Philip Horan has spent most of his working life purchasing, renovating, renting and on selling commercial and residential properties. He has developed and sold numerous properties throughout his career including 3000 square meters of commercial space on King Street Wharf in Sydney.

After many years of dealing with real estate agents, Philip realised that there had to be a better way of selling his properties. This is how the idea came about to develop the business of Hello Real Estate, a company that helps people, like you, to sell their own properties. Philip is passionate about sharing his experiences and knowledge with others to help them achieve their real estate goals.

In this episode we talk about:

• The importance of being hands-on when mentoring clients
• How to engage people in conversation
• The importance of  building business slowly
• How to attract smart people
• Choosing the right person for your business
• Phil’s scariest moment in business
• The difficulty of getting business finance in Australia
• The importance of managing cash flow
• The benefits of business partnerships 
• The top six people he’d like to share dinner with and have a good conversation
• The importance of balancing what we achieve for ourselves, for the community and for our family

 

Where to find Phil Horan

Website: http://www.philiphoran.com.au;  http://www.hello.com.au

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/helloyourhouse

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/helloyourhouse

Linkedin:   https://au.linkedin.com/in/philiphoran

Transcript

Jesse Green:      

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. Today we are in for a real treat. We are speaking to a really good friend of mine and someone who I have admired and respected for an enormous amount of time. I met Phil Horan who is the founder of Hello Real Estate probably a couple of years ago. I’ve been watching his journey with enormous interest. He’s put together an amazing business. Hello Real Estate is really shaking up the way that real estate is sold in Australia. In fact, it’s shaking it up so much so that there’s been numerous news articles likening Hello Real Estate to Uber in terms of the disruption that they’re causing to the industry. Phil’s also the author of a fabulous book called If You Love Your Real Estate Agent, Don’t Buy This Book. That’s a really interesting read. I’ve read it and I can certainly commend it to the audience. Phil, how you going mate? Welcome to the show.

Phil Horan:          

I’m fine, Jesse. Thank you for having me on the show.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, it’s absolute pleasure. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to have a chat to us. Mate, Hello Real Estate is really kicking some goals. You must be completely stoked with the way it’s going.

Phil Horan:          

We sure are Jesse. We started it just over two years ago now. We now have thirty licensees in Australia. We are licensed in south Australia, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, Queensland, and western Australia. Our foot print is really growing. We’re about to launch with six licensees in western Australia by the first of May. Things are going fantastically. There’s been great uptake of the service and quite a lot of interest from the business community to join Hello Real Estate.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that’s fantastic. I’m really curious Phil, because Hello Real Estate, obviously you’ve been around real estate for a long time. Before we get into the Hello story, I’m wondering if we can dive a little deeper into the Phil Horan story. What’s your background, mate? How did you get to this point?

Phil Horan:          

My background Jesse is I owned my first house when I was twenty-one years old. I’m now sixty-two, so that was a long time ago and not many people at twenty-one owned their first house then.

Jesse Green:      

Not many do now.

Phil Horan:          

I’ve always had a great interest in real estate. Although I’ve been in various different businesses, whatever money I’ve made I’ve always pointed the investment towards real estate. I’ve done everything from renovating and selling housing right through to major commercial developments. I did quite a big one on King Street Wharf in Sydney which was a pre-Olympic development. I syndicated through some partnerships that I had in the UAE. Real estate has always been a passion of mine. In late 2010 I decided not to travel as much and not do work overseas so I then came to the conclusion I needed to do something quite different and, again, real estate popped up. I thought the business was ripe for disruption. With my property development background, I’ve dealt with every real estate agent on the planet I tell some people. I’ve bought and sold under every different guise that you could think of, vendor finance, rent to buy, cash, all sorts of different ways. I’ve had a lot of experience with real estate agents.

Interestingly Jesse, one particular event happened. This was high on my mind, one event happened that really, really encouraged me to move ahead with Hello. I was selling my own house in Adelaide Hills. I had a beautiful property there Mary and I owned. We decided we’re going to change our lifestyle and do some different things. Around two million dollar mark. One day the agent sat down with me and he described in detail the five groups of people who had just been through my house at an open inspection. He went into detail. There was a lady who was a teacher from Walla who was moving to Adelaide. The house is in Adelaide. It was fascinating because what he didn’t know is I had been sitting down the road in my car and not a single person went to the open inspection.

Jesse Green:      

Oh, you’re kidding me.

Phil Horan:          

No, it’s true. Instead of hitting him over the head with a chair, I was just fascinated and thought it is quite amazing that a person can so convincingly paint these word pictures of people. I’m sure they were people who had been to other opens and he just drew from his memory to describe people that he’d met either that weekend or whatever. That was the defining moment when I thought this is an industry that A, is deluding itself and B, I think I could do a great job in disrupting it. That’s really the background and that’s how I came about to do Hello Real Estate.

Jesse Green:      

Cool. My understanding of Hello Real Estate Phil, and we’ve obviously had some discussions throughout our friendship together, but Hello Real Estate it’s a fixed fee real estate brokerage. There’s other fixed fee agencies out there. What is it about the Hello model that really sets it apart?

Phil Horan:          

Jesse, the industry’s really divided into two parts. One is the franchise operators and the independents. The independents now, by the way, outnumber franchise operators almost three to one.

Jesse Green:      

Wow.

Phil Horan:          

There’s been a huge exodus from the franchise operators. Then there’s the section of the market which is called, in industry terms I refer to them as FSBO’s, which really means for sale by owner. Those companies are focused on getting you listed on realestate.com on domain. They can give you some online assistance. You can download some cheat sheets. You can do all sorts of things. The problem with FSBO’s is they have a sixty percent revision rate. Sixty percent of the people who list like that actually go back to a real estate agent. They find it so difficult.

What I thought is we need a really nice bridge between the two. We certainly are not a do it yourself real estate agent. We’re very hands on, all of our people are licensed, the company’s licensed. We provide to every client a mentor. The mentor is really our secret to success. There’s a person who comes along, a licensed person, who works with you through the whole journey, from the moment you decide to sell right through the when you bank your check. That is a really important part of our business. That personal, hands on, we call it high tech, high touch, cause we use a lot of technology, is the real secret to the difference that Hello offers the clients.

Jesse Green:      

Phil, clearly Hello’s gained a lot of traction and there’s been, as I said in the introduction, quite a few news stories about Hello Real Estate indicating that it’s set to shake up the industry, set to change the way that we do business, and as I also indicated has been likened to such giants as Uber and Airbnb. What I’m curious to know is as you’re going through this process clearly you had that experience in your Adelaide Hills home when you’re looking to sell it, and obviously the agent had told you a few for fees. At one point as you’re thinking up a new way of doing things and you’re thinking there’s got to be a better way of doing this. How can we change things? How can we do it better? At one point when you’re considering this, how do you know when you’re sitting on a really good idea that’s worth pursuing as opposed to something that’s just a little bit left field and frankly a little bit kooky? At what point do you kind of go I know that I’m on a winner? How did you take that leap of faith?

Phil Horan:          

Jesse, we were advised by all and sundry to get market research and do focus groups and do all sorts of things. I actually didn’t do any of that. What I did was I booked two shopping center courts back to back for two weeks, once again in south Australia where we did our proof of concept. We went to Two Tree Plaza which is in the north, lower property prices, slightly lower social economic, and we went to the shopping centre down south closer to the sea, higher property prices… We literally stood there for a week with some of my staff. We put some of our branded cars there. We had loungers for people to sit on. We had nothing for them to sign. We made no attempt to hard sell anyone. We simply engaged people in conversation. Those two weeks were a very, very valuable part of the decision because people went, “Absolutely I would do it, as long as someone is there to help me I’ll be more than happy to do it.” That message kept coming through and through. I need someone to help me. On my own I wouldn’t have a go at it. With someone, I would definitely have a go at it.

That two weeks was the defining moment. I used the information we got as feedback, plus the fact we were already selling houses in south Australia quite successfully, to make the decision to relocate to New South Wales. I’m from Sydney originally. I’ve spent a little bit of time in Adelaide and I decided I want to go back to New South Wales and really launch the business which we did in the beginning of 2013.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that’s fantastic. Just for the audience members listening who might be thinking about how they can do things differently in their business, what I’m hearing you say is you’ve gone to test the market essentially?

Phil Horan:          

You’ve got to test the market. You must test the market, yeah.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, so you’ve gone to the market. You’ve asked them for feedback. In essence, you’ve run a survey is what I’m hearing you say. You’ve basically surveyed the market.

Phil Horan:          

Yeah, it doesn’t come under the true survey parameters like the whole idea of focus groups, et cetera. It just doesn’t come under that. Talking to people, and also in developing the business I did mentoring myself. I went and helped people sell their own homes. That was a very valuable experience.

Jesse Green:      

Fabulous.

Phil Horan:          

First hand, see their reaction to buyers, see buyers reactions to speaking direct to the vendor or the owner of the house, was an outstanding experience. That really galvanized the whole decision to really move forward.

Jesse Green:      

At that point Phil, you’ve gone and you’ve spoken to the market, you’ve tested it, you’ve poked and prodded, so to speak. At that point, you’ve got this knowledge now that you think okay, I’ve got a good idea. I know that there’s a market for this. I know that there’s an appetite for it. Clearly, that’s going to still require a leap of faith. I’m assuming that you had to take a leap of faith somewhere and put some money to it or take that bit of a punt. How did that go?

Phil Horan:          

Absolutely. I actually sold my house to develop Hello Real Estate, so yes that was a big leap of faith. Also it was a leap of faith that involved my wife Mary. We had to make it as a mutual family decision. Leaps of faith need to be tempered with real information. You see many people who develop inventions and patents and who just so passionately believe in it when they’ve got no evidence to say it’s even going to work. That’s not a leap of faith. That’s folly.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah.

Phil Horan:          

You need to temper it with … I built the business quite slowly. I didn’t rush into it. I took my time. I acquired some quite amazing assets quite early. For instance, I got the domain name hello.com.au very early in the development of the business. That was a huge coup. It’s a matter of balancing it out. If you don’t absolutely love what it is you’re about to do my advice is don’t do it.

Jesse Green:      

That’s a fabulous piece of advice. For anyone listening here, one of the key things I think just to take out of that is taking that leap of faith without testing the market beforehand, as Phil said, is really potentially foolish and you can end up getting caught in a bit of strife there. Clearly, you’ve taken the time to do that. That’s fabulous.

One of the things Phil, as we’ve been talking over the last couple of years and I’ve been observing Hello Real Estate’s progress and growth is I’ve been really impressed by the amount of good people you surround yourself with. What I know for all businesses really is that there comes a point where the founder or the owner just can’t do everything themselves. One of the things that I know as dentists we often get caught up with is we tend to be … We can be control freaks, to be candid. We tend to like to do things ourselves. We like to be in control of the operation. My observation is the people who manage to scale the business and to build something that’s enduring and long lasting inevitably build a team around them. I’m curious, how did that go for you? You’ve surrounded yourself with some really high calibre people I’m aware. How has that process been?

Phil Horan:          

It’s essential Jesse. If you’re going to build a business, particularly at the rate that Hello is building and also in a market, we’re in a very competitive market, you have to get people that are smarter than you. That’s really important. The moment you sit down at the head of the table and think I’m the smartest person in the room, your business is probably doomed. You need to get specialists in various areas. Everything’s a horses for courses approach. You need to get people who have some marketing experience. You need to get people who are experienced in business.

For instance, I’ve just had a gentlemen join the board, his name is Darren Cole. Darren has a massive CV in the real estate industry. He was the person tasked with doing the joint venture between Landmark and Harcourts in Victoria. He headed up Landmark Harcourts for three years in Victoria. He’s had big stints with LJ Hooker, big stints with Elders. He’s very experienced. He’s a lot younger than me, but he’s very experienced in the industry. I’m not intimidated by those sorts of people. I embrace and I enjoy having those sorts of people with me. Darren had an amazing amount of experience in his business and guidance, particularly moving to the next stage which we’re about to do. We’re about to open up in two other countries before the end of this year. Choosing those people is really important.

I’ve been reading a book recently called The Virgin Way, one of Richard Branson’s, I think his latest book. What he says in there is you really should never have to fire anybody, the reason being is you should choose them correctly in the first place. You need to take a lot of time. You need to think about who the person is that you’re going to get to do a certain job within your business or become a certain level of partner within the business. You need to be really balanced about that. Last year I had a few disasters in that area. You know I’ve had quite a big health issue and I did have to hand the reins over in some areas that I wasn’t happy to. I obviously paid a price for that. However, that’s also a great learning curve. I’ve got an amazing team with me. The lady who started with me day one, Trish Millwood is still with me. She’s on our board. She’s one of our licensees. There’s a fantastic depth within Hello of people that have been loyal and are also very smart and committed.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah. Just to touch on a point, Phil, one of the things I just wanted to drill down a little deeper in, you indicated to me obviously hiring smart, intelligent, capable people is essential. I couldn’t agree more with that. I always like to surround myself with smart people too and just soak it up, really. The interesting thing that you mentioned was having specialist knowledge. One of the things that, again, I think is really pertinent is I’m gathering and I’m assuming, so correct me if I’m wrong, that across your team though is quite balanced. You’ve got a balanced array of talent across the team, even though you’ll have specialists in individual roles. Is that a fair assessment?

Phil Horan:          

Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. Unless you’re a big multinational, duplication isn’t very smart. You need people who have got a particular talent in a particular area and then try and get others to come in who complement those people. Darren Cole for instance, is bringing with him a person who has been the general manager in Darren’s businesses for the last fourteen years.

Jesse Green:      

Oh, wow.

Phil Horan:          

He will head up, he’ll become our national general manager in the middle of this month. It’s important that you get that really nice mix of people who have got different skill sets, different personalities, but are happy to integrate into a team approach. They must be team players. If people aren’t team players you can’t build a business.

Jesse Green:      

Cool, fantastic. Again, you’re putting people in roles where they’re playing to their natural strengths and abilities. They’re bringing all that to the table as opposed to trying to compensate for a weakness you just put someone in a role where they’re naturally going to shine.

Phil Horan:          

That’s correct.

Jesse Green:      

Cool, lovely. Just from Hello Real Estate’s perspective, how much has that contributed to the acceleration of your growth? You guys have had some significant and rapid growth. I was smiling to myself when you said you thought you’d grown the business fairly slowly. The thing I know about you Phil is you’re a very quick implementer. You take knowledge, you implement it really quickly. How’s it been bringing that team on board and what’s been the contributions of that team to Hello’s rather meteoric rise?

Phil Horan:          

Getting the team together has been the essential part of this. It took a while. When I say grew the business slowly, it took a while to get the right team. Now that we have a great team in place the business is growing month on month. We’re currently up to thirty licensees in Australia. We’ve got probably another thirty applications that are live at this minute. We expect to have by the end of this year we’ll have more than a hundred. We will grow the business too within the next three years to probably around seven to eight hundred.

Jesse Green:      

Wow.

Phil Horan:          

That’s pretty amazing when you think that Ray Watt in Australia only have seven hundred and fifty or so. Yeah, there’s a balancing act to it. Can’t grow too quick, but if you’ve got the right team in place you can obviously move with a speed that’s determined.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, cool, which is fantastic. I kind of liken that to managing growth is a bit like driving a car. If you take the corner too quickly you’re liable to wipe out.

Phil Horan:          

Absolutely.

Jesse Green:      

Which is a deliberate segue. I have to confess, that was a very deliberate segue because Phil, I know you have a passion for rally car driving. Not only a passion, you’re very good at it. Walk me through that. How did you get into rally car driving? What’s been the story behind that?

Phil Horan:          

Okay. I got into it probably because I lost my mind.

Jesse Green:      

I reckon.

Phil Horan:          

From a little boy, I loved the whole idea of motor sport. My mom and dad lived within ear shot of Warwick Farm Racecourse in Sydney. I used to climb over the fence, swim across the river to watch were the Tasman cars in those days or the equivalent of Formula One. I saw Brabham and Hume and Clark and all these guys race at Warwick Farm. It was in my blood. Back around 1979 I decided look, I want to do something that will really be doable in terms, because motor sports are expensive, so I went rallying. I had a pretty fast rise. You start off as a grade four rally driver. It takes you some years to get to grade one. I went from four to one in the first year.

Jesse Green:      

Oh, wow.

Phil Horan:          

Then went on very quickly to be given one of the Nissan Works cars, the Datsun Stanza. I got an amazing navigator, lady called Suzie Wiseman who was then the PR lady for Mercedes-Benz Australia.

Jesse Green:      

Oh, wow.

Phil Horan:          

Suzie is still a wonderful friend and supporter to this day. In fact, she’s an investor in Hello.

Jesse Green:      

That’s funny how it’s come full circle, isn’t it?

Phil Horan:          

Yeah, it’s a lifetime friendship. I loved my rallying. I did it for fourteen years. Strangely enough, the car that I had was quite a special car. Someone’s bought that car, a gentlemen in Victoria. He’s rebuilding it. He and I are in some discussions for me to drive the car this year in October or November, I think it might be November, in the rerun of the Southern Cross Rally. Suzie, who lives in Texas now, is thinking of coming out to navigate. There’s a big circle coming around in terms of my motor sport career. I would love to do it if some of the stars align we will definitely be there. If the car gets finished in time, so I’m about to put an application in or an entry in for the Southern Cross Rally this year. I loved rallying.

It’s all about teamwork and it’s one of the things that you can take a little bit of a leaf out of the rally book in terms of business. If you’re sitting in a car with somebody, particularly at the higher end of the sport which I competed at, for those who don’t know we used to drive on pace notes. Pace notes are the largest leap of faith that anyone can have in a team member. When someone says that crest ahead is flat and I mean just go flat, you don’t even flex your accelerator foot, that’s a leap of faith. There’s a lot to be learnt from rallying. Recently …

Jesse Green:      

You must have … I mean the trust you’re placing in that person, Phil. You’re literally putting your life in their hands.

Phil Horan:          

It’s a life and death trust, life and death trust. We recently had a seminar with Hello and I invited a mystery guest speaker. This young lady was sitting in the front row at the seminar. No one knew who she was. She was impeccably dressed. She’s a very beautiful young lady. I made the analogy that saying that only a real estate agent can sell your house is almost like saying women can’t drive cars. I introduced Molly Taylor. Molly Taylor is European ladies rally champion. She’s very young lady. She’s twenty-eight years old. She lives in Sydney. Her mom’s in Canberra. Her mom’s a friend of the family. Molly gave this amazing presentation about how teamwork is essentially to rallying, from the service crew through to the navigator through to the manager through to the sponsors. That sporting nucleus is really important and it does have a lot of parallels for business. I have used a lot of those parallels for business.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, and of course you’re all engaged in the same goal and everyone’s got their role to play, of course, but ultimately it’s that common alignment of purpose really, isn’t it?

Phil Horan:          

That’s correct.

Jesse Green:      

Fantastic. Mate, what was the scariest moment you’ve either had in rallying or in business? What’s been one of those moments where you’ve just had to kind of hold on for dear life?

Phil Horan:          

All right, the scariest moment in business, as you know Jesse I spent fifteen years in the middle east. I actually got arrested in Beirut. I got arrested for taking photos of some soldiers in battle dress who obviously weren’t supposed to be where they were. It was not only scariest, but it was also very embarrassing because I was with a client. I didn’t think. I should have thought about it. I was for, not for long, twenty or thirty minutes, detained by soldiers in battle dress with rocket grenade launchers strapped to them whilst they dismembered my camera which was all that happened about it. That was very scary because at those days, that was 1997, the war had just ended, it was a very dangerous place to be and I was there establishing some businesses. In rallying I’m quite fortunate I had one really bad accident early in my career. No one got hurt. The car was a basket case but no one got hurt. It’s one of those things that I’ve been very lucky with so far.

Jesse Green:      

Fantastic. I just want to come back to Hello for a second and thinking about the business journey and your … This ties into the rally car journey as well. As you’ve gone through this particular journey, what challenges have you come up constantly that you think would be applicable to pretty much any business? Obviously there will be some nuances as it applies to real estate versus particularly dentistry, but what would be some of the challenges that you think you’ve come up against? I guess following on from that, what would you do differently if you had your time over?

Phil Horan:          

The biggest challenge that anyone, particularly in this country, is going to find with developing their business is getting finance. Getting finance is very difficult in Australia. The banks are not at all attuned to any sort of real venture capital. Private equity operators are very greedy. As you’ve seen what’s happened with Dick Smith, there’s a whole lot of real serious hurdles and problems with finance in Australia. It’s probably the biggest hurdle.

The other hurdle that I’ve found in the real estate industry, people are so willing to just simply tell misleading and false statements about you and your business. Couple of interviews that I had they were tagged, the Channel Nine interviewer was tagged by a guy from the real estate Institute of New South Wales who simply turned around and said, “Look, these people spend fifteen minutes mentoring their clients.” Well, that’s absolutely false and misleading. We spend the whole time, from the moment they decide to sell their house until they bank their check mentoring them. Industries can be very cruel. They don’t care what they say. You need to be very, very careful. Be cautious of people bearing gifts. If you go into a certain industry be cautious about the other players in that industry because many of them will make out they’ll try and help you. They have no intention of helping you.

Jesse Green:      

Wow, that’s interesting isn’t it? Okay. In terms of things you might do differently if you were to start your Hello Real Estate journey again from scratch, what would be the things you might do a little differently?

