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The mission of Five Questions Over Coffee is to bring a new ways to #stoptheleaks for building a business to growth-hungry business leaders and owners who want to do more with less time, thereby increasing their business and influence. We deliver actionable ideas using “five questions over coffee.” thecompleteapproach.substack.com

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June 4, 202622 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Ally Machete (ep. 148)

Who is Ally?Ally Machete has built her career working closely with a dynamic range of authors, but she has found her true passion in helping confident business owners become first-time authors. She specializes in guiding experienced entrepreneurs who know their industries inside out but feel unsure when it comes to writing a book. Understanding that her clients have no time, energy, or money to waste, Ally works deliberately and strategically to ensure their book aligns with their greater business goals. She is the expert these leaders turn to when the stakes are high, and there’s no room for mistakes—helping them transform their hard-won expertise into powerful, purposeful books.Key Takeaways* Writing a book isn’t just for the famous—it’s a powerful tool to build credibility and open doors for any expert. As Ally Machete shares, the real impact comes from writing the right book, with the right strategy behind it.* Don’t write a book for “everyone.” As Ally Machete explains, clarity about your target audience and their needs makes your book not only marketable but transformative for your business or career.* A well-crafted book is more than “decoration for your Zoom background,” says Ally Machete. It’s a tool—something to leverage intentionally, not just a vanity project.* Not every business needs a book. Ally Machete recommends crafting your strategy first—sometimes timing or focus on other projects delivers more growth than rushing into publishing.* Feeling the “magic” of book writing doesn’t mean ditching strategy. Ally Machete urges authors: don’t just write what you want, write what solves a real need for your ideal reader. That’s how culture shifts—one book at a time.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Ally, subscribe to the newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.SUMMARY KEYWORDSwriting a book, lead generation, business owners, book marketing, strategic writing, target audience, book publishing, book as a tool, writing process, marketable book, author credibility, authority, business growth, writing strategy, book promotion, niche audience, sales conversion, email list building, free resources, blog articles, podcast interviews, digital printing, ebooks, networking, credibility signal, partnership promotion, course creation, return on investment (ROI), book launch, marketing strategySPEAKERAlly Machate, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:00]:Live, please go live. Yeah. Hi, and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I am here today with Ali Machati, the writer’s ally. I’ve got those two right, haven’t I, Ali, Please tell me. Okay, thank you. So I was going to get something wrong.Stuart Webb [00:00:47]:I’ve managed to get through without actually making a huge mistake yet. So welcome, Ali. Thank you so much for making a few minutes today. Ali is, well, she’s somebody who helps people write books. So I can tell you somebody who has tried to do that and successfully succeeded, but by golly, it was hard. You need an ally in your corner. So I’m really pleased Ali has made some time today to come talk to us a little bit about this. You know, writing a book is probably the greatest lead generator you can do because it really sets you apart from the competition.Stuart Webb [00:01:18]:Ali is going to tell us all about that. So, Ali, thank you so much for being the writer’s ally. And welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee.Ally Machete [00:01:26]:Thank you so much for having me, Stuart. I’m really excited to be here.Stuart Webb [00:01:30]:Well, I hope. I hope we’re going to have a really interesting conversation. So let’s start by talking a little bit about, well, the sort of people you try to help as the. As the writer’s ally.Ally Machete [00:01:43]:Yeah. So we work with lots of kinds of authors, but our real sweet spot, our ideal client, are generally business owners, people who have been in business for a little while and are really confident in their expertise. But now they’re thinking about writing a book and they’re not confident about that. You know, they don’t have time, money, energy to waste. All of that has to go very deliberately into their plans and their strategies in business. But they want to have that book. They know enough to know that there’s things they don’t know, and they know that they really need to get it right. That book has really important goals attached to it.Ally Machete [00:02:24]:It’s a tool that’s going to be really valuable to them and is a part of their growth strategy. And so they need it to be done at the highest level. And that’s where we come in.Stuart Webb [00:02:33]:That’s brilliant. So tell me. I mean, you’ve obviously, you’ve obviously helped a lot of people do this.Ally Machete [00:02:38]:What.Stuart Webb [00:02:38]:What are the sort of things they tried to do? I mean, you know, everybody has sat with that sort of completely blank piece of paper or blank screen or whatever nowadays and thought, where do I start? What are the things that you’ve seen them try which have failed to get them anywhere.Ally Machete [00:02:54]:Well, one of the things that I think a lot of people who are new to writing a book get stuck on is there’s this sort of kind of like romantic, kind of magical, I think thinking around what a, what a writing process looks like. You know, you’re going to get struck by the muse and you’re going to sit down and it’s all going to flow out of you in a number of hours and you’re going to end up with this masterpiece that, you know, just needs a spell check and then you’re done. Right. And they don’t understand how much harder it actually is. You know, even if you are fortunate enough to be able to create a rough draft very easily, and some people certainly can, some people do have that experience, but that is rarely the finished product. Right. There is so much that goes into crafting a book strategically. Not just writing a good book, but writing a marketable book.Ally Machete [00:03:44]:Writing a book that’s going to get you certain results in your business is a lot more than just writing something that’s, you know, basically well written and, or even interesting to read. So I think that’s, that’s the biggest piece where people tend to get tripped up is they think, well, I wrote it, it’s good, right. It’s objectively good. And they miss that strategic tie in piece and they end up with a book that on the surface is really nice and looks professional and is well done, but doesn’t move the dial in their business.Stuart Webb [00:04:14]:So we may be straying into the sort of the third question here, which is about what, what free advice, what valuable advice you can give, but sort of talk a little bit about that. Sort of, what do you mean by a marketable book? Sort of explain the whole, you know, what that does to a little bit about what that does to somebody’s business, somebody’s career, but also a little bit about what needs to go into a marketable book for it to be something that people actually want to pick up and look at.Ally Machete [00:04:41]:Yeah. So one element of that is when you write a book that is the wrong book. Right. So first let’s just assume you’ve written a book, it’s a good book, it’s objectively well written. Right. It’s been, you’ve put energy into it, you’ve made an effort, it looks nice, you paid for a nice cover, maybe even, and it all looks good. What might make that book not marketable are a few different things. First of all, if you were never clear on exactly who your Target audience for that book is a lot of people write a book thinking that anybody can benefit from this, this book will help everyone.Ally Machete [00:05:15]:And even though that may be true, you can never market to everyone. Right. Like, I like to say that if you’re trying to talk to everybody, then you’re going to be connecting with nobody. So this idea that it’s just, I’m putting this out there, it’s going to help all of these people without really getting clear about who exactly the book is for, that can make a book not marketable. If you don’t know who to put the book in front of to sell copies, it’s almost impossible to create a marketing strategy. Right. A lot of marketing strategy is about who are the right readers for this and how do we get in front of those people. So if your audience isn’t clear, if your promise isn’t clear, if it isn’t crystal clear why your target reader needs your book.Ally Machete [00:05:56]:Right. Again, a lot of people start a book from a kind of internal place. If they have something they want to say or they have something that they feel like they can share, that’s a value. But ultimately, people don’t buy books because you think they need the book. Right. They buy the book because there’s something they want or there’s something they’re looking for that they feel like your book is the answer to. So that comes back to your unique promise. If your promise isn’t crystal clear, it might be a good book, but it’s going to be very difficult to position and it’s going to be very difficult to have that conversion situation.Ally Machete [00:06:28]:Just like any other product or any other sale, when you’re just trying to sell books, there’s conversions. People will come and check it out. If there’s nothing there to actually hook them in and make them see, yeah, this is the book that’s going to solve my problem or teach me the thing I need to learn. They don’t convert.Stuart Webb [00:06:43]:Do you know, Ali, you make it sound as if you’re trying to sort of put together a marketing strategy for some sort of product, which you would hope a business owner has learned how to do. But anyway, let’s, let’s move on a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about the. The sort of effects that you think a book can have to somebody’s business, somebody’s career, if you like. I mean, we can all think of people like Tony Robbins who have written interesting books and then they end up on the world stage. I’m not necessarily suggesting that we’re all going to do that tomorrow?Ally Machete [00:07:11]:No. And you don’t have to. That’s the really beautiful thing about books. And especially these days. You know, not only do we have the Internet, which gives us tons of opportunities to directly connect with our target audience and to market a book with, you know, very little cost compared to, let’s say, print media, for example, but also we have digital and print tech, digital printing technology, and ebooks. So the very act of creating a book, making it available for sale, getting it out there, is also more accessible to people now than it pretty much ever has been in history, really. So those are all really wonderful things. But excuse me, when you put that book out there.Ally Machete [00:07:52]:So let’s say, for example, that somebody is writing a book to bring in more clients. That’s like a pretty classic example. They’re writing a book to bring in more clients if they write a memoir. And I’ve seen this a lot with coaches, in particular coaches and consultants, they think, well, people who want to work with me want to know more about me. So instead of writing a book that shows how they think about that particular problem, how they’ve worked with people in that particular niche, how their process or their way of, you know, approaching a situation is a good method or a different way of thinking about certain things, and instead they write a memoir, they write a book that’s just all about them and their life’s journey. Right? Sure, there will be a subset of people who are interested in that book, but most people don’t come to the book because they want to learn all about you. Again, people buy a book because what’s in it for me? Right? What are they going to get from it? So when you have a book that’s dialed in to the right people and is strategically aligned to achieve goals in your business, and it can accomplish large numbers of things. Everything from the very simple giving books away to build your mailing list.Ally Machete [00:09:05]:We’ve had clients too, in particular that were enormously successful simply finding partners who are willing to promote the free ebook to their lists because they thought that it was something of value. It’s a win, win situation, right? I want you to promote my book. You get to give something free to your audience. Everybody looks good. Now all of a sudden you have thousands of people opting in to join your list to get a copy of that free book. That’s a real basic, simple way of leveraging a book to grow your business. But also things like we’ve had clients tell us that sitting down in a meeting with people and Taking a few copies of the book out of their bag and handing it to the high level people that they’re meeting with changes the conversation instantly. Right.Ally Machete [00:09:50]:Giving a book to somebody or even just knowing that someone is the author of a book is an instant credibility signal. They don’t even have to read the book. The very fact that you’ve written one, again, assuming it’s the right one and it’s done well, you hand it to them, they look at it, they can see this person literally wrote the book on this subject. And there’s a psychological effect. Again, there’s a reason why the word author is the root word of authority. Right. And that’s how we think about people with books. So having that book can get you to open more doors, it can get you on more stages, it can get you more clients, it can get you higher level clients, it can help you to close deals.Ally Machete [00:10:32]:It shortens the like, no trust factor and gets those that cycle, that sales cycle to shorten and speed up. It can do a number of really important things for your business. And I agree, I think it is one of the most powerful lead generating tools even still.Stuart Webb [00:10:47]:Yeah. And amazingly, I learned a little bit about this. But the words sort of, you know, the best business card you will ever have are really applicable here, aren’t they? Because somebody who has a book, you don’t need to leave them a business card. You leave them the book, they’ll find you. Even if you’ve got very little else in that book in terms of contact details, they will find you because a book says something about you. Ali, I’m going to sort of pose the, you know, is there one piece of. And I think you’ve already given some advice, but I’m sure there are other things and I know we’ve got some things that we’re going to be sort of pointing people towards, which is in our vault, which is in www.systemize.me. free stuff.Stuart Webb [00:11:32]:Tell us a little bit about some of the free, valuable services you provide to people.Ally Machete [00:11:38]:Well, we have a blog, of course. We publish new articles every month. So our blog is available for free at our website. Atthewriters ally.com you can find our newly launched library. And in the library we have links to the blog with all of those articles. We have a playlist of podcasts that I’ve been on. I’ve been on more than 50 podcasts. And so they can listen to those recordings or watch those videos and download a number of free resources that we have available.Ally Machete [00:12:08]:Checklists, a few mini Guides. I have a ton of stuff available for people. I’ve been in this business more than 20 years and I’ve accumulated some stuff. So I’ve really put it all together. We just launched this website. I’m very excited about having this, you know, the ability to put all of this stuff in one place to give to people.Stuart Webb [00:12:26]:And, and I, and I’ve had a look at some of the checklists and I must admit I, I was, I was really, really impressed. So look, if you haven’t captured all of the, the details of that, we will have links to, well, where you can find all this stuff and more stuff from alysystemize me forward slash free hyphen stuff. Yeah.Ally Machete [00:12:45]:Before you jump to the last question, I just wanted to add one thing.Stuart Webb [00:12:48]:We’re not even close to that yet. Don’t get excited.Ally Machete [00:12:52]:I also have a free gift that I prepared especially for your audience. And they can.Stuart Webb [00:12:56]:Oh, thank you.Ally Machete [00:12:57]:Yes, they can get that. If you go to offers.the writers ally.com rocketscience it is an evergreen video of my webinar called Don’t Write the Wrong Book. And it is about just that. What does it mean to write the right book? How do you avoid writing the wrong book? And a simplified step process for thinking through your book idea. Whether you have one idea you’re trying to choose, or if you’ve already started writing and you want to temperature check what you’re working on, it’ll help make sure that everything is strategically aligned in the way that we’re talking about today.Stuart Webb [00:13:27]:I will make sure that link is in the, in the vault, our vault, which is another valuable resource. But I will make sure that’s pointing straight to you. We, we will, we will get that to people. We are not yet at the end though, Ali, because we have more to go. Awesome. What, what you’ve just said. You’ve been in this business for 20 years, so that’s, that’s a huge amount of experience. But let’s, let’s talk about how you got here.Stuart Webb [00:13:52]:What is it? Was it, was it a realization that you just had to write? Was it the realization you didn’t write very well? What was it that brought you to understanding how to give such valuable advice? Was it a book? Was it a program? Was it a life experience that brought you this level of understanding of how to write a book?Ally Machete [00:14:11]:Well, Stuart, I am a lifelong dedicated book nerd. Really. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved writing and reading. It’s family legend that I learned to read at the age of three because I was frustrated that my parents just wouldn’t sit and read to me all day long, you know, God, they had had to go to work and like do things. But I started reading very early and making books out of construction paper and crayons and I would give them to like my neighbors and my friends. And I would tell people I was, I was a book publisher. And even as early as first grade, you know, you get into school and everyone’s always asking, what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be? And I would tell people I wanted to be a writer, a lawyer and an editor at Simon and Schuster.Stuart Webb [00:14:56]:Oh, wow.Ally Machete [00:14:58]:Yes. And you know, I have no idea where that came from. I’ll be totally honest, you know, like, why Simon and Schuster? Where did I pick that up? Goodness only knows. But it was something that I said and I stuck with it. I stuck with that love all the way through my academic career. I did, you know, yearbook and school paper and lit mag and all that kind of stuff. But was really in college where I started getting more serious about it. I started freelancing for pay as a writer as the Internet started becoming a thing and really opening up opportunities.Ally Machete [00:15:26]:And then of course, I did an internship at a small regional publisher while I was still in school in upstate New York. And after that, the big, big turning point was that I got that dream job and I got hired at Simon and Schuster.Stuart Webb [00:15:39]:Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow. But the greater challenge was then to go on and do it and show other people how to do that.Ally Machete [00:15:46]:That’s absolutely true. Yeah. So I spent some time there. I learned a ton, as you can imagine. Big five publishing. You know, that’s, that’s the Olympics of publishing. Like you really learn everything at the highest level. And I was also fortunate to be in particular in a department that was very nurturing and very supportive of its young people.Ally Machete [00:16:05]:So I got to really learn. Hands on. I acquired my first book for the company before I had been there a year, which is pretty much unheard of. And so I was able to just dive in and learn a lot about how it all worked. And then, you know, fast forward a few years, dot com bust happened, 9, 11 happened. A lot of things were changing in New York. I decided to step away for a little while. I thought I would wrap up.Ally Machete [00:16:29]:I was doing a part time master’s degree that had taken me a few years. I was real close. I thought, you know what, I’ll knock it out. I’ll take a Year, I’ll go full time, I’ll finish all my classes, I’ll do some freelancing, I and I’ll come back and maybe, you know, the economy will have calmed down and the market, the job market will have opened up again. And I loved working directly with the authors and running my own business so much that I never looked back.Stuart Webb [00:16:50]:Yeah, well done. Well done. Look, Alec, I’m going to have to say you’ve been asking some and or answering some brilliant questions. But there must be one question that you cannot get away from thinking. When is he going to ask me that killer question, the really important one? Well, I don’t know what that question is, so I’m just gonna have to ask you what is the killer question that I should have asked you by now? And obviously, well, you have the question, so you might as well answer it as well.Ally Machete [00:17:19]:Well, I think the killer question is one that most people maybe don’t ask because they assume, which is, should everybody have a book?Stuart Webb [00:17:26]:You know the question.Ally Machete [00:17:29]:Yeah, and the answer might surprise you because there are a lot of people out there who suggest that if you have a business, if you are an expert, you have to have a book, it is just a must have. And I do not agree with that at all. I think there are situations in which a book may not be right for your business. It really depends on what your strategy is and where you’re trying to go. Because as we’ve been talking about, the real power in a book is as a tool to be leveraged, right? It’s not just decoration for your zoom background, it’s something you’re going to use in your business.Stuart Webb [00:18:04]:Business.Ally Machete [00:18:05]:Not every business benefits from a book and not every business benefits from a book at any time. So there’s also a timing issue involved writing a book. As you know, Stuart, you’ve been involved. It’s a huge commitment of time, energy and money. And anything that you are saying yes to means you’re also saying no to other things, right? So, you know, one of the biggest misconceptions I think people have is this idea that, well, if every business owner has to have a book, I’m new to business, I’m still growing my business. If I write this book, that will help me establish myself. But you have to have a business to grow before a book can help you grow a business, right? It’s not the thing that gives you a business, it’s the thing that helps you level up what you already have. So if you’re not already at least a little, well, established, it might be too early for a book to really give you the kind of benefits that it would if you waited a little bit longer or if you’re in a situation where you have a choice to do I launch a new course? Do I do this big marketing push? Do I change this part of my business, or do I write a book? You want to think strategically.Ally Machete [00:19:09]:What is the thing that’s going to give you the most ROI where you need it first? And a book is not always the answer.Stuart Webb [00:19:17]:Do you know, it’s almost as if you are trying to say to people, you have to have a strategy why you are writing a book, know who your audience is and write the book for that audience. And if you’re still in the process of working out who what your business is about and who your audience is, maybe a book is not going to help you achieve that goal.Ally Machete [00:19:35]:Exactly right. Exactly right.Stuart Webb [00:19:38]:Hey, I think that is a fantastic and truly brilliant way to wrap this up. Because if there’s one thing that I think you’ve proven to us, Ali, is that you are an ally. You are somebody who is trying to think of the best for the authority, trying to think of the best way of helping that author achieve their goals, rather than just trying to pitch everybody on doing the same thing just for the sake of it. That’s a truly allied way of thinking. So thank you so much for bringing that perspective. And if you don’t mind me just taking two minutes from me, if you, you get such value from some of these, from some of these interviews from brilliant people like Ali, who’s bringing this wealth of knowledge. I would like to be able to send you an email once a week just to say who’s coming up on the podcast. And the only way you can get that email is if you join the blog, the email list, and that is to go to www.systemize.me.Stuart Webb [00:20:38]:subscribe. That’s a simple form. It takes you to. It needs two things. Your first name, your email address. I don’t want anything else. I just want to be able to send you an email. I just want to be able to address you as you and, and tell you about the brilliant stuff that’s coming up.Stuart Webb [00:20:50]:Ali, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us and being so, so, so honest with your advice and so, so helping us to think through just how we need to use books to be so intentional. Thank you for that time.Ally Machete [00:21:06]:It’s my pleasure, really. Thank you for having me. And you know, I like to say I’m a reader too. I want there to be better books out there for me too, you know. So I really do care is it.Stuart Webb [00:21:17]:Is a heart led business for somebody who’s been doing that since three years old. I guess you do need another one of those books to just have a look at least. At least one more time, don’t you? Thank you so much Ali. I really appreciate it.Ally Machete [00:21:32]:Thanks again. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

May 21, 202628 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Julia Felton (ep. 147)

