Part two of our engaging conversation with Luke Fatooros.

Business Built Freedom

198|7 Steps to Building a Smart Business Engine With Luke Fatooros Part Two

7 Steps to Building a Smart Business Engine With Luke Fatooros We've all been in a spot in our business where we're trying to work out how to get from A to B or how to get to the next level. But what is the next level? How many levels are there? Luke Fatooros from Ideas Into Business shares with us the 7 steps to building a smart business engine to give you time, money, and freedom. Luke's Business Journey Why are there seven steps? What are the steps to building a smart business engine to give you the time, money, and freedom? Luke: Let me start with my $12 million mistake or failure. It's something that I don't recommend, but this was my first step into business. My first business was a store that my father and I shared with $800. We thought we were going to conquer the world, and the first 14 months were a living hell. We didn't know what we were doing. We had all the ambition and enthusiasm, and that was really what got us through the first 14 months. When we eventually learned a few things, such as how to distinguish myself from the competition, my first joint venture took off. After all that pain, it eventually became a $12 million, 65-staff business after five years. I was winning awards like Entrepreneur of the Year, Microsoft top companies, the Westpac finance. And then I lost everything. My partner had to go to the staff and tell them we had to close this business. What came out of that were life-changing lessons. There are three critical lessons I want to share with you, and this was how the seven steps were formulated. 1. Understand Cash Flow Luke: I had to learn how money works and how money flows. The first lesson was to stop trading time for money—I didn't know what that meant. I had to move from a limited earning structure to an unlimited earning structure. When I lost that business, I learned the difference between being self-employed and being a business owner, and I understood creating wealth in business. I realised that my business was worth nothing because it was strapped to me. We become burnt out when trying to build a business the wrong way. It took me 7 years to recover. 2. Work on Your Internal Structure Luke: By contrast, when I built my second business, a distribution business, I had three factories in China, the Philippines, and Korea, and I'm supplying five countries from a desk. That gives you a lot of flexibility with the way you can travel. You're not tied to a location, which is something that's becoming very important with our current times. Luke: If someone saw me with my notebook at my home office, they would think it's a joke, a hobby. But that business was valued at $3.5 million up to 3 years. It's not how fancy a business looks on the outside. It's how structured internally. When I was 12 years old, I was given the opportunity to make these number plate brackets. It sounds like such a boring product, but I was getting $6 a bracket. I was able to make one in 1.5 hours. I sped up my processes. By the time I was 13, I was making 10 number plate brackets an hour, so I was then making $60 an hour relatively. I went on to employ people, but the lesson that I learned was people are lazy. Don't tie things to money, and don't tie things to yourself. If you have a problem or a key person in your business has a problem, how do you overcome that? How do you make sure that you aren't the key person? How was that valuable to the next person that was buying it? 3. Build a Strong Foundation Luke: This comes to this thing called sequencing. You cannot step out of the engine. You cannot hand down management or the responsibilities with regard to the foundation of your business to anyone else. If you have a vehicle that's got a broken engine, you cannot paint it green hoping that the engine would work. That is what people do in business. They change the website or invest in social media marketing and think this is going to grow the business. That has to come at a certain point. Your sequencing is wrong. 7 Steps to Building a Smart Business Engine to Give You Time, Money, and Freedom 1. Optimise Your Mindset Luke: People have this business idea, but people focus on marketing strategies, negotiation, sales, systems, processes, etc. But there's a thing called you. We all have our own personal brands. People don't buy your products and services. They buy you. They buy the image that you are projecting. Every one of us projects a particular image that we think we need the world to see. Relay that to buying a Samsung phone or an iPhone. The image was around the inspiration and message that Steve Jobs had. Who's the owner of Samsung? Luke: Exactly. No one knows who arrived second on the moon. Every one of us has self-sabotaging patterns and limiting beliefs. We might think we're marvellous, but the truth is we're actually not. You want to be the best version you can be of yourself and your business. How do your customers want to perceive you? You have to pay attention to that. When I started my first business, we went from $1 million to $12 million in 5 years. That incredible growth, the prestige and recognition, and so much money coming to my life as a kid made me think I was invincible. It didn't do any good because even though I sort of earned the success, I didn't know how to handle it. I didn't have mental maturity. My ego was running my show—a self-sabotaging pattern. It doesn't matter how fancy you get into your marketing sales strategy. If you have this self-sabotaging pattern, your business is just never going to make it. What I've learned over the years is the people who resist openness, self-development, and willingness to learn are the ones who desperately need this help the most. That's the self-sabotaging trait. That is a disaster in business. Optimise your mindset. The six inches between the ears is the most important six inches to measure on your body. 2. Optimise Your Niche Luke: There are lucrative niches, and the money is naturally flowing into those lucrative niches. The common mistake is when we have meat; we try to sell it to vegetarians. It doesn't matter how fancy your meat is; a vegetarian is just not going to buy your meat. That's not a lucrative niche for your product. My philosophy is to just follow the cash. What you want to do is you want to find customers who buy from you the quickest and the easiest. Out of 100 customers, there will be some of them who will buy from you instantly—they love you and your brand. I call these your real customers. I think this is where a