'd like to ask of me?
Drue: No, I think we've covered some great ground there. Don't ask me to repeat all that, because I don't necessarily know what I said, but I just hope that people listening can get a good feel and a good sense for the passion that we have. Yes, we're accountants, and we've got a bad stereotype of being boring and maybe a bit mundane, but I hope, Josh can attest to me not being like that.
Josh: Absolutely. No, no, no, not at all. I'd say you'd go and have a beer with me if I offered it after the podcast.
Drue: Absolutely. Or two.
Josh: Perfect, it's done. Or two.
Drue: But yeah, just to finish up, we are passionate about being your key partner in business.
Josh: That definitely sounds like you're on a really good business and its got legs and it's going places. I'd like to ask anyone out there, if you have enjoyed this episode, to make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love, and make sure to stay good.
Drue: Thanks Josh.
COVID for Computers
COVID for computers, it's coming. It's triple C. COVID for computers is coming, think about that. Where do our electronics come from? This is going to be a bit of a speculative episode more than anything else, but most of our electronics are made in China. We've already seen cases where there's been back doors and hack abilities where people's using automated doorbells, where you click on it and they can see your face. Hackers have been able to go in and spy on these children and the parents weren't even aware there was some weirdo looking at them. Multiple devices that people take for granted on their home networks such as their smart TVs, smart fridges, smart door locks, smart anything on your network, even your smart phone is a way for you to get broken into.
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Be Aware Working From Home is Dangerous
Don't fall victim. Your home network previously would not have been an issue if your home network was broken into and you lost your home data. Sure, the kids couldn't print off their assignment for school and a couple of inconveniences with being able to check on Facebook and things like that, but for the most part it wasn't that big of an issue. Now it is. Every new device that you add to your network gives you an extra door that's going to be opened for people to get into your network and that's a big issue when you're bringing home intellectual property and data that you might be dealing in confidence with on your work PC's. It just takes that old iPhone or iPad that you handed down to the kids to play Candy Crush on, to not have the latest updates to be vulnerable. Or they download a funny app that gives access to that device which can then talk over your entire network.
Minimise Devices That Can Listen In
It's kind of like being at a party. If you're at a party with a mate, I'm going to call you your name, which we'll call your name, Dash PC, and then I'm going to call the other friend Router. If it's just your name and the router talking at this party, no one else can really listen in on what you're saying. But if we add a couple of other people to the party and we call them smart light, smart phone, smart doll, smart TV, any of these other devices, all of a sudden you realise you've got dozens and dozens of these devices and you're not in a better position for having them. When you, your name, Dash PC, goes to talk to the router, we get a problem. All those other devices, even if you're just whispering something to the router, can hear what you're saying.
Security is Paramount
So if your PC decides to send something over the internet for work that has some level of sensitivity and when you go to send that information over the internet, you don't want anyone else to listen to it, you need to make sure that your PC is in a very, very secure environment. When you have any of these devices that you might have bought from Bunnings or Aldi or even straight off eBay that give you more flexibility in what you're doing in your business and in your home, you need to make sure these devices have been checked out for their integrity. Your IT companies would probably look over your work network and see if there's any traffic that's doing things that are a bit odd, such as spying in and prying on what you're doing. But I damn well sure bet that they're not doing that on your home network.
Remember IT Companies Are Reactive
Now that we've got businesses with hundreds of employees or more and then they're all working from home and they haven't had the chance to really set these systems up properly. They're doing them in a half assed way because IT companies as a generalisation are reactive, and that's why we position ourselves as the company that's not reactive, which means we've got plenty of time on our hands at the moment because all of our customers are well prepared. Thank you customers. Thank you Team Talks. And the problem that you had though is when other companies set these up, any of your devices at home can then interfere and listen in on what you're doing with your work PC's and the hardware and software that monitor this is quite expensive so they won't be set up on the home PC's.
The Final Word
I urge you to make sure that you're connecting in through a VPN and what's called a VLAN. Make sure you're connecting in through a VLAN. If you are not, it means that it just takes one dodgy file that your daughter downloads and all of a sudden you have disaster and doom. Think about that and let me know if you need any help. We're happy to help for free in this COVID crisis. All we ask is that you jump across to the Go Fund Me page where we're funding the Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital to find a cure for COVID-19. If you've enjoyed this, please let me know and I look forward to seeing some feedback. Stay good.
Don’t Work From Home Without These Tips
I'm being serious, now, guys. I don't normally have this tone when I'm doing a podcast, but we're seeing so many IT companies that are just doing a poor job at setting up their remote workforces.
Get more tips about working from home at dorksdelivered.com.au
Watch Out for Threats
There's been a 41.5% increase in the amount of businesses that are now open to threats. That's because they've been intentionally opened. Your business is like a box. If you have no light going into that box, nothing inside the box can spoil potentially. As soon as light starts going in, though, you can have bacteria and all sorts of things happen, and your business is exactly the same. Your business as a box, when you open up a door, you're going to let all sorts of nasties come in. I'll put a link in the description so you can see how much more, what they call RDP traffic, is out and around on the internet, which is a protocol that can be broken into.
Don’t Cut Corners
IT companies are cutting corners and they're not putting in the right measures. You need to make sure that when you're connecting into work, you're going over a VPN, that's a virtual private network, and you need to ensure that on that VPN, you have two-factor authentication technology. If your IT company is having you double click on an icon on your desktop that has something called remote desktop where it's a little blue icon on a Windows PC, you can even get it on a Mac, don't use it. You are opening up a door that is going to let all kinds of nasties come in and wreak havoc on your work network.
Prevent Hackers
We're at the start of unprecedented times with the COVID-19 pandemic that's out and around at the moment. The last thing you want to do is lose the small amount of business integrity that you've got left by leaving the back door open for hackers to come in. If you think the virus outbreak and speed of development that this current COVID-19 virus has gone through is breaking your neck, wait until you see what's going to happen when you have all of your PCs that are normally on a work network, working from home using insecure protocols such as RDP. Make sure you don't use RDP. Do not use it. Connect in through anything else. This is going to be a small miniseries that I'm doing around the outbreak, and I'd love any input and feedback.
The Final Word
I'm happy to have anyone in our team come in and help you set up your remote workforce, come in remotely and set this up for you for free, to make sure that you don't get attacked. Don't leave it until it's too late. Hope you've enjoyed this. I'll be talking a little bit more in future episodes around some other bits and pieces to harden your work from home network. Stay good.
Finance Alternatives with Paul Boyd-Skinner
Josh: Everyone out there in podcast land, we've got a great guest for you today. We've got Paul here from NoBNK, and he is a bit of a wizard when it comes to looking at a different way that you can do finance. This is especially critical in today's financial climate. So Paul, tell me a bit about what it is that you do with NoBNK.
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Paul: So NoBNK is predominantly a non-bank business and commercial finance solutionist. I've been involved in nonbank lending for around about 16 years. So I've done all sorts of finance. I've done everything from home loans to commercial development, construction equipment, finance, factoring, all that sort of thing. And I'm proud to say that I've never ever put anybody in a loan with the bank.
Josh: High five!
Paul: Look, you know, my adversity towards banks. Back in the 80s, back in the day when I got my first home, which was in late 1988, 89. You know we will be excited about getting our first home and interest rates at that time were around about 12% when we went and got our loan. The way it sort of worked back then was you go to the bank. And you're begged for a loan and they'd say, ‘Yes, yes, we'll give you a loan.’ And it was usually, you know, like about 70% or something that they give you, but they will do on a bit of a special, at the time for first home buyers where they give you 100% at interest only. We were living in a caravan when we first got married, so that was a pretty good option to get our own homes.
Josh: Absolutely! And upgrading it’s pretty low friction option, I guess.
Paul: The only thing was the in-laws had to go as guarantors. So I now know that today is like a parental guarantor. Really wasn't heard of back then. So it was a little bit of a product for first home buyers. So we did that. We jumped in and we got the house and everything was going along nicely. And then we had to have the recession that we had to have. And our interest rates went from 12% to a 7%, 8.5% in the space of about six months. And just to give you an idea, the loan was $105,000. My repayment was $1,560 a month. Yep. And I was on $33,000 a year. So when you take tax out, 80% of my income was going towards paying my mortgage.
Josh: Yeah. Far out.
Paul: And it wasn't knocking 1 cent off it.
Josh: Yeah. Just sitting there as interest only. And that is a scary spot to be in, because you're not sure if it's going to go up or down or left or right, or what it's going to do. Somersaults.
Paul: That happened with a lot of first home buyers over the years. Eventually, you know, it just got too heavy. I had to do up to 30 hours a week overtime to make ends meet, I was a fitter-machiner at the time,and you know, we ended up losing it. It's just the way it was. There were a lot of people losing their properties.
Josh: You weren't the anomaly. I don't think so.
Paul: I sort of didn't understand what happened to me. I didn't like the banks at all when I worked it out. I've done a lot of study on the banks since then, or the banking system, and, you know, my thoughts on the global financial system is, I believe it's a world's biggest Ponzi scam.
I've been open and honest about this for quite a long time, about how I feel about the banking system and I'm a bit like the disruptor.. I'm all about wanting to make the change so that it's a benefit for us, not so much just for them.
Josh: Yeah, well, I guess like I've done a bit of research into things such as the fractional reserve system and how that works.
Paul: Does it work?
Josh: Well, how it works doesn't mean it works. No, you're exactly right. It's not a very good system, which is based on, now, nothing really. It's just based on numbers in a computer. It's not weighted against any real thing of intrinsic value.
Paul: Well, have a think about that. So what a lot of people don't understand is that when you deposit money into a bank, you're actually lending them that money. It's a loan. You become an unsecured creditor, yet there is no security for that loan to that bank.
Josh: Yep.
Paul: It's a promise that they give you. We'll promise that we'll give you your money back.
Josh: After changing you bank fees or having it in there.
Paul: Well, what a great deal for them, isn't it? They say, ‘Joshua, can you lend me your $100,000?’
Josh: Yeah, no problem at all.
Paul: Now would you want to say, ‘Oh, I need a contract with that?’
Josh: Well, normally you would. Yeah. You hope so.
Paul: No. So what's going to happen, Joshua, on the bank is you're going to lend me $100,000. You're the bank, though. Not as a contract, but I do promise that I'll give you your money back and I'll dictate the terms. Right? So you might want 10% interest, but I'm happy to give you 1 ½. And you'll say, ‘Yep, I'm happy to do that.’
That's really what you've done when you put money in the bank, and just remember that one critical part. You're an unsecured creditor. Meaning that secure creditors, in the event of the bank collapse or whatever, secured credit is paid first and then unsecured credits.
Josh: Yup. So in the situation where shit hits the fan hypothetically, we can all feel the recession, we can all hear it being spoken about, we can also feel some pressures around the place. If shit hits the fan and everyone starts frantically pulling money out of the bank, they've already planned for that, and that's what's been going through at the moment. Am I right?
Paul: Yeah, correct.
Josh: Tell me a bit about that for our listeners.
Paul: Well, long story short is that there's three generations of savers, so you've got you've got your builders, you've got your boomers, and then you've got generation X, which is me. We've all been bought up as a generation of ‘get yourself a good job, save for retirement.’ It was all about saving money.
Okay. The other thing too is that we had our children quite young, so you know, I've been married 31 years and I've got married to my wife she was 19, and I was 23. And, we had our children when she was 21. So we had our kids young, and if you think about my father, he was one of 17 children, so they had big families. So they were called boomers, you know.
Josh: Huge families, but small houses.
Paul: Can you imagine having 17 children? And the house, there were three bedrooms, one bathroom, right?
Josh: One bathroom, 17 people. 17 children! 19 people.
Paul: It's 28 years from youngest to oldest. You know what I mean? Like it's just a constant flow of, you know, at least seven, eight, nine people in a 3-bedroom house.
Josh: Should have bought a TV, so that there's something else to do.
Paul: Didn’t have TV back in the day, so what they did was they went out into the world and started the businesses and all that sort of thing and created quite a lot of wealth. And they stored that wealth in the bank because that's what they were told to do, you know? And they'll get great returns. So when I had those interest rates of 18% of my home, you would get 16% return on money that you had sitting in the bank and you know that's a fantastic return. But look what's happened over the years. You know, that was 30 years ago. Now we're down to zero negative rates in other countries. Japan has been at negative rates for 20 years.
Josh: How much money have they reprinted over there?
Paul: Does anyone know why? Does anyone really know why? Or is it just like it's a bad economy and all this sort of stuff?
So what makes the bad economy? When people stopped spending! If you're not buying things at the shop, then retail starts to drop off. I want to spend the money. So they're trying to force you to get your money out to spend. Banks don't make money out of people saving and make money out of people borrowing.
So they don't want you having money sitting in the bank anymore. Their fractional reserve system, that doesn't matter anymore because they're reprinting money off loans. They make more money out of loans than they do early use saving. So the idea is to try to get that money out of the system and into risky investments or to just get you out there spending.
But when you have the majority of the world's population over 45 years old, that's when our spending curve drops right off. We're not out there buying. We're not down to supermarkets every week, three times a week, or whatever at the big shops.
I'd be lucky to go to near Robina. I'd be lucky to go there once a month.
Josh: Yup. For those listeners that didn't hear you. You were saying the GFC is a light rain comparative to what could be happening. And I always say if it's been 30 years since a major recession and it doesn't hit right now, all that means is we're going to be getting a slightly bigger downfall before we're getting absolutely torrential rain in 7 or 11 years time from now. Would that be fair to say?
Paul: It could be any time. When you think about in Australia, we've had 28, 29 years without a recession. What has stopped that recession from happening? So back in the 90s when it happened, like 1990, 91, we had the recession we had to have, but they didn't do anything to try to stop it.
You know, and as I said, the interest rates are at 18% so what they've done to stave it off every year, you know, because the next government that comes in needs to be leaving it in a good place. They don't want to be the government that caused the recession. Right.
Josh: The inevitable recession.
Paul: The inevitable recession. And when you look at what the US in particular, they've had about seven or eight in that amount of time. Australia have had none. So every time that you look at the interest rate table and you look at different things that's happened, like the 9/11, the GFC, they've dropped rates 3% to 6% in order to stave off that recession. Probably the other recession that we had to have. And now we're getting down to zero. We will be at zero. We're 100% going to zero. Where do they go? Where do they go if we had some major problem, like a GFC or whatever again or a reset? How do they fix that?
Josh: I don't know. How do they reset that? They can’t.
Paul: They can't! There was a paper written 18 months ago by the IMF, and in that paper, they said that they are working on models to make -4% to -5% feasible.
Josh: All right.
Paul: So try to get your head around that.
Josh: I get paid to have a house. Is that right?
Paul: That's already happening overseas.
Josh: I have read up about that. So that would mean that the more debt you've got. Go and buy a house now, ladies and gentlemen.
Paul: Why would they want to do that? Why would they want to get down to -4% to -5%?
Josh: Well, I always say if they're getting down to those numbers, it's going to mean that people are going to be more wanting to get loans and get things like that.
Paul: I think it's about getting rid of cash because if they could get rid of cash and move it into a digital world, get rid of the physical cash, then they've got complete control.
Josh: Well, see, the problem that I, and this is something that's come about over the last 10, 12 years. When cryptocurrency started coming around, if you're comparing apples with apples, and I'm not going to say that they're both exactly the same, obviously. But when you have a digital currency being compared to a digital currency, which is, if they're getting rid of all paper and all money becomes more frictionless to be able to move from the AUD to a Bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies that are out there without it being is in the power of the banks or anyone else. How do you think they are going to overcome?
Paul: Well, I believe cryptocurrency is a red herring. I believe that it's just been set up for you to play with while they build their real money system. And there's a little bit of a showing of that last week. So in this IMF paper, what they actually said is that they would introduce e-money. They call it e-money. And basically what that means is that that item there is $100. They say, ‘Joshua, you know, that's $100 if you pay cash or $95 if you use e-money.’ And you go, ‘Well, I'll use e-money.’ So that's how they destroy cash. So they make it worth less than what it is. That's how they get rid of it.
There's a bank in Sweden, and the currency in Sweden is krona. The central bank in Sweden has announced the e-krona and they're in the second phase of testing e-krona.
Josh: The timing of it's great.
Paul: And of course, it runs on blockchain because blockchain is a great technology. But yeah, it's a decentralized system? I don't believe so. I think it'll be a very centralised system, but it'll definitely be electronic or digital.
Josh: Yeah. Okay. So I guess the recession at this stage, you're saying, is inevitable. It's going to happen. Got a beautiful way to at least have people that are struggling a little bit in their business, whether that be because they need to have more finances bought into it. Or maybe you've got people on the other side of the coin that have liquid assets or liquid cash where they want to be able to use that and invest into something that's going to be giving them a bit of a better return without having to put it into the big nasty banks. How do you go about? How does NoBNK work?
Paul: So the way that NoBNK came around is that many years ago, I looked at many of the managed funds and different places like that where they would collapse. There were quite a few here on the Gold Coast where a lot of those managed funds collapsed and the person who lost that was the investor every single time.
And it's only because the managed funds, number one, they think like a bank. And number two, they take their fees and everything out first.
I'm not saying that all managed funds are like this. I'm just saying that when you get that real control freak at the helm, that's when there's a problem. So I designed a system where there is no control freak. So it's all about putting the control, the choices, the security back in the hands of the investor.
And the number one thing is the trust. You know, because I think that we put a lot of trust in these organisations, in the corporate side, the banks and a lot of these managed funds. That's what we were told. You know, this is what you do. And I think they’ve broken our trust. I think they've broken our trust big time. You know?
The way that NoBNK is set up is that we make our number one product service. You know, everybody wants service. Well, the banking model can't give you service. It's impossible because of the way that their pecking order is designed.
So their pecking order is profits first, shareholders second, then clients, then employees, that's the pecking order. They can't give you service. They don't make money out of service.
We're not about that. We're about, if we create that service for you, where you're having a great experience and you feel that you've got the trust and you will have to trust because what I say to people is, who's the one person that you trust more than anybody else in the world? To make the right finance decision for you. It's yourself, right? You trust yourself more than anybody else. So why are we giving that away? Why are we giving that trust away to the banks? So what we've done with this platform is that we're going to make you the bank.
Josh: Okay.
Paul: If I want to borrow money from you, why do I have to go to a bank to do that? You put your money in the bank and then I go and borrow the money from the bank. That's your money that's in the bank. That's not theirs. So why not just borrow directly from you? So the platform is set up where we facilitate accurate information between somebody who wants to borrow money and someone who wants to lend it.
So the terms are all worked out, and if the borrower is happy to go, and the lender is happy to go, we just put those two together. That's all we do. And they've paid monthly returns in events on their investment. I don't know how many other investments you get paid monthly in advance, and it's direct in the security goes into the investor's name.
Josh: Okay. So let's say I'm new to the idea and I'm going, ‘Okay. Yeah. Stuff the banks. They've stuffed me over too many times.’ Without saying the bank that I'm with, I can see the interest rates that I could be getting just changing to another bank, I could be saving $11,000 a year in mortgage repayments, and I had to look and I thought, ‘Ah, it's too hard.’ How hard is it? Or how would I go about moving a lot like a house?
Paul: The area that we're not going after at the moment is the consumer market. It's very regulated. There are a lot of rules around that market. We'll get to that. We'll get to that market. But the area that we want to look after, first of all, is the business and commercial arena.
I think that if you look after the business side of things first and the business owner, they're gonna have to worry about their day-to-day things rather than worrying about when the next dollars, you know, how they're gonna pay their bills, if the bank's going to foreclose on them and the house is tied to that loan and all that sort of stuff.
So we look at things a lot more commercially and it won't always need to be property initially. There’s a lot of lending that happens out there that a lot of people don't know about, where you might have some text it or you need to, you want to jump on an opportunity pretty quickly and all this sort of stuff.
So they use private, short-term lending and that short-term lending could be a loan that's anything from 3 months to 3 years. It’s not a 30-year loan and all that sort of stuff, and it's just about jumping onto an opportunity or it could be getting out of trouble. You know, ‘We're in a bit of trouble over here. We need to pay back the bank and get some cash flow into our business as well so that we can stay afloat.’ So really, we're more targeting that area there at first, which is perfect. Yeah. Well, I think it's an area that's very under-serviced.
And the other area that we're targeting, and this, as I said before, is those people all around the world, those high net worth investors all around the world that's got money sitting in the bank and it's getting them no return or very low returns. We want you to be able to negotiate the term between what sort of return you want. So really you get to choose the return you want. And the client gets to choose whether to accept it or not.
The way this platform is designed is that as an investor, we don't touch your money. So we never touch your money. We're not a managed fund. It's not a pooled investment. It's not a, you know, sort of property trust. It's not a contributory fund, none of that sort of stuff.
It's just one loan, one investor, one loan, one investor, one loan, one investor. So someone wants to borrow $1 million, the investor's gonna put up the whole $1 million, and we're just going to put those two directly.
Josh: So it sounds like obviously it's a lot of advantages for both parties in regards to the returns that they're going to be getting, as well as the rates that they're going to be paying because you're cutting out the bank in the middle. What would be some of the, I guess, risks? Or does it take the same amount of time to process through if you wanted to get an equipment finance loan for $50,000 for a new digital printer or something like that.
Paul: The process is quick, it all happens within 24 to 48 hours. You'll know how many people So as a borrower, you'll know how many people are interested in doing your loan and you'll get offered the lowest interest rate that they offer.
Josh: Is this a global thing or is this just Australia?
Paul: This will be a global thing. Initially, it's Australia, but we do want to take it globally because the problems that started in the world, the reason why I've talked a lot about Japan is because the reason why they've already experienced all this, what we're going through, is they’re the oldest population in the world, you know? So it all adds up to me. Their ages crossed over and over that 45-year mark, they're average age crossed over 15 or 20 years ago. So it comes in a lot sooner than what it has to us.
Josh: And their workforce is diminishing because of that.
Paul: That's exactly right. And the wages aren't going up. All the problems that we're starting to have here in Australia, you know, property prices are going through the roof, but wages aren't going up. So the next step is how does somebody that's on 60 grand a year buy a million dollar property in Sydney? Well, I'll have to have a 70-year mortgage just like they have in Japan. You can see it. You're watching the pattern globally. It's happening all through Europe. You know, there are 30 countries in the Eurozone now that are on zero and negative rates and the lowest is -0.75.
Josh: All right. That's nuts. It's nuts when you think about it, and as you were saying, like it was only 30 years ago, we had the last recession, and so for Japan to be at the position...
Paul: 20% 30 years ago. Now the -0.5.
Josh: And that all comes down to the workforce and the economy, and that's where we're, as you said, we're heading towards the potential issue here.
If someone wants to jump in and jump onto NoBNK or hear any more information, how do they go about sort of doing that?
Paul: The good thing about us is we can look after you no matter where you are in Australia and then as I said, that eventually, New Zealand will be pretty quick, but then we'll be going into places like the UK and America and things like that as well. This is something that can go global and that's the whole idea is that we're about like, you know, if you're going to disrupt your models and make it worthwhile.
Josh: Absolutely. If you’re going to kick the big in the head you may as well do it globally.
Paul: They had their place and as I said, we're not going to manage, we're not going to take your money and just go and do a hope and pray thing like many do. Your money stays in the bank under your control, so nothing changes, right? The only thing that changes is you get the opportunity to be able to have a crack at one of these deals and become the bank.
And your worst case scenario is you're sitting there with a security in your name and you're getting a return. Whereas what's your security in the bank? There isn't any, but if you don't win the deal, because it's going to be like an auction type system where you make a bid on what sort of return you want, then nothing's changed in your life. You still get your money sitting in the bank, you know? No one's touching it. No one's taking any fees off you or any of that sort of thing.
We're all about mitigating risks. We've got to mitigate the risk for the borrower, the lender, and for ourselves. So it's about everybody having this happy equilibrium, you know? That's how we're going to structure this thing.
We've got a whole website there. It’s NoBNK.com.au. And the reason why we got B N K is because ASIC won't let us use the word ‘bank’. It's a swear word. So we call ourselves NoBNK and we advertise as NoBNK does that, which has a double meaning. NoBNK does that.
Josh: Perfect. As an investor and a borrower, what's the starting and ending amounts you can go for.
Paul: Because we're starting with the property component of it first of all, the minimum line would probably be around the $50,000 mark. This is why we're up to sophisticated investors.
So this is some for your institutional versus, or you know, like your mum and dad's and things like that. You must be a high net worth. You know, I know people out there, they have tens of millions just sitting in the bank.
Josh: Yep.
Paul: Globally. So you might have somebody, you might have a deal here in Australia. There might be somebody in Japan that makes a bid on the deal and all of a sudden they're getting a return of 4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, whatever it is, whatever that agreed return is, where they're getting nothing over there, but they've actually got to pay to put their money in the bank over there.
So it's a really good outcome because, you know, we just let the market set itself dynamically. There is no ‘ring Paul up and say, “Mate, what interest rate can I get?”’ There's none of that anymore. It's just like, well, it's whatever anyone's prepared to bid and whatever you're prepared to pay.
Josh: Yep. So it's win-win.
Paul: And look, there's rules for the investors. I've got a pretty good record. We're doing this sort of thing.
Josh: You've been doing it for more than 10 years?
Paul: Yeah, about 10, about 12 years now. I've been doing these sorts of loans for some high net worth. And in that amount of time, we've had no foreclosures and the investors haven’t lost money in the capital. And it's just about managing it.
Josh: That's a good run.
Paul: Yeah. It's just about managing. You don't smash people when they're down. You help them. You don't have to be all hard about it. You know, you're a day late or two days late with your payment. It's about managing it. Nobody gets hurt. You know what I mean?
Josh: So how do you guys come into it? Do they just clip the ticket on the way through?
Paul: You have a gross line amount. You have a net loan amount. You got to add that first month's interest. There's lawyers involved, there's all sorts of things, which for the investors, it's great for them. It's their lawyer. So it's a lawyer of their choice. And you know, usually there's brokers involved in all the research, so there's nothing under the table. So there's no hidden fees and charges and all that sort of stuff.
In our letter of offer, it's like, say for example, you want half a million dollars and it might cost $520,000 you know, like when you add everything up. So you say, okay, so your gross loan amount is 520, that's what it is. You'll see all the costs that are involved, all the rest of it, and you get the choice to say, ‘Yeah. I'm happy with that.’ ‘Well, no, thank you.’
Josh: Fair enough. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I think there's going to be a big help for a lot of people that are feeling a bit of pressure, whether that'd be as an investor or they're looking potentially down the barrel of a gun for a business. They might not be going as well as it was. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Paul: There's lots of businesses out there that need lots of help in different ways. It's not just about, you know, finance and properties and all that sort of stuff. It's just about knowing that there are people out there that, you know, we'll have a chat about it first.
I mean, whether you've been rejected by a bank, don't want to go to their bank or can't go to a bank, that's why we're here. So pretty well covers everybody. When you do those things, we tell them, you don't go to the bank, come to NoBNK.
Josh: I guess back in the day, there was like no-doc loans and things like this. This is from a business owner's perspective.
Paul: It's a very, very simple process. So you know, the information that we asked from you is not onerous. It's really quite simple. It's a very quick application process. This platform that we've built that we'll be releasing in the next couple of weeks, it'll be automated.
It's just a quick, you know, fill in the application process type of thing and you'll get SMS and emails and all that sort of stuff, and then so will the investors and they'll be able to start bidding on your deals straight away.
Josh: Sweet.
Paul: It's a little bit of a game changer, come to the market.
Josh: Absolutely. Yeah.
Paul: That's what it's about, isn't it? It's about changing things up and seeing if we can do it better and make a change, you know, a different change for the better for once rather than just doing the same as everybody else.
Josh: Really enjoyed talking to you and is there anything else you'd like to add before we jump off?
Paul: No, mate, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'd like to wish everybody out there that, you know, there is hope. It costs you nothing to apply with us or to have a chat with us or anything like that. So, you know, your people wanting to, you know, they're welcome to have a chat anytime they like.
Josh: Cool. Only advantages and as I said, a very welcome time for me to be talking to you about this sort of stuff for a lot of people out there.
Paul: Appreciate it, mate. Thank you very much.
Josh: If you have any questions and bits and pieces, we'll put a link down to NoBNK as well as Paul's details. If you've enjoyed this episode, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay good.
How to Prepare for the Worst With Warren Maris
In this episode, Warren Maris from Magnus Business Advisers and Accountants shares with us how we can recession-proof our business. We talk about having a unique selling proposition, employing 'good' people, putting the right people in roles that are right for them, being open to change and involving people in changes, keeping only 'good' clients, documenting everything (from client agreements to procedures), getting off the tools, having a thirst for knowledge, and working on the important elements of business in the correct order.
Get more tips on how to prepare for the worst at dorksdelivered.com.au
How to Recession-Proof Your Business * Have a unique selling proposition. Do you want to be in a game where the only thing you would have to offer is price? * Employ good people (not necessarily those who are highly skilled). * Don't put the wrong people in the wrong roles. * If you don't like what you see [in your business], there's a big chance it's that person that you got to shave to or put makeup on this morning that is contributing to the issue. * Involve people in changes. Forcing change upon people is a complete waste of time. They will resent it. They will interfere with it. * Ask for your employees' input. These people have experiences that you don't. * Get good clients, and keep them. Bad clients are just gonna bring you down. * Get your relationships right. * Document everything. Take the time to write down procedures. Working on your network? check out our Best Practices and Checklist for Network Documentation. * Get off the tools. * Have a thirst for knowledge. And, apply it and make it work for you. * Focus on the important elements of business.
Josh: So I've got Warren here from Magnus Business Advisors and Accountants in Cleveland.
Warren: Good morning, everybody. It's lovely to hear you.
Josh: He's going to be talking today about one of the fun ways you can recession-proof your business instead of looking at some of the telltales like how long it's been since we've had a recession and the effects that they had, and I guess for me, it's kinda like the lotto. Your numbers will get drawn out, but there will be a car crash right where you are right now, but when it could be a day or it could be a hundred years in the future, normal likely.
Warren: Yeah, that’s right. In the economic cycles of the late 20th century, which I dare say many of your listeners may not be terribly familiar with. They were fairly predictable. Seven to nine years was the sort of length of the economic cycle and bust followed, boom! Sure, as God made little green apples, it's much, much different in the 21st century. We seem to have a more steady thing. The government and its finance people I think are a lot more subtle and nuanced on what's happening in the economy.
They've got a lot more leading-edge indicators that enabled them to massage the leavers rather than yanked them as they used to do. So be that as it may. One thing that you can take out of the 20th century, and it's still applicable, is that somewhere, there's an event that triggers the earthquake cause that's just what a recession is. It's an earthquake. Those tectonic plates have been bumping up against one another. They’re building and building and building and then bang! They release, so something big goes wrong.
You know, I'm hearing an awful lot of stuff in that coronavirus right now where they're talking about a worldwide recession. Because it is just starting to shut down international trade, and the world thrives on international trade. Are we affected? We're probably way behind because, you know, we're mostly an exporter of primary production, mining, farming products, what have you. So they tend to lag and the contracts tend to be in place for a long time.
So we, as a country, we are probably a little inch harder, but gee whiz, does that speak to your business today? Probably not. I think you need to have a sector and what the drivers are in your particular sector. So the mere fact that the economy is not having a rotation doesn't mean that your sector or your business isn't having one.
Josh: Absolutely. I guess you were saying about the coronavirus and you brought up the analogy of an earthquake in Australia. I guess we've had a few different things that could really shift things quite drastically with huge amount of bush fires that we've had and the businesses that have been affected from that, along with the coronavirus being released in Queensland with cases being found.
Warren: Yeah, it' hasn't been a great start to the year has it!
Josh: Yeah, there is definitely a 2020 effort. Everyone is going to have 2020 vision. It seems like it's getting very clad with soot and masks.
Warren: First, we struggled to breathe because of the smoke, then the virus. But what are the effects? One of the things about the natural disasters in this country is that the Federal government has almost always been there to pour resources in when there's been a cyclone or these big bush fires or floods.
It's an interesting thing. I have a client that is a medium-sized transport company. It might seem a little bit obscene perhaps but disasters are great for him. Because he's in transport, everyone needs transport. Everyone needs building materials, and they've got to get there somehow. So we got back to the floods of 2011, absolutely run off his feet for four months and he couldn't keep up.
Josh: Yep. Yep. We had had a client that had a manufacturing and heavy earth moving equipment business, and the moment he heard about the floods, he put in huge shipments of orders for new equipment. He took like a $2 or $3 million loan, he wanted to make sure that he had the ability to hire out as much of the equipment for the floods as possible when it came together to do the cleanup.
Warren: There is a case of somebody spotting disaster, understanding the relationship of his sector and whose business to what happened. So right, the best thing we can do is get as much gear as we can because there's going to be a lot of work to be done. Make hay when the sun shines.
Josh: Some of the sectors that I can see just from our own IT business have been heavily retail. And any of the secondary and tertiary industries supporting those, whether they be shopfitters or designers and things like that at Westfield, helping the retail is by extending their lease terms, and at least their renewal periods has helped the shops.
Is there any other industries or people that you've seen that are kind of just limping along?
Warren: I think the same ones that you see year after year, decade after decade. There's a notable four. Construction, it’s always number one. And in The others are transport, retail, hospitality. They’re the four where there are just consistent issues with solvency and they're a revolving door. And if you have a look at those industries, generally speaking, they're low barriers to entry. You don't necessarily have to be good at business. And probably the most telling factor is that that low barrier to entry then means that you're competing against people who've got no idea what they're doing. It’s bad enough that you struggle, but it's very difficult to argue with a clever man and it's possible to with a stupid one. And you know, the last thing you want is to have competitors that haven't got a clue that act on price and price of line. So one of the things I think you need to say is, ‘well, I feel I'm in an industry that's got a lot of barriers to entry.’ Say cleaning, okay, I have to have my unique selling proposition. They've had my point of difference because otherwise what have I got to compete on? Price.
Josh: Only price.
Warren: That's the only...price. Seriously, do you want to be in a game where the only thing you would have to offer is price? You just gotta get beaten up.
Josh: Well, on the cleaning business, have you seen that that person made a differentiator in the industry with the way that they're cleaning? Well more recently? Topless cleaners
Josh: I don't know if that's gonna work for me in IT. I can imagine I rock up here without my shirt on. I don't know if that's going to be my point of difference.
Warren: If it's a problem for Josh, folks let's just be grateful that this is an audio podcast.
Josh: You're exactly right there. It's about finding that point of difference, making sure that you have that value add or that thing that makes you resonate with someone else. Making sure that if you are cleaning, you're doing that for a certain sector or something like that so that you're less likely to have that as a downfall or a certain part of a sector.
Warren: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. One of the things I've noticed was that when people look at their own industry sectors, they get the difference between the good operators and the not so good operators, but those same people who can nuance them and understand those differentials in their sector that look out and see every other sector be exactly the same.
They look at accountants and they think they are all the same. There's one on every block. Why would I drive to one? So to get to a dollar and you think about it, it's a really, really common thing. And if you can't stand up and say, this is why I'm different from the next three guys, well, you're in a world of hurt.
Josh: Absolutely.
Warren: So if you want to recession-proof your business, have a look at your opposition. See what they are doing, and how can you differentiate yourself. And one of the ways I'd recommend is go and have a look at some .co.uk websites and .com websites in America where things happen over there that happened once upon a time we used to have trade makes and tell you what was happening.
Well, then you've got the Internet. It's right there at your fingertips. Um, if you are, plain and simple again, go and have a look at the cleaning cap news in Utah or Arkansas. See what they're doing so that you can differentiate yourself from your competition.
Josh: Definitely good advice. And if there is something I guess that you need to try and steer clear of a lot of industries, like just naturally everything, most things are becoming commoditised.
Warren: Yeah. And look, we're told that by the profits of doing in our industry, you know, where we're going to have artificial intelligence, and it's going to figure out everything. I'll be interested to say that I don't think it will happen in my lifetime because artificial intelligence is never ever going to get over natural stupidity.
Josh: No, I was going to say you'd be old enough to have seen the Jetsons in its infancy.
Warren: Absolutely.
Josh: And some of the cool stuff they had on there that we still don't have now. That was sort of told, as you said, the prophet said, this is going to be a cool thing. This would be a cool motor transport, flying cars. Can you imagine what the world would be like if we had flying cars? We have trouble having people not have accidents on the road and flying into buildings.
Warren: I couldn't agree with you more. I can't see it being a good thing. Unless we can come up with some way to control the notion of adding another dimension.
Josh: Yeah. Well, the biggest risk in any business is the chairs. It's the people in the business.
Warren: You're getting onto one of my favorite subjects Josh.
Josh: We can dive into it, but they're the biggest risk and the biggest liability, and they can be the biggest reward as well.
Warren: To me, it's very simple. If you don’t have good people, you do not have a viable business.
Josh: Correct.
Warren: End of story. You can forget the rest now. What does good people mean? Is there a certain percentage of the population that are good, some that are average and some that are bad? Well, yeah, I suppose there's certainly an element of that, but what opportunity do you give them to be good? There's no point. Your employees look to you for leadership. We try to supply our people with the very best infrastructure we had. Josh, you just had a look at it.
Josh: Yep.
Warren: Have you ever seen that in an accounting firm before?
Josh: I have not seen that in many, many businesses, especially accounting firms, which could be utilised significantly more than other businesses.
Warren: And I thought we'd gone far enough with four 27-inch screens. Joshua has convinced the staff I thought I'm off on another IT, technology leap.
Josh: Absolutely. And what you said before, like there is good, bad people every obviously and mediocre people. I believe it was Albert Einstein that said that if you measure the intelligence of a fish by its ability to climb a tree or think forever, the fish is stupid.
Warren: Interesting, I haven’t heard that before.
Josh: Obviously it comes down to you put the wrong people in the wrong roles and you might have someone who's fantastic at doing the trench work or doing the number dialing, the number-crunching or whatever it is, and you think, ‘Oh, they're doing really, really well. Let's increase them to a supervisor.’ But they...
Warren: The Peter Principle! Where each individual will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. So someone who's good at sales, let's promote her to a sales manager, well, you know what, they’re two different skillsets.
Josh: Absolutely. The EQ and IQ are completely different from the ability to manage a team of people and the direction that they're going to be looking at for you for leadership is going to be…
Warren: If you've got a hunter salesman.
Josh: Yeah. Nurture and farming. Yeah.
Warren: If you've got a hunter, you can't put him in an office. The guy's gonna go nuts. It was an interesting exercise when I was an account manager for an advertising company and, we lost the state sales manager and I was plonked into the role. Which was funny because I didn't consider myself a great salesman. So I sat down and I thought, well, you did numbers. Well, let's do this by numbers. So I sat down and looked at the cycle and what was involved in the sales process and identify various points, and I'll just get my reporting around that. And I found out that I had some really good presenters who couldn't close to save their lives. I had other guys that could close people on nothing at all.
So what we did was we had, by sitting down and getting this reporting, we were identifying the guys who were good at their instincts, and sometimes I'd even tag-team a client, we're not sending this brilliant presenter, but he'd go in with the closer and they just hand over and oh boy, did that work a trick?
Josh: Ying and yang.
Warren: You couldn't do that with everybody, but you know, we were looking at a large Queensland brewery. You can figure out who that is for yourself.
Josh: Do they sell mangoes?
Warren: Mango-flavoured beer, I think. It was a substantial opportunity. Let's put it that way. It worked very, very well. But what we also did was we got the guys who were good at one part of the cycle to train and work with the guys who were better in other parts of the cycle. So there's a bit of cross-fertilisation there, and that was all about working the people. You know the funny thing was we had an incredible turnout in sales there. The turnover dropped by 85%.
Josh: Wow. The churn from what was it?
Warren: That was a byproduct.
Josh: That's incredible. And that's, I guess, something that you say, people feel more comfortable in their job and more satisfied with the results.
Warren: They are becoming better at what they did. They were learning things, and as I said, it was nothing other than studying some numbers and saying, ‘Well, let's give this a go.’ And all of a sudden that was, ‘Gee, the boss does give a damn whether I live or die.’
Josh: If you hadn't been put in that position, where would the team would have been like if they didn’t have someone with a numbers background that obviously you're passionate about for them to have them take that part, it's kind of serendipitous the way that it all came together.
Warren: Yeah, it was, it was. And honestly, I don't think they could have done it. Me falling back on what was comfortable and a little bit of analysis and a little bit of work, and lo and behold, it worked really well. So I think it's a case of, you know, people are your biggest asset. Can they be liabilities? Yeah, sure. I'll tell you something, Joshua. I've worked as a consultant for over 30 years, and I have yet to see an organisation that doesn't reflect the boss. That simple. So to all you people out there that own your business and or are a manager or run a sector or somebody else's business, if you don't like what you see, there's a big chance it's that person that you got to shave or put makeup on this morning that is contributing to the issue. Oh, I have a good half. Look at yourself. It ain’t much fun, but I'll tell you what, I reckon you're getting results.
Josh: Yup. Yeah. Well, the whole ecosystem and ethos of the business stem off of your belief systems and your attitude. And if your attitude's portal or just staff there, they're going to be pulled towards your clients. And that's going to just carry through.