Who is Julia?Julia Felton is a business consultant who has built a reputation for identifying the real issues behind her clients’ challenges. While companies often approach her with concerns about team dysfunction, lack of trust, and poor collaboration, Julia quickly uncovers that these surface symptoms stem from deeper underlying causes. With her insightful approach, she helps organizations move beyond treating just the symptoms—enabling teams to break free from silos, improve communication, and achieve the results they desire. Julia’s clients rely on her expertise to foster genuine trust and collaboration within their teams.Key Takeaways* Is your team chasing results but feeling disconnected? Julia Felton says it’s all about energy alignment, not just process. Slow down, reset, and watch collaboration grow.* Most trust issues in teams don’t come from lack of tools, but from not investing enough in relationships. Build social capital, even if it feels “frivolous”—it’s critical for flow.* True leadership isn’t about controlling everything. Julia Felton reminds us: empower your team, step back, and let the natural talents shine for real productivity.* Vision isn’t a one-time message. Keep communicating your purpose so everyone knows where you’re heading. As Julia Felton notes, clarity builds trust and connection.* Take inspiration from nature: humans, like herds, thrive when leadership is shared. Health, harmony, unity—let these guide your team to higher trust and adaptability.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Julia, subscribe to the newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.SUMMARY KEYWORDStrust issues, team building, rewilding leadership, misaligned energy, team dynamics, collaboration, silos in business, business productivity, meeting fatigue, leadership styles, performance paradox, shared leadership, empowerment, micromanagement, business culture, teamship, employee engagement, organizational trust, social capital, remote work challenges, communication in teams, business vision, talent management, role alignment, leveraging strengths, sustainable leadership, natural leadership, flow in teams, founder-led business, relationship buildingSPEAKERJulia Felton, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:01]:Hopefully. Hi, and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I’m delighted. Today I’ve been joined by Julia Felton. Julia is an expert in, well, helping to fix trust issues within teams using rewilding leadership. She’s really going to help us to understand exactly how we can rebuild those trust issues which so often dog startups, even rapidly scaling a growing company. So, Julia, welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science.Stuart Webb [00:01:01]:Five questions over coffee. I hope you’ve got your coffee in front of you. I’ve actually got a fruit tea at the moment, but that’s because it’s after Christmas. I try to be careful with my body.Julia Felton [00:01:12]:Well, me too, Stuart. I’m, I’ve got ginger and lemon here.Stuart Webb [00:01:15]:So I’ve been off your only way to live. Let’s start by understanding, you know, the sort of person you’re trying to help. You obviously, you’re obviously trying to help somebody that’s got a problem. But how do, how would you recognize them? What would they, what would they be saying? What would they be doing in order to sort of, you know, for you to be able to say, well, that’s exactly the sort of person I’m trying to help.Julia Felton [00:01:42]:Yeah, that’s such a great question. Because I think what typically happens is what people come to me with and what actually the problem is, are very different. And I think often what we find in business, isn’t it, we, we, we, we of treating the symptom rather than the cause. So sort of people come to me and they go, oh, my team’s not functioning properly, Julia. You know, and people don’t trust each other. There’s a lot of bickering going on, we’re not getting the results we want. You know, there’s people are working in silos, nobody collaborates together. Those are the sorts of things that my clients are saying.Julia Felton [00:02:19]:And my clients range from, you know, smaller SMEs up to larger corporates, you know, and this, these kinds of problems exist throughout many types of organizations. So anywhere where you’ve got people involved, really. Because at the end of the day, trust drives everything in business. Right.Stuart Webb [00:02:41]:So what would some of those, I mean, you just talked about sort of smaller SMEs, large corporates. I mean, they’ve tried everything before, haven’t they? They’ve done the courses, they’ve sent people off on the training courses, they’ve, they’ve done that, they’ve done the online stuff, they’ve done everything they can and it’s still not fixing it. So what are the sort of things that they are trying that you break through and you find that even having done this stuff, they’ve still got these issues.Julia Felton [00:03:08]:Sure. So I think if we distill it back down and we go to, well, what’s really the cause of what’s going on in the business? Rather the biggest challenge, if I was to sum it up like that, is it’s, it’s not this lack of skill or ambition or desire, but it’s actually all to do with misaligned energy. So we’ve got brilliant purpose driven leaders out there. They built often fast growing businesses, but somewhere along the way this momentum turns into mayhem, right? And the team’s busy, but it’s not productive. People, you know, having loads and loads of meetings. We know this meeting fatigue, right? The progress stalls, everyone’s working harder, but people aren’t working collectively together, they’re not pulling in the same direction. So I call that the performance paradox. Because what we’re seeing is companies chasing these results so hard, but they’ve become really disconnected from the very people and the energy that creates them.Julia Felton [00:04:08]:So what happens is these businesses start running on logic and process rather when what we really need is this connection and trust and flow, Flow. And so I think what I really see leaders craving is a much more natural, sustainable way of leading where we get everyone pulling in the same direction and we stop forcing the results and we start getting the results flowing naturally because everyone’s working in their right energy. And as you know, Stuart, you know, I’m very passionate about nature. I reference everything back to the natural world. And, and you know, when we look at the natural world, the natural world understands the ebb and flow of energy and how it goes inside cycles. And that’s what we’re not really seeing in business right now is leaders really understanding that. And it’s interesting, we’re recording this right after Christmas, right, where people have actually had an opportunity to kind of rest and re reset themselves for this year. But we tend to wait till Christmas, right.Julia Felton [00:05:10]:And we take a week or two weeks off, try and rest and reset and then we don’t. Then we try and go for another whole year and, and that’s not feasible for people.Stuart Webb [00:05:21]:So what are some of the things that you then introduce into the business in order for them to, to understand that it’s that, you know, to develop that ebb and flow. What is it you do to help them essentially reset on a more regular basis?Julia Felton [00:05:36]:Yeah, well, obviously as we, as we just talked about there, you know, reset the rhythm and flow and recovery. So for me, that’s actually about leaders taking time out to rest and relax and, and it’s that psychology of slowing down to speed up that, you know, instinctively we know that, but everything’s saying to us, oh, you know, if I, if I take the afternoon off, I’m not going to get everything done. But I don’t know about you, Stuart, but I know when I step away from my desk, if I’m really struggling with something, all of a sudden when I’m away from, from my work and what I’m doing, I get all these insights. So it’s about understanding that in order to get into flow, we actually have to go through a period of resetting ourselves and resting and stepping away from the problem in order to get back. You know, it’s a good old adage, isn’t it? You know, we get our best ideas in the shower, wherever it is, out on walks and stuff like that. So I think it’s about really purposefully crafting time into our weekly schedules to do that. Because I think most people, they go into the office, you know, foot to the metal, go, go, go all day and we get to the end of the day and then they’re like, I’m not even sure what I’ve accomplished because we’ve just been being that busy fool that, you know, you and I know, I’ve talked about, you know, we’re spending all this time doing things, but we’re not doing the right things that we need to do.Stuart Webb [00:07:05]:Yeah.Julia Felton [00:07:05]:So, you know, if we look at some of the mistakes that people are making around, this is the first thing we often see companies doing, is we put all these tools right. We’ve got problems. Like you said, you know, teams are working in silos, there’s no collaboration. So we throw tools at the problem. You know, we maybe buy, you know, a collaboration platform like Trello or Asana or something like that to try and make everyone work more effectively together. And that rarely solves the problem. Right. Or we send people on team building away days or training courses, and all of these can have some marginal gain for the business, but they don’t really get to the shifting the underlying energy or trust dynamics that are actually blocking performance.Julia Felton [00:07:52]:And for me, the way that we change those trust dynamics is actually by really slowing down and investing time in building relationships. It’s this importance of social capital within business. Right. And sometimes it seems a bit frivolous. Right. You know, oh, we, we’re stopping and we’re talking to somebody in the corridor. But I don’t know about you, but you know, in the days when we were all in the office and I was in the corporate world, I got all my information from those informal chats. That’s where you knew what was going on.Julia Felton [00:08:23]:Of course the trouble that we’ve got right now is with so many people working remotely, all of that informal communication you might want to say isn’t getting shared and you don’t know what’s going on in another team, which you would have found out because you walk with somebody and you went and grabbed lunch with them when we used to go out to the sandwich bars for lunch or whatever or you were making your coffee. So I think there’s a big problem there that we’re not spending enough time investing in building that social capital.Stuart Webb [00:08:54]:Yeah.Julia Felton [00:08:55]:And go. I’m sorry.Stuart Webb [00:08:57]:No indeed. I’m just agreeing with you. Absolutely agreeing with you.Julia Felton [00:09:00]:Yeah. And I think one of the other mistakes I’m seeing companies make is that they, when things aren’t going well, there’s a tendency, particularly if it’s a smaller founder led business for the founders want to take everything back, to control everything. Right. You know, if I control everything, it’s going to work better, better. More meetings, more KPIs, more oversight. But actually all that’s doing is draining the founders energy. But more importantly it’s signaling to your team members that you don’t trust them. We’re not allowing them to get on.Julia Felton [00:09:32]:They don’t feel empowered because there’s so much micromanagement. And actually really what our team members are looking for is for us to trust them and to empower them to get the job done and then get out their way and leave them to do it. And when we’ve got that, then people will get on and do the job. And then the other lens that I often see going on here is when again when we’ve got problems we want to fix the people, we always think it’s a people problem. And rather than think about, well, what is the potential our team members have got to unlock, how can we leverage them more effectively in the business? What new responsibilities can we give them? What new opportunities can we give them to help them thrive? You know, can we redefine their roles to give them a role which is more naturally aligned to what they love to do? Because we all know we’ve got more energy for the things we love to do. Right. And so if your role, you’re spending 50% of your time doing things you don’t love to do, in it, you’re never going to be as productive as if you’ve got a role maybe where you’ve got 80 or 90% of things time doing the things you love. Now, the caveat I would just say against this is we’re all going to have to do things in our role that we don’t love.Julia Felton [00:10:50]:That’s just life. But, you know, we want to spend the vast proportion of our time and when we can start redefining roles so that people do that, it makes a massive difference to their performance, their, you know, their productivity and then ultimately the productivity of the business. So, you know, I reflect back often to my corporate role where I didn’t understand about energy and the best roles that people could go in. And I had this data manager, her name’s Jane. And every single appraisal I was like, jane, you need to get better at spreadsheets, you know, because, you know, you’re running the data center and that’s what you need to do. Failing to realize that her complete zone of genius and what she bought to my business was actually her ability to rally the troops around. She was a great collaborator, a great people person, and I didn’t leverage her skills effectively. So she wasn’t as happy as she could be and I wasn’t getting the best results out of her.Stuart Webb [00:11:46]:Yeah, I know. I remember very early on, in one of the first businesses that I, that I founded, somebody took me home on time. It was one of the non executives that sort of came in to help the business, said, are you asking the people that you’re working with anything about, you know, what they do when they go home? And I, I sort of looked at, I’ll be honest, I looked at him. What’s that got to do with this? As in somehow, you know, he was talking complete nonsense. He said, you’ll find those people go home and they run scout groups, they run, they run charity bazaars, they run charities and they run them brilliantly. All of those skills are open to you. If you only knew about them. And I looked at him and thought, that’s a huge insight that I’ve got to think about.Stuart Webb [00:12:30]:And it was back to what you were saying there. It’s about communication, isn’t it? I haven’t bothered to say to these people, what else are you up to? And, you know, they turn us, oh, I run a scout group. Are you good at admin? And that’s a really useful thing to know because oftentimes people come into work and they sort of drop all these skills over their shoulder at the front door and then walk in and sort of just come in and do their job, don’t they? Because they don’t think they have to bring any of those skills with them because I’m at work now. And then they go home, they pick up all those skills again and they take them home and they use them very, very effectively. So sometimes it does mean that we’ve just got to speak to each other, ask what’s going on and then go, wow, that’s a really useful skill that we could use and then learn to let them get on with it.Julia Felton [00:13:17]:Yeah. And then, and then they feel more empowered, they feel trusted, you know, they know that they’ve been heard and you know, it’s a win, win all round at the end of. But yet so important for us to, to really know our team members, like you say, what motivates them, what’s inspires them and what the skills are that they’ve got that they’re not bringing to the workplace that we could really leverage more effectively.Stuart Webb [00:13:39]:Yeah, brilliant. Julia, I’m sure that there’s a. And I’m. I know you’ve given us some very valuable information to stick into our vault, which is at www.systemize.me/free stuff. Gosh, there’s an awful lot of words in there. Immediately after the longish break, talk to us about what you’ve got available for people to be able to sort of advice, guidance that you could give people which they can tap into. And all of this will be available in the vault.Julia Felton [00:14:14]:Yeah, sure. So where I always suggest that people start is I’ve got a turbocharge your team quiz, which you can get at businesshorsepower.com forward/quiz. And it’s. What is it? It’s about 15 questions that just really helps you identify where your team’s energy is getting drained. And what I often talk about is something called Team Ship, which we’ll get onto in a minute when we talk about books and stuff. But Team Ship is about how do you. How do you run your business? Rather than leadership, it’s all about teamship, people getting together. And then when you take the quiz, you actually get a free copy of my ebook on how to create a business that runs on teamship and the three pillars that actually underpin that.Julia Felton [00:15:01]:And then anyone who’s taken the quiz is also welcome to join me for a Turbocharger quiz audit where I help you unpack the results of the quiz in more detail so that you can start to put together a kind of a short plan on how to how you want to change things in your business going forward.Stuart Webb [00:15:18]:And I can, I can assure you because I’ve been on, had a look, good look at that stuff. If you go to systemize me free stuff, you’ll see all of the details of that. And Julia is really good at this stuff. So you will be pleasantly surprised when you see the level of detail that this goes into. Julia, yes, you’re right. We’re about to get on to other things. What was it that brought you to your understanding? You talked about your corporate career, you’ve talked a little bit about your passion for nature. How did you get to now books, courses, programs that enabled you to understand that teamship was actually the thing which needed to drive your day to day existence in your life now.Julia Felton [00:16:10]:Yeah, such a great question because I think, you know, once I left the corporate world, you know, like so many of us do, you know, you see things in the rear view mirror, right, that you didn’t see when you were in it. And you know, I look back and I just got really frustrated with the way that we were running and leading businesses. And as everything I looked to nature and horses were a big part of my life. And what I looked to was the way that horses actually operate as a unity in unity, you know, that a team is a horse herd is always concerned with the health, harmony and unity of the herd, how to keep it all together. And they employ something called, I call shared leadership at the time. And shared leadership is this concept of as a leader you don’t need to know everything. And let’s face it, you know, in the good old days before Mr. Google, you know, and we were in the industrial era, it was probably true that the factory manager, they did know everything, right? But that doesn’t exist today.Julia Felton [00:17:13]:So I think for any leader today, they want to know that it’s okay to share the leadership with each other. And horse herds do this so well. And we see this in a lot of other dynamics of animals in nature, but they share the leadership. They realize that not one animal can keep the whole herd safe. So in the horse herd, they share the leadership between everybody. But there is a lead marine and a lead stallion within the herd that, you know, have pacific roles and then everyone else in the herd looks for the danger. And I was like, well that would be so much better if that was a model that happened in business where everybody in the organization is responsible for the health and safety of the organization. So even though you are, you know, on the production line or, you know, you’re in the admin team or whatever it might be, you still have a duty of care to ensure that the business is going to stay successful.Julia Felton [00:18:08]:So if you see a competitor doing something, you should be able to speak up and say, did anyone else notice that going on over there? That could be a threat for us, you know, so it’s all these eyes and ears looking out. So it was when I read Keith Freshley’s book, Never Lead Alone. He t. He introduces this concept of teamship, which is effectively shared leadership. And I was like, it gave me kind of a framework and some language to use. So I’ve now created my own framework. It’s called the unbridled Teamship roadmap, which helps leaders create this high level of trust, adaptability and shared energy within their teams that we see within, particularly within horse herds, for example. So Keith Farazi, I have to acknowledge him, he kind of gave me the language for this, but it was my life experience of partnering with the horses and seeing things in the natural world, particularly when I lived in Africa, that that kind of bought these two worlds together.Julia Felton [00:19:03]:And I was like, yeah, this is a new framework for how we need to lead in the 21st century that is just going to be much more compelling and engaging for people.Stuart Webb [00:19:13]:And I think you’re right. The, the, the, the, the days of the command and control have largely gone, haven’t they? Because there are so too many, too many moving parts, too quickly moving for you to be able to make, to be able to control everything. And so unless you’re prepared to allow the leadership to spread, it will be impossible.Julia Felton [00:19:38]:And you just become a bottleneck as well as the leader. If you try and keep it all together, right, because everything’s moving so fast, you’ve just not got the capacity to make that many decisions all day, every day. So we’ve got to share it out. Otherwise your business is likely to, to stumble and falter just because you’ve just not got the brain power to do it. All right? So, you know, you can actually end up being the biggest risk factor in your business if you don’t share the leadership.Stuart Webb [00:20:06]:Yeah, that’s the challenge. So, Julie, there must be one question that I haven’t yet asked you that you really want me to ask, which will sort of open up, open up the eyes of people who are currently thinking, this is kind of me, but I’m not sure what is the question that you think I should have asked. And, and as you obviously know the question, you probably also know the answer. So what would the answer to that question be?Julia Felton [00:20:35]:Well, I hope I know the answer. I think it. I think it’s this reframe about how do we reframe leadership? Because we’re still seeing leadership through this lens of performance and results. And I get that. We’ve got to get that. But actually, how can we reframe leadership to be the role of a leader is more about how do you direct and orchestrate the energy of the people around you? Because performance is the byproduct of where our energy goes. So if we’re really clear on where our energy goes, where our attention is going, then we can get better results. And we see this all the time, don’t we, where you get leaders that something happens and they go, you know, they go in.Julia Felton [00:21:17]:This is frenetic, scattered energy all over the place. And that ripples through the team. It causes confusion and nobody knows what they’re doing, and everyone starts running around like headless chickens. And we’ve seen this so often in businesses, you know, when this firefighting throws in, but actually it just causes disarray. And how would it be if the leader recognized in. Actually, in that moment is the moment that you need to become more grounded, more coherent and really pause to go back to the rest and set and pause and. And just be discerning about what’s going on? Is this something that I really need to get frantic about right now, or is this something that I can just slow down, pay attention to and realize there’s different ways I can approach it? And that kind of coherence is very, very contagious within the team, and it slows all the team down. And then we’ve got.Julia Felton [00:22:14]:We can be just a lot more discerning then about the decisions that we really need to take. So I think for from when we start looking at leadership, my question would be that you didn’t ask is, you know, what if leadership isn’t about performance anymore, it’s about how do we orchestrate the ebb and flow of the energy of the team so that everyone can work from their natural stance. And therefore we’re shifting from this control stance to getting connection. We’re moving from burnout to flow, and we’re moving into really true leadership that is sustainable for everybody.Stuart Webb [00:22:50]:And do you therefore think, and I’m sorry, that I’m going to ask you a question when you’ve just answered a question, do you think in order to sort of support that the leader has to have been able to transmit their vision for the business to everybody. So that when they get into that state of flow, they’re able to operate without constantly referring back and saying, why are we doing this again? I’ve forgotten.Julia Felton [00:23:14]:Yeah, absolutely. That’s 100% at the top of everything. If nobody knows where they’re going, nobody knows where we’re going to end up. You know, I often when my clients, you know, I say, well, you know, there’s so many different ways that we could maybe get to. I’m in the uk, so I could get to London at the end of. End of this call, right? But I got to know I’m going to London, otherwise the team will end up in Edinburgh or somebody will end up in Dublin or somebody will fly to New York. Right? And I think having that really clear purpose and vision absolutely underpins everything because it’s. That, for me, is the glue that pulls everyone in the right direction.Julia Felton [00:23:48]:And we need to remember that. We need to continually articulate that to come back to communication. It’s very easy for people to go, I’ve told everyone the vision and we expect people to remember it, right? But we have to be embedded into absolutely everything. Everything we do day in, day out needs to be aligned with the vision because people don’t remember, you know, and I know from, you know, having run workshops with clients, I. I remember I run the same workshop, I hosted the same venue, like, four, no, five or six times in a row, and my client attended as a guest each time because it was her venue and it was a particular workshop. Actually, I was running with the horses. And she said to me on the sixth workshop, she goes, that bit you said about xyz, that was a genius, Julia. And I was like, God, that has been in every single workshop.Stuart Webb [00:24:36]:It’s such cool content.Julia Felton [00:24:38]:And she hadn’t heard it. And of course, this is what we forget about communication. People only hear what they want to hear when they want to hear it. So we’ve got to keep repeating the vision where we want to go to the strategy. And sometimes I think as leaders, we. You can feel a bit like a broken record. We’re like, I’ve told everyone that. But people only hear it and get it when they want to hear it.Julia Felton [00:25:00]:Yes, absolutely. Underpins everything, Stuart. Yeah, And. And I think, you know, when we put that clear purpose, that really builds trust because people know, right? People have got that clarity about where we’re going. We know what the outcomes are, we know where we’re heading. So people have got trust that what’s going to happen. We. We’ve got a.Julia Felton [00:25:18]:We’ve got a vision, we’ve got a plan. And so that really helps.Stuart Webb [00:25:20]:Wonderful, wonderful. Julia, this has been really, really, really wonderful. It’s a really great way to sort of. For me to kick off what we do this year. Just one small thing from me, if you don’t mind.Julia Felton [00:25:36]:Yeah.Stuart Webb [00:25:37]:I send out about one email a week on the weeks where we’re doing a podcast, and it just. It just tells you who’s coming up and why you need to get in front of the. And be live. We’ve had a number of people, tens of people watching this today. So they got that from, you know, they’ve sat at the desk. They hopefully some of them have gone away and thought, I’ve got some problems I need to resolve. So if you would like to be one of those people who gets the email that sort of says, somebody’s coming up, go to www.systemize. that’s S Y S T E M I S E.com forward slash, subscribe.Stuart Webb [00:26:13]:Simple form. It asks you for just your first name and an email address. I don’t want any more than that because I just want to send you an email which basically says it’s coming up, so please go do that. Julia, this has been really enlightening to start with. Wonderful reset of what we should be doing as leaders. Thinking about trying to sort of allow the energy and allow the natural talents to sort of dominate rather than somehow trying to force everybody down into a narrow path in order to sort of make things happen. So thank you so much for bringing that to us, and I really appreciate you spending some time with it. No problem at all.Julia Felton [00:26:48]:Thank you so much.Stuart Webb [00:26:49]:Thank you very much.Julia Felton [00:26:50]:Thank you so much indeed, Stuart. Really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.Stuart Webb [00:27:19]:So I can talk to you. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

May 7, 202648 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Patrick Van der Burght (ep. 146)