Phil Horan:          

Jesse, there’s not a lot I would do differently. From a financing point of view I would have probably put a different financing system in place before I launched in the eastern states. In a way I underestimated what the real cost would be. Although we’ve surmounted all that now, but I would certainly … It’s always the utopian view of anyone starting a business. You’ve got to have enough finance. You’ve got to have enough capital behind you. The problem is unless you’ve proven your system or proven your business, you’re just not going to attract any capital. It’s a bit cart before the horse. You’ve just got to somehow balance that out.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, so for you guys listening in the audience there it’s about managing cash really well, isn’t it?

Phil Horan:          

You must manage your cash, yeah.

Jesse Green:      

Like all good businesses Phil, one of the things that dentists I think need to do is not just manage their cash but to have projections, have forecasts, be tracking that year month in month out, see where they are against their forecasts and the like. I’m assuming that’s just pretty standard good business practice really. Sometimes it’s not as common as it might otherwise seem.

Phil Horan:          

That’s absolutely Jesse. In this day and age you really need to manage your cash. You need to have a great accounting system. We actually use Zero throughout our business plus all the licensees all work on Zero. We use a lot of very high tech platforms. We’ve backed into some amazing partnerships. We have a great partnership with RP Data and Core Logic. We are now on their platform for the customer relationship management system. We’ve got some really fantastic partnerships. That’s another thing I like to say, partnerships are a way to build a business, particularly in the era that we now work in. You can’t be everything to everybody. The quickest way to the target is to get yourself a really good partner and do a really sound business arrangement with that partner and work together and have as much interest in helping them build their business as they are to having building your business. You can expand very quickly.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that’s, for anyone listening there’s just a couple of really terrific gold nuggets of wisdom that have just come out of Phil’s mouth there. I just want to make sure I highlight these, lest they be not captured. The first thing I just want to mention is you can’t be all things to all people. That’s a really critical thing. One of the things that I see in our profession is that as dentists we sometimes want to please everyone. I think when it comes to understanding your ideal customer, or in our case your ideal patient, you need to understand that’s like throwing your dart at the bullseye on the dart board. When it comes to marketing and all those things it’s about zeroing in on who you try to help. The second thing Phil that you said which was incredibly powerful, was harnessing the use of partnerships and using that to accelerate your business. We’ve certainly done some good things with partners as well and it’s been massive. Thanks, mate. That is absolute twenty-four karat gold there. Thank you, pal.

Phil Horan:          

Thank you.

Jesse Green:      

Good. Mate, I wanted just to go on to a slightly different tack now and talk a little bit about your health, if that’s cool. You did indicate you’d had some challenges there. I don’t want to dive into the personal stuff, but I know from some of our conversations that you’ve had with me over the little period of time, you’ve been actually able to take those business skills that you’ve been developing and apply them to help a lot of other people who have had some health challenges as well. I’m wondering if you can give us a bit of an overview of some of that.

Phil Horan:          

I’m happy to share that with you, Jesse. In February 2015 I was diagnosed with very high level aggressive cancer. The prognosis was really quite devastating. The worst thing about it was I didn’t even know I had it.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah.

Phil Horan:          

I asked my surgeon what he would do if he was in my position. He actually said to me the first thing that I would do is I would go to the Netherlands and see Professor Morentz. I asked more about this, what’s the story of Professor Morentz. Turns out that the Nimergan Medical Institute in the Netherlands had developed a special scanning system for detecting cancers and in particular detecting secondary cancers which I was diagnosed as having. At Easter Tim Time I whisked off to Nimergan I went to the medical centre. I had the testing. It’s a product called Comidex. It’s a system called Comidex, which in effect, most MRI’s cut you into five or eight millimetre slices for the images. This one cuts you into one millimetre slices.

Jesse Green:      

Oh, wow.

Phil Horan:          

They can detect very small cancers, very early stage secondaries, a whole lot of things they can do with this particular system that can’t be done with other traditional MRI scanning. The great thing about it is the material or the infusion that they put into your body to do this is actually a bio product. All that happens is two days after you’ve had it you have a heightened iron level in your blood. Anyway, cut a long story short, that was very, very beneficial for me. The images that were taken in the Netherlands were used to actually do my planning at the Mater Hospital. The radio therapy that I had to have was all done as a result, very targeted, high level radio therapy using the Comidex system.

Jesse Green:      

Wow.

Phil Horan:

I got in further discussions with my surgeon Professor Phillip Stricker who’s also on the Garvan Institute board and I won’t bore everyone with the whole story, but it turned out that I was able to convince the gentleman from the Netherlands to visit Australia and negotiate with Professor Stricker in respect to how we could bring this whole system to Australia. The end result of that was that in January of this year they started clinical trials with Comidex in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. I feel really proud of that.

I’m happy with that cause it’s not just for prostate cancer and some of the bone cancer I had, it’s for any type of cancer. It’s here in Australia now. The Ramsey Foundation I think put about over one and a half million dollars into the clinical trial system. It’s very real. It’s happening. It will be available for people I believe through Medibank sometime later this year. That I feel very happy about. I saw an opportunity. I didn’t benefit in any way financially. I’m not involved in any way with the project, but I was happy to in a way facilitate the arrangements with the Garvan and St. Vincent’s, et cetera. Yeah, I was very proud of that.

Jesse Green:      

Firstly, Phil, I think you should be enormously proud of that. That’s a wonderful contribution, not just to the Sydney siders, but to I think Australian health in general. Firstly, I think on behalf of everyone listening I would say thank you. I think that’s just a wonderful example of how taking some skills that you’ve learned throughout your life in so many different areas and applying them to a situation that doesn’t ordinarily kind of … You don’t necessarily think you would have to apply those skills to that situation, but certainly you’ve been able to negotiate things and get things in place. Now as a consequence of that not only thankfully your health is in good shape, but the health of many other people as well, so terrific work, mate. I really commend you for that. That’s wonderful.

Phil Horan:          

Thank you, Jesse.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, we’re going to wrap up in a little minute, but I just wanted to ask you a question which I’ve been meaning to ask you this for … It’s not since I’ve known you. It’s not long after, anyway. It’s a question that I always find intriguing. If you were going have a dinner party and you could invite half a dozen or so guests to sit around the table and have a meal with and have a good conversation with, I’m curious to know who would be your top six or so people you’d like to share a meal with, break bread with, have a conversation with, and really get to know and understand them and how they do things?

Phil Horan:          

Jesse, the first person I’d invite’s you. That’s all very self-serving, but we’ve had a great relationship and I mean that quite sincerely. The buddy system through KPR was fantastic. I’m honoured to have met you.

Jesse Green:      

Thank you, mate.

Phil Horan:          

Then the sort of people that I would have, I think a lot of Richard Branson. I think that the way he goes about his businesses he has his wonderful mix of intense casual. In other words, he’s able to remain calm but also disrupt industries and do all sorts of things. I would now, in view of my experience with cancer, I would definitely invite Professor Phillip Stricker. He’s leading the way in some amazing advances in medical science. He also is very open, which is strange for a surgeon, to alternative medics. I have, sounds posh, but I have a wellness doctor. Doctor Daniel Weber who looks after a whole lot of issues to do with my treatment and Phillip Stricker has been in direct contact with him. He’s happy to talk to him. Most people write off alternative medicine as adversarial towards medical science, whereas Professor Stricker hasn’t done that. They’re the types of people that I would invite.

Also some of the outstanding women who have done some amazing things for business. There’s lots of them. Naomi Simpson with Red Balloon. Janine Alice with Boost Juice. There’s some amazing women who have done great things in business that I think have not only contributed greatly to business in this country, but they’ve also contributed greatly to the social fabric. I think that’s the thing that gets missed all the time. Everyone goes, “Oh, this person made a lot of money,” or, “This person’s highly successful,” but my question always is well, what have they done with it? What have they actually done to help somebody or do something worthwhile to the whole social fabric of the community? I think there the balance is. People like Richard Branson have done that. Professor Stricker’s doing that all the time. I know Naomi Simpson and Janine Alice are involved in some really great work in that respect.

They’re the types of people that I would want to have at my dinner party because I think that that balance is important. Making money is not that important. What is important is what you can do with it, what you can actually achieve for yourself, your community, your family. There’s a whole lot of nuances that go with success in business.

Jesse Green:      

Phil, that’s a really wonderful way to round out the conversation because I tell you what, if the definition of success is to run a commercial enterprise that is A, successful and profitable, but also contributing really positively to the social fabric of the community, well, man, I think you tick all those boxes and then some. Congratulations to you, to Hello Real Estate and again, thank you for all the work you’ve done in the medical space. That’s terrific. I really commend you for it, mate. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Phil Horan:          

Thank you.

Jesse Green:      

It’s been wonderful to hear these words of wisdom. I’m really, really looking forward to seeing what the next chapter of Hello looks like and looking forward to catching up for a cup of coffee next time I’m driving past your place, mate.

Phil Horan:          

Thank you, Jesse. I look forward to it as well. Thank you for having me on the show.

Jesse Green:      

Thanks. Cheers, mate.

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Daniel Priestley started out as an entrepreneur at age 21 and built a multi-million dollar event, marketing, and management business before the age of 25. A successful entrepreneur, international speaker, and best-selling author, Daniel has built and sold companies in Australia, Singapore, and the UK. Daniel is the founder of Entrevo, which runs a 9-month growth accelerator program for small enterprises, working with over 500+ entrepreneurs each year to develop their businesses. Entrevo has offices in the UK, USA, Singapore and Australia. Daniel uses campaigns to help raise up to $100,000 for charity each year and is connected to some of the world’s most known and celebrated entrepreneurs and leaders. With a passion for global small business, Daniel is the author of the three best-selling books Key Person of Influence, Entrepreneur Revolution, and the newly released Oversubscribed.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Daniel became an Entrepreneur
• What led him to the Key Person of Influence program
• Insights and advice on leadership
• The critical business insights for growth
• How to find out what people like
• The role of culture on how the team develops
• The benefits of scaling a business
• Developing roles and sharing resources to retain trust
• How to develop good leadership and management
• Creating a culture of sharing
• The key or turning points and decisions
• The systems of best practices to make a business grow
• How to develop a strong brand
• Having great systems in place to run business operations
• The importance of a reputable, interesting, creative, and valuable marketing strategy
• Creating a remarkable budget

Where to find Daniel Priestley

Website: http://www.danielpriestley.com
http://www.keypersonofinfluence.com/author/daniel
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/keypersonofinfluence
Twitter: https://twitter.com/danielpriestley
https://twitter.com/KPImethod
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/keyy-person-of-influence

Transcript

Jesse:    

Hello everyone, welcome to the show. Today, I’m joined by Daniel Priestly, who is the bestselling author of 3 books, the Key Person of Influence, the Entrepreneur Revolution and Oversubscribed: how to get people lining up to do business with you. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Daniel: 

Thanks very much for having me.

Jesse:    

Look, it’s an absolute pleasure, thanks for coming along. For the audience members who haven’t been so familiar with some of the work, Dan Priestly is the founder of the business growth accelerator called the Key Person of Influence program, it’s a fabulous program, I’ve been through it myself. That particular program, Dan, correct me if I’m wrong, it originated in London, is that correct?

Daniel: 

Yeah, so I’m Australian by birth, my background is building businesses in Australia. I moved to London about 9, 10 years ago in 2006, launched business over here, and in 2010 had the opportunity to set up a business growth accelerator based on some insights that I had about what was going on in the marketplace. We launched in London, and very quickly, we thought, “This is something that would benefit people all over the world,” so we launched in Australia, Singapore, and the USA over the following 4 years.

Jesse:    

That’s on a fairly impressive scale mate, and that’s obviously some of the key stuff I want to have a chat with you about today, because one of the key things that dentists are always asking is, “How do we take our operation, how do we scale it, how do we go into new territories, how do we grow, and how do we grow really well and cleverly as opposed to just growing for the sake of growing, creating chaos and mess, and so on and so forth?” Those are some really key points that we’ll obviously dive deeply into today. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of that Dan, can you tell me a little bit about more of your background, a bit more of your story, and how the program came into existence in the first place, and then what were the key triggers to make you think, “Okay, this is the time that we need to take it to another country,” or, “How do we scale up?”

Daniel: 

My background was, as I said, an entrepreneur in my teenage years, running dance parties and different events. In my early 20s I set up an event marketing and management company which became … It was very boutique, but it became quite large. We were making over $10 million worth of sales by the time I was about 24, 25, so it was one of those very fast growth businesses. I’d never really travelled internationally, I wanted to go and live in London, so I set up the business in London in 2006, and we grew a very similar business to about 4 million pounds, which at the time was about $8 million, or $9 million worth of revenue. That all happened within about 2 and a half years. Along the way, part of what we did with the business is we brought international speakers from around the world into London, we brought people who were bestselling authors, we brought people who were ex-CEOs or CEOs, people who’d sold their companies for tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

I got a lot of opportunity to sit on trains and hang out in hotels, and actually get the behind the scenes look into the lives of those people. It led me to reading the … Sorry, led me to writing a blog called How to Become a Key Person of Influence, and that blog was well-read, and then it led me to writing the book, Becoming a Key Person of Influence. Around that same time, I became really fascinated with the tech space. I was giving talks myself, and we were … Our company was offering trainings on social media marketing and social media strategy, it was very much the new thing in 2009. We were advising companies around how to scale using technology, and I became aware of something called an entrepreneur growth accelerator in Silicon Valley, and there was a number of very successful growth accelerators there where they would take young technology men, basically, to be blunt about it, 22 year old boys who could code.

They would find these young guys who could code, and they’d try and get them to have some sort of an insight about the world and the world at large, and then turn that into a business. Because they were very good at coding, they could turn things into businesses very quickly, but because they were so young and inexperienced they didn’t have very many valuable insights. They would come up with really predictable, stupid stuff that you’d expect 22 year old boys who had never had many social interactions with humans to come up with. They weren’t producing, for the thousands of businesses that you’d put in one end, they weren’t producing high success on the other end. What I did is I thought, “What if we reverse-engineered it a different way? What if we took people who have no idea about technology and scaling through coding,” and all that sort of stuff.

“What if we took people who’ve been in their industry 20 years, and have very valuable insights about how their industry works, how it should work, how the client experience should be, and we take people like that and we actually help them to become more successful at building a business, using some of the tools that are being used to scale businesses around the world. That led me to launching the Key Person of Influence program, the results, to be honest, shocked the hell out of me. Our first group was of 40 people, and all 40 of them just started to lift off the ground. Businesses that have kind of been ticking along sideways for 5 to 10 years started doubling very rapidly, and people started talking to me about how this was creating brand new 6 figure revenue streams, sometimes 7-figure revenue streams, and we knew we were onto something. The case study’s basically, “We’ve grown because of the case studies,” people hear about our clients, they hear about what our clients have achieved.

They say, “How did you do that,” and then they talk about us. We’ve done no traditional marketing, in the traditional sense. My first businesses were built on newspaper advertising, and we’d spend up to a quarter of a million a month on different display ads. This business has been built on word of mouth, our clients tell other people what we do and we’ve grown internationally as a result. We now have over 1500 clients globally, and that’s set to double. We work with some of the world’s most celebrated entrepreneurs and leaders, we now behind the scenes advise some of the world’s biggest companies on how their leaders should show up in the world and how to develop insights for their team and turn those into new products. We’ve got a corporate training division as well, we’ve got a technology hub, so we actually have a team of technologists who built technology for our clients here in the UK, in Milton Keynes.

We’ve grown off in all different directions, we’re a team of about 50 people across 7 time zones working with 1500 clients.

Jesse:    

Dan, that’s a significant enterprise there, that’s a lot of moving parts. Clearly as you’ve grown there would have been some key lessons that have cropped up along the way. As you stand and look back upon that journey now, what do you think some of the key insights have been as you’ve gone from that fledgling business into something growing and then growing further and further and further into the organization that it currently is now?

Daniel: 

There’s a few insights, and one of the first insights is that business moves in a very predictable pattern. It goes from start up, which is all about the idea and being in love with the potential and the possibility, and seeing a very clear picture of what it’s going to look like when it’s big, when it’s done, or even what it’s going to look like at the next stage. The next stage typically is a stage called wilderness, which is basically living hand to mouth and surviving, trying to set up a business and trying to pay for a little team. Normally that is between the founder plus 2 or 3, and then, the next stage is called lifestyle, which is where you build a boutique business of 3 to 12 people, that’s a beautiful business for most people. Most people don’t ever want to get beyond lifestyle, that was one of our key insights when we set up the accelerator, is that most of the time we were talking about performance businesses, which were really big.

Our people were actually saying, “Hey, wait a second, hold up, I don’t want a big business, I want a lifestyle business.” We had to actually reverse-engineer what does a lifestyle business look like? We did the research, we found that it’s 3 to 12 people, in fact, it’s 3 and a half people to 12 people. It’s doing revenue per person of about $140,000 plus. It’s got a few other parameters, but that’s the next predictable phase. After that you’ve got a scaling phase which is incredibly difficult called the desert, and that’s where you take the business from 12 to 50 people and during that whole phase you’ve got quite a lot of growth to achieve. You’ve got to go from a couple of million dollars to $10 million plus. It’s 500% growth that’s required to get onto the other side, very few companies do it. Most companies fail in the desert, but it’s a scaling phase and there’s almost …

There’s not a lot of money around, there’s not a lot of room for error, and it’s a dangerous part of the business. The culture has to shift considerably, a lot of the time the winning strategy that got you a lifestyle business now becomes the bottleneck and the losing strategy. If you can get through it, if you can get to 50 people plus, you’ve got a performance business. Between 50 and 150 is your typical performance business, now your revenue per employee has to go up over 200,000 Aussie dollars, actually, quite a bit more than that. About 240, 250,000 Aussie dollars, by the way, I’m mentally calculating the shift from pounds to dollars.

Jesse:    

I’m impressed with the conversion rates going on in your head, mate. That’s pretty impressive on the fly.

Daniel: 

Then you get a performance business where you’ve got evaluation, you’ve got people wanting to buy, you’ve got money from the bank if you need it. The business is bigger than the founder, but the founder’s still important. You’ve got a board and a chairman, and you’ve got a HR person, and all of those things that a grown up business has. You get there in a performance business. One of the first insights was just trying to find out, what do people actually want? The first real question every entrepreneur should be asking themselves is, “Do I want a lifestyle business, or do I want a performance business, and then the real question is, real deal, not fantasy land, what does that actually look like? The fantasy that people have is that they’re going to have a lifestyle business with just them, or them plus their wife, or them plus one, or them plus their husband, or them plus one other person, and that’s not true. It’s 3 and a half to 12 people.

The other fantasy is they’re going to have a performance business with 10 people, and that’s not true. Performance businesses are 50 plus people. Some people say, “It’s just going to be me and my laptop, or me in my little office, and we’re going to somehow sell a business for millions of dollars.” It’s like, no, that’s never going to happen. You’ve got to choose a design, it’s either going to be a performance design or a lifestyle design.

Jesse:    

On that Dan, I guess there’s some really critical points about … In some ways, although the journey is predictable, I guess as you’re traveling through that and you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m at that lifestyle level, I’m pretty happy here,” then I guess you’re at that fork in the road point. “Do I continue to enjoy my lifestyle, do I sit here and enjoy all that I’ve created, or am I ready to cross the desert and move into that performance business?” We see that a lot with dentists as well, we see a lot of guys who, to be quite frank, they’re quite successful, they’re making a good income, they’re in that lifestyle business, they’ve got that 3 and a half to 12 number of people working in and around the team there, and then all too often people say, “Look, I really want to take this to another level, I want to scale it,” and as you say, that’s a risk.

Daniel: 

The Richard Branson moment comes in, and you sit there, and it especially happens for guys and girls who’ve got 10 people on their business and they’re sitting there going, “Wow, I’ve built this great business, I’ve got a Porsche 9-11 on lease, and I’ve got a BMW 3-Series on lease, and I’ve got a nice house, and I’m comfortably making my mortgage payments and my kids are in good schools, and we’re comfortably making those payments. They’re sitting there going, “You know what? This is good, but maybe I’m the next Richard Branson, maybe I’m the person who could be building a big global business, and a brand.” You start attending some business seminars and reading some business books, and you think, “Yeah, I’m just going to do this thing, and I’ll just tiptoe into the water and hire the 13th, 14th, 16th person, and that’s when everything goes horribly wrong.

Jesse:    

Talk to me a little bit about culture, now obviously, as you transition from a lifestyle business to a performance business, there is that great divide, the desert in between. I’m guessing that, in your experience, and you’ve seen many, many businesses, and dental practices really are no different, just to make that clear. We are speaking to dentists of course. Dental practices are exactly the same, the journey is very predictable and even though we all think our own business is unique in its own way, and of course it is in many ways. The journey that each practice goes on is absolutely predictable. What I’m really curious to understand from your perspective in the general business community is Dan, the role of culture and how as the team grows, the importance of that culture, how do you establish it, and equally the role of the owner, going from almost a manager to a leader, and what sort of growth needs to happen for them?