Warren: Well, you just hit on another one of our favorite topics. And one of the practices that we follow here is we seek to employ good people, not necessarily people that are highly skilled. Unless you're not terribly smart. I can teach you just about anything. You can learn just about anything. I can't teach you to be a good human being, somebody who takes responsibility for their actions, is prepared to be accountable for what they do, is prepared to say, ‘Well, you know what? Maybe I do need to pull myself up by the bootstraps.’ You get people like that. One of the great things is you get to a certain point, and there's momentum that will sort the bad eggs out for you because they just won’t fit in, because your good people are going to go, well, this person isn't fitting in because of this, that and the other. It's the getting in the road.
Josh: Yup. For me, I started out in business as a single-man operator. And when I looked in the mirror, I knew it was me. That was a problem at that stage. As the years have progressed on and we've put better systems in place and I've bought better staff on, and I'm happy enough to say that I've got a team of unicorns that work with us. And I say, ask not work with me because the business wouldn't be the business without us.
If everyone left, I'd be pretty screwed. And it's not that it would be unrecoverable, but it would be a very, very, a big question mark as to why they'd leave. And that would only come down to they're not happy with the work environment. That's what we need to make sure you have your finger on the pulse checking with are they happy with what's going on? What would they change in it? And we have any of our policy documents and procedures all pass by and pass through and created by all the staff. So it's not just one person saying, ‘This is the road that you're going to be walking. This is the Hitler's way.’ Everyone makes the decision and we work together to make sure it's the right decision or we work together and realize later on it was the wrong decision. And then we work together to make it the right decision.
Warren: Yeah. Forcing change upon people is a complete waste of time. They will resent it. They will interfere with it. You're going to have all sorts of problems. But if you involve people in that change, and it's their change, not yours, you're going to get a different outcome.
Josh: If you're able to use the knowledge from the movie Inception to have the people come about the change and solution themselves, they’ll own that change, own that solution, and then it'll become their baby and they'll want to see that move forward.
Warren: So my advice would be, and again, I think this goes to the recession-proofing your business because realistically what recession-proofing is doing is building a firm foundation. Those values, those things that you believe in, my advice is to write them down, publish them, share them, live them. And it's not as theoretical as it sounds. These are very, very practical things. It just doesn't happen with love-ins and motherhood comments.
You really need to have, as part of your business, the engagement of your staff, and have them involved in what's going on. My staff are involved in every appointment to do with the business. If there is a major client issue, we will seek their guidance as to how they think there is an appropriate way to deal with it.
It's because I value the opinions and understand that these people have experiences that you haven't, and they may see an aspect of it, they'll see a solution that's not clear to you, but the only way that that is going to occur is for you to get them involved. So it gets your people onboard.
They're part of your foundation if you're looking at them like they’re not my ideal thing. You've got a couple of options. You can bring them on board and get them involved, or you can replace them. Think hard because you're going to lose an awful lot of accumulated skill by sacking and replacing staff.
Josh: When it comes down to staff, as you said, they're pretty much the pinnacle, the number one aspect of your business, whether it's going to make or break. One of the things that we put in place was the Friyay meetings we call them. So the Friday meetings of vendor, they're normally quite casually said, sometimes with a cold beverage in our hand.
And we introduced, there's a local author, Ryan McDonald Smith, who has a book called Flawsome, which is about embracing your flaws. And we introduced some of the concepts within it around what we're calling a section within the meeting, hard conversations. Did someone piss you off this week? Let's talk about. It's a hard conversation.
Warren: Sure. That's a really, really good thing. Probably a little bit difficult to talk about in a public forum, but one of the things that I will not call right is if my clients are rude or disrespectful to my staff because the simple fact is there is not any client that always worked for one of my people. Yeah, they are that good to me and I've never had an instance in this particular business. It's possibly because we identify when things are going wrong. We will sit down with the client, just say, look, your expectations and their expectations are not making, we don't think that there is a future together, but we are very, very happy to discuss that and come to some sort of conclusion where I change or you change and we all change. Generally speaking, as long as it's done in a respectful manner, you can have that conversation. And what that means is that my staff have less pain because I've got a client who was completely disorganised and he is forever mucking them around.
And they get that joy from it because they're not achieving the things that they want to achieve. There's an old saying in residential property investment: better an empty house than a bad tenant.
Josh: Absolutely.
Warren: If your clients are giving your staff grief, I think you need to change the way you're doing things or you need to change your clients. But whatever you do, look after your staff. You know, in a practice I've worked at many years ago, there’s a single largest client. It was a big slice of the turnover in the business. It was a, you know, fairly important client, and he was quite abusive to our receptionist. And I've walked downstairs and she's in tears and she was unprepared to tell me what it was that had happened. And anyway, I've just got somebody else to sit in reception and we sat down and had a talk and it turned out this guy has called up and for no fault of hers, something has gone wrong and he's given her an earful and it was completely unwarranted, far from anything else.
So I went and saw the boss and I said, ‘Look, this is how I want to deal with it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, do it.’
And I rang him up. And I just said, ‘Look, I want to have a very frank discussion with you. The way you spoke to so and so this morning is not acceptable for this firm ever under any circumstances. If you want to yell at somebody call me. I'll cop it. I get paid for it and I can deal with it, but please leave our staff alone. They don’t deserve to have that sort of thing.’ And he apologised and he said, ‘Alright, what do I have to do to make it right?’ And I said, ‘Send some flowers and call her tomorrow morning.’ And he did it. He was a decent guy.
Josh: Is that enough?
Warren: Yeah, absolutely. Happens all the time, doesn't it? And he sent us some flowers the next morning. He called her to apologize. He actually called into the office and apologised in person.
Josh: That would have been much harder to do.
Warren: It was a lot harder to do. I respected him for doing it.
Josh: And that's what Flawsome is about. Embracing your flaws. His flaw, he stuffed up. He shouldn't have done what he did, but he fixed up the problem that he stuffed up with. He could've just gone to someone else.
Warren: Absolutely, and that's a fairly standard reaction. ‘I can’t possibly be the problem. It must be them.’
Josh: Exactly. There's a demotivational poster that I remember seeing it many years ago, and it's a picture of a chain. And there's one link breaking in the middle. And it said, the only thing consistent in all your inconsistency is you.
And it's like, okay, you can imagine bad things happening everywhere, running ever black cat. No it's just you. You need to just think about the position you're in and why it's suddenly only happening to you.
Warren: I was once doing an interview with a prospective client and, it came out of the conversation. They had had five accountants in four years.
Josh: A lot.
Warren: Oh yeah, that's a lot. I said, do you expect me to be the sixth? It's a bit of a revolving door. Can we have a look at what's going on behind the scenes? Because after five, you've got to have a bit, there is only one consistent there.
Josh: A few years ago, I was single and I was scared off my ass, ‘Oh, what's this going to be like talking to women?’ It's exactly the same as business. You look at the ones that have had to revolve through too many times like that. Something's wrong here. It's the same time point that you put your eggs in that basket or anything else. It's the same thing. It's just reading and analysing the situation. You don't want everyone to be a client and a client like that in a recession time would be someone that's going to come and leave and drop you as fast as they picked you up.
Warren: This should be the next tip for recession-proofing your business. Get good clients, and keep them.
Josh: Yep.
Warren: Bad clients are just gonna bring you down.
Josh: There's enough good people out there, as you said, and your clients might be fish and you might need a monkey to climb the tree. If they're fish and they liked swimming, they might not be the right client for you.
Warren: Absolutely. And just because it doesn't work between you, it doesn't mean you're a problem or their a problem. It just means the chemistry isn't right. Go and find somebody else with the chemistry that works. It's not that hard to do now.
Josh: I'm sure you've gone down a similar path. We've had times where I've had a client that was great, brilliant, grabbed business, they grew their business. They were in a very different direction with the way their business is working, and we went to them and said, ‘Look, you're not really working within the model's confines of the way that we were putting everyone in a box.’ Their model of business and the way they're looking to be pushing it wasn't a direction that we're hoping and looking to look after them in. And because we're not just the ‘you call us up when there's a problem.’ We’re there to help you out longterm.
If I didn't believe in the model and that what they're doing within their business, I didn't want to be the person they just called up when something went wrong. Cause I feel like I've become, you shouldn't, but you've become emotionally invested, invested in your client's problems and the situation you’re helping them out with and you feel amazing when something comes to fruition, from an idea or something that you've worked on together.
Warren: There was nothing wrong with that. The relationship at the end of the day, whether it's a business and employee-employer, a marital relationship, whatever, you know, one day you're on the side page is nothing but blue sky, and at the end, the world is your oyster. Everything is great.
I think I'm going to tell you something that everybody really knows and that is that people grow in different directions at different speeds. And if you are not allowing for that to happen, it's going to come up die when you're just not even in the same book, let alone the same page.
And one thing that I say is that relationships are as good as I give it to start. If they're not good then, they don't push you up, it is just not going to work.
Josh: Yup. Yep.
Warren: So there you go. There's another tip, folks. Get your relationships right.
Josh: It feels good. Do it.
Warren: Yeah, and you know, relationships in a commercial sense, ultimately down to the terms and conditions that you operate on, right. So you would have a letter of engagement with your people that worked for you that has standard set out in it. If I don't comply with that, they'd probably not in the right place. You have terms and conditions, presumably with your customers, as do we. And if they're not working out well, it's not a question of who's right or who's wrong. The relationship isn't working.
And the other thing is, have you got those things documented? I know an awful lot of people out there don't have partnership or shareholder agreements. Right. He's obese. He's too old. He affects it there that haven't got one. It's gonna fail. Yeah, absolutely. I can't tell you when, but it's gonna fail. I can guarantee you. I've had to mediate in a number of partner shareholder disputes over the years. And every single one of them had a common element: a lack of an agreement. If there was an agreement, typically that agreement is going to have the resolution for your problem.
Josh: Agreed upon already.
Warren: Absolutely. So we meant to do is got back to that insight. Well, this said, you had to do this and you're entitled to that, and I had to do this and I wasn't told of that. And that's not happening anymore. Therefore, what do we do about it? Do we recalibrate and get back to what we said in the agreement? Do we revise the agreement or do we just go to the exit provisions and work through them and see who wants to go when? One buys, one out. You sell the business and split the proceeds, whatever it might be.
So agreements with your stakeholders, folks, write client's terms and conditions, employer, employees, contractors. Please don't have any contractors. That's not a good thing. I'm not sure that you've got a letter of engagement that stipulates what you want to know and so on. So all of your stakeholders should have documentation around that.
Josh: So we've spoken a lot about people and how people are an important part of your business, and can make or break your business.
And without the right people, you're destined to failure in times where it becomes tough, such as recessions obviously. It's the failure seems imminent. The emotions become heightened.
We've got businesses that we've been working with that had 40 to 50 employees have dropped down to 3 and 4 employees because they've just said, ‘Let's keep us alive.’ We can't have that many people. For us in business, our number one goal for any of the businesses we work with is automation. Get as many of the processes that are repetitious, mundane, and anything that can be automated through software to be automated. Anything that can't make sure to do that through any standard operating procedures, if there's a reference document and have their KPIs attached to the documents.
So that way you've got, in a sense, the workforce knowledgeable of the direction or automated in a sense that you know how it should be working. And then for any of the other aspects that are software-based, all those automated for a business, that is looking to try and go one direction or the other, if they have the opportunity, if they have to spend money on automation or spend money on staff, where would you say, obviously I've got a biased opinion towards automation.
Warren: Well, let's have a look. Firstly, Australia has a fabulous standard of living. Which basically makes less expensive to employ. I doubt very much that employees aren't well protected. I might even go to the extent of saying heavily protected as they are in Australia. We’re expensive and we are to get rid of his employees.
All right, so obviously automation has to be something that is considered. Automation is often really difficult for small businesses purely and simply because they just don't have the capital to attack it. But there is something that everybody can afford, and that is to write down procedures.
I dare say you've come across it, Joshua, in your time. I've heard these words in different formats from dozens, possibly hundreds, of people over the years. It doesn't matter him much more onward. Nothing more comes out. So what's happened is they've hit the glass ceiling. It doesn't matter what they do. I just can't rise above it.
Josh: They're trading time for money most of the time, and they're hitting their ceiling because they don't have any more time. And they're probably getting more and more gray hair and less and less of that in lightning in the sky.
Warren: I'll tell you one of the things that comes out of it. Every time, there's a simple question that I ask, and that is if I said to you on a scale of 1 to 10, it's just faster if I do it myself, where are you, and when I say anything above seven, that's where the problem is. They would much rather do it than get somebody to do it for them.
Josh: I'll just be right when I do it.
Warren: Yeah, that's right. By the time I teach you how to do this, I could have done it. Well, that's fine. You've got somebody who works for you that is still untrained so you're going to have to do it next time and the time after that and the time after that.
Josh: Removing repetition from business.
Warren: Bingo. So I don't care how small your business is. Whether you’re a one-man business that works out of the tools in your van or in the back of your ute, you can still write down procedures. There is nothing to stop you. And then you follow those procedures and it's really simple. Look. Did it go wrong? Yes. Did I follow the procedure? Yes. Fix the procedure.
Josh: And adjust.
Warren: Rinse and repeat. So there's another tip for recession-proofing, folks. Procedures. Get them right. Take the time to write them down.
What we do here as tax agents and business advisors is damn complex. It really is complex. To do a company tax return or a trust tax return, I think there's something like 2,000 steps that we have to follow, and that's only if everything works.
Would I even contemplate doing a tax return without those procedures? No, and I'll tell you what all would cancel very firmly. Anybody you thought they came even a simple amount of setting up a company. I had set up hundreds, if not thousands, of companies over the years, and every now and then, just for the heck of it, I do one without the procedure and then go back and tick off the boxes later, and invariably I've got it wrong.
It can't get any simpler than that. If you've got a mindset that is ‘I don’t need what somebody else has written down,’ oh boy, you're in a world of hurt because you cannot run in a quality manner from that.
Josh: There's no consistency. It doesn't need to be good. It needs to be consistent. It is more important. McDonald's, no one goes to McDonald's because the burgers are absolutely amazing. In fact, the burgers are better at Hungry Jack I'm told. Yet at McDonald's, because you know the burger is going to be there in a certain amount of time, it’s going to be consistently the same quality. As you better your processes and procedures. If that's the direction you want to go, the quality will go up as well.
But having something consistent, at least, you know, if you stuff something up today, you've probably stuffed it up the last hundred times you've done it as well, and you can go back and fix that.
Warren: And have a look at McDonald's. One of the most successful businesses in the world is run by spotty 15-year-olds.
Josh: Exactly.
Warren: And I'll tell you how it's done, folks. They've got procedures and they have to follow them. Yeah. When it comes to bigger McDonald's franchisee, I don't know if you're familiar with this system, but you have to go to the academy. You will train in school, whatever it is. That was for four or five weeks, I think. Forgive me if I've got some of the details wrong. You stump up the money before you even set foot in there and they let you know at the end whether you're a shot. Otherwise, it's a case of ‘Well, thanks for coming, but, I'm afraid that five weeks and 20,000 bucks have been wasted because we don't want you.’
Why would they get consistently the same outcomes? Because they select people who will stay within them, within their procedures, and make things happen in the same way.
As you say, it might be the best burger in the world, but you can be pretty sure it's going to be the same as the one you got last week and that wasn't that bad.
Josh: Exactly. It was good enough. And that's another big point that you touched on lightly. There are people that buy into a McDonald's franchise, they do make sure they vet them accordingly, both from a financial perspective to make sure they've got the ability and understanding of how to run a business before they go and throw them in the deep end and say, ‘Hey, run a business.’
But none of the people running a McDonald's franchise are flipping the burgers. None of the people that are going, ‘Oh, burgers are wrong. I'll just do it myself. I'll just go out there and not just serve the windows, refill the soft serve machine.’ They're not doing any of that. They're looking at the numbers, the profit and loss. They're looking at the high-level stuff. They're not looking at any of this stuff that's going in and working out the procedures because the procedures are written, done, and repeated tens of thousands of times across the globe.
Warren: There you go, folks. So here's the next tool for recession-proofing your business. Get off the tools.
Josh: Absolutely. The 100% most profitable thing you can do in the world is getting off the tools, becoming the least important cog in your business that owns all the cogs. Don't become the cog that the business stops when you disappear.
Warren: Yeah, absolutely. I can name probably hundreds of people over the years where they said, ‘Oh, look, I'm just not a good people manager.’
Well, my response to that is, ‘So tell me about what you've done to make yourself a good people manager.’
‘Oh, well, nothing. I just haven't had the experience.’
‘Well, of course, you're not going to be good at it, but there's nothing to stop you learning.’
I'm a huge fan of YouTube. It is amazing how many people are going up prepared to sit down there and give you the benefit of their wisdom.
Yeah, they might not always be right, sometimes they will be damn right wrong, but gee whiz, it's interesting listening to them filtering that information. And seeing how you can apply it to make it work for you.
So probably one of my biggest tips is have a thirst for knowledge. I don't care what it is. Businesses, as you've heard from this discussion, has lots of aspects. There's no silver bullet. I'll do this and bingo, I'm going to be a champion. It doesn't happen, right?
But if you are prepared to invest time into reading and listening and understanding and not say ‘I can't do it,’ Which is really simple and it doesn't take long. Unfortunately, it's also extremely unproductive. But going there and find that knowledge. Sometimes, it's being a bit like diamond mining. You know, you have to get 2,000 tons of ore to find this little gem, and if you can pick that gem with you for the rest of your life, use it every single day, what is it worth over a lifetime?
Josh: Yup.
Warren: So finished with all those folks. That's the next one on our list so far. Did you write these down, Joshua?
Josh: They would be written down. Don't you worry. I got that automated.
Warren: You can put them in a dot point at the bottom of the blog.
Josh: I think we will. We will make sure that is all available in one dot point. After that, we'll actually put at the top of the documents so you can reference each of the parts.
A lot of people call themselves entrepreneurs and I think, well, what does that actually mean? It's just a word that's thrown around everywhere.
Warren: It’s a French word. It means the takers in between.
Josh: The takers in between.
Warren: That's exactly what it means.
Josh: And, what does a con man, short for convincing then? And so there's this person that the taker of, in between, which sounds like a reseller of services. And then there's a con man, which now has a very negative connotation, is the convincer or the person that would otherwise convince someone of an argument, which is taking a bit of a turn. But I think most entrepreneurs and sales people or people that are business just think, ‘Oh, I'm an entrepreneur cause I'm a business owner.’ It's not about that at all.
I think the way I would describe it is you've created a process that is different to someone else's process and you're able to talk and discuss and relay that in a way that is understanding to the other audience and relevant to the other audience.
Warren: You can ask a dozen people to give a definition of an entrepreneur and I guarantee you it doesn't. Different answers.
Josh: Absolutely.
Warren: Am I an entrepreneur? Am I a businessman? I often find those labels not terribly helpful.
Josh: I was going to put them in the same container as anyone who's ever attended a master class. Everyone's a business development type person that's helping you out and going to grow your business and add an extra zero and bring your business to the next level. Oh my goodness.
Warren: Oh, God.
Josh: I'm like, why?
Warren: I won't speak negatively of any, particular individual, but that is a lot of guys in the sales game that go out there and talk to a thousand people at, you know, 200 bucks a ticket and they walk out of the jumping out of the skin. And I've seen the results of these countless times. Seven days later, everything's still the same.
Josh: Exactly.
Warren: There was an absolute blinder on Monday. Tuesday was pretty dang good. Wednesday was better than usual. Thursday was okay. Friday…
Josh: Good luck.
Warren: It's all gone and lost. The way to me that you achieve anything is by being methodical and careful. Yep. This notion that silver bullets are around, I don't buy into it. Somebody comes to me and says, I want to improve my bottom line by 10%. My answer is, ‘Good. Let's go and find 10 1% because they’re a hell of a lot easier than finding one 10%.’
Josh: Yep.
Warren: And often, taking that approach has delivered very, very quick results.
Try and stay away from the flash stuff, I said in an article I wrote recently. There aren't very many of us that are like Nelson Mandela or Richard Branson. These are inspirational, highly motivated, motivating people, and they have a magical effect on those around them.
Well, I'm damned certain I'm not one of them, but over time, by investing in my people, I hope that I can become a leader. Am I ever going to be a Nelson Mandela? Absolutely not. But can I make that person's life better? Yes, I can. And can they, in turn, make my business better? Yes. You can build that reciprocal arrangement. I think you're going to go a long way, so stay away from the flashy stuff, guys.
Josh: I completely agree. Don't go and sit down in a conference and then in six months time sit down at another conference, thinking that you're going to absolutely change the world with this book or course that they want you to buy into, you're buying into snake oil most of the time. If they're giving you these diamonds and you're not actioning them, you're not doing anything with them, there's no point.
Warren: No. And I think all too often, you know, um, with these snake oil salesman, you've called it right there, Joshua. It's attend this by this and your world will change.
The only way your world will change is when you decide to make a change, and I know it all comes back to you. You are the centre of your universe. Don't go expecting some other star to make it better. Only you can do it, and it's not that hard, but it does take some effort.
Josh: And you have the impacts that you make on your own life. You're going to care more about. They don't care if they are already getting the money that they want. They don't gotta be looking to have your life impacted. Even if they were, your business is close to you, which is why getting off the tools and being the person they're selling your business, selling your ideas, selling your services, and talking passionately about them. I use the term selling, which can sometimes have a negative connotation. Just talking about it. Everyone in business that's a business owner is a sales person. It doesn't have to be that a bias to the knives and get another set of knives in the first 10 minutes, but it’s about making sure you're building up those relationships.
Warren: Yeah. We have a lot of sales. Come and see us. We do business with quite a few at the moment. And one of the things I show them is there are four elements. The regulations and all this stuff that makes business probably more complicated. We have four elements: marketing, sales, service or product delivery, and administration. And they're not in that order for fun.
Marketing. It starts with marketing. If the phone isn't ringing, people are walking through that door, you're dead in the water. I don't care what you do. It is irrelevant.
Josh: Yep. Cure for cancer in the garage does nothing.
Warren: Oh, I’ll use that.
Josh: Go for it.
Warren: Consider it stolen.
Josh: Did you hear that, everyone?
Warren: The next one’s sales. What is sales all about? Yeah, I hear you. Some people got this negative connotation of sales, but at the end of the day, sales is providing a solution. This person has a problem. Does your product or service provide the solution? I'll tell you, I've had people who were here with up that approach do far better in the long run than they, you know, sort of act sneaky used car salesman, politician, you know what they say.
So marketing, number one. Sales, number two. Product or service delivery.
If you're no good at that, what are you doing in business anyway? But it's not being good at product or service delivery that is important. It's being good at business that's important. And you have to have all of those elements.
Josh: And as you said, in that order, and when you start replacing yourself as the person that's on the tools, you should be employing in that order.
Warren: Absolutely. And the last one is administration. They don't tell anybody else I said this, but nobody has ever administered a business to success. Never. They might've kicked it out of the old pot, but it's never brought success to a business. It's ancillary. In fact, for my money, the first thing they get out the door is administration.
Running your accounting system. Seriously, guys, you can't be in a camp. Stop even thinking that you can put me in the best automotive workshop in the world. I can't fix your car. All the tools that there, I have no idea how to use them. And I know we've had Xero and QuickBooks and God knows who else is telling us, ’Come and buy my stuff and your problems are over.’
Well, I'm here to tell you if I took that work that way and it never has and it never will. Yeah. That's not just a plug for me or a plug for the accounting provision. That's a fact. You don't make money with administration. Get rid of it either and then put an employee on the handbook. Absolutely. But for God's sake, stop doing it.
If you do shit as marketing, you might have someone who comes over and says, ‘That logo is copyrighted.’ If you do shit out sales, you might have your business grow food. If you do shit in any of the administration stuff, you might have the government knocking on your door and suckering shutting down your business.
Warren: I can send a report and Josh, I've never seen it. Of the four elements that we just talked about, marketing, sales and product or service delivery, they are crucial.
Josh: Yup, absolutely.
Warren: Your business cannot function without them. It will get on for quite a while with really bad following or even bad accounting. But it's something you don't need to do.
There are bookkeepers out there that work for 100 bucks an hour. If your time's not more valuable than that, what the Dickens are you doing in business?
Josh: Yeah, it is. Yeah. There's quite a spread actually across the bookkeeping and accounting industries. It's very difficult to send across the IT industries. There's a lot of Cowboys out there that sort of say, they know the voodoo they do and they don't and frustratingly, for a business center, you don't know if they’re just always behind the curtain as far as you can see, like all they're doing it, the tick box, there's a tick in the box. I've got an accountant. We suggest everyone that engages with our services to get a second opinion from another IT company as often as you want, every 6 months, every 3 months, every 12 months. Whatever you want to do, get an opinion from someone else. Have them come in and cross-check our work, make sure you're comfortable with what we've been doing. Have them tell you any problems that we've found and we don't tell you to go, ‘Oh, go to this other company. We want it to be absolutely as pure as or as a result as possible. Cause they don't need to see that we're doing the right job. And we think the same thing for people in accounting.
Warren: That simply comes down to a commitment to excellence. I don't mind it. It comes with, it has to look at by staff. If they found a problem, I'm actually happy cause I want it fixed anyway.
Josh: Exactly.
Warren: So yeah, that's great. I'm a great fan of excellence and striving towards it. It also shows that you're not afraid of their check quality. And I think that's a tremendous thing for your business, Joshua. Good for you.
Josh: Thank you. Thirteen years in business, I have to be doing something right.
Warren: Well, absolutely. What is that old saying, I bet you that 50% of businesses fail in the first five years. Believe me. It's fundamentally true. I don't know exactly how accurate that is in terms of the quantity and the timeline, but it does happen. And invariably, why does it happen? Because people don't play it.
Would you get in your car and just start driving? No, not at all. It's like, I need to go from A to B and it's going to take you about an hour and I'm going to do this, that, and the other along the way, and Josh has just shared me this thing. He's got...what's that called again? That little note system where…
Josh: Google Keep.
Warren: Google Keep! Have a look at it. Go on, as you can create notes for your wives. It’s fabulous. All those female business people out there, through your husbands. We’re equal opportunity here. And you can just give them the shopping list, and off they go.
A lot of that it offered endorse products and certainly not many of Google's, but I think this one's a winner.
Josh: You've got the tick box. Well, we've gone through a lot of information. I think the big takeaway here is to make sure you have the staff and the people set up properly in business. If you've got that happening, everything else will flow on. Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we wrap this one up?
Warren: Oh, look, I think we've covered a lot of ground. I think the thing to understand that even the dot points at the top of this article aren't going to cover off everything. But I'll tell you what, if you can tick every item on this list, I suspect you're going a long, long way to recession-proofing in your business.
Josh: Cool. Cool, cool. And is there any way that people would get in contact with you?
Warren: Yeah, sure. Do a search on the Internet for Magnus Business Advisors. https://www.magnusgroup.com.au/ My contact details are on there. I'm always available to have a chat, whether it'd be as an engagement or sometimes it's just with some words of advice. Happy to do it. I'd love to hear from you.
Josh: Cool. Well, we've had Warren here on the podcast and I hope you've enjoyed this. If you have, jump across to our iTunes channel. Leave us a review. Give us some love, any other tips and tricks you'd like to see us doing a podcast on and look forward to you guys listening in on the future. Stay good.
Stewart Fleming Interview
Josh: All right. Everyone out there in podcast world I've got a very special guest for you today, I've got Stewart. He is from Logan, and actually know what, I'm going to let you tell me about what it is that you do in the voodoo that you do.
Learn more about the interview with Stewart Fleming at dorksdelivered.com.au
Stewart: What do I do in Logan? I do a lot of stuff. I'm involved in about four or five different, organisations as a volunteer. I run multiple businesses. I'm on the board of a number of different organisations in the city and currently running for mayor. So I keep myself pretty busy, man.
Josh: Do you have time to sleep?
Stewart: I get probably three to four hours sleep a night. Now, I'm pretty controlled to be very consistent about making sure I get at least five hours when, when possible. but look, you know, you do what you can with the time that you got.
Josh: I know I've gone through periods of time where I'm going, okay, I'm going to get something down and just working. And you, you're getting no sleep, no sleep, no. So you can get used to having no sleep, and then you have that one opportunity to have an eight hour night. And you feel like you've slipped the four days. Sometimes you have to be in the candle at both ends.
Stewart: I think there's also that, if you are used to running at that speed, sometimes if you have too much sleep, you get crazy tired at that point. It's like, well, you've had that now I want that four days in a row. Like, yeah, I dunno. Let's just keep running.
Josh: The way the body works. So, we've been talking a lot of different business owners through this channel and, which is something that's on people's minds, whether they're saying it or not. And that is around the recession is the recession coming isn't coming. And we want to talk about how to recession-proof your business. Today we're going to be talking a bit about specifically keeping things local. So I've been running a business for 13 years throughout Logan and been in business in one way or another for, for around 20 in Logan.
I've only more recently found out about a whole bunch of advantages to making sure that you are staying local, running your business within the local area that you are running a business. So what have you seen out and about around the traps in regards to a business, the overall health of the economy. What are your thoughts on that?
Stewart: Logan is uniquely positioned at the moment to grow. So obviously, we're halfway between Brisbane Gold Coast. We have a very large amount of land available to us. We've got some very good infrastructure. The M1, as much as we hate being stuck in the traffic, it brings millions of cars passed.
We've got train lines coming through, and access to some pretty good infrastructure at the moment. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Can get better for sure. But from a business point of view where uniquely positioned, Brisbane and Gold Coast have come from our sort of higher socioeconomic background and are starting to shrink in, as you say, this recession, the economy is shrinking and I think it's changing.
And we had someone talking to the most recent chamber of commerce about going from a materialism environment to a postmaterialism environment. And what he was talking about was the idea that we start to share resources. So rather than own a thousand shirts, you might only own 30 shirts and you switch them around more rather than own a car you use over rather than own a holiday house, use Airbnb. And I know those are two right there. Two very specific examples. But the examples sit behind our mindset and the mindset is that we don't need to own everything anymore. What you're talking about doing business locally is one of the things that we were talking about at a fairly high economic level.
When I started to put my hand up to run for mayor, I wanted to reach out to those that had some fairly significant influence in the economy of Logan. So some of the more significant business owners, some of the more significant landowners, some of the property developers now.
Yeah, property developers. Ooh, terrible. You can't take money from them. You shouldn't be listening to them because what they understand is some really cool stuff about how things are developing now and the changing way that we're looking at. We should be looking at economies. Sure. We should be making sure we get great roads, but if we had fantastic internet, I'm not talking good internet. I'm talking fantastic internet. Would you need to leave your house to run a business? Do you need to go to an office? If you are fully automated running from home, what does that do? Can you spend more time with your kids? Can you spend more times in the local parks? This is the kind of economy that we're moving towards and Logan is set to take advantage of that because we haven't overcapitalised yet on the infrastructure that Brisbane and Gold Coast have.
We're still growing. And so the reason I put my hand up from there is because, the opportunity for a there I saw for Logan needed someone that had some innovation ideas in their head.
I'm on the board of Innovate Logan. It's a little group that represents manufacturers, state government, local government, chambers of commerce, and it looks at how do we get more innovation happening in the city. There's some very, very cool stuff going on, but I think the idea of more people working locally we'll reduce the load, and it also helps us start to recession-proof our businesses.
Josh: Well, I couldn't agree more. You said it perfectly at the start. From a geography standpoint, we've got the Gold Coast, they've got the beaches and bits and pieces. You've got Brisbane. It's, it's, I guess the, the original, Mecca hub for working Logan is positioned in a perfect environment where it's growing from either edges. You've got all of the manufacturing and an industry coming up from the gold coast, edging into Logan, and then you've got a lot of the other industry coming from Eight Mile Plains and so on and so forth. Building up as it's coming more and more within Logan and from an investment standpoint, it's the best place, in my opinion, to buy any, house, anything like that. Because if you do have a business that is shrinking because of the recession and you need to be tighter with your dollars.
The dollars go further in Logan, the dollars allow for you to achieve more things in a localised area. With investment properties, there's a hell of a lot of people that are moving to Logan because instead of buying a place in Brisbane that's gonna set you up for $1 million or more, and then you have to, you have to walk around with traffic everywhere.
In Logan, you still have beautiful parks. You can still get something that's more than living on top of each other. It's at an affordable price with, as you said, that the end one there where, and at an intersection as well, where you're able to go out to Ipswich if you need to go and go wherever you need to.
It's perfect, from a location and drivability standpoint. I think innovate is fantastic. Some of the other cool stuff that I've seen around the place, Substation 33, that's something that they're using to, I haven't seen anywhere else where they're up-cycling old laptops, old gear.
You think you're going to throw at that record player because no one's going to use it. There is someone down there, brainy ethics going to turn that into something cool and then they're going to upcycle and start utilising that to bring more money to Logan.
You probably know more about it., some of the signs that they've made out of old, old gear and they look professional, schmick as for looking at the water levels and turning on flood signs along with, they made a bucket for giving power to third world countries. These are super innovative things.
I've only just started to dip my toe into some of the cool stuff that's happening around Logan that I wasn't even aware it was happening. I've been recruiting people. Okay. So I've got a friend that was in Tenerife and I was talking to him about some of the cool stuff. Substation was doing, Substation 33. And he thought, oh, that sounds really awesome. Let me check that out. And came down and was talking to them about making PCBs and all this other electronic stuff that he's building together with them.
He was so interested, he moved two streets away from them so he could be spending more time building stuff. So you've got your coffee shops in bits and pieces, in Tenerife. And he's like, no let's go to something that's making a difference and actually changing around the way people's minds are working.
Stephen: Yeah, we have this, and you're,100% right. Things are changing here in Logan, and I think we're on the, on the tipping edge of an absolute explosion in business in Logan. Now, we've already been growing in incredible, rate, without population, but the business opportunities that we have here, you know, in real estate, you say, buy the worst house and the best street. Well, we're on the best street. And realistically, Logan is probably the worst house in the best street. If you look at Brisbane, Gold Coast, Logan.
Josh: On a 10 year plan, If you look at where Logan was 10 years ago versus where it is now versus where it was 10 years prior to that versus where it is going to be in 10 years it's all on the up and up. The worst house in the best street, so to speak. You can find a lot of bad houses and you could find a lot more before, but so many people are moving in. There's young blood moving in and it's similar to a lot of areas, I guess that did have a bit of a stigma or had had a couple of things that happen.
Like we had that fence fight thing that happened years ago that was just a small thing that got blown out of proportion and overall bad things happen everywhere. One of the things that I always say, and I stand up for Logan pretty heavily off of friends who, hell, why do you live in Logan?
I said, well, because if I lived in a nice house down, in the areas that you're living in, two, $3 million houses, it'd be too, too much of a reason for people to come in and break in and steal all my stuff. No one's going to come up here to do that.
Obviously being facetious, but the reason why I love Logan is it takes good people in bad areas to make a change and to make an area, a good area. And you can have good people in good areas and they do nothing. But if you had these, these people that are actually the movers and the shakers, the people like Tony from Substation 33, and that the systems like Innovate where they are helping businesses locally and they are giving people the step up it really makes a difference. And, that is what it's all about. Just putting your name out there, listening to what, to what is available to help you out if you are struggling.
Stewart: Yeah. We also have here one of the most giving communities I'm sure in Australia, the amount of volunteers, people that volunteer to help other people in this city is higher than anywhere else.
We've got the social enterprise global forum coming to Logan. Why? Because this is where people give. It's such a given community. It's such a sense of that there is this sense of community here, but it's not integrated. And one of the things that I have done as part of this campaign is going out and talking to these various groups, finding out what their problems are.
Because as a coach, that's what you do. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want as the constant question. Okay. Finding out what they want, and then talking to the next group and realising that all of these groups and whether it's a seniors group, whether it's mental health, whether it's a domestic violence, whether it's the homeless people working with the homeless, they are all working towards the same thing.
Most of them have the same problems. They're not working together to solve those problems. And I think this is sort of the cornerstone of what I want to do as mayor of Logan is to create these, groups that champion and bring together the group guys that are already doing it. Like we should not be putting our hand up and saying, we're going to try and solve mental health as a council.
What are we doing? What we can connect the groups that are already doing it. There are at least 13 different groups in the city, work with men's health, but then don't talk to each other. Hmm. Now if we counseled and put someone on as a men's health coordinator, and it doesn't have to be, you know, there aren't any jobs but someone has to do the administration.
Because if one group tries to do that, it falls over. And this is actually what Logan together is based on, is a model called Collective Impact. 3.0 came out of California. And it talks about how you heard the cats, all of the organisations are doing fantastic things.
But if you asked any one of them to coordinate with the others, it's too much. The straw has broken the camel's back. But if you have a central backbone organisation called like Logan Together, they can coordinate. They can actually do the coordination, but also they can collect the statistics. The moment we don't know how many homeless that are on the city. Now, if I talk to every organisation, I might be able to get some idea, but even then there's going to be crossovers, so we don't know how big the problem is. And as you know, you can't solve the problem unless you actually know how big it.
Josh: Data in or data out If you don't have any data to work on, you can't really make a decision.
Stewart: If you think the problem is 100,000 people that are homeless, you apply a solution for that amount of people. When the problem was a hundred people, if you think it's a hundred. And it was actually a thousand you've applied the wrong solution, and you're never going to get anywhere, and then you'll say, we shouldn't have even tried.
You've got to find out what the size of the problem is, whether it's seniors, whether it's the sporting clubs. We don't have a peak sporting body for Logan. It’s not a hard thing to organise. Council could do that very simply because they're great organisers. The sporting club then gets representation as a peak body.
I've spoken to a bunch of these sports, whether it's squash or rugby or soccer about this idea, and they're like, yeah, yeah, that'd be fantastic. We could say, would you be part of it all? We can see how it would work. Yes. The seniors groups, national centers are structuring, how do we do this?
Now I've moved away from business, but the business side of it is the same sort of thing. If you've got some vertical businesses that are doing business automation or they're looking after finance for foreign companies. I know we spoke before we went on air talking about the multicultural aspect of Logan.
We have access to get into 200 and over 217 different cultures. I'm pretty sure if we've got some really good to sell, we have it really big market to sell.
This is the strength, man. This is, this is where I get really excited because we're doing some stuff in the schools at the moment. Mosman High has piloted a program where they're recycling all of their waste. Okay. So there was a $7,000 a month bill, now, they're making either a zero or making a small profit, or sometimes they pay $100 for it. So to outsource to ups to send that, that amount of waste to landfill 100 bucks, or they make a small profit because they're recycling the green waste, they're recycling, all the plastics are recycling the white paper.
Josh: That's not just beer money we're talking about that's some serious money.
Stewart: There are 17 high schools. It's now been gonna push into Mabel park. They're looking to roll it. It won't be rolling out into every school. I think, and I honestly believe this hand on heart, we could be zero waste for all our schools now. That's pretty exciting in and of itself. We're saving the planet a little bit. Yeah, but hang on, it gets cooler. The kids coming out of high school have a cert three. We could upgrade that to a cert four so they're coming out as recognized recycle experts, right.
We have 217 nationalities, and I'm pretty sure that the nationalities, they are the cultures that represent all have a problem with recycling and green waste and all that sort of stuff. If we can teach our kids to do it. Then we can teach other countries kids to do it. We could be exporting recyclers.
You're talking about what are the jobs are going to be, Oh no, I'm going to go big on you, man. I'm going to go big, go big or go home. If we're exporting recyclers, we are the center of recycling. If I can get the schools to be zero waste, guess what business is next. Yeah. If you get the kids that end currently in school to be lifelong recyclers, assuming they're going to live for another 60 probably 60 years, once they leave school.
There are 55,000 kids in school in Logan at the moment. It works out to be about 3.3 million years worth of recycling. It's huge. 3.3 million years. If I only got the kids that are in school right now, I'm not, the ones coming in next year are the ones that left last year. Just the ones that are in there.
3.3 million years of recycling. Someone said to me, how are you going to change global warming and the certificate four at a time and seriously, no, no, and the guy that was moderating said he's running for mayor. He can't do that. I'm like, let me try. Maybe try. I honestly believe we can be the center for recycling.
But that's just one of the innovations we've got in the city. As you mentioned, some safe station 33 and the upcycling and stuff that's going on there.
Josh: They're replacing back to the TVs to create filaments to 3D print stuff. How sick is that?
Stewart: Cool. You know there's a manufacturer in Logan that creates the nuts for nuclear reactors. If you want to build a nuclear reactor anywhere in the world, you will buy the nuts. For those nuclear reactors from Logan, how cool that is, and that is something that should
Josh: There's been over the years, obviously some, some stigma around Logan and some of the different names that happen to rhyme with the word Logan.
Stewart: It should be a new slogan for Logan. Is that what you're trying to say?
Josh: Sounds much better
Stewart: Anew slogan for Logan.
Josh: I did exactly that. That is where we have these cool stories, like these nuclear nuts and the flow hive. It's been a huge, huge success or being manufactured within the Logan and that, that's something that was developed within Australia.