Who is Patrick?Patrick Van der Burght’s journey began over 25 years ago, when he first discovered the transformative power of understanding human behaviour and research. Awed by how empowering and effective these insights were—without the need to lie or cheat—he quickly became passionate about sharing them. Today, as a sought-after keynote speaker, Patrick relishes witnessing audiences experience their own “aha” moments, just as he did decades ago. His mission is to help others unlock their potential by waking up to the profound impact of his teaching, sparking realization, growth, and change wherever he speaks.Key TakeawaysThe Secret Science Behind Getting a YES—Without Being Manipulative1/ Ever felt “icky” trying to get someone to say yes? Turns out, ethical persuasion isn’t about tricking—it’s about understanding human behavior. Patrick Van der Burght dropped some serious knowledge on this in his chat with Stuart Webb on “It’s Not Rocket Science.” 👀☕️2/ Persuasion isn’t just for salespeople. It’s for anyone who wants their ideas accepted—bosses, parents, partners, even project managers. If you want to move people (literally and figuratively), these insights are gold.💡3/ Fun fact: The World Economic Forum ranked leadership & social influence as TOP business skills for the next 5 years. And persuasion came in at #3 on hiring wishlists. Why? Because it’s POWERFUL.✨4/ But here’s where most people mess up: They use random “strategies” or lengthy logical pitches, thinking more info = more yeses. Uh…no. Patrick Van der Burght: “You might accidentally talk people OUT of saying yes!” 😅5/ Why? Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman says our brains make 90–95% of decisions FAST and unconsciously (System 1)—not by analyzing facts, but relying on shortcuts.Your audience has an attention span SHORTER THAN A GOLDFISH. They won’t analyze your 2-minute pitch! 🐠6/ The trick? Use the 7 Universal Principles of Persuasion (from Dr. Cialdini):* Reciprocity: Give first—genuinely. Free PDF, no strings attached? Magic.* Liking: Compliment, connect, be authentic.* Unity: Create community bonds—“we’re in this together.”* Social Proof: Show reviews, testimonials (the detailed ones count!)* Authority: Let OTHERS introduce your expertise. It’s more credible.* Consistency: Get small commitments first. People stick to what they start.* Scarcity: Highlight what they’ll LOSE by not acting. We value what’s rare.7/ Pro tip: Five-star reviews everywhere can actually REDUCE credibility. Aim for an average of 4.2–4.7. Realness wins trust! ⭐️8/ If you’re endlessly pumping time & money in, hoping for incremental “yes” rates, STOP! Persuasion science can 10X your results—without hurting your integrity or reputation.9/ Want to dive deeper into ethical persuasion and grab some of Patrick Van der Burght’s free stuff? Visit EthicalPersuasion.com or check out his podcast, “Ethical Persuasion Unlocked.”10/ Last word from Patrick Van der Burght: “If you want those yeses that were always yours to have, learn the science.”Ready to persuade with integrity?👇#EthicalPersuasion #SalesTips #Leadership #DrCialdini #BehavioralScience #Marketing #SmallBusiness—Drop a comment: Which principle are you going to test out first?Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Patrick, subscribe to the newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.SUMMARY KEYWORDSethical persuasion, persuasion techniques, sales strategies, Cialdini principles, reciprocity, social proof, authority, scarcity, consistency, liking principle, unity principle, behavioral science, Daniel Kahneman, decision making, system one thinking, system two thinking, attention span, sales psychology, B2B persuasion, ethical sales, lead generation, business coaching, influence tactics, customer testimonials, compliance, negotiation skills, persuasive communication, loss aversion, marketing psychology, consumer behaviorSPEAKERPatrick Van Der Burght, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:32]:Hi there, and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I have in front of me my coffee. This is, this is going to keep me going as I’m chatting today to Patrick Vanderburg. Patrick is. Well, Patrick’s an expert in how you get to go, to get somebody to say yes ethically. Now, if you’ve ever been in sales, if you’ve ever been trying to help anybody understand the need to say yes, and you only feel dirty and somehow manipulative when you try and do it, this is getting somebody to do that by ethically helping them to understand how they are going to be benefited from, from your product, your service, from working with you. So, Patrick, I’m really delighted to welcome you here to talk about the.Stuart Webb [00:01:20]:This Cini method. And I’m doing delighted you managed to make a few minutes available to us in order to talk to us. So welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee.Patrick Van der Burght [00:01:32]:Thank you for inviting me, Stuart. I’m excited to be here. And I remember quite clearly when I first was introduced to this and I was learning the insights and human behavior, the research, how amazing that was and how empowering that was. And I couldn’t believe how, you know, how potent, how powerful it is, and you didn’t have to lie or cheat to make it to work either. And I love seeing that in, you know, when I do a keynote and, you know, people are starting to wake up to the fact of what I’m actually teaching them, you see, the eyes go bigger and I know they’re having that same realization that I had, goodness, 25, 26 years ago. So while we can’t see our audience, of course I’m hoping those eyes are getting a little bigger in the, in the time that we’ve got together.Stuart Webb [00:02:24]:I absolutely agree with you, Patrick. And, and people, if you’re watching at the moment, look, please, if you have questions whilst we’re talking, or indeed after we finish, if you come to the recording of this and you’re interested in getting some more information and you wanted to understand, we’ll talk about how you can get some free stuff from PA Patrick. But also if you want to drop questions or comments into the chat below, we will answer them for you. So you get sort of free consultancy immediately from an expert like Patrick. So, but Patrick, let’s start by trying to sort of set the scene. Let’s understand what we’re talking about. You have been working in this field for a while, so what is it? Who is it you’re trying to reach. I, I mentioned salespeople, but it’s not just sales, is it? It could be anybody trying to sort of help understand a person problem and help sort of work with somebody who needs to better understand what they’re trying to do themselves.Patrick Van der Burght [00:03:19]:Yeah, ethical persuasion really is a soft skill that we all need. And as a matter of fact, the World Economic Forum did a study that they published last January looking at thousands of companies in terms of what businesses need moving forward in the next five years. And leadership and social influence was just another word of it. For, for ethical persuasion had been increased in priority from position number four, which was in the previous report, to position number three. And also another study done by CashNet, which was published by Forbes that looked at 17 million job listings in terms of what businesses are asking for in their new employees. And persuasion was also ranked there, number three. And it is a skill that helps us professionally, but also privately and simply put, whenever we’re trying to get an idea accepted or get somebody to buy into what we’re suggesting or asking for, and that can be sale, it doesn’t have to be whenever we’re trying to make that request and there’s someone in the middle that needs to agree with that. And you’re relying on your ability to be persuasive in terms of how quickly you will move to your goals or move to your boss’s goals.Patrick Van der Burght [00:04:40]:But that also applies privately. If you try to get your kids to clean up their room, you’ll need to be persuasive. And if you want your partner to really go to that holiday destination in the coming summer, then you’re going to have to be persuasive. So this comes back everywhere. And that’s the beauty of it. You can use it in both in business and privately and ethically without having to, you know, bend or tarnish your integrity.Stuart Webb [00:05:09]:So we’re talking about a way to help you get your message across to somebody to sell somebody on your idea. So you might be a project manager trying to persuade a customer or a team member in order to sort of meet your timeline. You might be a salesperson trying to sell your product. You could be the CEO attempting to persuade an entire company that the strategy you’ve got is worth coming. This is applicable to everybody. And I think it’s important to recognize, as you just said, that you don’t just use these skills at work, you use these skills when you get home from, get home from work. And you might find yourself in the situation where your partner is trying to Persuade you to eat that salad rather than the steak you want. So, you know, they are probably going to be wanting to try and sell you on something that you recognize probably is good for you, but you don’t want to go there.Stuart Webb [00:06:00]:So these are really important skills. So what is it you find that people have done? I mean, what are the, one of the routes people have tried? I mean, I’ve known that I’ve tried sort of, you know, processes. I’ve tried buying into people sort of, you know, this 16 step method to get somebody to say yes. And we’ve all tried these things. What is it they’ve tried to do before they come across something like you and the method that you’re, you’re now you’re no teaching.Patrick Van der Burght [00:06:28]:Well, I suppose we should recognize that of course, everybody tries lots and lots of different things to see what works. Right. And so in different industries we’ve bumped into particular things that we somehow were figured out that worked, strategies that worked. And we don’t really understand why they worked, they just do. And actually that’s exactly what Dr. Robert Cialdini, my partner, how he started with all this. He became a university professor in the late 70s and he was fascinated with the request process. What makes an individual say yes to another person’s request? And how can it be that I can make a request one way and get a small amount of yeses and I can ask basically the same request but in a different way and I get a lot more yeses.Patrick Van der Burght [00:07:25]:He was fascinated by that. And he realized at the time that there was, back then in the late 70s, there was already nearly 50 years worth of scientific research on persuasion. But it was all laboratory stuff, laboratory experiments and put somebody in a controlled environment and then sort of experiment on them. And so he realized that, you know, if he really wanted to know how, how this worked, he would have to go into the real world where the battles of persuasion and influence are fought every single day. And so he did something that was unheard of for a scientist at that time. He took three years off and he, he, with disguised identity and disguised intent, he enrolled in as many new employee training courses could possibly get access to. Because he, you know, like I mentioned, in every industry we figure out a lot of trial and error. We figure out some things that work for us.Patrick Van der Burght [00:08:30]:And so he collected all these strategies from all these different industries. And all these industries all, all told how different they were. Right? And the departments would tell them how different they were. As in the people in sales would say, oh, what we do in advertising is so, or what we do in sales so different than what they do in advertising. And the people in advertising would say, oh, what we do is so different than what happens in marketing. And marketing would do the same with hr. So they were all trying to convey how different they were, but Dr. Cialdini actually looked for what was it that was similar in those strategies.Patrick Van der Burght [00:09:09]:What is it that makes it work? So, you know, when you say, you know, what do people often try? I think we, we try a lot, a lot, a lot of different things and we waste a lot of time and resources and we sometimes bump into something that we, that we learn works and then we tend to go with that. The problem is that sometimes we also land on strategies that are not exactly ethical and then we’re risking our brand and our reputation, which nowadays can be very quickly destroyed. And what can also happen is that when we don’t know the science, that sometimes accidentally. And this happens so much more often than you’d realize, sometimes people use an argument and they’re actually very effectively working against what they’re trying to achieve. And so that happens all the time as well.Stuart Webb [00:10:03]:Yeah. So this is where we get to what I hope is going to be the valuable piece of advice that you’re going to live with. Leave with us Patrick. And, and for those people who are gonna, there’s, there’s some free stuff that we’re gonna put from Patrick in our vault. So if you go to systemize me forward slash free hyphen stuff, you’ll find some offers for, from Patrick where he’s gonna, he’s gonna be able to walk you through some of this stuff. But I’m gonna ask you. So, Patrick, what can you tell us about the ethical persuasion that Dr. Cialdini has? I’m not gonna say it’s discovered.Stuart Webb [00:10:37]:I mean, he’s, he’s, he’s using human psychology and he’s understanding human psychology. So he’s discovered how people react to this stuff and how you can use these persuasive methods. So would you mind just sort of giving that valuable sort of high level. How do you, how do you do this sort of thing so that people get interested? And then hopefully, as I say, we’ll, we’ll be, we’ll be grabbing hold of some of your free stuff. So just walk us through an example, if you like, of how do you get somebody to say yes ethically?Patrick Van der Burght [00:11:08]:Okay. So it all depends on the situation. So it’s hard to say, oh, this is one way how you do that. But I think.Stuart Webb [00:11:14]:Exactly.Patrick Van der Burght [00:11:16]:Or your audience would. Would gain a lot from if we first discussed how human beings actually make decisions. And then from there, it then starts making sense, why these principles are so powerful and we can do a quick run.Stuart Webb [00:11:29]:Great way of doing it. Great way of doing it. Great way of doing it. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, great.Patrick Van der Burght [00:11:35]:So when it comes to decision making, I’m going to lean on the work of a professor. Daniel Kahneman was a professor in psychology and a behavioral scientist, and he won.Stuart Webb [00:11:45]:A Nobel Prize, if I remember rightly.Patrick Van der Burght [00:11:48]:Absolutely. He won a Nobel Prize in 2002 in economics, which is a little unexpected. Right. Behavioral scientist wins Nobel Prize in Economics. I mean, what can you come up with in behavioral science that has such an impact on economics that you win a Nobel Prize for it? Well, a lot of his research was about decision making, and decisions shape economics. So that’s where the link is. So Daniel Kahneman explains, when it comes to decision making, your brain, your audience’s brain has two parts, System one and system two. System one is fast.Patrick Van der Burght [00:12:28]:It’s an unconscious brain. It operates outside of conscious control, and we use it for everyday decisions. It’s automatic, and it largely works on shortcuts, rules of thumb. So, for example, you’re shopping for something that you have no idea about how it works or what makes it a good product or not. And so you could delay your decision and you could go hit the books in the library, and for months on end, you could read books about that particular topic, then come back to the store and then make an educated decision. But chances are you haven’t got the time for that. So perhaps a shortcut pops up in the back of your head and a shortcut says expensive equals good.Stuart Webb [00:13:14]:Yes.Patrick Van der Burght [00:13:15]:Right. We’ve learned from experience. Often if we spend a bit more money, then chances are we’ll get something that’s better, lasts longer, better suited to purpose. And so in that moment, you might say, you know what? I’m just going to spend a little bit more money. And then I’ll probably have done the right thing. And you know what? That’s exactly what will happen. You will probably have done the right thing. Because these shortcuts, they stick with us because they work most of the time, but inevitably, they don’t work all the time.Patrick Van der Burght [00:13:49]:Sometimes expensive things are still rubbish, right? But it is very attractive to follow these shortcuts. The rule expensive equals good allows us a path to a quicker decision. Right? And so there’s other shortcuts like that. And intuitively, we know these as well. One for Example is if a lot of other people are doing it, then it must be the right thing to do. Right? And so that’s how system one works. Let’s move to system two for a moment. So system two, on the other hand, is a slow brain.Patrick Van der Burght [00:14:28]:Takes slow, you know, takes time to process. It costs a lot of energy, costs a lot of effort. And system two is conscious thinking. And because it takes a lot of effort, Daniel Kahneman actually referred to it as the lazy controller. It doesn’t actually want to engage. It’s quite happy to take the decisions of system one unless there’s, you know, alarm bells going off. So system two is our logical brain, right? It can look at all the information in the situation and then we can come up with the most rational decision based on that. So let’s say if we’re comparing two washing machines, or we need to make a decision, or somebody comes at us with a logical proposal for us to dissect that, we need system two.Patrick Van der Burght [00:15:16]:Great. Now there’s a caveat with system two. System two depends on our attention.Stuart Webb [00:15:26]:And.Patrick Van der Burght [00:15:26]:We have a limited budget of attention every single day. And so to give you an example, parking a car in a tight parking spot, that requires system two. You can imagine if you’re not paying attention, if you don’t have attention, you’re not going to do a great job parking a car in a tight spot. So Daniel Kahneman demonstrates back in 2002 that 90%, that’s 90. 90% of our decisions are made by System 1 automatically and outside our conscious control. And now it said that that’s more like 95%, possibly even higher. And so here a couple of problems bubble up. First of all, you might ask, why is this percentage increasing? Well, that has to do with our attention span.Patrick Van der Burght [00:16:18]:As I said, System two is reliant on attention. Our attention span was 20 minutes in the 80s. Do you know what the attention span of the famous goldfish is, Stuart?Stuart Webb [00:16:30]:Yeah, it’s a lot less than 20 minutes. And it’s very close to my attention span, which is about 22 seconds, 9.Patrick Van der Burght [00:16:38]:Seconds, supposedly for the goldfish. Our attention span is now 7 seconds. Yeah, we’ve been beaten by the goldfish. Right. And so system two relies on our attention. And so this, this brings us to the big problem that we have in business and privately as well. But let’s concentrate on business. When you’re sitting there and you’re thinking, okay, how am I going to convince this, let’s say in lead generation that doesn’t know me yet, how am I going to convince them to start communicating with me through, let’s say social media, post or flyer, you send out, that sort of stuff.Patrick Van der Burght [00:17:21]:Or maybe you’re thinking how when I’m actually doing a sales presentation to a person, group of people, how am I going to convince them that our product is right for them and, and you know, their trust is not misplaced in us. Right. And that they, they, they can avail themselves of, of our services or our product, be loyal to us. When we are con, when we are thinking about how we’re going to convince other people. You’re thinking that’s conscious thought. And so at that moment you’re using system two, your logical, rational part of the brain. And the problem is that that part of the brain tends to come up with the arguments, the rationale, why you should listen to me, why you should accept what I’m proposing to you. And that type of information would need system two in the other person to take care of it or to analyze it and to process it.Patrick Van der Burght [00:18:22]:And our audience doesn’t have the time for it anymore.Stuart Webb [00:18:26]:Our audience is using system one and they have seven seconds to grasp your message. And you’ve got a message which is two minutes long, haven’t you?Patrick Van der Burght [00:18:35]:Yeah. But also you raise information that just does not qualify as information System one can use as in a shortcut type of information.Stuart Webb [00:18:48]:Yeah.Patrick Van der Burght [00:18:49]:And so what happens is that we actually cause more uncertainty in our audience and they push back from you, from you and your wonderful genuinely good for them value proposal and they decide not to decide. And so I would argue that if you, I know, let’s say you make a thousand proposals, right. You get a certain amount of yeses out of those. And the other people didn’t go along with your proposal, your request. Right. So some people might have just straight out told you, no, it’s not for me. Other people might have told you other things. Oh, it’s too expensive, got to talk to my partner, come back next week.Patrick Van der Burght [00:19:34]:You know, all these sorts of things. I would argue that out of all the no’s you got, there is a much larger percentage than you can imagine that weren’t actually nos, they were indecision. And they could have been yes, had you provided the right types of information. And this is where the transition to the principles of persuasion come in. Is that the principles of persuasion the Dr. Cialdini identified or qualify as system one information. Does that make sense so far?Stuart Webb [00:20:09]:It certainly does. It certainly does. And you can see it, as you’ve said, in, in every situation where people are in this situation, they have thought and they start providing lots of information. You can almost watch business people, people who are buying services start to glaze over as they have to think, oh, I’m going to have to engage my brain, I don’t have time for this now. I would prefer not to have to all this information. So would you mind just going away please because I just don’t want to have to deal with this. Thank you very much. And that’s the end of the conversation, isn’t it?Patrick Van der Burght [00:20:44]:Yeah. And maybe, maybe in, I mean of course, to some extent we are of course successful, right? If we’ve been in business for a long period of time, of course we’re making money, we’re making profit, we’re making payroll, otherwise we wouldn’t been there anymore. So to some extent we’re successful because we figured out a couple of little strategies that have worked for us. But now imagine that your one little strategy is, or two strategies you might have uncovered is, is one out of a dozen that are one principles of persuasion. And there’s seven of those. There’s so many more strategies that would make it easier for people to make a yes decision. And so without it, you’re, you’re losing so much time, resources, competitive advantage, not knowing the science. It’s a, it’s a little bit like an architect trying to build a skyscraper without knowing the science.Patrick Van der Burght [00:21:40]:Right. The results are not going to be so great. But yeah, the problem is with a lot of, or with everybody that doesn’t know the science, they don’t actually know, they’re in agony. They have no idea that, you know, and they, you know, they might do lead generating efforts and just pour more money in it to create the same small results, just more of them just because they invested more in it. But if you actually use the science, your success rate would be where it really should have been all that time. And so by learning some science we can actually get the yeses that were always ours to have.Stuart Webb [00:22:17]:Do you know, I’m very aware of the fact that too many times people are not necessarily. And it comes back to a background that I’ve got in science as well. People don’t test their ideas, they just, they just look at it and go, well, that worked, we’ll do more of the same. And sometimes doing more of the same is crazy because you will get the same results, only bigger. And, and if the results you have got is only a tiny, tiny increase in your percentage profit and you pour more money at a strategy and you get a Tiny. Another small increase, then that’s not really tested to sort of find the best way, is it? That’s just sort of, okay, I’ve done one thing, I’m going to try and get the same result, but. But I’m doing it the same way. You can’t get a different result by just carrying on doing the same thing.Stuart Webb [00:23:04]:I’m very. But I’m really bought into the idea that you’ve sort of given us here, which is about scientific testing, about, you know, using these methods to actually trial these things to make it work for us.Patrick Van der Burght [00:23:15]:Yeah, and you hit an interesting point on the head there that, you know, sometimes we hear things and, you know, bless us for doing this interview and podcast. People might get some ideas from there, from here, and I hope they use it and hope they profit from it. But there’s a lot of subtle nuances that, you know, if you pick up a little bit of a clue from something, you might be doing something that works and it works a lot better than you used to do. And then you’re sort of, oh, great, now I’ve got it. But you don’t actually understand the subtle nuances that it would amplify the effects. So you’re still missing out. So you might be thinking, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, reciprocity, we got to give people stuff, right? Most people have figured that out, but the amount of people that get that wrong is enormous and easy. Example, there’s lots of businesses that have a, you know, a free ebook on their website, right? Oh, we have a wonderful ebook for you.Patrick Van der Burght [00:24:13]:Just put your name in and your email address. We’ll send you the download link. Our gift to you. Nice try, but that’s not going to activate reciprocity, because reciprocity, a gift that’s given a gift, is something that comes without a requirement that needs to be met.Stuart Webb [00:24:33]:Yes. Right.Patrick Van der Burght [00:24:34]:And so name and email address first, then we’ll send you the download link. That was a reward. Right. And so people feel like they’re paid for that ebook with their email address, which you’re likely going to put on your newsletter. Right. So, and I’m not saying that, you know, a free downloadable ebook is not a good lead generator. I’m just saying if you think that’s going to activate the power of reciprocity, then you’re making a big mistake. What instead, or maybe complementary to that approach would work.Patrick Van der Burght [00:25:05]:Well, to activate reciprocity is to have a simple PDF with, I don’t know, let’s say you’re in finance or let’s say retirements or something, right? You might make a checklist that says, listen, if you’re looking to retire in the next 10 years, these are the 15 things that you should not fail to get lined up now so that you, you know, you’ve got your eggs lined up as you move into the future for a good retirement sort of a thing. And then put that on your website and just tell people, just right click and download, no email required now. It’s a gift, right now. It builds that reciprocity and that feeling that, you know, that was really nice. That was, that was a, you know, that was interesting and valuable information. And so next time when you come with another request, I know which might be, hey, we’ve got a big webinar on, come join us.Stuart Webb [00:25:55]:Now.Patrick Van der Burght [00:25:56]:You’re going to be empowered by that principle of reciprocity.Stuart Webb [00:26:00]:Brilliant, Patrick. And you’ve just given us a few examples. I need to remind people, if they want to get more of this stuff, go to Systemize me Free stuff. You’ll see some stuff that Patrick’s got which we’re putting in there, which you will really love. Patrick, what is it? I mean, this was, this has been a big part of your life for 25 years. But, but this isn’t something that you sort of just discovered out of accent. How did you come to sort of understand what Dr. Cialdini is doing and, and, and really start your journey in understanding the ethics and ethical way of persuading people to that.Stuart Webb [00:26:41]:Yes.Patrick Van der Burght [00:26:44]:I found my way to it when I was a sales rep quite a while ago. I was selling scuba diving equipment wholesale to retailers and I was based in Melbourne in Australia. And so I was looking after Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, which is a decent clump of land. And I was putting in a lot of effort. I loved what I was doing. I was a dive instructor myself and so I was sort of doing what I loved. I was every day I was talking to people who had the same passion as me. So it was a great job to be in, but I sort of felt that for the amount of time I was investing in it, I wasn’t seeing the growth in my territory that I thought I should have seen.Patrick Van der Burght [00:27:24]:And sometimes I saw my retailers falling victim to dodgy promises and stuff from other sales reps and I didn’t want to do that sort of stuff either. So I wanted to be better at my work, but I didn’t want to lie or cheat either. And yeah, timing, I suppose, was perfect. My boss, the wholesaler, he got the services of A business coach, which is of course good. And he got some strategies and insights on how to grow his business. And part of that was that, well, back then at least, scuba diving retailers are lovely people and they love, they have a passion for what they do, but they’re not necessarily great business people. So the idea was to train us sales reps into sort of a low level business coach where we can do exercises and goal setting and strategies and that sort of stuff with our retailers, help them grow or double their business. And then by definition we would double our business with them, probably more because of course, reciprocity.Patrick Van der Burght [00:28:29]:Right. They’d feel indebted to us and probably stock more of our stuff. And so anyway, business coach was based in, in Melbourne. And he said, John McDonald’s gentleman’s names, name was. And he said, listen, Patrick, with all these strategies that we’re explaining, if you ever have any questions, we’re just here in Vermont, just come by the office and we can have a cup of tea and discuss it. And Stuart, I, I don’t know if you’ve ever met a Dutch person on holiday and then by mistake you say, listen, if you’re ever in our neck of the woods, right, you need a place to stay, come on over, you can stay with us. Don’t do that with Dutch people. They turn up and so did I.Patrick Van der Burght [00:29:13]:So I was visiting John and so I was, you know, I was asking question he liked because often people, you know, they might implement a strategy and it doesn’t work straight away and then dismiss it straight away, right, Instead of saying, hey, what am I not doing, right? Why I’m not getting the results that we should be getting. And he really liked that because I would come back and ask these questions and he started lending me educational series on cassette tapes, you know, things that used to cost twelve hundred dollars or twelve hundred pounds, expensive stuff. And so I was borrowing this stuff and anyway, there was a series called Mind Capture of an event that happened in Los Angeles and Dr. Cialdini was on there with two cassette tapes and it blew me away. I just love the science behind it. Human behaviors, interesting, funny, hilarious, sometimes absolutely terrifying, but always fascinating. And then I was, I had a challenge at work and I used that with a particular brand that had a bit of, a bit of difficulty. And basically within 12 months we were market leader with that brand.Patrick Van der Burght [00:30:18]:And so, yeah, I was converted for life.Stuart Webb [00:30:21]:As I say, brilliant, Patrick, that’s this great story, but I have the impression, and maybe this is just me that you currently are thinking he’s still not asked me that killer key question that he should have asked me by now. Well, I don’t know what that killer key question is, so I’m going to ask you to tell me. Well, what’s the killer key question I should have asked you by now? And obviously, once you’ve asked the question, you need to answer it for us.Patrick Van der Burght [00:30:50]:Well, I think you failed to ask me. Or I was. I said I was going to run down it, but we didn’t get to it. Let’s do a rundown of the seven principles, what they mean in some quick.Stuart Webb [00:31:00]:Please do, please do.Patrick Van der Burght [00:31:04]:All right, so there’s seven universal principles of persuasion. Why do we call them universal? Because they work in all. All cultures, all languages, and all countries. That is in itself amazing and very powerful because our cultures are intermixed and it’s much easier to do business with people in other countries. So this is a skill that works everywhere and with everyone. All right, so there’s seven of those principles in no particular order. Let’s start with reciprocity, because we mentioned it already. So reciprocity works on the rule, the shortcut that people tend to want to give back the same type of behavior that was first given to them.Patrick Van der Burght [00:31:50]:Right. If I invite you to my birthday party, well, then really you ought to invite me to your birthday party. Right. If I remember your birthday with a card or a gift, well, then you should remember mine. And so in the context of compliance, we are more likely to say yes to people that we owe. Okay, so that’s great. And as I mentioned, a lot of people in business think they know it, but don’t actually know it. And so they dive into that not actually doing it.Patrick Van der Burght [00:32:20]:Right. So a good thing to help you is to ask yourself, how can I help this person genuinely? Not as a mechanism to produce reciprocity, to just be helpful, to be valuable and look after that person. Person. And often just being a interested and caring person is already a great step towards being persuasive. So that’s reciprocity. Let’s say. I already gave you an example of how we could use that. So let’s move on.Patrick Van der Burght [00:32:51]:Liking is another principle. We like people that are like us, who like us and who like us and say so.Stuart Webb [00:33:03]:Yeah, Right.Patrick Van der Burght [00:33:04]:So to unpack that a little bit, we like people that are like us means we like people that are similar to us.Stuart Webb [00:33:13]:Yep. Yep.Patrick Van der Burght [00:33:14]:Then we like people that like us, which is the opposite of what sales typically teaches you. Sales teaches you if you want people to buy from you, then you should do what you can so that people like you. You got to be likable, and that’s not wrong. But if I get the feeling that you really like me, even if I don’t, not quite sure about you, if I get the feeling that you genuinely like me, well, then I’m safe with you, aren’t I? Because people that like you look after you, right? And then like you and say so that is compliments, right? So. And actually, on my podcast, we just released an episode about liking. And so, you know, one of the messages in there was pay someone a compliment. Try it. First person you see today, look for anything, anything’s game, what they wear, tie, nails, earrings, hair, shoes, whatever, just whatever you genuinely like.Patrick Van der Burght [00:34:15]:Pay them a compliment, watch what happens. It could be your kids, could be your wife when you come home, Pay them a compliment, watch what happens. All right, so it’s liking unity. Unity is often confused with liking. And unity is also the last principle that Dr. Cialdini added. Unity is about a feeling of being part of the same community. If we feel that we’re, let’s say, from the same town, or this, sometimes we’re from the same country, if we’re in another country or if we co create, if we make things together, we feel we have a bond between us and that inspires favoritism.Patrick Van der Burght [00:34:56]:And the favoritism can make you hear. Yes, a lot more often. Very powerful principle.Stuart Webb [00:35:02]:Yeah.Patrick Van der Burght [00:35:03]:All right, then we have social proof. Most people know the term social proof. The reason you know it is because Dr. Cialdini came up with it. Used to be consensus before that, but it was a little bit unclear. So he came up with the term social proof. Social proof means that we follow the actions of others, especially when they are numerous, when the others are similar to us, and when we are uncertain, that basically means we follow the crowd. Brain research actually shows that for a lot of people, the pain centers in the brain light up when we are out of step with what other people are doing.Patrick Van der Burght [00:35:43]:It’s painful for some people to not follow the crowd, but it also makes sense, right? If a lot of people are doing something, if a lot of people run away, it’s probably not a good idea.Stuart Webb [00:35:52]:You should run away.Patrick Van der Burght [00:35:53]:Yeah, exactly. So in business, we’ve caught on the fact of testimonials, right? As in most people are now collecting testimonials. That’s great. And if you think that that’s valuable for your business, well, then you’re correct. And that falls under ethical persuasion, provided they’re genuine. But in terms of social proof. You’re only using one little strategy out of probably more than a dozen different approaches when it comes to social proof. So there’s a lot more like that where that came from.Patrick Van der Burght [00:36:24]:Maybe a little insight in terms of testimonials. 98% of online shoppers say that detailed online reviews are an important factor on when deciding what and where to buy. The key to remember there is detailed, right? So if you ask somebody to leave you a review, I think it’s perfectly ethical to ask them to leave a bit of a detailed review. We imagine a restaurant and they go, yeah, food was great. That doesn’t feel so genuine. Right. But when we have more details, oh, the pumpkin was just cooked to perfection and the servers were so nice. And Sally the waitress, he was so funny.Patrick Van der Burght [00:37:08]:Right. More detail now we believe it more. What’s more.Stuart Webb [00:37:16]:One of the fact, one of the, one of the things you find in the, in the, in the reviews where people have bought them in for one, for want of a better word, is there’s that lack of detail which makes you feel as though they’re not genuine. And you immediately look and go, they’re probably all fake, aren’t they? Because there’s just no detail there which makes you feel as though that person actually was in that situation.Patrick Van der Burght [00:37:37]:Yeah. And did you, Stuart? We all want our customers to be completely happy and over the moon with the products and services we’ve provided. Right. And so we all want them to leave a five star review, you know, in relation to what they’ve experienced with us. But this, all these reviews are going to be boiled down to an average number, right? As in this business has an average score rating of so much. What would we want that average score rating to ideally be? What do you think?Stuart Webb [00:38:12]:We all want it to be a 5, don’t we?Patrick Van der Burght [00:38:15]:I want it to be a 5. But is a 5 average review score most realistic, As in the most persuasive range for an average score is 4.2 to 4.7, 4.8, 4.9 and 5 are seen as too good a deal. Right? Nobody is this good. You got all your friends to leave five star reviews. You deleted the bad ones. Even if that’s not possible, people don’t know, right? So it lacks credibility where 4.2 to 4.7 has credibility and it’s still for most people high enough to want to deal with that company under 4.2 has credibility. But this is getting too low for people to want to deal with. So yeah, next time you get a two or Three star review, right? Don’t take it so bad.Patrick Van der Burght [00:39:16]:If your average score is Moving towards that 4.7, you’re in the perfect place.Stuart Webb [00:39:21]:Place.Patrick Van der Burght [00:39:22]:All right, so social proof. Moving on then. We have authority as number five. Authority is that we follow the act, so we follow the advice of people that know genuinely more about a particular topic than we do. As in, we follow experts. That’s why it helps to bring in expert opinions that support your proposal. But you, you yourself, you are also an expert in your own field. And so you also need to have a way to convey that to other people.Patrick Van der Burght [00:39:56]:And the truth is that once you’re face to face with people, you have lost the opportunity to talk about your credentials. And people try, you see it all the time, right? Oh, I’ve got a master’s degree in this and I’ve done that and I’ve done this, right. And while we do that because we want our audience to, to respect what we’re saying, to process our words with the gravity that they deserve, but the subconscious of our audience goes, you are full of yourself. We lose on authority and we lose on liking. It’s lose, lose. So we have to arrange for those credentials to be conveyed before we meet someone. Which is exactly the reason why, you know, when you step on the stage as a speaker, there’s normally a master of ceremonies, an emcee that introduces who you are. So authority is raised and people process the words you say with the gravity they deserve from the beginning.Patrick Van der Burght [00:40:59]:If you fail to do that properly, then you might be talking to somebody for an hour and you may establish over time that you do have that authority. But that means that they didn’t process your words as well, the beginning. So you’ve lost that. All right, so that’s authority. Authority is also about believability. Then we have principle of consistency that is powered by the fact that we feel an internal pressure to want to stay true to past actions and statements that we’ve made. You know, sometimes, you know, online, when you’re filling in an online form, it questions, right? Let’s say there’s 10 questions to fill in. If you list all those questions in one row and then the submit button, a lot less people will fill out that form.Patrick Van der Burght [00:41:47]:They’ll just navigate away where if you break that form up in say three, four pages and you give people two, three things to fill out and then click next, it is much harder to now stop because they’re already done some right. So you’re using that consistency principle to get your form filled out. Which is again, just another behavior. So consistency, very, very powerful principle. And then last one is scarcity. So scarcity tells us that we value things more when they are less available. We all have that fear of loss within us. And if I can give a, let’s say a power tip to your listeners, and this would probably be it, have a look at your own communication, listen to your salespeople, what are they saying? Read your own brochures, read the index page of your own website.Patrick Van der Burght [00:42:45]:And when it comes to you expressing what your product or service is going to do for the other person, the other party, are you describing it in terms of what they stand to gain from having your product or service? As in, you’re going to save money, you’re going to get there faster, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for your children, right? These are all gains. Gaining language. While psychology teaches us that people are easily twice more motivated by the potential of losing something than gaining that exact same thing. So instead of using gain language, we should start to use the avoidance of loss. What don’t they get if they don’t get your product or service? Right? Without this, you’re going to lose more money, you’re going to take longer to get there, you’re going to lose competitive advantage. Right now we’re talking about what we tend to lose. And you’ll find that people will be, you know, far more take that message to heart. So that’s a bit of a quick rundown of the seven principles.Stuart Webb [00:44:03]:Patrick, you’ve been so generous with that and I can think of, well, if people haven’t already started rewriting their website, they should do. Patrick, thank you so much for being so generous with that. I really appreciate everything you’ve just said. I had not come across that last principle and many of the others I had heard, but the last one I really thought suddenly, hey, that is a real power tip. So I’m really grateful. If nobody takes anything else away from here, the fact that we should be talking about loss, I mean, it is often something that I do talk to people about, which is in your proposals. Say, what is the risk of not going with this proposal by just say, for instance, making no decision. But making no decision means you are losing time or you are losing the potential to actually make a difference.Stuart Webb [00:44:52]:So that is a huge new one that I’m going to be building into my own, my own persuasiveness now. Thank you so much for being so generous and for spending this much time with us. Look, I’m just going to say once again, go, go and find, go and find the, the vault. There’s some great stuff in there from, from Patrick that systemizes. That’s S y s T M I S E me free hyphen stuff. And if you don’t mind, I send out an email once a week with, with brilliant guests like Patrick who are coming onto the show so that you can dial into the absolutely brilliant training. This is, this is, this is real business training you’re getting. So go to Systemize me, subscribe, fill out that form you, you will get for that one gift to me of an email address, an invite to come and spend time with people like Patrick and knowledge of this sort of thing that Patrick giving away and trying to help you do things.Stuart Webb [00:45:51]:Patrick, thank you so much for being with us today and spending so long explaining that I cannot thank you enough for giving us so much of your time. And I really want to say you have persuaded me to go and do something today and give back more than I’m giving at the moment. So thank you for that. Wonderful.Patrick Van der Burght [00:46:09]:That’s great. It was great to be here. And yeah, if people want to know more, they can of course Visit my website, ethicalpersuasion.com and I’ve also started my own podcast channel, Ethical Persuasion Unlocked. And so if you want more of what you’ve heard today, then it’s also a great place to start. But please remember that to develop application skills and confidence, you are going to have to do and your team some formal training. You’re not going to get that from just watching videos and listening to podcasts.Stuart Webb [00:46:39]:Both of those resources are in the vault. So please, if you didn’t get those things, go to the vault. You’ll find them there. Patrick, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it and I look forward to going and practicing more of this stuff myself.Patrick Van der Burght [00:46:53]:Wonderful. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