Daniel: 

There’s 2 journeys that the owner has to go on, and one of them is either from entrepreneur to leader, and one is from manager to leader. We need to end up, at one point, being a leader as we grow our business, and the starting point is either manager or entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is the wild ideas guy, who’s that part of your brain that’s constantly coming up with new stuff and that part of the brain that is thinking about humanity and thinking about the market, and thinking about products and all of that sort of big, big picture stuff. That kind of person is going to scare the hell out of the team, and they’re going to sit there and go, “If you just do that every day, I’m going to get exhausted, because nothing’s actually happening, and I need something to actually happen.” Then there’s the manager part of the business, or even for a dentist, the technician.

The manager technician is the person who’s thinking about the individual customer, the client journey, what’s each individual customer experiencing, is it consistent, is it right, is it manageable? Do we have enough staff on to manage that client journey, and to meet compliance needs, and all of those sorts of things. The manager and the technician are very much hand-in-hand, they want to work on the customer, and make sure that their experience is at a detail level, as good as it can be. Then there’s the leader, and the leader wants to build the team around the vision. The leader wants a vision, and the leader very quickly gets the vision, and then the leader says, “All right, let’s inspire a team to fulfill that vision.” If you’re like me, your default position is called entrepreneur. For me, that means that I’m just going to … Give me a blank piece of paper and I’m just going to come up with ideas that can change the world, as far as I’m concerned.

They’re probably not, they’re probably rubbish most of the time. My default position is, give me blank bits of paper and let me tackle the world’s problems and let me dream, and let me think outside the box. What I have to do is I have to say, that’s who I am and that’s appropriate for me, but I can’t bring that into the office every day. I have to put a document together that is going to be our vision document, and I have to become a leader when I’m in the office, helping my team to understand vision, and to rally around the vision and to do what needs to be done to build the team and to build the client journey around that vision, and actually just stick with it long enough for it to work. I’ve got people on my team who are naturally managers, and their day-to-day, if you leave them to their default position, it’s just about getting their head down and being side-by-side with the team and managing things.

Managers have a tendency to be technicians as well, and they tend to say, “Oh, something’s not working, I will jump on top of that, roll up my sleeves and get it done,” which sometimes is not a bad thing, but too often means that they’re just basically working in the business and they’re not leading a team or creating a culture that gets things done as opposed to working on it. On the issue of culture, there’s that dynamic, there’s another dynamic. The culture that builds a lifestyle business is different to the culture that builds a performance business, and one of the reasons the desert is so hard is because the culture has to radically shift. That little lifestyle business of 3 to 12 people, the way that works is you build a culture that’s like a family, and everyone’s in on it, everyone’s part of this business. You get to know people, you get to know what’s going on in their family life.

You call forth from people that feeling of, “We’re a close-knit group who really cares about each other, inside work and outside work, we go to the movies together sometimes, we really have that fun little family culture.” That’s what a team of 3 to 12 people typically build around, and you also have a bit of what I called Swiss army knife culture. Swiss army knife culture means everyone’s okay at doing their job, but they’re also willing to do anyone else’s job and they’re also willing to roll up their sleeves and just do whatever needs to be done in order to get through. Swiss army knife can do 25 things badly, and that’s actually what makes it a useful little tool. It doesn’t do any of those 25 things particularly well, as soon as you want to actually chop down a tree every day you don’t want to use the little saw that’s on a Swiss army knife, you want to go get yourself a chainsaw.

If you only can carry one little device, well then a Swiss army knife is not a bad choice. When you’ve got a small team of 3 and a half to 12 people, you typically have these Swiss army knife people who … They’re not particularly great at anything, but they’re good at everything. That typically builds your business up to about 12 people. Here’s the problem, when you get up to a performance business, everyone is a chainsaw.

Jesse:    

You need a specialist.

Daniel: 

You need people who, their job is cutting down trees, they’re a chainsaw, they’re going to slice through there because that’s all they do. They’re not particularly good at opening a bottle of wine, so they’re not the corkscrew. Sure enough, they’re the chainsaw. They get out there and smash their particular thing. If it’s sales, then they’re brilliant at sales, but don’t ask them to do anything other than sales, if that’s delivering a particular service, then they’re really good at that particular service, but don’t ask them to do anything else, that’s their thing. You end up with people who are highly trained specialists in that particular area, and then you end up with a leadership and management team who manage all your specialists, and so your CFO is a particular brilliant CFO. They’re a finance person, their whole life has been built around finance.

In the early days, you didn’t have a CFO, you had someone who was an accountant/ops person. Here’s what happens, unfortunately during the scaling session, all the people that you told were your family, you told about 12 people that we’re a band of rebels, we’re a family, we stick together, we’re a merry band of people getting things done. Unfortunately, there’s almost no place for them up at the top level, so all those people that you told were family, they’re going to feel displaced through the desert, they’re going to feel rejected through the desert, they’re going to feel out of their depth through the desert, they’re going to feel like the culture of family is out the window, now it’s a culture of performance. Families don’t typically measure performance the way elite football teams would. You basically piss off your first 12 people.

Jesse:    

With the transition there, Dan, as you go through that, what I’m guessing is, as you go through the desert you’re keeping an eye on the organization you’re building, and you’re looking at the key roles as opposed to the key people, because one of the things that I hear about in the dental world at least, is when people are thinking about their organization, they’re kind of designing their business around the names of their current staff, which sounds so obvious when I say it like that that it’s not necessarily a good thing to do. I guess that’s probably part of the transition from a lifestyle business to a …

Daniel: 

Performance business.

Jesse:    

Going to performance business, they’re going, “Well, I’ve got Suzie, she does this, and Mary does that,” as opposed to saying, “I’ve got my chainsaw, and that role happens to be filled by Bob,” or, “I’ve got the corkscrew and that role is filled by Peter,” or whoever it happens to be. Do you see that a bit?

Daniel: 

That’s a huge part of it. Organizational design at a performance level is around roles, and when I say around roles, you have your job description, you have your on-boarding process, you have your development training for that role, and you have your management for that role. When you look at every single role in the organization, you actually say, “Do we have a job description, do we have a way of on-boarding the person in the first 90 days,” or, “Before that, do we have a way of selecting and engaging who we select for that role, do we have a way of onboarding them, do we have a way of managing that role, and managing performance in that role? Do we have a way of keeping that person sharp, on the cutting edge, with training in development?” All of those questions, but you’re not actually talking about any particular person. What you’re trying to do is create a role where if John leaves, Sally replaces John, and it’s no big deal.

It takes 2 to 3 months to have a new person up and running as good as the previous person, and successful organizations, they hire and they retain, and they absolutely … Retention is the goal. However, it’s not a make or break scenario. In the issue of a lifestyle business, it’s the opposite. In a lifestyle business, there’s only one job description, which is, Swiss army knife, and then with a leaning towards would be the caveat. This is a Swiss army knife with a leaning towards being a dentist, and this is a Swiss army knife with a leaning towards being the front desk receptionist. In small businesses, the front desk receptionist is also the person who’s doing all sorts of other things, and the dentist is occasionally probably picking up the phone when the receptionist is out. Swiss army knife with a leaning towards is typically the job description in a lifestyle business.

Jesse:    

One of the things we’re seeing in the dental profession a lot at the moment, is we’re seeing a lot of aggregation, a lot of roll ups, a lot of, I suppose, consolidation of ownership within the profession at the moment. That’s happening on many different levels. There’s the well-established corporations buying up practices, and yet there are other dentists who are looking to roll up their own group of practices and so on. Given that you’ve been through the process of A, scaling one particular business, but then aggregating other businesses, as you said, you’ve got the technology hub and so many other things around your organization in general. What would be, as you look back on it, were there any, I suppose, boo-boos you made? Any kind of, with the retrospective scope, things that you go, “Well, hang on, with the benefit of hindsight I realize that was a mistake,” or equally, with the benefit of hindsight, “Though I didn’t know it at the time, that turned out pretty well.”

Daniel: 

Scaling is… One of the best ways to scale is through acquisitions. If you want to cross the desert, if you’ve got …

Jesse:    

Get there fast.

Daniel: 

If you’ve got an operation that has … Let’s say your operation’s doing $5 million, and you’ve got to get over $10 million in order to be a performance business, it makes sense to look at 2 other businesses in the desert and bolt 3 or 4 businesses together and you’ve now got a performance business. That’s the theory, and it all sounds lovely in theory. Essentially, businesses become valuable once they hit $10 million plus, let’s say. A lot of small businesses, they sit there and go, “Ooh, I’d love to sell my business one day,” and I say, often you’re probably dreaming. You’ll get a small amount for your business, it won’t be life-changing, you’ll get enough to clear the lease on your [BIMA 00:26:46]. That’s the kind of money you’re probably going to get, you’ll get a payout of sorts. You’ll probably get some money over 2 or 3 years, if the business continues to perform.

You’re not going to get a million dollars, you’re not going to get anywhere close to that. You’re not going to get a big lump sum check from a lifestyle business. As soon as a business hits 10 million in revenue, the opposite happens. You’re suddenly big enough for big companies to go, “We will give you money, we will buy you out, we will give you shares in a bigger business if you want them.” There’s a very good argument that if you want to, one day, sell your business, you’re far better off either building a business to 10 million, rolling up other businesses around you to hitting 10 million, or being part of a roll up. This is not just coordinating it, but choosing someone who’s doing a roll up and join their roll-up is not a bad option as well. There’s a lot that goes wrong though, with roll ups. Probably the first one is what we were just talking about, which is the cultural shift.

If you’re rolling up a bunch of businesses that are … Let’s say you pick a bunch of businesses that have 20 people each. Fundamentally, their culture is already struggling at the breaking point. Because they’ve got 20 people in the business, they’re too big to be small, too small to be big. They’re having dramas, they’re going to need a lot of work as far as the development and the integration of their business into a bigger business. What’s going to have to happen is you’re going to have to start very carefully putting a different culture through the whole organization, and it’s a culture where people … We do develop roles, and people, and it’s a culture where we can share some resources, and you start slowly so that people don’t lose trust, or don’t feel threatened, and just allow some of the sharing of resources, and you start looking for a fit.

You almost have to let the new culture emerge out, with a little bit of guidance, as opposed to trying to impose a new culture on people, because you’ll end up with a lot of people who just … Who get pissed off with that. It’s a delicate balance, you know? You sort of bring things in and get buy-in from all the key stakeholders, you might need 2 or 3 months to get that buy-in from key stakeholders. When you’ve bolted a number of companies together, you have to almost view it as the way you’d get something done within a corporate now. You allow 3 months to get anything done, and you have to get buy-in from all the different people who you need buy-in from, and you have to have several meetings and several discussions, and create some documents. …. necessary, do you think anything else needs to be considered, all of that stuff that leadership, good management is about, and you have to create a culture of sharing of best practices so that people can feel that they can share within the group.

Gently, gently. It might only take you 9 months to put together the roll up, and it might take 18 months to integrate the teams into one culture.

Jesse:    

As you’ve gone through your process of scaling your particular business, and again, I’m just looking for lessons that we can take from your experience and apply to dentistry in general. As you look back on that, were there any key points, I suppose, turning points, when you’ve kind of been at a decision point and you’ve thought, “Okay, I could zig or I could zag, and depending on which way I go I could get a different outcome.” Were there any key moments in there that you kind of thought, “Well okay, this could go one way or the other.”

Daniel: 

There was a key moment that I had where yeah, I’ve had many precarious moments for sure, as most people in business have. One of the key learnings that I got was just an unbelievably good learning called Income Follows Assets, and Income Follows Assets means that in order to get rent, first you need a house, right? That’s the example we’re all familiar with. You can’t go off and try to get some rent if you don’t have a house? It just doesn’t work like that. In business, in order to get more money you need more assets, and you need to develop a business from the assets out. What most business owners do is they develop activities, and they develop a hustle. They think that for sure, the thing that got them their first million dollars’ worth of revenue was hustle, there’s no question. Picking up the phone, bit of sales, bit of marketing, bit of hustle, and you go from zero to a million dollars.

The thing that’s going to get you to $10 million is not hustle, because you just don’t have enough hustle in you to get to $10 million. You can’t employ people who are going to put all their hustle into your business, if they have that level of hustle they’ll be out there doing it themselves.

Jesse:

Doing it themselves, yeah.

Daniel: 

What you need is assets, and one of the things … Just basic things, like, really well-designed documents. For example, a great document might be the brochures that your practice has, another document might be the brand vision and values document that you give to all the people who work there. Another document might be your website, and your blog, and how that’s optimized and how that attracts leads, and how that gets people to inquire. Another document might be a system or a page that you give to clients that helps them to schedule their revisits. Another one might be an automatic texting system that reminds people that they’re due to come back. These are all what I call soft assets, and there’s a system of best practices around documents and systems that help people to re-book, and help employees to feel good, and rewarded, that help customers to get excited about the brand, that help shareholders to stay engaged and happy with their investment.

There’s documents and systems that you need, and it’s those documents and systems that really make a business grow up and turn into an asset. The test that I give people is, what happens if you get hit by a bus? What happens if you’re in Tahiti? We run a little bit of an experiment, we say, “What happens in week 1 if you just don’t show up?” All you’ve got is, in one experiment that’s a little less macabre, we say, “All right, you’re in Tahiti, you’ve got terrible mobile phone reception, you can only really talk for 2 or 3 minutes at a time, a couple of times a day, that’s it, terrible phone reception. What happens in week 1, what happens in week 2, what happens by week 4, what happens by week 12? How much of this business is still going, and why? What most people discover is that their business is pretty much done and dusted by week 12, so the goal is that with minimal touch, your business is running on its assets as opposed to running on your hustle.

Jesse:    

Just on that asset point too Dan, one of the things I found is when we sold previous dental practices in the past, one of the reasons we’re able to sell them for a fairly handy profit was those assets, because what we found as well is that if someone wants to buy that business, they’re assessing a whole lot of things. One of those things is risk. What I’ve observed in my own experience, and again, I’d be very open to hearing what your experience has been, is that all those assets reduce the risk for the incoming buyer. They can essentially go into your practice on the next day and continue to earn and have it operate as you had it earning and operating as well. It just adds a lot of value to your business as well.

Daniel: 

One of the reasons the big companies love to buy $10 million plus businesses is because they’ve hit that point where it’s about assets, not personalities. Big companies, they want to improve their balance sheet. It’s funny, when I talk to small business owners, lifestyle businesses, they talk about the PNL all the time. “How many sales did we make, how much did it cost?” It’s all about PNL, PNL, PNL. If I go all the way up to big businesses, especially publicly traded companies, they hardly talk about PNL, they talk about balance sheet, all the time. “What assets are we buying, what assets are we developing, what assets do we need in the future?” They’re always talking about the assets, and then they say, “Well, we have a team of leaders and managers who [sweat 00:36:01] the assets and make those assets work.” At a very top level, we just talk about what assets we need to buy or develop. That’s the top end of town, there’s a reason for that.

Jesse:    

Just again, thinking about those assets for a moment Daniel, when you look at your balance sheet and you’re thinking, “Okay, what assets do I have on my balance sheet?” You listed a couple of those things before, but, if you were to categorize those assets … What I’m trying to think about here is, for the guys listening, thinking about, “Okay, what assets do I have here?” I just want to give them some top level categories, obviously there’s the HR assets, the people and so on and so forth, there’d be the systems and operations and all the rest of it. In your experience, what other categories would you see, IP and all those other things. What sort of things …

Daniel: 

There’s the brand, and how well-developed the brand is. Does it have vision, values, does it have ambassadors and recorded case studies? Does it have a brand guidelines book, so does it have a consistent look and feel? There’s things like the intellectual property, do you have registered intellectual property, do you have case studies, methodologies? Do you have a content library? That’s your intellectual property. There’s things like products, do you have free products, do you have cheap products, do you have a full and remarkable core product? Do you have something that you can sell to your clients, or making sure that they stay with you? Do you have all of that productized? You’ve got your systems assets, have you got great systems in place that run the business from an operations perspective, from a sales and marketing perspective? HR assets is an interesting one, because when most people think about HR assets they think of people, as you said.

We think about the roles, so we sort of say … Rather than thinking about Tom as a great sales guy, we actually say, “Do we have a script, do we have a on-boarding process? Do we have a training video? Do we have a job description, do we have prerequisites that we’re looking for? Do we have hiring guidelines around that role? If you’ve got all that stuff then yes, Tom’s a great sales person. If Tom left, we can get another Tom, because we have the assets. When we think about marketing, we want repeatable marketing strategies. Do we have a handle that we can crank that just generates more leads and inquiries. For some businesses, that’s their key word on Google, but that’s a pretty low level one. For some businesses, they’ve got a really phenomenal Instagram page, no-one else in the area has an Instagram page, and it brings in 16 people a week very cheaply, just through Instagram.

It’s the interesting and creative sales and marketing strategy that no-one else is doing that becomes really valuable.

Jesse:    

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show. Sadly, our interview with Daniel was cut off, and that’s due to the vagaries of the internet, the connection between here and London was sadly cut short, for some particular reason, I’m not quite sure why that it failed, but it did. I was very fortunate enough to catch up with Daniel on his most recent trip to Australia, and we did get to have a conversation and pick up a little bit from where we left off, and I wanted to share some of the insights that came out of that conversation with you, and really pick up the thread from where we left off. We spoke with Daniel about creating a remarkable budget, and the reason we spoke about this is because most businesses, when it comes to their marketing, are really competing in a sea of sameness, in a sea of beige, what I call it. There’s no great way for one business, or in this instance, for one dental practice to stand out from the others.

When a patient is thinking about considering a dental practice, really, there’s no compelling reason for them to walk past other practices, to pick yours. It turns out that over the years, when Daniel first got into marketing, their first marketing efforts were really around newspapers, and they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month promoting various events in the newspapers, and in the early 2000s they were getting a return on that. Certainly as the years progressed and definitely by 2008, that return, he says, had fallen off a cliff. He got to the point, the same point that we had gotten to with our practice as well, where we realized that it was all about creating a remarkable patient experience, and we discovered that rather than having a marketing budget per se, we needed to actually have a remarkable budget. Rather than spending money to attract a lead, we spent money basically creating an experience for our patients.

So that they’d be willing to talk about us. I know that there are other people out there that talk about this, but there is so much that goes into creating a remarkable experience, and we’re aiming for the patients to walk away where they’re saying, “My dentist is phenomenal, my dentist is amazing, no-one does things like my dentist does.” In practical terms, how does one do that? It really comes down to understanding that patient journey from the beginning to the end, and what I call touch points, which are those moments of interaction that a patient can have with your practice, or indeed, when it comes to general business, any of us as customers would have with other general businesses as well. Understanding that patient journey and crafting a truly remarkable experience does require a lot of creative energy. These days, if you think about it, you could spend a lot of money, say you spend a thousand dollars on a newspaper ad, and you’re trying to attract a lead.

You might pick up 3 or 4 leads through that advertising, but I can guarantee you that if you spend a thousand dollars creating a remarkable experience for your existing patients, then you’re going to get a much greater return on that investment. The key thing there is, as I said earlier, is to know exactly what it is you’re trying to create, and that’s going to require some creative energy, and in our practice, the way we do that is by having a team retreat, certainly annually, or even more frequently if you think that’s appropriate. It does require an off-site where you get away from the day to day stuff with the practice, you get away from the phone ringing, you get away from everything, and you put some really good creative energy into that process. That’s where the remarkability comes into it. The biggest challenge as well is to be able to resource patients to give them the material that they can then take and spread your word or your message for them, for you.

I was telling Dan about this story, about a dentist I know in Sydney, who’s just a fanatical follower of a particular football club in Sydney. I won’t mention which club, because that will probably identify her. What she’s done so well in this is, she’s resourced her patients brilliantly, because she’s known as the fanatical dentist that follows this particular footy club. Her surgery is in the team color, she often goes to work in the jerseys, near Grand Final time and Semi Final time, she’s really into the whole footy thing, which is great, and it’s truly authentic, and it’s absolutely who she is and what she stands for. Interestingly enough, a lot of her patients come in, and want to have a selfie taken with that particular dentist, and because she’s so unique and she’s doing it so well, what is actually happening is those selfies are being beamed out to the various friends of her patients on Facebook, Instagram and the like.

Rather than spending a thousand dollars on ads, this particular dentist, what she’s done so cleverly is … I think it’s just organic, I don’t think there’s a great strategy here, but she’s just stumbled across it brilliantly. She’s now allowing her patients to spread the word via their own social media, in which she’s tagged and the friends and the patients, of which there’s at least about 3 or 400 friends per person on Facebook, that photo’s being beamed out to those 3 or 400 people. She has now effectively resourced her patients to be able to spread the message about her practice. Coupled with that, she’s got a very clever hashtag, and I think she does that really, really well, and again, that hashtag gets beamed out along the way. The thing that follows up around remarkability and creating that experience that is truly remarkable, as well as resourcing your patients to talk about it, is the concept of capacity.

Again, when we speak to most practices, most dental practice owners, we say, “How many patients is enough?” There’s never enough, the answer’s more and more and more patients, which is why I wrote the book around retention, because retaining patients is absolutely critical to your marketing, because there’s clearly no point pouring new patients into the top of the funnel only to be leaking existing patients out the bottom of the funnel. The key thing to understand is around capacity as it relates to remarkability, and again, we were talking to Dan about his favourite restaurants in London, he’s a big fan of Grangers, which is in Notting Hill. I think it’s Bill Granger who runs that one. The concept is around capacity, and understanding that you need to protect that patient experience. When you take on more and more and more customers, or in this case more and more patients, there is the propensity for that experience to be eroded.