That's been a fantastic new way of harvesting honey. There are all these really, really cool bits and things that people are doing that needs to be really pulled together to have people go, Oh wow, this is what they're doing. And we sang on recycling 200, so 217 different pods, Watts of life's ways, backgrounds and belief systems that have all been bought together underneath one roof.
The spans, I don't know what the radius is of Logan off the top of my head. But it spans the theory that Logan does and, and all these different people will be eating different things and have a different idea on the foods that they're buying and the different plastics, and they're all be able to take that back to their Homeland to talk to them about how they would be able to do this.
Maybe there's a, a certain enzyme within Rogan Josh, for instance, that gets broken down differently to what it would if you'd be having a kebob. And so that is what is awesome. Being able to have those many minds work to that. And that's an advantage that you, you don't have it anywhere else in Australia.
We are the most multicultural area within Australia.
Stewart: I don't think we've taken advantage of it though. And look, there's some, some things that I've done. I'm a businessman, but on the community focus, business matters. How are we going to do five different things? But one of the things I looked at was one of the questions I got asked was, where is the CBD?
Where's the CBD? Logan, what's the center?
Josh: If I had to pick a spot, it wouldn't be the bit that I would say would really represent Logan as much as I'd wanted to, but I guess it'd just be with it. The council building is, I guess.
Stewart: Logan central. Yep. Okay. Right. What about Springwood? What about Beenleigh? What about Jimboomba? We have opportunities. We are, uniquely placed to have three, possibly four, possibly five different hubs within our city. Now you've got Chermside for Brisbane, which is sort of the Northern hub, and you've got Mount Gravatt, sort of the Southern hub. We had the opportunity to do the same sort of thing, and so what I did was I actually went and found a guy that's created.
I managed to meet Joe Versey who set up a park road, several fair, the coffee culture. He created the coffee culture for Brisbane. Late-night coffee was not a thing until Joe came along and created it. Now Joe drives Ferrari's and he still does that sort of stuff. He was instrumental in getting James straight off the ground.
He has bar spritz on Kangaroo Point cliffs and was talking recently to council about putting a zip line between the top of Kangaroo Point cliffs and the botanical gardens because he is a visionary that sees things before they exist. Yeah. I brought him down and drove him around Logan Central.
We went to Springwood, Logan Central and Beenleigh and I've got his take on what do you do to create a scene? Yeah. What do you do to create a precinct and it was interesting because I've taken the ideas that he gave me and then I've taken them to the businesses in those areas and the property guys that own the land in those areas and the residents around those areas to see does this actually make any sense to you guys in front of Springwood?
The Springwood hotel. The very large copper, which you can see from the highway. Yup. If there was a function there every Friday night with a live band and laser lights and spotlights and food, you've got to have food. You've got to have beverage. We would get people coming off M1 on a Friday night.
I may meet my mates at the Gold Coast or Brisbane, let's meet in the middle. Let's meet at Springwood. Make it easy to get off, easy to get back on, great food, great entertainment and know it's there. Yup. You've now got a precinct.
Now that precinct will grow because corporations will want to have their office workers where they can let off steam on a Friday, Saturday night if it's open longer. There's an opportunity being lean, different perspective. Logan central.
The global food market at Logan central should be the entire area of Logan central. But what it was saying was you don't let just any old person come in and start stumping up. You have to foster culture. You have to get, if you want to have a food present, you get a restaurant that's already really good somewhere else.
They know how to run a business and know how to market. They, they've got that bit sorted. Bring them in. Entice them in, bring a few in, and then make the local businesses come in around them and learn from them. Yep. So you're fostering local business based on the models that actually currently work.
People will come for the big, big ones, and then they will also visit one of the local ones. And so what you do is you start to build this presenter and everyone wins. Everybody wins. Logan is so uniquely placed to do this sort of thing. But you've got to have someone with a vision that can drive that vision forward, and that's why I ran for mayor, not for one of the divisional seats, because the mayor is the person that sets that big vision and then brings everyone along for the ride.
For the last eight years, I've been doing executive coaching, working with the leaders of TAFE or Queensland government or Domino's. Big organizations to work out how they fix their culture, and that's what I teach them how to do the culture in the council. It needs some work, right? So again, applying my skills to my schools then better serve me.
Representing the people as a divisional counselor, what do my skills better serve me at the top? Trying to set the culture from the top down. Because when you try and set the culture from a mid-level, it really is hard if you've got toxic people at the top. Then what tends to happen is that they learn really good lessons about managing up, but there's a struggle and you're never going to get there until you've got the right person at the top.
Josh: Richard Branson and the more close to home Dick Smith. Had the idea of the culture of a business and how it should run and that that is. Dick Smith said one day, a month, no matter what level of business you're in, you need to be in one of the stores looking and servicing the people to make sure you're making the right decisions for the right people and see the impacts and the effects of a decision that you've made.
You know, just pushing paper and ticking boxes. You're actually able to see the flow-on effects and how that has affected that business with the council and with the people that, that sits within that council. There is a, I don't know if the right terms or hierarchy, but there is definitely, if you've got a, a toxic environment that will flow down and if you have a great environment, the people within the environment will promote and back up that that council or business or boss or whatever the case till the cows come home. And that's where there definitely needs to be a bit of a shift in the mindset of, of the people that are making these big decisions that are impacting the smaller guys. And definitely the smaller guys will, we'll carry that through and have a lot more respect for the location that they're in.
And as I said, I love Logan. I see no issues with Logan. I'd love to see more people have the same approach and the same thought on it. And anyone that has lived in Logan, they got, you know, it's not that bad. It was
Stewart: It’s not bad, it's awesome. One of the things I think we're missing though, and I'll finish up here, is that the Logan has to be the easiest place to do business.
We want our economy to grow. We've got to be the easiest place to do business at the moment. Brisbane is giving a wave waivers to business. They are waiving application fees. They're doing all sorts of stuff to attract more business. We're not. Yeah. We have to not only match them, we have to get smarter at that than them.
Then we have to use things like your business automation skills and get that. How do we get that into 100,000 businesses? We've got 15,000 businesses in the city, but let's say I went big, well, let's say there's 15,000 businesses. How do we get 15,000 businesses? And this is one of the things that I've learned very early on work the solution to the size of the problems we spoke before.
If the solution is 15,000 businesses, and you said, I'm gonna run a workshop and you can put 15 people in it. Yeah. You've completely messed them up. What are you doing? You know, you've turned on the light. I want you to get hit the sun. How do we do that sort of stuff. And I think that's the big vision thing that I'm trying to bring into council.
The guys that I'm running at currently they're all set in the past. They're talking about the 80s. They're talking about the 90s that they're, they don't realize things like,
Josh: I'm investing in the yellow pages.
Stewart: Drone buses are coming, you know, two years away. We'll be able to get in a little pod, a drone. We'll pick it up and we'll take you somewhere. So, uh, we were doing, uh, measuring distances. It's so crazy. Yeah. You're planning by big league, big arose and the, the. Academia will tell you that smarter roads, if you manage the roads with a different way, like you think about how to make the roads, who's carrying what lanes they're in, all this sort of stuff, you get a 30% return on your investment versus a 3% return building a bigger road.
Josh: Yup. Man of my own heart. I was going to say, you've touched on a topic that, I think if we actually had smarter control of the way that the lighting for traffic flats worked without, throughout the area, along with not throughout the area being pretty, well, Queensland, probably Australia, but then also took advantage of paint.
It sounds like such a weird thing to do, but that made the lanes a little bit narrow, except for, as you're saying like a heavy haul vehicles that might need the left lane. It's a wider lane. If we did things like that, you'd be able to squeeze, if you look at the road from here to Brisbane and extra lane, the entire distance along.
Now, I think if you look and you said 15,000 businesses throughout Logan, if you are running events fantastic, absolutely jaw, jaw-dropping, amazing business in Logan. People would come from Brisbane to Logan, and the beautiful thing is they'd be coming to work at a time. You'd be burning those greenhouse gases. You wouldn't be burning the brakes. You wouldn't be burning in either of the, the other resources around your car and run consumables there. You'd be running a more efficient lifestyle and be able to spend more time with your family and friends. So that's, that's, that's my sort of 2 cents on that.
Stewart: Look, I think if we can, if, if we can hit the goal of making Logan the easiest place to do business, the economy will look after itself and we've got to set those big priorities zero way schools. Let's try and do that. The upside is all acute, or a lot of our kids will come out with some, a little bit of an extra certificate and maybe we can export that. Like it's big, I get, it's a big dream.
Josh: It carries onto their mentality and mindset at home. And that then carries through the parents and see what their children like doing and why they like doing it. And that then affects the whole community. The home is located close enough to the school. So you know that. The impact of changing around the, their mindset within the schooling system will change around the mindsets within the homes, which are change around the amount of landfill that's going to change around the amount of rubbish, It's just a carry on effect, butterfly effect, domino effect.
Stewart: If we do it really, really well. We become the center that others copy. I don't want to do this just for Logan. If we do this really, really well, we can show Townsville how to do it with all your schools. We can be the template for how, who changed the planet.
There's this idea of life one recycling. You're absolutely right, the parents start picking it up. But we're also starting to talk to the schools about how to get more entrepreneurship into the schools. So we've got Logan cha junior chamber of commerce kicking off. So it's how to get the kids, and not only just get them to think about it now, but provide a pathway for them to move into the adult world of business.
Josh: That's perfect. And that, that's going to get it, set them up for success. As someone who went to school in Logan.
Stewart: What school did you go to?
Josh: I went to winder high school. While I was there, I had my ups and downs, but overall it's set me up with information, technology, and it put me into an environment or I started doing the IT work for the school. I was very, very happy to be able to automate and better a lot of the processes there and have people come underneath me and learn, learn what I had to do and, and what I was doing. And it's, it's something that is a great opportunity.
Things, as I said again, that are just there that you, your kids can start doing now. It was much better for mum and dad, to be honest. I was doing the training ship instead of a friend's going off to McDonald's and having to do the backwards and forwards driving. Then you get traineeships, upskill them and all the good stuff.
Is there anything else, any finishing notes, final thoughts?
Stewart: No. Look lower than amazing. I really hope that whoever wins. Hopefully, it's me, but whoever went actually has the vision and that brings innovation in. If we can bet the innovation and tie that to the multicultural tie, that's the precincts, tie that to the schools. It's kind of the same thing. It's not like I'm not trying to invent seven different things just to solve seven different problems.
It's the same sort of problem. Staring at the same, yeah. Rinse and repeat. Let's keep going here. I think in, you know, in three to four years, Logan will be. The place that people travel to for work. Logan will be the place that, sorry, you should've invested four years ago. We're not the worst house in the best street anymore. We're not a drive through. We're a destination.
Josh: I could not have said it better. Well, it has been great talking with you and I'm really happy to have had you here. Anyone else that's listening, if you'd like this, jump across to iTunes. Leave us some love. Give us some feedback. Leave us a review.
Let us know what your thoughts are. Other than that, Stay good.
127: Interview with Dr Larry Little
Josh: So, I've got a special guest with us today, which is Dr. Larry Little. Now, Dr. Larry Little is somebody who's been very, very fun part of my life and has influenced millions of people through his book Make a Difference. Now Make a Difference is all about doing just that, making a difference. And I'd like to introduce you now, Dr. Larry Little, why'd you want to make this book?
Learn more about how to make a difference at dorksdelivered.com.au
Dr. Larry Little Well, Josh, thank you first of all For allowing me to be with you and just to hang out and to talk. I'm so proud of you and you're such an incredible leader, and example of what that make a difference the whole concept is about. And you're a wonderful example of why I wrote the book. Because I understood that people they may be brilliant and certainly can do things from a skill standpoint, can do things from a technical standpoint that were... and they were very gifted in that area. But what happened was I had entrepreneurs and owners and people that were leaders would come to me and they would say, "You know, Larry, I had this wonderful, for instance, engineer and she was brilliant. So we promoted her and she failed miserably. We promoted her, she had a team of people around her. She had no clue how to lead a team. She frustrated the team. She was frustrated. She ended up leaving. So we lost a great engineer, not to mention we still have a need for this leader in this area."
I got to thinking about that, Josh and I saw a gap and how we literally talk, communicate, engage others. And I thought we're going at this kind of in an ineffective way. So, the Make a Difference concepts began to emerge around understanding who you are but not so you can just understand who you are, but let's understand who you are so that I can then understand who others, who they are and so that I can get to where they are and speak their language. And that's the real secret if you were to take... So if you take the whole book, in a nutshell it's understand who you are, but understand how to speak the language of others. The results have been really, really exciting as I've seen relationships grow personally in business, professionally simply because people begin to understand how to connect, engage, and really speak the language of those within their circle of influence.
Josh: I completely agree. And one of the things that I definitely found from the book that I got now, I was fortunate enough to have started reading the book a number of ago when you did a bit of a tour around Australia and I met you in person, which was... didn't realise I guess the golden nugget, the opportunity that had landed in my lap in meeting you and how it was the change and pivot the direction of my life and the influence that it gave to me. So one of the things that I've found is it's not just about business, and it's definitely about relationships and communication and the way that you're talking with people and understanding what's their carrot for some people, and what is the driving motivators? why do people act the way they do?
I know myself, and if it's not overly obvious, I'm definitely a quite a monkey. And the the interesting thing, actually, I'll give you a bit of background on the book. So you've got different characters that you all relate to, and there's different of profiling that you can do. But this is really easy to see and understand what type of person that you are and the type of... and how you discuss different things with different people. And how you've received the information from different people. And there's different books that I've read over the years and other ones on the five love languages, which I'm very familiar with. A different type of concept, but still resonates strongly with me. And being able to understand that when I'm talking with a line and they told me something very directly, and it was impacting me emotionally from them telling me what they've told me and it was... And they've told me and then it's been shifted on, it's out of their mind.
And someone might say, "Josh, you look stupid in that shirt. What are you wearing that shirt for?" And all of a sudden that's in my head every time I see them for the next three years, they think I look stupid. And whether or not it was just something silly that I did or some off the cuff comment. And in my mind they were thinking about that as well the whole time, and I was thinking about it. It had entered their mind and let their mind and that was it for them.
Dr. Larry Little Great.
Josh: So, it's interesting just to understand how people think about you and how you should start thinking about others. And I'd say comfortably it's affected in positive ways, all areas of my life. My communication with family, friends, business associates, anyone and everyone. The way that I present myself on stage, the whole lot has changed because you can more easily gauge the feedback of the people that you're discussing or conversing with and work your way from there. It's a valuable read. So what would you say is where are you going from here?
Dr. Larry Little Well, first of all, Josh, once again, congratulations, you get it. That's exactly the purpose of the book. And books like The Five Love Languages the Make a Difference these books all have one thing in common. And that is, it's about servant leadership. It's about understanding how to get to where someone else is instead of them to get to where you are. And that means you've learned to put your sensors in when you're around lions and not be offended with their direct language. You've learned to when you're presenting, to understand who your audience is and present in that format. And all of those things are... those are concepts, principles that really are undergirded by that servant leadership model. And the servant leadership model is just, let's understand and look at leadership from a service mentality instead of a dictatorial, narcissistic mentality.
Josh: Yes.
Dr. Larry Little Which it really is about serving others. And that's the premise of the book. The book, there are two myths that we really have to debunk. And the first myth is that we believe everybody shares our value view. In other words, we believe that what we think is important, everybody else thinks is important in terms of emotional connection and those kinds of things. That's not true. Everybody has their own value view. The second myth is that we believe everybody views us the same way we view ourselves. That's not true. We had this narrative that we tell ourselves, and this is how, based on our personality, based on who we are that is the narrative that drives our behaviour many times. But when we become self aware and we say, "Wait a minute. You know what, that narrative is not true for her or for him," then it changes the way we connect with others.
And it's that understanding that drives us to serve others. And really the crucible of leadership is your purpose. Why are you leading? Why are you doing what you do, Josh? And the answer is because... for me it's because I want to make a difference in the lives of others. I want to make a difference in their life. I want to be able to speak into that. So this is a vehicle, this Make a Difference book is a vehicle for that. And that book it's been around and it's been around the world and we've been just very excited and very humbled by seeing the difference that it's made in relationships. Because Josh, if you in this interview you had said, "Hey Larry, this book it's really good. It's helped me to be a better leader. Boy it's helped me to be really much better president, CEO of my company, entrepreneur. Boy I could really lead my people in my company now."
I would really be disappointed in you and I would say, "I'm so sorry. I was disappointed in myself because we didn't achieve what I wanted for you." But if you said what you said a minute ago, that, "Hey, this has helped me personally. This book has helped me in my personal life with those relationships that are so important to me. And oh by the way, I use the concepts in my professional world as well because it spills over." Then we celebrate. Then we say, "Hey, that is awesome. I'm so excited. I'm so proud and I'm so glad that you were able to use a bit of this to speak into the lives of others."
So what's next? And it's really cool to watch it. The organisation that I work with, it's called Legal Centre for Leadership and we are taking these Make a Difference concepts and we continue to coach around them. With the executive and leadership coaching. We also have make a different seminars. We have a series of those that from accountability to engaging the disconnect, those kinds of things that our trained facilitators do a tremendous job. Very excited about our products and tools that we offer to support that and assessments. And really excited to roll out in 2020 what we are calling Eagle University. And Josh, we are taking those concepts and we are building a university online where you can go and get certified as an Eagle leader by walking through these, make a difference courses and other courses and that kind of thing.
We are, our team is, they're going at it. They're excited about it, and we're focused on it. And I'm so grateful they let me hang out with them. It's exciting times around Eagle leadership.
Josh: That's cool. So for the people that are in the land down under, a lot of the time that we find I guess we were only a very small, I guess we're a small continent full of widespread people. Is that someone that you'll be touring around Australia with or is that something we could say and definitely jump into online for some of the online university type media?
Dr. Larry Little Oh yeah, the answer's yes and yes. Definitely you can jump online. Definitely you can participate in the Eagle university in the coaching, the seminars. With that I was just over in... well I would say your neighbour, maybe, we were in New Zealand.
Josh: East Australia as I call it.
Dr. Larry Little Yeah, the East Australians. Yes. So we were in New Zealand and we were able to roll out some of these concepts and yes, we'll be back in Australia. We'll look forward to that. But a lot of our work from a coaching standpoint can be done virtually now. We coach leaders literally across the globe. And so to answer your question, absolutely, we can do it virtually or in person or online. So that's exciting.
Josh: That's cool. Yeah. Well, it's definitely as I said, it's impacted my life and it's been something strong enough that my position has evolved as it does over the years. Over the 12 years I've been in business, I've gone from being the guy in the trenches and talking with customers all the time, to being the guy that goes out and builds a team. And then from the team now I've started influencing and leading other business owners, which is something I'm very, very dear about and interested in doing. Because it's helping not just grow my business and the way that on own my mindset, it's helping grow theirs and hopefully accelerating their growth. Instead of taking 12 years to gain the knowledge that I've gained, helping them get it in a fast paced way that allows for them to apply that to their business, grow their business. And have the maturity that they can have, hopefully sooner.
One of the actual great bits of feedback that I got and only a couple of weeks ago I had someone call me up, and I'm sure he would've called you up if you had your number. But he called me up and he said, "Joshua, I can't tell you how happy I am that you book Make a Difference on to me and how much it's changed my life." He's only halfway through the book at the moment. And him and his partner, they both work together in a local plumbing business. And he took his car to the mechanic and so the mechanic he's been taking his car to for years, and he he left. And he noticed that there was something wrong in the brakes and he thought, okay I'll bring it back to him and I'll just let him know there's something wrong with the brakes. And he thought, I'll talk to him as he would because they're on a friendship basis, the working friend relationship.
Dr. Larry Little Right.
Josh: He said, "Oh, I know you came in and you discussed... you had my car serviced, but I've noticed that the brake pads don't seem quite right. I've had a bit of a check over some pretty technical mind and I've noticed there's only a couple millimetres left. And I know I didn't bring it in to build the brake pads, but whats to go with that?" Now the mechanic went into an attack position, got rather upset with him. And Dan, the person who took the car to the mechanic was able to diffuse the situation by not retaliating and showing his teeth, and instead understanding where he was coming from and making sure to calm down the situation.
Now the relationship with the mechanic might not continue on a whole bunch because it's... he felt very, I guess... you don't feel comfortable when someone does something like that.
Josh: But it showed him this mechanic that's been a local mechanic for 20, 25 years around the area, what he could gain from the learnings or from the teachings that you have. And how impactful it's been for somebody who's only halfway through your book. And I can only imagine what value they would be getting out of any of the courses and through your seminars.
Dr. Larry Little Well, you know I'm really glad to hear that. It is fulfilling and I just love to hear when someone says, this is helping me in my personal life. That was the purpose of the book. And that Dan had the competency to absorb and then to put into practise how to have those hard conversations. Realise that situation, how to have a hard conversation is certainly very, very important part of the things that we talk about in the book and in our seminars. So it speaks well of your friend. And like you said that professional relationship may change and look different and not be salvaged. But the fact that he did not allow himself to engage in that personal conflict, but yet he had healthy conflict and had a hard conversation, it says a lot about him.
Josh: Absolutely. And there's a book that I've read by called [Flawsome 00:15:14] and it's about embracing your flaws. Now these aren't necessarily personal flaws, but about embracing flaws that you might have had because you dropped the ball, you stuffed up. Now everyone does it. Everyone has a bad day. Everyone has an off day. And when you dropped this ball, Flawsome is all about making sure that you embrace the flaw and then overcome it. What I love about Make a Difference is it's about making sure you're understanding it from the other person's perspective so that once you aren't... you have a lot of empathy towards the situation and you're not going in with the Lion heart outset or the monkey outset or the camel outset. And I think that's such really important to do.
Dr. Larry Little Well, I think that you're very wise and that is a skill and you're 100% right. You've got to be willing to fail. You've got to be willing to say, it's not about getting it right every time, Joshua. Right? It's about saying, "I'm going to try to get in those other quadrants." And when I say other quadrants, I'm talking about where are the other personalities live? And the book breaks that down. So, that takes practise just like anything else. It takes discipline, rigour and rhythm. And if we have those things and we say, "I'm going to have the discipline." Yeah. Josh, just a quick... we'll chase a quick rabbit is, one of the things I've never understood this when we start teaching and talking about this, sometimes some of those lions or camels will say, "These are soft skills. You're just teaching soft skills."
And the truth is no, there's nothing soft about it. This is hard. These are hard skills. If they were so often easy, then everybody would be doing it and relationships would be flourishing everywhere and we would never have problems. Right? This takes practise and it takes it... Good news. It is something you can choose to learn and choose to grow in. Right? But it takes practise and being willing to say, "Hey Josh, I blew that. I tried that. I'm sorry. Let me back up and try something. Yeah, Josh, I thought you were lion. I was a bit direct there. Let me back up." Because you're really a monkey and I got to tell you how good looking that shirt is and how I really like it.
Josh: Exactly, exactly. And it's about understanding someone else, understanding how your team's working. And I also find, and I've done a couple of YouTube videos and this one's called the Mirror Mindset. It's about understanding yourself and about also knowing a situation where you need to be present as a different person. So, being a leader is about making sure you understand your team and you have your team all pulling towards... I think the saying goes, all ships rise with high tide. And hopefully I didn't quote that wrong.
Josh: The important thing is when I was very introverted at school, and very introverted for the first part of my life. I was overweight. I was picked on to a spot where I wasn't able to walk anymore. Walk any more for a couple of weeks, when I was... Sorry, bashed up would be the more appropriate term rather than picked on, physically picked on. It was a traumatic experience. And when I lost the weight, I lost 38 kilos, I was still the timid person that was still trying to make people feel good, feel happy. And the reason I believe I became a monkey or what was because everyone resonates with the class clown. Everyone resonates with something that can make them laugh. And the universal languages is the smile. And Mr. Bean did it really well as did Charlie Chaplin making everyone smile without even speaking.
Dr. Larry Little Right.
Josh: Now, now when you read this book and you understand the teachings of Larry, it's fantastic to sort of know, okay, when you jump onto stage, you need to snap out of the mindset that you had and the person that you was, and you then need to become this other person. And one of the things that I found that taught me a lot is people such as [WindoyYankovic 00:19:19] Jim Carrey and a bunch of other people that are very loud extroverted people. But at heart are still very introverted people and they're actors and they're acting extroverted. Now, what I found is I was able to put on different hats, depending on different situations, and more easily resonate and get my message across.
If I'm talking with a lion and I know that the information they want is to be direct. They want information, but they're not looking for details, that they're wanting to pieces to get the information... to get everything done. And that also goes for myself when I'm in a situation that I can't be a monkey or I shouldn't be a monkey. Or I need to be aware of all of those traits. It allows for me to be a better person in all situations, even if it's, yeah, I guess in just all situations. So-
Dr. Larry Little Well, Josh you know, you're so right. And first let me say to you congratulations for how you walked through trauma because the truth is that was a very traumatic event for you as a young man. Congratulations for losing the weight, I knew that took discipline and nobody understands that work. But I'm really impressed with the fact that you look back at that very difficult, unfair, not okay situation that you found yourself in. And in today's world would call it being bullied, and that's not okay under any circumstance. However, you chose to look at that and instead of remaining the victim, you chose to learn and you chose to grow, and you chose to overcome that and say, "I'm going to... Was that fair? No. Was it okay? No. But neither is life." Life has never fair. Life is not fair.
Josh: No.
Dr. Larry Little And the only thing we really get to choose is how we handle the struggles. We don't get to choose if we struggle because we all struggle. We all have things. But we do get to choose how we navigate those. And you chose to learn and to grow from a... I hate this really, but the truth is we seem to learn more from the hard experiences in our life. Not that they're okay, but if we choose, we can really learn and grow from those. And you did just that, and boy that's inspirational. Thank you for that. That's choosing to learn and grow and become a better leader and then to go into these concepts instead of becoming bitter, angry, defeated, you said, "No, no, no, I'm going to learn these concepts so that I can invest in others better, so that I can lead through serving them. So that I can understand and be self aware of who I need to be." Josh, that's great work. Congratulations.
Josh: Thank you. It's obviously doesn't come with having the right mentality and making sure that you are investing in your personal development. Interestingly, actually that story has a second part where the person... there was these, about three different people that were picking on me out of a school of 1200. It was relatively low numbers, but still life impacting, isn't it? It's not about the percentage, I guess.
Dr. Larry Little That's right.
Josh: And so one of my first jobs was at subway, subway sandwiches, which we've got everywhere I guess. And I'm there behind the counter as a sandwich artist as it would be, and one of the bullies came in and my heart dropped. And I went, Oh my goodness. And I started freaking out and I thought to myself, no, because... I thought to myself and thought about it from their perspective, and put why are they bullying? What is going on in their life? And I feel whatever's happening in my life could only be... I've got great parents, I've had a great upbringing. I'm fortunate enough to say that I live in one of the best countries in the world, and we... and I thought what has happened in their life for them to be doing what they're doing?
And I felt in my mind, it calmed me down. So I thought, okay, they've gone in a direction where they've had to lash out. And I thought they probably don't have the best family and upbringing. And I'd thought of this in my head and as I'm making their sandwich, and obviously everyone has this one thing sitting on this shoulder saying, spit in their sandwich.
Dr. Larry Little Right.
Josh: No one listens to this one, I hope. I hope not. I still go to subway. Obviously we're not talking about yet. So and he said to me without me saying anything and I was just smiling and being the best person that I could, and making sure that my outlook was not dropped down to any of the previous influence that I'd had from the situation. And he said, "Josh, I'm sorry for picking on you." And he said, "I'm sorry for bullying you at school." And he said that without me putting anything up, and nearly made me cry because I thought, wow, he's also matured in his mindset-
Dr. Larry Little Wow.
Josh: And that instantly all like... everyone's sort of... always having not miss about it. No, not about that situation, but at school. And when he said that everything sort of just felt like it was just a blanket that disappeared, and it shows the mental games that you make in your mind and how that plays and the impact that has on you, and what someone might say or do to you that changes and pivots the direction of your life. And as I said I'd be lying if I said that... I'm pretty sure when you first gave me the book, it was 2013 I think. Might have been 2012 around then. But it was, I can comfortably say that people come into your lives sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. That bully...
And it's all again up to the mindset. That bully came into my life, and at the time I thought it was for bad, but then it's allowed for me to further understand how people think. So in a way it was for good. It was a hard lesson to learn. You came into my life for good. And again, that's a pivot and grown the direction of my life and how I've gone to impact things and people and that has been for good. So, it's all about your mindset, everyone... And this is again in the YouTube video I made the mirror mindset is about. When I started losing weight, I felt still overweight. My eyes saw a fat person in the mirror. And it was only after I then put on a couple more kilos that I then looked at a photo of me when I'd lost as much weight that I look anorexic. And I thought I've gone in the other direction.
And so it's about your mindset and making sure that you keep in check and making sure you understand how people are perceiving you, how you're perceiving people. And know that the way that you're seeing you does not necessarily reflect the way that other people are seeing you. And we always, we're our worst critics, I'd agree. We do agree?
Dr. Larry Little Yeah. There's no doubt. Well, unless we're narcissistic and then we're delusional. Right?
Josh: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Little But I think a lot of times that's very true of leaders and people that we are our worst critics. But perception is reality. And so you have to make sure that your perception is rational and it is real. And you had to check that even when the bully was apologising to you. You could have perceived that for him just to try to make up to you or that he had an ulterior motive, or that he wanted to get something for it. But you didn't. You took that at face value. You allowed it to be a source of healing for you. When people come into your life, when we introduced you to the concept that you had a choice to make. You could have perceived that as these are just soft skills and maybe it's good for somebody else, but you don't know what I've been through. You don't know what I've suffered. You don't know...
But you didn't do that. You said, "I'm going to take those, I'm going to perceive that as something good and I'm going to use it and I'm going to apply it." And you did that Josh. And your choice, and we can never underestimate the power of choice in our life. We all have choices to make every single day. And you chose to take those concepts, you chose to use those concepts, you chose to apply those concepts. And you know as well as I do, if you were honest that took work. I mean, you've been doing this now since 2013 and you're still applying it and still using it. It's not a onetime and done. It's you've made that a part of your life and that took a lot of hard work.
Josh: Right. And it's hard work. Nothing comes easy.
Dr. Larry Little That's right.
Josh: And a few things my father has taught me, is nothing comes easy and trust everyone until they prove themselves untrustworthy.
Dr. Larry Little That's right.
Josh: So, walk up to someone with open arms, not, not closed, and feel comfortable with the person that you're approaching until they show themselves to be, not the person that they first appeared to be. And that's a... Another person that's influenced my life. It's you and dad now, so-
Dr. Larry Little Love that. Wow. You know, it's so true. And the whole centrepiece around the Make a Difference is that. And that's what we entitled it Make a Difference is that it's outward focused. It's about becoming self aware, yes. But becoming self aware so that we can give to others. Becoming self aware so that we can make a difference in the lives of others. And so you have done that, you've taken that and that's our goal in teaching these concepts. Josh, the truth is there are a lot of personality profiles out there. There are a lot of psychological assessments and they're all good. But seriously, there are a lot of very good psychological assessments that you can take.
The problem comes when you take those tools and you get this plethora of data, you get all this stuff right? And they set it, and you try... First, you don't have time to go through it all. Second, you're not really sure what it means. And third, and most importantly, you don't know how the heck you're going to apply that quickly. So, the concepts we developed, the secret is not in a little assessment tool, that's not the the secret. The secret is well, I'll show you. So the secret is this, the secret is white picket fence.
Josh: Okay.
Dr. Larry Little White picket fence. So right now, Josh, even if you wanted to or not, it doesn't matter. Who you are, you're thinking of a white picket fence. You could say-
Josh: I sure am.
Dr. Larry Little ... I'm not thinking of one, but you are. And so that's the secret of what we do because neurologically our brains are hardwired to download word pictures very quickly and to process them very quickly. So, we use silly animal names, much love monkey, leading lion, competent camel, a tranquil turtle, so that our leaders are... And by the way, when I say leaders, I'm talking about all of us because we all are leaders. We all lead-
Josh: Absolutely.
Dr. Larry Little ... at least one person and that's ourselves. We only get to choose if we lead ourselves poorly or wisely. So, we wanted something that leaders could take and download quickly and apply quickly. So, the secret is in making it simple so that it can be practically applied so that then you can begin speaking that lion language to the lions in your life. You can speak the turtle language to the turtles in your life, and learn how in the world do you speak camel language and you speak that into the lives of camels. But the secret to the success of this, I truly believe is as simple as white picket fence. It's the practical application. It's the word pictures that we created because colours and numbers, our brain can't process that quick enough to really use it in the moment.
Josh: Having a full letters that come back on a piece of paper without talking about the other tests. Obviously you can't really describe that or relate that to someone. But when you ask a five-year-old, "What does a monkey do, and how does a monkey look? How does a monkey react to a situation? And how does a lion look and what does a lion do and how does a lion react to a situation?" And anything that's worth teaching and worth learning should be able to be understood by a 12 year old. And I could comfortably say that being that we're related to animals, everyone knows animals, everyone loves animals. Everyone can see and see how they work together and how they can work better together. So, it's very, very smart the way that you did it.
And as you said, situationally you can look and go, "Okay fine. They're that sort of person, they're that sort of person." And we've got a job network in Australia called Seek, which is you put an ad up on there to find a new employee. And we were using the make a difference test to sort of work out how they would fit into our organisation and how that would fit with us and the rest of our team.
Dr. Larry Little Love it.
Josh: And right from the word go we knew how we would be relating to them. And it's important too, what you pointed out earlier about engineers. And engineers may be being put into a managerial role does not necessarily mean that they should be managers. And it doesn't necessarily mean like a pay rise and a responsibility rise may not be what they're looking for. It may not be their carrot, and it may not be something they're looking for in their skillset. But if it is, it's definitely make a difference as a way that they can make it work with that position to make a difference, to there, present in the moment around that new position.
Dr. Larry Little You're so right. Hey Josh, so I have a little secret and if you want me to, I'll let you in on it. You'd ask earlier what do you have? What's next? You want me to share it with you? I'm going to tell you just a little snippet about what's happening next.
Josh: Yes, please. That'd be wonderful.
Dr. Larry Little So, we're very excited that we knew the Make a Difference book, we felt like it had the concepts and we're so thrilled that it has helped people on an international level. That's awesome. But I knew there was something else and I knew there was, and the series is wonderful. We're glad to do that. We're so glad that, so cool what would people do that? But I knew there was something else. So, for over a year I've been piloting ideas and thinking about ideas and teaching and doing some work. And just last weekend I finished, I went in to an intensive, what I call an intensive, and I wrote a book that I believe is the sequel to the Make a Difference book. The working title of the book is called Lead to Make a Difference Above and Below the Line.
Josh: Okay.
Dr. Larry Little It's a different concept, but here's a snippet just to kind of give you an idea of where I'm coming from. You have to read the book to find out what above and below the line is all about. But it builds on, if you think about the DNA diagram, in the Make a Difference, it'll give you a hint. But the concepts are more around this. We talk about teams and that kind of thing and why they underperform or why there's toxicity in the team, or toxicity in a relationship. And the book centres not only on professional, but we talk a lot about personal relationships. And I think there's a monster. I think the monster attacks our relationships and attacks our teams. This monster is, I believe the reason that companies go under, that company's struggle, that relationships are destroyed.
And the monster is fear, and the fear of failure, fear of being misrepresented, fear of being misunderstood. We could go on and on and I think the antidote to that fear is trust. But not in the traditional context of trust. We always talk about trust in terms of trust in a team or building trust in your relationship or building trust to be a strong... to trust each other to... Here's the problem with that. There's a huge disconnect there. Gap, if you will, and this is it. I don't think we can truly develop trust in someone else until we understand how to develop trust in ourselves. And I think self trust is something that people don't want to think about, but how in the world can I ask you to join me in a trusting relationship if I don't trust myself?
Josh: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Little: How can I build trust on a team if I don't trust my reaction?
Josh: Got it. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Larry Little: Yeah. So that, the book Lead to Make a Difference Above and Below the Line talks about how to gain that self trust. There an assessment tool in there about it. So, I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to... Boy, I hope that it helps a lot of folks. It was difficult to write because it kind of went down a different direction even then when I first started the concepts way back. Because I've talked and listened, and learned and I've tried to learn from others. But I think the end result is going to be pretty exciting.
Josh: Well, I'm definitely pumped. I've loved your first book and I'm very interested to read the next one. It's something that I think everyone has... As I said, everyone has this demon inside themself. They're self-doubting, and I know I'm going to say I'm the worst for it. The worst for it, I guess. And I know myself, I have a team that look up to me. I have staff members that have left. And I've continued personal relationships with them. I'm still friends with them. And whenever they come to Queensland, they see me. And I sent out a something to one of them recently. And and I said, "Oh look, I'm looking to go this approach." And I said, "I'm worried about some of the directions that, some of the parts of the business are going."
And I sort of brought them up to him and he said, "I've worked for five companies since you. You are the most professional company. You offer the best, most outstanding service verse any of them. You should not be worried about anything." And I felt wow, the way he's told me and how he was able to put that data together nearly made me cry to be honest. It was wonderful and I thought, everyone's got this doubt in himself and I can't do this and I won't do this. And I relate it back to the girl at school that you had the crush on, or 2009. The person you had at school, you had a crush on I guess. But the girl at school that you had the crush on, looked across you thought, Oh, I'm going to... At the right moment I'm going to go there and talk to her and I'm going to... Oh, I'm going to ask if I can say hey or hang out with her at lunch or whatever the case was.
And then you didn't. And a year goes by, two years goes by and this person is saying, still do it. And you go, "No, I'm not going to do it." And then you... I'm not going to have to hang out with her. She's too pretty. She's too beautiful. And then the last day of school happens and then you finish school and you realise, wait, I'm in the same position now as I was before if I hadn't jumped on that opportunity. And this self doubt can have you lose opportunities and have you fail at I guess the butterfly effect. If you've got a small thing that just saying hello once to someone, reaching out like I did with yourself and saying hey. The smallest thing can build into a big thing for everyone involved, if you've got the... I guess not the guts, but the power within yourself to override those thoughts, feelings, and strive forward. So, I guess it's an important message.
Dr. Larry Little: No, it really is. And it's revelation when someone realises that she no longer has to allow feelings to drive her behaviour. He no longer has to allow irrational thoughts, right, to define who he is or who he's not. That there is choice involved and we can learn the discipline of learning to lead through those emotions and making good choices based on that rational thought process. In fact, if you take two leaders and look at two leaders who were put in the exact same scenario of struggle. One may do very poorly that he may become a victim. He may become disassociated, he may become... Another may experience struggle and hardship and pain and so... But at the end he's grown stronger.
Josh: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Little: What is the difference? And so the book addresses that head on. The difference is this person understood how to lead above and below the line, understood the voices that he or she had before them. And we talk about the importance of having a grit, G-R-I-T and leading. And so I don't want to go into all of that and take out time, But I'm very excited about it. I think it's a good, I really do think it's a good sequel to the first make a difference project.
Josh: Cool. And is that going to be available in Australia or online or audio books?>
Dr. Larry Little: Yeah, all of the above. Right now, it's just brand new and it's actually at our... we're in the editing process right now, so look forward in the spring of 2020. And it will be, our goal is to have it hard copy, online obviously you can get it on Amazon, those kinds of things. And then also I'm going to push our team so that we can do an audio version. I want to do it... In fact, I want to do that for both of those books and create that audible experience as well. So it was a great question.
Josh: Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, especially I guess for business owners, and I'm going to say I love a physical book. I love feeling a physical book. I love the paper of a physical book and you want to get many technical people saying that. But I'm in front of a computer monitor sometimes eight hours a day, sometimes 18 hours a day. And the thing that I absolutely love is stepping away from that feeling something and you can... I think you can feel more of an emotion in the book. I don't know. It's probably just someone I'm saying. I feel that there's something there that you just can't get off of a screen. And that's where I'm looking forward to getting the physical book and I think that's going to do it for me. But at the same time, business owners are busy people and some people spend half their lives driving around in cars and I'd sincerely suggest not reading a physical book while in a car driving. Right.
Dr. Larry Little: Agreed. Agreed.
Josh: Yeah. So, it would be good to see it as an audio book. Well, I'm really happy to have been able to speak with you and go through and hear about the new exciting projects that you've got on offer coming through in the future. And also the, some of the ones that you've got on offer now through the university in bits and pieces, and... or soon to be on offer. Is there anything else that you'd like to ask me will go through?
Dr. Larry Little: I'll tell you, Josh. It's leaders like you who are truly going to successfully make a difference moving forward because you are, as our friend Brad Scow talks about the entrepreneurial journey. You're in that leadership journey of now mentoring and coaching and just be encouraged that that is a very, very influential and important place to find yourself. So it is my hope. Who knows, Josh? This is what I might ask of you moving forward. Let's have a talk. I mean, we're always looking for coaches, so you never know, and presenters. So we may have to talk offline a bit about what you're doing.
But seriously our website is eaglecenterforleadership.com and we'd love to talk with whoever is listening or watching and to be able to speak into your life as a leader, to walk with you to journey with you. That's a call that we have that is bigger than any of us any one person. We have a team of around 60 or so individuals that are all committed to walking with leaders in order to help them to lead differently and help them to influence others just like you Josh. And so it's been just a real honour. Thank you for calling and inviting me to come hang out with you for a while in the land down under. It's been a blast.