lot of marketing companies get things wrong. They all say that this is your ideal customer, but that doesn't mean those people are actually going to buy from you. When you've been in a business, or you've been trading, and you look back at your history, you see that there's a group that just hands you cash. Shift your focus toward your real customers, not your ideal customers. I analysed why we struggled for 14 months with my first business. My business partner, Gary, was an engineer, so we thought we could do computer programming. We're going to write software to help businesses become efficient and more profitable. We thought this was just marvelous, so we took my $800 and launched the business. No one bought anything, and we couldn't understand this. We kept trying stuff, but the customers didn't want our stuff. Instead, they're looking for computer hardware. We quickly decided that we would give them what they were looking for. We got rid of the software, and we opened a little shop in the back of some shopping centre. No one went there. We started putting the computers where people could see them. We still had a lot to learn, but we started to see a little bit of light. If you are struggling in business, find where the money is flowing. Listen to your customers, what they are looking to buy, instead of ramming your product down their throat. Shift and sift to what the market really wants. My first business really took off because we've shifted and sifted out of selling computer software, which was a dead niche. You can't keep flogging a dead horse, right? You have to be smart enough to move across. How do you make sure you're not emotionally attached to that dead horse? Luke: If you are absolutely in love with your idea, that's a self-sabotaging trait, and you need help with that. My help was a hammer on my head, and now I'm very aware of self-development and problems in my own business caused by my own self-destructive traits. The people who ultimately fail are those who will not let go of their idea. That's ego, and that is a terrible self-sabotaging pattern. Did you fix that through reflection or having other people come in? Luke: Yes. I went through seven years of massive self-reflection and actually understanding that you need to get help in your life. I was not mature enough. I didn't have the structure to be successful in business, even though I was very good at business strategies. I've done a lot of self-work over the years, and the biggest thing is getting rid of the ego. That's not easy for most people. But if you can do that, you're on your way. Is there a certain size of the market that you need to start doing that? If you've been in business for a little while, say you've got a B2B business with 100 clients or a B2C business with 10,000 clients, how do you work out the numbers? Luke: If you've got a bit of history in your business, you can take the time to analyse your database and then categorise them into A, B, and C clients. Who are the people who are just paying you and not giving you problems? Who are the people who won't just buy from you, no matter what you do, it's just never enough? And then who are the ones who buy from you after some hard work. It's not about percentages, time, staff, or size. It's the process. Analyse, and then you'll be fine. 3. Optimise Your Sales  Luke: What do your real customers want to buy from you? I've been in business since I was 23. I've done probably every sales course under the sun, and I've never seen anything that's told me the two secrets that I believe you need to have to achieve success in sales. The first one is don't sell. That's a big one that I've had a lot of trouble grasping. I've realised you shouldn't be doing the sales courses. You are already the best salesperson if you're passionate about your product. Luke: I agree. What you hear is the secrets of closing—how do you trick people into this or influence people? Looping, straight-line persuasion, that sort of stuff. Luke: When someone is buying for you, what is that one thing they are subconsciously looking for? When they walk in, they scan you for one thing before they even want to hear your pitch about your product. It's trust. If I don't trust you, I don't care how fancy your Ferrari or whatever your thing is, I'm not going to buy from you. I'm going to try and find someone else who I feel comfortable with to give my money to. I've never heard a sales course ever tell me that. They all try to show how to influence, trick, close, overcome objections, etc. to get the money in the bank. I genuinely don't believe in that. Even if you do that sort of tactics, will they be long-term clients? Are they going to be happy at the end of the day if you use some psychological neurolinguistic programming thing? Are they going to be the type of client that's going to be a raving fan and going to be sitting in your A-grade pile? Probably not. It's better to build that rapport and relationship and to make sure that you can know, like, and trust the person. Luke: There are two ways that you can build trust to influence sales in the right way. The first one is your personal branding; the second is your hook product. Its purpose is to let your customers experience your value with the least amount of risk. And resistance.  Luke: For example, there are two pie ladies in the supermarket. One lady has a stand with flyers, and the other lady has a stand with a little microwave and pies. The first lady is handing out brochures, telling everyone how marvellous her pies are. The other lady bakes, and she has samples in the oven. People could smell their aroma. She puts some on a tray, cuts it up, and invites people over. The second lady is actually letting her customers try and experience. That's what you call a little hook, and there's no risk. They love it. The other lady is telling everyone how marvellous her pies are, but there's no experience. There's nothing going on there. And that's the two different ways people sell in the world. One of the things I found was my competition was garages. This was the early 1990s, so they sold computers in converted homes. It wasn't a mainstream retail thing. Customers would go in and then speak with some dude behind the counter who is unbelievably knowledgeable on computers, but the customers don't know what he's talking about—ROMs, processors, etc.—so it freaked them out. That's not a good customer experience, which is what customers really want. What I did was I put displays up even if we didn't have a lot of customers then. We had to prove our concept. We knew we were in the money, but we just didn't know how to be known yet.