The thing is, if you have the capacity to genuinely serve a finite number of patients so that you are delivering a full and remarkable solution consistently to each of those patients, then if you start to take on more and more patients the risk is that that experience becomes diluted, and instead of having your patients walking out saying, “My dentist is awesome, no-one does things like my dentist, he or she is just the bees’ knees,” then the patients will walk out thinking, “Well, my dentist is okay.” Of course, dentistry becomes commoditized, and your practice then slips into that same sea of beigeness as everyone else’s. Understand capacity, how many patients can you surprise, how many patients can you delight, and how many can you really handle before taking on more patients will start to erode that experience? I know that there’s people listening to this going, “Yeah, but I need more patients, I need to have through put and so on and so forth.”

Understand who it is you’re trying to create the experience for. Who is your ideal patient, what do they need, what do they stand for? It goes right back to those marketing basics, and again, when Dan was here we spoke a lot about the fundamental mistake that most businesses make when it comes to their marketing, is not starting those foundations, not understanding very clearly who their ideal patient is, and what is the remarkable experience that you need to create for that ideal patient? Your ideal patient, if you’re looking at marketing, really, represents the bullseye on a dartboard. All your marketing, all your efforts, everything is geared towards hitting the bullseye with your marketing. Of course, if you happen to attract some people from, let’s say, the 25 ring on the dart board, then that’s okay too. Just make sure your marketing is geared towards your ideal patients.

That the experience is geared for that ideal patient. We had a great conversation with Dan, it was wonderful, and those were some of the lessons that came out of the conversation. I just wanted to take a moment to share them with you, looking forward to seeing all you guys around the trap soon. Please, if you like the show, send us a rating on iTunes, we’d love to get that feedback, and look forward to talking to you soon. Bye for now.

 

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Ben Ikin is a former professional rugby league footballer who played 150 games in the NRL with the Gold Coast Seagulls, North Sydney Bears and Brisbane Broncos. Ben represented QLD 17 times and played 2 tests for Australia and still holds the record as the youngest player ever to play State of Origin football. Ben was also lucky enough to win a premiership with the Brisbane Broncos in the 2000 season.

Following a triumphant playing career, Ikin spent 5 years with the Nine Network working as a rugby league commentator and co-host of The Sunday Footy Show. Ben also worked for 10 years in various senior commercial roles in the property and construction industry but now works full time in the media with Foxsports and Crocmedia; he is also a director of the North QLD Cowboys and the Men of League Foundation.

In addition, he delivers a presentation with Robert Ford, State Director – Queensland, Corporate & Specialised Banking at Bankwest. Robert has 20 years experience as a senior executive of the banking industry and together Ben and Robert speak on “high performance teams and individuals”.

Ben is married to Beth and has four children.

 

In this episode we talk about:

• Ben Ikin’s football career
• The importance of loving what you do no matter what you do in life
• How to deal with adversity
• How injury and setbacks can become a challenge and a life lesson
• How he began his media career
• The importance of trust, alignment, and certainty when working in a team
• The character traits of effective leaders
• The power of self-believe
• The power of hard work and a willingness to learn and improve
• Learnings from sport that benefit business
• The feedback loop to help you get you better
• How he balances his personal life, business demands and commitments
• The importance of balancing and scheduling a diary

 

Where to find Ben Ikin

 

Resources

Website: http://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-on-fox/ben-ikin/story-fn5k30ac-1226284205628

 

Linkedin:   https://au.linkedin.com/in/ben-ikin-97936082

Transcript

Jesse Green:      

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. Today is an exciting day. We have a bona fide Rugby League legend with us, talking to us today. Very excited to hear Ben’s views on the world.

Ben Ikin is a football great. He’s been playing … Probably born with a football, I reckon because he played so much. He played first for three clubs, the Gold Coast Seagulls, of course, North Sydney Bears, my favourite team. My second favourite team is the mighty Brisbane Broncos. Not only that, Ben’s a Queensland State of Origin Player, with 17 starts for Queensland, and of course a couple of tests. Ben, welcome to this show, mate.

Ben Ikin:

Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse Green:

Mate, that’s a pretty impressive CV, I might add. I’ve never met anyone with a football pedigree like that before.

Ben Ikin:               

I have.

Jesse Green:      

I’m sure you’ve met a few, mate.

Ben Ikin:               

Some good mates, a lot of blokes who’ve got better numbers than I have. In fact, I joke with them sometimes. We’ll go down and do a public speaking engagement together, and I have to jump on Wikipedia and edit my numbers, just so I can sort of respectfully stand on the same stage.

Jesse Green:      

That’s fabulous, mate. Even with that, there’s some pretty impressive numbers. I’m just curious mate, you must’ve been born with a footy in your hand. You’ve been playing all your life? Did you start as a whippersnapper?

Ben Ikin:               

I started young, but it wasn’t my first sport, Rugby League. I started in IFL, actually here on the Gold Coast. I played for Palm Beach Currumbin, which is a side, a proud club it’s still in existence. I think Wayne Carey, the king, actually went and had a season for Palm Beach, at one point after he retired from the IFL. Then, after IFL I got into hockey. That was my winter sport of choice for a few years. My last year of primary school, at Currumbin State School, they started inter-school sport, and they only gave us the two options. One was Rugby League, and one was Netball.

Jesse Green:      

So Netball didn’t get a looking then?

Ben Ikin:               

No, my hand was kind of forced. It just so happened that particularly year, 1988, was the same year that the Gold Coast Giants, as they were back then, got introduced into the New South Wales Rugby League. So too, the Brisbane Broncos. I’m living in southeast Queensland on the Gold Coast, and there was much excitement around Rugby League. I had one season for the school. I went and joined the local footy club, the Seahawks and never looked back. I think I was 11 then, and played right through the age of 27, so I had much fun.

Jesse Green:      

That’s a fabulously long career. We’ll get into the path that you took throughout all that, but from the age of 11 to 27, that’s 16 years of playing footy. I guess, you know, in a way mate, you’ve been really lucky to make a career out of something that you obviously truly love. There’s not many people I know that get to do that. I think that’s a bloody good thing to be able to do, mate.

Ben Ikin:               

I feel really lucky and honoured to have something that I love doing, that I was passionate about, turn into a career for me. Of course, it doesn’t matter what you do in life, whether you love what you do or not, by the time you get into it, and start to do it professionally, it has its hairs on it. There’s things involved with going a professional athlete that make it tough. There’s a lot of public expectation. It’s a high risk career. It doesn’t go for a long time.

I was certainly one of those guys that got shot down early in his career, having retired at 27 off the back of three reconstructions on my left knee, certainly made it difficult, but can I say with all the broken bones and injuries and you know, lost games and disappointing moments, I wouldn’t have changed it for one moment. It was an opportunity for me to learn a lot about myself. I set myself and my family up for a brighter future. I can honestly say, all those wonderful lessons that I learned through my time as a professional rugby league player, I’ve been able to take into life after Rugby League.

Jesse Green:      

That’s a really key point, and I’m super keen to drill down into that, which is fantastic. One of the things though, because I did read up abut your career, in preparation for today. I tend to be a bit of a researcher, and the injuries that you mentioned just then, they did cut your career short, and clearly that would’ve been quite heartbreaking in many ways. What I’m really interested to know, Ben, is when you deal with adversity like that, and you literally are thinking “this is the end of my footy career, what’s next?” I’m assuming you come to this kind of crossroads, a bit of fork in the road.

                 

Firstly, I’m curious to ask how did you deal with that adversity? What got you through that? When you got to that fork in the road, what was the decision making process that you went through?

Ben Ikin:               

You learn certainly learn that life’s not linear, as we’d like it to be. In hindsight, today’s always better than yesterday, and tomorrow isn’t necessarily always going to be better than today. You have good years and bad years, and good months and bad months. You have good games and bad games, and you’ve just got to be able to adapt to both, and take both in your stride.

I kind of, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way back when I was playing, so probably too young. For some reason inside me, when the set back struck, particularly with my left knee, and those three knee reconstructions, I started to get excitement about life after Rugby League. I didn’t sort of wallow in self pity. That’s not going to be the same for everybody. There’s guys that I with played getting really down in the mouth about injuries, and handled it a different way. For me, I probably started about the age of 24 and I had these major injury set backs, my mind just starred to think forward.

I started to prepare for life after football. While I’d like to sit here and tell you that it felt like some great big adversity at the time, and I had to fight my way back on the field, and they’re all these wonderful lessons that I learnt from it, I really didn’t. I just sort of adapted, and I think that’s a skill that’s kind of innate in me. I’m glad I’ve got it, because it means that I can sort of push my way through any set backs that happen along the way. I guess the downside of it is that I’m easily distracted. I’m always looking sideways for the next challenge. It’s just kind of who I am.

At the time, as I say, while from the outside looking in, it might’ve seemed like I was doing it really tough. It certainly wasn’t the case for me, personally.

Jesse Green:      

You had that first knee injury when, it started going about wonky, about 24 you’re saying. I guess what I’m hearing is that at particular moment, you had the presence of mind to go, “well hang on, it could be an issue here. Better start thinking about my post footy career. I guess that’s when you started that mental process to, you know, plan for your next adventure.

Ben Ikin:

That’s right. I just had to get busy learning, because you know, while there’s a lot of character traits and behaviours that you pick up in life as a professional athlete, it certainly doesn’t equip you with the knowledge to go on and do a trade, or fill a role anywhere else. Except for perhaps coaching and the media, and the media weren’t that readily available to me, at the time I was ready to retire.

I went and studied. I was doing some work experience with the Broncos. For me, sales and marketing was kind of the area where I ended up. I schooled myself up. By the time I realized it was time for me to move on, cut my ties with professional Rugby League, and the Brisbane Broncos, I had a couple of opportunities. Ever since then, I’ve kind of applied the same philosophy. I’ve been through a few different jobs, but the moment I get the sense that it’s time for a change or I start looking for a new challenge, I start that learning process over, and know that if I’ve any chance of kind of being the best that I can be, in whatever role it is I take on, I’ve got to have the knowledge, and the know how to make sure I get it right.

Jesse Green:      

Fabulous, mate, and clearly, that’s been a success. We’ve seen your face on all sorts of media over the years, and every time I turn on the footie, there you are, which is just fabulous. Clearly, all that hard work and learning has paid off.

I just want to go back to your early days for a moment, Ben. When you thought about playing football. Obviously, you started at 11, and you went your way through for 16 years, at what point did you kind of have the inkling that you know, this is something that I’d like to do forever? Did it just continue on, playing one game to the next, and it kind of evolved without any master plan, or did it just evolve?

Ben Ikin:               

It came very late for me. I had a moment in my last couple of years at high school, where I actually went through high school pretty young, so I finished my first year of grade 12 at 16. I was lucky enough to get an OP who let me go off and do a science degree, environmental science degree, I should say. I’d locked that down. Going through high school young, also meant that in my final year, I wasn’t old enough, so to speak, to compete against the 17 and 18 year olds who were all vying for those Queensland and Australia School Boys spots in my chosen sport, Rugby League. What I did was I made a decision to repeat grade 12, and instead of sort of focusing on my school work, I got up to that point, I went back and chose a few easy subjects, and really worked hard at my Rugby League, and ended up making the Australian School Boys side.

I wanted to have that 12 months in 1994 to figure out whether or not I had what it took to be a professional Rugby League player. Come the end, having made the Queensland and Australian School Boys teams, I had the opportunity and offers from a couple of NRL clubs. That’s when I knew, only then, that this was a dream that could perhaps turn into reality.

Of course then, history will tell you, it became really fast tracked for me, because my first year out of high school, in 1995, I was selected to play in the Queensland State of Origin Team. By the time I kind of hit that point, the environmental science degree, very much got put on the back turner.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, mate, I read that you were adding years in something like 83 days. The youngest ever player to play Origin. That’s correct, right?

Ben Ikin:               

That’s right.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that must’ve been for a young boy, walking into that Queensland team, which were full of probably people that we all, as spectators idolized, but you, as a player, you would’ve certainly looked up to, as well. What was it like, walking into that dressing room for the first time?

Ben Ikin:               

It was surreal. It’s the only way I could describe it. I’d like to sit here and probably recount what I learned, and the enormity of what I was going through, but sort of six weeks, my head was just spinning. I was 18 years of age. I didn’t have the life experience, the emotional experience, to kind of properly handle what was going on. I guess make a … What would you say, a contribution of any sort of profoundness except to jump on the bus and go for the ride. I was playing off the bench. I was sort of, I think in the course of three games, I played for 25 or 30 minutes on the wing. So Fatty Vautin was the coach back then. He was doing his best to make sure I was getting on the field.

I was that young, and that inexperienced, but we were so short on numbers, they really had no other choice than to select someone like me. Truth be told, it was just so, six to eight weeks of just something that I’ve never experienced up to that point in my life. I just went for the ride, and what a ride it was. Coming to camp, as you rightly pointed out, I had some of the guys that I’d grown up watching on TV, idolizing. I was rooming with Mark Coyne, and eight weeks later, we won a State of Origin series 3-0 when just about everybody on the planet was saying we couldn’t win one game, so, I mean, what a story.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that’s a fabulous story. What a … For a young boy of 18, what a massive shot of confidence that must’ve given you, because even though you’d had that second year of year 12, to really put into your Rugby League, and obviously NRL offers, to be thrust into that, onto that enormous stage so early in your career. That’s just absolutely breathtaking, really.

Ben Ikin:               

It was spinner. If you can imagine yourself coming out of university, having done your degree, and being handed the keys to a highly successful dental practice, first year, out of university, you can’t have, you just finding your way to success, because you don’t know what you don’t know.

Everything from there was new, I’d not experienced before. I was just lucky that I had good people around me. Wonderful parents, who’ve been hugely supportive, pretty much allowed me to achieve everything that I have in life. I was at a good club, with the Gold Coast Seagulls, with some guys, you know, clubs that were contacting me, making sure I had my head right, and likewise, by the time I arrived in the State of Origin camp, as I’ve already mentioned, I was rooming with Mark Coyne. Freddy Horton was the coach. He was fantastic.

He’s bit of a joker but let me tell you, this is a very, very smart man that knew exactly what I was going to experience, and how to sell it to me. When it comes to the ferocity of State of Origin football, and Chris Choppy Close who the academy bleeds maroon, was the team manger that year, and my father actually moved him a couple times in the Gold Coast. He stuck solo with me, right the way through that first Origin series, and every series thereafter, so it was important for me that I had those great people around me. They ultimately allowed me not, to bugger it up, let’s put it that way.

Jesse Green:      

That’s fabulous mate. Obviously, being part of many of teams over the years, Club Footy, Rep Footy, State of Origin, and the Australian team, of course, and not to mention your broadcasting teams that you currently work with, and all that sort of stuff, as well. One of the things I’d really love your perspective on is you know, when you walk into a team, are there some teams that just feel like they’ve got a better vibe than others, in terms of you know, you can feel this is a great team, or we’re really going to kick some goals here, or is it you’ve got to take it as it comes?

Ben Ikin:               

At the time, you’ve got a sense of that. You’ve got to be put in the pressure cooker environment to find out how functional you are as a unit, who lines up, who doesn’t. These are things, I mean that can be learned by playing a number of games together. You’d like to think that you can simulate that sort of sort in the training environment, but it’s really hard. I mean, that’s why you probably hear all those stories about coaches taking their players off to these army camps, for three and five days. What they’re trying to do is testing them as a group, trying to break them down. See who breaks, see who stays strong, see who the leaders are, see who the worker bees are, and you know, the really experienced coaches, they get a sense for that quicker than the younger coaches.

I don’t think it can be spotted in an instant. You can’t walk into a business at least, I don’t know a hell of a lot of people who can, and go that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong. This is how long it’s going to take to fix it. He needs to go, she can stay. It’s just not how it happens. Anything rushed like that, what I think’s going to bring long term success and my time involved with high performance teams, be it in sport or business, you know, there’s kind of three things that I land on that run common through all of them, and that is trust.

You trust the person beside you can deliver, and has got your back. Alignment, so you’re all on the same page, hitting in the same direction, and certainty, which is something that great leaders do well. They help people understand where they sit in the organization, what their role is, and this where we’re heading, and this is how we’re going to do it.

Trust, alignment and certainty. As I say, it takes a bit of time to understand whether or not you’ve got the right team to deliver that mix.

Jesse Green:      

That’s fabulous advice. I’m sure anyone listening to the show today is going to be writing that down, trust, alignment and certainty, because that is just absolute wisdom, that cuts through everything. You spoke about the great coaches identifying the leaders and the worker bees fairly quickly. In terms of some of the leaders that you’ve been fortunate enough to associate with in your footy career, and your business career as well, is there anyone who comes to mind as someone you think wow, they were just one of the best of the best?

Ben Ikin:               

I think – look, there’s plenty. I’ve been involved in some great businesses and great sporting teams, and more than anything, this is what I can say for great leaders, is that they’re all authentic. They’re not pretending to be someone. It’s not like they’ve read the leadership book, and they’ve sort of borrowed, you know well, I’ve got no idea that they’ve picked up some good habits, and some good leadership traits along the way. At the end of the day, their person, their character is authentic to them. It’s like they’re really comfortable in their own skin. I’ve been coached by Wayne Bennett, one of the greatest of all time. I’ve had a couple CEOs that I would put somewhere up on the same level, but they all do it different. They all treat people differently. At their core is a few things, I think that they have in common, you know like, that they all care.

Wayne Bennett from the outside, and I love this story because it’s so personal for me, together with my mother growing up, we didn’t like Wayne Bennett, because that was the bloke who sacked Wiley Lewis and never smiled on TV. You kind of get this feeling about Wayne, that he’s cold and calculating. People now know, having watched that Australian story, and any number of interviews that he’s done over the years, that’s not who he is at all. I think all the great leaders, be they players or CEOs, or coaches, or chairman of the board, that they care. They care for their people. They’ve got great empathy.

Second to that, I think I’ve already mentioned this earlier on, is that they’ve got the knowledge that the know how. It’s all good and well to have visions and give great speeches, and care for your people, but if you don’t know how to take an organization and the people that work in it forward, because you don’t have the know how, well then no one’s going to be following.

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, absolutely. Again, that authenticity that you spoke of earlier, that really feeds into the trust thing, as well, because you know, what’s the famous saying, that you know, Australians can spot a phony a mile off. It’s true, once you’re not being true to yourself, it does tend to undermine the credibility and trust you have in that leader.

Just on Wayne Bennett and I know clearly, you have a relationship that extends into your personal life, which we won’t go into too much, but I just want to share one little kicky story about Wayne Bennett that I experienced, and this is going to sound so trivial to you, perhaps, because you’ve had so many of them, but as you know, where I used to live in Brisbane, down at the local shops sales, walking my kids home from school, and we needed to cross at the shops, and the pedestrian crossing was no where to be seen, and anyway, as I was walking across the crossing, I had school bags and one child on one arm, and on the other end of that child was my second child, and Wayne walked out of the local barber shop, and Ben you’ve met me, I’m quite a short guy, and Wayne’s quite a tall guy.

What I noticed with Ben is he visibly changed his stride to bookend my other daughter as we crossed the road. I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t know Wayne from a bar of soap, but it’s something that’s just always stuck with me, and I really appreciated it at the time. He seems like a really genuinely, good guy.

Ben Ikin:               

He is yeah, and the bigger question on that is what was he doing in the barber?

Jesse Green:      

He’s got no hair! You can make that joke, mate. I’ll give that one to you to take home, and share with him.

Ben Ikin:               

Thank you.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, I just wanted to touch on a day in the life of a pro footballer. We spoke about some of the things that you’ve been through, and all the rest of it, but what are some of the habits you get into? You mentioned that the know how is not necessarily transferable into business because some of those skills, but some wont’ be, those habits that you developed at a young age, developing as a football, obviously and then into the club setting and then later into the State of Origin Australian teams, and beyond, what would be some of those habits that you think a professional footballer would pick up that they might not necessarily realize they’re picking up, but hold them in good stead as they go through.

Ben Ikin:               

There’s a few, I’d start with self belief, because the life of a professional sportsman is so public, so many people watching, and having an opinion about who you are, and what you do, not to mention the media and the slicing and the dicing of what you do on the field, that happens every other week of the footy season. Self belief is key. It can’t be false, you know what I mean? You can’t live in a fool’s paradise. You need to believe what the coaches ask you to do, the challenge that lies in front of you, you absolutely, are able to achieve it, because if you don’t, it’s too tough a contest. It’s too tough a competition to survive in if you start second guessing yourself.

When I rolled out of professional sport, the one thing I took with me was that just about anything that I was asked to do, I would say “yes, I’ll give it a crack,” because I was so used to building an armoury of self belief to get through the kind, the pressure and the expectation of the NRL season.

The other thing that underpins everything you do as a professional athlete, is hard work. It’s so totally effort for reward. You can’t take short cuts. I think in business, perhaps I’ve noticed that you can, and a lot of people do, but in sport, you just get found out. There’s too many eyes, there’s too many people watching. You’ve got multiple coaches, and again, a competition too tough that if you are taking short cuts, you will get found out. You’ve got to build that habit of continued hard work.