Josh: Any bloody time. All right. I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity here as well. And as I said, I've looked up to you and your teachings for quite some time and I've carried them through to my life and carried them through in all aspects. And also in the lives of the people that I'm influencing. And it's touching to hear the stories. And I could only imagine the stories that you would have with people that have come to you and how you've helped them out. And there's a few written in the book, but the amount you would have had from the book, I could only imagine, would be a very impressive and very humbling to have all those.
We will put a link to your website in the description below as everyone does, or it will be in the article on our website or in the podcast, or whatever the method is that you're listening. There'll be some way to jump on the site and check it out. And yeah, I really look forward to speaking with you again and yeah, going from there.
Dr. Larry Little: Thanks my friend. Good day.
Josh: Thanks. You too.
How to Secure Your Business Network
Joshua Lewis: Everyone listening out there in the cybersecurity world and business owners, I've got a very special guest on here, Alex from Jolly Frogs. And he does something called pen testing and that's something that might sound really scary, or might sound like you've only ever seen it on NCIS or CSI. When they're jumping through, getting through all the firewalls and breaking into the hackers websites and all these other sort of fun stuff. But it's actually quite a lot more involved than the way they make it look on TV. What could you tell me about what you do Alex, and how that affects businesses?
Learn more on how to secure your business network at dorksdelivered.com.au
Alex Penrose: Currently I focus on training, penetration tests. So I've got a lot of experience, and I've done probably a ridiculous amount of research myself to get myself to the level that I wanted to be at. And I'd like to do nothing more than to share that knowledge. So primarily at the moment, I'm training pen testers, I'm training reverse engineers and forensics experts as well. Before I started doing the trainings I held the role of Director of Cyber Security at Queensland Public Education. And before that, I had various management roles in Queensland health and Queensland police. So most of the knowledge that I accumulated is not from work but from personal research. You get home after six in the evening, and you've got four or five hours to do your own research, every weekend 12 hours per day. Researching various new technologies, new ways to get into websites or get into companies and doing various certifications to get to that level as well. So I enjoy doing it. It's something that I like doing. It's a hobby for me.
Joshua Lewis: Cool. I think it's a cool hobby to have. That could definitely get you in trouble if you do to the wrong things. If you're doing the black hat stuff instead of the white hat stuff. And-
Alex Penrose: Yeah absolutely. You got to be very careful. For instance one of the interesting things that I was looking at was reverse engineering. And some of the things that are the most interesting to me are reverse engineering hardware devices. And do you know IoT, the Internet of Things?
Joshua Lewis: Absolutely.
Alex Penrose: They're basically the little things that you can buy. The little cameras, little portable devices, even coffee machines. Anything that's connected to your network or to the internet for updates. Fridges nowadays, ovens, and the way that these devices are being put out to the market, it's all about speed. To get them out to the market as quick as you can because, it's innovative only for the first few months. And after three months, six months, that device starts to get old. So those devices are not always given the scrutiny that other devices are being given Like your Operating System. Your Windows Operating System has a lot of scrutiny going over it. Linux as well, which is another Operating System that has a lot of scrutiny going over it. And it takes many months for particular patches or security updates to come through to be tested by Microsoft or by the Linux consortium.
So these IoT devices, these little hardware devices you can buy them off Alibaba or eBay. And some of them come from China and they're really not that secure, but you still connect into your network. So they're an entry point for a hacker to come into a network. I love to do reverse engineering of those devices. But coming back to the issue of black hat, white hat, there are some legal issues with reverse engineering. You're not always allowed to do it. So the best way to go about that I found, was to contact the vendors and to agree with them that you're going to do it. And a lot of the vendors are more than happy to help you out and say, "Yes, sure." And I ask for a signed form from a high up executive in that company. And what I found that a lot of the Asian companies out there are more than willing to do that.
They don't immediately call a lawyer and try and get it all sorted out. They just say, "Yeah, go ahead and test it for us. If you want to do that in your free time, and for free we'll even help you out with that." I had one vendor send me a device, quite an expensive device that I could reverse engineer. Found a few bugs in that one, a few security vulnerabilities for them, reported it directly to them, and they security updated it in the back end. And all of that went on without anyone knowing about it in the public, and their devices are now more secure. So you've got to be careful especially at say with American and European companies that when you start reverse engineering anything or unpacking firmware that you are covered legally. I'll stop talking now.
Joshua Lewis: That's all right. It was really good because it's something that I'm a huge believer in the IoT movement. I've got a very, I'm going to call it automated house, and I'm also going to call it vulnerable. I would say that it's ... And it comes down to the way that you do it. With any new flexibility with technology, comes about generally inherent security issues. And I can say my gates, my locks, my watering system, the level of my pool, my lights, everything is automated or has some level of IoT connectivity
If I want to turn on the waterfall and the pond, I can do that with my voice. So it's all really, really cool. But what people don't understand, and this is ... I've set it up as an IT specialist, which means I've got everything on ... You know what I'm talking about for everyone out there, and the rest of the world on it, sort of VLAN. Which means it is separated to anything that I have that I hold dear myself. So worst case scenario, someone hacks in, and they're able to open the gate. The locks, I intentionally went with something that I've developed myself, which means although the security ... and this isn't what everyone should do, the security might not be as unpenetrable as what you'd have with a Western country developed device.
I can say that the obscurity would definitely mean it would be zero chance of being attacked. And that's what it is. It's kind of balances with everything. The worst thing that could happen if someone was to gain peering eyes onto my IoT network as a separate network to everything else is, they'd be able to turn my waterfall on and make my lights go to music or something against my want. And that would be obviously quite an interesting thing to happen. And I would do something about it at that stage.
You're exactly right. A lot of companies have these products that they just want to send out the door as quickly as possible. You look at Apple and Samsung, just as their basic phones, they're both fighting to be the biggest market competitor. And so, they're releasing these things. Like Apple had a vulnerability on their device for years that was being backdoored and utilised by Google. And it was only found out that they were tracking and grabbing information out of these iOS operating system for years before something was actually done about it. And it is just because we are in this instant gratification life cycle with the people, the Tinders wanting people to have everything straight away and not necessarily thinking about what the longterm risks are with that.
And I think that's bad on a home IoT device level. But there's also something that gets a bit more concerning, and that's the PLC world to me. When you have these controllers that are controlling main water systems, how much fluoride's being dumped into the different areas. And if something was to be broken into there, we could have some serious issues. What are your thoughts on where the world's going, and how do you think you'd be able to fix those things without taking them away? What would you do?
Alex Penrose: Yeah, I think your approach at home is actually really, really good. And that's something that I would advise most businesses and organisations to do as well. Consider the vulnerabilities of your networks. And every network is going to be vulnerable to something, to a certain degree. And you need to be comfortable with what happens in the worst case scenario. As you said, worst case scenario, they can turn on the pump of my fountain or they can turn it off, and I don't care about that too much. I might lose a bit of order, but I'll find that out the next day because I can visibly see that it's on, or I can hear it during the night, and I can do something about it then. So the damage is controlled. And I think you need to treat your network in that way as well.
Joshua Lewis: Absolutely.
Alex Penrose: Consider the worst case scenario. Do a risk profile and do a risk appetite statement as well for your organisation. This is something that is really big in the Information Security Management System world or ISMS world. Is that you create a risk appetite statement, where you state what your appetite is for particular risks and you always have a certain appetite for risks. For instance, you might think that DePaul education might have a zero tolerance zero appetite for any risk related to personal injury because you don't want your students to get injured and you don't want your teachers to get injured, so there would be a very low appetite for risk there.
But the police, you're sending your police force out there is an inherent risk of your police officers getting hurt. So you might have a slightly higher level of tolerance for that risk of people getting injured during their work. Same for firemen, you're sending them out in the middle of a fire, what's more dangerous than that? So you must have some level of risk associated with that, and you must accept that risk. And the same is true for cyber security. So a bank especially like a Bitcoin bank, an online bank will have a very high a ceiling of where the cyber security would be. Right?
Whereas someone who owns I don't know ... it's hard for me to give an example because everyone cares about their security. Right? but you might have a personal home light in your home. You might not have the same level of cyber security requirements as a bank because you say, "Well, okay, so they can come in and they can turn on the pump. I don't really care about that. They can tend to shut those down or the lights on and off. Okay, big deal. I'll learn from it and I'll fix whatever the issue is, but it's not going to cost me outside of my risk appetite."
Joshua Lewis: Yep. And that's, I'll walk in that ... exactly you've said there too. Like Oceans 11 or any of the big heist movies where they're going to break into a bank or break into a casino and grab a bunch of money. And they have these really crazy plans where there's distractions, an illusion. What I think it comes down to is banks have great security. And if you have to think about the actual physical banks now, physical banks don't have anywhere near the security relative to their online counterparts. And that's because, a physical bank will hold 40,000 or $50,000. They'll have many security cameras, but not ... when I say not as much security, I mean it's not too indifferent to what you'd have in a commercial property for a business. You'll have screens that go up, a safe, most businesses will have safes. Most businesses will have security cameras, but the chances of them getting caught is incredibly high.
The chance and the prize at the end, the booty, the reason for them spending all this time and effort making these big plans is so high. It's not worth the prize at the end. And that's what security I think is all about. Anyone that wants to get into anywhere will work out a way to do it if they have enough time, patience and the motive is high enough to get whatever the prize is at the end. But most people are not going to be too bothered because, there is so many steps that you have to take through. If someone had to break into my wifi or through my internet connection, to get into the VLAN, to then jumping and turn my fountain on. The amount of times to get to spend to do that well outweighs the advantages it's going to be for them in the end.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, I agree. Another thing to consider as well, you spoke about the physical versus the cyber breaking in. One thing to consider as well is, back in the old days when you broke into a bank, you had to have a truck, a major truck to carry all those bags of money. Right?
Joshua Lewis: Yeah.
Alex Penrose: But if you break in with the cyber method, you don't need any kind of big truck. You don't need any bags, you don't need any effort. It all fits on a little USB stick nowadays. So it's much easier to exfiltrate information via the cyber way. So I do agree. I think cyber is more important than the physical. Because, in the physical world, you've got physical guards, you've got your security cameras, but also it's incredibly difficult once you do have your loot as you say, you still need to walk away with it. And that can be a major problem. Whereas if you're in into a network, all you do is you download it to some Cloud provider and you're done. And once it's out, it's out as well. You can't stop it then.
Joshua Lewis: No, that's right. And then it's out in the dark web, people are buying new information. And that's a big thing that I think people have this misconception of what penetration testing is, and what hacking is. In where Frank Abagnale, who was famously put into a movie called Catch Me If You Can played by Leonardo DiCaprio fooled people to make everyone think that he was a pilot, and that he was a solicitor, and that he was a doctor and a bunch of other things. And what he was doing is social engineering, social hacking to be able to get into a spot that he's not meant to be. And penetration testing doesn't just stop at the wall of your internet service provider or with the security of your physical network.
If you were to ring up someone and you said, Oh hi, my name is X, Y, Z, and you've worked at this, they had this client name because they had a testimonial on their website or something like that. And then you said, Oh, I'm just double checking if our account's delinquent or if we're all up to scratch, because we're changing accounting systems or whatever story you feel like saying. And then all of a sudden, they're telling you the financial position of this other company. And then you're able to use that information and then slowly bite away and break into their network or break into accounts' information. So then use it on the flip side and potentially break into the network that you're pretending to be. And so what it's about I guess, is the way that you talk, and that comes down to the security of your staff and the training that they've had in how to deal with suspicious questions.
I rang up I'm not going to say which one of the big four banks it was, but I rang up one of the big four banks. I spoke as I'm standing right now. And I gave them my mother's details, her birthdate, full name and the address. And it was able to change around her mortgage on the phone sounding nothing, indifferent to what I sounded like right now. And I thought how bad is that? That I can answer three security questions and I could have been a stranger. I was doing it to help her out because she was at a season, needed to sort something out. But I could've done anything, and that would've absolutely caused a world of trouble for someone. I have written letters from mom to say that this is okay, and was ready to patch in on a three way call, but I thought, let's just try, I've already got permission from mom to say this and I was surprised at how easy it was.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, it is. And I think the two easiest ways to get into a company in terms of cyber is either via the help desk. And the reason for that is because, as you did with the bank, you were probably connected to a help desk. And as the name implies, it's a help desk. They're conditioned to help, right? So from the very first day they come into the organisation their performance is monitored and managed based on helping people. And the more happy people leave the help desk, the better the performance. Now if you're a hacker, you'd be extremely happy to get whatever passwords that you want. So that's what they're going to give you, right? Because as a hacker, you're asking for the password and they're going to give it to you. The only thing you need to do is you need to make sense.
So for instance, the help desk is one way to get in, the other way is the HR department. So human resources, and in order to make sense what you would do is, you might wait for some kind of position to open up at that company. And the HR department would then at that point expect PDF documents or word documents to come in with people's resumes, and it makes sense to them. So they will open them without thinking usually. Because, well that job interview did co ads, I'm expecting a document. Because I'm expecting a document, I'm going to open it without thinking twice. And it's really easy at that point from a hacker's perspective to have some kind of malicious code in your resume-
Joshua Lewis: An old version of Adobe reader or something like that and bang, they're in.
Alex Penrose: Oh yeah, absolutely. And all you need to put in there, you put a message saying, in order to view this message, you need to download this programme. And then off they go, they download the programme. Because again, they're conditioned to do this, this is their job, to open these PDFs, to read the contents and to process these applicants. So you got to play to that weakness in a way of those departments. But definitely, help desk, HR department very easy to get in via that way as long as you are believable, and as long as you do it in a way that they expect you to act. So don't send a PDF with the resume saying, Oh yeah, I saw this job for blah and actually the job doesn't exist. You need to make sure it probably exists, it's listed and that's within the timeframe as well. And that they want to open the document. You need them to want to do something.
Joshua Lewis: Yup. And that's as easy as creating an anonymous account on LinkedIn and double checking when they're putting up posts for a new job. And that's where the biggest vulnerability ... Or I'd like your opinion on this, the biggest vulnerability though in my opinion is your staff. Your staff are by far the biggest gateway to bring people into your network, and to bring unwanted nasties and IP and other integral documents of your business outside of your network.
Alex Penrose: Yup. I agree. Staff is behind 50% of all the access. I saw a number a few years ago, it was 50% that they are behind it. This is insiders. So you might've stopped doing accidental things but you might also have malicious staff doing malicious things. So you've got to consider both those approaches. Not all your staff is happy to work for your company. And some staff might be enticed by a few thousand dollars that they could grab if you gave them the opportunity. So you've got to remove that opportunity. And you've got to expect your staff to do something like that. So you've got to monitor your staff in that respect. Both for accidental things, but also for malicious things. And actually most stuff would be accidental, opening a PDF in the HR department is something that they're expected to do, but they accidentally compromise your security for doing that.
Joshua Lewis: We use a tool for monitoring our staff as well, there's a tool that we use for our clients called ObserveIT.
Alex Penrose: Yes, you've got to use some kind of a tool to monitor what people are doing. And you would have read in the news that a few QPS employees were indicted looking up people in the system that they shouldn't have looked up. They didn't have any reason to look that up. This is all public news. And they were indicted for that. So I think there's two or three cases of coppers abusing their position to get into the backend system. And you need to take into consideration that a big organisation like the police or like education, they have tens or even hundreds of thousands of people working for them. And some volunteers as well, right? The Queensland Volunteers, education volunteers, health volunteers. And they get more privileges than the public. So you got to monitor them somehow and whatever monitoring system you use, whether it's ObserveIT or something else or ...
There's various solutions for that. You've got to monitor your staff, but you can't monitor every staff all the time. So usually, you'll have some kind of trigger going off and you would use some kind of screen recording software to then check what actually happened. Was it just accidental? Because someone could accidentally double click on a programme and open it up private. It does happen. It's happened for me as well. Where you open up the word document, it just double clicks. The mouse might have double clicked by accident and it does happen. So that's completely different than someone opening the tool, specifically searching for a particular person that they might know, and then finding out some details that they're not supposed to know. So there's a difference as well. And to differentiate between accidental and malicious that's where your screen recording software comes in. So I'm not sure if they use ObserveIT or not, it might be something else. But yeah.
Joshua Lewis: I was just going to say anyone listening out there in the podcast world ObserveIT is just a tool that lets you audit what your staff are doing, or what a network is doing. Gives you text data so can see if they're opening out notepad or Firefox or Google Chrome or something that they wouldn't have normally opened up. And then also lets you see suspicious login activity. So if your receptionist for whatever reason logged in at 2:30 in the morning for half an hour and that wouldn't be what her normal process would have been. It will then create an alert, and send that off so that you can then monitor and work out more accurately what your staff is doing. So it's good that we both know what we were talking about, anyone else don't know what we're doing.
Joshua Lewis: So above and beyond putting that sort of software in, there's obviously tools like Nmap or Wireshark and things like that. So Nmap lets you scan over a network and monitor what new devices might've appeared. And then Wireshark depending on how you have it set up, lets you intercept and then see the type of information that's being transmitted. Now these tools are only just a couple of free tools that imagine you would have in the plethora of tools that you would use to go and work out vulnerabilities in a network. And then once you've gone through, say an Internet of Things device and you've accessed it, and how you can actually work out the goodies on the other side. What other tools do you use?
Alex Penrose: I like to categorise the tools that I use. I use a plethora of tools, hundreds of tools. And I also write my own tools as well. I'll write most of tools in a programming language called Python. But I also write it and see whatever's needed. If I need a fast programme, I might write in C or C++, if I need a programme really quickly, I might write it in Python. I like to categorise the applications passive, which means you already raised Y shock. You can passively tap the network and listen to the network, you won't get detected doing that. It's basically having like a microphone on the network which records everything that goes over the network. And you might pick up passwords, you might pick up network protocols that should not be enabled or which you might be able to abuse. So I would say that would be the one category.
The passive reconnaissance. Then you've got your active reconnaissance tools Nmap would be one of those. So, Nmap is a port scanner with some additional functionality that is able to recognise certain protocols and certain services that run on a particular computer. So you might be able to detect not only that there is a web server listening on a particular network port, but also what type of web server that is. It might be an Apache web server, it might be a Microsoft IIS server, it might be whatever the make of that web server is. And sometimes, even the version of the web server as well. And all that information allows you to then research to find vulnerabilities. And one of the tools that I like to use for finding vulnerabilities is a Kali tool, which is Searchsploits
So there is a distribution, a Linux distribution or Linux operating system that you can download for free on the internet. It is called Kali, K-A-L-I. And Kali is preloaded with a lot of different tools on it. And one of those tools is Searchsploits. So you can type Searchsploit in the Kali prompt, and then space, and then puts an Apache in there, and that will list you all the available public exploits for Apache web server. So if you find a particular vulnerable Apache servers, say whatever version number and you use Searchsploit, it might give you the exploit ready-made and you can just run the exploit right there.
Obviously, there's another tool called Metasploit, which does a very similar thing. Metasploit automates that hacking process to a certain extent. It allows a hacker or a pen tester to break into the system using known exploits, and then instal a backdoor automatically on the server that was compromised or the IoT device that was compromised. And the backdoor, not everyone will know what that is. It is effectively a piece of software that allows you to easily get back into the system at a later date. So like a Trojan horse kind of thing.
Joshua Lewis: Well, I guess the way that I would describe it, a general network is imagine you've got a unit complex, and there's one big gate at the front. You could call that your router, and then all these little things inside the unit complex, all these little units, could all be different devices. And if you're able to grab the key to one of these units, that means you're able to get through all those different ... The front as you said, you have a backdoor created, it means that the more devices you have on your network, the more chance of vulnerability things are being looked at, and actively patched. And using one of the Internet of Things devices or any known patchy server or web server or anything like that could then mean that you gain access to absolutely everything for a later stage. So, that's kind of the way I sort of normally think about it. If you've got lots of doors into a building, and you just have one door that you leave open a lot of the time, they're not going to go and check that.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, that's true. It's a good comparison actually to how it really works. You try and find an open door or a door that is ajar and you get in. And then once you're in, and you are at a particular security level on that system, it is then very, very difficult to first of all detect that person. And to get rid of it is difficult as well. So there is a thing in cyber security which we call a privilege escalation. So as a normal user on the computer, you typically have low privileges. Which means that you can't instal programmes. For instance, especially in managed environments like big government organisations or banks, employees are generally not allowed to instal programmes. And the reason for that is that, if you do instal a programme that is a back door then that's installed in your system and you need to provide access to a hacker remotely. So generally speaking, people have low privileged accounts, normal user accounts. And what you want to do as a hacker is, you want to try and get access to administrative accounts or a high privileged user.
So the process of hacking into a company is to first get access to a low privilege account on a PC. For instance, using the HR department trick or the help desk trick you might get access to a PC. You get what we call a remote shell which allows you to enter commands on a desktop. And the next step would then be to try and elevate those privileges to an administrative account on that PC. And that is usually fairly easy to do on the Windows and Linux machines. There will always be some kind of vulnerability on the PCs that aren't specifically hardened, especially the PCs that haven't been updated. If the automatic updates on windows have not been enabled, you can be almost certain to find some kind of vulnerability in that system. There was a test done at one point. Some university did a test, they put an unpatched or unupdated system on the internet and they checked how long it would take for that machine to be compromised. And this is back in 2015 so I'm sure that nowadays it's even faster. But in 2015, it took four minutes for a device to be connected to the internet for it to be fully compromised and added to a botnet.
Joshua Lewis: All right. That's quick, isn't it? And that that goes, should I say the severity of security and how much more important it has become even over the last years?
Alex Penrose: Yes. And the importance of running automatic updates. I understand that large organisations don't want to enable automatic updates. They don't want to disrupt the business. And security is always a concentration between usability and security. But I believe that not enabling automatic updates is probably one of the bigger issues in metrics being compromised nowadays. So, one of the things I always advise is, enable automatic updates on everything. On your web servers, on your user fronting servers, VPN servers, routers, everything. Just automatically update that thing. And don't wait a day, don't even wait half a day. Because one of the things that hackers do is, they run daily scans of the internet. And when I say the internet, I mean the whole internet.
So they've got what's called a botnets which is a network of compromise machines. And these might be very big. You might have 10,000 computers that have been compromised, that have been added to these botnets. And the botnet can be operated from one central location, from one central server, one computer effectively will then manage all those 10,000 compromised machines. And you can give those compromised machines orders. You can tell them to do certain things. And one of the things that hackers do is, they take scans of the internet Nmap scans specifically, to find services and service versions.
So they might find that your organisation might run a WordPress site and it runs WordPress 5.7 or whatever the version is. They will add that knowledge into it's database. So there are hacker groups that just do that. They scan the internet every 24 hours, the whole internet, and they add your WordPress sites with the version number to that database every time. Now, when a public exploit then comes out ... and an exploit is something that exploits a vulnerability. If an exploit comes out and they find that's odd as an exploit for WordPress 5.7, I'm not sure if WordPress 5.7 exists. Might be a different version number. But let's assume that it does exist and that you are running that on your-
Joshua Lewis: It doesn't yet.
Alex Penrose: Yeah. Well there you go. And so the hackers know, as the public exploit comes out for that version ... They know the IP addresses or the locations of all the vulnerable machines on the internet. So it doesn't take them weeks to find your server. They already have that information. They already have it in a database. So as soon as the exploit comes out, what they will do is, they will run that exploit against your database to those IP addresses that they know to be vulnerable. And bomb suddenly they got another thousand nodes, a thousand robots in their botnet. So that's how things happen nowadays. So you can't wait even hours anymore after a public exploits comes out. You have to run automatic updates. If you don't run automatic updates, you will at some point get owned. That's just the way it is. Especially on your web servers, they're extremely vulnerable.
Joshua Lewis: Absolutely. And then when you have services like WordPress, you kind of hope that there's no vulnerabilities that come out. But given it's all open source, if there's anyone that's a bit tricky, they may find a vulnerability and then not release it to the public. Like there was the Heartbleed attacks a couple of years ago that had been seen to have been patched on the Google servers years before it was released as public knowledge. And-
Alex Penrose: Yeah.
Joshua Lewis: Again, that's a bit sass. Was Google using that as they were aware of the vulnerability and doing something about that? Or were they just a bit sass in my opinion? But, the best thing you can do ... I guess the take home would be, if you're a small business and you don't want to have any downtime, which is what hacking is going to create, is make sure you keep things up to date, secure, and have an active backup that's not connected to the same physical network. Would there be any other tips that you would give to make sure that they can stay protected in this ever worrisome world?
Alex Penrose: Backups. That's the only thing you can really do. The thing that you were talking about there was, we call them Zero-days in the cyber world. So they're effectively vulnerabilities that have not been released, that are not public knowledge. But the chance of getting hit by one of those things if you're a fairly small business here in Australia is extremely low, and this comes down to your risk appetite again. Are you going to worry about being owned by a Zero-day? I personally run WordPress on my website. So jollyfrogs.com is a WordPress site. I do automatically update everything. I don't care if it goes down for five minutes, I'll shut the website's offline for a bit. If I want it to be 100% available, I'll run a second one and I'll run the patching five minutes apart.
Oh, sorry. I touched my microphone there. So I'll still have 100% uptime, but I don't even care about that I just want to update. But I'm aware as someone who has a Zero-day against the particular WordPress site that I'm using, they could break into the website. But then again, there isn't very much on there. The only damage that would be done is, someone could what's called defacing the website and could put some nasty things on the front page. But it will be obvious that'll be taken, but I don't really care about that. It's a risk I'm willing to take and I think everyone else should consider that as well. Unless you're the NSA or the FBI, the CIA or some major international organisation that works on defence contracts.
Zero-days they're not really used that much because there is always a chance that if you use your Zero-day that it'll be found out. And then your Zero-day's gone because they'll be patched. So they're very valuable for hackers to have Zero-days and most hackers would have one or two Zero-days that they don't disclose. Because it helps with pen testing. And so you don't disclose everything. But you do disclose some of the things I would say. But yeah, you can't really worry about those kinds of things I would say.
So you ask what other things can people do? Definitely backups, have backups and make sure your backups are not connected to the network. So that if something happens, you can always restore it and practise your restoring process. Don't just have backup. Because I worked for a company a long time ago and they had a backup system that they never checked, they made the backups and they made it on what's called a tape, which nowadays is old fashioned technology of course. But a lot of companies still use tapes. And they're magnetic tapes, and they never actually checked them. So they ran them for years and years and years, and eventually they would fade in their effectiveness.
And when there was an incident at this particular organisation, we had to restore something. And that's when they found out the restore process didn't work. So the backups that they had were useless. Luckily, it was only one small system that wasn't too important. But it immediately sparked replacing the whole backup process and also testing your backup. So don't just make the backups, also test your backups as well. And that'll allow you to restore your things much quicker. If something does go wrong, you'll have all your processes ready and you can usually be online within an hour.
Joshua Lewis: Yeah. If you've got active backups, you've got verification on your backups and UI. As you said, you're going into a mode of let's do a test when it's an available time for the business as opposed to in the middle of their busiest weeks. Which let's be honest, is the only time things really break. It gives you then the ability to get, "Okay, we're having some downtime, a three day weekend or something's coming up. Let's restore everything on current hardware and see what happens, see what breaks, see what doesn't." And it gives you the ability to see if it was going to work hopefully when you don't have a catastrophic event. But hopefully if you did have a catastrophic event, you then know that you're going to be protected. We were very lucky that ... well not lucky I guess prior planning prevents piss poor performance.
Alex Penrose: That's it. That's the piss perfomance.
Joshua Lewis: And when the Brisbane floods came through a number of years ago, we had clients that were evacuated from Brisbane, and they had their backups that were offsite. And as soon as they were able to be at the offsite location, we were able to restore their servers, workstations, and everything to a workable state. And that meant that they were down as you said hours, not days or weeks. Where their office wasn't going to be manageable, ended up being in two foot of water where they were and everything was covered. So it was replaced everything. I was going to say hilariously, not hilarious really.
But two years later, they've moved buildings and they said, ah, we're never going to have a problem with the floods. Two months later the roof collapsed in, in the middle of the storm and everything was in a foot of water. But part of the times they had backup, and so they were all back up and running. And you don't know when these things are going to happen. And just for small business, I think it's more important than ever to have backup because you can't afford to have ... If you have a work workforce of 10 or 20 staff and all of them are sitting there doing nothing, you don't have the cash flow that cash buffer to be able to be paying them all while everything is being recreated, as opposed to just being restored.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, absolutely. Backups are probably at the top of the list. There's some other things that I would advise people to do. The other thing that's probably as important as backups is, to use some kind of a security proxy in front of your web server so-
Joshua Lewis: Like CloudFlare?
Alex Penrose: Yeah like CloudFlare for instance. So the way it works is instead of web browsers, web users going directly to your website, they'll instead go through this security service like CloudFlare, you mentioned it just now. There's a few other ones out there as well. They're very cheap by the way. They cost almost nothing but $29 a month or something or a year even, I don't know. It's really cheap. It's something that doesn't cost a lot of money. And what these proxy services do is, they sit in between the end user on the internet and your web server.
So even if your web server has a vulnerability, say in WordPress, and some hacker's trying to exploit that vulnerability, the proxy security service will pick up on that and actually block that request. So your web servers vulnerable, but your proxy security provider will actually save you from being compromised. So that's a really important thing to do as well. And it's cheap. They know that these are not expensive services and they offer additional services as well like speeding up the content delivery of your website to the users in different countries. So definitely look at CloudFlare or some other kind of provider in terms of security proxy services.
Joshua Lewis: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's very good advice, CloudFlare. These attacks called DDoS attacks or these denial-of-service attacks where these bots, like you were talking about will just go and smash your server with 10,000 requests a second or something ridiculous. And these services such as CloudFlare allow for you to overcome that problem because it goes, "Hmm, that's odd, you're getting a lot of traffic from Turkey at the moment or a lot of traffic from some that you wouldn't normally get. All seems a bit weird." And then protects it and blocks it out and has them go through typing one of those annoying codes that no one likes, that robots seem to have a big issue with, the CaptureCodes.
Alex Penrose: That's the ones, Yes. And those security proxy services are getting smarter by the day. They are actually using what's called artificial intelligence to learn what your web server normally is exposed to. So normally you get 90% of your customers out of Australia for instance, and only 10% out of the US and suddenly you start to get 99% of your requests starting to come out of Russia or China or the UK or wherever. And that's not normal. And then the security proxy will go "Actually, well, let's have a look at what that is. And based on AI we'll then make a decision." Say, "Hey, hold on a minute. This is actually an attack happening because this is not what we've seen the last year on average."
So they're really smart. So don't underestimate them. They're very cheap for what they provide in terms of security. And that'll provide your front end, your web server, which is really important. Because if your web server gets compromised as a business, and someone puts the Iranian flag on there with ISIS stuff and whatever. That's not something that you want on your website, or worse, illegal materials, illegal content. They could put all kinds of things on your web server and if you get caught with that on your web server, you're in deep trouble, legal trouble at that point. So you really want your web server to be very secure. So put that in front of CloudFlare or similar kind of service and you'll be sleeping a lot better.
So the other thing that I'm recommending as well is, use the Cloud more. The Cloud is actually really secure if you do it properly. Cloud services, Cloud web servers, everything is all monitored. And you can automatically update that without having any downtime whatsoever. Everything is automatically backed up for you in three physical stores, locations if you want that to happen. Everything's kept up to date. So you kind of remove the human element a little bit from the maintenance aspects if you use Cloud. And the human element like you said, that's one of the biggest elements in terms of security issues, it's the human element. So if you can remove that by going Cloud, that's actually a good thing.
Now you do need to use the Cloud very securely. There are ... I would definitely advise doing a training. So Microsoft offers one, Amazon offers a training as well. If you purchase a contract with the Cloud, they might even offer you something for free. Who knows. So that's something that I definitely advise doing. Get a training, don't just go into the Cloud without having had training because, you'll end up on the front page. Because, you've left a particular what they call buckets with information exposed to the internet. And that's really bad because, once it's ... everything in the Cloud is on the internet, right? So you need to lock that down.
So before you put it in the Cloud, get some training. Usually it is three or five days with training for your IT staff. And then consider getting stuff into the Cloud. Because it is ultimately if done properly very secure. More secure, I would say than most organisations I have to manage. Because a lot of the aspects of security are actually managed by a company that does a really good job of doing security, whether that's Microsoft or Amazon or Google or some other provider of Cloud services. They cannot be seen as not doing security because, if one of their servers ever gets hacked, it'll hurt their business too much. So they invest a lot of money into security. So that's the third piece of advice there.
And then the fourth one which is a really good one as well I think. Personal security, use a password database.
Joshua Lewis: Yup LastPass.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, LastPass is a good one. KeePass is the one I personally use because it's offline.
Joshua Lewis: Really good.
Alex Penrose: LastPass is really good yeah. There's a lot of really good ones out there. Just have a look at the history. Just Google, "Has LastPass ever been hacked? Has KeePass ever been hacked?" Whatever, just get some information. Don't just go with a random password provider if they have ever been hacked in the last few years. And I would suggest not going with those particular ones. But LastPass is a really good one, KeePass is a really good one as well. And the benefit of using that, is that you don't reuse passwords because by now most people would have hundreds of websites with a council there.
You might just go shopping for shoes and you need an account on there. You might go shopping for motorcycle parts and you need an account on there. You have an account on eBay, you have an account on Facebook, Google, Gmail, Hotmail various accounts. So it's very easy to get to more than a hundred accounts. And a human brain, typical human brain is not able to remember all those passwords. So what people start doing is, they start reusing the same password and the same user ready for the various ... for their work but also for the personal accounts.
So if one of those accounts then gets hacked, and people are able to find your username and your password in one service, then it might be able to break into your work, or your VPN account, or your web server because you use the same account details there. Now this can be overcome with a password database. So the way that I use password is, just every single account that I have is a unique generated 30 plus character password that is generated by KeePass. If someone were to try and get the password from me for a particular website, I could not give it to them. They could torture me, I could simply not give it to them because I do not know my passwords. They are automatically generated in a password database and they are stored there. Sorry, you wanted to say something?
Joshua Lewis: No. I was going to say ... what you're saying is ... what's the term that hackers use when they find out one password and then go and hook into other accounts? Because it's if someone has reversing-
Alex Penrose: I think you're looking for Natural Movement maybe so-
Joshua Lewis: It's like my fitness pal accounts were broken into only recently, where they've got millions and millions of passwords. If you use that same password for LinkedIn they're in your LinkedIn, but as you said, if you use a Password database manager, they're not.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, password reuse. You have password reuse. And the way that, if you use a password on one side and you use it on the other as well, you can basically possibly reuse. You can reuse it in another service as well. And this is actually a big issue because, you can go to a particular website. I can't remember the name. It's a guy in the Gold Coast who manages that. You might know the website.
Joshua Lewis: Yeah, I do.
Alex Penrose: Have I Been Pwned.
Joshua Lewis: Yeah that's it.
Alex Penrose: That's the one. And you can actually look up your email address to see if your password has ever been exposed anywhere. And if your password ... and this is some something I'd advise everyone doing just check your work email and check your personal email to see if that email address has ever been compromised. Because if it was compromised, I would start changing passwords really quickly if you have been reusing the same password. So this again, if you use a password database, you only need to change that one password that was compromised, not all your passwords.
Joshua Lewis: It makes it so easier, and especially if using say a password database as well as with as many services as possible. Two factor authentication and ...
Alex Penrose: Yes, two factor authentication very, very important. I would advise using two factor authentication on most important administrative accounts at your workplace. So if you manage a firewall, definitely have ... because that's one of the key security devices in your network. Use two factor authentication at work, but also personal. For your Facebook or for your LinkedIn use two factor authentication, unless you don't care about your account being compromised. In which case, it comes down to risk assessment, isn't it? Do I care about this account being compromised? Do I care about this shoe shopping account that I have that I created 10 years ago? I never shop for shoes there anymore. As long as I don't have any financial details, link there, personal details, you might just think, Oh, actually I don't really care if they get compromised or not. I'll just put a really hot password on it, save it in my KeePass and never actually look back.
The other benefit of KeePass is that it automatically enters your passwords for you. So if you go to a website, you don't need to type your password anymore, it does it for you. So you go to a website, then you're automatically logged in, in a secure way. So that's another benefit of using KeePass. So it's not just more secure. It is also more user friendly and that's how I was able to sell it to some businesses. You start using it ... once you use it. It's really good.
Joshua Lewis: People don't want to remember their passwords as you said. They have too many things to remember. Too many other things that are going through their mind and it's unnatural to remember what can end up looking like a 30 long character string of hieroglyphics. So it's sensible to me and it should look like that. I'm not saying don't use your mother's maiden name, zero, exclamation mark or the word password with an exclamation mark that is not secure. That is-
Alex Penrose: That's it, it's one password. Password one most common passwords.
Joshua Lewis: One of the best passwords that I had someone come to me with and they said, Oh yeah, I believe to log into my computer, the password ... I said, well what's your password? He said, what password? And I said, you pop up your computer is what password? And the guy's, "It's what password? Capital W capital P. What password is the password. And I was "All right, that is terrible."
Alex Penrose: Yeah. Well if you can't use a password database for whatever reason, the most secure way in terms of making it as unbreakable as you can ... Nothing is unbreakable given enough time of course. But use full words put together even in low capitals, it doesn't matter. So horse, bank, suitcase, school, four random words put together is incredibly difficult for a computer to break, but incredibly easy for a person to remember. So, if you absolutely cannot or don't want to use password databases, then use full words together. Random ones.
Joshua Lewis: And you can make those words something easy enough to remember. Like your name Alex. You could have the word apple, elephants, Lima, xenon, or something like that. And it would be easy enough to remember it's your name, Alex. But it's your words and incredibly beautiful.
Alex Penrose: And from a computer perspective, it would take millions or billions of years to crack such a password like that. It would be unfeasible in terms of time to crack, something like that. But from a human perspective, still fairly easy to remember. So don't try and remember the really difficult passwords with all kinds of things in it. Make it long and make them just normal words, and put together four words or five words and you're good. Very difficult to break that.
If people make good backups and they use password database, they use CloudFlare, use Cloud services. I really do believe that Cloud services are more secure than most networks in Australia. Because of that focus on security, right? These Amazons and Microsofts, they employ some of the biggest brains and security in the world to work for them. So I think that's a really good thing to do as well. So I think we covered a lot of the simple do's and don'ts of security.
Joshua Lewis: Cool. Well, Alex, it's been lovely speaking with you and I really appreciate you coming on the show and going through some of the different dos and do-nots for security, giving a few different tips there. And if anyone is looking to get more advice or maybe even get their network tested out, jollyfrogs.com would be somewhere to be checking out to start off with and having a late through and jump through some of the different potential vulnerabilities you have in your network.
Alex Penrose: Yeah, absolutely. And for training as well. OECP, OSCE kind of preparation trainings or Assembly or Exploit Development. Send me an email and I can give you some training.
Joshua Lewis: Cool. Well is there anything that you'd like to go through before we finish off?
Alex Penrose: No. I think that's it.
Joshua Lewis: Thank you very much for your time.
Alex Penrose: Thank you for having me.
Alex Penrose: Thank you very much.
Joshua Lewis: Thanks. Bye.
How to Recession-Proof Your Mindset
Special episode featuring business coach Tyson Sharpe. Check out Tyson's Facebook group Connect, Contribute, Collaborate: https://www.facebook.com/groups/connectcontributecollaborate/
Learn more on how to recession-proof your mindset at dorksdelivered.com.au
Josh: Good morning everyone, and welcome to this podcast. Today we've got a fantastic guest with us. We've got Tyson Sharpe and it's going to be a doozy of an episode. We're going to be talking about recession proofing, your mindset. Tyson tell me a bit about what you do.
Tyson: Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me. I always love doing these interviews and love sharing this type of stuff. But basically what I described as what I do is I help business owners and CEOs basically understand what's happening in their unconscious mind when they see these patterns of fears, doubts and frustrations arise. And so, we can have a different relationship with them. So, not only can we start to resolve those internal conflicts, but we can start having more success in business or in whatever ventures we're in, just as a byproduct of who it been. So, that's really where my work and my expertise lies.
Josh: Sweet. Well, I know that it's, everything comes down to mindset. I started today with the eight suspicious transactions on my credit card and I thought no, so here we go. How's this week going to be? And I thought, you know what? I could smile off or cry. A rang through to the bank, got the transactions, looked at, had the credit card pause and then laugh.
Tyson: You've got to stop sharing your details on the podcast.
Josh: That's probably a good hint and tip there for anyone out there and security learn. So, if you had to go through different situations that you've seen and I think it's an imminent to the situation we're in in Australia with the recession, and that can bring about nasty thought, patterns and am I going to be successful or why are people disappearing? Why are they leaving and things like that.
And it's a lot of the time not due to your own doing. How do you make sure that you have... what hints and tips would you give to make sure that you do continue on a positive train of thought in making sure that you're aware of your emotions and you keep up with your emotional fitness.