April 23, 202621 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Anna Kallschmidt (ep. 145)

Who is Anna?Anna is a psychologist who specializes in helping individuals and organizations navigate the often invisible, yet crucial, “unwritten rules” of work. Anna works particularly with neurodivergent individuals and has a deep background in exploring class culture clashes within the workplace—especially the challenges faced when employees transition from blue-collar roles into corporate environments. Her upcoming book tackles these unwritten rules head-on, offering practical advice for leaders, staff, and HR professionals on how to recognise and address the subtle dynamics that impact team engagement, employee retention, and overall organisational success. Get ready for a conversation packed with actionable insights and straight-talking advice from someone who’s dedicated her career to demystifying what really makes teams tick behind the scenesKey Takeaways* If your best performers hit a wall after their promotion, look out for unwritten rules holding them back. Culture clashes are real, and naming them is the first step to fixing your team.* Every workplace has unwritten rules—norms no one talks about that trip up even the best people. When these rules go unspoken, they can kill engagement and stall change.* Do you ever promote a top worker, only to see them struggle? The issue might not be skill, but hidden cultural expectations. It’s time to get clear on what success really looks like.* What does your “ideal employee” look like in your mind? Dig deep—sometimes our assumptions create noise, not results. Get intentional about measuring what actually matters.* Before jumping into AI or new strategies, solve the unseen people problems first. Automation just speeds up whatever’s broken—fix your foundation before you build.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Anna, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.SUMMARY KEYWORDSunwritten rules of work, employee engagement, employee retention, promotion pipeline issues, blue collar workers, white collar workers, management training, cultural norms, organizational culture, class culture clash, communication skills, indirect communication, assertiveness, workplace professionalism, neurodivergence, unconscious bias, productivity issues, team performance, leadership recommendations, HR practices, workplace audits, work miscommunication, onboarding, context performance, task performance, workplace diversity, automation, AI in the workplace, organizational change, workplace complianceSPEAKERAnna Kallschmidt, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:31]:Hi and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee I have with me. Well, it’s not coffee actually at the moment, this is a tea. But I’m here with Dr. Anna Kauchmid. Hello Anna. Hope you’re got a coffee or something with you to refresh you during this brilliant stuff. Anna is a psychologist.Stuart Webb [00:00:52]:She works particularly with people who know neurodivergent, etc, talking about the unwritten rules of work. And I know you’ve got a book coming out soon, Anna, which I hope we can get into. So welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. And I hope that you are going to be able to tell us about the very unwritten rules there are around work.Stuart Webb [00:01:14]:Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I love the title of the podcast because I do think that internally a lot, this isn’t rocket science. We don’t need to, we don’t need to make it more complicated than it is.Stuart Webb [00:01:25]:No, we don’t. No we don’t. And there is, there is too much already of people trying to make things sound complicated. And I do say often, you know, if, if it’s too, if it’s too complicated for me to understand, it’s already got too complicated and you don’t have to get too complicated for me to lose it. So let’s talk about you and your work. Let’s talk about the sort of the people that you’re trying to help. What’s the, what how would you characterize and what, what, how do they, what is it that they notice about themselves? Or are they business owners that need the help for their employees?Stuart Webb [00:02:00]:Yeah. So since I look at the unwritten rules of work, which are the cultural norms that are so ingrained in your organization that people don’t think they need to be transparent about what they are. So it’s really about. There’s a cultural problem which impacts so many things. So I’m going to tell you the signs that my clients notice when they come to me, but at the core of them is being not in denial. That’s my ideal client, someone who’s not in denial. Someone who’s recognized that there’s an issue and wants to move forward.Stuart Webb [00:02:32]:And for those of us who aren’t yet even aware of the problem, what’s the problem? What are the things they’re noticing so that, so maybe there are people out there that haven’t even yet got to.Stuart Webb [00:02:40]:That stage so it can be low. Employee engagement is always one very poor retention. You’re having Problems promoting have. You have like great employees. This is a big one. I see you have great employees from like entry level to like almost middle management. But once they get into like the higher corporate levels, it’s like they fall apart or they just don’t get it. So I see this a lot specifically in industries that have like a blue collar, white collar, two different subsets, so like retail or anything in manufacturing etc.Stuart Webb [00:03:17]:Of where you have like these excellent blue collar workers. You promote them up to the corporate side and they’re like, what is going on? Because he introduced me as neurodivergent, which is true, but originally my work is about class and there’s a class culture clash there. And so it’s when you have a really good performer who as they get higher they run into more problems. And when you see this, so you have promotion pipeline issues, you have retention issues, you might have productivity issues and you might have complaints about your management at the management level after you’ve promoted them. And you’re not sure why because they were always great performers and you know, they work really hard.Stuart Webb [00:03:54]:So tell me, you know the people that you’re talking about there, the managers, the business owners, the founders of those companies, what are the things they’ve done? They, presumably they’ve gone through the sort of, they’ve gone through the usual training, they’ve tried to sort of train their managers in better communication, all that sort of thing. What do they normally find that, that they haven’t done, that they haven’t understood what their problem is.Stuart Webb [00:04:16]:A lot of us, and this is normal human nature, a lot of us have a hard time conceptualizing that our normal isn’t. Everyone’s normal. And it’s one of those. That sounds simple, that’s not rocket science, but that’s so deeply ingrained that a lot of companies spend a lot of money trying to add more things to solve the problem, have this training, have that speaker come in, etc. But they don’t look at what the core issues are. And it’s just assumed that it’s very, it’s just professionalism. And that people get bristled when you say that because like, well, that’s just being respectful. That’s not all the professionalism is.Stuart Webb [00:04:59]:Right, it’s very easy to dismiss and be like, this is just how things are done. This is just white collar work, this is just professionalism. But it’s things like indirect communication. It’s things like they don’t know how to schmooze enough, they’re rubbing People wrong, they seem rough around the edges or that they either don’t know how to be assertive enough or they come across as aggressive. And it’s those little nuances that are more common in blue collar and pink collar work of being more direct in your communication, of talking more about task and less about interpersonal skills. And then it changes when it gets to the corporate level. And so bringing in somebody to talk about unconscious bias can be great for other reasons, but it’s not going to solve those culture clashes.Stuart Webb [00:05:47]:Okay. Okay. So you must have some great advice that you can give to people to take them into that first step. And I know we’re going to get into some of the stuff that you offer us in terms of sort of. If you go to the vault that we have here, which is the systemized me free stuff vault, we’ve got got stuff from, from Anna which you can sort of grab but talk us through sort of. What is the advice that you give to companies when they first come to you? The sort of thing that you’re telling them they need to start this process before they get an expert like you involved.Stuart Webb [00:06:20]:So I do it on. I will do an unwritten rules audit for where I look at water. I have eight groups of unwritten rules and I can survey that and tell you which ones you’re struggling with. But I have a very quick free version on my website drkaulschmidt.com quiz and it’s about four questions. Once you tell me if you’re looking for yourself, your organization, and that’ll let me know which one you’re struggling with the most. Are you struggling with people? Don’t tell you about problems until it’s too late. Are you struggling with people? There’s a lot of miscommunications and it’s delaying productivity. Are you struggling with.Stuart Webb [00:06:54]:You have a team of really top performers, but they do not know how to work together. And that helps me narrow down which culture clash might be an issue. And then I can make recommendations for your organization so that that is the quickest free option. But I do have, like I said, a book coming out in the next couple of weeks and that has every chapter covers an unwritten rule and at the end of every chapter I give recommendations for leaders, staff and hr. And those are very practical, hands on. I don’t do the vague advice thing, if you haven’t noticed. I’m like. The first thing I said was like, well, you have to not be in denial.Stuart Webb [00:07:34]:Right. So it’s a very, it’s A very. I’ve been told I’m not a B12 shot speaker. I’m not going to make you feel great and then walk away and you’re like, what are we doing? So it’s very. The book is over 300 pages for a reason. It’s very tangible, hands on.Stuart Webb [00:07:51]:And that’s a really good recommendation for anybody who’s here at the moment for actual practical advice. And that’s the stuff we love to give on this podcast. Because I don’t know about you and comment in the below. If you’re beginning to see things in what you’re being told now, are you seeing things in your work, where you’re going, I think I’ve got one of these. And I know Anna or myself will come back to you and sort of direct you in the right direction to start getting that help. Because we all need to start being direct with people. We need to start getting that sort of action that Anna’s talking about now. We need to, to be able to move things forward.Stuart Webb [00:08:28]:So, yeah, do comment below on things that you might have seen in your workplace and let us know whether or not this is resonating. Anna, you were saying you were direct. How did you come to be this expert in these unwritten rules, the things that we don’t see? How did you manage to sort of find them? And how did you find them, work them out?Stuart Webb [00:08:51]:Well, I like to do well. The short answer is I screwed up enough that I had to figure it out. You know, I pissed off people. Okay, yeah, I can see that deep dive on this. But I would say, I’d say the moment that it started coming together for me was in my first week of my PhD program. We have this class, Introduction to Industrial Psychology, where we’re going over. I’m the type of psychologist, nobody knows who we are, so we’re going over like, you know, job performance, how to design metrics, how to design jobs, how to do a job analysis, all of those tangible things. And we learned first week there are two types of job performance.Stuart Webb [00:09:25]:Does that sound right to you, that there are two types? No, that’s not so it fascinated me as well. And so the first type is task performance, which is what is in your job description. And the other kind is contextual performance. And it was all of those other things that help organizations, but that aren’t written down. And I was like, so what are all those other things? And the room just went silent and everybody was like, well, you know, I was like, no, no, I wouldn’t have.Stuart Webb [00:09:57]:Asked the question if I knew and.Stuart Webb [00:09:59]:I was coming in. I didn’t go straight from undergrad to grad. I worked since high school and I worked in between grad. So I had work experience. And I was like, what is this? And I was already doing a research my master’s thesis was on. Is a low income background stigmatized at work even after you’ve experienced social class mobility and even for white men in America? And so I was already in that vein of looking at class. And so when nobody could tell me what all those other things were. And IO psychology is so big on measurement.Stuart Webb [00:10:32]:Like, we’re so big on what gets measured, you know, matters and drives performance. So it was just weird to me that there was this whole second piece of performance that we weren’t being really clear about. And so that’s what I ended up doing my dissertation on was what are the unwritten rules of work for people who move up from a low income background to middle class or higher through employment? And So I interviewed 64 people and noticed themes and what they were saying. I talked to black and white women and men in the United States. And then over time, my next study, I made a scale and I administered it to all races and genders in the US And I looked at statistically significant differences. And so it’s just kind of evolved from that moment of being like, what’s all that other stuff?Stuart Webb [00:11:22]:And so is that effectively the book? Is that what you’ve now put into the book so that you can really, well, at this stage categorize what those unreal written rules are so that now there is an answer to the question, what are the unwritten rul rules?Stuart Webb [00:11:40]:Yeah, that’s the book. So I did the dissertation and I didn’t plan on becoming like the unwritten rules coach, but I. I have largely been outside of academia. Like I’ve done, you know, I’ve kept a research hold and I sometimes teach, but largely I’ve worked for the federal government or private consulting firms and worked in organizations. And everywhere I worked, the unwritten rules were a problem. Like, no matter what, if you go in and you’re trying to implement a change and nobody knows what you’re talking about when they don’t know how to talk to each other, it’s not going to work. And so it just kept on becoming this pattern of noticing that it’s like putting a band aid on a broken bone, right? We’re not addressing the broken bone. And so, yeah, I just kept researching it.Stuart Webb [00:12:25]:And then in the book I talk about I spent a chapter on the research on each of them. I spinach. I talk about my personal experiences with organizations, and I also talk about case studies of where we can see these rules play out in other organizations as well.Stuart Webb [00:12:41]:That’s fascinating. And, you know, I mean, that, that strikes me that it’s not just small business owners who are currently struggling with their teams, which are perhaps not quite as functioning as the way you. They would like them to be, who are listening to this and thinking, that might be me. But it’s those organizations that are trying to undergo big change. And I’ve been involved with. And you are absolutely right that when you try and make a change, even if it is for the better, nobody wants to adopt that change. And it’s largely down to a bunch of things that you cannot tangibly put your finger on and go, we need to address this. And it’s those unwritten rules which actually prevent and cause those transformations to often go very badly wrong, become very expensive, and be very expensive to fix.Stuart Webb [00:13:29]:So this doesn’t change a large number of people. Yeah, that’s exactly right. AI is actually making problem almost worse.Stuart Webb [00:13:36]:Yeah. Because it’s ample. AI amplifies and automates the good and the bad. And then I’m sure you’ve heard of the MIT study that came out a few months ago that was like 95% of AI actually isn’t increasing profits at all. Did you see that?Stuart Webb [00:13:49]:I did.Stuart Webb [00:13:50]:Okay, so what I found interesting. So one of my unwritten rules is the unwritten rule of compliance, which is that people might ask you for your opinion, but they’re not really asking for your opinion. Right. You’re supposed to just agree. And one of the examples that the MIT report gave was that there was this huge flop. And of course, they don’t name the organization. That one person, one leader made this global rollout, just him and AI, no feedback. Nobody else looked at it.Stuart Webb [00:14:22]:And guess what? It didn’t go well. Isn’t that shocking? And that to me, that’s an example of you automated. The unwritten rule of compliance.Stuart Webb [00:14:32]:Yeah, yeah.Stuart Webb [00:14:32]:Because AI is only going to disagree with you if you tell it to. Otherwise it’s like, yeah, you go, girl. You are so smart. Like, hello. Right. And you have to tell it. Don’t hallucinate. What are the holes here? And even then, you still have to think for yourself.Stuart Webb [00:14:50]:So to me, that was an example of. I wasn’t even looking for it. I was just reading the report. I found it interesting because I’m not anti AI. I’m just anti being stupid with AI. And I saw that example and I was like, well, there you go. There’s an unwritten rule on automation.Stuart Webb [00:15:06]:I must admit that that’s one I shall now start to quote more often. I do often get involved in companies that are trying to improve productivity with AI. And the one thing that I often say about automation, and I did automation for a number of years, I built a couple of companies around automation. And the one thing that I was always taught and always said to customers as they started their automation product, please let’s start by sor out the problems because otherwise your automation will just make your bad stuff flow faster and you cannot then control it. If your bad process is now fast, you don’t even understand where the bad stuff’s coming from because it would come at you so quickly. Too many companies I don’t believe are looking at these sort of unwritten rules, looking at the underlying problems first, resolving those. So they’ve got a foundation for growth and a foundation for building those, those, those, those glorious temples of, of sc. And I’m not going to try and keep you here all afternoon.Stuart Webb [00:16:06]:I’m sure we could have a very, very long conversation and it would be great fun. But people want to get, want to get to the nub of things. And one of those things that I think is really important is there must be a question at the moment that you’re thinking he hasn’t asked me the killer question, the one question that will really break this topic open. So I’m going to ask you to tell me what that question is because I obviously don’t know it and I haven’t asked it. But then you’re obviously going to have to answer it for me because that is the key to getting this topic embedded in everybody’s workplace.Stuart Webb [00:16:42]:You know, I have not the only question you sent me that I could not answer. But I what it reminded me of is that something, an exercise that I do with some of my clients is I’ll ask them to picture their ideal employee and I’ll ask them what are they doing?Stuart Webb [00:17:01]:Good question for them.Stuart Webb [00:17:03]:And I’ll ask them what are they doing? Okay, what does this look like? And it’s a helpful because you know, you should already be doing this because why are you measuring job performance if you can’t tell me this? Right? So we’re having this conversation. It’ll be like this person is a great communicator. This person is a great team player. This person, you know, tries to solve problems first and then they Come to me Da da da da. And then at the end I asked them, and what background did you assign that person? Because inherently, what race did you assign that person? What gender did you assign that person? How old were they? There’s all these things that we don’t realize. Color, who we foresee. And it’s both important to know who your ideal employee is so that you can make sure you’re measuring job performance. That is needed.Stuart Webb [00:17:48]:And it’s important to also recognize the noise because too often, and we all do this, we all, like, I think white women with a Southern American accent sound brilliant, right? But that’s because they sound like me, you know, and so, like, we all do that. And so it’s important to recognize that we all have noise. And, and that is a really critical takeaway in my book is one of the main recommendations is we all need to have frame of reference training. And that’s going to be the next rollout. In my workshops that I do in my online school community is focusing on how do we narrow down the noise because it may make us feel good short term, but then we run into all those problems that we talked about in the beginning of the. Why are the people I’m promoting not meeting expectations? Why do we have low engagement? Why am I spending so much in turnover? What’s going on? Why is my AI not working? Right? All of these things.Stuart Webb [00:18:55]:Yeah. Yeah, Brilliant. Anna, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. You know, what you say is so critical to people who are trying to grow their businesses, who are trying to sort of get work done more profitably, get it done productively. They’re ignoring, they’re often ignoring, you know, they’ve got the task, they’re ignoring the other stuff. And that’s the thing that often slows you down. So I think you’re, you. You’ve got a, you’ve got a great way of putting it.Stuart Webb [00:19:25]:I love the way you’re putting it. I really hope that if anybody here is, is thinking, I, I know that’s me. Please drop comments down in the chat below. We will get back to you. We will point you in the right direction because I think this is a great way of doing it. The other thing I’m going to ask you all to do now is this link, which is www.systemize.me forward/subscribe. That’s systemize.me forward/subscribe. It’s a simple form.Stuart Webb [00:19:53]:It just asks you for your name and an email address. You will then get onto the website, the mailing lists, apologies, the mailing list for this, for the show. You’ll get an email once a week from me telling you who’s coming up. And you can come and look on LinkedIn and join the join the call so that you can get your questions answered. But in the meantime, Dr. Anna Carlschmidt, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. Really appreciate you coming and explaining some of those unwritten rules. I’m now going to have an unwritten rule, which is I need to have a drink immediately after this.Stuart Webb [00:20:23]:So thank you very much for your time. And I look forward to seeing, seeing more of what you are producing as you do the second version of all of this.Stuart Webb [00:20:31]:All right. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

April 9, 2026Episode 14423 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Royce Blake (ep. 144)