A willingness to learn and improve, you know. We always want to be better tomorrow, than we are today. That’s the other thing that professional sport does really well, is that we’re surrounded by mentors. That’s not something that business does all that well. Which I hope, which you’ll hopefully achieve through this podcast, is that the managers and the leaders in business, are generally focused on the doing of things, and getting other people to do things, whereas in professional sport, you get coached and mentored every week, you get feedback on what you did well, and what you didn’t do so well. You’ve got this team of people helping you improve, because the coach knows that he is no more than the sum total of the efforts of his players.

You’ve got a long way to find leaders and managers, senior executives in business, that wholly embrace that philosophy. For me, getting out of sport into business, what I learned was the feedback loop, was nowhere near as comprehensive. Most of the time in business, no news is good news. I kind of had to generate, wherever I went, my own feedback loop, because I was continually asking questions about how I could be better. You don’t get that sort of information.

There are probably the three things – self belief, hard work, and a willingness to learn and improve.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, they’re fabulous lessons for life, and clearly again, they’ve held you in good stead. As you transitioned out of playing footy and into your other roles, you for a period time, were one of the, I think you were a board member of the cowboys up in North Queensland, and what sort of transition was that like? You spoke about the habits that stood you in good stead throughout life in general, but what was it like stepping onto the other side, the corporate side I suppose of footy, if you will, or the business decision making behind footy, how did that go?

Ben Ikin:               

It was fantastic, I loved it. You know, I’ve had a fair bit of corporate experience by the time I jumped on board at the Cowboys, but the thing I liked about my 2 1/2 years up there in North Queensland, was being involved in that process of planning for success. We had this conversation started not long sort of before I arrived, but they were certainly getting it going, about who we wanted to be and how we were going to get there. You know, in broader terms, there was this kind of goal that we wanted to be the best rugby league club in the country, and if we weren’t prepared to put that up as their goal, then what were we doing? That ultimately meant, win a comp! To go through that process, with some very smart people, so figure out where we were, where we wanted to be, and how we were going to get there, who we needed to take on the journey, how we engaged them, was something that I’ll never forget. I guess it’s a process that’s now ingrained in me, that I can not only take to the next organization that I work for, but I can also apply to my person life. That is again, planning for success. Where am I now? Where do I want to be? What do I need to do to get there?

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that’s just fabulous, and as you’ve gone through your career, clearly, that’s the thing that’s running through. What’s the next adventure for Ben Ikin, do you think?

Ben Ikin:               

I’m raising a family at the moment, as you know. I’ve got a lovely wife and four kids, who are all sort of hitting middle school, they need me to be around and present, which is important to me, at the moment I’m just trying to strike my balance. I’ve got a wonderful job at Fox Sports. I host a show called NRL 360. Fox Sports, magnificent employees. I fly down from Brisbane, so they’re very accommodating in that way, at present, all I really want to do is produce quality TV, so make NRL 360 the best show it can be. When I’m not at work, just make sure I’m at home and ticking all the boxes. That’s about as exciting as it gets for me at the moment, Jesse, which I must say is pretty fun.

Jesse Green:      

It is fun, mate, and it’s about success for that fulfilment is probably a bit of failure in a sense, really, because that whole family life is so critical.

As you were playing footy, I know you’ve probably had your kinds post footy or towards the end of your footie career, were you aware of the competing demands of footy and your personal life at any point, or indeed your business demands and your personal life, and how did you manage those things?

Ben Ikin:               

Not such much Rugby League, I mean it’s you get a lot of down time, as a professional league player, which affords you a whole stack of time to spend with your family. By the time I retired, I only had the one son, I’ve got two sons and two daughters, I guess the balancing act became more important for me when I pushed into corporate life. I ended up in a couple of national sales roles, in the construction industry, doing a lot of travel and doing my media commitments on the side. I could work sometimes up to 50-60 hours a week when you throw in the travel. At some point, something was going to give. I’ve just sort of scaled back now. I’ve been lucky enough not to have to work corporately anymore. I work for Fox Sports full time. It’s a sort of seven month a year gig. I’ve got a lot of time off. The balance has come, just by virtue of the fact of the job that I do. Look, I’m absolutely certain that I’m in the tiniest of minorities, when I look at my work schedule.

For you to strike a balance, and this is the point I got to when I was working 50-60 hours a week, it needs to be important to you. You can’t have half a crack at it. If you decide you want to spend more time with your family, then you almost, it sounds silly, but you almost need to diarize it, otherwise, if you’re not scheduling family the same way you’re scheduling meetings or work commitments, then they end up becoming secondary, because if you diary, if you allow your diary to be filled with work, it can happen real easily. That’s the thing I found out, so I have to make a really stern commitment that I was going to change. I was going to strike some sort of balance, and then go after it with as much rigor as I did everything in my professional life.

Jesse Green:      

Mate, that’s a fabulous point, and any of the guys that I work with who are listening will know that that’s the drum that I beat pretty loudly, that scheduling family time, and making it part of your routine. It’s sort critical to take charge of your time. It’s so easy for time to be frittered away on things that are not always of the highest importance in terms of your highest values, and what not.

Just a little story, I did actually schedule some time with Miranda, my wife, and I have learned the lesson then, I learned that it is good to schedule the time with my wife, it’s probably just not helpful for me to tell her that I have scheduled the time. It didn’t go so well. Anyway, that’s good, so yes, definitely.

Ben Ikin:               

Your wife’s got to be more than just a diary entry, doesn’t’ she, Jesse?

Jesse Green:      

She really does, and for my darling wife who might be listening tonight, that’s fabulous, we’ll get that sorted. Mate, I wanted to, as we’re wrapping up our interview today, and firstly, thank you for taking the time to come and have a talk to us, wanted to talk to you about one or two little things, just outside of footy for a second, just a bit of general info, about Ben Ikin, mate if you were hosting a barbecue, or a dinner party, or getting a group of people around for a meal, who would be the half a dozen of people or so, that you’d most like to have around your table, that you don’t already get an opportunity to see on a day to day basis?

Ben Ikin:               

That’s a big question, so dead or alive?

Jesse Green:      

Yeah, dead or alive.

Ben Ikin:               

OK, well, I’m fascinated with religious history, fascinated. I’d have to say maybe, Jesus Christ. Is that too big? Can I hare him along?

Jesse Green:      

You can have him along.

Ben Ikin:               

I’m non-religious, but I would just love to know what was going on back then. Who else?

Jesse Green:      

You can have his 12 apostles too if you like.

Ben Ikin:               

Yeah, right, I’m a massive Richie Benaud fan, he’s also leftist. I’ve never got the chance to meet Richie, but I’ve been a great admirer of his work. I’d love to sit down and say “listen, I’d love to have a career like yours. What were the things that you got right, to have the career that you did.”

Love my golf, I am a golf tragic. I would say, it would be an equal split between Greg Norman and Adam Scott and Jason Day. They all count as one person by the way. I’m not losing seats.

Jesse Green:      

That’s all right, you can have as many seats as you want, mate.

Ben Ikin:               

I also love my Rugby League history. I know and understand how much the game has given me, and that there was many people go before me that made the game as great as it was, so I’d have to go back to 1907/1908 when the game was founded, and invite along the great Delly Messenger.

Jesse Green:      

Wow, that’s cool.

Ben Ikin:               

He was the key to Rugby League in this country, and I … there’s probably a stack of Rugby League fans out there, but if the people who set up Rugby League in Australia, don’t sign Delly Messenger, then we’re probably not having this conversation.

Jesse Green:      

Wow, OK, that’s phenomenal.

Ben Ikin:               

Is that good list?

Jesse Green:      

That’s a great list, that’s an interesting list. I’d love to hear the dinner conversation with that group of guys. That would be really, really interesting.

Quick question for you, around that group of guys, going back to your golf, you said you’re golf tragic. What do you play off these days, mate? How’s the handicap going?

Ben Ikin:               

I’m playing off 9, I have been lower and I have been higher. I’ll put it this way. The amount of golf I play, I should be much, much better. I think if you go and ask most golfers around the world, they’d say exactly the same thing. No matter how good you get at golf, you always want to be better. It’s my great frustration.

Jesse Green:      

It’s interesting, I’m always invited along to the golf course just to make everyone else look good, mate. That’s my role on the golf course.

Another quick question for you mate, if you had a favourite book, you’re allowed to take a handful of books, one or two books with you wherever you go, what they be? What books have moved you or inspired you most?

Ben Ikin:               

Look, again I’m a lover of religious history, so I’ve read a lot of books. I love the Tao Te Ching written by Lao Tsu, which was the text that sort of underpinned Taoism. I love business literature. My favourite business book is GOOD TO GROW, by Jim Collins.

Jesse Green:      

Great book.

Ben Ikin:               

Something that I’ve read recently … I’ll tell you what I’ve read recently, that I could not put down. It was Vladimir Putin’s biography.

Jesse Green:      

Really?

Ben Ikin:               

What I understand of European politics or communist politics, and to look at Russia and the Soviet Union, through the life of Vladimir Putin, was just awakening for me, and just goes to the point that there are so many different people around the world, that see the world so differently, from the way we do. There’s some lessons in there on leadership of what to do and what not to do. I found that intriguing.

I just got for Christmas, which I’m enjoying as well, the book that Paul Keating did with Kerry O’Brien, it’s fantastic.

Jesse Green:      

I will have to duck out and get that. This is going to sound like a book club review, isn’t it? I’ll have to tell you, mate, my favourite book in the last couple of weeks has been TEAMS OF TEAMS by General Stanley McCrystal. It’s a cracking read. Put that on your shopping list, for your books. It’s an awesome read.

Ben Ikin:               

Absolutely.

Jesse Green:      

Cool, Ben thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show today. I really enjoyed having a conversation with you. Mate, your story and your history, your knowledge of the game is obviously outstanding. What I’ve really enjoyed listening to I think more than anything is the little nuggets that ring true for all of us. Not all of us, very few of us, play footy for a career, but everything you’ve spoken to us is so relevant and pertinent to life, mate. I really thank you for taking the time out of your day to come and speak to us. It’s been great.

Ben Ikin:               

My pleasure Jesse.

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Dr Nauv Kashyap is the founder of Practice Ownership Consulting, Australia’s first dedicated consulting business to help employee/associate dentists explore practice ownership opportunities. He has been helping dentists transition into ownership with some excellent results. Many dentists have relied on him to provide expert guidance as they take on the challenges of ownership.

Dr Nauv bought his first practice in 2008 with approx $400K a year turnover and 2,500 patients. That practice has seen more than 20,000 patients and in 2015 will turnover approx. $2.5million. He has started a further ten dental practices and has also sold practices. He continues to find opportunities for successful startups and takeovers even through a saturated dental market.

 

In this episode we talk about:

• The key to establishing a good base so you can expand rapidly
• Being a delegation Ninja from the beginning
• Focusing on strengths and outsourcing weaknesses
• The major lessons he learned early in his career
• The business philosophy he learned from his parents
• Supporting younger dentists
• The importance of creating an elite team
• Choosing friends and valuing honesty
• Nauv’s major achievements
• The importance of systems to improve efficiency and save time
• The importance of financial backing
• Taking risks and understanding the risk forces
• The importance of a partnership
• The parallels between poker and a business
• Taking a chance and stepping into the unknown
• Keeping the right decisions in business
• The importance of being patient

 

Where to find Nauv Kashyap

Website:

http://www.dentevents.com/speaker-profile/dr-nauv-kashyap/c11003676

http://www.raceviewdental.com.au/category/dental-blog/

Linkedin:   https://au.linkedin.com/in/nauvneel-kashyap-04041b4b

Transcript

Jesse:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We have a special guest with us tonight, Dr. Nauv Kashyap, who is an expert in the art of starting a practice and indeed helping dentists transition to ownership. Nuav, thank you so much for coming along tonight. It’s great to have you.
Nauv:

Thanks, Jesse. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Jesse:

We’re going to have a bit of fun tonight. Nauv, you’re a very well-known figure in the dental community certainly in Australia and New Zealand. You’re a regular poster in the forums of DPR and DPO and others, and so there’ll be a lot of listeners who are familiar with you, but there’ll be equally some new listeners who aren’t familiar with you and your stories. I was wondering, mate, if you wouldn’t mind just sharing a little bit of your story with us. For those who don’t know, Nauv has started 11 practices, which is phenomenal. That is a phenomenal record. There’s not too many people I can think of who would have done more than that. Mate, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind just giving us a little bit about your background, telling us a little bit about your story, and then we’ll go from there.
Nauv:

Yeah. Sure, Jesse. I guess it all started when I graduated from dentistry back in 2006. I had a year of working as a dentist. It was always the plan to do medicine following dentistry and getting to surgery and the rest of it, but I enjoyed my first year of working. I did a lot of surgery with … As you know, I do a lot of wisdom teeth surgery. I decided to stick with dentistry and then we had the option to buy a practice quite early on in my career, which I did. I saw a lot of opportunity and I capitalized on it. Then from there, from my first practice, it was quite a few years before the second practice started, but once systems were established and I had a really good cash flow with those first 2 practices, then from number 3 to number 11 was quite a quick process. I guess, yeah, the key thing there for me was establishing a good base initially, and once that base was established, then it really did become a lot easier to do certain things and expand rapidly, I guess.
Jesse:

Fantastic. As you’ve gone through this journey, has there been any underlying philosophy that’s guided your decision-making process around this? Has there been an overarching plan? Did you begin with the end in mind so to speak or has it been something that’s evolved naturally?
Nauv:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I did get asked this a little bit, but for me, I can’t honestly say that I began with the end in mind. There was no way, if someone had told me back in 2008 when I bought my first practice that 2015 I’d have started 11, I don’t think there’s any way that I would have believed them. In that respect, no, but there was a lot of things that I did I guess by chance that really helped set me up for that level of growth, and I think the major thing was that I was very pro-delegation from the beginning.
There was a lot of things in my practice I didn’t know how to do. I left it to a practice manager that I really trusted, and that freed up a lot of my time to look for startup locations and set the strategic direction for the group. I think that that obviously helped, but at the start, it wasn’t like I was actively thinking if I delegate everything and be completely hands off, then I’ll be able to grow quite rapidly. It was the function of how I set out to do things at the beginning.
Jesse:

That’s a really interesting point, Nauv, because that’s a bit counter-intuitive for most dentists, because most dentists tend to like to be in control of a lot of things. What I’m hearing you say is you consciously gave up control of certain elements of your practice so that you could focus in other areas. Am I interpreting that correctly?
Nauv:

Yeah, exactly right. I’ve always been one to focus on my strengths, and my strengths aren’t clinical dentistry other than surgery. Obviously, I enjoy wisdom teeth. I had a lot of training to do them to quite a high level, but there’s a lot of administrative tasks, a lot of bookkeeping, and a lot of things like that that have never been my strength and never will be. I guess marketing is a strength of mine because I enjoy it and I do a bit of research into it. I’ve really tried to focus on my strengths, whereas I’ve outsourced a lot of my weaknesses, and I think that’s helped a bit along the way.
Jesse:

I think that’s a massive insight there for anyone listening, is making sure that you’re playing to your strengths. Again, Nauv, I’d be interested to know, I’m sure that that’s a philosophy that’s going through your organization as well, is putting people in roles that play to their strengths, if I’m assuming that. Am I correct in assuming that?
Nauv:

Yeah. Well, from the clinical level, a great example of that is our model is very different to a lot of conventional dental practices out there in that we have pseudo-specialists or practitioners with special areas of interest. A patient that comes through our surgery could well see a lot of different practitioners, and there’s arguments for and against that kind of thing, but I firmly believe that if you’re seeing the best person for a certain procedure, then that’s more ideal.
We’ve got a guy that does root canals really high level. I do wisdom teeth surgery. We’ve got dentists and a couple of dentists with a lot of experience. Yeah, it is about focusing on the strengths as well, and not so much … I had lunch with a dentist today, or a dental student today, and he was saying how he’s really tried to build up his weaknesses, but for me, it’s been about letting go of your weaknesses and focusing on strengths. I think that’s been a major guiding philosophy, yeah.
Jesse:

Yeah. I really concur with that. What I found certainly in my own life as well is the things that I enjoy, I’m generally better at because I enjoy it. I put more time and effort in it and I inherently develop the skills just through interest levels. Like you, there are a lot of things that I’m really lousy at, and I’m more than happy to have those taken off my plate, too. As you’ve gone through this journey, clearly, 11 startups, and you would have learned a thing or 2 clearly, what would be … As people are listening here, what would be the number one or 2 or 3 things that you think, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be boo-boos? Were there any key blunders or key, I suppose, traps for young players in terms of starting a practice?
Nauv:

I guess within the context of business and ownership generally, the biggest trap that young owners I think get into is the relationship with their staff. Often, as a young business owner, you have a really young team, and the tendency is there to want to get really close to your team, to socialize with your team, have Friday night drinks and kick on to a pub, and all that kind of thing, and I’m guilty of that. I was guilty of that in the early days, but the problem that that does is it sets it up for a really uncomfortable time when things start to turn around. When you want to discipline a staff member or have a talk to them about something that they perhaps haven’t done the right way or how you’d like them to improve, it’s a much more difficult conversation to have with someone who’s a friend and someone who is a staff member, so I think it’s really important to maintain that boundary.
That’s been one of the major lessons I’ve developed, and that was simply by making huge mistakes in that regard early on. I guess in terms of things that I’ve done right, just from a young age, I’ve always had my parents instill in us the philosophy that to build up your own business, you don’t have to destroy anyone else’s or destroying someone else’s business, or if you dig someone else’s grave, God will have dug your grave ready for you. I think a lot of that guides a lot of the principles that I follow.
Jesse:

That’s a really nice principle. Again, for those who do know you, Nauv, will know that you’re very generous in what you share in various forums and so on. Interestingly enough, just as a small topic, I was talking to friend of mine, Andrew Griffiths, who, extraordinarily gifted marketer, extraordinarily gifted public presenter. He’s just a really lovely guy. He and I were having a conversation a little while ago, and we think one of the new currencies is really generosity. I don’t know. Do you have a take on that? That’s not really a conversation that I thought we’d be having tonight, but do you have any views on generosity as currency at all?
Nauv:

Yeah, it’s a little philosophical, but I think my view on it is that, as you know, you and I have disagreed previously on the role that luck plays, but for me, I feel like the position I’ve been in, although I have worked hard and the rest of that, a lot of it has been luck. I’m quite, I guess, fortunate to be in the position I am at such an early age, but part of that is also giving back to people who haven’t. I think I take that view when I try to support younger dentists, advocate for younger dentists, help educate younger dentists in the past to transition to ownership, but also, wisdom teeth surgery, I regularly have dentists from the forums come and watch me take wisdom teeth out and that kind of thing. All that is free of charge, but it’s something that, yeah, it’s more because I felt like I’ve gotten to where I have because of luck and I should give back a little.
Jesse:

We are going to delve into the role of luck in a minute because I know that’s something that you and I do, yeah, kick around a little bit, so we’ll certainly get into that in a moment. Again, just while we’re on the startup journey you’ve had, and I suppose one of the most watched speeches you’ll see on the internet is Steve Jobs’ address to the Stanford Uni graduates, and one of the things he says is you can’t make the dots forward. You can only connect them, with the benefit of hindsight, looking backwards. As you look back and connect the dots in your journey, what things do you think you did well? Things that you might not have known at the time, but things that turned out to be master strokes.
Nauv:

I think leading on from the point initially, and I won’t go back to that, focusing on my strengths, but an extension to that was really picking well the team that I established around me. What I found is one of my major principles in my personal relationships, in my choosing of friends, and the rest of that has been honesty. I value honesty above pretty much all else. I found that I gravitated towards people who value the same when dealing with business.
I’ve got a situation now where if I have found a location for a startup practice, I pretty much pick up the phone for my… guy, him and I arrange a meeting, we go there, we have 30 minutes to look at the building, I’ve already done all my research, he measures it out, within 2 days he gives me a floor plan, I make any changes I want to make, and then the next time I go to that practice, it’s when it’s fitted up. The same thing happens with my equipment guy. We’ve got a standard order of equipment that we have. When you can automate it to that level, I put in the time into how much time I look out into a startup. My personal time is literally between 5 to 10 hours, it’s very little, whereas the person that’s starting their first practice, obviously, they’re putting many, many more hours in that.
I think the key thing was because I value honesty, I’ve gravitated towards people that were quite honest, and that served me well in the business world. The lesson, I guess the greater lesson from that is, and the question you were asking, is that you need to do business with people that share the same values that you share. I think that’s helped me a lot along the way because if someone makes a mistake, anyone I deal with makes a mistake, they’re very honest about it, we address it, and we move on from it. Yeah, I think that’s been one of the major blessings I guess I’ve learned over the years, and that anyone who’s not honest, I cut business ties with them very quickly. Yeah, I’m just trying to think. In terms of other good things that I’ve done along the way, I guess I have an appreciation for return on investment in a very strong numbers background. That’s helped a lot as well in assessing things in a business sense.
Jesse:

Yeah, okay, cool. I certainly share your love of numbers with you, but the other thing I think I share with you as well, and we’ve spoken about this in previous conversations, was how systemized your business is and you take a systematic approach with a lot of things that you do. I’m just wondering if you’d be happy to share a bit of insight around the level of systemization that you have and how you went about doing that.
Nauv:

I think the main things that I have systemized is the process of opening, the process of starting up. I recently ran a seminar in Gold Coast, and one of the key feedback things I got from participants is how I delivered a recipe, almost a how-to or a checklist of how to transition into ownership. The big thing was it was a really easy-to-follow recipe, and I think I’ve systemized that over the years. We’ve got people that make our initial stock and equipment order. We’ve got people that look at our marketing and get our marketing up to date. Everything in the startup process has been systemized to a point where my time and investment in that is very, very little, and that’s the important thing about systems.
I guess with experience and having done quite a few now, you can refine the steps in the systemized process that are not as efficient as they could be or not getting the ideal results as they could be. You work to refine that over time, but I think if you go into it with a view of having a system in place, no matter what it is, it could be … Let’s just say you’re grocery shopping. If you have a system in place that you’re going to do this, this, and this, you can do things a lot more efficiently and save a lot of time. It applies to everything in life, I think, and so that’s been a bit plus for the way that we’ve done things.
Jesse:

Yeah. Fantastic. In terms of the day-to-day operations of your practices once they’re up and established, again, how important have the systems been in that as well?
Nauv:

Yeah, in the day-to-day running of the practices, admittedly, my systems are still a work in progress. From 2008, from my first practice to the point we’re at now, we basically have grown 11 practices. A lot of effort has gone into that, a lot of thinking has gone into that, and now I’m taking a step back from the growth process in terms of expansion to focusing on the internal systems within the practice. Those have evolved themselves from the back of my practice managers and their knowledge, but now, we’re getting, obviously, professionals like you involved who are much better at that kind of thing. Being upfront, it’s not a strength of mine, so that’s something that I’m more than happy to get outside help in.
Jesse:

Well, it’s basically your point earlier about playing to your strengths, really, doesn’t it?