Tyson: Yeah, sure. So, one piece of the awareness I would give people, and people can find this in themselves as well, is that when you have something like some uncertainties in your environment or you have some uncertainties in the future around finances or what's going to happen, whatever it may be, if you feel triggered by that, if you feel the scarcity, if you feel lack, if you feel overwhelmed uncertainty, what you have to understand is those patterns were already in you, right?
So, if the recession comes or the recession's on its way or it's sort of slowly moving its way in, and that trigger you, what you have to know is that pattern was already in you. So, your external environments just triggered what was already in you. Right? So, what a lot of people will do is they'll try to solve their internal, how they feel and the uncertainty with the external results, right?
So, they're like, "Oh, I just got to make more money or I just got to save this or whatever." And that's where I sort of find with a lot of business owners is they try to resolve the internal conflict with something externally. Or another way to put that as you're trying to achieve something external by filling a void within yourself. Right?
Josh: Yeah.
Tyson: So, if you're looking to achieve, if you're looking to get more money, more success, more fame or whatever it may be, what I find is a lot of people are doing that through an unconscious pattern of trying to solve an internal conflict, right? An internal void within themselves that they can't solve any other way because they didn't have the heightened awareness yet.
And so, I like to raise that awareness so that people can actually start seeing what's going on within them and actually what's driving them, right? So a lot of people are trying to achieve success and they're thinking, yeah, I just want the best life possible. But what they don't understand is what unconsciously what's happening is they're trying to achieve at a different level because it's some level within themselves they're trying to feel enough or they're trying to feel worthy.
And that's why I find a lot of people are trying to build a business based on fear, based on scarcity and based on lack, which obviously is not sustainable.
Josh: So, I guess in that situation you'd be saying that maybe the measuring stick that they're using and what successes should be changed?
Tyson: Totally. So, in terms of, it's not only the measuring stick, but it's also what's driving you. It's also what's giving you the fuel? Is it a push or is it a pull? Is it something that you feel like you have to do in order to be enough? Right?
Josh: Mm-hmm
Tyson: Or is it a pull, is it like a calling to you? Is it like when, so for example, if your internal and external world was exactly the way you wanted it, would you still have a calling to do the exact same thing right?
Josh: Right. Do you wake up to do it or is it a job or is it a lifestyle I guess, is this something you would do if you were retired and you had all the time, money in the world or you found out you had a terminal illness or something like that?
Tyson: Yeah, exactly. So, that's where I find a lot of people are trying to achieve because they're trying to feel that void within themselves. And that's why when they run into all the fears, doubts and frustrations, they're not too sure what to do and all of a sudden they think they need to change their external circumstances in order to feel a certain way. And obviously if you're trying to achieve something externally to feel a certain way, a lot of that can be outside your control.
That's what sort of like drives people crazy, right? Trying to change things outside of their control and thinking that that impedes on how they feel on a day to day basis. So, that's the sort of awareness that I like to sort of raise with people.
Josh: So, bringing awareness to the problem I think is very important. I know that I went through a darkest portion in my life, if I could call it that. And I wrote down a list of all the things that make me happy. All the things that make me sad. And one of the things was things outside of my control.
And I was becoming aware of that, it allowed me to think, okay, now that I'm aware that that's outside of my control, I now know that something that makes me upset. But you can then change your emotions and change your relationship with that situation once you become aware of it. Would you say that's an approach that you would take, yeah?
Tyson: Totally. So, that's the sort of what I call the first step.
Josh: Correct.
Tyson: So, in the business. So, everyone loves personal development, right? So, we love improving ourselves and so we love being able to reframe our thoughts and shift our state and learn how to feel better. Right? I call that's sort of first step. That's the pillar because that it's a good first step because it shows you that you are in control of your emotions and that it's actually your thoughts that lead to any emotions, not the circumstance themselves.
So, that's a really, really good platform and it really sets the stage for personal development and for you to become the director of your own life. What I find what other people like my clients and my community is doing is just going that layer deeper.
So, in terms of when they already know that, okay, my feelings and everything in my internal world is being driven by my thoughts and my internal pattern's not the circumstance themselves. One thing that you can start doing is when you do have emotions like fear, like doubt, like worry, scarcity, overwhelmed. When those feelings start to come up, instead of changing your emotion straight away, what you can actually start doing is starting to have a very, very different relationship with those patterns.
Because what I found in my work coaching hundreds of business owners in the last couple of years is that, when these patterns arise, say a pattern of fear, so you've got the recession, you got external circumstances that are outside your control and you have this fear come up. What a lot of people do is, they avoid that feeling or they resist that feeling so they can avoid it by, like I said, by shifting your state and avoiding that feeling all by trying to change your external circumstances so that you don't feel that feeling right?
Avoiding the circumstance, avoiding a situation that would make that feeling arise or they resist it. They resist it by not allowing it. So, they resist it by making it wrong. They resist it by thinking it shouldn't be there. They resist it by trying to fix it. Right? And so, what happens is when you have any emotion that arises, like fear and you avoid or resist it, it actually grows unconsciously. You're actually pushing down a side of you unconsciously. And that takes a lot of unconscious energy, but also allows that pattern to grow.
So, it's almost like, if you were to have a five year old come to you, and they're running chaos, right? So, they're a bit scared. They're worried, they're fearful, and for a bit of peace, what you do is, you go and you place that five-year-old in a different room in the house.
And so, you place the five-year-old in a different room, you come back to the room you're in and it feels more peaceful. Right? It feels more peaceful. But-
Josh: It's not.
Tyson: ... that five-year-old's still running chaos in the other room. Right? And they're probably doing it a different level, and in a different manner, because they're in a different room just running chaos. And that's what I find that a lot of business owners do, when these patterns arise is they avoid them. Right? Or they resist them.
And so I find when people shift out of those patterns quickly, and they try to fix them, or they think something's wrong, they grow unconsciously. So, you can feel better on the surface with some personal development, and you're shifting your thoughts and reframing and all those really, really good tools. But unless you resolve that conflict, it's always going to grow unconsciously.
Josh: Okay. And so, what would you say is the first step? Well, yeah, I guess we were talking about writing them down and becoming aware of them, but how do you know some people have had these ingrained in their life for so long that they're not even aware that there was some something like, I guess the old Hollywood scenario of you go and see a psychologist and they say all the problems stem back to your mother?
Tyson: No. What should?
Josh: And then how do you become aware that that's an issue?
Tyson: Well, you can only become aware of what's in your conscious mind, right? So, what's coming up consciously that you can recognise are your emotions. We're genuinely pretty aware when we're fearful, when we do have this emotion of worry or stress, right? We totally do have those emotions and we're generally pretty aware of them.
And so, I find it is true. A lot of your emotional patterns do come back to your childhood, right? Because we have conditioned in our lives, we have conditioned patterns that say who do I need to be and what needs to happen in order for me to be enough? Because if I'm enough, therefore I'll be loved and unconsciously love is linked to survival.
So, that's why when we have an obstacle in our way between us and success, it can often feel like life and death because at some level it is to our unconscious mind. But you can definitely be aware of the emotions you're feeling and you don't actually need to know where it's coming from. It can help.
You don't actually need to know where it's coming from to resolve the internal conflict, to resolve that pattern. What you actually need to do is feel it, is to feel that pattern without any resistance, without any judgement . And if you allow it to be there and not need it to leave, that's when the pattern starts to resolve.
Josh: Okay. So, I guess, where do you start? I guess I know you've got a Facebook group. What are the other tools that you use or that you have to help people out with this?
Tyson: Yeah, sure. I have, yeah, so many things. I've got the Facebook group and the YouTube channel and all those different things. The type of exercises or content or whatever it may be that helps people most, is helping them become aware that, so, to feel these patterns, so to feel when these emotions arise and to feel them fully. The way I sort of explain it, we'll stick to the five year old analogy.
So, it's like when this patterns arising, let's say fear for example, if fear is arising within you, it's almost like an internal five of year old that's scared, right? So, for the recession, for example, recession's happening a lot of uncertainty, you're not too sure about your financial future. And all of a sudden you have fear.
Now, what's actually happening is you have a pattern within you that was, I call it your five year old self, right? You have a pattern that was generally conditioned in your childhood that says, and that this pattern and his five year old within you believes that you need to have finances in order to feel enough or you need to have finances in order to be okay, in order to be safe, in order to be secure.
Josh: Okay. And that could be depending on how your parents brought you up or the lifestyle that they had or other aspects like that.
Tyson: There's so many factors. So, that's why I find it can help to identify the story, but it's not necessary. It's not an absolute puzzle piece to figuring out all of this, but it can help to understand that there is a five year old within you, a five-year-old pattern that does believe that something, that your financial future needs to be secure in order for you to be secure. Or you need money in order to feel enough and worthy, right? Or in order to feel safe.
So, this five-year-olds freaking out. And what's emerging in the form of fear. It's almost like your internal five-year-old freaking out saying external circumstances aren't the way we think they should be. And so, the reason why this five-year-old's emerging, is so it can be seen, is so it can be heard, so it can be understood and loved.
So, it's almost like that five-year-old coming up to you, right when you're in your house or whatever it may be. And this five year old is trying to be seen, trying to be heard. And that's why when a lot of people try to avoid them, or resist them, using the analogy of putting them in the other room. That's why that pattern grows unconsciously because it's not seen, and all fear will continue the more you don't want it to be there, and the more it's not seen. But fear will resolve and you can almost feel it start to dissolve within you.
The moments that it's seen, the moment that it's understood and the moment that it's loved unconditionally. Another way of putting that is, fear will always resolve when you don't need it to leave. When you don't need it to leave and you just sit there and you feel it fully and you love that pattern and you listen to it, and you allow it to be there. That's when the pattern starts resolving. That's when it's [crosstalk 00:18:40]-
Josh: There was just exactly what you're talking about. I might be misquoting this a bit, but are you familiar with the story of the turtle and the hungry fox about-
Tyson: I'm not.
Josh: It is a story told by Buddha and sorry for anyone that's listening as I'm terribly, it's terribly reiterating this wrong, but the fox sees this turtle and gets something to eat this turtle. This is going to be amazing and runs over to the turtle. The turtle pulls itself into the shell, instead of running away knowing that it won't ever be able to run away from something, the turtle in the situation would be fear as for the fox in the situation would be fear.
The turtle pulls itself into the shell, not to necessarily protect itself, but to look within its own mind is the metaphor there to find and be within its own mind to be able to look outwards once the fear is gone. But battling the fee and not running away from it, was the sort of the analogy there. So, that'd be similar-
Tyson: Yeah, exactly.
Josh: I guess to sort of what you're sort of describing there. And it's definitely something that everyone needs to do. There's a lot of people that suffer from anxiety and I think anxiety is just, and this is again as a generalisation, it is a disease, but it's when we're not put in a situation where we're asked to grow beyond our comfort circle. You build up more and more of a problem and that's where you need to sometimes just battle up and jump straight forward through it.
And that's stress. I guess another immersion, if you have stress a lot of the time it's because it's something that's important to you. You have anxiety because it's important to you. And so you need to know how to deal with that and be able to jump through those hoops so that you can overcome some of those five year old child, five year old self problems that you might have that have been ingrained into your belief systems.
Tyson: Totally. I love that story. And it's true, if you are trying to solve something by running away from it, it's never going to work out. It's always going to be a downward spiral. But the moments you evolve are the moments when you know you need to look in. All the answers you have are within. And that's what a huge shift in my life has been, is when I have all this fear, doubt and frustration, and I realise that everything I want to achieve externally is internal.
Every answer is found internally. And I am the answer that I'm looking for. And so, when I go in and meditate, for example, or I look in and resolve these internal conflicts, the external success is just the byproduct, all right? The excellent success in terms of the wherever it may be, the clients, the income, the Facebook group, whatever it may be.
All of that is just growing just as a byproduct of the resolving these internal conflicts, because you can't help it evolve, you can't help, you're like a helium balloon that always just wants to expand and rise up.
[crosstalk 00:21:54] A lot of us have the patterns that keep pushing the balloon down. So, once you resolve these internal conflicts, you naturally just float up. You naturally just move into a higher level of consciousness and a higher level of success, high level of contribution because that's naturally where we move, that's naturally where we go when we start resolving these patterns.
Josh: Well, I couldn't agree more and having the best mindset and I've got a podcast and a YouTube video on mirror mindset. And looking within, because it is ultimately, it's where everything sits. The six inches between your ears is the most important six inches you have in your body. That's right. It's funny. So, yeah. Meditation doesn't have to be difficult to either. I know that you are a king spear who's meditates for a couple of hours a day, is that right?
Tyson: Correct. Yeah. So I meditate. I've gone past a hundred days of meditating, two hours a day. And a lot of people freak out when they think of themselves doing the same, like how do you have the time? How the hell do you run a business and do all of this when you're meditating two hours a day. And I just find that when I wake up, I can feel when I'm in my head I'm like, I need to have this to do list. Right?
Josh: Yes.
Tyson: And my mind has a story of what I think I need to do in order to be okay. In order to be successful, in order to feel enough, in order to feel worthy. And then when I sit down and meditate for an hour, and I do at least an hour in the morning before I do anything, before I check my phone or emails, whatever it may be, social media.
And so, when I do that, I come out of meditation knowing I don't have to do any of that. And in fact that was just a story I was telling myself. And then the actions taken moving forward, I'd just from such a guided place, it's from such a resourceful place. It's from a space of creativity and flow and that's why the success is the byproduct.
When you're in flow, like you're unstoppable, right? When you're in flow and you've resolved some of your patterns and your internal conflicts and you start to love these five year olds so they can transcend, you just naturally fit into a flow and into a creativity. And you can start to feel when things feel heavy, when things feel a lot. And you can just stop moving from a place that's a higher guidance system.
And that's what I find is, that's the flip that where everything sort of changes, and everyone sort of starts to notice that the answers are within them and they can just move from that place and they can be guided from that place and then they start to realise the success that they find is a byproduct. It's really just it's your own natural, it's the internal work that matters most and the external that is just the secondary gain.
Josh: I would absolutely agree. I would say the best way to describe it in my opinion is everyone has experienced that writer's block is experience where you're there in front of the computer or pen on paper and you are like, honey just got to get this thing done and it might be a school assignment, might be an assessment, it might be something that's due the next day at work or, and you're just going through.
I can't get it, and nothing is working. Nothing is working. A lot of the time, the amount of time that you sit there pestering your brain with negative thoughts saying, I can't get it, it's not working, I can't think of it. This is just crap, but I'm writing. Your conscious mind is passing all that to your unconscious mind and you're in 100% belief that you cannot do it, and you won't be able to do it.
And then, as soon as you hit that point, which is the normally hours before it's due, or the night before, and then you have these cram sessions or this epiphany where this writer's blocks removed and you just have this huge amount of work that just comes out of you. And you think, "Wow, where did that all come from?" And as you said, it's always been within you and it's that you had this shift at a time where you went, "Okay, the negative of me not doing this work is now worse if I don't get it in because then I might not get the university degree or I might not get that promotion or whatever is at the end.”
And so, the two balances of evil weigh each other out until you finally get it done. But if you meditate and if you, instead of procrastinating and having those negative thoughts, if you're, instead of spending the same time meditating, you'd find most people would have an easily an hour a day where they would be just procrastinating that they could easily be spending on meditation and positive thought training rather than sitting there not working, but waiting to work sort to speak.
Tyson: Yeah, and I did this for like when I just started to, okay, I'm going to look internal. I'm going to resolve whatever patterns are emerging. I'm going to start to see, I'm just going to experiment. I actually did six hours in one day, just meditating and just in silence, complete silence, just sitting there. And that's scary to a lot of people, right? Very, very scary to a lot of people, and it was scary for me as well. And that's the exact reason why I thought I needed to do this.
We live in a world where we are scared of what's emerging within us. We're scared of our thoughts, we're scared of our emotions. We're scared of just sitting there in silence. That's alarming to me, and my thought was how the hell is building a business or living the life you want, in terms of what you want to feel, and the relationships you want to have, and the contribution you want to make? How the hell is all that going to happen? How the hell is that sustainable? If I'm not okay with what's emerging within me, right?
This doesn't make sense. It does not make sense if you're scared of the thoughts that are coming up or if you're scared of the emotions, like wouldn't that be something that needs to be addressed? Like wouldn't that be something? And so, when I sat down, I'm like I'm going to meditate for six hours, and I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's going to come out of it, but all I know is I'm going to find out who I am.
And so, for hours I just had all these patterns and all of these stories of like, oh my God, you're irresponsible, you should be doing income generating activities, right? I felt guilty, so much guilt come up, all these thoughts around why, I shouldn't do it. And as I just sat there, I allowed it. I realised these were just five year old patterns that needed love, needed to be seen. And one by one, all those patterns just started falling away.
All those stories, all of those patterns just melted away. And then I just sat there and I just kept feeling what was coming up. And I was just a space that all this was emerging in. And then, that's when I started having the biggest levels of creativity and flow and alignment. And yet a lot of patterns came up. There was a lot of sadness, right?
I opened up a safe enough space for more and more five year olds to come to be seen. And I had sadness around past relationships. I had so much uncertainty around money come up, uncertainty about business, and finance, and clients I had, and all these different things. I just allowed it to be there, I just welcomed it, I loved all of it. I just sat there and just paid attention to what these patterns are saying. And one by one I just resolved them and then they transcended, and then more came up and that transcended and what was left.
It was just this infinite flow like you described, if you're, would you rather be in? Would you rather be in a situation where you're like, I have to write this blog or I have to finish piece of work. And we're there when we're grinding an hour, we're trying to finish this blog. But then there's moments when the blog writes, you sit there and you're like, "Oh my God, I have to get this down."
And you're just in flow and it's like everything else doesn't matter, and time stands still and you just, you're flowing with this blog and it's riding you. And that's what I find is possible. That's what I find, if you build a business based on that energy, based on that pattern where it's just emerging and flowing out of you, then that's it.
Then that's a pattern that's sustainable, that's a business that's sustainable, that's a business that will be focused on growth, focused on vulnerability, focused on love, contribution, all those things that you know you are, instead of the fear, lack and worry and fear that we sort of explained before.
Josh: And you're not pushing against yourself, which is really important.
Tyson: Exactly.
Josh: You're working with yourself, with your own goals and your own mindset. And I would like in this, obviously as with a computer background, I would like in a meditation to defragging your brain. As you said, you've got all these distractions all the time. You've got more than 350, 400 pieces of advertisement that's sent to you every day in one form or another to try and promote someone's product and do something here and something there.
You've got people talking to you about is this thing done? Is the timeline done? Do you have this other thing done? Is this thing paid? All these things are going through your mind all the time, and you don't give yourself a moment to just breathe. And defragging your brain is putting everything in order, putting things in the right place, finding those priorities, finding the things that are important and letting your brain do the walking for you.
Letting your brain do the calculations for you as opposed to you trying to dictate what's meant to be happening. There's 86,400 seconds in the day and people don't give enough time to themselves. People give themselves heaps of time to their clients, their family, their friends, their social posts. Their liking, whatever they're doing at the time, but they don't give that moment to themselves where they're not off when they're asleep and on when they're awake.
They need to have that moment of reflection for themselves. And what you were saying, again on the 86,400 seconds in a day, during the day, some are like, "Aw man, you're a dickhead." And they say something about it and you go, "Oh man, I'm so offended when they said that, I had so much respect for them. Why would they say that?" And then you're there pondering over that one small comment and it might've just been like an off the cuff thing that you misunderstood the tonality in their voice.
Like "Oh man, how are you even dickhead?" And you go, "Ah, okay." And then you're overthinking that problem. I don't know. I'm guilty of that. I've had situations where I've thought of something that someone has said even years later when I saw them again, I'm thinking, Oh, you said that to me. And they probably thought about it, said it as a funny joke and they continued on.
And meanwhile, your brain is sitting there stewing over this one thing that they've said that's changed around the relationship with that person. It changed around your and mindset and burnt away a lot more time than the 86,000 and then the 10 seconds that might've been that they said it. And it's eaten into the 86,400 seconds in the rest of your day or even onwards.
So, meditation is in very, very needed in the society, and it doesn't need to be hard. I started off looking at a candle and breathing deeply, holding my breath for a second and then breathing out and doing that 10 times or looking at a candle in a dark room with no distractions. And that is, in my opinion, one of the easiest forms of meditation to just start. What would you say? Where would you start? Where would you go from, some of these?
Tyson: I mean, I meditate a lot, but I'm not the meditation expert. I've really done to teach on it or anything like that. But I think meditation is a tool just for you to connect with yourself at a different level. So, that's the way I describe it. I call it the may-first meditation, where that's when I meditate, before I do anything else in the day, I'll just sit, I'll just wake up, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, and then just sit down in silence for an hour.
But I say meditation as the opportunity for you to hold the space, to allow what's emerging to emerged. So, if you just sit there in silence and you'll start noticing all these thoughts, you may notice some emotions. That's just the space. Because what you're feeling emotionally, you're feeling it. It's coming up so that it can be transcended. It's coming up so that it can be released.
That's what I know a lot of people understand. If you have fear, doubt, why are you scarcity that's coming up because it's ready to be emerged. Like the five year old sees you as safe enough to approach you, right? The five year olds approaching you because he wants to be seen, heard, understood and loved. And the five year old feels safe enough to come to you, right to be seen. And that's what's happening when these emotions arise?
And so, instead of seeing the patterns and allowing them to transcend, we're neglecting them, or resisting them, right? It's almost like going exactly going out to that five year old and saying, it's wrong you're feeling this way or go away until you feel better or you need to be fixed on how much is the five year old going to feel seen.
Of course not. And so, I find in meditation, it's giving you the space for you to feel and for you to notice what's happening internally and transcend these patterns that are ready to be released. Transcending these patterns that are going to give you the deeper connection with yourself. Because what's trying to emerge is not you. Right?
Another analogy is that everything that's emerging is trying to die. It's trying to die. It's trying to move on because it's showing you what you're not. You're not these emotions, you're not these patterns. You are not your thoughts, right? You're the space at all of that exists in.
And so, when you can start to tap into meditation, you can start to sit down and start to, whether you are looking at a candle, whether you are in nature, whether you are just sitting there in your room and just paying attention internally. It gives you that space for you to start loving those patterns. Start seeing, start noticing, start to hear those patterns and allow them to transcend and feel them fully so that they can transcend. And so, I find meditation for me is more of a self-connection than anything. And so, there's many, many ways you can do it. But that's just the way I view it.
Josh: Cool. Right. I'd agree it's all about becoming connected in your special way that allows for you to do that. So, I guess for anyone that is listening, that is worried about the recession or doesn't feel aligned or doesn't feel enough, I know that you've got the Facebook group, you've also got a course that people can look to. Is that right?
Tyson: Yeah, totally. So, the Facebook group is Connect, Contribute, Collaborate. So, that's the group where there's a lot of online business owners there, that are looking to do this in a work, but then they're also looking to connect with one another and they're connecting to form collaborations, joint ventures, all those really cool business things. And they know that that group is a group of heart-centred business owners who are looking to transcend these patterns who are looking to use that excess creativity and flow to add more value to their marketplace.
So, there's a lot of value in that group and it's a really cool group. It's so engaging, everyone's looking to find ways to do joint ventures and collaborations. And then another aspect we're doing is we're actually going to combine our resources, combine our business brains, our expertise, and we're actually going to start donating some time towards charity and some non for profit organisations and helping them build their businesses as well.
So, it's a really, really cool group that's actually making a difference. And so, that's what makes me super excited about it and super excited about the people that are in it as well.
Josh: Cool. Well, I'm definitely keen to see what comes with it and if anyone wants to reach out and see what some of the awesome work that Tyson does, definitely jump across that Facebook group, would be a good entry point to start on your new journey of making sure that you have a recession proof mindset, and you're emotionally attached to your goals, I guess. Well, is there anything else you'd like to cover off on Tyson before we cruise off?
Tyson: Oh man, there's so many different things that I could talk about. But the main takeaway is to just notice when you're resisting, and notice when you're avoiding those emotional patterns and your life will take a complete flip in the moments when you actually start to drop the resistance to those patterns. Right?
Every emotion is never the problem. It's always a resistance to it. And so if you want to really start shifting, then dropping that resistance, dropping the judgement of what you're feeling and actually stop feeling without resistance is where I would say the biggest takeaway is.
So, if people wanting to do that work, then that's where I'm always looking to support and I think it's going to be a complete game changer for so many business owners, and that's just what I'm passionate about. So, that's what I would leave you with.
Josh: Cool. I guess engaging and embracing.
Tyson: Mm-hmm.
Josh: Well, it's been lovely having you on the show Tyson and I look forward to some of the new cool stuff that will come through over the next few months. I've been checking out some of the bits and pieces on your YouTube channel and I'm sure we'll have some of our listeners do the same. So, if anyone has enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across the iTunes and leave us your reviews, some loving the comments and any questions you might have to Tyson. Thank you very much.
Tyson: Awesome, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me Josh.
Tips for Automating Your Business With Chatbots
Josh: So I've got Mike here from Chatbot Agency, and as everyone knows, I'm all about automation. The one thing that everyone needs to do in their business is automate, automate, automate, and he's got a fantastic product, a fantastic system, that allows for you to create something that you would never have been able to do 20, 30 years ago. He's able to create the human conversation in a digital world. Now tell me Mike, why did you get into this?
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Mike: Well Josh, great question. I was a Facebook Ads dude. And we used to drive a lot of traffic from Facebook into landing pages, and based on the analytics and the backend material that we were looking at, at least 50% who were clicking on the ad weren't actually making it to the landing page. Obviously, because they load too slow and when they get there they're going to have to put their details in. So capturing leads meant that out of the 50% that was left there, we might end up, luckily, and this is being conservative, we might end up with 15 or 20% that might actually put their email address in. Now, back in the late 90s while mucking around with automation WeChat, we built a platform whereby we were going to put chat in there.
We left that on the back burner, and then as soon as Mark Zuckerberg opened up the API for Facebook Messenger, we thought, "Wow, I wonder if this could respond the same way SMS marketing works," because we were all mobile marketers. So we mucked around for about a week and we actually got Messenger to respond back to us and we thought, "Hey shit, we're on a winner. How cool is that?"
So getting back to the initial bit, Facebook Ads played a big part. So now we're able to take them from Ads into Messenger and actually start having a conversation with people and find out exactly what they really want from that business.
Josh: Cool. So I guess your end goal is to turn someone without a face, that doesn't know your business into giving someone a face around your business and their business and making sure they start doing business with your business. So that'd be right?
Mike: That would be absolutely spot on. Remember Josh, every transaction starts with a conversation. That's in the real world.
Josh: You don't want to remove that personal touch. And that's something that I think is really, really good with the way that you've actually created your application because you're able to get the details, get the nitty gritties, the bits and pieces they need to get in a very, very human way. Would you agree?
Mike: Totally, absolutely. You still have to remember, it's still machines talking, so we don't want it to make it too human. But at the end of the day, mate, if we can start bringing in tomorrow's prospects overnight, so when you start work first thing in the morning, you've got a nice bag of prospects sitting in there you just have to convert and then you can go knock off and go home at 10 o'clock.
Josh: And that's ultimately what it's all about. If you've got a money-making engine that's just driving income, if you've got the ability to have a 24-hour salesperson, the ability to make sure that when you've created something and you've created a process, people are able to follow that process and you've got people falling through and into your funnel, filling up your funnel and you're removing any of the friction such as, as you said, like slow landing pages, you're removing those, you're making sure they have the least friction, a frictionless transaction, you're going to be having conversions go through the roof and as you said, like a 20% conversion on landing page is pretty good. A bad landing page, two to 6% in my experience and you're going up to 20, 22% in a very, very good landing page. So what are you finding your conversions currently?
Mike: So we look at from the ad, we measure the click on the ad and we're effectively converting into the funnel between 20 to 50% of those. So if we have a hundred people click on the ad, we can put 20 to 50 those into my funnel.
Josh: Okay. So that's pretty good. That's definitely much, much better. And the research that I've done and I'm going to be honest to everyone here listening in podcast land, I am a novice when it comes to this, but I will say straight away they are very good conversions.
Now, if we rewind 20 years and as Mike was saying, he was here in the SMS boom and using some mobile marketing stuff. If we rewind 20 years, the effectiveness of email marketing, I would say, is on parity now with what you'd be having with Facebook Messenger marketing. Would you say I'm talking out my arse? Or where are you at?
Mike: Yeah, I would say you're talking out your arse. Messenger is a new beast. So especially when we're talking mixing with Ads, putting the bot inside your website, all that kind of stuff. Obviously it's going to be a bit higher. Messenger, actually, we're getting a higher rate with Messenger that we were with SMS.
Josh: Sweet.
Mike: Especially when you're pushing messages back out. The read rate is somewhere between the 90 to 95% mark. So the strategies we're educating our clients on is getting them into your list, and then use Facebook sponsored messaging from Messenger to pull them back in. And that's where it's going to become a little bit different down the track because that's the way Facebook wants us to go. We believe that that's going to be way out the way what your gang did to get from SMS.
Josh: All right. So hold on. You're saying that not only can you attract them through Facebook using their APIs, you're able to push them into your CRM system from the CRM system, then able to enable any other automated marketing systems that whether it be through email or anything else, is that right?
Mike: Oh, absolutely. No, no. If you can pull the data in you can use any CRM you like. What I'm suggesting here is if it's in Messenger, purely Messenger in your inbox, what we're able to do is push back out to those Messenger users through Messenger.
Mike: So we're getting a higher conversion rate there. So what we're able to do inside Messenger is, imagine this. You can build the best email newsletter along with the best website pushing it out through SMS. That's what Messenger is all about.
Josh: And it's on an engaging platform that everyone's on.
Mike: That's right. And the more you push through it as an engagement, Facebook's AI algorithm was learning. So Facebook now knows where to point the rest of the people who are thinking and talking about the same thing.
Josh: So that's pretty awesome. And I'd say everyone knows what the bell curve is. There's the adoption cycle and then the replication cycle. And then the people that finally jump on at the last stage there. I would say this is something that isn't like a wait until you hear your friend about doing it. Do it now, because you want to be at the start of the adoption cycle.
Mike: Absolutely. Right now, Josh, mate, the number is out. Less than 1% of all business pages have an automated chatbot. There's a lot of business pages out there. There's about 600 million, I think that's the last wacko number they've come up with. They're telephone book numbers of course. But this means there's a lot of opportunities for small business to actually stake their client the same way if you were able to state your claim in 1995 on the internet.
Josh: Well, I think that that that speaks worlds of words. If you're able to get on board now and have this done for your business, you're going to be seeing huge advantages. You're going to be seeing massive, massive lead generation. Your lead funnel's going to be full, really.
Mike: Oh, mate, this is the simplest lead funnel ever invented for mankind.
Josh: I don't need you to go through process and bits and pieces because as everything that lives on the internet lives forever, but my understanding is at the moment it's got a reasonably affordable entry price. Is that right?
Mike: Yeah. I think he used a really good number there. 2020. If you want someone to professionally build it for you, you're looking at 2020. If you want to do it yourself, you can get on there for about 20 bucks and try and build it yourself. Knock yourself out. Anyone can do it. It all depends on, okay, what's your end goal? Do you want to actually turn it into a tool and generate leads and make money and do it the right way, or do you want to try and suffer and do it yourself? Mate, the videos are there, you can do it yourself. We'll provide all those videos. You just value your time, brother.
Josh: I guess that comes down to one of the other episodes we've had there on money and being frugal. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. It depends on what you charge yourself out at and making sure that you work out that's an acceptable rate. What I can say is if you check out Chatbot Agency, you're going to be able to see an amazing result with the professionalism as well as the speed to delivery, to be honest. And when you get that up, tell me, what have you seen? What's the fastest time you've seen a lead generated after you've had one of your bots be thrown up?
Mike: Mate, I love telling this story. I do training for marketing people and it's basically a three or four-hour process, where we go through, we train them how to build the chatbot. So here we are teaching marketing people how to actually set up Facebook Ads and do their targeting. I assisted this young lady with putting together a real estate listing ad for her client. She must've been charging the guy three grand, but she only paid me 900 bucks.
Josh: The story of my life.
Mike: Yeah. So I trained her how to do it all herself and by the time she left my office and she was on the City Cat heading home, this is within an hour of running it, she had a phone call from the real estate agent going, "What is going on? My inbox is killing me. What am I meant to do now?" So that was within an hour.
Josh: So there's no reason why you don't want to grow your business. You've got to jump on this. It's 2020. This is a new technology. You've got to be jumping onto it. Do you have anything else that you'd like to add before we round up this episode for today?
Mike: Mate, I reckon, look, if you're a small business right now and you're not on Facebook, I suggest you do it, because it's going to be hanging around for a while now. There are so many people on the platform.
Josh: It's no longer Myspace, is it?
Mike: No. This has gone way past Myspace and it's probably the best platform where you can target to the right audience from interest-based, and it's actually pretty good fun.
Josh: Cool. So everyone hear that? If you'd like chat bots, chat bot automation or anything like that, makes sure to jump onto Chatbot Agency and you'll be able to get some really, really cool deals thrown through there. I might even be able to get a link here, a specialised link that you'll be able to jump across and check out. It may maybe a cool deal from Dorks Delivered across to you guys. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love and stay good. Enjoy 2020.
122: Your Personal Risk Analysis
There are these almighty scales that you have to try and keep in balance wherever you can, and sometimes, they get out of whack. What we're going to be talking about today is risk analysis, but more specifically, your personal risk analysis.
Learn more about your personal risk analysis at dorksdelivered.com.au
Now, what I mean by that is, if you're in business, you're doing something, hopefully, that other people in your business are not, and that means that you are a key player or performer or cog or reason to be in that business, and you might need to work out a way to overcome that. If you are a key person, you can get insurances to make sure that you are protected if something was to go wrong with you. You can get insurances with any other people in your business, that might be key people, to make sure whatever goes wrong with them doesn't come back and be a problem for you, but you need to have a look at the risk analysis for yourself.
Some people are high-risk takers who will jump out of planes, and go in V8 supercars and all this cool jazz. Some people don't, and wrap themself in bubble wrap, and don't even consider going on a plane. Your risk is up to you and how you go about doing that, but the amount of risk and the things that you do in business needs to be able to be formed up as well. You need to be able to analyse what you're doing, how you're doing it, how you could be doing it better, how you can remove yourself from business by creating standard operating procedures, knowledge-based articles, putting in KPIs for other people to overtake you, and make sure that you're not the person that's blowing the whistle.
Make sure that you're the person who has a whistle, but they're able to pull up themselves from their own mistakes, and that's the big difference between just being a manager and being a leader, making sure they have accountability, and they hold on to the project that they may have thought of, or you've may have guided them with, but more importantly, they hold on to the problems within the project and they're accountable for this.
Being able to analyse your personal risk, and seeing what happens if you remove yourself, and that could be from anything, it could be removing yourself from your kids' lives. Hopefully, it's not. Hopefully, it's spending more time with your kids, and that's why you're able to look at this risk and try and work out a way that you can remove yourself from the business, or remove any other risks from the business and from your life.
I think, back in the day, when I first started the business many, many, many years ago, I had a car, and the car was great, but it wasn't very reliable, and that was a big risk to me. It wasn't reliable, because sometimes, it would just stop working, and it wasn't reliable, because when it stopped working, it meant I was out of work for a long time. So it was not safe, which meant that other people that we're relying upon the services that we were offering could not rely upon myself, personally, but in addition to not being safe, it meant that being not reliable, meant that I had huge risk in keeping that car. Removing that car and buying a better vehicle overcame that risk.
So as I said, maybe just G up some time with yourself and just look at your risk analysis. I don't know. I said G up, that's pretty gangster. This IT guy goes gangster, thug life. Nevertheless, check yourself. Stay good.
The big year is upon us. 2019 is nearly finished and we are going to be talking about how to make sure you have 20/20 vision in 2020. It's clever. You can't do that many times. So I'm going to say it as many times as I can. So we've got a pretty good episode today. I guess it's all around making sure that you have the appropriate goals for your New Year. How do you work out what your New Year's resolution is, and why do most of them fail?
Learn more about setting your 2020 new year resolutions at dorksdelivered.com.au
What is in the Future?
To accompany this, I will actually be popping in a download on this page or in the description below, so check that one out. One big scary thing for businesses currently in 2019 in Australia particularly, is where the interest rates are going, and I am not your financial advisor and if you're trying to get financial advice from me, wooo, you've got to sort that out first. But that should be your New Year's resolution. Don't take your financial advice from a dork. Having said that, the financial situation in Australia with the interest rates potentially going into the negative very shortly shows that we've probably on the verge of a recession, and that means that you need to consider that when moving into 2020. So not only do you need to make sure you have great New Year's resolutions, you need to make sure your recession-proofing your business. This document will cover off on that as well.
Don’t Aim Too High
The reason most people's goals fail is because they set them too high. This goes for personal goals as well as for business goals. A personal goal, if you weigh 150 and you say you want to get down to 95 kilos in six months, you need to realistically think about how that's going to occur, how energy works, how those calories sit in there, what are the little building blocks to allow for you to achieve that goal? And you should then consider the little building blocks as the goal or part thereof, as opposed to the huge big goal of losing such a massive amount of weight, which is a huge achievement, but it's difficult.
Don’t Give Up
When you crack out that first chocolate bar or beer or whatever it is, whatever your crutch is, and then you notice the scales aren't moving, and you had a bit of dopamine released, you decide let's not bother. And 2020, January, you give up. So you don't want to have that as a situation, as the outlook. Make sure you have a large goal in mind and then have smaller goals to allow you to achieve that. With the recession possibly coming onboard and how to recession-proof your business, you want to make sure that you're looking at what the building blocks are that you're offering your customers, and you're not just looking at your whole business as a big entity.
What Are your Building Blocks?
If you're a pie store, you can say, "Oh my goodness, people aren't pies as much because they're going to the supermarket, because they're in and out of a job because of the recession," or whatever the case is. You have to think of yourself not as a pie store, but what is the actual items people are buying within your pie store? If they're buying all the vegan pies or the chicken pies, whatever it is, promote that item and make sure that you're able to see across the board which of the items that people do buy and which ones they do not, and give them reasons to continue to shop and buy with you.
Communication is Key
Make sure that you know your customer, and that your customer knows that you exist. Make sure you have a voice. Don't sit in the corner waiting for them to come to you. Speak up. A lot of the time, they've just forgotten that they enjoyed the pies that you sell, or the haircuts that you cut, or whatnot. So if you don't have a way to talk to your customers currently, to keep you front of mind with a digital fridge magnet or otherwise, get that as your first goal. Don't say that you want to increase your bottom line by 20%. That's great. That's a great goal, but that should be your yearly goal or even longer than that. You should have a smaller, more achievable bite-size chunk as to how you do that, and to increase your bottom line by 20%, it could be something such as creating a marketing plan or refining your current marketing plan or looking at your current customers and creating a referral program or an affiliate program, or anything like that. Just having a second set of eyes on your existing work, or getting in an advisor that can give you that information to help you out and to build your business.
What Would You Like to See Happen?
Dream, plan, execute. Have a great idea of exactly what you'd love to see happen. Increase your bottom line by 20%, but then plan how that's going to actually occur. Bettering your marketing plan, doing door to door sales, getting an affiliate program. So plan that all out into bite-size bits, and those bite-size bits should be your resolution, your New Year's resolution. Execute, and make sure that you have a schedule in there that you say, I want to do this on this date, I want to do this on this day.
Celebrate!
Then celebrate the victories. I call them champagne moments. I think that's become synonymous with the industries. It is when you decide, not I got to 20%, but you finished the marketing plan. Champagne moment. You achieved your first new customer through that marketing plan. Champagne moment. And keep doing that. Don't make the bite sizes too small though, because you'll end up just being a drunk and you don't want that. If your bite sizes are small enough to say, I just wrote my signature on a piece of paper that says marketing plan, you're not going to finish that. Keep yourself in line, and keep yourself with realistic goals where you are rewarding yourself and you are releasing that dopamine for doing that, and giving yourself that success to drive to the next thing. Because you don't want to be removing a whole bunch of baggage, whether it be 50 kilos or more from your body in one fell swoop, because you'll put it all back on, and you'll feel terrible about doing it.
The Final Word
So keep your business lean, keep your business clean, keep yourself recession-proof through looking at the trends of what's selling well in your business. Check out this document that we've got here. It is going to give you heaps of information about how to do that for your business, and overall Happy New Year. Merry Christmas. Stay good. Drink too much and be jolly!
How to Market Your Business Online and Make People Respond
What is marketing? Who even knows? All we know is that it's something you need in business and has something to do with making money. Probably. Marketing's all about relaying your message to your customers in a way that's fun and easy for them to understand without it getting into all googly gook and everything else.
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A great way to do that is by showing yourself and showing your face like I'm doing. Even if it's a face for radio, you can try. But you need to show your face and one of the great things you should be doing is chucking your photo or a portrait photo or a very fancy photo or a nice professional photo image in your email signature. And the reason for this is people relate to faces. People like knowing there's a person on the other end that cares about them and that they are a real person.