197|7 Steps to Building a Smart Business Engine With Luke Fatooros Part One

197|How to Leverage Social Media to Generate Clients With Chantal Gerardy

Psychological Safety at Work With Geoffrey Wade How do you work with your staff? How close are you to your staff? Dorks Delivered Director Joshua Lewis and Geoffrey Wade, the founder of Onirik, talk about psychological safety at work.  What Is Psychological Safety in the Workplace? What is psychological safety in the workplace? Geoffrey: It's a piece of techno-jargon, isn't it? It sounds really good. I'm comfortable using technical jargon. However, I prefer to think of it and describe it as team dynamics. The academic nomenclature has its place, but it's a lot easier to think about it in plain day-to-day terms. People Speak Up Geoffrey: Team dynamics cover how we work together with one another, how we communicate with one another, and how we behave with one another. As a leader, we create a culture or an environment where people feel safe to speak up. They are comfortable asking questions. They feel safe to critique the status quo and make mistakes. In the context of the team in the organisation, they classify mistakes as "learning opportunities" rather than "they made a mistake." We made a mistake. Let's clean it up and what did you learn from that? What would you do differently next time? Safety is not really about creating an environment where we live in cotton wool. By "safe to speak up" I mean we can ask questions like, "What the hell's going on here?" and the team will take that without feeling threatened because they know the questions are about learning and improvement. We can challenge one another, and we can be a little provocative with one another. I can tell a lot about the research, but I'll tell a story. It happened in Queensland last year. There was an underground coal mine up in Northern Queensland. There's a big heavy machinery underground churning out coal. When you mine coal, there's a flammable explosive gas, so the mines were carefully designed with ventilation to remove that gas, to make it safe for workers to be there and operate machines, and to avoid undesired explosions. They've got a new longwall up and running, and they were getting about 60% more gas from the coal than they anticipated in their design. That was a real problem because they couldn't evacuate the gas as quickly as they needed. Everyone knew about it—the workers, supervisors, and managers—and they kept running that machine, generating more gas than they could clear. No one spoke up. You can predict where it went. Thank God no one was killed, but people were injured. The CEO of that company said he was stunned that no one felt safe enough to speak up. People could have died, but they were continuing to work in that really dangerous environment because they didn't have the psychological safety to speak up. The Precursor of Other Measures Geoffrey: Psychological safety is the precursor of so many other measures that are important in a business. It is the lead indicator for employee engagement and mental well-being. It's a really critical human wellness measure for your workplace, and it correlates with other work satisfaction measures. These then correlate with productivity, performance, customer experience, and growth. And these correlations are not random. Like many people, I believe employee engagement is an important measure. But as a statistician, I also understand that we can show a correlation in an individual organisation between employee engagement and other performance measures. You can get Gallup's data, which was pulled from 200 companies, and then massaged it so it all fits together. Across 200 companies, they could show a correlation between employee engagement and commercial outcomes. In an individual company, you can't. With psychological safety, we can show statistical correlations between psychological safety and the KPIs that matter. You get correlation coefficients and impact percentages, and that's profound. It's an important measure, particularly when you can show an organisation how they can get a healthier, happier workforce and great commercial outcomes for all other stakeholders, customers, shareholders and the wider community. Is It OK To Say Anything? Your workplace is a working, breathing organism. You want to make sure that people are listening and that the left hand is talking to the right hand. With that, is it okay to say anything like "I hate that the toilets are only cleaned once a week" or "I hate that this X, Y, Z that's happening is impacting my life?" Is there a limit that you should be putting on yourself as an employee? Geoffrey: Is it okay to speak up with almost anything? Can you ask questions that are not politically correct? Yes, you can in a psychologically safe environment. What sort of questions should be safe to ask? Pretty much any question. Is there a stupid question? No. People ask a question because they truly do not know. They are asking the question in order to learn. They didn't know and realised that the gap in their knowledge needed to be plugged in because there are real consequences, so they ask the question. Do the questions have to be politically correct? No. One of the dilemmas that we have in our nation is some well-intended politicians passed laws that say I'm responsible for how you feel about what I say. That law is wrong and fundamentally flawed. You are responsible for how you feel about what I say, just as I'm responsible for any emotion that I evoke in response to what you say. But I'm also responsible for what I choose to say in response to what you say. I'm responsible for my emotions. Yet the law is saying that I have no control over my emotional state but the rest of the population do, and therefore they are responsible for my emotional state and they have the keys to me and they have to use it wisely, otherwise, I'll sue their butts off. It's very easy for everyone to be holding a thought but we feel uncomfortable because we should be able to do it. I had a friend that came into my house with a girlfriend. I'm