Nauv:

Definitely. Yeah.
Jesse:

Cool. As you’ve gone through this whole process, Nauv … Again, for those people listening, there would have been a couple of key lessons which obviously, we’ve covered off there. Is there anything else, any other insights, any other awarenesses, any other key aha’s or pennies dropping? I can’t think of any other metaphors to roll off my tongue any faster than that, but is there anything else that you think that an aspiring practice owner should really think about as they’re contemplating their journey?

Nauv:

Yeah. I think one story that I think I want to share is a situation that I was in. When I had my first practice, I bought the first practice. It was a small, one-chair practice. Yeah, we got to the point where we got quite busy about 9 months after I bought it. It had reached its capacity, so we really needed to add a second chair, but for me at the time, a second chair was going to be roughly a $50,000 investment. Back then, I’ve spent around $280,000 buying my practice, and $50,000 more, that was a lot of money.
$50,000 is a lot of money any time, but it was a massive amount of money. For me, other than the initial investment, I was also going to hire another dental assistant, I was going to hire another dentist. The dentist that I was looking at at the time was recommended by a friend, and she had a pretty busy public job, and she was wanting to get into private practice. For me, it was like, “You know, if I put this second chair in, is she going to be busy? Am I going to waste my $50,000?” There was a lot of sleepless nights that.
One night, I was at dinner at a very close friend’s house whose dad owns … Well, just recently sold the third biggest battery company in Australia. This guy is very well-versed in business. He said to me, “Oh, Nauv, you look a bit concerned. There’s something on your mind. You’re not your usual chirpy self.” I said to him that … I explained the situation as I just have and, yeah, he said to me … It’s so profound. It seems so simple, but at that time, it was a big lesson to me. He said, “Nauv, how much do you charge when you pull a tooth out?” I was like, “Oh, around $200 or so.” He said, “$50,000. Lease repayments, that’s, what, about $500, $600 a month?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Pull 3 teeth out and you’ve paid off your lease repayments. Do you think you’re going to do well?” Obviously, that’s a really simplified thing and there’s no return on investment lesson in that.
There’s a lot more to it, but when he broke it down like that, someone in business who had years of experience, when they broke it down to the fact that forget about the $50,000, think about the repayment on the $50,000, think about how much units of labor or how many products you have to sell to break even on that, it just became such an easy decision. We put the second chair in within 3 or 4 months. It was booked out and we’re ready to expand again. I think the massive lesson from that is the difference between us as dentists and business owners generally in their ability to think about problems. I urge people that are looking at ownership to get an idea of things like return on investment, to get an idea of just little things like this that will make decisions that are supposed to be difficult or that appear difficult much, much easier. I think that was very profound for me, and I tell that story a lot, actually.
Jesse:

Yeah, it’s a cracking story. I really like it, Nauv. Again, one of the things that’s coming up for me as I’m listening to you speak or share that story with us is the difference, in my view, between traditional practice ownership, which I think is really an owner-operated model, versus true business ownership. They’re 2 different models. One may not be necessarily more right than the other, but 2 very different skillsets in my mind. Do you have any views around … What are your thoughts around traditional business ownership or traditional practice ownership versus true business ownership? Do you have any comments around that?
Nauv:

Yeah, I think for me personally, I’m very pro, as you’ve probably gathered, pro the second thing which is the business ownership model. The traditional practice ownership model for a startup in today’s environment, especially in most major metro cities, I’ll make the statement, it will be controversial, 98% of people that take that approach to it will fail. I completely believe that with everything I have. The ones that will succeed, the 1% or 2% that will succeed, will probably have an established base already, will be bringing that into their startup, and have some extraordinary skills as a dentist, so offering very niche-type services. They’ll be the one to succeed.
Now traditional practice ownership involved very little marketing. It involved perhaps one associate, but it involved the dentist doing the bulk of the dentistry, involved opening hours of 9:00 ’til 4:00 everyday, Fridays off playing golf, not even dreaming of being open weekends, that kind of thing. I think there was a place for that. There was definitely a place for that because that’s how every dentist was, but if you try that model with very little to no marketing, relying on word of mouth as a startup in any of the metro cities in this day and age, it’s definitely not going to work for you. My view is obviously very strong. It’s quite polarizing, but, yeah, that’s how I think of it.
Jesse:

I happen to share a very similar view. I have a view that in the years to come, those practices that succeed are going to combine really what it means to be a great health professional and combine that with the very best in terms of business knowledge and business skills and business acumen. In the past, again, coming back to your comment about trying to have the 9:00 to 4:00, Monday to Thursday practice in today’s world in a metro area, the reason it was so successful in the past or able to be successful in the past was purely because there was an under-supply of dentists.
Nauv:

Yes.
Jesse:

As things have tightened up, and we all know the situation around the market at the moment, really, those dentists that don’t change, don’t grow, don’t develop their business thinking, their business skills I think are really going to suffer. Yeah, I think it’s incumbent on everyone to learn how to be a better business owner, not just a better owner/operator.

Nauv:

No, definitely. I just want to clarify one point, Jesse. The 9:00 to 4:00 thing that I mentioned or the 9:00 to 5:00, I think that a lot of dentists, once they established themselves or once … I was talking in respect with startup, but there’s a lot of established dentists out there that have had a following for 10, 15, 20 years that can afford to work those hours. Their patients will move hell and high water to come and see them during those hours, and they’re fairly well-booked up working those hours. It could be just 2 or 3 days a week, but talking more in the context of startup, that if you’re starting up, trying to go into it with those hours, it’s going to be quite difficult for you to establish a good patient base. That was just one example.
Jesse:

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. Yeah. Now, Nauv, one of the things that people who don’t know you so well or haven’t seen much of your stuff around the traps, or even those who have, they might not realize that you’re an extraordinarily good poker player. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise as we’re listening to the conversation when you think about it, but I was wondering, can you give us a bit of an insight? Tell us a bit about your poker. I know you’ve played some tournaments and I know you’ve had some astoundingly good wins there. Talk us through a bit about that. How did you get into poker? What was it that attracted you to poker?
Nauv:

I think poker came from back in the uni days. Late nights, procrastinating instead of studying, switching on the TV and watching poker games, and I guess getting addicted to the strategies and the suspense and everything that was involved with that. I guess my first throw of the dice with real money was one night at a casino. It was with a bunch of mates and I went to the casino in Brisbane Treasury. I had $100, which $100 to me was an astronomical amount of money as a student and for us. I was with some friends and they egged me on to have a go. They knew I was a bit interested. We played a little, a few fun games together as friends. I whacked this $100 down and I thought, “Oh, yeah, you’ll give it a go,” and 3 to 4 hours later, with the friends on the rails backing me on and the rest of it, I walked away with $1,100 that night, which, if $100 was an astronomical amount of money, you can imagine how much $1,100 was.
Jesse:

Yup.
Nauv:

The funny thing was, when I got better at poker and got more experience and started playing in bigger tournaments, I look back at my play that night and some of the key hands that came up, and I realized just how bad I played them and how lucky I’d actually gotten. It was a good reality check, but for me, I guess that’s what spurred it on. I don’t know, if I had lost that initial time, I don’t know if I ever would have played again, but that certainly peaked my interest. Just a continuation from that story, the very next week, I went and lost that entire $1,000 playing poker, but I was hooked from that point on.
Jesse:

Yeah, gamble responsibly, people, just for the sake of the disclaimer. Interesting, though, Nauv, because what I’m really interested in is understanding the parallels between poker playing and business. I’m sure there’s got to be some good lessons in there. Tell us a bit about the relationship of risk. Tell me what your thoughts are around that.
Nauv:

I guess with poker in my very, very initial days, it was still while I was at uni. That first story was very early on in uni, and then it evolves a bit. I played a lot of poker through uni when I first graduated as a dentist and I’ve been playing a lot since, but the key thing was, back then, I didn’t understand risk and I didn’t understand risk to the extent that I needed to. I lost a lot of money initially, like a lot of people that first get into poker do. When I say a lot, a lot in the context of my personal situation at the time, but I think I wasn’t understanding risk. Here I was, putting a lot of money in. $100, like I said, to me was a massive amount of money at that stage. That’s probably all the money I had in my wallet, and it was completely irresponsible of me to have gambled that $100 that night.
It turned out to be good, but I guess with risk, as a new practice owner or as someone starting out in ownership, I think it’s really important to have a good financial backing and understand that starting a practice is a massive risk. The more financial, I guess, backing you have under you, the more savings you have, the lesser the risk it becomes. As I said to you, between my first and second practices, there was almost 3 years of gap, and that was because I was establishing a really sound financial base such that once that was established and I’d had my second practice and the cash flow was there, I could afford to take risks.
Last year, we started I think 4 practices in the one year. 4 practices in one year is a massive risk, but it’s a calculated risk. It was a risk that I found some really good areas and they just happen to be at the same time. They’ve all turned out really well and things have gone well, but taking that risk without calculating the risks and without understanding the forces or the different dimensions around that risk could have been catastrophic. It paid off, but in the end, it was still a risk.
Jesse:

What I’m hearing you say is for those of us contemplating practice ownership, be sure to make sure you’re not betting the house or betting the farm in one play, so to speak.
Nauv:

Exactly right. Exactly right.
Jesse:

Don’t put your whole life on the line for this practice. If that’s what you need to do to start up, would you suggest delaying it for a little while, no?
Nauv:

Yeah. There’s a lot of strategies. Delaying, considering a partnership …
Jesse:

Partnership, yeah.

Nauv:

Yeah, there’s financing a greater portion of it, getting outside investors. Just, there’s a lot of different things you can do to ensure that even if the practice doesn’t turn out well that your personal life remains strong.
Jesse:

Yeah, so you’re minimizing your exposure.
Nauv:

Yes. Exactly right, yeah.
Jesse:

Cool. When you’re playing a hand of poker, and it is, as you indicated, the game of unknowns, you don’t know what everyone else has got, what filters do you have in place for thinking, “Okay, I’m going to play this hand or not”? What’s the decision-making process that you go through?
Nauv:

I think it’s actually a really interesting question. I was thinking about this the other day in terms of the parallels between poker and business I guess generally. When you’re playing a hand, poker is known as a game of unknowns, so incomplete information. I know the hand I have. I don’t know the hand of anyone else at the table. I know the cards the dealers placed in front of us all. They’re called the community cards. The only information I have about a particular player’s hands is how they act on those hands, so any physical mannerisms that that player may display when they’ve got a strong hand, stuff I commit to memory.

A lot of times, a player plays a hand a certain way, goes to what we call a showdown so in the end the players remaining in the pot reveal their hands. That allows you to see what they’ve got, but what you try to commit to memory is the way they played their hand, their betting characteristics, how much they bet, how quickly they bet, any physical characteristics, so their breathing increase, all that kind of thing.

Combining all that and committing it to memory, the next time you play a hand against that player, especially if they’re not a highly skilled player, you get an idea of a shortened range. Although you might not know their specific hand, you get an idea of the strength of their hand and you can make your bets accordingly.
I think the parallel to that in business is simply that business is also a game of incomplete information. You don’t know how the future is going to go. You don’t know how a particular marketing thing is going to go for you. You know basically that you’re interested in marketing a certain way, but you don’t know the result of that marketing. By researching and finding out about different aspects of that marketing venture that you want to embark on, you get a good idea of how it’s going to respond, so even if the worst-case scenario comes about, in anything in business, you have a good grasp of it and you can control it a lot more.
I think the big lesson is research the information. The more that you’ve got, I guess the less catastrophic the unknowns become. For me, if I’ve gotten a player in poker where it’s quite a large pot and I’ve determined that the player doesn’t have the best hand, then there’s 2 ways I can win that. I can win that pot from betting high and him folding, but if I know that I’ve got a better hand than him, then I want him to commit more money to the pot. Because of the information that I’ve gained through previous hands and the way that that player has played that hand, it can really allow me to control the situation a lot better. I think in business, it’s important that you have control of any situation that you’re in and it’s not just left to chance.
Jesse:

Interestingly around this, Nauv, that’s fascinating because it is such a study of the human condition and psychology, and not just the psychology but the physiology of it and all those things that go with it, but have you found those … I’m just curious to know. A random question. Have you found those poker skills translating in any way, for instance, negotiating leases or anything like that?
Nauv:

Yeah, definitely. I have a lot of friends that I help, friends and colleagues that I help around negotiating. The thing about negotiating is you hear the term used all the time in normal life and business. It’s, “Just call his bluff.” A lot of the time, when I’m negotiating with a potential landlord, I think back to poker. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge from my poker playing days and applying that to business, and knowing, based on the actions that they’ve done, whether they’re serious about a certain offer, whether they’ve reached their limit, or whether you’ve got more room to negotiate, all that kind of thing. I think playing poker really allows you to get conditioned in the process of negotiation. There’s a lot of times in business where negotiations happen, so I think it’s helped a lot. Dealing with staff, dealing with other people that you do business with, and everything. Yeah, it’s been quite good in that way as well, I think.
Jesse:

Fantastic. Remind me not to get into too many negotiations with you, mate. Another question I have for you relating to poker is, you’ve got your hand there, and you’ve used all of your best intelligence, you’ve tried to understand what the other players are doing, and surely, there must come a time though when you’ve got to take that leap of faith. You’ve got to take a chance in either reveal your cards or fold or whatever it happens to be. What’s your thoughts about taking a chance, stepping into the unknown?
Nauv:

I think for me personally, I’ve got a personality that’s quite happy to take on risks, especially if I’ve calculated the worst case and I’m happy with the worst case. What I mean by that is I won’t get into a situation where I’ll take a risk on something where I feel the return is not going to be something that makes me very happy or where the loss is going to be something that makes me alarmingly unhappy. From that point of view, poker has helped.

Getting back to the hand-specific situation that you talked about, the other important thing around that though is, in poker, like in life, you can play a hand perfectly. At the end of the day, as I got more experienced with poker, I used to concentrate a lot on results. I used to think, “Okay, that day, I lost a lot of money, so I must have played really badly,” whereas because of the luck element in poker, you can have a situation where you play perfect poker all day, you make all the perfect decisions, you read players well, but the hands and the cards just don’t fall your way.

The problem that I find with people in life is that you could work hard at a particular job and you might not get that promotion, for argument’s sake, and they read too much into that, so they start to think that, “Oh, I’m a failure. I didn’t do things properly,” and they’re trying to learn a lesson where there’s no lesson to be learned. The important thing with poker as I got more experienced was realizing that I wasn’t … My wife and I used to go and stay at hotels I used to come back, and the first question she would ask me is, “How did you go?” My answer in the early days of playing poker was how I went financially, if I’d lost money, how I went, but as I’ve got more experienced, the answer became more about how I played, so the money was inconsequential. I could have lost a lot of money and played perfect poker, but I was more happy with myself because I played perfect poker.

In poker, they say there’s a 30% skill element and there’s a 70% luck element. In life, there’s a much, much smaller luck element, but the thing about luck is if I play the best poker I possibly can, everyone’s luck in the long run will equal out. It’s the skill element that will differentiate us. In life, as I said, there’s even a smaller luck element, so as long as you keep doing things the right way, as long as in business you keep making the correct decisions, and just because they don’t turn out well for you this time around, it doesn’t mean that they won’t. A lot of the time, when things don’t go well, people try to learn a lesson when there’s no lesson to be learned. If you think you’ve done the right thing and you can analyze things and assess that you have and things haven’t gone your way, well, you can put that down to a bit of unluckiness in that particular situation instead of learning a lesson that’s not meant to be learned. I think that’s important.

Jesse:

Yeah. Well, that’s a really good point. In spite of previous conversations that we’ve had around luck, I think we are on the same page. I just also have a view that the harder I work, the luckier I get. I guess one of the comments that I would make about luck just on that, and I think you’ve really covered it anyway, is doing the right consistently and putting in the work. One of the things I find when it comes to luck is people will blame bad luck when really, it could have been lack of preparation, lack of training, lack of whatever it happens to be. While I know that you attribute a portion of your success to having the cards fall the right way, I also find that there are some people who attribute their poor results to factors beyond their control when the reality is, in my view, there were plenty of things that they could have done to improve their odds of winning.

It goes both ways, of course. We’re probably singing from the same song sheet there, mate. What I’d really love just to understand, just as we wrap up the conversation around poker, is the concept of when you play poker, you get dealt a certain set of cards, a hand, and obviously, those are the cards that you play with, and same in life. We all get dealt a certain hand that we play. Do you have any view about making the best of what you’ve got, finding the enjoyment or finding the good in what there is already? It’s perhaps a little philosophical conversation perhaps, but … or even, how do you change the cards if you can in life?

Nauv:

I think my view might be a little more contrary to most people. Just going back to poker, in poker …
Jesse:

It’s certainly not, mate.

Nauv:

Basically, the best players or the players that do the best in poker are the players that play the least hands. What I mean by that is, a good day of poker playing, typically, you should be folding or getting rid of between 80% and 90% of your hand, so you should only be playing with 10% or 20% of your hand. I think the application to that in life and in opportunities is … I had a lot of people that come to me, and 2 months ago, they made the decision that they wanted to look into practice ownership, and all of a sudden, they’ve got a practice to buy and it’s the one their heart is set on. It’s the very first practice they looked at, and there’s nothing good about that practice other than the fact that they think that there’s no other practices out there and this is the one for them. I think in poker, the most successful players are only playing with 10% to 20% of the hands that they have, whereas …
Yeah, I think in business, there’s a lot of opportunities that walk through the door. You get 20 reps who see you in a year’s time trying to sell their products. There should only be a very small percentage of products that you actually buy. The same way as a new practice owner. You might have 10, 20 different locations come at you, but it’s about being patient and about sticking to what you know, sticking to I guess a set of principles that will guide how you look at different opportunities.

For example, in my talks on the weekend, I went through location selection and gave the attendees an idea of what makes a perfect location. If they follow that, I’m convinced that they have half the battle won in respect to choosing a location, but the issue following that is there’s going to be many locations that come at them that they’re going to have to just refuse and just say, “No, that’s not good. That’s not a good location. My practice is going to be on the back foot from day one if I start in that area.” I think, yeah, poker and life have a lot of parallels, and that’s yet another one, I think.

Jesse:

Yeah, that’s a fantastic story. If I can just build on it for a moment, one of my very earliest business mentors back when I was in my 20s early, early on, he used to say to me, “Jesse, the opportunity a lot of the time comes along about once a week, and you’re going to need to learn to say no to the things.” This is a comment that, again, we’ve discussed on the forum in an abstract way last night, but it’s about designing a life where you have some filters where most of the stuff that comes across your desk, you’re going to have to refuse. It seems to me, that’s the same way with poker as well, is you’re going to carefully select the hands, you’re going to pick your handful, and then play them, and leave the rest. I really think that one of the problems that dentists have is, as a rule, dentists tend to bounce around like pinballs looking from one opportunity to the next, and I think that’s a problem.

Nauv:

Yeah, and it’s a problem. In poker, when I get impatient and play a hand that I should really let go of, that’s when problems arise. That’s when I can lose all my money and things like that. I think the practical application of that is if you get bored of waiting, you start to take more risks, and a lot of those risks are unnecessary risks, so it’s really important that being patient is a lesson, I think.

Jesse:

Which is a beautiful segue into cricket. Really random, I know, but, yeah, I know you’re a cricket fan, and I am, too. I was just thinking, as you described that, that reminds me of Glenn McGrath bowling ball after ball after ball, just short of a good length, just outside off the stump, and the batsman, he’s boring the batsman into taking a risk, right?

Nauv:

Yes, exactly right.

Jesse:

It’s exactly the thing. Then they do something rash, and all of a sudden, they’re caught in the slips, and bingo, he’s got his wicket. From the batsman’s point of view, it’s about shot selection, and it’s the same thing in poker, the same thing in business. It’s all about waiting for the right opportunity and capitalizing on it when it approaches.