Who is Royce?Royce Blake is a seasoned professional in the radio industry, known for his deep expertise in audience engagement. Drawing on years of experience, Royce specializes in helping podcast hosts and guests connect meaningfully with listeners. Through his insights and practical advice, he teaches how to make each guest feel valued and every audience member feel special. On this appearance on “It’s Not Rocket Science: Five Questions Over Coffee,” he shares his proven strategies for keeping listeners captivated, making him a trusted figure for anyone looking to elevate their podcasting game.Key Takeaways* Ever felt awkward hearing your own recorded voice? Royce Blake explains: it’s normal! The key is getting comfortable with your true sound—crucial for building real connection, whether you’re on air or in the boardroom.* Struggling to keep your audience engaged? Royce Blake says: Be natural. Ditch the “radio voice” and just be yourself. Recording and reviewing yourself honestly will transform your confidence and presence.* Silence feels uncomfortable, but pausing can be powerful. Let moments land. Pauses give your audience space to process and make your next words even stronger, says Royce Blake.* Great podcasts start with research. Asking guests questions they’ve never heard lets them shine and keeps things authentic. Dig deep—don’t settle for surface-level!* Facing trolls? Royce Blake shares: No one more successful than you will ever put you down. Focus on being your authentic self and let the hate go. Keep showing up, every day.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Royce, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.SUMMARY KEYWORDSpodcasting, podcast hosts, podcast guests, audience engagement, radio industry, public speaking, event hosts, speaker training, business leaders, microphone confidence, voice recording, self-assessment, filler words, affectation, natural speaking, pause technique, research, interview preparation, guest questions, press junket, celebrity interviews, social profiles, hobby discussion, body language, hand gestures, listener retention, overcoming nerves, handling trolls, negative comments, authentic communication, podcast improvementSPEAKERRoyce Blake, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:00]:Hi, and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I’m really pleased that I’m here today with Royce Blake. Now, Royce has got a huge amount of experience in the radio industry, and I think he’s going to really help us to understand, as podcast host, potential podcast guests, exactly how you can engage your audience, make sure that you keep hold of them, and do the intelligent thing of making them feel like the special person on your show. So I’m hoping that Royce can do that for me. Royce, welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I know we’re gonna have a great time, and I really appreciate you spending a few minutes with us, making time in your busy day.Royce Blake [00:01:13]:It’s my pleasure. Stuart. Got my coffee. I’m ready to go. So let’s do this.Stuart Webb [00:01:19]:Terrific. Okay, let’s start with. I mean, you’ve got an absolutely enormous amount of history. Who is your ideal audience at the moment? Who are you trying to help understand how to better engage their audience and keep them held?Royce Blake [00:01:35]:Right now, it’s mainly podcasters, but I also help event hosts, speakers, even business leaders that do a lot of speaking before even their employees. Anybody that needs to keep an audience, that’s who I help.Stuart Webb [00:01:53]:And tell me, Royce, I mean, you’re obviously doing this from a radio perspective, but it’s not just radio, is it? You. You. You help people who understand how to appear in front of an audience and. And in. And interact in that way.Royce Blake [00:02:04]:I like to call it mike shy to camera confident, because that’s. That’s what it is, really, because we’re all. It’s. It’s normal. Do you remember the first time you heard your. Your voice recorded?Stuart Webb [00:02:22]:Never heard it. Royce, don’t. Never, never, never. It’s never been possible.Royce Blake [00:02:26]:It’s human. We all. We all go through the same thing because we hear our voice through bone, and people and microphones are hearing our voice through air, and that’s the big difference. That’s why it sounds weird.Stuart Webb [00:02:44]:Yes, yes. And unfortunately, that weird makes us all very nervous. Makes us feel somehow as though things are wrong. And that is the. The root of all the problems you get, isn’t it?Royce Blake [00:02:58]:Oh, absolutely. And, you know, even, like when I was first on the air, on the radio, you know, you put headphones on, right? And so you’re hearing your voice as it appears to other people live in your ears. And that usually causes, in radio, what we call affectation, because you put those headphones on and you say, hey, there, and all of A sudden it sounds weird, right? It sounds. And you say, hey there. And wow, that sounds even better, you know, so pretty soon you’re talking like this, and eventually affectation leads to what we call in the radio world, puking. Because you get down to there, how are you? And it sounds like you’re really trying to vomit. So we try to avoid that. And luckily these days, especially in the podcast world, people.Royce Blake [00:03:52]:People are kind of swinging back to real, so they appreciate people that are just real. You don’t have to have a radio voice. It’s be natural. And that’s what I help people do.Stuart Webb [00:04:06]:So tell me, Royce, what people, what have people tried to do before they reach out to an expert such as yourself? You know, we’ve all recorded ourselves. We’ve all tried to avoid listening to it. Again, what are the things they’ve done and how have they made that affectation worse?Royce Blake [00:04:25]:Well, see, this is the biggest challenge for me because asking someone to admit they need help when it comes to talking is a big mountain to climb, ego wise, right? So you’re like, oh, man, I think I talk good. And, you know, you can get so much better. And if you like, I can jump right into one of the techniques that anybody can do at home.Stuart Webb [00:04:50]:Okay, yeah, why don’t we look into that? Because this is. This is the valuable free advice that you are. That you’re going to offer us, isn’t it?Royce Blake [00:04:58]:Absolutely. All you need is one of these. Use your cell phone, right, and record yourself a lot, and it’s going to be very uncomfortable at first. It doesn’t matter what you’re recording, but you need to record for five whole minutes, because we can all start off, you know, reiterating our elevator pitch or your sales presentation or whatever. And that goes great for a couple of minutes, but after that, you’re starting to stress out on what to say, and that’s when the magic happens. The real you starts coming out, and that’s what we’re looking for. So five minutes. It can be about your grocery list.Royce Blake [00:05:45]:One of my favorite topics to help people is talk about a hobby you love and why you got into it and why it’s so awesome, or why someone is your best friend, whatever it is. Talk for five minutes. And remember, you can always delete this stuff, right? You don’t have to keep it. No one else has to see it. But the key is how you watch it when you record yourself. First time you watch it, I want you to do it with the phone facing down. Don’t watch it. Just Listen to it, crank up the volume, and just listen to yourself.Royce Blake [00:06:24]:That’s when you’ll start to discover little things. In radio, we call them crutches. Things you say that you’re not even realizing. Realizing that you’re saying the ums, the likes, you know what I mean? Those are all filler words or phrases, and that’s when they start to stick out. Secondly, watch it back again, but this time with the sound off. So you’re just watching yourself. Do you sway all the time? Are you playing a statue? Do you never move? You know, things like that that you had no idea you were doing? Do you use too many hand gestures? Are you flailing all over the place? That’s going to start submitting in your subconscious mind exactly what you’re doing, and then watch it entirely. Watch it full screen and rinse and repeat.Royce Blake [00:07:22]:You keep doing that, after five times, you’ll be at least 50% better. Maybe. I’ve seen some people go 90% better because they had no idea what they were doing. And once again, it’s a crutch. It’s one of those things that personally we’re not aware of. But that’s what the audience is seeing, and that’s the way you get used to you. That’s the bottom line right there, is getting used to yourself. And nothing helps more than watching.Royce Blake [00:07:56]:And, you know, it can. It can go away. No one else has to see it, but you’re going to start seeing things a lot differently.Stuart Webb [00:08:07]:So, Royce, this is. This is really interesting stuff. Tell me, when you. I mean, you obviously help people a lot with this sort of thing. You help them with those filler words. And I know how embarrassing it was. For the first time, somebody. Somebody did that with me, and I found it intensely embarrassing.Stuart Webb [00:08:26]:How do you get people to understand that? That’s just what natural is?Royce Blake [00:08:31]:Because humans. It’s a great question, Stuart. Humans abhors silence.Stuart Webb [00:08:38]:Yes, we think.Royce Blake [00:08:40]:We think that if there’s silence, oh, man, people are freaking out. Let me tell you something. First of all, an overall view of audiences. People are so afraid of what people are thinking, and that’s the real fear. We’re not really worried about our voice or even what we’re saying. We’re worried about being judged. And that’s part of. That’s part of human nature.Royce Blake [00:09:04]:And so when you abhor a vacuum, right? Silence, you try to fill it with, no matter what. You know what I mean? Do you get that? You guys understand where I’m coming from, Things that mean nothing. One of the Big secrets that most great speakers use is something I did right there, and that is the pause. When you take a pause even for three seconds, it doesn’t even have. You don’t have to count to three seconds, but if you can just pause and say the letters and A, B, C in your head, that’s a perfect pause. And see, I threw in another one right there. Did that feel weird to you?Stuart Webb [00:09:53]:Yeah. The thing is, Royce, it kind of you, you feel, you feel as though you should be saying something, and yet sometimes the audience needs that pause to process what you’ve just said. And you’re being kind to them by actually pausing long enough for them to have that revelation or whatever it is you’re trying to give them.Royce Blake [00:10:12]:Right. It lets them ponder it, especially if it’s an important point. The other awesome thing about pauses is it makes what you say next much more powerful.Stuart Webb [00:10:25]:Love that.Royce Blake [00:10:26]:So once again, the pause, it’s hard to do in your brain. It sounds totally natural to any, any audience, really.Stuart Webb [00:10:38]:Let me just put a link on the bottom because we have got some fabulous stuff that Royce is going to make available to the listeners and to the audience here. If you go to www.systemize.me, free hyphen stuff, Royce, I’ve already got some of this stuff. The five day course, things like that, where you are going to be taking people from a world, from amateur to professional.Royce Blake [00:11:06]:Right, right. And in, in the course brilliance.Stuart Webb [00:11:12]:Just, just, I just. Thank you so much for making some of that stuff available.Royce Blake [00:11:17]:Absolutely. In the course, I go into all these.Stuart Webb [00:11:20]:Hide that again for a second so that people can focus on what you’re saying.Royce Blake [00:11:26]:There you go. Well, in the course, I also go over all this in much more depth. And each, each day it’s just a five day email course. Each email also has a video included. So you can see me explaining this more. Are you still there, Stuart? I’ll just keep talking. I used to get a. I used to get a lot of money on that for that.Royce Blake [00:11:59]:You know, the other awesome thing that I really want to help podcasters with is research. And if anybody asked me what’s the secret to a great podcast or a great radio show? It’s research. Figure out something you want to get to, a question a guest has never been asked. And that’s the secret. And when you get to research, I’m not talking about like on the radio, for instance, especially when we had a celebrities. The reason that celebrities even appear on, on radio stations or TV stations is they usually have a book to promote. Right. Or, you know, a movie, a brand new movie coming out.Royce Blake [00:12:49]:Well, they’re on a press junket. And a press junket is where they sit in one studio and then they do a TV hit in Cincinnati and then a radio show in Cleveland and then off to another radio show in Dallas. And so when you’re doing these things, you have no idea. If you’re a radio host and you’re about to interview a celebrity guest, you don’t have any idea what number you are. You could be station number nine for all. For all. All things considered. So, and odds are, whoever it is, they’ve been asked the same types or sometimes the same exact question nine times in a row.Royce Blake [00:13:33]:And so you don’t want to be that host, whether it’s on a podcast, an event, or, you know, on radio or tv, you want to be someone that asked them a question they’ve never heard before. I. I always recall one with boxer Mike Tyson, who was awesome. Obviously, this was at really the height of his popularity. And for those of you that remember the ear biting incident, well, I’m sure he’d been asked that a thousand times at that point. Instead, I had done deep research, and once again, yes, you can look at their social profiles. You can, you know, check into any, any, anything they posted and see where they’re coming from. Check their hobbies and all that stuff, but go much, much deeper.Royce Blake [00:14:26]:Anything you can find, even if it’s a business owner you’re talking to, go back and look at their ads, See what kind of ads they had running. If they had a weird ad or maybe a weird job. Before they, you know, got into the car business, they used to, you know, build porcelain dolls or something, something weird like that. For me and Mike Tyson, it was pigeon racing. Now, I have no idea how you race pigeons, but I knew that Mike Tyson was into pigeon racing. And so what did I do? While everybody else was asking him about the ear biting incident, I asked him about pigeon racing. Hey, champ, how’s the pigeon racing environment this year? Everything. You got a shot, and he lit up like a Christmas tree.Royce Blake [00:15:20]:It was amazing. So that’s the type of research I’m talking about. Go deep. If I didn’t. If I finished an interview and I didn’t have at least two pages of questions I didn’t get to, then I hadn’t done my job. So once again, it’s all about research.Stuart Webb [00:15:42]:Brilliant, brilliant stuff, Royce. Thank you so much for that. Royce. There must be one question that you’re currently thinking that I haven’t in the process of this interview or discussion, asked you what is the question that you think I should have asked? And obviously now you know what that question is, you need to answer it for us as well.Royce Blake [00:16:07]:Well, you know, once again, I, I think, by the way, just talking about. Here’s. Here’s one for you. We were talking about. I know we’re having tech problems here, Stuart, but, you know, if I had a, you know, a question for you to give you an idea of what kind of research, and it doesn’t take long, this took me probably.Stuart Webb [00:16:27]:Oh, no.Royce Blake [00:16:29]:I would say, hey, Stuart, I know that. Well, how did you go from like, killing viruses to helping businesses scale? You know, you were in the, in the bio.Stuart Webb [00:16:46]:Do you know the reason. The reason that I did that, Royce, Tell me the reason. The reason I did that, Royce, was because I wasn’t very. I. I was. I was actually not a very good practical scientist. I was a very good thinker. A lot of people kept telling me I had brilliant thoughts, but I was very poor at putting them down into an experiment.Stuart Webb [00:17:12]:And so I had to find something where I was able to use my brain to solve big problems, but not necessarily always. Always sort of make those experiments very successful. So it’s about finding that thing which you are passionate about, but at the same time, you can actually turn into something people will pay you to do.Royce Blake [00:17:35]:Absolutely. Have you been asked that before?Stuart Webb [00:17:42]:That is not what I have been asked. And I’m going to remember how good you are at turning the. The. The question and answer into a discussion, because you find that way. And that’s how you make an engaging podcast guest or host out of people, isn’t it? By getting to open up and explore things with an intelligent research question.Royce Blake [00:18:08]:And listen and listen intently. Don’t worry about getting to question seven when your guest has just spun gold on your podcast. You know, let them expand, let them go with the flow there. You know, as. As far as questions that, that you didn’t ask me, I get this from a lot of podcasters. Well, a lot of people in general is. How do you handle trolls? How do you handle negative comments? Right. People, you know, all this.Royce Blake [00:18:38]:I was lucky, I guess, because I was trained. I. You’re. You’re old enough to remember. I’m not sure if they have this on the BBC or any of the, you know, any other. But the request line, this radio station request line where you can call in and request a song, right?Stuart Webb [00:18:57]:Yes.Royce Blake [00:18:58]:Well, this is. You got to think about it. This is the only time for free you can reach another human being and say anything you want, because 95 weren’t there to request a song. A lot were there to give their opinion. And. And, you know, a lot of times it always amazed me, someone would sit on the request line on hold for a half an hour just to tell me, hey, you suck. So, you know, after you get that a few thousand times, you start. You start losing the nerve that, you know, so.Royce Blake [00:19:34]:But I want people to remember, no one more successful than you will ever put you down. They don’t have the time. They don’t have the inclination.Stuart Webb [00:19:45]:Brilliant.Royce Blake [00:19:45]:So ignore them. I know it’s easy to say and hard to do, but trust me, something’s wrong with them, not you, so just let it go.Stuart Webb [00:19:56]:Brilliant, Royce. I love that. And I want to end it there, because I think that is the best advice that you can give anybody. I mean, if I want to take away two things, and I know there have been a couple of technical difficulties, but there are two things I want to take away, one. One of which is, you know, you have just got to get used to the fact that you need to sound natural and need to get over yourself and start behaving like you are just a normal human being. And we all have that problem. And. And the haters.Stuart Webb [00:20:26]:Well, the haters are going to hate, and you just got to let them do it and get away from them and move forward being your positive self.Royce Blake [00:20:33]:I’ve got a great phrase. You can. You can write down everybody. And it’s something I learned from an old radio pro. He said, royce, I don’t care if they hate me as long as they hate me every day.Stuart Webb [00:20:49]:I love that one. I love it. Listen, people, I’m gonna. I’m just gonna thank Royce for spending a few minutes with us. If you would like to get an email from me where you can actually just find out who is going to be on the show and listen to the brilliant advice like people like Royce Lake bring to us. Go to Systemize Me, subscribe. That’s systemized me. Forward slash, subscribe.Stuart Webb [00:21:20]:Just go there. Simple form, name, email address. We don’t ask you for any more than that. Once a week, you get an email from me saying who’s coming up? And you really should listen to some of the people that are coming up on this show. Royce, I want to thank you so much for being here and telling us a little bit about this, and I appreciate you keeping going when I know there have been a one or two technical difficulties, but I just think what you’ve told us is absolute gold about how to engage people and keep them engaged, and I just love it. And thank you so much for spending a few minutes.Royce Blake [00:21:47]:It’s been a pleasure, Stuart. Thank you so much. And, you know, once again, this has been awesome. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

March 26, 202619 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Donna Amos (ep. 143)

Who is Donna?Donna Amos has been working with a law firm since 2010, helping them share their expertise with the world. When she first started, the firm had three attorneys and two financial planners specializing in elder care. Donna encouraged the team to create weekly videos answering frequently asked questions, making their knowledge accessible on every platform. However, when the first video shoot arrived, nerves got the better of the group—they greeted Donna with a case of beer, hoping to calm their anxiety about being on camera. Thanks to Donna’s encouragement, they pushed through their fears and successfully filmed their first video, marking the beginning of a new chapter in the firm’s outreach efforts.Key Takeaways* Action is what drives change, especially for solo and micro business owners. Donna Amos reminds us: just take that first step, even if it’s scary. Progress starts before confidence kicks in!* We often get stuck in our own heads, telling ourselves we’re not good enough. Donna’s advice: seek out someone who believes in you, encourages you, and helps you move forward. Sometimes that’s all we need.* Staying “busy” isn’t the same as making progress. Donna explored how focus and vision make the real difference—not just for ourselves, but for those we work with and serve.* Writing a book can be daunting, but Donna recommends starting with simple research and writing a little each day. In 3 months, you could have your biggest calling card and a new way to share your expertise.* The first challenge is finishing what you start. Donna shares: Only 3% of people finish their manuscript. Create discipline by writing 500 words a day—small steps lead to big results in your personal story.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Donna, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.SUMMARY KEYWORDSsolo business owners, micro business owners, solopreneurs, marketing agency, self-publishing, book publishing, business inspiration, taking action, self-talk, productivity, time management, strategic vision, encouragement, coaching, marketing strategies, authority building, marketing tools, business growth, client engagement, discipline, writing a book, business storytelling, video marketing, social media promotion, networking, expert positioning, lead generation, case studies, business challenges, research techniques, Amazon researchSPEAKERDonna Amos, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:00]:Hi there and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. My mug is in hand. Still got coffee in it, which is just as well. And I’m delighted to be welcoming Donna Amos to the podcast today. Donna is a marketer, she’s a publisher, but mostly she is someone who aims to try and inspire others to take action. I’m really excited to that we’re going to be having a discussion about how Donna is going to inspire us to be taking action today. So welcome to the podcast, Donna.Donna Amos [00:01:05]:Thanks, Stuart. I appreciate it.Stuart Webb [00:01:09]:Thank you. So let’s start by trying to understand those people who you are trying to inspire to take action. Who is it that you’re trying to help with that particular problem that I know we all have.Donna Amos [00:01:24]:So I focus on solo and micro business owners. So those are the people that I want to inspire to take action, to realize that whatever it is they want, if they just take the first step, they’ll see that it’s not impossible to make it happen.Stuart Webb [00:01:49]:Difficult sometimes to do when you’re a solopreneur or a small business owner buried under paperwork and mountains of things to do, isn’t it?Donna Amos [00:01:58]:Yes, it is. And our, our talk between our two ears, our self talk actually gets in our way a lot.Stuart Webb [00:02:08]:It does, it does. So let’s, let’s explore some of those sort of problems, some of those people. And I guess there’ll be people listening to this right at the moment there is. If you want to drop a question into the chat to get Donna to answer it or if you need to drop a question into the chat later, please do. Donna or I will pick up and answer those questions for you. But so what are the sort of problems that they might recognize? What are the, what are the things they might have tried to do to get themselves out of these situations, these that you can help them with?Donna Amos [00:02:42]:I think the. So for years, the biggest challenge that I see is that they spend time being busy because it makes them feel like they’re, you know, they’re accomplishing something, but they’re really just being busy and they’re not really focused on the end goal and, and taking the right actions towards that. And again, it’s because we get in our own heads and yes, tell ourselves that we shouldn’t be doing that we’re not good enough.Stuart Webb [00:03:22]:And that’s not good for self talk. But it’s also not good for businesses that have small numbers of employees, is it? People want to see that you have a vision that, you know, where you’re going.Donna Amos [00:03:33]:Absolutely. But for solo business owners, they also have to think about they may not have employees. Many of them will have subcontractors, though, that support them in what they’re doing. And their customers will also see if they have that vision or not. And that can either attract people to them or push people away.Stuart Webb [00:04:07]:And how, how do you help them? What is it you try to do to get them out of that situation?Donna Amos [00:04:15]:I think probably the most important thing is to encourage them that when people are encouraged by others, when they’re told that they really do have what it takes and that they. They deserve to. To accomplish whatever it is they’re looking for, then it helps them to again take that first step. So, encouragement.Stuart Webb [00:04:44]:Is this the sort of thing you spend your time doing at solopreneurs Solutions? Solopreneur Solutions.Donna Amos [00:04:50]:It is. So, you know, we’re a marketing agency, but. And we’re also a publisher, but oftentimes our clients just need somebody in their corner. Yeah, it’s telling them, yes, you can do that. We’re happy to help. We’ll hold your hand so that they will take action on the things they want to.Stuart Webb [00:05:13]:Yeah, yeah. And that’s a, that’s often the most valuable thing a marketing agents can do, isn’t it? It is, it is. Helped bring that clarity and it’s helped move those people forward. That one step.Donna Amos [00:05:25]:Exactly. Yep.Stuart Webb [00:05:28]:And so, Donna, have you got a valuable piece of advice or anything that you wish to sort of leave with people so that they can, they can understand how you could help them?Donna Amos [00:05:42]:I’ll share a quick story if that’s okay.Stuart Webb [00:05:45]:Please do.Donna Amos [00:05:46]:So I work with a law firm that has been with me since 2010. And they have. They had a staff of five attorneys. Well, staff of three attorneys and two financial planners that focus on elder care. So when we first started working together, I was encouraging them to do weekly videos, just quick, frequently asked questions that they were answering that we could then push out there to every platform. And the first day when I got there with my camera and ready to go, they had a case of beer sitting there because every one of them was scared to death to get in front of the video. They just, you know, they just didn’t think they could do it. So they got through that first video shoot.Donna Amos [00:06:47]:We did probably 15 videos that one shoot they made it through. They, when we left, they went to the bar to watch basketball because it was during Marsh Madness. But now we’re what, 15 years down the road and every week we still publish a video for them. And they get business from it constantly.Stuart Webb [00:07:15]:Brilliant.Donna Amos [00:07:17]:Yeah. So it was just encouraging them and telling them they could do it. And, you know, and that’s what I believe. So if you’re not, if you don’t think you can do something, find somebody that will wrap their arms around you and say, yes, you can. And I’m right here to help.Stuart Webb [00:07:35]:We’re going to drop some links to where you can find out more about Donna and the way she’s talking about this sort of thing and helping people in our vault. And if you want to get access to the vault, just go to www.systemizer sy s t e m I s e.me forward/free hyphen stuff that. Systemize me forward slash free hyphen stuff. You can see where Donna is posting and more about Donna in the, in the vault. And she, I’m absolutely convinced she will be more than happy to pick on any information and, and help you in the same way. Donna, you’ve talked a little bit about what you do as a, as a, as a marketer and somebody who publishes or helps people to publish books. How did you, how did you learn those skills? What, what, how did a marketer start with, become a book publisher?Donna Amos [00:08:30]:Well, interesting story. Again, I had a client that we were, we were actually doing their social media and they had a website that was about helping children overcome their fears. Her daughter, who was about 13 at the time, 13 or 14, her, she, her mom came to me and said, natalie’s written a book. We want to get it published, but we don’t know how to go about it. Can you help? And I said, absolutely. So I went looking for, you know, what I needed to do to publish a book, all the steps. And we did that. So her, Natalie and her friend.Donna Amos [00:09:17]:Her friend did the imagery for the book. We published the book. They, we promoted it, all of that good stuff. But when Natalie went away to, when she was going to go to college, she was interviewing with colleges and she took that book with her to show them that she knew how to start and finish a project. And yes, most of them were impressed. And I said to myself, duh, you need to help your other clients do this because it is a way to show authority and to share what you have. So it’s in my mind it became a large business card for them to use for marketing themselves. So it wasn’t about the publishing piece.Donna Amos [00:10:09]:They’re not going to make a lot of money selling books. That’s not what we do. But it’s about having that marketing tool that you can then use to get speaking gigs and on podcast and to develop your social, your Social Security, to develop your social media from. All of those things can be taken from one book.Stuart Webb [00:10:31]:Yes. And it’s, and you’re right, it is a, it’s an incredibly good way of demonstrating your, your, your, your expertise to demonstrate your knowledge, isn’t it? Because writing the book is, is half the story. But getting it published because it’s, it’s got the, it’s been edited and it’s, and it’s in a readable format is, is not a simple task and it does require you to actually know what you’re talking about. And that is a great demonstration to any of your potential clients that you have got the knowledge and skills that you need to be able to engage with their situation and help them.Donna Amos [00:11:06]:Absolutely. And you know when, so when I, I’ve written to myself and I use those as calling cards, I send them to people that, you know, that I might meet on LinkedIn, I will carry it with me. And when I have a face to face, I make certain that I give them one of my books because it, I don’t have to say then that I know what I’m talking about, that I have the expertise in a marketing sense. The book tells, tells the story for me.Stuart Webb [00:11:44]:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And I know from experience that writing a book is only half the job. It is, it is a, it is a heartbreaking thing to send it to somebody to edit and they take very large chunks of it away that you spent very many hours writing and then realize that it didn’t actually aid anything to help anybody to understand what you were talking about. And the red pen that comes back is quite disheartening, but it’s such a valuable exercise. It’s true, isn’t it, that a book, sometimes less is more?Donna Amos [00:12:16]:Absolutely. It is. In any kind of writing, it is pulling all those words out that don’t need to be there can be huge in clarifying the message that you’re trying to get across. But the first challenge is actually finishing your manuscript.Stuart Webb [00:12:36]:Yeah.Donna Amos [00:12:37]:Only about 3% of the people do that.Stuart Webb [00:12:41]:Have you got any tips for people to say, how do you go about having the discipline to finish a book in that way?Donna Amos [00:12:53]:Yeah, so it takes discipline, but if you focus on writing 500 words a day, five days a week, you’ll be finished in about 90 to 120 days. And so if you just focus, okay, in three months I can be done. That is. Yeah, that’s huge.Stuart Webb [00:13:21]:Once again, if you have questions about how you can focus and structure your day to produce a marketing. This is a great marketing marketing piece. It is the biggest and best calling card you’ll ever get. If you want to drop comments down below and get Donna to give you a few tips on how you can get your book out there, it is a great way of doing it. It is really fabulous. Please drop them in the comments. I’d be more than happy Donna will pick up those comments as well. I’m sure she’ll be happy to provide you with, with, with any advice.Stuart Webb [00:13:59]:Donna, I’m kind of very aware I’ve been standing here asking you questions for the last sort of 15, 20 minutes. And you must be wondering when I’m going to get to the really key question, which is the killer question, which will actually sort of, you know, really open up the discussion. So I’m at a loss to be able to answer exactly what that question is. So I’m going to leave it to you to, to ask what that question is. And of course, once you’ve asked what the killer question is, you’ll have to answer it for us as well.Donna Amos [00:14:26]:Well, Stuart, tell me the killer question.Stuart Webb [00:14:31]:What is it? I haven’t asked you, Donna, that you’d like me to ask. Oh.Donna Amos [00:14:40]:Great question. I don’t know that you haven’t asked me anything.Stuart Webb [00:14:48]:Oh, that’s just not. I can’t believe that. Okay, I will ask you that, that question then. Donna, what it. You’re, you’re, you want to inspire somebody to take that first step? How do you. What is the best way for somebody who’s sitting there at the moment overwhelmed with marketing things to do, overwhelmed with thinking I should get on with a book, but I don’t know how to start. How do they go about making that first step?Donna Amos [00:15:14]:Start doing the research because that will help to inspire you to keep moving forward. So by that I mean there are. People have different ways of learning. So one author might be the kind that does all the studying and then shares what they’ve learned with others in their book. Another might be that they take everything they’re all their experiences and they tell them the story and how they can overcome the challenges that they have overcome. Or it might be that you use case studies to discuss what you have learned or what you want to share with others. The bottom line is do your research. Go look at.Donna Amos [00:16:10]:One of the best places to research books is Amazon. Go pull up the genre that you want to be an expert in. And every book has a look inside.Stuart Webb [00:16:28]:Yes.Donna Amos [00:16:28]:That you can click on and you can see the chapters that they wrote about. And that can help you identify gaps that you might be able to explore in your book. Do things like go to answer the Public, which is like a search engine, except it delivers to you the questions that people ask Google, and then you can take those questions and use that to help inspire you as to how you move forward. So just go, start doing some research and you’ll feel that tug at your heart to get it going.Stuart Webb [00:17:11]:What a great idea, Donna. I think that’s a really brilliant thing to leave the audience wanting to start and take that action, as I said. Look, go to the comments, post, post a question or a comment on the, on the, on the episode, and Donna or I will get back to you and answer those questions and give you the help that you’re looking for. And in the meantime, whilst you’re doing that, go to this link which is systemized SYS T E M I S I E me. Subscribe. If you get onto that and just put in your name, it doesn’t ask for anything more than your email address. And just put in your email address and each week you’ll get an email from me telling you who’s coming onto the podcast and how you get it. And follow these great people who are speaking, you know, and helping, trying to drive things forward to inspire you to take action, like Donna.Stuart Webb [00:18:05]:Please do that. And you’ll see next week who we’ve got coming on. Donna, I want to thank you very much for spending a few minutes with us. Thank you for trying to inspire us. I hope people have taken that inspiration and are even now thinking about going to Amazon or looking for a book that they ought to write because they know something that people need to hear about.Donna Amos [00:18:24]:Absolutely. Thanks, Stuart. It’s been a pleasure.Stuart Webb [00:18:27]:No problem. And thank you, Donna. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

March 12, 2026Episode 14237 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Mitchell Levy (ep. 142)