If we rewind to when you're at school, and you think about your teacher. Now we know the teacher had a face, but like that's just really, really well-engineered. They're actually robots, or so we thought. Just because we didn't see them outside of school, I assumed that the teachers slept at school and I don't know, is that just me? Anyway, I'm digressing.
So teachers seemed like robots and you don't want to seem like a robot to your customers, especially not to your new customers, and 100% not for your long-lasting customers.
Be relatable. I've got a fantastic video and it looks like I'm here in Australia at the beach right now, but the cool news is with only a few simple clicks, I'll go from here all the way to Mount Rushmore. Here I am. So I'm going to step off for you to hear a little bit about what I have to say about Mount Rushmore.
You know where this is right? Yep. It's Mount Rushmore, and this world-famous historical site is really just a giant marketing stunt. They came up with the idea in the early 1920s as a way to attract tourism to this part of South Dakota. You can't deny that it worked. Well over two million people visit each year and tourism is South Dakota's second-largest industry.
It goes to show how much people respond to faces. It's hardwired into our brains. If this had been a giant carving of the White House, it would never have had the same impact.
Businesses need faces. We all respond so much better to an individual with a name and eyes and hopefully some teeth. Multiple studies and real-world tests have shown that using photos of people builds trust and increases conversion rates.
And the most popular customer service is when a customer deals with a face and a name, even if it's just at the bottom of an email. Businesses are all about people and people, well we like to deal with people. So try and put a face on it.
Who would have thought that marketing was that interesting and it's been going on for that long? Turn a bloody rock into a reason for people to come. Blew my mind. But here we are.
Nevertheless, I hope that's given you a couple of hints and tips as to the way people are using rocks to their advantage. If there are any rocks in your business, make sure you're very resourceful and re-utilise them. Stay good.
Welcome to Miami. Welcome to Miami. So here I am in Miami, and how beautiful is it? Check out the babes. Nevertheless, it's one of the places that really spoke to me, because of Miami Vice, probably the most famous TV show around a crime that there is. But don't take my word for it. Instead, let's jump across to the man on the street. Take it away, mate.
Get more tips on how to protect your small business from cybercrime at dorksdelivered.com.au
Miami Vice, probably the coolest crime-fighting show ever shown on TV. And though there's probably more crime shows on TV than ever before, very few focus on one of the fastest-growing crime industries, Cybercrime. Now in Australia, a report last year put the cost of cybercrime at over $1 billion, and that's just the direct costs. Identity theft can cause longterm, economic and psychological problems, let alone the cost. Businesses can lose opportunities while fighting the problem as well as the damage to their reputation. We take cybercrime far too casually. It's just as important as the lock on your door because of the impact that it can have is exactly the same.
So what can you do? Here's some Miami cyber vice advice. Double-check who you're giving your info to. That's number one. Never use a link in an email to log in. Go directly to the site itself. Email phishing scams are all around the place. Always update your system and make sure of the latest security patches. Use multiple passwords or a password manager. That's key. You don't want to have one password for everything. Don't log into random wifi connections. Make sure you know who's providing it. Okay. Now on a serious note, I need to solve the most important problem. Why am I not holding a drink?
And with the magic of video editing, that crime is solved. Stay good. Well, look at this wonderful nectar. I have found this. Eureka. I found the beer. We've made it. By gum, you've got it now. We've got the beers. What you're trying to say, ese? You're going loco?
How to Set Yourself Up for Success
Josh: G'day, g'day, you got Josh here and I've got a couple of special guests here. We're actually going to be doing a group conversation. We've got Sarah from Perfectly Beautiful. Say hey.
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Sarah: Hey.
Josh: We've got Masso and he's starting a fantastic business around sailing. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that?
Masso: G'day guys, my name's Masso, got a little sail business starting up in Croatia. We'll talk about it pretty soon I think.
Josh: Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. I've also got Al here and Al's had a couple of businesses in the past, and he's looking to go into his third venture. And what do you think?
Al: I think the biggest thing I've been considering is how I can be in the building industry and leverage other people's time, and just manage a business and be off the tools.
Josh: That's cool. And I think that that's ultimately what every business owner should try to get into. They should try and get off the tools, because ultimately the tools have a dollar value that are associated with them. So the moment you're on the tools, they're costing you money because you can only make a certain amount of money. But the more people you have on the tools, the more money you could be making as a percentage. That makes sense, obviously?
Al: Yeah.
Josh: Sweet. And so tell me, Masso, what are you looking to be doing with Croatia and sailing?
Masso: I'm trying to change the game a little bit. In Croatia, you've probably heard of Croatia Sail. It's a pretty hot topic at the moment, but I've noticed in my time there working there for the last four years that probably the younger crowd, if you're in the late 20s to early 30s, the young professional crowd, they're not enjoying their Croatia Sails as much. So that's what I'm targeting towards. Nicer boat, nicer accommodation, beautiful dinners, young professionals, basically. That's my target market.
Josh: Sweet. So when you say young professionals, you mean people that have gone through university, or people that have got some sort of education or something behind them. They're not just still living with mom and dad?
Masso: Exactly. That's it.
Josh: I think that that's a really cool spot to be in and what you're doing. So for an IT business, what we do a lot is we try and get the big boys toys, these big corporate toys, that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to use, and we bring those down to small to medium enterprises where we're able to have them utilise these cool tools, and we buy them in mass and sell these licences at a cheaper price. So they get the big boys toys. And I guess you're doing that in a similar way in where you're allowing people who don't necessarily have the ability to go and see these cool things in their early ages when they're just starting to get into this, and being able to experience life changing opportunities, which is pretty cool.
Masso: Yep.
Josh: So Sarah, your business started 12 months ago, is that right?
Sarah: 18 months ago.
Josh: 18 months ago. Oh shit. Look out. Okay. So 18 months ago. And you've gone from strength to strength, and you've obviously had some stressful times from what we've spoken about in the past and you've been in a couple podcasts before.
Sarah: Yep.
Josh: What would you say would be the one thing, one piece of advice that you could give Masso and Al that would have them skyrocket into the future? What's one tool that you could say their businesses could use that would advantage you?
Sarah: Well, I always use... Love using Active Campaign, if that's a tool.
Josh: Plug. Active Campaign plug.
Sarah: Plug.
Josh: Okay, yeah, cool.
Sarah: But at the end of the day you've just got to work hard. And if you have the passion and the drive, you will get there. It's about what's in the heart, what you're passionate about. And if you do what you're passionate about, then you can go places and achieve it. So if you're doing a rubbish job that you don't enjoy, you're never going to go anywhere because you don't have that passion behind you.
Josh: No drive. That's something I see a lot of the time. A lot of my friends, some of them have been working for Coles or bits and pieces for years and years, and they're just doing their thing and they're not really enjoying it, but they're just doing their thing. It sounds super cliche. Just work hard and you'll get what you want, your dreams and aspirations, don't screw anyone over. It's probably not a good idea to screw people over, but at the same time, if you're really passionate about what you're doing, you'd be able to drive those long hours and you'll be able to take it home, but you've got to make sure you're working on the right things to be able to go to that next level, which is a sentence I freaking hate. How many levels is there?
Al: Probably for Masso and I, we're not afraid of hard work, and we've probably put the hours in and it would be for us about educating ourselves on how to step up from that and add smarter into working the hard hours as well. Yeah, like incorporating things that maybe don't normally, just in our industries, but work in other industries.
Sarah: It's scariest taking that first step of hiring your first employee or your subcontract or whatever. That was the scariest thing that I did. And I thought, "Oh no, I'm going to do all the work myself." And Josh was like, "You'll never ever make money doing it yourself, you make money off someone else." At first I thought, "No, I'm going to do it all." And then stepped back and thought, "Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to trust someone else." And that was the hardest thing.
Al: And I'm sure your pathway is quite similar to a lot of tradie subcontractors where, as you mentioned, we can only earn a set rate. So you put in the extra hours, you're doing quotes after dinner, you're going to see people on a Sunday, but that's not a paid part of the work.
Sarah: No.
Josh: No. You've got to either really be passionate about that.
Al: And it's never going to get bigger or better than what it is, doing things that way.
Josh: My biggest thing, when I started out, I was the technician running around with a screwdriver underneath people's desks. I actually went to the doctors. I couldn't kneel down anymore. And they said they hadn't seen this for years. They said this has been something that was very popular years and years ago. I was underneath people's desks so often fixing their computers, they said I've got religious knees, which meant that the piece of cartilage underneath my knees, the cushion underneath my kneecaps had worn away, and whenever I knelt down I was on veins and it was pushing down and my leg would just spring out and I couldn't control it. They said that they were called religious knees because back in the day people would be at church all the time praying. And so that would be on their knees at the time. As funny as that sounds, I was on my knees too much working hard. It resulted in me-
Al: Trying to climb the chain?
Josh: Yeah, exactly. You got to do what you got to do. Exactly. What I guess I found from that is you can't be the person on your knees doing the work. You need to have other people on their knees, sorting out the jobs that come through. In being on my knees that long and then going home and then sitting on a desk, sitting at a desk and then having to then do the invoicing, and do all the reconciliation and do everything else, the biggest thing that I found was none of that was profitable. So my first step was automate all of that. I went through and made a whole bunch of different processes that allowed for me to automate any of the different travels of the kilometres, made sure it's all okay with the ATO, and did all of that before I went through and then started employing other people.
So my job was doing what I enjoyed doing, which is the technical stuff, before I then went on and then had other people starting to do the technical stuff. Ultimately the best that you can do in business is be the best person, but the best sales person, the best advocate for your business. Then once you're doing that and other people are doing the work, your business will absolutely boom and flourish, but you need to be able to be able to get to that spot. And that's where, like Sarah was saying, Active Campaign, which is...Have you guys heard of that?
Al: No.
Masso: No.
Josh: Active Campaign is... I'm going to say email marketing tool, but it's significantly more than that. Have you guys heard of MailChimp?
Al: I've heard of MailChimp.
Josh: MailChimp you can send out email newsletters and bits and pieces. Active campaign, imagine you've got this website you're talking about, Masso, what your website has is you've got a section where they click, oh yeah, I'm 18 to 21, or 22 to 28 or whatever it is. Or they click on a finance bracket or they click on a B2B, or whatever the industry they're in, or whatever you think would be a way to segregate your audiences, they click on that. Active Campaign can go X, Y, Zed person that just clicked on that? I know that you are now interested more so in this, and then you start talking about what are the things that are going to get them across the line.
If they're between the ages of 18 to 21, and they're in a professional services. Bit weird, good on them. But maybe you're focusing more on getting out of the house and really, really spreading wings as opposed to someone who's 30 to 35, which you're talking more about experience that lifetime that you've never had before, and make sure that you put a nail in the coffin and say, "This is it, this is this great tour," or whatever the case is. So you speak to them in an appropriate way.
But with Active Campaign you can then take that information, and have that enter in against them, and then have it set so that if they do subscribe or they do, fill out a form or whatever they do, and they come back to your website, you can actually see how long they're on the website before, and then have it set so if they're on the website and they actually read through all the information, so they're on a certain page for like say six minutes or something, or six minutes of reading, you can then have it set so that you have a scale on how hot they are as a lead, and then you send a certain email.
If they're only on there reading it for two minutes and they still fill out the form, you then send them an email that might have more information about the original page they were on, or then give them a 20% discount or whatever it is. But you can absolutely automate the entire sales process.
Masso: But you really, you shouldn't lose a customer these days.
Josh: No, you shouldn't. And it starts at $15 a month, so it's nothing. There's other competitors out there. There's Ontraport, there's Infusionsoft, and as a technology company, we don't tell anyone to go with a certain company. We're agnostic with whatever the solutions are, but Infusionsoft and Ontraport are $300 plus a month, give or take for the same sort of plan. $15 is pretty good. They're amazing for the price, but that's a tool that would definitely have you skyrocket, but it takes a lot of planning.
One thing that we see business owners do too often, I think you guys are not in this category, but they go, "Oh, I'm going to be a millionaire in 12 months," or 14 months or 24 months, whatever it is, and they just expect that all this money's going to come to them as soon as they create this new idea that everyone's going to love, but they have no idea on how to market it. Most of the people that I speak to that have these awesome ideas are engineers or someone that's just whipped up something in their backyard. There's a fantastic guy that I've been speaking with who's got this invention called the Motherfluckers. It's a chicken feeder, and it's completely automated, and it's only once every 30 days you need to actually go and refill it. The chickens can choose the type of grain they want to age out of this device. So there's no waste on the ground.
I don't know if you've seen how a chook eats, but it picks the grain and throws away the shit they don't need, and then the rats and other vermin come and grab it. This removes all of this from them. And it's still just as simple as just pouring it all in. He's got a really cool idea, but he's still focusing heavily his skill set on marketing because that's not his strong points. That's where you need to be able to market your product and automate your process.
Al: How do people like Masso and myself learn about automation and technology? Or do we outsource that and focus on the parts of our business that we understand?
Josh: This comes back to what we were talking about before and what are you passionate about. I'm a strong believer of teach a person how to fish. If you can teach someone how to fish, you don't have to worry, they just go and fish. But if someone just likes eating fish but fucking hates fishing, don't teach them how to fish, it's not going to work. They're going to hate the whole situation. If you went, okay.... You're okay to learn what the difference is between a H1 and H3 tag, meta tags, meta descriptions, long tail keywords and all this other stuff and you want to know how to G zip your site and how to make sure it's going to be efficient, and then ranking on things back linking and everything else, and with SEO and you go, "Aw man," and you're getting a rubbery one over it, that's cool.
Al: I just like to eat fish, I think.
Josh: Exactly.
Al: I'm going to outsource this one.
Josh: That's where you're like... All right, if that's what you're keen on, some people go, "Oh yeah," look, the minute you start a business, you might not have anything else that you're doing. You might not be working. You might have somehow come into money and so you're just like, "All right, let's just do this." If that's the case, then it's a different situation. But if you're not in a situation where that's the situation, then you need to be able to work at what's right for you. I would suggest learning a little bit about everything, so that when you're outsourcing, you know you're not getting fucked over, is the short of it.
Sarah: See, everyone's different. I love the business side more than the hair and makeup side.
Al: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Sarah: I always love hair and makeup and I'm passionate about it, I know a lot about it, but I would rather be sitting back doing the business side of stuff than always doing the hair and makeup.
Josh: But that's changed over time as well, because before when we first started discussing this, you were very passionate about-
Sarah: Doing the hair and makeup.
Josh: The hair makeup and then it sort of pivoted a bit, and I think it just comes down to, again, what you find is an interest. For me, I love helping business owners out so that if you said, "Josh, I want to do X, Y, Z," I'd have a look at the game plan, I would say, "Okay, that looks good," or help you make the game plan.
And then whether that be helping you to write documents or later create standard operating procedures to outsource things, or whether that be to be able to teach you how to do these different things, or outsource it yourself, or write these documents for you, or whatever the case is, our team could help you do that. But it could also be a situation where you're just happy to do it all yourself anyway, and we just teach you how to use the skill sets that we've got. The take home, I would say in answer to your question before, which is how do you go about learning all this?
Listen to the podcasts. Plug. But pretty much just read and read and read everything about automation. People think automation are removing jobs. They're not. A car automated a horse, and horses are not neglected the way that they were before and treated the way they were before. There were delicate animals that were being killed all the time because of what we were doing.
Josh: Dale Beaumont is actually a great one.
Sarah: He's doing 52 ways of-
Josh: 52 ways in business. There's a day course. It's held in Auckland, Queenstown-
Sarah: All over the world.
Josh: Three or five places around Australia, free day course. So just check it out. It's pretty good.
Sarah: He does a paid course, but you can go do a one day course and he'll tell you 52 ways how to do it. And you've obviously got to follow it yourself. But he tells you everything to do.
Josh: In my opinion, what Dale Beaumont is selling, is selling you 52 different ways for you to do something, and you'll leave feeling absolutely super impressed, and he'll charge you $15,000 to $20,000 for the course to help you more out with that over the next 12 months. The 52 things he teaches you, if you actually implement them and you have the drive and motivation to do it yourself? In my opinion, you do not need his 12 month course, but if you are driven enough to do that, if you need someone who has like an accountability partner, you need someone to have more information about it. You can't just go and Google it, then his course is fantastic.
Al: I think that's interesting as well, because one thing I've found with getting into podcasts and audio books is so much of it is American content, and it's so hard to filter through and find... You might find little bits of Australian content, but to find someone that can give you a whole system or something to follow, I think is getting hard to find.
Josh: Absolutely. And we are in a different climate, and this is something that is terrible for technology, because a lot of people, especially from America, they're going to go, go cloud, cloud, cloud. But cloud is not right for Australia. Cloud is great, but the internet speeds in Australia are absolute pus. And so it does not mean you should be moving everything into the cloud. It is not sensible. And if you're looking at it from a business perspective, if you think your business is able to scale from one to 10 from 10 to 100 employees or something like that, cloud is going to be very, very expensive for you as opposed to going for something else.
But that's all about swapping capital expenditure versus operational expenditure. Your capital expenditure will be higher if you're investing in your equipment. I'm going to cut this one off and we can continue on and talk about this a bit more later. You've been listening to Masso, Al and Sarah about some of their business interests and the way they're doing business, and if you've enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, give us some love leave us some feedback. If you haven't enjoyed it, still give us some love. Leave us some feedback. Let us know how we could've changed this around and made this better for you. I look forward to having you tune in in the future. Stay good.
Special Presentation on Agile Methodology
Joshua: I am Joshua from Dorks Delivered. So, cool stuff I've done in the past are columns for an online entrepreneur magazine so that's something that's happened more recently. Published a book, a couple ago which I'm pretty excited about. Some of the different stuff and ways that we do business has been featured on news.com.au I've got a YouTube channel and a podcast as I already sort of pointed out there. Which you guys will all be podcast famous in a few weeks so, it's pretty exciting. Woo! In one way or another I've been a business owner for 19 years, with Dorks Delivered for 12 years. And I'm pretty keen on automating things. So my home, my lifestyle, and everything is automated wherever possible.
Learn more about Agile Methodology at dorksdelivered.com.au
A business owner needs to be able to automate everything. Not just when they're in their business and trying to get their processes and their staff all accounted and right, they need to make sure they're doing that in their home lifestyle as well, because if you're sitting at home and you're vacuuming, well you're not vacuuming if you're sitting are you? But if you're at home and you're vacuuming then you're wasting time a lot of the time. You need make sure that you're looking at every single process. That's the fish pond that I've automated, which goes through, uses the fertiliser coming from the, or the excrement from the fish is fertiliser across all the gardens, and does it all automatically. Looks at the amount of evaporation and goes nuts. Any questions? I can see a few confused faces.
Speaker 5: It looks like a spa.
Joshua: It does look like a spa! It's actually a dual tank fish, so you can have two different breeds of fish, sit out there in a little pond and have a look and they've got a little putt putt area up the top there. That I build around, so, just, fun stuff. You've got to automate your life. So with Dorks Delivered as I said, I'm an automation specialist through south-east Queensland. And what we do for business is remove poor time, time-poor, we bring time back to business owners by improving efficiencies and removing repetitious tasks. So I also help with sales and marketing to an extent through some of their social media aspects, but mostly all just as a holistic view, and point you in the right direction of how to get to the right person.
So, what is agile development? As we sort of discussed, there's a waterfall methodology which is where you're producing something and then you're saying "okay now it's working, but it might have broken", and then you're going through a very, very, a process that's in series. There's a clear start and there's a clear end, but there's nothing in the, necessarily in the middle that isn't defined. It has a start, has an end and then the product is created.
The problem with that is it's incredibly, tell me if I'm talking to quickly, because I say it and I just get excited. But the problem with it is, agile development, has a start, has an end, but costs a lot of money and doesn't make money most of the time throughout the process. And so the whole process of agile development costs a lot of money, needs a lot of capital and there's no money coming in from it. So, as I said, in a nutshell, it's creating the smallest most basic item that's scalable, that you can have sent off to your clients or sent out to market.
So a good example would be Uber. Whoop I've gone too far. So Uber created their app on their phone so that you can rideshare and so on and so forth. Their intention is, and was, was and still is, to create autonomous vehicles but they needed to have acceleration, data and any other points of black spots and what-not... Of what's going around the area. So, Uber's intention is to create an autonomous vehicle, but they created an app that allowed for ridesharing, and used people, the meat in a seat, to achieve their objectives until they were able to have AI to a spot where they were able to then have it work. Because AI was going to be way too expensive, so they created a small product and then continued to develop the product, but had a known ending, but had a profitable product to start off with. So, any questions on how that all works? Any participation you get a prize.
Speaker 4: Josh, it's just a, yes a question. So you said like, with agile development, there's like, you'd don't really get any sort of like, the potential return on investment until the end. So what you're saying now is with Uber, if you look at their agile development, you know, the intention was at the end was to have the AI intelligence that will make them, you know, self-automated. But what, so, they have got a return now, by implementing the first basic part of it.
Joshua: So agile development gives you a return straight away. Or very, very close to straight away. Traditional models, or the waterfall model, means that you, they would have said, "we're going to make an autonomous vehicle" and they're going to say "okay, it's going to cost us billions of dollars but we have a clear defined outcome". Instead they've said "let's break this down into profitable steps, where we can then, use that". So although Uber appears as if they're in competition with DiDi and Ola and Lyft overseas, they're not really in competition with them and that's why Uber's balance sheets look like they're running at a loss.
Joshua: Significantly. That's right. And then you look at others and you go "wow they're doing exactly the same thing, how are they running at such a loss?". So, and that's where their money is going, is-
Speaker 4: But you generally find that people who are first, are the ones who end up losing all the money and then the others jump on it and like, like the DiDis and the Olas, et cetera, now they're using the same, but Uber paved it.
Joshua: It depends, like McDonald's and Hungry Jack's could have the same argument. McDonald's and Hungry Jack's are pretty much exactly the same, but you've got McDonald's and it's definitely first, and it's still out there and I'd, it's definitely larger. It all depends. Uber's definitely got the name. No one says "I'm going to catch an Ola", they're going to go catch an Uber.
They've changed the market. They've made it a level playing ground. From my house into Brisbane, it was a 20 dollar Uber, now it's a 46 dollar Uber, to get to the airport was 28 dollars and now it's something like 55 dollars. So all DiDi's done is they've just levelled the playing field. What Uber did is they said "let's crush", they did what Netflix did to Blockbuster, "let's crush the taxi drivers, once we've crushed taxi drivers, increase our profits". But you have the early adopters, and then you have the latecomers, and the early adopters and their... I'm not sure if I'm, that makes sense? The curve of where everyone sits in the adoption cycle. They would've known that someone was going to come along and copy the idea. But they would have had such a deep footing and grounding in what they've done, that it wouldn't have mattered, it doesn't matter a whole bunch because their end goal isn't to be competing with DiDi or Ola, it's just to be using their, the points of data. So for us, it looks like the same app, but what they're actually gaining, and the intelligence they're gaining from the app is far greater than what DiDi or Ola has does that make sense?
For the questions, I'm going to give, you get a pair of fun, where is it? Green glasses! All right we can match. So has anyone heard of Beyond Meat? So Beyond Meat is this meat that has more protein than steak, more protein than most hamburgers, takes up 99 percent less landmass, has nearly all the health benefits of consuming meat, burns and cooks like meat, has haem in it the same as you have haemoglobin in meat, and to anyone that has not tried one of these, it tastes exactly like you've had meat. Has anyone tried any of these before? Grill'd, yeah they have them at Grill'd. They've only just recently come in there. And they're absolutely amazing. I tried when I went, you can't tell, if I gave that to a vegetarian, they would have sent it back to the kitchen they said "oh no this is terrible, this is meat". It, yeah, it flame grills a whole lot exactly the same.
Anyway so, they created one product. Which is the Beyond Meat patty. And the Beyond Meat patty is absolutely revolutionary with the way that it works, and it means that it'll be a sustainable product that still gives you all the same benefits as meat into the future. Regardless of health and life choices and stuff, their intention was to have a huge range of products. But they obviously can't do that and be profitable if they're working on all these products at once. So they developed the easiest product that was able to sneak into the market as easy as possible. So, if you have a look at the predominant meat eaters, it'd definitely be America ever ever else, obviously India and Asia are significantly more vegetarian than they are anything else, even though they have a huge population.
Jeff: So why does agile make a difference? Surely [crosstalk 00:11:24] the traditional project methodology, your goal was to produce the simplest product into the market as quickly as possible, why does agile make a difference?
Joshua: It's about improving upon the original product, with a bigger end goal than just the initial project.
Joshua: So the idea is testing the waters without getting your feet wet. You can use the agile methodology for anything, even marketing. So, as I said here, you can slowly develop your business without having huge cost outlay, is one of the big things. So from a marketing perspective, there are different ways that people use the agile methodology.
So Dad and I, we've started a craft brewery. We've got ten different products that we've got on tap. We haven't got the licensing to sell it or anything like that, and the licensing to sell it and what not is quite expensive, when you don't know if it's going to work and people are actually going to enjoy the taste of your brew. So what we've done is we've created a survey, where when people fill out the survey, because we can give the beers away for free, when people fill out the survey and they try they beers and they go "yes this is fantastic", we pay a pre-order to buy a six pack for instance, when we have 6000 people on that list we then know that there's enough of a test there that we know that people would be interested in buying it, without having to then fork out the money for larger infrastructure and any of the licensing costs and so on and so forth.
Speaker 4: So what will it cost you though, to give those 6000 beers for free?
Joshua: Well the beers for free to start off with, the 6000 beers are quite cheap. Maybe 30 cents a beer or something like that.
Speaker 4: Oh, okay.
Joshua: Yeah, so it's very, very cheap. And in scale, cheaper than that. So that's why my wallet, it's better to be producing something that you can test the waters with. So if you need any help with the agile development process or anything in your business we can jump in and have a look at some of the projects that you're doing and make sure that you are doing them in the most efficient and effective way.
So, what Steve Jobs did, is he has six different iPhones in front of his stand. On the six different iPhones one of them played videos, one of them received SMSs and calls, one of them played music and so on and so forth. So one of them had different apps that showed maps, and all these different things. Not a single iPhone could do all the things at once without crashing. Additionally, if you tried to, and you accidentally did it, it may start working and then crash mid presentation. So to save face, while he was showing everyone this revolutionary new technology, each different person with agile methodology was able to create the certain function working on each device, but not all of them together.
He went up and said, "this is world-changing, this is revolutionary, everyone's going to have one of these in their pocket". And he's not half wrong. What he did there it was just fancy video editing, as he put the phone down and then picked it up, he already knew that it was going to be exactly the spot where it needed to be. Additionally to that, they had a tower that was put there by Verizon that, that was only paired to their phones that were on the stand, to make sure that they had absolutely lightning-fast speed, that had no congestion with everyone else that was in the audience. So, that is, that bit isn't really agile, that's just tricky. But having the different phones, knowing that you can do it somewhat, but you don't have the capital to continue producing a single device, and you don't know how well it's going to be received, this allowed for a world audience to see, pre-order the devices, continue to have the money to then build it out.
Does that make sense? Does that kind of answer your question before on the, how it can be varied with the approach for agile development as opposed to just creating a full device from start to finish?
Jeff: I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are on the difference between lean, agile and scrum, as delivering outcomes for small business owners like us.
Joshua: With communication and branding you'd say that a lot of that would come to their marketing, and how well they're being shown on the web, making sure that everything's consistent. Yeah?
Jeff: Oh, well I'm thinking about story-telling, so, if Steve Jobs you just gave is the best example of, any marketing story-telling, best businesses telling their stories.
Joshua: That's correct. But if you went to a small business and you said "you need to make sure that your story resonates with your ideal client, and you need to make sure this you do that and this", and you said that the marketing budget is going to be $200,000 to make sure that we get your message our the appropriate people. Most business owners are going to be like "I can't afford that, I know that that's what I need to do, but I can't afford that". So let's test the water, use a long tail key word, sniper marketing, target a very test small audience, because you can't afford the $200,000 even thought you know that's going to work. You test a smaller audience, a subset niche of their target market, and then from that go "okay, that has worked, that is now bringing in an income", especially for startup business or something like, even if the income's not huge, it's bringing in then an income to then afford to then push the money towards the $200,000.
So it's about, that would still be testing the waters, as opposed to knowing that you've got from start to finish the full solution.
Speaker 4: Isn't that just the normal way that you would start a business? [crosstalk 00:29:17] don't startups just do that?
Joshua: Do what, sorry?
Speaker 4: Exactly what you're saying. You start with a smaller part of the market, make some money.
Joshua: You should. That's exactly right. But even if you know that you need to have the larger portion of the market, or you're not necessarily a larger portion, but you need to market and brand in a certain way. Like I know that for instance, YouTube, cost the business a lot of money to produce a channel, it doesn't necessarily have a whole bunch of views, but the views that are does have, convert, and work towards our end goal in our business. So it's a functional platform, but most businesses when they start out they know, "if I have a YouTube channel I'll be able to get my message across more easily, be able to tell the story about what we do", but you won't necessarily be able to afford to be able to tell your story to the audience that needs to hear it. So, does that, am I explaining that right? I don't know, does that sound fair?
So, sometimes you don't know how to go about finishing creating a product to service, and that's where we've sort of just said: "agile developmental design is your answer". That's what Steve Jobs did to make sure that they had a product, although they would have had the money and the market research that said "this product is going to work", they may not have wanted to spend the capital on something that might have flopped because there already was the Nokia phone that could do nearly everything, but it just didn't have the right story-telling and the right approach to it.
So, security is another big objective towards agile development. If you don't have good security in your business, if you don't have good security practices, it will delay and push things out. One of the things that a lot of businesses, has everyone seen the HTTPS at the start of their website? So like, up until a couple of years ago, there was this thing, a vulnerability in it, that had been there for decades, for about a decade. Called heart bleed. Apple was aware of it. Apple had protected all their systems. Apple didn't let everyone else know about that. Apple was able to snoop and see any details that were deemed encrypted on everyone else's system. That's terrible.
The OpenSSL protocol was able to be broken into. Certain people knew about it and other people didn't. The person that developed that was in their garage, just a home business that developed this and gave it away for free for everyone to use, and then everyone abused that, and that then opened up to mass hysteria when that came out of, the security problem came out about a year ago. So that's where you need to make sure you keep your eyes on the process and your security around all of the processes. Because if you don't, you, you'll have delays in the way that your product's going to be released.
Griffith University Entrepreneurship Seminar Series Presentation
This is a special episode that features my presentation on content curation for the Griffith University Entrepreneurship Seminar Series Presentation. I hope you enjoy!
Josh Lewis: How are y'all doing? Woo. Very cool. So it's going to be high energy. So you got to be like ready and pumped even though it's late at night. Is that all good? So who here owns a business? Very cool. Okay. Very good. And who here has a website for their business? Awesome. Awesome. Very good. And who came here for the, for the nibblies outside? very cool. Who didn't get the chance to put their hand up yet? And who here's wearing brown undies just in case I stuff? Just me. That's good. So, my name is Joshua and I automate things. I go into businesses and make sure they're running as best as they possibly can through putting in processes and procedures that ultimately drive more income to their bottom line.
Get more tips on how to make your website better at dorksdelivered.com.au
Today we're going to be talking about how we can do that with your content. So, everyone that put their hand up, they had a website. How many of you guys actively update the website? I know you have bits and pieces that go up. So we've got a few hands up here. How many don't? And how well are those websites working? If you're, they're all right, going all right, going okay, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Very cool. So we found time and time again. If you're putting more and more content up onto your website, you're going to be getting more traffic to your website. And there's lots of reasons for that and everyone's heard of that. Everyone knows that content is king. Everyone agrees. Yeah. So why don't we put the content up? We've got all these opportunities to do it and we know that it's going to make our business better, but we don't. And the main reason is we're all time poor. Put your hand up if you're time poor. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so we just, we don't, and so we're going to talk today about how we can overcome some of those time objectives and how we can speed up the process. I'm going to introduce you to a few different tools that will allow for you to make content for your site that is really, really geared into exactly what your customers are looking for. Who here has consumed Campbell's soup? Yeah. Yeah. I think most of us have, and we could agree that it's something that they had to create a 1700 ads that were very, very targeted, very, very cleverly targeted to the people they knew were going to be eating them in Australia. They didn't start talking about bears in Russian taxis. If that wasn't going to be what people in Australia were looking for. Do you know what your customers are looking for? Does anyone want to put their hand up and say yes or no? Yeah? What would you say your customers are looking for?
Audience Member1: They're looking for a golf training aid.
Josh Lewis: Yep. So what do you do sir?
Audience Member1: I sell golf training aids.
Josh Lewis: Very good. I thought that would be accurate, but wanted to double check, it'd interesting if the answer wasn't the same. So that's what they're looking for. So is that what they're actually searching for though? You know that's what they want, but do they know what they want? You don't know what you don't know until you know it, you know?
Audience Member1: According to AdWords. Yeah.
Josh Lewis: AdWords. Yep. So is that one of your key phrases?
Audience Member1: It is yes.
Josh Lewis: Yep. And that'd be obviously a high hitting one?
Audience Member1: Yeah, it's about 50% of the hits.
Josh Lewis: Yep. Cool. And what's your cost per click there?
Audience Member1: It's probably eighty cents to a dollar online.
Josh Lewis: Cool. Cool. Now what if I was to say that you can get 160,000 impressions and have over a thousand clicks for free?
Audience Member1: That would be nice.
Josh Lewis: That'd be lovely, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So in having a really well thought out content creation strategy allows for you to do that and these numbers are backed. And this is a website that went from zero hits six months ago to having a 160,000 impressions and over a thousand clicks a month. So we're talking a lot coming through all organically without having to pay for AdWords. And that's all gearing towards exactly and your business won't be the same as Campbell soup and we won't all be selling the same things, but get exactly towards your business. Now that comes down to the next question.
How do you know what your customers want? How do you, how do you know what they're searching for? So you know they're searching for that one key phrase, and you said that 50% of your visitors, and I'm going to keep picking on you for a while. Sorry about that. But you know that's 50% of your visitors, which is great.
Who else knows what their customers are searching for? It's hard yeah? But we've all been there and if we've been in business for more than a couple of years, you've heard questions that your customers are asking you and if you started jotting down those same questions that people are asking, you can start creating content around those questions because they're not just asking you. They're also asking Google and they're not just asking Google your customers, your new leads and your new prospects are also asking Google those same questions. And if you've just started out in business, you say, well Josh, that sounds fantastic except I don't know what people are searching for. That's fine as well. If you use a tool such as answer the public or there's many other tools out there similar, you're able to find out what people are searching for or just have a few months of organic traffic where you can then see what people are searching for as you've pointed out here, and then gear your content around that.
Now I can nearly guarantee, do have a blog or any active content coming from the website?
Audience Member1: We have repression content on the website.
Josh Lewis: Is that unique content or is that some through some aggregate? yup. Cool. Are you making it yourself or someone within your company that's very familiar with the product and exactly what you're selling? Cool. And how many hits did you get to those pages or are they the pages that you're promoting with AdWords as well?
Audience Member1: I have no idea how many people go through the blog because I get bored before I get to that end of the funnel. But yeah, a lot of our sales are conversions coming through direct. We suspect part of that is because the awareness part that we're talking about leads them to go back and have another look and another look and another look.
Josh Lewis: So it could be a secondary method of marketing for your business potentially?
Audience Member1: Awareness. That's what we use AdWords for.
Josh Lewis: Yeah, that's right.
Yup. Yup. Yup. So in our business we, we have AdWords. Does everyone know what remarketing is? Yeah, enough, yeah. So we use it for remarketing. We found for ourself internally it didn't work well enough for us. We're in a B to B space, so business to business and for us we found that AdWords didn't quite hit the nail on the head for us. Business to consumer, it's fantastic. Facebook, it's fantastic for business to consumer, but for us we found LinkedIn works quite well and also using any of the different mediums for remarketing but having a fantastic, engaging... You going to chuck it on? Yeah, no worries. How are we doing? Can we hear me? Yeah. Has it popped through? Yes. Yes. Very good.
So having engaging content, there we go. Here we go. Thank you all for coming and welcome down. Come on. Very good.
So having engaging content will also lower the price of your AdWords because they look and they go, the quality score of your site is more relevant, therefore we want them to be the top result in Google. And so you'll end up paying less, which is great. So your 80 cents per click drops down to a lower rate to start off with. But it also means that from a remarketing perspective, you can drop that down even further. Does anyone have any questions about what I'm saying so far? Perfect. I'll continue. So as I said, Campbell's geared exactly the words that people were searching for and created 1700 ads that they knew people already searching for, they're already somewhat engaged with, and then they created these ads that seem hyper-relevant.
If you have all these questions that you know your customers are already asking, you're able to use those questions, create content around the questions and answer the questions. When you do that and you create the answers and we already, we're already answering our customers really saying when they ask us a question, we're just not writing it down, we're just not creating the content. Once you've answered it, it does a few things. Number one, it shows exactly the type of person that you are. So if you're someone who is not as much of a Laracon as myself, then your message will be not received as well by people that don't receive well from that sort of persona. And so you know that the people that are listening to your message are also the type of people that are already resonating with that message. Does that make sense?
So it means that the content you're creating is geared exactly towards the customers that you already have that are already interested in that message, that are passing that through now. Now, sounds all great to say you're going to make all this content. Now, you know some places that you can get it from, whether it be Answer the Path or being able to just know the questions that people have been asking you. And believe me, I started writing them down and when I started writing down the questions people were asking me a couple of years ago, I went "Geez, I've got this huge list of content that I can create." And you can not only just create one article and create model multiple articles around that and you can use different tools to make sure they're keyword optimised. But we still don't have time to write that, am I right? Like no one has time. We're all busy.
Business owners are out there running our asses off, trying to make sure that we're doing what we're meant to be doing. Doing the Voodoo that we do. But, there's enough tools out there that you're able to automate a lot of the processes that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to. I use a tool called [inaudible] and a couple of others. Otter is a fantastic tool that I'm using right now on my mobile phone that allows for what I'm saying, to be recorded and transcribed. It can then be checked over by a VA or any assistant really, and then made sure it's perfected. You've then got the spoken word of what you've just said written. So you're one step through the loop and you can be doing that just as simply as clicking the button.
What I'm doing right now will turn into a podcast as well. So not only am I speaking to the room in here, I'll be speaking to, well, we'll have over a thousand a thousand listeners a month that tune in. So I'll be speaking to all of them as well. So now you've created content that goes out to iTunes and Spotify and everywhere else, and all you've done is click the record button on your phone.
So who he has a phone in their pocket? Yeah. Yep. Everyone? Yep. So the only difference when your phone and my phone is, I've got a microphone that cost me $100 plugged in. So my audio sounds better. That's it, and I looked like a goof with two microphones on. So that's the main reason.
Making sure that you create the content that people are listening to is important. Making sure it's easy to do it means you will do it. Once you've got the spoken word on paper, it's very easy for someone to spin that into written word and make it bullet points. Put in the heading tags and bits and pieces that you need to make sure it's search engine optimised. That's something that as a business owner you shouldn't be bothering to do. That's something that you have someone that's specialised to do that. Someone that knows what they're doing about marketing and SEO to make sure that the words are geared around that.
Once you've got that done, you can then schedule out all the different posts and have it so that you've just got this drip feed of content that's going onto your website, which you can then have that same content be pushed out through any of these different social media channels and I would strongly suggest to not have every single social media channel being pushed with the same content because regardless of where you're at, your business will resonate differently with different social media channels.
People that are going to be buying your product on LinkedIn may very well not be the same people that are buying your product on Facebook or through a Google search. When someone searches on Google, they know what they want. They know enough of what they want to say, this is, this is where I'm going with this. When people search for something on LinkedIn, normally they're searching for an ex employer or or someone that they've, that they've met somewhere, so it's not necessarily the same relationship. So you just need to change it, change the content around.
But a beautiful thing happens after you've created content. And you've created lots and lots of content, which just a number of questions can create lots and lots of content very quickly. Once you've created all this content, you can create the customer's journey, the buyer's journey, where you're able to then gear that content directly towards exactly the persona of the person that's buying it. So what would you say is the ideal person that buys your product?
Audience Member1: A middle aged male will buy about 95%, they're golfers. And we don't like to say it often out loud but they're golf craters.
Josh Lewis: That's fine.
Audience Member1: They're starting to lose the energy and the their abilities and their handicaps rise.
Josh Lewis: Okay. And on that, that means that you'd be able to very easily gear content around solving the problem that they've got there. So Harvey Norman had a big campaign around solving the restriction for people to want to buy something. Oh, why don't you lounge, I can't afford it. And it may not relate to everyone, but it's relating to exactly the target audience that they've tried to squeeze into and push onto. And having all this content allows for you to really, really hyper target exactly whoever it is the person is that you're trying to attract to your business. Does that make sense to everyone? Cool.
Cool. So any questions so far? Any questions? No questions. Question free since 93 no worries.
So lots of people using AdWords. Yeah? Yeah? And we already now know the advantage in maybe making an organic move. One of the big things that you need to make sure you understand is AdWords is like a tap. You turn it on and off. It stops when you turn it off. Organic traffic is not like that at all. Organic traffic will just continue to flow through. It's like you've created a leak in this dam and it's just gonna continue to flow through. It's not turning the water on and off, but it takes a long time for Google to see what you've created, understand what you've created and really build out from that.