a bit of an investment entrepreneur and I don't mind sharing my earnings from my properties, and she looked at me like I was absolute dirt because I had more than one house, therefore, I'm a capitalist. Geoffrey: You said something that offended her, but you didn't offend her. Your language didn't offend her. She chose to be offended because she had a different belief set. She could have just chosen to go, "Okay, Josh is building financial independence for his family and himself. It's different to my map of the world. I don't have to be offended because he does stuff that's different." Exactly right, and that's a big problem that we have with speech at the moment. Why Should You Measure Psychological Safety? Geoffrey: We've done some workplace-wide studies in Australia, and they're suggesting that as much as 40% of the workforce is working in that context where psychological safety is low. When we work with organisations and measure it, we find that number is about 20% to 30% of the organisation. Psychological Safety Affects Your Team’s Performance Geoffrey: The other thing that we find is there's a huge correlation between those quadrants and the performance; the teams that have got a high psychological safety are always the ones that are performing the best and they have greater resilience and agility too. They adapt to change more quickly and effectively. I had a conversation with a leader, who is the head of HR, and he thinks that psychological safety is fine in their organisation, which had 3,000 people in it. I asked him how he knew, and he said it's subjective and he just feels it. The observation I made was when psychological safety is low, people don't speak up, they don't ask questions, they don't rock the boat and challenge the status quo, and if they make a mistake, it's swept under the carpet—there's silence and invisibility. Will subjective assessment know what's going on? No. You have to measure it. When you measure psychological safety, you can see what the return on investment is going to be if you decide to fix it. But you have to measure it and you can do so at a low cost too. There are some tools that actually show you what it's costing you or what you can realise in terms of value to fix it. Some of the measurement tools for the human wellness dimensions are hideously expensive. I'm against that because I want organisations to be able to measure the stuff at a low cost and then have a budget to fix the problems. Measuring it should be fast, accurate, and cheap. Psychological Safety Embraces Diversity and Inclusion Geoffrey: The other thing about psychological safety that's really interesting is it embraces, encourages, and supports diversity. You can ask a provocative question or a different question, and the rest of the team accepts it and doesn't get offended by it. You come in and you've got an entirely different culture and you speak with a different accent and the team will embrace you because they know that you will have a different perspective because you come from that culture. You will ask different questions, too. Sometimes there's genius in that, and they want it. If no one spoke up, you wouldn't have the diversity. You just have a dictatorship. The reason you have a team is to have that. Fear and Anxiety Grow Without Psychological Safety Geoffrey: If you don't have psychological safety, what you have in its place is fear and anxiety. You've experienced fear at some point in your life, whether it's physical, emotional, or psychological fear. If you recall those experiences, what happens? There's a kicker of adrenaline and your brain freezes. You go into a fight or flight mode. Your workforce needs to solve complex problems, manage effective communication, and innovate and deal with change. If you've got anxiety and fear and you've got a workforce whose higher brain function is compromised, their ability to innovate, solve problems, and deal with change goes out the window. That's costly for them because health-wise, they're running on cortisol and adrenaline and they're not feeling good. They're better with endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin—the nice feeling stuff that makes your brain entirely resourceful so you can perform better. Think of me as a newbie in retail and it's Friday. I've been with the company for a month and I've just had a rocking day. I've made 20 sales today, which is the best of the best. I'm performing, a star retailer, after only being with the company for a month. I'm walking out the back of the store, and I tell my boss that I made 20 sales today, but he says, "Yeah, Jeff but your floor is undone, and I really needed you to make 30. Why didn't you make 30?" What's going to happen to me? I’ll be deflated, destroyed. Geoffrey: It’s unlikely I’m going to talk to my boss again next week. He just silenced me for a long time. There are simple things leaders have got to understand in terms of what they say and do in those simple, day-to-day contexts, which have consequences. We've all been in a situation where winds were taken out of our sails and not necessarily always at the best of times. It's interesting because sometimes as a leader, you say these things at an inappropriate time, but you then reflect on it but you don't necessarily tell the person that you stuffed up and you shouldn't have said that. You sort of hold it to your chest. Geoffrey: That's a brilliant example. If my boss came back to me 5 minutes later and said, "Hey, Geoff, I think I just blew it." If he apologised, that is fantastic for someone who is new with the company. There's a lot of research about trust that says if you screw up but then acknowledge it, own it and fix it, you wind up with deeper trust between you and the other person than if you've had a flawless relationship. I think that that's a lesson for everyone because we've all been in a spot where we've lost our cool whether it be in family or in business. It's important to be able to understand the ways that you can come back from that. That all comes down to psychological safety, being free and transparent so we