Who is Mitchell?Mitchell Levy is a passionate advocate for purpose-driven business relationships. Through his work, Mitchell observed a common frustration among professionals on platforms like LinkedIn: many reach out without a clear purpose or differentiation, often leading with sales pitches rather than genuine value. Recognizing this disconnect, he champions the power of having a “North Star”—a clear vision and understanding of the problem you solve and the unique value you bring. Mitchell encourages business owners, regardless of their size, to approach networking with intention and a customer-centric mindset. His insights help professionals articulate their purpose and foster meaningful, effective connections in the digital age.Key Takeaways* Mitchell Levy reveals the power of clarity: leaders and business owners need a simple North Star—a CPOP—in under 10 words. When you know where you’re headed, decisions get easier and credibility follows.* Tired of random LinkedIn messages? Mitchell shares why real connection starts when you understand who you truly serve and their real pain or joy. Purposeful outreach beats cookie-cutter pitches every time.* Small business? Big CEO? Mitchell’s “executive abundance” works for all. Growth happens when you get clear on your purpose, your people, and the possibilities you can create. Alignment is everything.* Elevator pitches are overrated. What matters is knowing, in a few words, who you’re helping and why. That’s your true vibration—one you won’t need to memorize, just live.* Want credibility? Keep learning, stay coachable, and be willing to reset your focus. Mitchell’s path: clarity, purpose, connection. Change your story, and your impact grows—no matter your size.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Mitchell, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)SUMMARY KEYWORDSexecutive coaching, credibility, LinkedIn sales tactics, business owners, CEOs, executive abundance, fast-growing companies, Inc 5000, Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches, clarity, North Star, customer point of possibilities, CPOP, marketing cookie cutter, business scaling, founders, path to scale, leadership, business strategy, elevator pitch, business clarity, operating system of credibility, business growth, credibility expert, solopreneurs, company purpose, personal compass, decision-making, business differentiation, referral partners, customer focusSPEAKERMitchell Levy, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:31]:Hi and welcome back to five Questions over Coffee. Here is my coffee. Now be careful spill that, it’s quite full at the moment. Mitchell. Yeah, well done. It’s a Guinness, so well done. Mitchell Levy here is a leading executive coach, a global credibility expert and I’m looking forward to him walking through his process today talking to us a little bit about how he helps get leaders real credibility. So Mitchell, thank you for making a few minutes available to come and speak to us here on It’s Not Rocket Science.Stuart Webb [00:01:06]:Five Questions over Coffee.Mitchell Levy [00:01:08]:My pleasure. Thanks for having me Stuart. Really nice to, really nice to engage with you.Stuart Webb [00:01:14]:Well that’s terrific. So let’s start by trying to understand the sort of person you’re reaching out to with helping them with their credibility.Mitchell Levy [00:01:25]:You know it’s interesting, I, I have two distinct audiences. So as an executive coach, so I’m part of The Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches, some of the top executive coaches on the planet. And for that audience it is fast growing CEOs leading the future with executive abundance. Now in if you were in the U.S. i say Inc 5000, which basically is the, the top five, 5,000 fastest growing companies in the U.S. but yeah, since this is Australian, I’ll just say fast growing company. So that is one group of one audience. And, and executive abundance is a new framework I’m introducing into the marketplace.Mitchell Levy [00:02:12]:It’s been my executive coaching for years. But one of the things you, you asked me in the green room, how you doing? Last week I advanced to candidacy on my PhD program and so I am actually doing a dissertation and then we’ll, we’ll write a book, do coursework and chatbots on executive abundance.Stuart Webb [00:02:33]:On your Congratulations. Thank you doctor. Not a, not a, not an easy thing to do as I recall. So tell me a little more about sort of the people that you’re helping that you’ve just sort of described. Give us an example of sort of things that they might have tried before and the ways in which you help them.Mitchell Levy [00:02:54]:Well so by the way, let me do the second audience and then you could tell me which one you want me to.Stuart Webb [00:02:59]:Oh, no problem.Mitchell Levy [00:03:00]:So the second audience is business owners escaping slimy LinkedIn sales tactics. Perfect. Perfect. That’s exactly what I want to get right. It’s, I’ve been on LinkedIn since before they were making money. Now a couple hundred thousand people could say that, but there’s one thing I could say that nobody else in the planet can say and that is I was in the room with two, with two of the five founders And I was commissioned to have written and published the first book on LinkedIn. I’ve looked at a couple hundred thousand LinkedIn profiles and I have a system and approach that helps people drive one to one business relationships with people on LinkedIn. And I can do it at scale.Mitchell Levy [00:03:43]:And so it’s the 5% on LinkedIn functionality that brings 80% of value. So that sort of answers that question for the business owner side. On the executive coaching side, the question is what sort of things, what have they tried before? You know, I think I’m going to generically say something and then you could, you could drill me in if we need to. Life is, and business is really, really simple.Stuart Webb [00:04:14]:It’s not easy, right?Mitchell Levy [00:04:17]:And what’s not easy about it is the fact that even if you know the answer in your heart, in your head, in your body, you know exactly what to do. There’s chaos out there and there’s these experts who have what I call marketing cookie cutter approaches. And so in, in your vernacular, there’s a wicked problem they have and they’re trying to solve it. They’re going to go out and talk to a ton of people and they get such a diverse range of answers and then they hit one they like, but they don’t hold on to it. And so for those that I work with on executive coaching, the first thing we need to do is establish the clarity, establish the playground they play and establish what I call their cpop, their customer point of possibilities. And that is in less than 10 words, where they’re executing on their purpose. That’s for the company or for the individual. And once you have that, then you can deploy an operating system of credibility.Mitchell Levy [00:05:23]:But until you have that, it’s really hard to make decisions because you need a compass, you need a personal compassion that you can actually live by. You need your own North Star. And, and so that’s, in terms of business, we need a North Star and that’s, that’s where we start. And after that, when I hang out with somebody who’s doing executive coaching, I’m just, I’m just helping them understand how they’re making decisions in their North Star, how they propagate it throughout the organization. It’s, it’s always fun to see and everyone’s different. Some are really fast, some take a little bit more time, some need to fall down a couple of times so they can get up. But generally speaking, what I do is extremely simple, but apparently it’s not so easy.Mitchell Levy [00:06:18]:Let me just try and link those two customer types together. In some way, I think something like LinkedIn requires somebody to have what you’ve just described in terms of the Northstar, what they’re doing and be very clear about what their problem solution is. I see an awful lot of people on LinkedIn just sort of, you know, reaching out quite randomly to people, sending the immediate, why don’t we just. Why don’t we just cut to the chase? Buy my. Buy my stuff, buy my thing. And I find myself very frustrated by the fact they don’t actually have, as you’ve just described it, a real purpose, a real point of differentiation, a real customer focus behind that message, because they’re not able to actually articulate what it is they’re actually going to do. So there’s a great deal of sort of overlap between those two things that you’ve described, because business owners, even if they’re small, need to have that North Star about what it is they’re reaching out to do with LinkedIn and why they need to do it. Am I wrong?Mitchell Levy [00:07:24]:No, no, no. It’s, it’s a great observation. Thank you for seeing it. It shows a little bit about who you are. It turns out that if I’m working with a CEO with a couple hundred, couple thousand, tens of thousands employees, there’s a lot more what to say, politics and vested interest and vested groups in place. When I’m working with a CEO who’s a solopreneur, where they’ve got five or 10 people in their organization, it’s a whole lot easier to make change. And so it’s a different price point, a lot less expensive for the LinkedIn work. And it turns out that the lessons I learned in both places apply to each other.Mitchell Levy [00:08:14]:I call the LinkedIn guys mini executive abundance, even though I don’t necessarily call it to them. In my mind, I, I’m deploying executive abundance at the individual level as well, which is a great way to. So it’s, it’s technically the same thing, but most of the time I don’t, I don’t say it that way.Stuart Webb [00:08:33]:Yeah. And thank you for. Thank you for sort of endorsing the fact that I had misunderstood it, because I do think that this idea of executive abundance applies to some smaller businesses. They just don’t know it applies. They just don’t recognize it in themselves. And I think a lot of business owners probably don’t grow because they don’t know how to do that. They don’t know how to start to let themselves have that abundance. So talk to me a bit, a little bit Mitchell about.Mitchell Levy [00:09:01]:Well, I know you’ve got a valuable offer that you’re going to put. And we’ve got this, we’re going to have this in our vault, which I’m going to show now on screen, which is a www.systemize sys t e m I s e me free stuff. So you’ll be able to get hold of some of the stuff that Mitchell is going to talk about there. So Mitchell, talk to me a little bit about the process that you go through. So if people were thinking I need to get and understand this guy a bit more, talk about the process. Talk about how you help them with this abundance as you’re talking about.Mitchell Levy [00:09:38]:So we’ll practice on you. Stuart, you’ve demonstrated that I should do that. What, what I ended up doing. And I’ll share. This is actually what I do second, but I’m, I’m sharing on screen. Oh, not working at the moment. Looks like I, looks like I have a small problem with my, my screen sharing. So I will not do that.Mitchell Levy [00:10:00]:I ended up interviewing 500 thought leaders on, on credibility. And with those 500, I was able to articulate the definition of credibility, which turns out to be a good operating system. We live by credibility is the quality which we TR light. And it turned out that I unlocked a superpower. My superpower is deploying the framework of clarity. So I sit with any company, any human, help them articulate in less than 10 words where they’re executing on their purpose. Now, I call that a C pop. Your customer point of possibilities, that’s, that’s that north star.Mitchell Levy [00:10:36]:That’s the compass we’re talking about. And Stuart, let’s create that view. I looked at your LinkedIn, looked at your website. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong. What I will promise you is that after you hear your C pop, you’re going to go, oh, I have to make changes because it’s just going to help focus you right. Now let me say something and I’m going to guess right away. I’m going to guess that you’re in a 10%.Mitchell Levy [00:11:03]:And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. When I share a C pop with somebody, I’m they. We as humans, we vibrate out of frequency. And so what happens is the, the C pop represents in words, the frequency you vibrate at. It’s who you are. It’s, it makes you feel aligned with who you are. I’ve done this over 1200 times and in 1200 cases, the person’s Feeling aligned. Now here’s the scary part.Mitchell Levy [00:11:37]:In 90% of the cases, they will get unaligned between two hours and two weeks because of the chaos and noise out there. I’m going to assume that you’re going to be in the 10%. So we’ll see next time we talk.Stuart Webb [00:11:49]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:11:52]:Now, I also will tell you something else. I will give you the formula. It’s a secret formula. And I will gift that to you and we’ll go through the exercise together. When I was doing the interviews, I created a video and I would share the formula and say, listen, what I found so far. I created the video somewhere around interview 50. And what I said, what I found so far is even when somebody had the formula, only 2% would actually articulate their C pop. Because even with the formula, it’s hard because we get stuck on this marketing cookie cutter stuff.Mitchell Levy [00:12:30]:And even after they got the video, they. There was still only 2% of people could walk in. So I’m gonna give you. I’m gonna give you in the audience the formula and we’ll walk through it together. The C pop is less than 10 words, and it’s really two components. The first is the who. And I’m gonna go in and ask you the questions. Who do you serve? If we’re credible, we’re servant leaders.Mitchell Levy [00:12:55]:So who do you serve? And the second piece is from their perspective. What is their pain point? Or what is their pleasure point?Stuart Webb [00:13:04]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:13:05]:So let me ask you these questions. So who is it that you serve?Stuart Webb [00:13:10]:So I serve a business leader who has a really bright idea but doesn’t know how to get that and make it into a positive business reality.Mitchell Levy [00:13:20]:Now, it’s funny because you’re LinkedIn says founders.Stuart Webb [00:13:26]:That’s true. It is true.Mitchell Levy [00:13:28]:So when you think about where 80% of your revenue comes from, is it from corporate businesses and business leaders, or is it from founders? Or who. Who is it?Stuart Webb [00:13:38]:It’s 80% comes from founders.Mitchell Levy [00:13:41]:Okay, so good thing I looked at your LinkedIn. All right, so from the. I think you said it, but I’m going to ask you both pain and pleasure, what’s their primary pain point?Stuart Webb [00:13:58]:They have no ability or starting point to make that business strategy or business idea an actual reality in the marketplace. They are unable to articulate, possibly even to themselves, where they start to go from. This would be brilliant to. It is there and it’s making me money.Mitchell Levy [00:14:29]:So you’re talking about really founders, pre revenue founders.Stuart Webb [00:14:34]:Now, a lot of the people that I deal with are. They’ve already Got a product, but they’ve got one product. They need two because they want to scale. And the problem they have is I’ve got a great idea for my second product, but the way I did it first, but now I’ve got a small team, it doesn’t work the second time.Mitchell Levy [00:14:57]:Interesting. Okay, so they, they have money because they’ve, they’ve been able to get something in the marketplace, but now they want to scale. Either scale what they’re doing or scale into another product.Stuart Webb [00:15:14]:Essentially, yes.Mitchell Levy [00:15:16]:Oh, oh, Tell me how to get it wrong. Tell me what you got.Stuart Webb [00:15:20]:No, no, no, you’re absolutely right by saying essentially, yes. The only other thing that I would add into that is there are. There are sometimes businesses who have managed to get that second product, but it’s now tanking because they have got all the wrong. They’re trying to do it the way they did it before, and therefore, you know, the, the mechanisms they’re using are wrong for where they are because they’re now a bigger company. You were talking about politics. They’re now sort of saying, it’s got to be done by other people, but it’s got to be done my way, in the way that I started this. And that just doesn’t work if they start instructing in that way. Whilst we’re doing this.Mitchell Levy [00:15:55]:While we’re doing this, Mitchell, I know you’re just doing a bit of typing, such like, I’d invite anybody. If anybody’s hearing this and thinking to themselves, I need to make comments or I need to actually sort of, you know, leap in. At this point, Mitchell and I will be monitoring the comments on LinkedIn after this. So if you’ve got questions or if you’re looking at this and thinking, I want somebody to talk to me about this, post your questions there. I can guarantee Mitchell will get onto that and we’ll answer your questions because he’s that sort of guy.Mitchell Levy [00:16:22]:Thank you, Will. Interesting. Okay, give me a pleasure point, not a pleasure point of working with you, but we’ll just fast forward to a period of time after they’ve had a chance to spend time with you. How are they feeling? What are they doing? What. What makes sense to them?Mitchell Levy [00:16:41]:Let me give you a very real example of that. Working with a company, the founders needed to start to scale something. We turned their service that was poorly defined couldn’t be delivered because they couldn’t really articulate it. It’s now much more of a sort of defined product idea, although it’s still a service, but it’s got a Logo. It’s got a description, it’s got a series of processes which their staff can operate, and they’re selling that multiple times per week. And it’s now. It’s now. Then they’re now proud of it.Mitchell Levy [00:17:18]:They’re now saying, I’ll use the name of it. They’re now saying, threat sure is a great product. It was a great idea, and now it’s something which is actually making us money. And customers love it.Mitchell Levy [00:17:32]:Cool. Nice. Okay, thank you. So yours is easy.Mitchell Levy [00:17:42]:I don’t want it to be easy, Mitchell.Mitchell Levy [00:17:44]:Let me rephrase that. Yours was really simple. And it was only after I started talking to you to see who I was seeing this morning that I. Because, remember, we talked in the green room. Should we do this live? And sometimes there’s a lot of marketing, cookie cutter stuff that gets in the way, but everything you said reinforced. Wait, let me count the words. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 words. Would you be happy if you could describe yourself?Mitchell Levy [00:18:11]:Wow. Okay, that is now. I will say now. This is where people. If you are watching this live and if you are going to go onto LinkedIn, you need six words. I have never been able to articulate this in six years. Six words. I can articulate it in two or three hours if you ask me to.Mitchell Levy [00:18:26]:But six words, that’s impressive.Mitchell Levy [00:18:28]:So let me. Let me say that. Or just say less than 10.Stuart Webb [00:18:34]:Right?Mitchell Levy [00:18:34]:Because if you. If you think about it, and, and this is. This is for people paying attention. When you asked me my two audiences, I gave you my seat, my two C pops. C POP stands for customer Pointed Possibilities. So my executive coaching is nine words. Inc. 5000 CEOs leading the future with executive abundance.Mitchell Levy [00:18:55]:The goal when you share your CPOP is that the referral partner or the prospect says, oh, tell me more, Mitchell, what’s this executive abundance thing?Stuart Webb [00:19:02]:Right? Or.Mitchell Levy [00:19:04]:Or the other one when I’m talking to a business owner. By the way, Stuart, you’re a business owner, right? So when I talk to your founders or business owners, When I talk to business owners, it’s business owners escaping slimy LinkedIn sales tactics. And I either get the laugh that you gave before or the visual reaction because you just remember being slimed recently.Mitchell Levy [00:19:23]:Yeah. Yeah.Mitchell Levy [00:19:24]:In either case, the goal when I share those words or is to paint a compass, to paint a. A playground that I plan. And then when I answer what comes next, I get more credibility because I’ve been so finite in terms of the playground. So in your particular case, your playground is six words. And I’m Putting it in chat, because I’m a visual person, so you could see it as well. But I’ll share it out loud. Founders needing a path to scale.Mitchell Levy [00:20:01]:Brilliant.Stuart Webb [00:20:02]:Right?Mitchell Levy [00:20:03]:And so, by the way, once again, anybody who is watching this, that is such a brilliant summary. I could not. I couldn’t have done. I couldn’t have done that without Mitchell’s help. But that is a fabulous summary.Mitchell Levy [00:20:18]:I’m going to say thank you. And it’s. By the way, it’s you. Because, by the way, although what happened, you’re marketing cookie cutter stuff, which I’m glad I looked at your LinkedIn. You said the word founders, and that seemed important to me, so I had to ask you, where does 80% of revenue come from? Yeah, right. And it’s. But other than that, everything you said reinforced. And you already have this on your LinkedIn.Mitchell Levy [00:20:46]:You have a couple other things which I might encourage you to remove. But everything you said reinforced. Having a path to scale. Even the pleasure point was talking about a path to scale.Stuart Webb [00:20:59]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:20:59]:And so when you now have these six words, and by the way, what I was typing in on the back end is, I have a Mitchell Levy chatbot, and I said, if this is your C pop, what could the acronym path stand for? And I’m putting it in chat. We don’t have to talk about it, but this is just my gift for you. You know, path could stand for, you know, basically, purpose, action. Ooh, team, and. And. And harmony. Sorry, I. It didn’t cut.Mitchell Levy [00:21:37]:It didn’t cut and paste really well. And then it talks about what. That what stuff is. But. But I think. I think the way to think about it for you is, is when you share with somebody. Let me do your. Tell me more, if you don’t mind.Stuart Webb [00:21:54]:I’ll.Mitchell Levy [00:21:54]:I’ll do it. Because we’re recorded. Right, so. And now a superpower I have is the ability to do this. It’s a formula, and I’ve just done it over 1200 times, so it’s easy. I’m happy for people to grab it. It’s the who and the what. Who in the what comes before why.Stuart Webb [00:22:12]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:22:12]:Just to be clear. Comes before Simon Sinexy. Who in the what comes first? It’s a C Pop. And a ancillary superpower is if I know somebody C Pop most of the time, I could do their tell me more better than them until they feel good about it. So let me tell you, Stuart, what I mean by this. When in the future, when you share your cpop now, if somebody says to you, hey, what’s your cpop? Now, maybe a couple hundred thousand people know this word, so most likely they’re gonna say, who are you?Stuart Webb [00:22:45]:Right?Mitchell Levy [00:22:46]:What do you do? Who are you? And in that particular case, you need to put a.Stuart Webb [00:22:51]:A.Mitchell Levy [00:22:51]:A hook up front. The hook is, hey, there’s an audience I spend a lot of time with, or there’s an audience I do really well with, or my clients all get success in a certain area.Stuart Webb [00:23:01]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:23:02]:Whatever the hook is. Then you do a pause, and then you say, founders needing a path to scale. Then you drop the mic, and then you may say something. Oh, let me tell you a little bit more. Listen, I work with a series of founders. A lot of times they’ve already put their first product out there. They’ve already been successful, and they need to scale. They need to get to the next level, and they get stuck.Mitchell Levy [00:23:29]:They either don’t know how to move forward or they’ve already moved forward, but they’ve deployed what worked in the first product to the second, and it doesn’t work. What I do is help them lay out the path that will allow them scale going forward.Mitchell Levy [00:23:45]:Mitchell, that is the best way I have ever heard somebody describe what is effectively an elevator pitch. You’d have heard elevator pitch. And they’re all. They’re all very difficult for people to do, and most of the time, they’re not very good. So I’m not going to say that, because there are a lot of people on here will be offended by that. But that.Mitchell Levy [00:24:04]:Oh, I’m gonna say it. I’m gonna say to you and everyone else, if you’ve memorized an elevator pitch, please forget it.Mitchell Levy [00:24:13]:Yes.Stuart Webb [00:24:15]:Right, stop.Mitchell Levy [00:24:15]:Now.Mitchell Levy [00:24:16]:It comes from here. Your elevator pitch comes from your head. And your goal when you talk to somebody is you want them to feel the energy inside. You want them to feel your heart. So memorize the six words or nine words or three. A couple people have three words, right? So memorize your C Pop. But you won’t have to memorize it. It’s your.Mitchell Levy [00:24:38]:It’s your vibrational energy. And then your.Stuart Webb [00:24:40]:Your.Mitchell Levy [00:24:41]:What would have been your elevated pitch is more the tell me more. Which you custom tailor to the person you’re talking to.Stuart Webb [00:24:47]:Yeah, absolutely. I love what you’re saying. Look, Mitchell, I could keep you here for another couple of hours, but I have a feeling you have important business to go and speak to other people who need this. Once again, I’m going to invite anybody listening live or in future, when you see this, drop comments into the comments Below, Mitchell, I know, will come back, give you some very, very good advice to try and get this sort of thing into your life, because we need more clarity. I am, as Mitchell has probably managed to sort of convince me. I spend a lot of my time with people who haven’t got the clarity they need. And it is always difficult to get that clarity because in their own head, they’re trying to rationalize, they’re trying to sort of apply a set of rules. You know, they’ve done all the courses, they’ve read all the books, they’ve.Mitchell Levy [00:25:43]:They’ve been out and seen all the YouTube videos, and somehow that’s actually created less clarity than if they just sat down and did a very simple exercise like Mitchell is doing here. So drop your questions, drop your comments. I know we can get some clarity back in the world. But Mitchell, how did you get to this? Where did you come from that this became your mission in life?Mitchell Levy [00:26:07]:It’s really interesting, I think, what happened because of time. I’ll try to do this super quick. My undergraduate was a Bachelor of Science in Stochastic and Deterministic Models of Operational Research. In essence, I was taught how to model. Well, as long as I could say the words and the syllables come out of my mouth, I’m still happy. And one day I won’t be able to do that anymore, right?Mitchell Levy [00:26:34]:So.Mitchell Levy [00:26:36]:But I was taught how to model people and systems and improve them. And what I learned then I got an MBA, and as I mentioned previously, I’m doing the PhD thing, right? So what. What I learned was, although I only speak English and it’s American English, and so it’s bad English, I don’t speak those multiple languages. I do speak multiple languages of functions, you know, so marketing. Funny. Marketing, talking to sales, talking to engineers. I mean, it’s just, whoever you are, I could speak your language because I’m feeling the energy of what does it mean to be who you are? And then it was in 2019 that I went on a Napoleon Hill journey And I interviewed 500 thought leaders on credibility between 2019 and 2020. And so I.Mitchell Levy [00:27:27]:It turns out I asked everyone five questions. And the first question that just sort of magically appeared to me is, what’s your C Pop? That’s the first thing I wanted to. I wanted to learn from people. And. And it took me a couple years, post the interviews, post the TED Talk, post the book that I wrote on it. By the way, I’ve written 65 books. My 66 is the most important. It’s the one I’m writing now called Executive Abundance.Mitchell Levy [00:27:57]:It took a number of years afterwards to really understand. As a matter of fact, what happened is I went to the Purpose Summit. Now, when you go to a summit called the Purpose Summit, you got a lot of people talking about purpose, bringing purpose into corporations, what people’s purpose are. And, you know, everyone had a different definition and it meant many different things to different people. And at some point in time, I thought the C pop had to do with purpose. But as it turns out, the C pop is where one is executing on their purpose today.Stuart Webb [00:28:30]:Yeah, brilliant, right?Mitchell Levy [00:28:32]:And I’m like, oh, my God. And then once that started happening, and then. I’ll give you one last. One last thing. It was about seven months ago, eight months ago. So, by the way, if you haven’t figured this out, being credible means you’re always learning, you’re always growing, you’re always coachable.Stuart Webb [00:28:47]:Right?Mitchell Levy [00:28:49]:About seven, eight months ago, I realized something, and this put everything into perspective. I’ve known this my entire life. I’ve been in Silicon Valley, started 20 companies, and sat on the board of a public firm.Mitchell Levy [00:29:01]:And.Mitchell Levy [00:29:01]:And I’ve known this my whole entire life, but have not ever executed on it until about seven or eight months ago. Sell them what they want, deliver what they need.Stuart Webb [00:29:13]:Yeah, brilliant.Mitchell Levy [00:29:14]:So let me. I’ll just finish that. So what’s interesting is I ended up spending five and a half years of my life focused on what people need. Clarity and credibility are what people need. It’s not what they want. So you sell them something else, but behind the scenes. So I’ll make a. I’ll make an offer for you.Mitchell Levy [00:29:31]:And listen, there are many people who actually sell clarity, and they could still use the CPOP and what they work. So I do, once a month, I do a clarity session. Have your clients come with your client to one of my clarity sessions. Have them get their CPOP and then do your thing and do your magic, right? And. And it’s. It’s the. It’s the partnership thing that we’ve been taught not to spend time on and not to focus on. But, you know, if you can bring your client to get a C pop.Mitchell Levy [00:30:03]:And. And then all of a sudden, everything you do from then out in is so much easier. You know, just an offer, if that’s interesting here.Mitchell Levy [00:30:12]:Brilliant. Mitchell, I am very aware that there must be a question that you are waiting for that you are begging me to ask, but I haven’t yet asked, and I am obviously unable to articulate that question because I don’t know what it is. So what’s the question you think I should have by now asked? And then clearly you’re gonna have to answer it because I haven’t yet thought about.Mitchell Levy [00:30:35]:You know, that’s always my favorite. That’s my favorite question.Mitchell Levy [00:30:39]:It’s the one. It’s one I like best because I don’t have to do any work for that one.Mitchell Levy [00:30:43]:Yeah, you know, I didn’t really, given I’m looking at the time, I didn’t really have anything. I guess the. Probably the biggest question is it’s along the lines of, Mitchell, what you did with Stuart was so simple and so straightforward and so quick. Why is it that Stuart didn’t already know that? Or why? Why? If you say you’ve done this 1200 times and every time they’ve had the same reaction with Stuart, how come you’re not known universally around the world? That would probably be the answer.Mitchell Levy [00:31:30]:And the answer.Mitchell Levy [00:31:32]:I’m still, I’m still grokking. I’m still trying to grok all that.Stuart Webb [00:31:35]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:31:35]:Still trying to figure that out. The, the. A lot of the answers. There are many people who, who focus on clarity and focus on credibility and, and I think ultimately it’s the best way I could think about it now. It really is what people need, but not exactly what they want. What I found is that 90% of. Of. Of people, or let’s even go down to the C pop level, 98 of people don’t know their C pop.Mitchell Levy [00:32:14]:And if you ask them if they have clarity, they’re either going to say yes or they’re going to say, I don’t care, I don’t need it. But 98% of people, 98% of the audience has figured out that. That understanding where they’re executing their purpose in less than 10 words is not important to them yet. And so it’s hard to imagine that you could sit with somebody and they could look at you and they could. They could actually present a summarized version of how you’re showing up in the world so quickly. And, you know, there are people who watch us who would think it’s staged, that we did it ahead of time.Stuart Webb [00:33:00]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:33:01]:And it’s not. So. But the answer, I don’t. I don’t know exactly. I just know that when I talk to somebody, whether it’s a CEO of a large company, if, if you’re my client, I’m going to stick with you and you’re going to play in your playground.Stuart Webb [00:33:15]:Right.Mitchell Levy [00:33:16]:But if you’re somebody who I’m just Sort of giving a gift to or you’re. You’ve paid me to be in my clarity session. The it, it’s so easy to get off track. It’s so easy to get out of alignment that people often do. And they go, yeah, it was good talking to Mitchell for a period of time, but I didn’t do anything with it. Right when and, and what I’ll say to you is last week was also, it was a great gift. It’s when I advanced a candidacy for the PhD. I also had a woman join me and apparently I had talked to her three years, three years earlier.Mitchell Levy [00:33:56]:And the first words out of my mouth, out of her mouth was, Mitchell, I’ve been thinking about you for the last three years. Which is one of those things that are really, you know, you know, how do I interpret that? And she goes, I was about ready to enter an extremely difficult chapter of my life. And what you gave me, that C pop was the best gift I’ve ever received in my life because it allowed me to actually pull myself out of that chapter to focus on my business. And I’ve served 259 clients over a five year period. Most of those came after year two because that’s when you and I spoke. And I am just so honored to have spent time with you. That’s an example of somebody who heard it, understood it and used it. And I did.Mitchell Levy [00:34:54]:I challenge anyone. If you get your C pop and I’m someone who supports you or where you could take the formula in the 2% and you can make it work for you, I’m going to encourage you to live it and see what happens. I guarantee that your life will be different.Stuart Webb [00:35:10]:Mitchell, that is a brilliant story to end on. I’ve got nothing very much else to say. I’m going to ask people if they would just go to this link www.systemize.me subscribe. You need to go to that link because that link is a link to a form which will allow me to send you an email and you will then get an email once a week when we have brilliant guests like Mitchell on. And you can just sit and learn from people like Mitchell because they are worth listening to. Mitchell, you have been an inspiration. I have got some words to add to my LinkedIn profile, but better than that, I’ve got some living to do now because I have now got a challenge from you to live up to something that you have set down as a standard for me. I cannot believe what you do and you should be world famous and I’m going to try and make it so.Stuart Webb [00:36:05]:Mitchell, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. I really appreciate it.Mitchell Levy [00:36:09]:Oh, Stuart, my. My pleasure. I. I look forward to whatever our next conversation and seeing who you are the next time I have a conversation with you.Stuart Webb [00:36:19]:Terrific. Thank you. Mitchell. Mitchell, that. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