One of the things you definitely don't want to do is plagiarise. They're right onto it. It's the silly no point. But if you're able to create your own unique content that's putting your brand on it and it allows for you to be the person that you want to be. Now sometimes when you're doing these sort of things, you have to become a character. Sometimes you have to put on your special magic glasses and when you're looking around at everyone, you're going, "Okay, I've got these glasses on now this means I'm a new character."
So you seem like a bit of a character. You're wearing a grey shirt. Yeah, that, that works out well. Let's see what I can do here. Grey glasses. Look at this, isn't that lovely? Okay, so now we've got grey glasses, grey shirt, and now you are now the superhero. Here we go. Perfect. So we've got the super hero here and we're able to see that you're doing what you need to do. You're doing the voodoo that you do and going to be at to create that content. And who doesn't want to be up in front of a video camera talking? Who wouldn't want to be where I am right now? Why am I wearing Brown undies?
So it's difficult to go and do that, but sometimes you have to just put a pair of glasses on and say, "Okay, this is now the new me and this is the person that's going to be talking and promoting my brand and my business." Because if you're not going to talk about your brand and your business and you should be the most passionate person about it, no one else is going to. And if you're there with a fantastic product or a fantastic service and you don't have a voice, there won't be any ears for it to hear. It makes it absolutely pointless. So even if you have to put on a pair of magic glasses and go and talk to a bunch of people and talk online to an invisible audience, it doesn't matter because ultimately it'll bring people in and that's what you want.
You want more traffic coming to your website and you want more traffic coming through any of your social media posts and you want to make sure that you're keeping your current customers engaged with the content you're creating.
Many times we see the content that we've had people create and even the content for ourself internally, we end up finding there's these people that we worked with years and years ago; now I've been in business 19 years and 12 years in the current business; and we find companies that we were working with years and years ago are really engaging with our current content. And that sparked conversation to bring them back on as clients, which is fantastic because you want to make sure that you're making a difference with what you're doing with your content and it is engaging with your customers. Does that make sense with everyone? Yeah? any questions now? Zero questions. Very cool. Yes?
Josh Lewis: Right, so the questions, what does your business do, sir?
Audience Member2: I'm an accountant.
Josh Lewis: An accountant. Okay, cool. So you'd have people come to you and ask you all sorts of different questions about tax and minimising risk and what not. Yes?
Audience Member2: How much can you do it for.
Josh Lewis: Is that what they ask? Get different clients? What's your point of difference that you'd say against your competitor?
Audience Member2: Most people ask me how much.
Josh Lewis: So it, it really depends on the value that you're giving to some, you've been an accountant for a while?
Audience Member2: Long time.
Josh Lewis: Yep. And you'd say, are you doing personal tax stuff? Are you doing tax like what sort of stuff?
Audience Member2: [inaudible 00:18:23] for instance what they're asking questions you know are a waste of time.
Josh Lewis: Okay. So you need to find out what the thing is that people are driving into your door. If it's only the money side of things, it makes it a very difficult conversation because there's always going to be someone that's cheaper than you and it makes it very, very difficult. So you need to make potentially, yeah.
Audience Member2: People don't seem to question. You're talking about the questions when you're recording and that's what's leading you write the copy. Where did he get the questions from to get it to you, that's what I'm asking.
Josh Lewis: So where do you get the questions from? If you have people that are talking with you and they said, for instance, like the questions I could think I'd be asking my accountant, is " Is this setup be better being a trust or is it better being a company? Is it better being X or Y? How am I going to make sure that I'm removing any risk for myself personally when setting up a company?" Any of these sort of questions would be the things that you should be creating content around on your website and in a way that you would create the content, not just copied and pasted from the, the ATO or something like that. So if someone came to you and said, "Looking to have some kids, I've got a trust, how much can I distribute to them?"
And you said, "Well," and I'm making numbers off the top of my head, but if you said, "well, $417 is what you can for this year." And you thought, "Well I should probably write an article about that." Is when the tick needs to go, all right, let's make that, does that make sense? So it's not necessarily about your potential leads coming in. It's about your already tried and trusted A grade clients that you resonate well with now that have already come to know and love what you do regardless of the price. Does that answer the question?
Audience Member2: Half the questions you're asking are excellent.
Josh Lewis: So if you don't know a question that a customer could ask, you can use a tool, there's a website called Answerthepublic and you can jump onto Answerthepublic and you can write an accountant and it'll come up with a bunch of different things that are searched for, for accountants. Or in Google you can write in, say what is an accountant and then it will automatically fill in a bunch of different terms. And you could use that as a different ways to work out, questions to create articles around. But it comes down to obviously the business and what resonates with you. Pardon?
Audience Member2: There are firms that specifically write articles?
Josh Lewis: Yes, yes, there is.
Audience Member2: You just click on-
Josh Lewis: That's right. And the problem with those firms is those same articles are used between multiple places and when those articles are used, there's a another website called Copyscape, which is only touching on a tiny bit of what Google would do to know that that article is being plagiarised or use more than once. And so you don't get the search engine benefit. It needs to be stuff that you're creating that as new and engaging content. It can't be something that is being spun from one office and then being sent out and syndicated across multiple websites.
Does that make sense?
Okay. So yeah, you need to make sure that the content is your own. You can't have-
Audience Member3: The Google algorithm monitors if it's plagiarised or not and sort of brings it up higher if it's original. So if you say the originality of the content it matters.
Josh Lewis: Yeah, yeah. The, the more unique the content, the better it is. The same as this university here. If I was to hand in an assignment that someone else had written last year, that'd be able to tell that I've done that. Even if I just changed my name, a few different details, that'd be able to go, "This looks about 60% similar." There's a very good chance that I'm pulling, pulling the wool over their eyes.
Audience Member3: [inaudible 00:22:39].
Josh Lewis: Sorry?
Audience Member3: They could make [inaudible 00:22:42].
Josh Lewis: Absolutely, but Google's ruthless. They're not going to look at the mistakes. They're going to think to look for the look for the victories and just sort of run with that. They don't have the time to talk to a little business owner like any of us in the room, sadly, but once you've got the content there, if you know you're creating it yourself, there shouldn't be too many mistakes that can be made and that's, that's what I guess it comes down to. You need to just know that the content that you're creating is unique and whether or not that is through a podcast or through a blog or through a YouTube video or any other medium, you want to make sure that is unique. Everyone's got these fantastic devices in their pocket which allow for you to record audio recorded video and really, really make a difference with what you can do.
Even if you don't like standing in front of a camera and recording. As I said, you put on some funky glasses. There we go. Still happening over there, put on some funky glasses and you're able to to transform into a person that can talk. And the best thing is it's so forgiving. We're not recording on 35 millimetre and having to use hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tape. We're recording on, or film rather, we're recording on something that is 100% forgiving. So yeah, that's, that's me. My name is Joshua and my automation's your liberation. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
So we've had some questions immediately, but one of my questions is how much content is enough?
Josh Lewis: That's a great question. It depends on the industry and how flooded it is what you're doing. Really. I would say, and it's hard to know whether I'm giving a very globally okay answer, at least one blog a month would be absolutely minimum. Our company has five blogs a week going out and it all comes down to how fast you want the traction to come on. If you know that Google is going to take six months to notice any new content you put up there. Not notices, it notices it a lot quicker, but to notice and create any of the, the wants and attraction that you want. The more content, the better is the short answer. Now, that's for Google. For Facebook, not so much.
Speaker 1: So if it's one a month minimum, how big should the blog be then?
Josh Lewis: 750 words or so with two long tail keywords within that article.
Speaker 1: Everyone know what a long tail keyword is?
Josh Lewis: That was what I was about to bring up next.
Speaker 1: Come on, someone here was going to ask that.
Josh Lewis: Okay. And obviously Google doesn't give answer to any of their algorithms. It's just you know, best guess, you know, they don't sort of say this is what you should be doing. But a long tail keyword. I'm going to use an example that we're both familiar with, but a long tail keyword. If you're selling shoes and someone's searching in Google for shoes, that would not be a long tail keyword and they might find a shoe repairer or they might find shoe soles or they might find something that is absolutely unrelated such as the shoe fly device, which spins around on top of your food at an Australian barbecue and stops the flyers hanging out. So shoe is not a long tail keyword. If someone searched for black shoe, then that'd be getting better. If someone search for Australian black shoe with white trimming or, or beautiful perla red shoes, then that would be a long tail keyword, which means it's less competitive. Does that make sense? People are less likely to search for that and when they find it, it is very, very geared to exactly what they're searching for.
Someone searching for watermelon socks. I've already ticked one box, but maybe I don't want watermelon socks. Maybe I just one funky socks or funky socks that are for big feet or whatever it is. So that would be a long tail keyword. Thats me! My name is Joshua and my automation is your liberation.
How to Teach Staff Members About Data Security
All right. I've got a funny episode today. I've just been talking to a business and we put them up to the “let me hack you” challenge. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. We're the good guys and we jump in and try to hack your systems like the baddies could and see if we can get in. Now, okay, much to their dismay we got in, they were not impressed.
Get more tips on how to protect your data at dorksdelivered.com.au
Staff Need to Be Educated
Now this happens. People don't like thinking that they've got something that's secure that's not. People don't like thinking they've got an inferior product. But what it comes down to most all the time is your staff. We need to talk about how to get your staff involved in data security and how businesses can get staff to take data security seriously. I'm going to be cruising through some training tips to make sure they're doing the best by your business and hopefully the best by themselves personally.
Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
So, let's start off with tip number one. Don't believe everything you hear. Whatever someone's trying to sell you, there might be some other ulterior motive there that you're not seeing. A great example would be Facebook. You're getting this fantastic ability to connect with your friends, but they're also selling off your information and ultimately you are the product that they're selling. Nothing is what it seems. So you need to make sure that you're aware of that. When someone calls you up from Westpac or Commonwealth Bank or National or something like that and they say that there's been a data security issue, press one to continue if your name is XYZ, then that is potentially fraud. They might be tricking you. And that is something you need to be on your toes about.
Be Aware
So first step first, make sure that you're aware of exactly who you're talking to. There are so many programmes and applications out there such as Lyrebird and a bunch of others that allow for you to have your voice taken, your voice print taken and then used against you to log into bank accounts, change people's mortgages, do all sorts of crazy stuff we shouldn't have access to do. You need to be on your toes. How do you go about fixing that? How do you fix that problem? The best thing would be make sure that your answers aren't something that you'd ever answer. If someone said, "What are your favourite coloured socks?" You'd be like, "That's a weird question." Instead of what's your mother's maiden name? Come on guys.
Make Security Questions Hard
Be a bit more diligent with those security questions. That is tip number two. If you're going to be listening to someone on the other end of the phone, make sure they can tell you as many details about you as you can tell. That's tip number one. Make sure you know who you're talking to. Be diligent. Think about what their ulterior motives are. Tip number two is don't have stupid security questions. Make sure that you're able to be secure with the questions that you've got and that if anyone asked you, whatever that question is, you have your ears prick up and you think, "What is that? Why would they ask me that? Why would they ask what my favourite coloured socks are? Such a weird question." And you think the answer would be white because most of them are white or black or whatever. So you need to make sure that you're on top of that.
Watch Out for the Free Stuff
Free, free, free is tip number three. Free things are not always free. There's always some catch. That can be that your email address is being harvested and sent off to someone else. Don't BCC, CC or to a bunch of email addresses because any one of those gets hit and you're up shit creek and you need to then have your email go on to someone else's mailing list, which then means they're getting paid a pumpteenth of nothing to your email address spammed and sold off. So make sure that you're not sending lots and lots of people the same emails. Send them all separately or make sure to BCC them in blind carbon copy instead. That's a simple one that so many people don't do it. It surprises me how many emails get hacked because people are not doing that.
Spam Filter is a Must
Tip number four, that invoice that you received, remember that invoice from that company you'd never heard of that you opened up, you double clicked on and then you got a virus? Why did that ever happen? You should always make sure you have edge protection. Make sure that you have your emails going through a spam filter. Make sure that's something that you do. That is a hundred percent. After that, they might still get through. It's kind of like data security isn't like you are secure or you're not secure. It's very, very variable. You're more secure or you're less secure. If there's a new virus that's come out, no one's combated it. That goes for computers, that goes for people. It just goes for anything really. If there's a new virus that's come out, there's not going to be an antibiotics to get over that. So you need to make sure that you are combating as best as you can and make sure that your computers are vaccinated as best as they can be. That doesn't mean that nothing will get through, but at least if you get sent that random invoice from that company you've never heard of, you don't open it.
Don’t Open Unverified Invoices
That goes for companies you have heard of as well. If you have heard of the companies, still probably don't open it. If they don't normally send an email to you with an invoice attached, or if they've written something that doesn't sound like they would have normally written, such as, "Hello, invoice attached, urgency, emergency," which we had a customer yesterday that had that happen. So make sure that you're aware of what is meant to be sent to you. Don't click on things you're not meant to click on. Don't look at stuff at work that you shouldn't be seeing.
Test Your Staff
Now, you might be thinking, "Crap man, we've got so many staff. How's this ever going to happen? We're going to have to train everyone up and everyone might click on things they shouldn't." The great news is there's a few different products that you can use that will actually test your employees. So there's one that we use called KnowBe4. What it does is it allows for certain emails to be sent to your staff that look legitimate to see if they click on them so you can test hundreds of people at once and then change around your security policies within your business accordingly. The last thing you want is the meat sitting in the seat to cause a vulnerability in your business. Let's be honest, that is where the vulnerability sits 80% of the time. As much as we'd love to think that the code monkeys and code jockeys that are sitting there doing their thing and just making it really, really poorly, most of the time it comes down to the people in the seat that are giving away information they're not meant to be. That could be your customer's information, that could be your personal information, that could be any sort of IP, that could be whatever it is. So, KnowBe4 is a fantastic tool to be able to test them and their email etiquette. As I already said earlier, another tool that we find is absolutely invaluable is the ability to make sure that all of your inbound emails and outbound emails are filtered in a way that lets you know that there's no garbage attached to them, there's no viruses attached to them, or fewer viruses.
The Final Word
As I said, it's not bullying and it's not yes or no, it's not black and white security. It is you're more secure or less secure. Ultimately anyone that wants to get in somewhere will work out a way to get into it and that's what it comes down to. My beautiful partner Sarah, I can comfortably say there was no way that I was ever going to get with her, but persistence broke down her walls and security is exactly the same. And that's how you can all end up with really beautiful networks. So, make sure you're persistent with your staff, make sure you're on top of any of their hygiene around security, data privacy and generally the way they deal with breaches. You don't want them to be taking data security anything less than one hundred percent seriously. I hope you've enjoyed this, and if you have, jump across to iTunes and leave me some love, stay good.
Ugly Apples Selling Cheap
Our last episode covered off on apples and oranges, and how they can't be the same price. How is that going to work? Obviously, you can't compare apples with oranges, but this comes down to another big problem, and that's having your price as your identifier.
Learn why price should not be your identifier at dorksdelivered.com.au
You Can’t Have Price As Your Identifier
The moment that you have your price as your identifier, you're comparing yourself with a rotten fruit. Don't compare yourself with a rotten fruit. Think about that analogy for a moment. How is the service that you're giving costing you so much, and the service someone else is giving costing them so much less? If their price is that much cheaper than yours, there's got to be something wrong with it. I buy fruit in wholesale of occasion, and I buy the fruit that's called the nearly dead fruit. It's nearly out of its time, but it's cheap. It's very, very cheap. But I know that I'm buying something very, very cheap. I know when I'm buying that, I'm getting something cheaper. I know that it literally will be probably rotten in a couple of weeks, as opposed to some of the stuff you can get from the fresh produce. I know that I'm getting that, and that has that risk associated with it.
Be Fair With Your Product Or Service
So I'm not saying be the cheapest and be the most expensive and always charge more. But what I'm saying is make sure that you don't have price as your identifier. If you've made it clear that you've got a B-grade product, and you're charging an A-grade price, you're charging, that's not very fair. If you have a product that sells for $10 and you're charging six, but there's no service and support, that's not very fair. That's when it becomes very, very hard for people trying to compare apples with oranges.
Do the Math
Work out what the difference is and how someone else is able to do that cheaper, and then you will be able to charge what your product is worth. That's what's important. This fruit would never have ended up at Woollies or Coles because it was not to the level of what Woollies or Coles would sell, so the fruit wholesalers would end up taking this fruit and just throwing it out. They then thought, "Let's make a market for it. Let's say that it's ugly fruit," or whatever they're marketing it as, "and say that it doesn't have the same warranties, but you're also getting it for a ripper of a price." They've removed wastage. They've moved items off of the shelf. They've made their whole business more efficient and more profitable than if they didn't do that, but they made it very clear, and they changed it around.
What is Your Example?
Price wasn't there identifier. The quality of their food was the identifier. When they changed that, and they said, "You are getting this price because the food isn't as good," no one cares if they get a full box of lemons, and there's two rotten ones down the bottom. They go, "Oh, well, you know, shit happens," verse if you buy a full box of lemons, and you're paying the normal price, the A-grade lemon price, and you buy this box, and at the moment it's about $85 for a full box of A-grade lemons, because I drink a lot of lemon juice, and that's when you buy that, and then you see a couple of rotten ones, you feel like you've been tricked. You feel like you've had someone pull the wool over your eyes, and that's no good. So make sure that you make sure your price is not your identifier. Make sure that when you're comparing apples with oranges, your customers understand the apple that you're selling is different to the orange of your competitors.
The Final Word
I hope you've enjoyed this, and if you have, make sure to let us know. What do you think about this fruit theme? I don't know what I'm doing with it. It's something fun, something different. I think I'm just feeling a bit fruity. I'd be very interested to know how you guys separate yourself from your competitors. If it's not on price, what are you doing it on? Is it service? Is it on support? Is it on extended warranties? Is it on going the extra level, having a 24-hour call centre in Australia or something like that, like what the Commonwealth Bank has done? What are you doing differently to allow for them to come to you? For our IT support business in Brisbane, we have dedicated account managers. We make sure that we're on top of everything financially, and if something does go wrong with any of your IT systems, we pay you for the downtime and problems that you have by giving you the whole month for free. So that's our difference, and I'd love to hear yours. Stay good.
How Can Apples and Oranges be the Same Price
You can't compare apples with oranges and that's what it comes down to. We've been told this time and time again, don't compare apples with oranges. But the problem is people know what an apple looks like and people know what an orange looks like, but people don't know when they've bought a lemon. Pretty clever what I did there, I thought. Anyway, so what are we going to be talking about is removing and unveiling what's behind the curtains. This comes down to any service that isn't really tangible and you are led to believe that the person that you've got doing the service is doing a good job. Now this can be book keepers, accountants, solicitors, lawyers, anything like that. IT people, marketers, SEO people, SCM people, ad-words people, all these people. Unless you're in the industry and you can double check and cross check what they're doing, you don't really know if the voodoo that they do is any good.
Get more tips on getting services for your business at dorksdelivered.com.au
What Are Your Agreements?
You know the voodoo that you do is good, but you don't know what they're doing. And that is a problem for your business because you don't know if you've bought an apple, an orange or a lemon. What's worse is most of the time you don't know until you find out that it's not working. Depending on what that is, if it's not working, that can cost you a lot of money. If your agreements, terms and conditions, confidentiality agreements, nondisclosure agreements, anything like that that you've had organised and sorted out through your solicitors have not become bulletproof, then you got problems and that can cost you a lot of money. Similarly, if you've been spending lots of money on ad words and search engine optimization and organic ranking and all that other stuff, onsite, offsite SEO, and you find out that it's not really working, but you've only been told years later, you could have spent thousands of dollars.
An Unfortunate Example
Sadly more recently I was going into a business to do an IT audit and marketing audit. When I did this business IT audit, I found so many problems. Now I went into to do the business IT audit but when I left, I had left showing them how many things are wrong with their marketing. Now we don't do marketing a whole bunch. We do it a little bit, we do it enough. But our bread and butter is definitely around IT Security know you as much as what it would be otherwise. So the things that we found, that we're spending about $2000 a month on the ad-words and search engine optimization. I said, "What are you getting for this?" He listed off a bunch of fantastic wizbang marketing words that he's been told obviously. And I said, "Okay, so how are the results?" He'd been doing this for quite a while, "Well they said it takes a long time." I said, "It does. Actually takes two months to six months before you get any real traction instead of nine to 12 months before that traction really gets flown into gear." But what was upsetting is they hadn't seen any traction. They've been spending all this money and I couldn't see anything to show what they were doing was actually of value. That's what you need to always have.
Get a Second Opinion
Have someone else that can come in that can do a second review. It doesn't mean that you're going to be changing services, it's just to keep them in check. It doesn't mean that the person that you've got doing whatever they're doing is doing it wrong. We see a lot of web designers out there more and more now that they're making it easier to make websites and we're seeing more and more poorly made websites. It comes down to, they may be designers or really good at just finding templates, but not very good when it comes to the technical aspects of it. Most all of them are not coders. Most all of them are not really there doing the development of the site. They're just copying and pasting stuff into spots. And that's a problem because you end up having this inefficient website and you spend a lot of money on it and you don't know that. You've thought you've bought this beautifully awesome Pink Lady apple and you haven't, you've bought this Bush lemon, but they've painted it red and made it sparkle. So making sure that you've gone the right path and you've got someone else double checking the accountability for every aspect of your business that's dealing in non-tangible professional services. If you've got anyone giving you professional IT services, make sure you get someone else into an IT audit.
Let Us Try Hack You
We have some pretty cool guarantees. We have a, let me hack you test, where if you ask us, "Can you hack us?" We'll give it our best shot. If we approach you with the, let me hack you test, it generally means we already know that you've got a pretty good surface area to be attacked on. So we will upfront money and we'll say, "Look, if we cannot hack you, we'll give you two grand." Depending on the size of the business, 10 grand, depending on the vulnerabilities, 20 grand. It doesn't matter the number, we know that they might be being managed very well. We're doing it in the best of heart with the best of intentions. That is just to show them what their current company is doing may not be necessarily what they think they're doing. When you hire a web designer and you think the web designer is going to make you this awesome spaceship, they might not be that great at making spaceships. The same thing as someone who's really good at drawing cars may not be that great at designing engines. With a website, you need to have someone who's good at both or a team.
The Final Word
So keep in mind, any professional services that you have throughout your business, have them cross checked, double checked by another company. It doesn't mean that you're asking the company you're with to disappear, it's just to make sure that they're doing what they're meant to be doing. Shed some new eyes on the same problem, and make sure that that royal Gala or Pink Lady apple that you got is exactly that and not a rotten tomato or a Bush lemon. So I hope you've enjoyed this and I've found myself becoming rather hungry. If you could let me know if you have any other types of professional services or times that you've had issues, that'd be really interesting to hear how you managed to overcome those. And if that costs you a lot of money or if you got out scot-free. Jump across the iTunes, leave us some feedback and I look forward to speaking to you soon. Stay good.
Tips to Stop Customers Cancelling
As time goes on, different trends appear to emerge. One of the things that we've been seeing is people cancelling a lot. I've got someone here that I'm going to be talking to from Perfectly Beautiful. Her name's Sarah and I'm going to be talking about if she has any customers and if she's frustrated with them cancelling on her. So Sarah, have you ever had anyone cancel on you?
Read more about Tips to stop customers cancelling: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/482-tips-to-stop-customers-cancelling
Sarah: Yes, I sure have. Occasionally, we get people booking in for phone calls and when I call them up they won't answer the phone call so pretty much that I suppose is cancelling on on us.
Josh: It's a bit annoying and I can imagine when they do that, it means that you're left at a dead end. You've spent some time, put it aside. You've already diverted that chunk of your life and everyone knows time is money and we've only got time in our life and that's the only thing that has value, really, so when they cancel that and you're going to be on the phone to them for 10, 15, 20 minutes and then they don't, what do you normally do with your time?
Sarah: Well first of all, I'll usually start off by sending them a text message to say that we have called and if we can arrange another time to chat with them because usually they are interested in booking, so we don't really want to lose them and just leave them alone. We do that and then usually I'm kind of in the office anyway, so I'll just continue working and doing whatever I'm doing. Maybe sometimes they'll call back because them themselves might've forgotten about it and be in a meeting or in the car at the time. We then just hope that in some way they respond back to us, which they usually do, which is good. Then we'll just give them a call back at another time.
Josh: Do you think that the reason for people, maybe cancelling or forgetting to be there to answer the phone when you've booked that in, might be not as much because they're millennials, but just because we have been put into a position where we've got too many things that we're having to juggle. There's so many distractions. We're driving to work. Obviously, we've got Facebook here and we've got Snapchat there or what do you think the reason is that they're forgetting the appointments?
Sarah: Well, I think because especially a lot of people I work with are brides, so they're at a stage where they're in the craziness of organising a wedding. They sometimes will organise so many appointments that they might just simply forget about it. I suppose they might be in their downtime where they're sending out their emails and doing all their wedding planning and then forget that they actually just booked in an appointment. Sometimes it's not always their fault. We know that people are always busy, but yeah. I think our life is just busy in general.
Josh: I absolutely agree, brides are busy people. That's why people call them bridezilla, I guess. With business owners, it's about the same so you're also a busy person, so your time and their time is both valuable and lining that up ... I know that you've got a couple of pretty cool tools that you use in your business to try and create calendar appointments and things like that. What have you found works and what doesn't work?
Sarah: At the moment, I'm using Calendarly and in their email, they can click on that to organise a time so that will actually show my availability. If I'm, myself, busy with something, I make sure that it's in there so they're not wanting a call at that specific time. Then it shows that kind of when we're both free to sit down and have a chat. I kind of usually will allow my days that I know I'm going to be in the office all day and my days are going to be quite freed up so then I can have a proper chat to them and take the time to actually talk to them and if they aren't available, then organise another time during that time of the day.
Josh: Cool and obviously in life, shit happens. Sometimes people cancel. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes it all works out well. Sometimes they don't have reception or the kids are home sick and they don't have the chance to to talk to you obviously. What do you find the trend is once they've got a deposit put down? Do you find that they cancel as often or have you ever had issues with people changing around or moving their appointments or adjusting things after you've had some sort of financial money come into the equation?
Sarah: No, so with our bookings we take a deposit from them so then we know that they're secured and they're locked in. I feel like this stops them from cancelling at the last minute because they already have money invested into it and they feel trust in us that we're definitely going to be there because they've also got money invested into it. We don't really get any cancellations when people have put a deposit down because they know that it's all locked in and secure and we actually get people adding on people, which is actually more of a benefit than a loss.
Josh: At the moment, I know your business is still in its infancy, but in one way or another, you've been in business for awhile and you've really just gone gangbusters over the last 12 months, but at the moment you've had no cancellations whatsoever after they've put finance down?
Sarah: No, I haven't. Been lucky enough. No one's had a wedding been cancelled just yet so I'm lucky that I've had to do every wedding.
Josh: Cool. Okay. So I guess that goes to say that the way that you should structure your business to make sure people are not cancelling is to make sure they've got some hand in the game, make sure that they're in a position that they have something to lose so that they don't cancel.
I know myself, I've had had speaking events, we've had 140, 180 people registered and we've had 80 rock up and I find nearly every time it's only the free events that have such a terrible ratio as opposed to the events where someone has to put down even something small like $10 and they're going to rock up because they don't want to see that money lost and they wouldn't have registered for the event anyway. I definitely think making sure that they've got some sort of finances in there that they're holding up their money makes a big difference and it all comes down to the person. I'm sure if something terrible happened to a bride or something like that, that you're doing makeup for, you'd be understanding of that and help them out.
Yeah, I think that's interesting stuff. Did you have anything else to add?
Sarah: No, that's all.
Josh: That's wonderful. So that was Sarah from Perfectly Beautiful and hopefully you don't have any frustrated customers cancelling on you and these tips have helped a bit. Make sure that they've dropped some finances down. Use some tools such as Calendarly, and you should be pretty good. I would love to hear how you stop customers cancelling on you and make sure to leave some comments there in the iTunes and leave us some feedback. Stay good.
Improving Productivity Through Workplace Design
If there's anything you've ever learned from Ray Kroc, it's that there's always room for improvement in efficiency. The way that your office works and the way that you design your office around efficiency. Workspaces on improvements are always required to increase productivity. The reason these are really important is because you want to be the person that brings out the new McDonald's and I know that sounds corny, but ultimately when it comes down to it, if you're running an inefficient design, you're not going to be doing things anywhere near as quickly as you can. If you have to walk 10 steps to the printer instead of two steps to the printer or go up a flight of stairs to pick up a piece of paper and there's multiple problems with what I just said there. Why are you using paper? But unless you're trying to get your steps up and you're trying to be more efficient by exercising at work, you shouldn't be traveling that far and it comes to all different aspects of the way that you set up your office.
Read more about productivity improvement at dorksdelivered.com.au
Setting Up Your Office
We have our office set up in a reasonably efficient design. We do still have a printer and we go through about one ream of paper every decade. We've actually, not even kidding, we had our ream of paper that we loaded the print up when we first bought the printer in 2007. Office design is really important and automation is really important, and anyone that knows me knows that I ramble on about that for hours and hours because it is incredibly passionate to me, and very, very strong subject. But making sure that you've got an efficient design in your office will mean that work gets done more efficiently and more effectively. That means that you can either have an increase in productivity or you can have a little bit more downtime for your staff for fun Friday drinks and things like that.
Reading Up
If you're ever looking at ways to grow your business. The E-Myth is a fantastic way by Michael E. Gerber. It's one of the first books that I read when I got into business and it does describe a few of those different roles that you play in your business and how they work to increase your productivity. This can be used to increase the way that you do design your office, making sure that there is a balance of colour, of balance of fun things to do. You want to make sure that when you go into an office it's inviting, you don't want to leave, you want to have it so like it's the Google office when someone rocks up there, they're so happy being at work, they have no interest going home. That's up to you if you want to set up pods and have people sleep in your office or not, but you want to make sure it's fun.
Install Some Fun Activities
A lot of the different environments that I've seen and I've gone in and helped out with have ping pong tables, pool tables, bar taps, all sorts of things. Myself, we swap between running from a small service office in Brisbane and the rest of the time we run out of the house and that's because it's a better, more cost effective method. It's more efficient. It's in the design with the way that we've set our business up. So that I can go traveling for six months of the year if I want to and I can also make sure that I'm not combating traffic and putting out all that pollution. But from the home office, we have a putt putt course and all that fun jazz, so we always had fun times to be able to relax and unwind and that in itself increases productivity.
Focus on Quality over Quantity
Anyone that's ever done research on the Tomato Time will know how much more efficient you are having a 25 minute on, five minute off schedule, and being able to really lock yourself in the zone. If you're not sure of how efficient you are, how efficient you can become, it's a really sensible idea to check out and get an IT audit to see how efficient your systems are. When it comes down to it, IT wasn't the backbone of the industry's 30 years ago, but nowadays it's as important as electricity. No business runs without Because it has there and it's sitting there doing its thing and every business has kind of been twisted into requiring its use. Most businesses don't spend enough money or time on making sure they've got efficiently designed systems to make sure that they're able to do the work they need to do. When I say systems, I'm not just talking about the hardware, I'm not just talking about the Cloud application, I'm talking about the way the users are using them. Sometimes people use the system's wrong for years on end and that has no advantage to anyone. So yeah, let us know if you can, we can jump in and give you guys an IT audit and make your business more efficient.
The Final Word
If we can't find $2,000 worth of ways to make your business efficient, I'll give you $2,000 ever and wins. If you've enjoyed this, jump across to iTunes and leave us some feedback and I'd love to hear how you've made your business more efficient and different tips that you could help us out with to spread the knowledge. Stay good.
Project Management Software
I don't care how big your business is, or if you think you need this or not, you need it. If you don't think you need it, you just never used it properly before. Now I'm talking about Asana and Trello and all those other different project management software pieces. There's lots of different project management software items out there, and the thing that you need to remember is your mileage varies, obviously.
Read more about Trello: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/479-want-to-know-why-we-love-trello
Trello is Awesome
We're huge Trello fans. After mucking around with a lot of different project management tools we found that Trello is great, especially at their price point. I like having a diversity between the different software packages that we use and Trello ticks that box as well. I don't necessarily always like buying into the same brand. Although it's nice being in the same ecosystem, it doesn't always pay off when they up all their prices or infrastructure goes down. Office 365, yep. That would never go down for nine hours during a business day in Australia. But then it does. So it's fantastic and you've got to make sure that you look at project management software from a perspective of how it manages and works with your business.
Trello is Easy to Use
One of the great things that I like about Trello is how easy it is to manage the cards. You can create lists of cards, and each of those cards can then have tasks, and each of those lists can have multiple cards that you can then move between the lists. Imagine, let's look at it like this. You're a kid and you want 15 different things for Christmas, and you want those things no matter what. Instead of having to ask for all of them, they all have equal value. Instead you could make a list of what the priority items are. You can have the lower priority items, that, not the red bike, but maybe it's the pencil case, you know, I kind of want that because my other pencil case looks a bit dodgy and a you don't want to be picked on at school, so you want this other cool pencil case. I know, I know, do kids even use pencils nowadays? Anyway, this project management software will allow for you to have that in a separate list of a lower priority, and then when you actually get it for Christmas you can move it into, I got it from Santa. And then you've got that in the list.
When to Use Project Management Software
I use project management software to manage different projects between my teams, and that works out really well. I've even got one that I manage with my girlfriend. So you can use it for anything and everything. But the big thing is when you have a brainstorming session with the rest of your team, even if it's just yourself wearing different DeBono hats, thinking hats, you are able to see what tasks need to be done and visualise what's the most important task to be done. Set reminders and make sure that you're kicking goals.
It Makes Life Easier
Project management software is just about making your life a little bit easier. It's not going to overtake everything, but it is definitely going to make things when you go, "Oh, I need update that thing on the website. Who do I do that? How do I know who that goes to?" And you go, "I'll put that to the web guy." Our computers are a bit slow, make another project board, call IT. Then your IT department comes in, they do an audit and when they do an IT audit, it comes through and they say, "Okay, you need to upgrade this, this, this, this and this." Again, you can see all of these different tasks that need to be done and you can set a priority on them, and you can see what stage they're at. So it's not just good for you, it's good for you to be able to keep accountability with the rest of your team.
The Price Tag is Great
I can't speak more highly of Trello. I've been using it for a number of years and I'm still on the free plan that is still servicing us as we require it. Now, I always use another package called ConnectWise, which does a little bit more nitty gritty technical stuff, but generally speaking, Trello is going to get you 95% of the way there. I use Trello for all of our marketing teams, for any of our sales teams, for any of the other collaboration that we do with any external companies. t's there and it does its job, and it does it well. And the price tag's right.
The Final Word
So I would give Trello four and a half out of five. The only things that I would change is ultimately just allowing for a few more integrations in the free package. But that's just because I'm being stingy, so they have to make their money somewhere. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this and if you have, please make sure to jump over to iTunes, send us some love and give us some feedback. What would you like to hear about? What project management software are you using? Because I'd love to go and trial that out and see how that works for us. Stay good.
Risk VS Reward in Your Business
Risk versus reward. If you can't measure it, is it worth doing at all? It's a great question. The way I sort of look at it is there's a lot of different people and everyone's tolerance towards risk is is different, and you have these different people that come up to you and try to express the way they're going to be doing their businesses better. They don't have to go to university and get an education. They might not have any experience or any anyone to really coach them through, but they are going to risk at all. They're going to do it because there's 70 other people out there that did it, that didn't go through university. So because they didn't do it, I don't have to do it, and that's a risk that they're taking.
Learn more about risk and reward in business at dorksdelivered.com.au
Do Your Research
Obviously you can mitigate that risk by gaining more points of experience listening to other peers that have maybe done it before. Or researching some articles on the likeliness of you becoming absolutely gangbusters, famous, rich as an entrepreneur by a not going to university or if maybe your chances are a bit higher by going to university. Chances are you going to find, yeah, university is going to help you out, or at least having a fantastic coach. I'm definitely not saying university's the only way to go, but all these little points of difference help.
Risk Has Changed Over Time
Risk versus reward has changed over the years and it will change with business to business all the time. We've got this new cloud computing era that's come through, which is absolutely amazing, but it comes about with its own risks and its own rewards. We've got systems in place such as the banking systems, which if you've looked at any movie such as Oceans 11 or any movie with a heist and a casino or a bank, you'll know that they always take some element of risk. People buy franchises and put their entire house on the line, and that is fine if that's what you want to do. That is a risk and you're hoping that the reward will pay off at the end. It might and it might not, but you need to be comfortable with the risk that you're putting through there.
Robbing Banks Has Even Changed!
Banks, back in the day, so it would seem, you grab a gun and a balaclava, you cruise into the bank and you say, "Give us all your money." They would, and they would give you the money. Lou leave, and you're rich, and everything's amazing. Now, all notes are tracked. All money that's within the bank is minimised and digitised. There's several security cameras and other elements of security that have inside a bank, and so the risk versus reward for a criminal just to run in there and shoot up the place and grab a bunch of cash has gone. A bank, back in the day, would have had the equivalent money of hundreds of thousands or more in the bank. Now we've got $20,000 or $30,000 or $100,000 depending on the size of the bank, hardly any cash is kept on site.
Businesses Change Too
So the risk versus reward has changed and that's the same with all businesses across the years. The risk that there's going to be a problem or a change given a long enough timeline is, it will happen, 100%. So if you bought into a Blockbuster franchise or Video EZY back in the day, you're probably not in a great position right now unless you pivoted and removed the risk from your life. That goes with all businesses. Everyone's looking to move to the cloud. As long as you're doing it in a way that is mitigating your risk, you have great rewards. The reward is, you don't have to have all the infrastructure costs, the capital costs. You're exchanging all that across for operational costs, which is fantastic when looking at any cloud or cloud-computing environment.
Is the Reward Worth it?
The thing to remember though is the reward is there, but the risk is that now all of your information is stored on third-party servers that you don't have access to. They are now central points of attack. As opposed to someone breaking into your house and looking in your pillowcase for your cash back in the day, they would grab it out of the bank because it was easy just to go to the bank and steal everyone's money.
You Need to Secure Your IT
Now we've got these massive targets, and obviously the security is going to be better, but the reward is better for the criminals. That's where you need to make sure that you get an IT audit, or any IT security audit. Doing this will allow for your business to make sure that the risk versus reward balance is in check for you and your comfortability levels moving forward when you're looking to move into the cloud.
The Final Word
Hope you've enjoyed this, and if you have, make sure to jump across to iTunes. Leave us some feedback. Give us some love, and I look forward to you guys tuning in again soon. Stay good.
Tips for Creating a Social Media Calendar
As you carry over from our previous podcast, today we're going to be talking about tips for creating a social media calendar. As you you know, there's always new social media types of things coming up and disappearing. We know that Instagram is the running horse. It's shooting up, down and centre and it's absolutely overtaking some of the others and annihilating them. We also know that Google Plus has disappeared and is no longer a thing. So you need to make sure that you have a multi tier approach whenever you are going to be marketing through any social media, and marketing in general. You don't want to rely upon any one technology because when it disappears, you'll burn and you will disappear as well. So there's these tools that come out for managing social media calendars.
Read more about social media calendar at dorksdelivered.com.au
We Love SocialBee
One of the fantastic ones that I've been looking at and playing around with recently is SocialBee. It is absolutely incredible. What it can do is far superior than any of the other different calendars out there. Now I've used Buffer, I've used Sendible, I've used Hootsuite and by far, SocialBee is the tip top best that there is. Best bang for buck. Nevertheless, I'm digressing. If you want a free trial, send me a message and we'll get it sorted for you, or just jump across our website and ask me for a link. I'll give you one that you can just play around, trial for a month or two. However long you want, we'll give it a go. See what you think. That's how passionate I am about the product. Nevertheless, I'm not associated with them, I just really love the product.
Think About the Future
What you want to do is make sure that your social media calendar is set up in such a way that you're able to send the posts out at an appropriate time that help your end users see them when you want to see them. There's this compounding effect whenever you put a post through to any of the social sites. What happens is originally back in the day, and I'm talking like back in the day, eight years ago or so. I know. You used to be able to send out these posts and everyone on your list, everyone that have liked your page, everyone, all of your friends would see this post and be like, "Okay, that's pretty cool. Awesome, awesome."
Facebook Today
Then what happened was Facebook decided now we want to make some money out of this. So we're going to give you a little taste tester of your audience, so if you've got 1,000 people that have liked your business page on Facebook, they're only going to show your page to 100 people. Those 100 people, when they look at this link, if their engagement levels are high, so they're sharing it a lot, they're commenting a lot, they're liking it a lot, you then have a carry on effect and they'll show it to a larger subset of your audience. So instead of 100, they'll then show it to 200 more people. So then 300 people and only a third of your audience have seen it. As time has gone on and your News Feed has become more and more valuable to Facebook, what they've done is they've cut that 100. So originally 1,000 were seeing it and they cut it to 100, and now they've cut it down to like 10 to 15 people. So as a percentage, next to nothing. One and a half percent of your visitors are seeing this traffic. When they see it, if they have high engagement, they then start pumping it through.