don't have this baggage that hangs about you. How Do the Dynamics of Communication Change With Business Growth? Growth can be very stressful. Growth can bring in a whole bunch of different types of chemicals, whether it's growth in your family, like a new child on the way, or growth in business. In a small business, it's very easy to have the boss relay exactly their belief systems and why they're in business and have a productive team. How does that happen when you get bigger, when you get to 10 people, 20 people, 100 people? How do the dynamics of communication change with business growth? Geoffrey: The answer is not complex. We look at a big organisation and we go, "Wow! How do they do it?" However, the experience of your team and your immediate supervisor trumps the organisation. Certainly, it has to come from the top, but when you think about it, we just do it team by team. Your average span of control is 9 or 10, so if you have 100,000 employees, divide it by 10. That's 10,000 teams, so it's not so much that I have to work with 100,000 people. It's 10,000 leaders. If I measure what's going on, and I find 2,000 have actually got it nailed, another 2,000 that with or two changes would be world-class, another group, say, 3,000 that got quite a bit of work to do, I'm down to the 3,000 leaders who really need attention. To build psychological safety is not complex. It is about setting some frames. Leaders will say how the team is going to operate and that they don't know everything and when someone is making a mistake, they need them to speak up, ask questions, contribute ideas. When we contribute as a team, we will listen to what you have to say, we'll respect it and no one's going to put anyone down and ask “where did you get that dumb idea?” People are going to ask you with courtesy and respect, and they will ask enough questions until you realise for yourself that there are holes in the idea and then we pack it and move to the next idea. We also set the frames in our team that it's a learning environment. Often, in the organisational context, we think it's an implementation problem or an execution problem but it's a learning problem. How do you execute your interactions with feedback and trial-and-error? How do you make a change? You need that learning culture, that learning environment, and the understanding that it's a learning problem to help you have an agile, responsive, growing organisation. Whether it's a team of 5,000 or 50,000, it doesn't matter. It's within a team of 5 to 10 people where it happens each time. Ultimately, you need to have people who are comfortable being leaders and driving the organisation, but make sure that they're very elastic. They need to be ready for change and be ready to hear what's going on—not just listening but hearing what you're saying. Geoffrey: You need to measure psychological safety because it's a tricky beast. It also has commercial consequences and consequences in terms of benefits for the well-being of your workforce. Western nations are passing more and more laws around psychological safety. That's becoming a compliance issue. You actually need to be able to show that you have it under control: you're measuring it, reporting it and managing it. Otherwise, you can be liable for consequences you don't want. It's better for business, better for everything and may become mandatory. Recommended Book: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmonson If there are people who are looking to engage more or create a team that's able to speak out, how do they go about doing that? Geoffrey: Come talk to me. You can go to my LinkedIn profile. I've done a number of postings and very simple videos explaining it and how to make the changes. It's a leadership thing, and it's not complex for leaders to learn what to say to set it up and what to do.   Connect With Geoffrey Wade on LinkedIn Geoffrey: There's plenty of literature out there. The leader in the field globally at the moment is Amy Edmondson, a researcher from the US. She has published an excellent book on it. She summarised 20-30 years worth of research papers. Get Simple Readings and Research Around Psychological Safety  What Is Business Freedom to You? What is business freedom to you? Geoffrey: For me, business freedom is the next threshold of this business. I'm a chairman of a couple of companies and the CEO of a company that specialises in helping organisations measure and improve business performance through psychological safety. I think business freedom would be getting to the point where the business doesn't really need me in the day-to-day marketing, sales and oversight of the operations of the business. I'm not there yet. Ask me at the end of 2022, and I'm confident that I'll be able to say I've got that business freedom that I described. Others describe it as working on the business rather than in it. I'm still a bit of both. In my chairman roles, it's very much working on the businesses but in the psychological safety stuff, I'm still doing a bit in the business. We were also talking about retirement. You should ask my wife about that. When someone asks when I'm going to retire, she says he'll still be working at 85, he loves it. It's not work, is it? I can comfortably drop tools and do whatever I want right now. I do what I do because I love doing what I'm doing. Geoffrey: It's a legacy I want to leave. My work is about building that legacy and influencing the people that our business connects with in such a way that their work life and their home life are richer, happier, more meaningful. For me, it's not about work. It's about impacting in a positive way the people's lives that we're lucky enough to intersect. I get a real sense of meaning from what I do. I think that's a noble purpose and it's important to be able to know that so you are working towards something and business is just a vehicle to achieve that. Join our Facebook group!  If you have enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump onto iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback and always stay healthy out there.