Nauv:

When it does come.

Jesse:

Yeah, and being prepared for it, too.

Nauv:

Yeah. Even Glenn McGrath, as good as he was, if you were a patient batsman, he’s going to bowl a bad ball, but if you … I guess the beauty of Glenn McGrath was he had the batsman in such a defensive mindset that it were just gun shy, so he would get away with the odd bad ball because they just weren’t ready to capitalize on the opportunity that he presented when it came. I guess the other parallel from that is to ensure that although you had a run of bad luck, all these bad locations have come across your desk and none of them are being good, when the right one comes along, make sure you’re using the same filters so that you can actually see that it’s the right opportunity. Yeah, I think there’s a lot to it with all sports, I guess, and business.

Jesse:

Fantastic. Listen, Nauv, I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on the show tonight. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you here, mate, and sharing all your lessons, all your wisdom, and all your insights over the last how many years you’ve had in this business and starting those 11 practices. There’s so much more that we could go into, but we might save that for another episode. Again, mate, on behalf of all the listeners here tonight, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it, mate. You’re a gem.

Nauv:

No, thanks a lot, Jesse. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks very much.

Jesse:

Cool. Thanks, man. Bye.

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Andrew Griffiths is Australia’s #1 small business author with 12 books now sold in over 60 countries. He’s a writing and publishing expert, an international speaker and leading business advisor with over 20 years’ experience. Andrew presents around the world, sharing his ideas and expertise on all aspects of entrepreneurialism. Considered an expert in entrepreneurship and an authority on building a profile as a thought leader through writing, publishing and speaking, Andrew is featured regularly in mainstream media globally. Andrew’s greatest strength is his ability to energise entrepreneurs to achieve extraordinary results. His best selling books include: The Big Book of Small Business, The Me Myth, Bulletproof Your Business NOW, 101 Secrets to Building a Winning Business, 101 Ways to Sell More of Anything to Anyone, 101 Ways to Market Your Business and more.

In this episode we talk about:

• The challenges of doing business and the secret to achieving great success
• The importance of being a peak performer to be successful
• How to focus on one thing at a time, and why you should
• How listening more and talking less benefits your business
• The importance of simplification to getting things done well
• The things successful people do differently
• The Top extraordinary, successful and inspirational people for Andrew Griffiths
• Making mistakes, get it right and learning along the way
• Finding success in our own terms
• The importance of developing good work habits
• The illusion of productivity
• Personal success vs business success
• Getting what we think we want
• How becoming clear on what we want in life gives us extraordinary clarity of what success truly means

 

Where to find Andrew Griffiths

Website: http://www.andrewgriffiths.com.au/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.griffiths.165

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/agauthor

Linkedin:   https://au.linkedin.com/in/griffithsandrew

Transcript

Jesse:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. Today we have a very special guest, we’re speaking to none other than Andrew Griffiths, our good old mate, AG, all the way from Cairns who happens to be Australia’s leading small business author. How are you mate?

Andrew:

Very good thank you Jesse, how are you?
Jesse:

Mate, fabulous. We’re sweltering down here in Canberra mate, we have a balmy 38 degrees. I think we’re giving you guys in north Queensland a bit of a run for your money today.
Andrew:

Unbelievable. Jeez, you’d feel it down there at 38 degrees, wouldn’t you?
Jesse:

It’s a bit uncommon for us mate, it’s normally minus 6, so you’d see it’s a bit of a shock for the system. Mate, we’re having a great chat today, mate, we’re having a chat about all things related to success.
Andrew:

A great topic.
Jesse:

I’m really looking forward to diving into that, but before we do that mate, I wanted to give some people who may not be as familiar with your work as the people who belong to the Practice Makes community, because they all know you and love you. For the general audience, what you might not know about Andrew, he’s a contributor to the Ink magazine, Flying Solo, CBS, and you’re a mentor at KPI, the Key Performance … Key Person of Influence program. Mate, that’s a CV and a half. How did you get into all that?

Andrew:

I guess like all CVs, it tells half the story. I think I’ve had a few different lives Jess, that’s the reality of it. I think if I started … I’m a commercial diver by trade, so for me, I had a business, I bought my first business when I was 18, and I bought a dive shop in Sydney of all places. As life evolved I did different things, I worked in exploration in Western Australia for a few years, I’ve worked in travel, I’ve traveled around the place. What I’m doing now really started, I think, when I was … I’d got decompression sickness as a commercial diver, and I had to retrain myself. The company I was working for, they retrained me, put me into sales and marketing, and I kind of took to it like a duck to water. Next thing, I thought, “Well, I’ll start my own marketing business,” and the real change for me came when I actually wrote a book about marketing.
I wrote a really simple book, 101 Ways to Market Your Business, and from that great things fortunately evolved. That’s probably the easiest way to describe it, Jess.
Jesse:

You’ve got 12 books now, Andrew?
Andrew:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep, 12 books in some 60 countries around the world. They’re sold in around 60 countries, at times more, times less. I’ve been translated into Indian, into Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, Estonian… It’s very, very cool if you’re travelling around to see your books in different languages, and of course I’ve got a whole pile of the foreign language editions here as well, which is … It’s really cool. Also to me, interestingly enough Jess, it really highlights that I talk about pretty simple stuff, I talk about the challenges of doing business and how to do business better, and that’s what I’m really passionate about. Helping people to achieve greater results in whatever they’re doing. It’s kind of interesting to see that my books have been so successful in different areas, which just showcases and highlights that people have the same issues, the same problems all around the world.
It doesn’t matter where you are, businesses in Vietnam have the same challenges as a business in Australia. They might look a little bit different, but at the end of the day they’re pretty much similar, and I think that’s probably one of the biggest realizations for me with the success that I’ve had in the literary world.
Jesse:

That’s a really interesting point mate, because one of the things that I know you and I have spoken about in other conversations is about the similarities from one business to another, what can we learn from one business, and what can be applied from someone else’s business that we can take into our own. As we dive into this topic of success and peak performance, I know that there’s going to be a lot of dental practice owners and dentists themselves thinking, “I just want to be a dentist. Why do I need to think about all this sort of stuff? I’m just wondering if you’ve come across that kind of situation with other professions, and what would be your thoughts around that mate?
Andrew:

It’s a great point, and I’m sure you’re right. There are always people listening, going a little bit overwhelmed, when you start mentioning words like success. That can be a challenging word for a lot of people, which is interesting. When you start to throw in the concept of peak performance, that can, again, scare people off. I’m saying, “Hey, look, I just want to have a business where I can make a good living, feed the family, have a nice holiday every year and do those kind of … Have a life that I’m happy with and satisfied with.” To me, to achieve that, you have to be successful and you have to be a peak performer. It’s just that there’s different degrees of peak performance. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to climb Mount Everest once a week, it just still means though that if you want to be successful, and personally, I’ve yet to meet anyone who I would deem successful who isn’t a peak performer.
It’s just that they don’t consider themselves a peak performer, that’s the reality of it for me. I would never have called myself a peak performer, but other people keep telling me that I am, and I kind of go, “Oh, I must be.” It certainly isn’t a term that I would have applied to myself, Jess, and I guess that maybe other people are the same.
Jesse:

That’s a really interesting point. I guess what I’m hearing you say is “success” means so many different things to different people, and one person’s definition is their own, and that’s completely cool.
Andrew:

Absolutely, and I think that, to me, is vital. If I’m working with someone, if I’m coaching someone or if I’m … Whatever that situation might be, I really ask them to define what success really looks like for them. What does it really mean? Not the flipping, driving a Maserati, got a mansion by the beach, got babes hanging off me or any of that kind of stuff. What does it really, really mean? When people are honest with themselves, and they start to give more meaningful answers to that, it’s a lot more about contribution, it’s about security, it’s about freedom to be able to do the things that they want to do, it’s … Very few people say, “Oh, I want to be successful so I can do nothing,” you know? “I want to be really successful so I can sit on the beach from when I’m 40 to when I’m 90.” I don’t see successful people saying that, in fact they say the opposite.
They say, “You know, I wanted the financial freedom to do more stuff, I want to give back, I want to contribute, I want to change the world in some shape or form,” or, “My little world, in some shape or form, provide a future for my children.” I think defining what success means to you in a really honest way in your relationships, in your health and well-being, in your business, in your interactions with others, in your relationship with the world, that, to me, is what it’s all about. If you have a good definition of that, and a clarity around that, then you’ll tend to make it happen. If you don’t want to use the term, “Peak performance,” you use another term. The reality of it is that, again, you don’t have to think about athletes climbing Mount Everest. You just got to say, “There’s the things I want, and that’s my definition of success, now I’m going to go out and make it happen,” and that is what they’ll do.
Jesse:

I think the beauty of that too, mate, is because in the past, and I’ve been thinking about my own goals, when I was in my 20s particularly, I used to have these visions of successful people and think I needed to emulate what they were doing. To be truthful, I found that a bit intimidating. I felt it was actually a negative motivator rather than a positive motivator in some senses, because I just thought, “Oh, that was just so far out of my zone, just don’t bother.” What I love about that is, if you can take success in your own way, in your own definition and think consciously about that then that’s cool. Mate, I just wanted to tap into something you said about contribution and relationships and all that other sort of stuff. It’s the new year, it’s early 2016, and traditionally at this time of the year we think about goals. Do you think that setting goals and thinking consciously about those things …
I’m guessing I know the answer. How do you translate those big picture ideas into something concrete that you can work towards? Do you go through a goal setting process yourself?

Andrew:

I do, I do. I do it a little bit differently though, these days. I used to be a bit of a, “Here are my top 10 goals for the coming year, and this is what they’re going to look like and this is what I’m going to do, and I’m going to get that done by January and that done by February.” For me now, goals are much broader, I think is probably the easiest way to say it. Part of my planning process is, say, I spend a lot of time reviewing the year that was. It’s really important for me to figure out, “What am I really proud of that I did in the last year? What frustrated me, what irritated me, what didn’t I do, why didn’t I do it?” I like to do that really reflection of the good and the bad from the year that was, and then that forms the basis of my planning for the year that is. I look at that and go, “Okay, what am I going to do more of in the coming year and what am I going to do less of in the coming year?”
That, for me, is starting to set that mood where you’re looking at my own behavior, perhaps, is where I start. I’ll turn around and, some of my more of, less of in the coming year is, I’ve got them in a notebook in front of me. One thing, I’m going to focus more on one thing at a time, last year I got pulled apart in a lot of different directions and I’m a big believer in that focusing on one thing. That’s going to be one of my things that I’m focusing on, is every day, what’s the one thing that I need to get done today, the most important thing right here right now. I’m going to eat more good food, eat less stuff that’s not good for my body. I’m going to do more yoga, I’m going to do less sitting, I’m going to make more money, have less wasted money. I’m going to listen more and talk less. I wouldn’t call those goals, but I’d call those behavioral goals that I look at for me.
On that then, sure, then I’d have my business goals. I’m going to run 6 programs on there, I’m going to have 10 coaching clients, I’m going to do 30 key note speaking jobs. Whatever it might be, in my little world and a targeted amount of revenue that I’m going to make in 2016. I know that I’m going to do that, and then I have one for my writing as well. What do I want to do with my writing. I’m going to develop my writing style, et cetera, et cetera. I have, rather than just a list of, “These are my 10 goals for the year,” I, over many years, have worked at a system that I think just works a little bit better for me, and there’s much more about less, perhaps, definitives and more behavioral type stuff, but there are still definitely some very specific goals in there to achieve as well.
Jesse:

That’s really interesting, that you’re saying that. I love the way that you’ve framed that, what I really love about what you do is we see this in action all the time. You have those of us who are fortunate enough to get to hang out with you a bit more, we see these come through and see you live them. One of the things I’ve learned from you actually, Andrew, as we’ve been talking, whenever we spoke throughout 2015, was setting themes as well, so just to share with you, one of my big themes with some similarities here with you is to simplify as much as I can, I’ve found that my life got a little bit complicated in some areas, and I was adding more and more stuff into it. I’ve just found that I needed to strip some stuff away, and get back to the essence of the good stuff.
Andrew:

Themes are great, because they become … If I go back a step just for the stuff that I talk about, I have the over-arching themes for the year. I come down and say, “Well, what is that going to look like? I want to move more, physically I want to move more.” I break that down, “I’m going to do more yoga, I’m going to stand more, use my stand up desk more, I’m going to go for walks more, I’m going to have more adventure holidays as opposed to laying by the pool holidays,” or whatever it might be. You break that down to the third stage, and that’s actually turning those into specific goals. “Right, book 3 holidays now, and they’re going to be walking holidays. Right, buy the extra gear you need for your stand up desk, or whatever it is today, and stand up for 20 minutes a day,” or when I’m at home working or writing or whatever. Each week, stand up for another 20 minutes, and increase it over the space of the year.
Starting with the big picture, strangely enough, a lot of people don’t do that, and I think that the theme for the year is just a great way to actually … To give a meaning, and I guess give that drive, that point to aim for that this time next year, you want to go, “Well you know what, I achieved that during the year, I did do less, I did simplify my life and I got better stuff done.” It’s like saying no, if your big theme is, “This year, I’m going to say no a lot more, because I’m getting pulled apart in too many different directions,” then again, that’s something that you need to focus on all the time. I’ve had a few of those years, where I’ve really had to say, “I’ve got to say no more,” and so you automatically say no before you say yes, and people go, “Oh, but you’re going to miss opportunities,” et cetera. The problem is, well, I wasn’t really taking advantage of the opportunities that I had, because I was too busy chasing butterflies.
I think that’s a good thing to do, and I think you can change a theme during the year as well, I think you can master it. “You know what? I’ve got on top of this now, I’ve simplified, I can actually have another theme now, I don’t have to have 12 months of simplifying if I’ve got my life simplified and I’ve got my life on track after 3.” I think that’s a really nice thing as well, but if you start to sneak back into a bad habit then you’ve got to get the theme up again, that’s the way that I look at it.
Jesse:

That’s certainly the way I’ve come to look at things too, and that’s really been based on quite a few conversations that we’ve had over a number of months. Mate, I wanted to touch base, because you’re in an entrepreneurial space where you come across heaps and heaps and heaps of people, and what I love about what you do, Andrew, is you have a reputation for being probably one of the most generous people in the business space. I think that’s firstly, huge kudos to you, which is wonderful. What I wanted to ask you is, as you observe this plethora of people, what do you think it is that the successful people do differently in terms of habits, or mindset? What is it you think that actually allows them to achieve their own success, perhaps more than others would?
Andrew:

It’s a good question, isn’t it? I think there’s a few things, to be honest, Jess. I look at it and I think that, successful people that I know, I think that they’re great dreamers, that they are able to dream and create a vision and have a plan. Sometimes the implementation and sometimes the actual doing is not that good, but they have a dream about, “I want to do this.” I know for me, when I wanted to be a writer, I just had such a dream of making it happen that really nothing was going to get in the way. Of course you make it happen. I think of all the successful people I know, they are very good at dreaming and visualizing, that what that dream is going to look like. That’s what makes it happen, we know that. The second thing I think that they’re really good at is they had a high level of self-belief, and it was interesting for me Jess. I tell this story often.
When I was thinking about writing my first book about marketing and I asked a number of people in the marketing world that I knew of, “What do you reckon? I’ve kind of got an idea for a book on 101 ways to market your business.” You know what, most of them turned around and said to me, “Andrew, you’re a nice bloke, but really? You haven’t got any qualifications, you live in Cairns for starters, you’re not famous, who’s going to publish anything that you’ve written, and really, what do you know?” Of course I was quite surprised by that, but I completely ignored them and wrote it anyway. How lucky am I that I did? I look at that, and I think, successful people have high self-belief in themselves. That doesn’t mean they don’t go through the stages of doubt, impostor syndrome, all the rest of it, which we all do. Believe me, I do as well, but they have more self belief than they have self-doubt.
I think when you have more self-belief than self-doubt, well, that’s when you make stuff happen. Another thing, a third thing, and I think that they tend to do well, is they’re very good learners. They learn and they listen, they observe, they’re hungry. I worked with a guy, for a number of years, a Swiss guy who was an amazing entrepreneur. We were travelling around the world, I was working for a company, he had his own resort. He was in his 70s, and I was in my 30s. He could outrun me, and what I admired about him, everyone he met he would ask questions about, “How could I do business better? How could I do this better, how could I do that …” Keen to learn. When I had the pleasure of working with Richard Branson, and met him in Melbourne, the questions that he asked me were, “Tell me about your business, how do you do what you do? How have you been successful as an author, where are your books published, how did you do it, how did you come up with the ideas?”
Successful people ask a lot of questions, and they listen to the answers. I think that that’s a real sign of a successful person. Anyone who gets up and says, “I’ve got all the answers,” we already know that they’re probably a douche, so we don’t go. The more successful they are, the more they tend to ask and the more they tend to listen. I definitely think that. A last 1 or 2 there I would say, Jess, is one is that they normally have a really good peer group, so that they have good people around them, which I think is important. I think we all know the value of a peer group, and then probably last but not least, or maybe second last, would be that they’re very resilient. They get knocked down, they dust themselves off, and they get back up. Even if the idea they did, or they had failed, they don’t go off and suck their thumb and sulk about it for the next 10 years. They just move on to the next thing.
The last point I’m going to say in here is I think that they are generous, generous with their time, generous with their spirit, generous with their knowledge, and keen to help other people. They’re all the signs to me of what really successful people actually do.
Jesse:

Mate, that is quite a list, and firstly, there’s so many questions that are coming up for me now I just want to ask you. I guess the big question I wanted to ask you, with those particular attributes, is, do you think people are necessarily born with those, or do you think they can be cultivated, or do you think they learn them, or is it about surrounding yourself with the right people and getting some of that through osmosis? What’s your thoughts around some of that, because people might be sitting there going, “I’m just not in that space right now, how do I get self-belief?”
Andrew:

It’s definitely about the right peer group, there’s no doubt about it. I think that some people are born with a vision, I remember seeing a guy on TV who runs a really successful restaurant in the Hudson River off New York. That was interesting, he was being interviewed and they said, “So, when did you want to be a chef and run a restaurant?” He said, “My earliest thought.” They said, “What, how old?” He said, “5 or 6 years old, I wanted a restaurant, 7 years.” He’s 50 or 60 now, and they said, “Well, what are you going to do in 10 years?” He said, “I’m still running my restaurant.” He was so passionate, just that conviction was there. Some people are lucky, they have that conviction at an early age. Most of us aren’t, I wanted to be a marine biologist at a young age, then I kind of realized I spend more time in a lab doing stuff I don’t want to do than riding humpback whales around the ocean, which I imagined a marine biologist would do.
I do think that we change, we evolve, we grow, and we hopefully learn along the way. I do think you can learn about these things, I think that more and more people discover it in themselves, of, “Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur and I can do that.” Other times we find people that, “Hey, I’m an entrepreneur, I run a business, and I really don’t want to, I just want to work for someone and get a pay packet.” That’s okay as well, so I guess it’s a combination of learning. A lot of the time it’s failing, I know for me a lot of my life there was so many mistakes that I made in business, and still make in business. I think anyone who says they don’t is probably just not trying hard enough. Some of the most successful people that I know of are making mistakes every day, but they don’t beat themselves up about it. They go, “Awesome, I’m one step closer to getting it right.”
I think there’s that real culture that we see in the entrepreneurial space and the success space of … It comes back to that resilience factor again, going, “Okay, this is what I want, I’m clear about what I want, I’ll do what it takes to get it.” Sometimes, I’ll make a mistake and I’ll have to take a different path or a different direction, or find a different peer group or learn a better way to do it,” or whatever the case may be. That will help me get to where I want to go.
Jesse:

Mate, that’s fantastic. I guess what you’re saying is that it’s a constantly evolving thing and as we go through life, as long as we’re defining success on our own terms, as you said, you might find yourself in a business and then think, “Maybe that’s not for me,” and that’s fine. You go in and work for someone else, and that’s a perfectly great definition of a successful life, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Andrew: It comes back to that point, what does success mean to you? If you don’t define what that really is for you, I think that you’re looking for success on someone else’s terms, what you’ve seen in a movie or what you have this false vision around it is, you think all the money in the world will solve all your problems. I know it’s easy to think that way when you haven’t got any money, but it’s rarely the case. Again, I do think as we grow, we get a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and that helps us to perhaps get a little bit clearer about what success means to us. Very different if you ask an 18 year old kid what success means to them, you ask a 50 year old woman what success means to them, 2 very, very different definitions.
Jesse:

That’s really good. Mate, while we’re talking about these things that, I guess, contribute to success, as I said you’ve come across a lot of different people in your line of work. I don’t know if I can ask this question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Is there anyone that springs to mind that’s really inspired you and you thought, “Wow, they’ve just been great,” someone you might observe or work with, or I guess to put it another way, who would you have at a dinner party if you could invite these people over?
Andrew:

I’ve been really lucky, and even I kind of felt often like I’m just getting started with what I’m doing. I have been fortunate enough to work with some pretty extraordinary people, but also I guess met some extraordinary people and followed a lot of extraordinary people in the same vein as well. I look at them in a couple of different directions there, I think Jess. I think about, when I got into personal development at a young age, I was given a copy of Dale Carnegie’s book, How To Win Friends and Influence People. When I was 18, I’d just bought my first business, and I’ve got to say, for me, even though I don’t like the title of it, it’s one of the most extraordinary books that I’ve ever read about how to deal with people. It really, really tailored my entire life, and in fact, I just wrote an article for Ink.com about it, which is I read the same book every year, Christmas morning is my ritual.
I spend a couple of hours and I read Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve read it 30 times now, and I look at that and go, “It’s just a wonderful kind of a book to learn stuff.” A lot of people were like that for me, like Zig Ziglar, I’ve loved Zig Ziglar and I had the fortune of talking to Zig Ziglar a few years before he died. Those kind of people who are inspiration and motivational, and told wonderful stories, a little bit later on and it seems like Tony Robins is, to me, a very inspirational guy. Some people love him, some people hate him, I think he’s awesome. I look at Louise Hay, a lady who started a business in her 50s and has built this incredible global publishing empire. I just think she’s one of the most extraordinary women on the face of the planet. Right up through to, interestingly enough, there’s so many people.
Now, for me, having been doing what I’ve been doing for quite a long time now, I look back at the people who I’ve met who are entrepreneurs, there’s a guy that owns a chicken shop around the corner from where I live, as in roast chickens. He’s been running this business for 30 years, and I look at that. Making roasted chickens for 30 years, and I tell you, I’ve never seen him without a smile on his face, I’ve never seen him not engaging his customers, I’ve never seen him not giving his staff a bollicking because something’s not good enough. I just look at him and think, “What an amazing guy,” and I met a lot of those people. I met recently a guy called Edwin, I can’t remember his surname but he was a third generation sausage and small goods maker in Brisbane, 85, okay? His grandfather had immigrated to Australia, set up a small good factory, and of course Edwin came into it when he was like 10.
Edwin’s just letting go of it now to give it to his grandson, and Edwin’s going, “Oh, I don’t know,” his wife’s saying he’s got to have a holiday. You look at this going and you think, “What does this guy … He was in the business for 70 years, so modest, so humble. I look at a person like that and I go, “Man, I just want to sit, and I just want you to tell me everything. What do you know?” People go, “What does he know about social media?” He doesn’t know anything about social media, but he knows about people, he knows about developing products, he knows about doing business, he knows about negotiating, about … Excuse me, about money management, about getting through tough times. All of that kind of stuff. I’m far more inspired by people that have gone through that than by someone who may be has started one company that’s been really successful and they sold 30 million dollars.
You go, “That’s awesome, I admire you for it, it’s cool, great and all the rest of it, but I’ll be interested to see where you are in 10 years, 15 years, and see what you’ve done with yourself, and with the company, and with the money,” and all the rest of it. I guess more now as I get older, I’m looking towards those people who really inspire me are the unknown people. No-one knows Edwin, no-one knows the guy at the chicken shop around the corner from me. No-one really knows those people, they’re not famous, but they’re the ones that I think are just extraordinary at what they do.
Jesse:

I agree wholeheartedly, I’m always drawn to those people that have lost a little bit of bark as well, the people who’ve kind of had a few knocks along the way but managed to get up and continued to have another swing at … Eventually had the success that they were looking for. You mentioned the guy that starts his company in his dorm room at Harvard and sells it at 21 for a squillion dollars, which is, as you say, good luck to them. The people who I really look to are the people who’ve overcome some sort of adversity to climb whatever summit it is that’s important to them, so that’s really cool. Ladies and gents, if you’re just joining us now, we are speaking to the one and only Andrew Griffiths, Australia’s number 1 small business author, contributor to a bazillion magazines such as Ink, Flying Solo, CBS, and mentor, a key person of influence, the world’s leading personal brand accelerator, all round good guy.
Andrew, just wanted to have a chat, if we could, about where you think that … We’re talking about these successful people and so on and so forth, we’ve spoken about some of their attributes. One of the things that has always interested me, and I’m going to butcher a quote in a minute, and I’m hoping you might be able to set me straight because the quote has just completely sprung to mind right now, and I haven’t written it down in preparation. It’s the old saying, you sow an action, you reap a habit, and you so a habit, you reap a destiny, and so on and so forth. I can’t remember whose quote that is, and I know that I’ve completely butchered it. I did want to talk to you a little bit about the role or the importance of habits in people getting through to achieve what is important to them. Do you have any thoughts or anything about that at all?
Andrew:

I do a lot to be honest. I think again, for me, I don’t really call them habits, I call them rituals, and I guess whatever you call them, because I find that if I’ve got the right rituals that I make things happen. I do think that it’s a very common characteristic of very successful people is that they’ve developed a really … The right set of rituals, or the right set of habits. For me, I have certain rituals, like I get up very early so I’m at my desk by about 5:00 pretty much every morning. I spend that first hour getting my act together, so my first hour of just … I don’t check my email, I don’t do that first of all. I plan for the day, I really focus. What’s that one thing that I need to be doing today, my main project that I want to get knocked over during the day? What am I focusing on? I read through my notebook with my visions for the business for the year.
What am I doing, making sure that I’m on track. I do a bit of writing as well, normally I write an article every morning so I’ll do that in that hour as well. After that, then I’ll go and … I’ve woken up then enough, then I’ll go and do other things, like do a bit of yoga, maybe have a walk, have a nice breakfast, do that, and then I’ll come in and by then it’s normally around 7:30, 8:00. I’ll start and spend an hour doing my email, and one of the new things that I’m doing this year, like a lot of people, is my new ritual for me is to batch my email. I’m only going to check my email 3 times a day, and I’ll check it first thing in the morning, 8:00 ish, I’ll check it again around 11:00 and then I’ll check it again at around 3:00, and do that. I just, like again, many of us, I think I’ve just got to break that habit of being stuck on email all day long.
Once you start doing email and you open your email, you spend the rest of the day responding to everyone else’s demands. I just think that to get anything done these days, we’ve just got to get much smarter at how we do that.
Jesse:

I agree wholeheartedly. I think for me the other one is alerts on phones, is another one that takes me …
Andrew:

Turn them all off, yeah, turn them all off.

Jesse:

Absolutely, if I see Facebook or whatever it is sending me an alert that so and so has commented on this or that, the number of times I’ve been taken off task … Like you, I’ve cut mine down to twice a day now, so it’s morning and night. I think it really gives you that clarity of thought, and it gives you that uninterrupted time to focus on a particular task, because when you’re completing a task, as soon as that concentration is interrupted it takes … I don’t know. For me it takes about 10 minutes to get my head back into the zone of where I was before the interruption, I don’t know if you find that.
Andrew:

A neuroscientist will tell you it’s 20 minutes, even if you think you’re back in there, you’re not. When you’re multitasking, and when you’re just distracted, that’s where it is. I know for me Jess, if I spend a day writing, so my day is writing a book or whatever it might be, I get up in the morning, I check my email, but then the rest of the day, I just going to be writing or I might not check my email, I always find that, at the end of the day, how I feel is very different. I feel clear, I feel calm, I feel like I’ve got a lot done, I feel a real sense of satisfaction, and I feel quite energized, yet at the end of the day, when I’ve been on email all day, and social mediaing, and taking 50 phone calls, and doing all this kind of stuff, I feel absoutely exhausted by 4:00 in the afternoon.
That’s the thing that I notice, and not physical exhaustion but mentally exhausted and rightly so. I think that the moral to the story there is, I think we’ve got to be constantly developing our work habits, our rituals, whatever it might be. No-one taught us to use email, no-one taught us to use social media, no-one’s taught us how to manage this stuff, and every time we turn around there’s more stuff for us to deal with. I predicted 2016 is the year of the digital detox where more and more people are going to say, “You know what, I’m just going to disconnect, and I’m going to work in really powerful moments.” I had a really interesting example of this Jesse, I went on a retreat last year, to a place called Camp Eden, where you go there, and people go there to stop smoking, and I don’t know, whatever other things they want to stop.
For me, it was a week of a lot of travel beforehand, and I was tired. I just wanted a really good, healthy week, no email, no internet, at all, there’s no signal in the valley, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t sneak hit in. You started every day with yoga, and there’s no tea and coffee and all that kind of jazz there. What I really, really noticed was how difficult it was the first day, but then how, as the week progressed, how much easier it was and how much better I started to think, et cetera. The big thing was, when I was leaving, I thought, “Oh well, I’d better turn on my email,” as I was driving down the road of course, I’m getting hundreds of emails. I had, I think it was bout 1800 emails that had come in during the week I was away. You know what, I went to a coffee shop, open up my laptop, and just sat down and responded. It took me an hour and a half to respond to the ones that really need it.
Most of them were crap, didn’t need to be responded, they were junk or whatever. I realized, well, I did all of my emailing in an hour and a half for a week. If I’m at home and in my office, not on the road, I tend to spend hours all day long. I looked at it and I thought, “Isn’t that interesting, when I do it in that condensed one it’s a week, hour and a half, yet I can spend 3, 4, 5 hours a day, sometimes more, doing these kind of crazy emails. Hmm, interesting.”
Jesse:

Mate, that is so cool, 1800 and you’ve managed to get back to the important ones in an hour and a half is fantastic, what a lesson.
Andrew:

Very eye-opening for me, and kind of put stuff into perspective about, A, just how much crap we get in our email, but B, just, if you’re really focusing to get through them, it’s a daunting task to look at an inbox with that many emails to be responded to. Of course you realize that 90% of them don’t need to be responded to, and then the ones that do are really very, very short, bang, yep, got it, thanks, yep, yep, yep, whereas I would probably spend more time on them, and yeah. Interesting little thoughts there I guess.
Jesse:

One of the things that I certainly do in my practice, and I certainly, when I’m working with my clients, one of the things that I suggest, just in terms of making that really practical on a day to day basis for dentists, one of the things that I’ve done in our practice is, I’ve allowed about half an hour a day within my work day to have as administrative time. During that half hour, I’m time partitioning basically. I’m basically saying, “This is when I’m batching my email, this is when I’m batching my phone calls, this is when I’m batching writing, or referral letters,” or whatever it is that I’m doing. I allow half an hour a day within my work day to do that. Whenever I talk to dentists about that, the first thing that comes up is they go, “But that’s lost productivity Jesse, you’re losing half an hour, how many dollars an hour, and that’s going to add up to this much over the year.”
The irony of that, Andrew, is it’s actually the opposite. What I’ve observed is I am so much more focused, so much more productive in the times that I’ve gotten my fingers in someone’s mouth that it actually boosts my productivity and it means that I just clear out the mental clutter as much as the physical stuff as well, and it’s great.
Andrew:

I agree completely. I think, again, I think the concept of maybe peak performance means working for 18 hours a day and charging through and doing all that stuff, I don’t think that’s peak performance, I think that’s lunacy. I’ve certainly done that, and I did that for years. Did I get any more done? No, I just got less productive. I got into a routine in my business where I worked 7 days a week, and the way that it happened Jess, was quite simply because I didn’t get anything done during the week because I was talking to people, meeting with people, blah blah blah, and I started working after hours to get the actual work done. I would say again, “Oh, look, I’m going to come in on Saturday, and get stuff done,” and then because I was going in on Saturday, really, I was just fluffing around on Thursdays and Fridays. I was there, but I was totally non-productive, and then because I had so much work to do, then I had to come in on Sundays as well.
All of a sudden I was in a 7 day a week cycle, really because I was just unproductive in my rituals and my routines. I made the decision that I was going to not work weekends ever again, and it was a long story why that happened. I said, “Well, I’m going to work Monday to Friday, if I’m going to work 20 hours a day, I’ll work 20 hours a day, but I’m going to work Monday to Friday. It was interesting, within 6 months I’d halved the number of hours I worked, and doubled my income. Look at that as an illustration of productivity, and just again, being focused and all the rest of it. Bad habits sneak in so easily, I think they’re the little killers. Lying in bed at night looking at Facebook, rolling over at 6:00 in the morning and checking your Facebook feed, or checking your email. Really, how many vital emails have come in between 10:00 last night and 6:00 in the morning?
Jesse:  I’ve got someone trying to give me SEO at midnight, surely that’s vital. Don’t you get those emails at midnight too?
Andrew:

I do, I get them all, and I look at it and kind of go … We’d be kind of like lab rats, where we’re just responding to bells and tinkles and emails, and how many shares and how many likes, and we’re like Pavlov’s dog. We’ve got to have the right rituals.
Jesse:

Interestingly enough as well Andrew, because you mentioned the bad habits. One of the things I’ve observed in myself actually, is some of my bad habits actually started with really good intention.
Andrew:

Always, always.
Jesse:

I would do something that I was trying to help someone, and of course, not that you don’t want to help people, but sometimes you get into the habit of doing these things, as I say, with the best intentions of helping someone else, but that becomes your new norm and all of a sudden you’ve just got to, as you said earlier, learn to say no.
Andrew:

One of the biggest things that I’ve observed with businesses over the years, and I certainly have probably been in this situation myself, and I see it with men predominantly. Men are running a business, they start working longer, longer hours, spending less time at home, right about when they actually get financially successful is when their marriage breaks down. They turn around and they go, “I did all of this for us,” and the partner goes, “Yeah, but I just wanted you,” you know? “I haven’t seen you for 10 years,” you know, cats in the cradle kind of stuff. The fellow goes, “Oh, I’ve got this successful business and this money, now I’ve got to sell it to pay for a divorce, and I’m on my own.” You kind of go, “Hmm, interesting lesson there,” I think we’ve got to have our family have got to come along with us on the ride, and they’ve always got to be number 1.
That whole thing, blokes go, men, the mentality is, “I’ve got to build this business for the future of the family,” the family want you now. They don’t want you in 20 years when the business is successful, they want you now. I think successful, smart people figure that out pretty quickly.
Jesse:

I’ve seen that a few times as well, and it’s a tragedy when you see that happen. You have this dichotomy where you’ve got this seemingly business success and professional success, but the personal life is a complete disaster. Really, I think if we go back to that definition of success, what success really means to each of us, I think if we’re really honest with ourselves every single one of us would say, personal success is actually more important in many ways than the commercial elements as well. Why are we doing it?
Andrew:

It’s just when money’s tight or you’re younger or whatever it is, that becomes the appealing thing because we’ve seen that with money comes all of the things that we think, freedom and a Playboy mansion or a whatever your view of the world is around money and freedom. The reality is it’s not like that, as we get older and smarter, we kind of go, “Well, what really matters are the relationships we have with others, our health and our well-being, our ability to influence people in a positive way, make the planet better, leave a legacy.” Those things happen, but I think we all have to come into that realization at our own pace, me telling you to come into it isn’t going to make you do it. I didn’t think like that when I was 18 or 25, or probably 30. It’s only when I got older I got a bit smarter.
Jesse:

Mate, when I was 18, my definition of success was a fast car and a bird on my arm, really. That’s fine when you’re 18, that’s no problem at all. I think you’re right though, as you get older the things that you want or the things that you realize are important to you, you suddenly become more aware of that sort of stuff as you go through life, which thankfully, is the gaining of wisdom, I hope.
Andrew:

Lifestyle does become more important, we want to have a lifestyle business. I live in Cairns because I like living in Cairns, and I can run my business from anywhere in the world, really, these days. I choose to do it from Cairns at the moment, that’s for sure, because I can have a good lifestyle in Cairns. You can put on a pair of shorts and a pair of thongs and walk down the road 100 meters and have a cup of coffee with a friend. You can go fishing, you can do the things that you want to do here. It’s a lot harder to do that stuff in a city, in the largest city anyway. I’m not judging one way or another, I think it’s more about, well, what kind of lifestyle do you want? It’s like saying, “What does success mean to you,” is the same as the question, “What do you want your life to look like?” I think that’s a success, peak performers, and answering those questions all roll into one.
Jesse:

I think, again, coming back to that point, one of the purposes of creating the business in the first place is to have that lifestyle, and that lifestyle does, whether you live in Sydney or whether you live in Cairns or whether you live in Canberra in my case, that’s all part of the deal. The purpose of it is, you only get one life, so you might as well enjoy it. For me, having an enjoyable life, the definition according to Jesse Green of success is to enjoy my life in every possible way.
Andrew:

I think people, some of us confuse that though, and they think, “Oh, so you’re sitting around, you want to pick fluff out of your belly button …” Of course, the reality of it is that it’s not like that in the slightest. The reality of it is, I work hard, I have a lot of … I don’t have a lot of stress but I have stress, you know. I have commitments, I have financial pressure, I’ve got those whatever, all the things that everyone else has. You look at all of that kind of stuff and you go, “The difference is you choose how much of all of that you have.” If life is too stressful, I change my life. I find that if I have no stress I don’t do anything, I don’t get out of bed. Give me 100 things to do and I’ll get them done, give me 3 things to do and I’ll get none of them done. I think a lot of us are like that. This whole success thing is really learning to understand yourself better. I think if you can do that, everything else kind of falls a bit into place.
Jesse:

Mate, that is absolutely wonderful advice, and I think that anyone listening to the conversation we’re having today is going to go, “Wow …” In terms of thinking about takeaways for the audience, I guess one of the things that I’d be encouraging, it’d be interesting to hear feedback is to put some thought into it. What is it that I want out of my life, what does success look like to me, at least, and how can we then move forward with that?
Andrew:

I think you have to start there, that’s got to be the beginning, and then you’ve got to turn around and say, “Well okay, so that’s what I want, so the logical next step is to say, well, how am I going to get it?” The logical choice there is find someone who’s already got exactly what you’ve got and learn from then. Move your way through that particular process. If you’re not clear on what you want, you’ll get what you think you’ll want, and often that’s not the same as what you actually do want. We’ve got to have that extraordinary clarity around, and I don’t think enough of us spend enough time getting really clear on that, “What does success mean to me? What does success mean to you?” More than the Ferrari, and more than the whatever it might be. It’s an interesting realization, and I think that those who are truly successful are those who are able to really be clear about that in their own mind.
Jesse:

I think that’s absolutely 100% correct mate, gold right there, ladies and gents, from Andrew Griffiths. That is just a nugget of solid gold, so if you can get that clarity, I think you’re halfway there, probably more than halfway there really.
Andrew:

I agree mate, I agree.
Jesse:

Now mate, before you wrap up for the afternoon, I wanted to ask you a quick question. Given that you’re an author, and I think I might know the answer to this, but if you could only have one book on your book case, what would it be?
Andrew:

It would have to be Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, it just has to be my book that I guess I read every year. I can’t stop reading it now, my house looks like a Dymocks store. You could easily put a Dymocks fricken sign out the front, I’ve got books everywhere. For those that don’t know I do teach people how to write books these days, so I’ve got hundreds of authors of mine that I’ve taught, I’ve got their books as well as my own unhealthy addiction to books. My accountant just shakes his head every time he sees my credit card statements, and how much I spend on books on a monthly basis, let alone a yearly basis. I read a lot, and I have a voracious appetite for learning. I think it’s one of the greatest joys in life, is to be able to read a book. Unexpected bonus, look at what you get out of it. 25 bucks for a book? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s the best money spent on the face of the planet, a good book, in my view.
Jesse:

There are lots of great books, and speaking of your books, Andrew, you had the 12 books, and I guess this is a bit like trying to name your favorite child. Of the 12 books that you’ve written, is there any one for you that stands out that you’ve enjoyed writing or has resonated?
Andrew:

I enjoyed writing The Meme Myth, which is my first personal development book. That came out around 2010, and that was an interesting book because, like a lot of people, I’ve had an unusual kind of a life I guess. For me, I didn’t want to write an autobiography initially, the publisher, Simon and Schuster wanted me to write an autobiography. Instead, I kind of said, “No, I want to write a personal development book, but I’ll share my stories and my realizations and my observations in there.” That’s how it evolved, so The Meme Myth was probably the one that I enjoyed writing the most for many different reasons. In terms of my business books, I guess probably the one that I’m proudest of is The Big Book of Small Business. I know it’s a bit of a cliché kind of title, but it is, it’s a big book. 350 pages, and it’s just filled with what, to me, are my philosophies and strategies and ideas around building a successful business.
That was a bit of a culmination of a lot of my work, so I think that was a nice … Really enjoyable to write that book and put it together, and of course since that’s come out, and even The Meme Myth now, as you mentioned mate, I do this as I write so many columns and things like that on a weekly basis. I haven’t had a book out for a few years, so I’ve got to change that this year. I’ve got a few books in the pipeline that will be making an appearance in 2016.
Jesse:

Mate, I’m looking forward to that, because both of the books you’ve mentioned are on my bookcase and I’m looking at them right now. They are just behind me on my book case and I’ve read them both, so I can certainly commend them to the listeners. Mate, if people did want to get a copy of those books, where would be the best place? Booktopia, Dymocks?
Andrew:

Booktopia, Amazon, wherever they are, Dymocks, any of those places. If they haven’t got them they can get them in, very, very easy from that point of view. I think they’re easy to find mate, no worries about that.
Jesse:

Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show today, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I hope the audience has taken away lots of little notes from all the bits of info and gems you’ve been sharing. I just wanted to, on behalf of all the listeners, say thanks for coming on the program, and …
Andrew:

A pleasure, thank you for having me.
Jesse:

You mentioned earlier Andrew, that generosity is one of the key indicators for success, and certainly mate, using that one metric alone you’re a phenomenal success, so thank you so much mate.
Andrew:

Thank you Jess, and thank you to everyone listening, and always a pleasure mate.
Jesse:

Cheers mate.

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