You Need Engaging Posts
The problem is unless you're paying to boost all your posts, which can cost a heap of money over time, you need to make sure that when you have an engaging post, it's seen at a time that puts it close to the top of the News Feed so at least the people that it is being shown to are engaging with it for you to gain more organic reach.
Example
A great example would be photographer from the last example, from the last podcast. You might have a thought and go, "Okay, we have this beautiful deal that we're putting through. A really funny, engaging post that releases dopamine, makes people chuckle, and we want to have this post released on Instagram, on Facebook and on LinkedIn."
Choose Your Site Wisely
So what you do is you think, "All right, I don't want to release on all these things at the same time because as we're already discussing, if you have it going through to Facebook, although it's a fantastic medium, it's going to be when people are more in a relaxed downtime mode, or they're at lunch or they've just finished, or they're picking up the kids from school or something like that." So when you're advertising this post, and you can have the same deal, let's call it six portrait photos for 60 bucks or something like that. Okay, you have this great, awesome deal. When you sell the six portrait photos for 60 bucks and you'd do it on Facebook, you'd be wanting to make sure that the audience and the way that you're wording all the information is more around six family photos for 60 bucks. Cherish the memory of your kids at the age that they are, and have this last forever or whatever. Then when you're putting it through on Instagram, six portrait photos to boost your business profile. Make sure you get that job and you're paid what you're worth, and then you have that post go through. Then Instagram you'd have a more generic one that would apply to both audiences where possible.
When to Post
Now the release time of this, when people are looking to get another job, can you guess which day they do that on? It's the days they have their shits, after they've been away on holidays, days after public holidays. These are huge days for people to want to change jobs because they're coming back in, they've got to fight this fire where normally it's a Monday of two days of problems. Now instead they're fighting this fire when there's three or four days, or if it's been over Christmas, sometimes two weeks to a month. That's right, and if you're overseas listeners, we get a lot of time off over Christmas. How good is Australia? Yeah, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oe, Oe Oe. Nevertheless, when you come back, people want to change jobs. They might've had a new year's resolution to earn more money, or walk their way up the ladder or whatever it is. Then they get taken down a peg when they realise that they don't really have the capacity to do that. Nevertheless, advertising at appropriate times in some of these different channels is a great idea, and using a social media calendar automation tools such as SocialBee will allow you to do that with ease.
Scheduling is Key
You'll be able to set it up and schedule certain posts to go through at certain times when you know they're going to be looking at it. You know on that Tuesday after a Monday public holiday in Australia or anywhere else, at around 12:30 maybe 12:00, if you put up a post about enhancing your LinkedIn profile on LinkedIn, people are likely to see it because people are looking around thinking, "I'm not interested in this job anymore. Let's make sure my resume is up to date." Then they jump straight across to LinkedIn, make sure that LinkedIn is up to date, and then they see this post in their News Feed and they think, "Shit, I need to make sure my photos are up to date." So that is where you can really capture a lot of audience. Now imagine the flip side. Yeah, advertise is same wonderfully crafted piece of image that you chuck up there, and you put it up there on a Thursday at 4:00, just after they've had lunch before they're coming home. They don't want to be looking at LinkedIn on their way home. They're going to be in traffic for the next couple of hours, they're going to get home. They're going to crack open a beer. They're going to be talking to their Mrs or their husband or whatever it is, and they're going to be in disinterest. That post is going to be seen to have lack of hits, lack of results that are coming through. When that happens, your post is not going to be promoted organically. So you want to make sure you continue to have that organic reach, because if people are clicking on that post and they are engaging with it, you're going to reach more people with less effort and less money. Ultimately, all it came down to was a very simple social media calendar automation tool like SocialBee.
The Final Word
Hope you've enjoyed this and if you have, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love. We're doing some pretty good deals at the moment. If you wanted to leave us a review on iTunes and then jump across to leave a Google review, search for Dorks Delivered. If you're local to around South East Queensland, I'll personally come out and drop a six pack of beer off. We can meet in person, and talk about your business. Stay good.
Building Your Business Through Social Media
Let's talk about building your business through social media. Now, as we all know, social media is changing the way that we communicate and market business, so we're going to be talking today about how to utilise social media to grow your business and being in closer touch with your clients. We're going to give you a few tips and hopefully you'll be able to take them as a plus.
Read more about building a business through social media at dorksdelivered.com.au
Back to the Beginning
To understand social media, let's rewind 15 years. Yes, you heard me right, 15 years. How quickly has that flown by? We've been there with social media for 15 years. Now, if we have a look at how social media started out, forums on the internet gained a lot of social traffic, a lot of traffic from real people where content was being created all the time. It was a content-churning instrument, these online forums where people were able to put up posts about different things that were happening, but normally always very, very content-specific. There was never a forum where you could go to talk about life's problems and chuck up a photo of what you had for lunch.
Are They Really Social?
Ultimately though when you think about it, social networks are not social networks, they're anti-social networks. When you have a look at most businesses, most of the time what they have on their label is not what they are when it comes down to what they're doing. When you look at good food labels on things and you get crap food and you use social media and social networks, yet they promote being by yourself and not socialising. It's quite interesting, very, very silly really, but here we are, and everyone loves them.
Choose Wisely
You don't want to be promoting something that doesn't have a visual cue on LinkedIn. For instance, the latest and greatest in antivirus now seen to you on LinkedIn, makes no sense. You're seeing this product that doesn't really have a face, it doesn't make any sense, but if you operate a hair and makeup salon or you do something like that, very, very good. You operate a restaurant and you want to showcase how awesome your food is, then that's a great spot to be able to put that sort of information in. Either way you look at it, building your business through social media has changed. Social media has changed the landscape of how you build your business. Social media for the better or worse has become an intricate part of your marketing stack. You have to be on social media. If you are not, your competitors will be and they will blow you out of the water. Here are these amazing stats, there's over 1.2 billion people on Facebook, and you have to be on there if you want to be where the people are, you need to be advertising where all the people are.
It Can Be Very Helpful For Your Business
Social media is a great tool when used properly. There's so many times we see it used poorly, you're not engaging with customers and what the message is you're putting through are not going to be shareable, sociable messages. You want to make sure people, when they're seeing this stuff, are engaged and interested to continue following your brand.You should make sure that you've got multiple feeds that are coming in and you've got multiple angles with the way that you're doing it. Any one technology will change, and this isn't a new thing from a social media era onwards, this has been happening for years, for years, probably thousands of years. I haven't done the research, don't hold me to that, but probably thousands of years. You had the business through social media Yellow Pages and it was the medium to be able to advertise in. They would charge $20,000 or more for a single-page ad in the Yellow Pages, and that's a full page, a single page, I mean the whole page, but $20,000 and people were paying it. People did it because it brought in customers, and that is where people were looking. Now people are looking through multiple different streams. A great example of this would be if you're a photographer and you want to put your brand out there, you might think, "Oh, I don't know. How am I going to do that?" Yes, it's a very visual thing, so Instagram is sensible, but other people that are on Instagram are going to be the type of people that are going to be engaging your services. If you're a photographer, obviously you can do lots of different stuff. Let's stay with people as the core objects that you're taking photos of. You can take photos of families, weddings, portrait photos, business photos, all sorts of different things.
The Final Word
Make the most of different social marketing tools and your business will grow. I hope you've enjoyed this and stay good.
Is Your Smartphone Listening to You
Today we're going to be talking about is your smartphone listening to you? The short answer is, yes, it is. How creepy is that? If you've got Facebook Messenger or any of the big apps on there, you're going to find that your phone is actually listening to you. You might be thinking, "Why? How did they know that I was looking to buy new tyres?" And the reason is they saw you make that call to Goodyear, or Beaurepaires, or Bob Jane, whoever it was, and then whoever had the highest bid on any of the different networks that are advertising to you, be it Facebook or Google, has then said, "Oh, they've got the highest bid. Let's shoot them across even if they're a competitor."
Learn more about smartphones and cybersecurity: http://bit.ly/2kpgJkx
What Can You Do About It?
So is your smartphone listening to you? Absolutely. Absolutely, it is. And what can you do about it? Not much. It's getting worse and worse each day, to be honest. You've got these different units. Alexa, Simon says, I'm listening to everything you're saying. I'm listening to everything you're saying. See? Even Amazon's agreeing that they are listening to everything that we're saying. And that goes for Google Home as well. There's more and more things all around us that are getting points of interest and points of data about us. Google, Facebook, Amazon, all the big players know more information about us than our peers, than our spouses, than our families, and most importantly, than ourself, which is some scary stuff.
Your Devices Know What You Are Doing
They know your searching habits, they know everything. And I say searching habits like, oh, I'm just talking searching on Google, but I'm not. I'm talking about searching anything and everything anywhere. If you're clicking on a certain type of video and they know that cat videos really entice you, meow, to continue through and click through, they're going to try and keep you on their channels for as long as possible by playing cat videos, more so than how-to videos. If they know that you're going to be picking up your phone at a certain time and looking at something at a certain time because that's your lunch break, they know when your lunch break is. They know when you go home. They know the path to get you home. And you know how convenient they make some of this data to you accessibly. And that makes you think, "Oh, that's really handy," but it's the data they're not showing you. Over 300 points of information are taken every single day by anyone on an Android, that's an Apple ... Stuffed up. From anyone on an Android, that's a Samsung phone, or an iOS Apple phone. There's over 300 points just from those two different main carrying networks. So that's quite incredible when you think about it, 300 different points.
They Know Who You Are
They know where you travel to. If you look up say the Google timeline, they can see how well travelled you are, how fast you travel, what you go and see, how long do you spend in that pub or wherever it happens that your night ended up. They know if you're single, they know if you're in a relationship. They know the whole lot and they can advertise and sell that information off and incredible prices. You're talking Facebook makes about $12 a month per user that it has on there. So quite a lot of coin when you think about it with how many users they have. People think, "Ah, doesn't matter. I don't mind." I've got the service and has everyone's been told in the past, if you're not paying for it, you are the product. And that is 100% and the case most all the time. And if you're not paying for it and they're making $12 and you're going, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter." It does because you're not going to be given realistic numbers with what you're working with.
Advertising is Targeted to You
You're going to be given numbers, the things and products that you're looking for. You won't know who the competitors are because you'll be shown the highest bidder only. You won't know and be given a holistic approach to what you're searching for because everything's going to be skewed in the direction that helps you find the information in a way that they want you to be seeing it. So if you're looking for something and your way of life is that you're a gambling degenerate who's addicted to whatever, you will be seeing things that are relevant to you as opposed to a church going, non-gambling, degenerate that has their life all in order. You'll be shown a sharing a different view of the world. So it really compounds down and shows you information around a skewed perspective. As I said, it's not going to give you a realistic understanding of where the world is at and what's going on with it. So that's really, really important to make sure you understand and see where you're at and make sure you're aware they are looking at us, they're spying on us.
The Final World
I hope you've enjoyed this and it hasn't freaked you out too much. As I said, there's not much you can do about it. Just jump back on the Nokia 5110. If that doesn't work, well then you obviously never love playing Snake. Having said that, if you have enjoyed this, jump across to iTunes. Leave us some love. Give us a review and let us know what you think. Stay good.
Automation Is Life Live Episode
Joshua: So good morning, everyone, and thanks for having me. So today we're going to be talking about automation and how your business can be more automated and what automation means to everyone. So I'm going to go and ask, I guess everyone, what do you think automation is? What would you say automation is?
Learn more about automation at dorksdelivered.com.au
Audience member: Do something once and not have to do it again.
Joshua: Perfect. So removing repetition. That's a good answer. Is there anyone else that has any different understandings of what automation is?
Audience member: Stuff happens without you having to do it.
Joshua: That's very good. As long as it's being monitored for and you're told when it's not doing the things that it should be doing. So yeah, absolutely. Yep. That's another great example of automation. Any other answers?
Audience member: Taking care of certain processes, setting them and allowing them to happen.
Joshua: Yup. Yup. Absolutely. So automation is a very used buzzword at the moment around the place. And automation as I've written here, which was for Neil, but he's not here, oils just ain't oils and automations just ain't automations. I wrote that line just for him and he's not even here, jeez. Anyway. And the important thing is you need to automate as much in your business as you can, because if you don't, your competitors will. And automation is happening all the time and innovation and technology is happening all the time. And people think, "I'm scared of technology," but you go back only a few years ago, back 150 years. And refrigeration wasn't around. No one's scared of fridges now and no one's scared of microwaves now, no one's scared of a lot of things that we just take for granted.
All these things are automating processes within our own home. We're able to have things washed in a dishwasher instead of slaving over a sink. So all these little things speed up your process and there's just a lot of automation happening at the moment to speed up all your processes. Automation shouldn't stop at work, though. Automation should happen at home. And so ultimately you have more time to spend with your family and your friends, because we've only got that once on this earth and that's our time. Everything else should be able to be automated. Does everyone agree? Good. Because otherwise the next 23 minutes is going to be really boring. So that's good. Everyone agrees. So as I said earlier, my name's Joshua and I'm from Dorks Delivered and Business Efficiency Experts. I've got my business cards here. Don't actually have them in the box, but if you want to pass them around, that'd be awesome.
So Dorks Delivered does a lot of IT stuff, but a few years ago we found out that more and more businesses were getting us in to automate their processes, hence Business Efficiency Experts being born. So what we do is we try and automate and document... tell me if I talk too quickly as well. I naturally talk quite quickly, so, okay, cool. No worries. Pull me up on it. So yeah, so anyway, Business Efficiency Experts was born out of the need to have businesses automate their processes better. And that can be through removing repetition. That can be through better documentation processes and making sure you're doing a task once. Because you're doing it once and it can be repeated a hundred times or a thousand times, that's awesome if you're not doing it. Automation can be just documenting the processes down. So if you're... you said you had a problem with a staffing member leaving. You can make sure that the onboarding process is much faster.
You then are able to have them onboard and have them profitable in a significantly faster time. It can be removing or creating accountabilities and removing any sort of repetition. So anything that is going to speed up your processes in business is giving it elements of automation. And this goes for home as well. So my home, I'd have to say out of... you've seen my home. Garry's been... lucky enough? I don't know.
Audience member: Fortunate enough.
Joshua: Fortunate. That sounds good. My home's very automated. When I go to bed I can call out to Alexa, which normally when I say that it starts talking, but it's not doing that here, which is good. But I can call out to Alexa and turn off all the lights, shut the gates, lock the door, turn the sauna off, turn the turn the pond waterfall off or whatever else is happening around the place and make sure everything's locked down.
So very easy. You don't have to sort of be in the warm blanket reading a book and then have to have a fight over who's the one who gets out to turn the light off. So it removes arguments, automation removes arguments with your partner. So anyway, so in my spare time when I'm not doing stuff with Dorks Delivered and Business Efficiency Experts, I'm a columnist for My Entrepreneur Magazine. I've been featured on news.com.au, and soon to be published in every entrepreneur's guide, focus in on your marketing. As I said earlier, though, today I'm gonna be talking about automation and that's covered off heavily in our podcast, which is called Business Built Freedom.
So I started automating things 19 years ago and I didn't even realise at that stage that that's what I was doing. I was going through a process where I was earning only $6 to make these number plate bracket things. And it was taking me an hour and a half to make them. I got this task, and as a 12-year-old, now you know how old I am, as a 12-year-old, I was making these number plate brackets, an hour and a half for $6 so I was earning $4 an hour. Not very good money but more than every other 12-year-old that was out there. In hindsight and looking back, it was child labour, but I'd chosen to do it. So I guess it's okay. Now, these number plate brackets, I used Lego, and I don't know if you know Technic Lego and robotic Lego and stuff like that. I saved up some money and built a cit that allowed for me to automate the process of creating these number plate brackets. And as a 13-year-old I was creating 10 of them in an hour. So as a 13-year-old, I was earning $60 an hour from home in mum and dad's garage.
So that's more than what most 20-year-olds were earning and a lot of people were earning, as a 13-year-old. When I got to 14 and nine months, I registered my first ABN number. I then had it as a registered business, so it was legit. I then from there started to have my friends come over and work for me and work with me and had the rate increased to $10.60 per number per bracket. That meant that I was getting $106 per hour of work that was being done and then I was outsourcing that to other people to do it. Now, at that stage, I was just trying to make the process as quick as possible. I didn't really look at what I was doing as automation, but it was absolutely automation, and that's just where my love for automation has grown from there. So who here would say they're automating things in their business?
Yup. Cool. Awesome. And who here thinks that they could be doing more with their business in the way of automation that they're not? Everyone should have their hand up. There's always ways to improve. I've automated a lot of things right now, but we're talking... How I'm talking at the moment. This will come up and be on my podcast. It'll be edited down and go into my podcast, it'll be transcribed, and from the transcription that'll end up on my blog. That will then be posted through Facebook, Instagram. Not Instagram, sorry. Facebook. No, it will be Instagram. Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. So that's in a doing all my marketing for me, it goes through a search engine optimizer that puts in all the heading tags and everything else, so then I've got content that's going up on the web, and I'm doing that all while talking to you guys. Because my time is valuable and all your time is valuable.
How much would you say your time is worth per hour? I'm going to go around the room and I'm going to get Roger to grab your calculator out and you have to add all these up. Okay. Just quickly shoot.
Audience member: Yeah, it varies depending on whether I'm selling a house or whether I'm doing a...
Joshua: What would you like if you had to look at it, if you were sitting at home and you were told you needed to fix something or change a light bulb?
Audience member: You know, when I've sold a house and I've sold it within a week, I've earned a lot for two hours' work.
Joshua: But what would you say your time is worth? So if you were told that you're going to put a dollar figure on it, would you say your time is worth $5 an hour or $500 an hour?
Audience member: Oh, it would just plummet. $80 an hour.
Joshua: $80 an hour. Okay.
Audience member: $250.
Joshua: $250.
Audience member: $450.
Joshua: Okay. You adding this up real quick?
Roger: Yeah, I'm adding up.
Audience member: $250.
$250.
Joshua: $450.
Audience member: $380.
$550 at the moment.
Joshua: Okay, cool.
Audience member: $500.
Joshua: $500? Yeah.
Audience member: I have no idea. I'll go with $50.
$110.
$250.
Roger: Let's just say, ballpark, we're up to about three grand or so.
Joshua: Three grand or so. Okay. So roughly, and how many people do we have here? Five-ish, 20, 15? Okay, so we're talking about $150 an hour roughly, is what we have as a group accumulatively here. So every task that you do, whether it's at home mowing the lawn, or whether you're out and about shopping, you should be putting that number as whatever the number you've put in your head. So $5.50 is very competitive. That's going to be difficult. You need to have a dollar figure put on it, and not just for the time that you're spending, when you're earning money, but for the time that you're spending all the time. If you go and mow the lawn at home and it takes you two hours to mow the lawn, that's $10, $11 that you missed that on there.
And with the different numbers we're looking at here, even as the average of $150 per a per hour, that's $300 to mow the lawn. If you can get someone else to mow the lawn for $50 and they're using better equipment, faster equipment, that's time that you can be spending on your business or with your family. That's more valuable time. So my dad's an engineer and one of the things that I saw him doing was fixing a DVD player, a $25 DVD player. It took him two hours to fix. Now, that is absolutely stupid, but he was learning and seeing how it all works. So if there's a learning experience then it's a different story. And that comes down to, again, automating what you're doing. If you enjoy learning, then do the task. But don't continue to do the task if there's better time that you should be spending your money, or time... better things that you should be spending a time and money on. Does that make sense? Cool.
I know it sounds like I'm just saying the same sort of stuff in different ways, but that's cool. As long as we're all on the same page. So what would you say you'd like to be able to automate in your business? Everyone's sort of said that they had something that would like to automate or know that they're going to be doing something better. I'm going to go around the room and try and work out a way... or a business problem, maybe. Let's do it like a business problem. What's a business problem that you'd like to see removed? Roger, what would you-
Roger: I like your automated postings and so forth. I've got some automated postings. I'd like to polish those up and improve them. [inaudible 00:10:57] exploited them to their full-
Joshua: What ones are you using at the moment?
Roger: What do I use? I use IFTTT.
Joshua: Yep. That's really good.
Roger: Yeah, that's what I use more than anything. And I use SocialPilot.
Joshua: Cool. And how about you, Julian?
Julian: Julian, yeah. Yeah, I'd like to be able to take a business card and just scan it and then have it send all the emails and introductions.
Joshua: Do you have a business card?
Julian: Yep.
Joshua: Okay. So while I'm here... This is great. That's really, really good. Really good answer. So I'll send you an email while I'm doing this presentation. So I've just taken a photo, and I'll show you how to do that later. So yeah. Okay. And Sarah, would you like to automate?
Sarah: Well, I just recently automated it. When I go do hair and makeup for weddings, I kind of don't really have time. So now I just pretty much put it in a drop box, somebody then takes it from there and they post it up for me and now it's done. I don't have to worry about that. As my business is very visual, people want to be seeing work all the time. That was a big thing. So that's been a good thing that I've just recently done, so yeah.
Joshua: Cool.
Audience member: So what we do do or what we want to do?
Joshua: What would you like? What would you like to have automated? Or a business problem that you're trying to overcome?
Audience member: I suppose for me it's making sure that my numbers are competitive with the rest of the market. So it would be really cool if I didn't have to go and check every time I needed to do a quote. Automating that sort of process of finding out what everybody else is charging, it would be great if I could do that with automation.
Joshua: Is price a big deciding factor?
Audience member: I think it is for people.
Joshua: I know people look around a lot and you've got a lot of... like Vistaprint, very competitive. Not competitive probably in the quality of what you'd be doing versus what they're doing though. And so I strongly think everyone in business should not have price as a differentiator. You've got personalised service, localised service, fantastic face and you're able... Vistaprint have no face to their business. They just a cold business that are online and they're convenient and cheap, but that's not what-
Audience member: It's finding the balance.
Joshua: Absolutely. Yeah. And Willem?
Willem: More of a social media presence.
Joshua: Yep. Yep. Yep. So getting a better presence.
Willem: I was able to farm that out to my wife.
Joshua: Absolutely, causes less arguments. It comes up with blue screens of death when there's problems as opposed to arguments within the relationship.
Audience member: Did you say you want to automate your wife?
Joshua: Automate his wife! Do you have content at the moment that you could be putting up?
Willem: Being part of a worldwide organisation, there's always something happening somewhere in the world.
Joshua: Vetting your website with some of the videos and bits and pieces that go up and it looks good. So yeah. And Gary, how about yourself?
Gary: I'd like to start a revolution to have Google shut down. I need young, smart fellows like you to be able to go and come into the industry and put decent competition against them and stop them from destroying small businesses.
Joshua: Yeah. Well, I think between the big companies, Amazon, Facebook and Google, they're too big of a conglomerate. And Microsoft and Apple and everything else further from that. But the big three there that I already mentioned should be divided up and split up so that they're not owning the entities. I completely agree. I don't know what sort of militia we're going to have to put together to do to achieve this.
Audience member: It looks like it might be happening in Europe.
Joshua: Yeah? Yeah, I haven't haven't seen it, but... Yeah, it's a... Definitely. I agree with you. It's very difficult to do that the way... it's sort of like the devil. You have to just be with the devil. Now my rankings are going to go down for this social post. "What are you doing? You can't badmouth Google!"
Audience member: That's the problem, everyone thinks like that.
Joshua: Oh, you can.
Audience member: If a lot of people started standing up to it...
Joshua: It's just... So what sort of phone do you have?
Audience member: Samsung.
Joshua: Okay, so there's more than 200 touch points that Google gets from what you do every day through that phone. There's an experiment they did where they removed Google and Amazon from their life. They were unable to log into any of the other services such as Dropbox from the different ways and methods they using to proof it was a human or wasn't a human. They weren't able to use any Google maps. They weren't able to use anything else, so they started using Waze and then Waze was working but it cost a lot of money. A lot of the services that we use and take for granted are backed by Google, even if it's not the systems that we're using directly. And the problem is... Because they are selling our information off. That's how they're making money. Facebook makes $10 a month off of the data that we give to them. If we weren't marketed through anything on Facebook and the information wasn't sold, it would cost us $10 a month to use Facebook, and no one would use it because it wouldn't be worth it. So it's a balance. I think, yeah, the system should be changed, 100%. People should be very aware of how much data is actually being thrown around there about you. And Valerie?
Valerie: I'm helping people to understand that once some data is taken, it should then be what a software industry is built on, plus it's growing more on bugging people's Bank statements through their systems. But it's not a huge buy-in to that. So I think in terms of my own business automating, I guess my process is automating that hasn't been done.
Audience member: For me, it would be networks. Documents sending and receiving.
Joshua: It's big thing that annoys me in your industry, how much paper goes everywhere. And also, has anyone heard statement, "Don't marry me on the first date"? Has anyone heard that? You have people that jump in and they go, "Oh, hi, yes, I'm Josh Litt and I'd love to do some work with you." And just really, really selling themselves without building the relationship. I've dealt with a broker in the past and they... It was like, I said, "Oh, can you help me out? I'm a small business owner, and that that makes things of question mark on complication." And they sent me an eight-page thing I had to fill out. I'm like, "Ah, I'm not going to go with you."
Joshua: Well, have you seen some of the open banking stuff that's coming in in the start of July?
Audience member: Open banking?
Joshua: Open banking, so the bank statements and a lot of the information can be fed through APIs to different systems. Yeah. This bank statements, I think, dot com, or something like that, allows you to... that's really good for your industry.
Audience member: Probably a structured onboarding process video and having it easily accessible. Can you sign it off as well?
Joshua: Yep. Cool. Cool.
Joshua: Bob?
Bob: Probably the process of intakes, where the lawyers do a lot of writing. That can be digitised and then put back into our lead CRM system, development management system, so still when the client comes back, they don't have to redo it, it's actually from hand to digitised to CRM. Or it could be onboarding for a normal conversation as well. I've started a little bit, but I think it's culture change more than anything. I've looked at people with a Microsoft tablet.
Carrie: We're in a relationship with business, so I think we've just got to be a little bit careful. We've automated our, what? We've got electronic work papers. The ITO is making us automate things because things come through electronically now, so we're trying not to have the whole paper thing, etc. But what everyone else said, I guess, we could do with some work on our CRM. Because it's rubbish in rubbish out with a lot of this.
Joshua: Absolutely.
Audience member: It's a little bit awkward in our business because a lot of those people who are just looking for insurance, they don't want to fill in forms. But in terms of having a social media presence, that's probably what I'm interested in.
I would be firstly automating my data collection, so I'm still handwriting our analysis. It would be great to do it online so I'm not wasting paper. And the other thing that I want to automate ,gathering reviews. So when we've finished the process, we have a system where an email or an SMS, whatever, goes out with the link seeking reviews.
Joshua: Cool. Cool. Awesome. I'm going to try and go around the room really quickly to give everyone a quick answer as to how to automate this stuff a bit better.
Joshua: Okay. So your business, if you want to have your posts automated a bit better, you do know what RSS feeds are?
Roger: Yeah, I know RSS feeds.
Joshua: Being able to collaborate and join RSS feeds together. So what they do is that if you do updates on things on your website or updates anywhere, you can have it so that update is pulled and pushed to any other location that you want around the web on different times and different schedules and you can create different ways that it all works. And using RSS feeds in Sendible is what we use, and we found Sendible's fantastic. It integrates into most things.
Roger: I haven't looked at Sendible.
Joshua: Oh, it's fantastic. It's great. I've managed a couple of businesses through it. And yeah, it's by far the best one that I've seen out there. Not the cheapest but the best. Yeah. And you'd have to have some automation to be able to sell the websites for the price that you're selling them, because there is no money to be made in that otherwise. Yeah. So with your onboarding process, everyone sort of said something here and everyone's sort of... The answers they've got, it's not like there's a question mark for most of them. A lot of the things that you want to do are able to be done. It's just a time thing to be able to do them for most people, I'd imagine. Yeah? So for me, one of the biggest things that I did in my business was automating every single task that I did and documenting every task that I did and then finding something to do everything that I did so I could go traveling.
And I went over to America for nearly three months last year and didn't have to touch a computer, didn't have to touch anything to do with the business, which was awesome. So that was my big a-ha, champagne moment in automation, being able to really step away from the business. Because a lot of the time we put ourselves into these businesses that we buy and we sometimes don't really buy into a business. We buy into a job. We've bought into our position in business. And that isn't a good position to be in because most of it's buying for more money or more freedom. And a lot of the time you end up with less of both. And the only real way out of that is by automating things.
And automation isn't something you need to be choosing, do I do or don't I do it? It's, if you don't do it, you will be left behind. Because if you didn't have a microwave and you didn't have an oven now, it'd be very difficult to cook your food on a fire out in the backyard. And that's just-
Audience member: No, we had three years without an oven.
Joshua: You did? Three years without an oven? Did you have a dishwasher?
Audience member: Yeah, my son.
Joshua: See, see, you've got automation, that's automation.
Audience member: Yeah, you'd want to sit and think.
Joshua: So it's not monitored automation. So you need to always just be looking at ways to automate your business. We were contacted by a government agency in what we've been doing with some of the different things we've been putting around the web, and they've asked us to help businesses out, to automate their businesses. And they've actually reduced down the rate of what we charge out to $40 an hour to be able to help businesses, small businesses automate their processes. So if there's anything you ever see that needs to be automated at that sort of price, yeah, there's no reason why you shouldn't be getting someone in to at least look over your systems and see what needs to be automated.
The great news is everyone already knows something that needs to be automated. Most of the time with fresh eyes and another perspective, you'll find that there's always more and more that can be automated. It's always great to get someone to come into your business and see how your process is working and how everything is going together. Because as theold quote goes, with the NASA spending millions of dollars to develop a pen that works in space and the Russians used a pencil. So it's a just a perspective thing. that didn't actually happen, but it's still a fun quote.
So yeah, so that's, I guess, the main thing is make sure you're automating everything in business. Very few people here brought up automation, automating their marketing, only like a couple of people. And that is a big thing because you want to make sure your name is out there. If your business has no voice, your customers won't have any ears to hear it, so you need to be out there and be present in one way or another. Most businesses here are business-to-business businesses, I think, most of them. There's a few business-to-consumer businesses, but generally speaking, we all have a skill set that we can bring to the table to help each other's businesses out. Even if we're just going in, individually reviewing how things are working and how things could be better.
With your systems to be able to see what your competitors are doing. you can do things such as what's called web scraping and you can have it so that all of your competitors and all their prices are automatically update in a spreadsheet or a dashboard that you could see each day or each month, however often you wanted to do that, and then you can use tools such as Proposify, which would allow for you to go in and see how you can go about change... sorry, you can use Proposify to be able to quote to your customers really quickly and easily in a templated way and know the prices that they could be seeing from any of the competitors around the place, and know the pain points and the reasons why you'd want to push away.
I've worked with Sarah in the past and one of her concerns was there was other people out there that were cheaper in price. And I said, "Yeah, but they're not going to be anywhere near as good as what you're doing and how you're doing it." But we put a cheaper price up on the website and then just made conditions that it had to be a certain amount of people and it only included the same things that the other people included. A lot of the time, if people are looking to things such as Vistaprint, they're not going to necessarily go, "Is the stock as thick? Is it good glaze?" Or whatever the situation is, they're going to just go, "Oh, the cards are cheap. And then you can sort of just pivot that and you say, "Well, is that the image that you want to have from a business front? Do you want to have an image of a cheap business? Do you want to have these cheap cards"? Doesn't really sound very good.
Your first impression's a crappy card, so that's where you can then sort of change the argument. But have the pricing on your website as competitive as Vistaprint so you're not backing people away. But you don't know if they are or not backing away from that without having some data to really sink into and work that out, which is what we love. We love building businesses up with lots and lots of data so that you're able to make informed, decisive decisions. You can work out if your staff force is efficient, if your systems are efficient and if things are as automated as they should be. Automation doesn't remove jobs. Automation brings health and life back into your business because the jobs that people are doing aren't repetitious. They are fun loving jobs. Automating your wife is a fantastic idea. Automated wife, happy life.
Audience member: They have special shops for that.
Joshua: And they can fit in your pocket. Sendible would be great to help automate all your social media marketing though. Sendible, the same thing I was talking to Roger about, which I can talk to you more about. It's a fantastic tool. It lets you see everything, all the comments and everything in one spot for all of your customers so you can just respond to everyone in one location. You can post everything out, you can make sure it only posts during certain hours. And set there so that it posts out videos and everything else. We've got our marketing down pat, so in one hour, one hour a week, I'm able to create two youtube videos, three podcasts, five blogs, and we've been doing that one hour a week for the last six months and we have over 160,000 written words that have all been SEO optimised and put onto our website. Which has increased our traffic for a B to B website, which we don't pay for any paid advertisement on our website.
We get about 3,000, 4,000 unique visitors a month, so that's pretty good for a B to B business where we're not selling anything on the website whatsoever. There's no reason for them to come there except for see our services and see the blogs that we've been writing. So my time's up by a minute more than what I should have been talking, but plus extra and extra. But has everyone enjoyed this? It's been good? We've learned a bit? I could talk for hours and hours, but if you want to hear more, definitely if you've got my card, let me know. As I said, because the government rate is pretty, pretty amazing. We're pretty happy that I got into that.
Audience member: The one big obstacle everyone's trying to overcome with all these message bots and things is automating the sincere personal touch.
Joshua: You'd never automate that. I'm here. I can't automate what I'm doing right now because the feeling and the heart that I have for what I do in my business can't be seen through an automated message. So you can't automate the personal touch, but you can automate everything else around it.
Audience member: They try.
Joshua: Yeah.
Audience member: You can't automate passion.
Joshua: You can't automate passion. What you can do...
Audience member: You could give them a microwave once started. My mother would think this is witchcraft.
Joshua: It is.
Audience member: Oh, it is, that's right.
Joshua: Getting back to Google, it is. So you can't automate the passion and drive you have as a person, but you can remove that requirement. Say Google, the face of Google, the face of Amazon, the face... none of these big companies have a face. Apple had a face but then PC killed him. Do you get it? Yeah. It's a terrible joke. Anyway, you can't really automate that passion, but what you can do is create a lot of content around it so you can build a relationship beforehand, having dozens of videos and lots of social posts that sort of show that same approach.
So I've got a comical approach to the way that I approached people, and showing that and having that means that you can build 80% of the relationship up and then the other 20% can be nurtured in person. I have seen some of the stuff they do around the reading, the psychology on how people talk. If people are talking in feeling words of people talking and doing or hearing words, you say, "How do you feel about that?" And it can analyse with their words and then reword whatever you've written to then post that back to them in a way that resonates more strongly with them. So you can do some things like that, but I still think we're all operating a small business. We need to be able to automate, but we need to also keep that personal touch. You don't want to remove that. It's one of the best things you've got in small business. That's what Vistaprint don't have!
Special Interview with Dan from Pasfield Plumbing
Josh: Good morning. Good morning on this wonderful morning that is this morning, and I'm here with Dan and he's going to introduce himself and why he started business. So Dan, tell us a bit about your business.
Dan: Howdie. We started our business for getting some freedom.
Josh: Yeah, cool. And that's a great reason. A lot of people decide to start business to either get more money or do something different or get some more freedom or be able to at least choose their working hours. And my understanding is you're trying to build a family as well?
Dan: That's correct. Yeah, we've got one daughter and that's probably enough for us.
Josh: Enough? Enough, definitely, I'd say. That's one more than me and I can totally say that's enough. I've got 10 nieces and nephews and no way would I want to have one full time at the moment. Too much other cool stuff to be doing. But you're still managing to make time to be able to spend time with your family and still manage the business at the moment?
Dan: Yeah, we are. I mean, obviously we're in the building stages of our business, so we are time poor. We would like more time, but we know that comes with more time and development on the business.
Josh: Yup, yup, yup. It's always a bit of a battle, especially when you have to wear multiple hats and you have to be the salesman, the businessmen, the every man or woman. You can be all these things, all at once, and then still have time to be a dad and a husband. So balancing that can always be difficult. Knowing, I guess, that you need to balance it gives you the ability. Being aware of it lets you at least put your time into different containers.
And that's what we're all about, is all about automation and making sure you're getting your time back. So you've got your first employee as well, which is really exciting times. It's exciting stuff. And what would you like to see come in your business in the next 12 months?
Dan: Next 12 months ... more workflow from the customers that we would like to see. More private customers, more people who ... Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who call up through the website or whatever platform and they have problems and we're here to help kind of thing.
Josh: Cool.
Dan: We'd like to grow our team with one more plumber on hand and we would also like a bit more time for us-
Josh: Yep, yep. That's all really, really good goals. And do you know what you'd like to see out of those things first? Like, I guess a marketing approach first and then cruise onwards from there?
Dan: Hundred percent. Yeah. So we can't really move forward with our goals until somebody comes on to help, another plumber, but once we have that other plumber, then we'll be able to drop back a few hours per week and focus on getting the website built.
Josh: Yeah. Cool. Awesome. That's really good stuff. So you've been in business now about two years or so, coming on two years?
Dan: Yeah. Correct.
Josh: Yup. And what would you say for anyone out there starting their business or not even started. They've just got this brain fart in their head and they want to see something happening with it. What would you say is the advice that you would give them?
Dan: Forget any opinion or idea that you have as being the only way. Be open-minded. Listen with two ears. Speak with one mouth and be ready to work very hard.
Josh: Yep. Yep. I could not agree more. As I was saying earlier, it's kind of like you have to choose. If you're happy working full time, would you be happy to work double full time, working an 80-hour shift, knowing that you're building up this fantastic thing that's going to flourish into the future?
It reminds me a bit of what we call the bamboo story, which it goes that you plant a seed and it takes up to five years for that seed to really take off, and you plant a seed and you're watering it, you're nurturing it. Anyone else would be looking at you like, "You're stupid. Why don't you just go plant something else that's actually started to grow quickly?" But then, after five years, it goes from growing only a few inches to 80 feet in a matter of months.
And that's what it is all about, being a business, I think. You need to know that you need to plant these seeds and really need to push forward, knowing that you've got good common sense goals. Because if you end up shooting and you're not aiming at anything, you're not going to hit whatever your target was.
Dan: 100 Hundred percent. You need to have goals. You need to know that the moment that you're in the early stages that that's not going to be permanent. You know, it is exactly the bamboo story. You know, you're growing at the start and you can't expect to all of a sudden become self employed or be the boss and then earn the big bucks or, you know, achieve the goals that you want. It takes a lot of time. That's why not everyone becomes self employed.
Josh: That's exactly right. And the people that do sometimes have very unrealistic expectations, and that's why businesses fail in the first 12 months and in the first five years, in the first 10 years, and all these other different metrics that you hear about. They just don't hang around long enough or they had very unrealistic expectations.
I've got a friend who's come to me and he said, "Oh, Josh, I've got this fantastic idea for an app." And I talked to him and he goes, "Oh, but you can't steal my idea." And I'm like, "Well, you haven't really ... ". It's like saying, "I've got this fantastic idea for a new type of wood." I say, "Okay, cool, but you have nothing or no practice or process in here to allow for this to happen." But he wants to have his million idea purchased with just being two sentences on paper. And that comes down to I guess all the planning around your business and making sure that you've done the proper planning and you have a business plan. You've scoped things out and you've done a SWOT analysis and things like that.
But more importantly, knowing that that needs to be reviewed and that no way sticks and is the one thing. Did you make a review at the start of business, whenever you first started, a couple years ago?
Dan: Yes. Yes, we did.
Josh: Have you gone back and reviewed that recently?
Dan: We have and the fact that we had a review, we had goals to reflect back on and we kept that on the wall in our office. So we see them every day and we work towards them and we had our champagne moments when we achieved those goals. Yeah. You have to have your goals clear and you have to know them and you have to see them every day and in those moments when it's so hard and you're like, "What am I doing? Should I give up?", you need to look at those goals and you need to punch forward.
Josh: Absolutely. And keeping in mind the goals, but also that your life circumstances change, your knowledge changes. A lot of people that we help out in business, they start off as a technician and they're looking to grow their business. And as I've said, you can't really do both. You're only one person, or two people, depending on the size of the business, and you can't just go and jump in and expect to be able to have 40, 60 billable hours and then still be growing the business.
And I know from myself how I've gone through those growth pains over the years. So it's important to have those goals, but know that what you've written there, it can be adjusted. If you didn't get the jet ski by the time you had the business for two years, it's fine. You can adjust that and make it the three-year goal and then know that you've achieved some other things. And write down the things that you achieve, even though it may not have been on the original scope. Like, maybe you've decided to do this really cool documentation system or marketing thing you weren't going to be doing before, or some of the stuff ... we're talking about the quoting and lead generation stuff ... and maybe doing that is more important and is going to ultimately lead to a bigger, better goal. We have more bamboo instead of just one shoot growing 80 foot in the air.
Dan: That's right. Hundred percent.
Josh: Well, it's been really great speaking with you and I've enjoyed our time here. And if you do have any plumbing requirements around Southeast Queensland, don't feel afraid. We'll chuck the contact details on this blog article and in the description below. If you do have any questions or have any needs, feel the love to send us some feedback there on iTunes. Enjoy and stay good!