195|Psychological Safety at Work With Geoffrey Wade

194|Money Mindset and Self-Worth With Aimee LaLiberte

  Are you running an old business but feeling like you're flogging a dead horse? Or are you running a new age business and pushing in the right direction where things can be done in a way that's leveraging your value but not your time? What is an innovative revenue model? Samantha: An innovative model is very dependent on what you want, and I think this links straight back to your podcast: Business Built Freedom. Traditionally, we go into business for ourselves or one that's built around our expertise. We don't then look at moving forward, instead we kind of look back to how everyone else has done it.  It's shifting towards what success actually means to you—not what success should be—and towards building a habitat in your business that links all the way from your vision based on what you want to the financial statements, leadership, people, process and systems that you want. The next part of that is enveloping that in core values, safety and accountability.  The main issue around this structure is that we have not been taught how to do any of that. We've been taught how to maybe do our product and financial statements, but we haven't been able to talk about how to actually run a business. It takes 7 or 8 minutes to open up a business. Most of us spent years getting qualifications, I spent a decade learning how to be an accountant, but it did not teach me how to run a business. It's something that should be taught more at school and as a career. I am guilty of it. I've been a cowboy trying to work out how to get to where I'm at. I've learnt by touching fire, most of the time realising that's not a good idea. That's the problem. As technicians and as experts, we are taught not to make mistakes, but if you're building a business, you have to make mistakes and you have to make it safe to make them.  Failure leads to success. If you don't have any failure, you won't have success. If you're mining, it's very unlikely you're going to strike gold the first time you hit the ground.  Leadership Is the Most Important Part of Any Business Samantha: We mainly work around experts and dollar businesses that have products or services that are very much needed, like IT. The problem is they're built around one person, and then we don't even know how to look after ourselves. If you're building any kind of business, the leader is the most important person but the leader tends to come last a lot of times. First, you actually have to learn people skills. I know this because I've made so many mistakes. The good thing is I've learnt from those mistakes. I'm a very curious person by nature and I always ask myself "how can I make that better?" It wasn't until very recently I realised that if I'd look after myself, then my people and everything will follow. That was a really big learning experience. For me, it's to stop people who want to change—those who actually understand that it will take some changes and show that they actually have to change behaviour and skills to go forward. We think that we can just continue doing things the same way and then we can make those $ 2 million dollars.  Particularly in the expert style of businesses, we've got spreadsheets. I don't know how many spreadsheets that would say I would take this from here to here, and then you get to the end of the year and wonder why that didn't happen. It's because you actually have to make it happen and you have to have skills and you have to bring your team on board too. Nothing leverages a business faster than all in with your people. Safety, Trust, and Collaboration  Samantha: We have to learn how to make collaborative spaces. We have to learn how to trust. And the biggest thing to trust is to create safety.  You have to actually create safety to make mistakes, and I'm not talking about doing three times the wrong way—that's slackness. What I'm talking about is going and experimenting, rewarding that and finding ways to actually measure it. Actually say, "we're here and we want you to make mistakes," but you have to send rules and boundaries around that and actually then demonstrate it. The biggest thing about leadership is actually leading by example. You do not get your team to do something that you're not willing to do yourself or you haven't done yourself. If you want your team to go on a high-level change, be ready to change.  I think this is the biggest mistake I made, particularly when I was in a very large accounting firm. I was trying to change, but a lot of our leaders did not. A lot of the business structures that we have now are not built for that. They're built on expertise and ego and everything else. We have to start shifting this, and I'm on a journey to find out how to do that. There isn't a lot of instruction on this, but there are ways to have really safe conversations and communication. Building Relationships Toward a Heart-Centred Business  Samantha: If you look at what's happening in the thought leadership area around this—the ones I follow are Bernie Brown, Simon Sinek, and Jim Collins—they're all talking about heart-centred businesses into the future and how we shifted from muscle-style businesses to the industrial age type of businesses to brain-style businesses, such as IT and accounting.  We have to build relationships, but no one teaches us how to build relationships and how to build community. The way most people spend their time is in businesses, so businesses have to be safe. And by safe, I mean you can come in and bring your problems to work. There's a framework for you to have a conversation, such as if you're having a bad day, and someone else will pick it up for you. All of that sort of stuff doesn't happen. How to Quantify Value  Samantha: First of all, we have to acknowledge it. When I say success on your own terms, the concentration is I want to make money. There's no question about that. You need to make money so you can empower other people. Your profit and loss should be how much can I help and pay my staff and my family, and then your balance sheet should be what's my worth and what's my value, my asset value and cash flows, how you fund it. Surely you need to concentrate there. But you also need to say what success looks like and how I'm feeling, how I'm working, and how my staff are feeling. If you concentrate on that, I can guarantee counterintuitively the money actually follows. It follows where the good energy is.  