February 26, 2026Episode 14117 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Joe Abreu (ep. 141)

Who is Joe?Joe Abreu is the creator of the Profit Optimization Program, designed specifically for small to medium-sized business owners striving to bridge the gap between hard work and real profit. After years of working closely with business owners who frequently asked him how to translate increased revenue into greater profits, Joe began collecting and analyzing their recurring challenges. Drawing on these insights, he developed a results-driven program to help entrepreneurs break free from the cycle of endless work and unlock their businesses’ true financial potential. Through his work, Joe has empowered countless business owners to move beyond just doing more and instead focus on building businesses that reach their full profitability.Key Takeaways* Many business owners work harder, but profits still lag behind. Joe Abreu reminds us: true success comes from understanding your numbers, not just chasing more sales. Clarity leads to freedom.* Are you slashing expenses without strategy? Joe says test each change. Don’t cut blindly—learn what truly moves the needle for your business growth.* Delegation scares a lot of owners—what will I do once I delegate? According to Joe, it’s your chance to step back, innovate, and focus on what really matters.* The 80/20 Principle changed Joe’s business life: focus on the 20% of tasks that create 80% of results. Systemize, delegate, and start freeing up your time for what counts.* Your business shouldn’t be golden shackles. Profit optimization is about designing your business to give you freedom and the life you dreamed of when you started.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Joe, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)SUMMARY KEYWORDSprofit optimization, small business owners, medium sized business, revenue, business profits, expense management, business growth, sales strategies, bookkeeping, financial literacy, accountant, business owner challenges, business expenses, business numbers, business coaching, process improvement, business systems, delegation, 80/20 principle, business mergers, business acquisitions, business sales, business optimization, podcast, business clarity, CRM, AI in business, business freedom, online course, certification course, workbookSPEAKERJoe Abreu, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:31]:Hi and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I’m here with my guest today, Joe Abro. Joe is the author of the profit optimization program which I’m really excited to learn about. And Joe, I just want to thank you for taking a few minutes out of what I’m sure is a very busy day to spend a few minutes with us talking about this new program and the book you’ve written.Stuart Webb [00:01:00]:Oh, thank you for having me, Stuart. It is a pleasure to be here today.Stuart Webb [00:01:04]:Terrific. Now listen, let’s start why. So who is it that this book is written for? Who is it, if you like the person you’re trying to help by giving them access to the profit optimization program?Stuart Webb [00:01:17]:A great question. The profit optimization program was set up to service the small to medium sized business owners. That’s pretty much everyone everywhere who’s working exceptionally hard, trying to do their best that they can. But the revenue and the profits are just not connecting. We’re just doing more work, but we’re just not seeing the bottom line. We’re not really seeing what we could, how best we can be. And so what I’ve done is over the years I collected all the information from different business owners that asked me questions over and over. How do I get the revenue to actually create more profit? Because sometimes we put in more business, we create more business, but we never get to the very end.Stuart Webb [00:02:06]:Right. The profit doesn’t translate just the same way. And that’s where the profit optimization program was born, which is the collection of all these business owners. Over the years. In my experience as a business owner, I’ve had the opportunity to purchase businesses, to merge them. I have also to sell, so, you know, have sold them. So that’s given me a lot of experience to share.Stuart Webb [00:02:28]:And, and Joe, I mean you’ve obviously been through this, this program yourself, but what have you found when you’ve been talking to these people? What have they been trying to do to, to help themselves from, you know, the situation where the, the profits are somehow not quite adding up. What, what do you see as some of the common things they try to do, which, which are not, which are not effectively helping them?Stuart Webb [00:02:49]:Oh yes. So we see a few common things happen over and over. The first one I would say is in most business owners, what they do is when they look at their profit, it’s not matching the revenue or it’s not translating to the profits. They’ll just say, well, let’s go ahead and just do more sales, let’s just increase the revenue side. Right. That’s the most common thing. I mean, it makes sense. I mean, that’s exactly what we would all do as business owners.Stuart Webb [00:03:14]:So let’s just go ahead and put more deals through the pipeline and to see if that translates into profit. The second thing that we often see common mistakes or things that are slowing them down that probably they can improve would be looking at their expenses and not slashing them all at once. Because what happens is they start going through the whole business, all of their expense list, and what they’ll do is start slashing everything without testing one thing or another and then impacting the business. The third thing that they do very often is just hand over the books to an accountant or a bookkeeper and not really learning their own numbers. And I’m guilty of that. As a business owner, I just want to do the sales. I want to get out there, I want to get involved, I want to grow, and I don’t want to see the numbers all the time. But if we don’t learn our own numbers, how do we know how to impact? How do we improve them, how to slash some of the expenses? So we have to learn those numbers.Stuart Webb [00:04:17]:And, you know, lastly, what they do is they try to do all of these things at one time versus trying one step at a time to see what works and what doesn’t work.Stuart Webb [00:04:29]:Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve just put on the screen, you know, if anybody has questions or comments on what you’ve just said, I. I’d love to see them in the chat, because I know you and I will respond to that. And I’m sure there are people that have got questions about, you know, how do I best get these numbers and what do I understand by them? And I know exactly what you’re saying. Too many of us actually don’t want to have to look at numbers. We see that as a dull, boring, administrative job. But actually, it’s when you start to see those and you understand them that these optimizations become obvious, isn’t it? It’s the time when you suddenly recognize the, hey, if I actually sort of develop the area that, you know. And we often find that customers are the best sources of these things.Stuart Webb [00:05:15]:If I develop this, that would be a much more profitable area than just chasing the new customer and things like that. That’s the sort of insight you get by looking properly at what your numbers, what your CRM, things like that tell you.Stuart Webb [00:05:27]:Oh, absolutely. It’s the clarity to see where you are. That’s why I say often that at Globis are our company. What we do is we take a look at every step of the business and we break it apart in a very positive way. And we’re sort of the lens for the business. We close in or just maybe zoom out a little bit just to show them exactly what they have. Because most business owners, they have the right elements, they have the right tools. It’s just that they don’t really have the clarity to see which direction they should go where they should actually invest most of their time or money.Stuart Webb [00:06:07]:I love the advice. Joe. I know that you have got a very valuable free offer for us. I’m just going to point people in the direction. If you go to this link, this link is available now, which is if you go to www.systemize me/free hyphen stuff, you’ll see Joe has put a very valuable offer which I believe is at the download, seven quick wins, which I think is a really valuable piece of advice that you’re going to offer. Tell us about seven. Seven quick wins.Stuart Webb [00:06:37]:Yes, the seven quick wins transformation for a business in 30 days. It’s a workbook. It’s a small workbook that gets you started in the process. Going back to when I put together the profit optimization program. My idea was that if I can offer a business owner one aha moment, one of those moments where you’re like, wow, I didn’t, you know, I had heard that before or I can actually multiply my business or multiply my profit based on what I just learned. For me that was that that would be a win. So the seven wins is just the beginning. It’s, it’s very common things that you can do to start the process of identifying the things that could improve your profit in your business.Stuart Webb [00:07:22]:And if you see that you find one big aha and then you want to move forward, that’s what we move on to the course, the POP certification course that we have. And that’s pretty much so we have the book which is a self help and then we have the certification course which is an online version and that is more structured. But individuals started to let us know that they wanted a little bit more than just the book and they want a little bit more than just the course. So then we move down to doing some coaching and that’s what we do. A little bit more of the personalized version.Stuart Webb [00:07:54]:Brilliant. And even, even if you don’t get the personalized version, that seven quick wins could be the one thing that you need to get that one aha moment to move you forward. Joe, I’d just really love to understand at the moment. There’s a huge amount of experience you bring to this. You’ve bought businesses, you’ve merged, and you said you’ve sold businesses. Was there one course, an idea, something which sort of brought you to really understand how you could help people in the way that you’re helping them now?Stuart Webb [00:08:26]:Yes, I would say the 8020 principle. Oh, my Coke. And I, once I read that, I mean, it blew my mind, really, because I’m thinking, how is it that 20% of our actions actually brings 80% of our results? Then I’m thinking, why am I wasting my time with the other 80%? What am I doing?Stuart Webb [00:08:51]:Wonderful, wonderful.Stuart Webb [00:08:53]:So that really blew my mind. I started to think, okay, well, then in that case, I have to find a way to improve. How to divert or how to channel those 80% in another way.Stuart Webb [00:09:05]:Yes.Stuart Webb [00:09:05]:So I can go ahead and get the other 20% and then maybe I can take the other 80% of the time off and we can do that. That’s a lot of what we do with the optimization program. We’re identifying how we can improve processes, how can we systemize certain things, how can we delegate? Because that’s a huge thing for business owners. We fail to delegate. The 8020 principle really just highlights that. And then once I started to just infuse that into the business, I was, you know, I started to line up everything that I can just say, okay, that’s part of my 80%. Let’s find a way to delegate to someone else.Stuart Webb [00:09:46]:I. I don’t know if you have a comment on this, Joe, and once again, I’d welcome anybody currently listening to us or people who are listening later in the. In the podcast version of this. There is a sense in which. And I was talking to a business owner only this morning that was afraid of the idea of delegation, because as they said, what do I do when everybody else is doing my job? And my answer was, go and do another job, because there must be a ton that’s waiting for you, but you haven’t currently got time for it. You know, developing your staff, developing your team so that they are the most efficient, the most effective, and effectively allowing them to do your job, to free. Free you up, to do something else. That seems to be a burden, or at least it’s.Stuart Webb [00:10:29]:It’s a blocker for a lot of business owners who are basically saying, but if I let everybody do my job, then I’ve got nothing to do. And that’s actually just not true, is it?Stuart Webb [00:10:39]:Oh, no, it is not. Actually. If you find ways to delegate all of these tasks, they can be systemized or can be organized in a certain way to give you that freedom, then I think that’s when you can come back as a business owner and have that macro view where you can now start to innovate, where you could start to bring in other new processes that. That frees you up to do that. So a business owner’s job is never done because we’re always looking for the next thing. And now that AI is coming into the picture, we’re basically changing processes and systems almost on a monthly basis. Now. By the time that we’re done producing a system, we’re already thinking how we’re going to improve this, how we’re going to make this better.Stuart Webb [00:11:24]:Brilliant, Joe, you’ve been very eloquent. You’ve explained this brilliantly, and I have a funny feeling there is something in you at the moment that’s saying, he still hasn’t asked me that one real killer question. So I’m going to assume that I am too stupid to be able to work out what that killer question is and say, Joe, tell us, what is the killer question that I. That I really should have asked you? And. And when you’ve obviously made that question known, you’re gonna have to answer it, because I didn’t even think of the question. So what is that killer question that I have failed to ask?Stuart Webb [00:11:56]:Well, I don’t know, Stuart, I think you’re considered one of the smartest podcasters, so I don’t know. But I would say if there’s one question that, that often I think that most people should ask is, why now? Why do I have to do this now? Why should I do it now? And I think the number one thing is that we’re business owners who are working really hard at growing our business. But ultimately, we are humans and we have to be as successful. We have to meet our dreams. We have to reach that freedom as a business owner, because that’s exactly what when we open our business, when we started our business or merged into another business, we had the dream of becoming more successful. So why now? Now? Because we owe it to ourselves. We have to be the best that we can. Sometimes businesses are just golden shackles.Stuart Webb [00:12:51]:They’re fantastic because they’re providing us a. An income. And that’s why they’re the golden shackles, because they’re beautiful, because we’re getting that income. But that’s. So that’s good. But sometimes, as the saying goes, good is the enemy of great and brilliant. Sometimes we’re just missing that part to getting to great. And if we can sit down and really learn our numbers, figure out how can we get rid of these ghost expenses, how do we improve our bottom line? That equals freedom, freedom as a business owner.Stuart Webb [00:13:23]:And that’s really the, the ultimate sign of success that you can do what you want when you want.Stuart Webb [00:13:33]:Joe, I love the message. I think it’s absolutely brilliant. And I absolutely agree with you because I worked with a business who had to learn how to do a lot of what you’ve just said. The business owner was very reluctant to sort of go forward with some of these ideas, but they then had a family emergency. And if they had not learned how to delegate how, how to let go, they would not have had the time, the freedom to be able to deal with that family emergency. They would then never have been able to come back after that family emergency, after several months and still had a business that they could get involved in. And I absolutely agree. You trying to help people to understand that their job is about making their business an effective route to, to, to.Stuart Webb [00:14:24]:To their. To their ability to enjoy their life as opposed to being the shackles that keeps them involved in their business forever is a brilliant message. Thank you very much for sharing it with us this afternoon. I really appreciate it.Stuart Webb [00:14:37]:Absolutely. Thank you.Stuart Webb [00:14:39]:So listen, one quick plea for me. I’ve just put a link on screen. This is WWW Systemize. That’s sys T e M I S E. Please go to that link. Just put in your name, your email address. You will get one email from me a week giving you details of the brilliant guests that we have coming up on this podcast to allow you to come find out what the LinkedIn Live will be and to ask questions to get your questions answered about your business growth and the sort of things that people that brilliantly Joe has emphasized today. So just go to Systemize Me, subscribe, get onto the mailing list.Stuart Webb [00:15:25]:And I want to just finish by thanking Joe for taking time out of his. I can only imagine it is a very busy time with a book and a bunch of other things to do. Joe, thank you for coming on and spending a few minutes talking to us and I really appreciate some of the pearls of wisdom you’ve left us with.Stuart Webb [00:15:40]:Absolutely. Anytime. Thank you so much for the opportunity.Stuart Webb [00:15:44]:That’s no problem at all. Thank you. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

February 12, 2026Episode 14025 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Arup Biswas (ep. 140)