That comes down to passion and why you do what you do. Listen to Finding Your Passion With Joshua Lewis We're talking about different business models and leadership roles. If you've got a lawn mowing business or you're a solo entrepreneur, it doesn't mean what you're doing needs to go if that's what you love doing. It does not mean that the asset that you're creating or the vehicle to your success has to change. That's a big thing. Own the Kogs  We were talking earlier about the way to shape a business and the way kogs can work in a business. I'm happy that I've written myself out of a job. I'm no longer the main kog, but I own the processes around the kogs and how everyone works together, which is a lovely position to be in. Samantha: That's so interesting because those processes that you're talking about are your asset. If you can repeat them again and again, you've got an asset, you have a business, you have a business asset; you don't just have a job or the people in your business don't just have a job either. Owner Alliance and Valuation Samantha: I started this work really early on when I used to do a lot of business valuation work. The biggest thing that would hit a valuation faster than anything is owner alliance, and most businesses up to the $10 million mark have a massive owner alliance issue. Now, that issue does hit you on the valuation.  If you've got somebody who the business is relying on, not just from a technical point of view but also from their mind they're not sharing, the valuation goes. What is interesting as you look forward now is those people are burning out. They're dying early. It's a health issue as well, and you've got to think why. Listen to Inspiring Wellness With Karen Pyke Samantha: Going back to your example, if you want to be a control freak—and that's okay—and you want to build a small business that makes lots of money, you can do that, too. The model of your business just needs to be built on what you want. So if you want control—although there is no such thing as control—or if you want that or you want the perception of it, build a model that suits you. This is the problem. We should have these big growth businesses. We should have a model. We should have an online model or whatever model. Don't get too stuck on that. Ask: What do I need? How can I explore that and find that?  If you want a business that's small where you control all aspects of it, you can still make quite a good coin out of that. It's just that your systems and processes and everything will need to be worked on. We often go, "we've got to go." Sometimes, the growth you need is internal as opposed to external. It's very hard to say this will be the model of the future. I think the business models of the future are going to be very much based on the humans who run them. Financial Independence, Retirement Early  You're familiar with the FIRE (financial independence, retirement early) movement. It's about finding out what are those key things in your life that you want to be doing that brings you to that retirement spot. Now, retirement to people is a lot of different things. Some people just think it's a number, 65. As for me, I'm retired now. I'm happy with what I do. Do I do too much of it? Sure. Does it give you the shit sometimes? Absolutely. But if you're retired, is everything just going to be roses? I don't think so. There are things that will still give you the shits. I look at the income streams that I've got coming in and the way that I've distributed the eggs in our basket—between real estate and the businesses that I'm running—and I'm very happy to say that if I wanted to stop doing what I'm doing, I could stop doing it. And that really empowers you to make the right decisions. You're not dealing with C-grade clients. You're dealing with people that you can be happier to work with. But how do you know if you've got a C-grade client or an A-grade client or if your business is running like a machine, you're running a new age business model or you if you don't have these processes in place? The other day, I went into a business that was still using timecards. It doesn't integrate into their systems like, they can't make sure that no one's doing something they shouldn't or they're doing what they're meant to be doing, etc. And that's where finding your A-grade client, your A-grade staff and focusing on your business are really important. The Transformative Business Model If we're looking at a business in a transformative stage, how do you apply the transformative business model? Samantha: The people who would be asking that question are the people we're looking for. How do we actually shift it? Honestly, it's one step at a time. When we start working with businesses that have got blocks, the first thing we ask is what type of person are we working with and what energy do they have? Do they want to change? We work with a lot of businesses and we start where you're at right now and we have a look at it. We always start with that process of finding out where you want to be personally as the leader because the business does not disconnect from the person. About 10 years ago, I didn't get that. You do not become a new individual when you walk through the doors of your office, and you certainly don't become a new person when you walk through the doors of your home. If you're dragging shit around with you, you're going to drag it all over so it's most important that you are happy and that you find joy in what you do every day. We need to start there, and then we build around that and we see where the next rock needs to go. Usually, it's around staff and actually starting to talk collaboratively with staff and then the changing skill sets. Once you get the staff going and they're coming up, then if you are still using fax machines, then your staff will tell you, they will then take it, and they will empower it. If you hear me say we need to start working on systems, processes, people, financial statements, and all of that stuff, the first thing it probably would cause is absolute fatigue. We’ve got to start undoing that first and then you've got to bring other people on board. Create a Collaborative Space Samantha: If you're a small business, that might not mean employees. Some of the business models of the future that we're working with are collaborative. So how do you work with the people around you? How do you work with your clients? How do you actually look at what your clients do and can they help you with it? But the first start to anything is what the hell do you want? Not many people ask that question. The way you said it actually is perfect. Why We Do What We Do  I went through a spot where I was wondering if "Dorks Delivered" is the right name for our business. Is it really relaying what we're trying to do? We were called something else many years ago, and we changed to talk to Dorks Delivered in 2009.  And then I read Find Your Why by Simon Sinek. I got whiplash from how fast I stopped and thought that I'm going to change everything around. Over the course after about 4 months as I was reflecting on absolutely everything that I was doing in life—why am I brewing beer, why am I automating the gardens, why do I have fish—what it came down to is I realised that personally, I love automating things and bringing back time. Why do I do it? Because I want more time. We only have that time once on this earth. I've got Our Shout Marketing, Dorks Delivered, and Business Efficiency Experts. I asked why am I running these businesses? And I thought that all of them are doing the same thing. They're automating a certain aspect of your business, like using technology as a fulcrum to better your business.  Ultimately, what we do isn't transactional with a business. It's transformative. We want to make sure that we're changing the way that they're using these tools, not just calling itself to say that this tool is a bit blunt. It may be to change from using a tablet to a laptop or laptop to a tablet or a desktop to a workstation or whatever the situation is. In reflection, I love automating things because it brings me more time and you have a fuller life. That's why I'm in business. Knowing your Why allows you to have that trickle down and impact the rest of your business and make sure that your staff are aligned with your ethos and ideas. It was only when I was reading through notes that I made in a diary when I was 12 that it all clicked. And I've always been automating things. I started building electronics at a very young age, started automating my bedroom, making it so that I could click a button on the remote control and the door unlocked.  When I was 13, I had all these things that I have been building, like an automated manufacturing line for technically the first business that I started. I was doing it because it was making me more efficient. It allows me to earn more money because I'm more efficient.  It was only by reflecting that I realised I've been automating my processes from Day 1. I was very lucky that I was given the opportunity to earn money through product development, instead of per hour, so I looked at the fastest, most plausible ways that I could create what they wanted me to create. Finding Your Why Is Hard but Worthwhile Samantha: When you're looking at that, one reason it's so uncomfortable to do is quite often people come up with something that is what they want, but not what they should want. If you've worked in a business for 20 years and you realise that your passion is actually being creative and finding change for people, it's really hard when you're in that. My passion, my Why, never changed.  The first time I saw Simon Sinek on TED Talks, I wanted to make sure that people do not compromise their personal goals for the business ones. It makes decision-making really efficient. Every decision you make from then on is around that. So you're an efficiency expert and if you know where you want to go and you don't even know how to get there, that actually puts you on a longer path. The other efficiency thing is we teach a lot, so getting people around you who are on your Why saves not just time but also a whole lot of energy. Finding your Why is hard. No one is saying that it's easy. It took you a long time. It's taken me a long time. But there is a process that you can go through.  About BlueprintHQ If someone is thinking about changing to a new age business model or at least wants to have someone check in on their processes, how do you go about that at BlueprintHQ? How can someone get more information or more importantly, maybe a health check on their business? Samantha: Jump onto our website and hit the free consultation. You can book a meeting with me for about 20 minutes. For me, it's really important to build relationships straight up. And I love talking to people and really connecting to see if we can help. Worst case scenario, on that call, I'll give you some tips and tricks and give you value that's so important to us. I just love talking to people. It's one of my passions in life. My husband and my kids hate it because I'll go into a cafe or anything and I'll talk to anybody. We have a podcast called Business Habitat. I would love for you to have a bit of a listen. We talk about this stuff all the time. We get a lot more into the behavioural issues and what needs to shift. We have really interesting people who have built businesses that are different from the normal. We're looking for really curious, interesting people. If you think that's you, give us a bell and we would love to have you on too. Listen to Business Habitat Episode 78: Building Business Freedom with Joshua Lewis  I'm going to be having a listen because I love seeing people do cool stuff, especially around Southeast Queensland and on a global scale which can help and impact businesses.  Recommended Books: Dare to Lead and BE 2.0 What would be the most influential book that you've read that people could dive into to get more information? Samantha: There are so many. I am a Brené Brown a freak. Her stuff is fantastic. It's all about being vulnerable. From a leadership point of view, I think her last book, Dare to Lead is very operational. It tells you what to do. And I just don't think you can go past Jim Collins' BE 2.0. It's so practical, and it has a bit of a mud map and a road map as well. What is freedom to you? What is business built freedom to you? Why do you do what you do? Samantha: So I can ride my horse in the middle of the day and not feel guilty about it. That's the hard bit there. If you have enjoyed this podcast, please make sure to jump across iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback. You guys drive the direction of who we speak to and the content. We've got to the Top 11 Business Podcasts. Stay healthy and stay good. 

193|New Age Business Models With Samantha Dean

192 | Inspiring Wellness With Karen Pyke 

191|A Systematic Approach to Business With Ken Lundin

190|How to Find Ideal Clients With Paul Kennedy

189|Hiring Business Lawyers With Katie Richards

188|Improving Your Business Strategy With Jason Button

187|Enhancing Customer Experience With Floris Blok

186|Improving Communication With Marlise van der Merwe

185|How To Prepare a Business Plan With Marty Lewis

184|Becoming a Leader With Tim Stokes

Welcome to Business Built Freedom, the podcast made for business owners who want more out of life and ultimately, build a vehicle of wealth and freedom. We are technologists, owners, forward thinkers, and life hackers, most importantly, we are human and down to earth Aussies. Brisbane based entrepreneurs are interviewed regularly from all walks of life, in all positions of business from greenfield start-ups to long-standing owners looking for exit strategies to retire. If you want to increase your wealth, better your health and get a residual income, sit back with a beer and relax, unless you're on the way to work…. See how the new kids are doing it, get the time you deserve with the family, gain perspective, direction and stop the business owning you, instead OWN it!

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Business Built Freedom

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