Who is Arup?Arup Biswas is a dynamic entrepreneur at the forefront of AI-driven marketing solutions. Recognizing that true innovation lies in customer outcomes, Arup has dedicated his career to making powerful marketing accessible for all. He identified three key audiences—marketing agencies, recruitment firms, and SME owners—who often found traditional radio advertising out of reach due to high costs and lack of expertise. With a passion for breaking down barriers, Arup’s work centers on helping these businesses connect with audiences more effectively, using cutting-edge technology to solve longstanding challenges and drive real, measurable success.Key Takeaways* Arup Biswas, founder of Klaxon AI, shared how AI can make radio and podcast advertising accessible, affordable, and targeted—even for small businesses. Breaking down barriers is reshaping who gets to be heard.* Removing technical barriers in media isn’t just about cost. Klaxon AI lets anyone create professional audio ads in minutes, not days, changing who gets to participate in the advertising landscape.* Culture shifts when technology puts power in new hands. DIY audio ads, as Arup describes, give small business owners a voice where only big brands used to play. That shapes narratives—and who gets to tell them.* Targeted messaging is more than a marketing tactic. Klaxon AI shows that when we speak directly to our audience, we foster deeper connections and more inclusive cultural conversations.* Audio advertising isn’t just for radio. Arup encourages using your audio ad everywhere—on your site, social, emails. Culture today is cross-media, and your voice can travel further than ever before.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Arup, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)SUMMARY KEYWORDSsmall business hiring, remote work, hybrid companies, digital marketing agencies, coaches and consultants, e-commerce businesses, hiring process, HR departments, bad hire costs, hiring mistakes, onboarding, job candidate selection, concierge hiring service, affordable recruiting, job post templates, freelancer pricing guides, virtual assistants, customer service hiring, company culture fit, soft skills, work from home, moms working remotely, freelancing, home-based businesses, job boards, local business networking, HireMyMom platform, Hire Thy Neighbor, faith-based business, church directory, entrepreneurial journeySPEAKERArup Biswas, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:00]:Hi there and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I have in front of me my coffee mug. I hope Arup has his drink with him, whether or not it’s coffee or something else. But I’d love to welcome Arup as well. Arup is the founder of something called Claxon AI which I’m hoping we will learn more about in the next 15, 20 minutes. But from initial introduction I’ll say that Klaxon AI is one of those game changing type AI systems that really should be shaking up the podcast advertising, media advertising landscape, enabling us all to produce those really game changing ads cheaper, faster and with more specificity.Stuart Webb [00:01:14]:So Arup, welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science five questions over coffee.Arup Biswas [00:01:19]:Thank you, Stuart. I’m delighted to be here.Stuart Webb [00:01:22]:Terrific. Well, you know, let’s start with who the who the who. The ideal audience for Klaxon AI is what’s the sort of characteristics that anybody who’s listening to us at the moment might be thinking? Well, I wonder if this is for me.Arup Biswas [00:01:38]:Yeah, well, there are three key audiences for what we do. And I should say that actually, yes, we are an AI business, of course, but actually it’s all about the outcome for the customer. And the outcome for the customer is reaching people effectively in a powerful way. So our core market is marketing agencies are already working with clients, but offering traditional marketing methods, recruitment agencies who may be looking to recruit volume numbers of staff and owners of SMEs. So those business owners who are struggling hard to, to make their business business a success. But I’ve always thought that radio advertising in particular has been out of their reach because of lack of knowledge or price cost. Those kind of traditional factors have always been the issue. So that’s our traditional market, that’s our marketplace that we focus on and our solution is all about helping them overcome those issues.Arup Biswas [00:02:31]:And we provided a, created a solution which we think does all that.Stuart Webb [00:02:36]:And let’s just sort of understand that. I mean you talked about the fact that it’s a solution. So what are the sort of problems that you noticed that you were trying to solve with this? Obviously cost is one, but there must a bunch of other things that you’re looking at this solution in AI that will actually help solve.Arup Biswas [00:02:55]:Absolutely. And the biggest, one of the biggest issues other than price, price is always an issue for small business owners is knowledge and technical expertise.Stuart Webb [00:03:03]:Yeah.Arup Biswas [00:03:03]:Particularly when it comes to broadcast advertising, whether it’s TV or radio, people think, and traditionally this has been the case. So this is completely justified why people think this way. You need to go to a recording studio, you need a sound engineer, you need a voiceover artist, you need to create a script. And traditionally the cost of creating an audio advert has been thousands and thousands of pounds. Typically a recording studio can be upwards of £300 an hour to just hire the recording studio. So the costs are really high. But also the technical expertise, you know, if you’re a business owner running whatever your business is, you know, how much do you actually know about creating a radio advert? You think you might have to outsource that, but it’s not typically something you think you can do yourself. So there were high barriers to entry to get into radio advertising and there traditionally always has been high barriers to entry.Arup Biswas [00:03:56]:So when we came up with the concept for doing this, and I should say myself and my co founder, we come from a media background, so we were very experienced in working with small business owners who were looking to promote their businesses in normal market ways, but struggled with things like broadcast advertising. So we came with it from a problem point of view of how do we make it easier for these business owners to get their message out via radio advertising and increasingly podcast advertising. So we know that we know the pain. We, you know, we see the pain every day. And historically the pain’s been there, been there. So what we’ve done is create a system which removes every, every barrier to entry. And I’ll, you know, we’ll talk a little bit more about what we offer, but essentially one of the services we offer is a self serve advert creation system where anybody can go in and create a professional audio advert with no technical expertise in less than five minutes. So that’s what we’ve tried to do, is remove barriers to entry.Stuart Webb [00:04:55]:So let’s, let’s just deal into that and I guess we’re going to get into some of the sort of the offerings and services that you’ve got. And I hope that there’s going to be a valuable offer, a piece of advice that you’d like to give to the audience. But let me just explore for a moment. I mean, how does this system work? What does the business owner do to, to solve the problem they’ve got? Having sort of looked at the cost of this and thought this is going to be too expensive for me to be able to sort of put a radio advert, a podcast advert, TV advert, whatever, out this might be a solution to it. What’s the steps that they take? What are the different services you Offer.Arup Biswas [00:05:33]:Yeah, well, the first thing to say is when we talk to business owners is to forget everything they know about creating radio adverts. Because most of us, or most people come to this thinking expensive techniques, technically complex, all those kind of things. As I said, we’ve created a system that removes all that. So we’ve got two services. One is a self serve system I mentioned where anybody can go in, they can just write a few words of text. We use AI to create a script for the, for the company owner or the marketing executive. So you just need to put in a few words about your business. You know, for example, you know, ABC is a marketing company that works in Chester.Arup Biswas [00:06:11]:Our AI will automatically create a 30 second advert script using that text, or you can put in the exact text that you want to be read out. What happens is our system automatically creates the script, automatically adds an AI voice, and these are high quality AI voices. We use the best AI voices in the industry. You would never know it’s an AI voice. And we add background music to it as well and we patch it up as a, as a 30 second advert. Now that process is super quick. Anybody can go into the site now, they could do it now and they’ll see that they’ll have an advert there to listen to literally within less than a minute, you know, no more than five minutes if they want to translate it, because we offer a translation facility as well. So that’s fine, they could do that, then they could download the advert, do whatever they want with it.Arup Biswas [00:06:56]:But what we also know is quite often somebody will produce something like an audio file and they won’t know what to do with it. It’s great having an advert on your desktop or what the hell do you do with it. So what we do is we don’t see ourselves so much as a tech company, we see ourselves as a full service tech and advertising agency. So we offer what we call a fully managed service where we’ll create the advert for the client for the same cost. It’s the same low cost. So we’ll create the advert for the client and then we work with our media partners. So we have media partnerships with the largest radio station owners in the UK and the world’s largest podcast advertising network. And, and these are companies that own every commercial radio station you’ve heard of, the big ones, you know, Heart Great Sits Radio, lbc, Capital Jazz fm, Classic fm, all the ones you, you’ve heard of, which get millions and millions of listeners every week.Arup Biswas [00:07:49]:And we partner with those guys to actually broadcast the advert for the client. So we offer a full one stop shop solution where the client can just say to us, yes, create the advert for us and we want it broadcast in Chester in, in September for two weeks. And we want to target a particular demographic now because more and more people are listening to radio adverts, not on traditional radios but on what you call connected devices, smart speakers, phones, game stations, Alexas, all those kind of things that gives you a lot of data about who’s listening. And because the media owners have that data, we could target really effectively. So nowadays if a business owner says to us, oh my target audience is Eastbourne for example, but I only want to target 45 year old business owners in Eastbourne, within a 10 mile radius of Eastbourne and they have to be female business owners, we can do that. We could target exactly that audience through our media partners and deliver the advert exactly to that audience. So nobody else other than those target audience people will hear the advert which makes the advertising spend really effective of course. So what we do for the client is we create the advert, we manage the broadcast for them, we get it broadcast and we send them analytics at the end of it.Arup Biswas [00:09:02]:So, and obviously they can hear the advert when it’s live on air. So we offer a full service solution.Stuart Webb [00:09:09]:And I think it’s really important to, to, to, to, to sort of emphasize in this, if it’s not become very obvious, that makes this really very, very cost effective, doesn’t it? Because you’re not paying for the normally 95% of people who don’t want, you’re targeting the very specific people that you know that you have a solution to their problem and therefore that advert becomes extremely relevant and very much more targeted.Arup Biswas [00:09:35]:That’s right. And actually some of the campaigns we’ve already run for clients, they’ve been very targeted campaigns. So we’ve got one coming up actually in the next couple of weeks which is targeting business owners in Birmingham and it’s just targeting Birmingham city centre. So like a mile, a couple of mile radius of Birmingham city centre. It’s only targeting business owners because that’s who the business the advertiser wants to target. We can even set the age range. If they only want to target business owners over 25, for example, we could do that. So yeah, it makes it very effective and it means you’re not, you’re not wasting your ad spend on people hearing your advert who aren’t in your target audience.Arup Biswas [00:10:13]:So why why waste money doing that?Stuart Webb [00:10:15]:Terrific. So that brings me on to the sort of third question. Is there a piece of advice, an offer, something that you can give, give to the audience listening at the moment, the people watching us on YouTube, LinkedIn who might say, well, this sounds like it’s interesting. So how do I get some advice from this guy and understand whether or not this is for me?Arup Biswas [00:10:34]:Yeah, well, the first thing I would do is I’d say look at one of the challenges is people often think that radio listenership in particular is declining. They know podcast listenership is increasing because podcasts are booming massively around the world, but they think radio listenership generally is declining. And that’s not the case at all. Radio listenership is really, really strong in the and around the world. So in terms of free advice, free resources, I would tell people to go to a couple of the industry websites. These are completely in industry official websites. One is called radiocentre.org which is kind of the voice of the radio industry in the uk. The second one is a site called Rajar R a j a r.co.uk which is run by the BBC and the Radio center which gives the stats on how many people listen to different radio stations.Arup Biswas [00:11:24]:So if you go there and even if you look for your local radio station, so you might want to know how many people listen to heart radio in your part of the world, you can go there and you can see the actual stats of how many people are listening to heart radio in your area. So you’ll know how big the audience is. The second bit of advice I’d give, and this may sound a bit self serving, is just go onto our website, go into register for our free advertising service. There’s no cost to create the advert. The only, the only cost is if you want to download the advert at the end of the process. But you don’t have to do that if you just want to go in, have a look, see how it works, actually create an advert yourself, see how it sounds, do that, go in there, have a play with it, see how easy it is to create a professional audio advert and that you’ll, that will make you very familiar and comfortable with knowing it’s really easy. Now you don’t need the traditional ways of creating adverts now. What we’ve done is created a disruptive way to create an professional audio ad cheaply and quickly.Stuart Webb [00:12:21]:So anybody who’s just tried to sort of write down all of that information, I can promise you, and I’ve put it on screen. Now, if you go to our vault, which is systemize S Y S T E M I s e.me forward/free hyphen stuff that’s systemized me free hyphen stuff, all of those links that ARIP has just, just mentioned will be there. You don’t have to try and write them down. Just remember, systemize me free hyphen stuff, dead easy. Go on that, pick up all of that links, pick all of the information that we’ve got and we’ll be able to direct you to all of that stuff that ARUP has just mentioned. And that will save you having to try and remember a lot of information which is actually going to help you to understand exactly how you can create these adverts. Low cost, highly targeted, very relevant to the person, has a problem that you can solve for them. And if that doesn’t bring in leads, then nothing else will.Stuart Webb [00:13:17]:Arab, you’ve mentioned a little bit about how you sort of began your journey towards this. You were, you were obviously in the media world yourself. Was there a, was there a moment, a book, a course and in a meeting, something which sort of struck you as, okay, I’ve got a solution to a problem. I need to, I need to start telling the world about this. What brought you to who you are at the moment, as it were?Arup Biswas [00:13:38]:Yeah, well, as I said, myself, my co founder, Monok, we come from the media sector and actually we both started off as traditional newspaper journalists back in the day when, you know, newspaper readership was huge. So we started in the media sector. We moved into different areas of media operations in terms of managing news websites and operations, those kind of things. But we worked quite closely with advertising teams in our media companies. So we were working with colleagues who were working with local businesses who were looking to promote themselves via. In those days it was all newspaper advertising. You’ll remember, Stuart, back in the day, all the job listings weren’t on. Indeed they were in your local paper.Stuart Webb [00:14:16]:And all the properties, I don’t remember those times.Arup Biswas [00:14:18]:I’m only 21, I’m obviously older than you.Stuart Webb [00:14:24]:21 in a few months. I just haven’t counted the number of months recently.Arup Biswas [00:14:29]:But trust me, in, in, I’m going to say in the old days, job listings, property listings, they’re all in your local paper. That’s where you would go, you know, Thursday used to be job paper day. You know, you’d get a paper on a Thursday and that’s where your jobs were. Wednesday was for property. Now all that has moved online. But working with commercial teams in media organizations. Like I said, we understood how SME owners, business owners were evolving, what they wanted to do. They were Google AdWords was a new thing at the time.Arup Biswas [00:14:55]:You know, the, the power of advertising online became a new thing and more and more were shifting away from traditional print advertising into online advertising. But there was a growing band who wanted to go further and want to do things like radio advertising. But there just wasn’t the capability to do it. A low cost, easy to, easy to use and understand way and it hasn’t been for years. You know, we set up to solve that problem, to fix that problem. We, we knew AI could solve that problem and we built our own system to enable us to do it. So we have our own proprietary system that uses AI. Now if you’re into AI, yeah, it’s fine, it’s exciting.Arup Biswas [00:15:31]:But if you just focus on the outcome of I want to reach potential large audiences in a really effective and powerful way. Radio advertising, podcast advertising is number one. And actually it’s not me saying that numerous bodies, including the Guardian newspaper and Tapestry research, they did some analysis a few years ago about the effectiveness of podcast advertising, for example, and what they found, what they found was podcast advertising is more, it’s the most effective form of advertising around, much more effective than online advertising, a lot more effective than TV advertising. And actually what they found in their in depth analysis and research was 52% of of podcast listeners who heard an advert in a podcast wanted to buy something from the brand. 38% of people who heard an advert on radio wanted to buy something from the brand. And there’s a whole stack of literature about the science of audio and the fact it goes in your ear and it sticks in your brain and it, and you digest it and you, and it works its way into your brain in a different way to things you see visually, for example. So there’s a lot of science about how audio is the most effective method of getting a message in, in your brain and also the most effective message method of advertising and getting the customers to recall your brand, recall your message and go onto your website and make a purchase.Stuart Webb [00:16:55]:Terrific. I’m very aware of the fact that you’ve given a huge amount of very detailed answers to questions that I’ve given you, but probably I’ve not yet asked you the one question that I should have asked and that’s probably my fault for having not realized. There’s an important question here, but there must be one important question that you keep thinking. When’s he going to ask this really, really important question. So I’m going to ask you now to tell me what that question was. And obviously, as you know what the question is, you’re also going to have to answer it for me because I can’t answer that question.Arup Biswas [00:17:25]:That’s fine. Well, I guess a really obvious question is what do I do with an advert? And I know it sounds really obvious because we’ve been talking about advertising on radio, we’ve been talking about advertising podcasts and Absolutely, you know, create the advert. That’s where it’ll go. That’s where you’re going to get your biggest audience when it’s broadcast on radio or broadcast in podcast. However, an audio advert doesn’t have to be just used in that way. There’s lots of other things you can do with an audio advert. You can stick it on your website, you can stick it in your newsletters, you can stick it on your email, you can use on social media. So if you never want it to be on radio or you don’t think you can afford the cost of it, going out on radio or podcast doesn’t mean that an audio advert won’t be effective.Arup Biswas [00:18:06]:It will be effective and there’s lots of ways you can use it. So, you know, if you don’t want it on Heart FM or Greatest Radio or in the podcast or whatever, fine. Use it on your website, Use it on your, in your blog section if you’ve got one. Use it in your emails. User on social media, people still digest it in the same way. It’s still going through people’s ears. They’re still hearing the message. It’s just a different medium that’s going out.Arup Biswas [00:18:29]:So that’s the one thing I think people should get, should really understand that using our system or using any system to create an advert doesn’t necessarily mean you have to broadcast it on radio. An audio file, an audio advert can be used in lots of different ways and it’s a powerful mechanism whichever way they use.Stuart Webb [00:18:48]:And now it’s as cost effective as you described, Eric. There’s no reason not to do five, six, seven of them and use them in different ways, different channels where, you know, there’ll be different audiences. I’m always very keen on talking to business owners who are sort of unsure about whether or not they should target and get very much more niche in there trying to solve particular problems. And I keep saying to them the niche person is the one that actually it’s where the money is really made. So actually creating a very niche advert might sound like a really crazy idea, but actually it’s the one which is probably going to be the most effective in bringing the person that has a problem that you solve to get to know who you are and start to know and trust you. And it’s a much more effective way of doing it by something as simple as creating an audio advert like you’re describing than it is by blasting a message to the entire world and hoping, which is just a very ineffective strategy.Arup Biswas [00:19:41]:Yeah. And, you know, with our services, there’s two ways to, to look at that. One is, as I said, with the radio advertising, it can be really targeted at who you want to reach and the demographics. But podcast advertising is a really interesting space. I mean, everyone know how big podcasts are getting? You know, they’re huge globally in the UK and globally. But with podcasts, obviously there, it’s a bit like websites. There’s podcasts for everything and podcasts for very niche subjects. So if you want a podcast just on marketing, you’ll come to your podcast Stuart.Arup Biswas [00:20:11]:But if you want a podcast on business growth that you, you know, sorry, your business growth podcast will come to you. If you want one on marketing, if you want one on cars, whatever, there’ll be a podcast about it. I mean, if you. Everybody knows about the Peter Crouch podcast, you know, and he’s got some really successful podcasts out there now, music podcasts that appeal to people, they’re funny, that the comedy podcast, but the podcast for everything. And whatever sector you’re working in, there will be a podcast that relates to that sector. So that means you can have an advert in that particular podcast, which means only people that be hearing it are people that you want to target, people who are, who are looking for those services or looking for knowledge and experience. So you can be really, really highly targeted. Which is why some podcast advertising can be a bit more expensive because it’s so targeted.Arup Biswas [00:21:04]:But going back to your point, it’s exactly that point, you’re not wasting a single penny on people that aren’t in your target audience.Stuart Webb [00:21:11]:Brilliant. Brilliant. Arab. I think you’ve really, really hit the nail on the head with that. And I’m just going to, once again, if you, if I would encourage you, go to Systemize me free hyphen stuff, go and find out Those email, those URLs, those websites that are mentioned, they will be in the vault. You can go there, you can pick up those, those valuable links and find out just how quickly and easily you can create an advert like Arup has just described to you. I’m going to back up what he’s saying. I’ve been doing some sort of helping people launch their own podcast just recently.Stuart Webb [00:21:47]:When you look at the number of blogs there are in the world and yet there are so few podcasts and blogs are something that I know every web expert tells me, you must have a blog, you must have a blog. If you’ve got a blog but you haven’t got a podcast, you’ve missed out on a huge section of potential audience I happen to have to attend. Not because I, because I was doing something else there, but I was attending an event recently in the middle of Derby which was around the train industry and there were no less than 12 YouTube and podcast people there, all creating podcasts about the trains that they were seeing. So there are some really huge audiences for these people. If they hadn’t expected there to be a huge audience for their stuff, they wouldn’t have been there. So go think about it. Go have a look at what you can do with podcasts, look at what you can do with an advert to promote your stuff on a podcast and get out there and do it. Arup, I’ve got to thank you for, for what you’ve just said.Stuart Webb [00:22:46]:I think it’s brilliant stuff and really, really appreciate you coming on and spending a few minutes with us.Arup Biswas [00:22:50]:Thank you, sir, I really enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity.Stuart Webb [00:22:53]:No problem. If you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to now encourage people to subscribe to this podcast and website. Go to once again, Systemize Me subscribe you just, it’s a simple format, asks you for what two things, your first name and your email address. And every week you’ll get an email with me from me telling you who’s coming up on this so that you can join live on LinkedIn or YouTube and actually get the sort of valuable free advice from experts such as Eric. We don’t have people on here who have got something really valuable to say. So if you want to listen to more people like Arup who’ve got really valuable free advice for you and really will help get your business motoring, come and subscribe at Systemize Me Forward slash subscribe. Arup, thank you very much. Thank you for indulging me for a few minutes in making my own little self promotion there.Stuart Webb [00:23:42]:It’s not an advert. Maybe I need to start thinking about one of those as well, but thank you very much for being here.Arup Biswas [00:23:47]:Thank you, Stuart.. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

January 29, 2026Episode 13515 min

Five Questions Over Coffee with Lesley Pyle (ep. 139)

Who is Lesley?Lesley Pyle is the founder of HireMyMom, a company dedicated to helping small business owners—especially those running hybrid or remote teams—grow and succeed. After seeing countless business owners struggle to find skilled, trustworthy candidates and juggle the demands of recruiting, Lesley made it her mission to simplify hiring. Through HireMyMom, she connects digital marketing agencies, coaches, consultants, and e-commerce businesses with talented remote professionals, eliminating the hassle of massive job boards. Lesley also offers a unique concierge service, allowing an experienced HR professional to handle the entire hiring process, so business owners can focus on what they do best—growing their businesses.Key TakeawaysHere’s what’s brewing in this episode:🎯 Hiring Help for Small Businesses Lesley breaks down the biggest hiring challenges for small and micro-business owners. If you’ve ever rushed a hire just to fill a gap, you’ll relate! She reveals how a bad hire can impact team morale, productivity, and even customer satisfaction. But don’t worry—Lesley also shares how her platforms connect entrepreneurs to the right remote candidates (and even offer a concierge hiring service to take the pressure off).🙅‍♀️ Common Mistakes and Smart Fixes From skipping steps to hiring out of desperation, Lesley outlines what NOT to do—and how a step-by-step system can save time, money, and headaches. She highlights the importance of hiring for culture and soft skills, not just resumes!📚 Free Resource: Smart Hiring Guide Don’t miss Lesley’s offer: a free Smart Hiring Guide packed with checklists, job post templates, freelancer pricing guides, and a comparison of platforms. Grab yours at www.systemise.me/free-stuff🌟 An Entrepreneurial Origin Story Lesley opens up about her unexpected path from PR professional to entrepreneurial trailblazer, inspired by her own struggle to balance motherhood and career. Her journey from a single-parent household to earning a master’s degree in Scotland and founding two impactful businesses is both relatable and uplifting.💡 What’s New: Hire Thy Neighbor Get an exclusive peek at her latest venture, helping people connect with local service providers—and even search by faith connection or church affiliation. (It’s in early launch—look for updates soon!)✨ Most Inspiring Takeaway Finally, Lesley leaves us with a reminder: no matter your background or obstacles, with determination, faith, and resilience, you can reach dreams you never imagined.Don’t forget: If you want to connect, ask questions, or get notified about upcoming guests like Lesley, subscribe to the Systemise.Me newsletter here. You only need your first name and email—easy as (coffee) pie!Thanks for sharing a cup with us this week. Here’s to strong coffee, smart hiring, and believing in the dreams you’re just starting to imagine.And don’t forget: keep an eye out for next guest. To submit your own questions, subscribe to our newsletter and join the conversation!P.S. Loved this episode? Hit reply and let us know what resonated most_________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at www.systemise.me/subscribeFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Do You Need a P.A.T.H. to Scale?We help established business owners with small but growing teams:go from feeling stuck, sceptical, and tired of wasting time and money on false promises,to running a confident, purpose-driven business where their team delivers results, customers are happy, and they can finally enjoy more time with their family -with a results-based refund guarantee: if you follow the process and it doesn’t work, we refund what you paid.This is THE P.A.T.H. to scale your business.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)SUMMARY KEYWORDSsmall business hiring, remote work, hybrid companies, digital marketing agencies, coaches and consultants, e-commerce businesses, hiring process, HR departments, bad hire costs, hiring mistakes, onboarding, job candidate selection, concierge hiring service, affordable recruiting, job post templates, freelancer pricing guides, virtual assistants, customer service hiring, company culture fit, soft skills, work from home, moms working remotely, freelancing, home-based businesses, job boards, local business networking, HireMyMom platform, Hire Thy Neighbor, faith-based business, church directory, entrepreneurial journeySPEAKERLesley Pyle, Stuart WebbStuart Webb [00:00:00]:SA hi, and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I have my cup of a mug of coffee with me here, and I’m here with Leslie Pyle. Leslie is the founder of Hire My mom and Hire Thy Neighbor. So we’re gonna have some interesting, exciting discussions, I think, about how she is helping business owners to, as I say, move from the path of least assistance to something better where they can actually free up their time for more strategic decisions. So, Lesley, welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science. Thanks very much for being here.Lesley Pyle [00:01:05]:Yeah, thank you, Stuart. It’s my pleasure and my honor to be with you.Stuart Webb [00:01:09]:Terrific. So let’s start with the who is the business owner, the business person or person you’re trying to serve? What is, what are the sort of characteristics of that person?Lesley Pyle [00:01:19]:Yeah. So our ideal client is a small business owner, typically running a hybrid or remote company. Anything from digital marketing agencies to coaches, consultants, and e commerce businesses. The biggest challenge they face is finding and hiring the right candidates to help their business grow and thrive. Many times these business owners try to quickly hire to alleviate the growth pains or issues their businesses are facing. They either don’t have the skills to hire well or they don’t have the time. So at HireMyMom, we solve that problem by connecting them with skilled, talented, remote talent without the headaches and stress of the mega job boards. In addition, we offer a concierge service where our HR professional can take the burden off the business owner and perform the entire hiring process for them.Lesley Pyle [00:02:09]:And at the end of the project, we present them with the top two or three candidates for the business owner to then review hire their top choice. And we do this at an affordable price, unlike many of the traditional recruiters.Stuart Webb [00:02:22]:So.Lesley Pyle [00:02:22]:So it makes it very attractive for the small and micro business owner.Stuart Webb [00:02:26]:Terrific. I mean, you’ve just described an ideal situation there, but what have you come across as sort of routes and things that some of the business owners you’ve worked with have tried to do to alleviate these problems? Because as you say, getting the right person in the right job to really help your business grow can be a really critical thing. And as you said, a lot of people don’t really understand the steps, don’t understand how to best choose, and often make mistakes.Lesley Pyle [00:02:52]:That’s right. And most small businesses, they don’t have HR departments, so they are typically the hiring manager. So the most common mistake we see is hiring too quickly, not taking the time. So hiring the wrong person, it doesn’t just waste money, but it can disrupt Your entire business. On average, people don’t realize this, but on average, a bad hire cost up to 30% of what you’re paying that person. And in addition, there’s these four negative impacts. Number one, you lose time training someone who doesn’t work out. Number two, your productivity is lost as you have to restart the entire process.Lesley Pyle [00:03:31]:Number three, your team morale and your personal morale is shot. Your customer experience is probably affected. And then number four, your burnout because you’re having to juggle your job and theirs for that time. So most small businesses spend 45 hours trying to hire onboard train a new member, and 82% of them report negative impacts from hiring the wrong person. So that’s really where we try to come in and help. And if someone doesn’t want to use us as a concierge service, they can do the hiring themselves, obviously, with our platform, but we just try to educate them as best we can on the proper steps, you know, writing a good job post, what types of interview questions, and all of those things to really help them be successful.Stuart Webb [00:04:20]:Yeah, you’re right. I’ve often seen it in businesses I’ve been working with where the wrong person coming in can do more harm than good. You know, they often leave not just cost and wasted productivity, but poor, poor attitude. With people dissatisfied that somebody else has been hired, that has left a bad taste. And that can be quite damaging for the, you know, the small business that’s got maybe a small team that’s just started to gel and the wrong person comes in can cause a lot of disruption, can’t it?Lesley Pyle [00:04:51]:Yes, it really can. So that’s why we tell people not to rush the process, to really take their time, make sure they’re hiring the right person, the right fit, who has the right skills and, you know, not. Skills aren’t always the number one thing to look for, because a lot of times those can be trained. No, but do they have the soft skills? Do they have the culture? Do they fit your culture, your values, your mission, and things like that? So there’s a lot more to kind of think through versus just how does the resume look?Stuart Webb [00:05:21]:Yeah, absolutely right. It, it is a. It is a case of hiring the behavior, not for the, for the skill. I often say to people when they’re hiring, and I don’t know if you find this yourself, you should not hire as if it’s 100 meters race, but higher as if it’s the high jump. You set a quality standard. You say, this is the bar, and if nobody clears it or you Just start the process again. You don’t just lower the bar and say, we’ll take whoever we can get.Lesley Pyle [00:05:45]:That’s right. You’re right.Stuart Webb [00:05:47]:So Leslie, I think you’ve got a great, valuable piece of advice that you can leave with the, with the, with the people that are listening to us at the moment.Lesley Pyle [00:05:55]:Yeah, we absolutely do. So because of all these things we’ve talked about, we have our free smart hiring guide and it’s available for free. So if you go to hiremymom.com podcast, you can get our free guide. And it comes with a step by step smart hiring checklist number one. It comes with common mistakes to avoid. It comes with a sample job post template so you know things to include and not include. It also comes with pricing guides so you know how much typically a freelancer or a contractor is desiring for various roles from social media, virtual assistant, customer service, and all the different roles. So we’ll give you an idea on the going rates and then we’ll also do a side by side comparison so you can see how hiring my mom compares with some of the other job sites.Stuart Webb [00:06:46]:And we’re going to have all of that in the vault that we give you access to, which is systemized me free stuff. So if you didn’t catch that link, it will all be in the show notes for us. So thank you for that. Leslie Lesley, what is it that got you to the stage where you’re now trying to sort of help other people understand the hiring process? What was the, is it a book, a course, a life experience that really sort of brought you to this place?Lesley Pyle [00:07:15]:Yeah, I would say it would definitely be a life experience because when I graduated with my master’s degree there in Scotland, I had no intentions of not pursuing my public relations and marketing career. However, I had a baby shortly after that and that baby pretty much changed my world. So I went from being certain that I wanted to be a full time corporate career woman to oh my goodness, what am I going to do? This is not suited to me anymore. But I want to work, but I also want to be a mom. And this was back in 1995, so 30 years ago. And I began soul searching and decided after, you know, talking to my husband and praying through it all that I would take the leap into freelancing. And freelancing back in 1995 was not a hot commodity. There weren’t many people doing it.Lesley Pyle [00:08:07]:It was tough. I had to try to learn so many things on my own. And that led me to start a website back in 1996 called Home Based Working Moms. And it was basically like an online chamber of commerce where moms either worked at home or wanted to work at home. And then fast forward 14 years, and I was noticing that the business culture was becoming more accepting towards working from home. I no longer had to hide the fact that I worked from home. I openly shared it. And people were so, like, envious.Lesley Pyle [00:08:41]:How can I do that? So the idea came to me as I had this great audience of moms. I did not have an audience of small businesses, but I thought it’d be wonderful if I could create a platform similar to match.com because it was popular back then and connect moms with legitimate jobs. So that’s when hiremymom.com was born, in 2007. So 18 years ago now.Stuart Webb [00:09:06]:Brilliant. And it’s grown ever since. Now you’re hiring, and now you’re into hiring Thy neighbor as well. So what’s the difference between. Between hi, my mom. And Hire Thy neighbor.Lesley Pyle [00:09:17]:Yeah. So Hire Thy Neighbor is brand new. It hasn’t officially launched. Although the website’s live, we’re still tinkering it and, and getting it up to speed before we start promoting it. But the premise behind Hire Thy Neighbor is to help small businesses connect to their local community. So when you need things for your. Your personal self, your. Your home, your children, such as doctors, plumbers, lawn care, you can go on to hire that neighbor and find people locally who provide those services.Lesley Pyle [00:09:48]:And you can read all about them in a Facebook profile type setup. But in addition to learning about them, it has a faith component, so you can learn about their faith, their testimony, and you can also use the church directory to find people who may go to your church.Stuart Webb [00:10:05]:So what’s the burning question you’ve got for me that you haven’t yet managed to get me to ask? Lesley, you must have one that you’re thinking the. He’s asked a lot of really interesting questions, but the one that he really isn’t getting to. And you’ve got that, I’m sure. So would you just tell us what is the question you want me to ask? And then obviously you need to answer it for us.Lesley Pyle [00:10:27]:Yeah, absolutely. So one question that I like to answer and have people ask because I think it’s inspiring, and that would be, how did someone who grew up with a struggling single mom without any family, having gone to college, find herself living out an entrepreneurial dream that she had no capacity to even dream as a young girl?Stuart Webb [00:10:48]:Well, that’s quite a long question. So I hope it’s a long answer.Lesley Pyle [00:10:52]:It won’t be super long. But, you know, growing up, we had no idea that college was an option for me and my two brothers. I’m the only one that ended up going to college, and someone just told me that I could. And that’s all it took for me to then take the steps and learn about grants and loans and work study and all of that. And because I was in charge of paying for all of that, you know, I worked really hard, graduated at the top of my class, and then it was time for me to graduate. I couldn’t get a job. So it was like obstacle number two. Number one, I never thought I could go to college.Lesley Pyle [00:11:27]:And then number two, I couldn’t get hired. I’m like, I had these interns, these great grades, but I cannot get hired. So I decided to look for scholarships to get my master’s degree. And that’s when I stumbled upon this full scholarship to study anywhere in the world from the Rotary foundation and ended up getting my master’s degree at the University of Sterling in Scotland and, and, you know, use that background in marketing and PR and able to launch my businesses. So I just say that as a way to inspire others that, you know, you may have these, these things that feel like they’re impossible for you, but I think with a lot of determination, a lot of prayer and a lot of fortitude, you can really reach your dreams that you didn’t even know to dream of.Stuart Webb [00:12:12]:Brilliant. I really find it inspiring you put that much work in and I think what you’ve built in Hire my mom is a brilliant platform. I look forward to seeing it grow now with the new concept that we’re bringing on, which is going to be even more interesting. And Leslie, I want to thank you very much for coming and spending a few minutes with us, telling us about it today. I one one thing from me, and this is the only plea you’ll get from me at this. If you would like to join and listen to people as interesting as Leslie and also ask questions if you want to. And you can easily post questions in the chat on LinkedIn. And Leslie, we can can easily get back to you and answer you.Stuart Webb [00:12:53]:But if you go to Systemize Me, that’s Systemize Me forward slash subscribe. That gets you onto newsletter. All I ask you to do is drop in your first name, just one name and an email address and then you’ll get an email from me once a day, once a week, coming up and saying who’s coming on this week just to give you notice of who’s coming up so that you can join and listen to people as inspiring, as interesting as Leslie. Leslie, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I really appreciate you spending a bit of time, and I know you’re very busy, and I know you know your children, right, might be a little bit older now, but they still take up time, don’t they?Lesley Pyle [00:13:29]:That’s right.Stuart Webb [00:13:30]:Okay. Thank you, Leslie.Lesley Pyle [00:13:32]:Thank you, Stuart. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe