Biz Bites

Revolutionise your service delivery, data driven transformation. Join us as Jason MacLean from Freepoint Technology shares unique insights on measuring and improving manufacturing performance. Now I know what you’re saying. You’re in professional services. You’re a management consultant. There is so much we can learn from what manufacturing does.

They’ve got real time data that enhances productivity. That’s something we can all learn from. You’re going to be able to reduce downtimes and foster continuous improvement in your business. We’ll talk everything from AI to change management. It’s an episode you don’t want to miss. Let’s get into Biz Bites.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And my guest today is someone we met online, but we actually got to meet in person, which is a rarity considering he’s way on the other side of the world. Jason is. All about measuring performance, improving excellence as a result of that in a very interesting way.

I’m gonna let him introduce himself. Jason. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, Jason MacLean. I’m director of enterprise accounts and sales here at three point technologies in London, Ontario, Canada. Pleased to meet you and see you again. Yes, that’s the great little story that we had where we actually had an opportunity.

We engage with each other and unbeknownst to me. You were traveling to to Sydney and we actually got a chance to meet in person, share, share a drink or two, and and discuss a whole lot of different things that we’re going to touch on some of those as we go through it go through the episode today.

Just tell me, I guess that’s the first thing is the business itself is not just located there. You obviously were in Sydney amongst other places in Australia for Yeah. What we do is primarily in the manufacturing sectors. We have software and hardware that we bring into the manufacturing environment where we can attach sensors and different types of software solutions to measure performance.

A lot of my customer base is in Australia and New Zealand, so I try to make it down at least once a year. To, visit all the customers. I don’t always get to see all of them, but I try. Yeah, so we connect all these sensors and limit switches and software to a manufacturer’s environment and we can pick up downtime, count measure performance and benchmarking.

We have scheduling solutions for production scheduling where, you can optimize your output. Standardised work instructions, the list goes on, but that’s primarily what we do. We come in and give that manufacturer the visibility from the shop floor perspective that they may not have had.

Before I think what’s interesting about this space is that particularly I know a lot of my audience are in the professional services or consulting type spaces, but ultimately, there’s a lot of similarities here because it’s still people driven, even though there’s a fair amount of equipment and automation that might be involved in the process, there’s still people that are driving the quality of the workmanship that’s happening along the way, let alone the end quality of the product itself.

Yeah, I felt like our solution gives you that visibility from, say, production supervisor or management standpoint to see that action and that activity on the shop floor. If anything, it’ll boost productivity and quality because the team members on the shop floor. typically want to do a good job and they want to be rewarded for that.

This gives us a visibility of that activity, right? Yeah, I find it boosts that morale, it boosts the quality output of whatever product that manufacturer is making, and and that OEE, if you want to call it that, right? I think it’s interesting too, because most people would assume that once you put Whatever equipment you need in place, that efficiency just happens.

That’s not necessarily the case, right? No, typically, what I see with my customers anyway is, if you deploy our solution on the shop floor and you show the visibility give that visibility, whether that’s on big screen TVs hanging up on the shop floor or maybe it’s operator monitors that they can view their own activity.

You typically see about a 15 percent increase in productivity across the entire shop. And that’s not with, that’s without doing anything. That’s just showing what, because people are going to see that. They’re going to see their own metrics and their own KPIs and try to improve. That’s just human nature, right?

Whether it’s competitive from shift to shift, or it’s just them challenging themselves. But yeah, when you start really diving into, say, the reports and all the metrics that we do capture, and then form plans, whether it’s continuous improvement projects, to make processes or environments better that’s when you see The real ROI, right?

Yeah, I think that’s, it’s interesting as well. I just want to touch on the initial reaction that you have from people because they’re effectively being monitored. And so the one part is to go as you described it as being competitive and going, Oh, I’ve got, and that willingness to want to improve, but is there the other side where people are going?

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So come talk to us, podcast done for you. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to biz bites, but is there the other side where people are going? Hang on, Big Brother’s watching me a little bit too closely. Oh yeah, you get that. It’s all in the approach. I try to be as hands on with the deployment as I can.

There are some customers that they want to do all that onboarding and set up themselves. And deployment is in their control. And that’s fine, but you do have that, that mentality that Big Brother’s watching every move that I make now, or You also have that, depending on how you deploy solutions is You know, you’re giving the team member a voice and the ability to tell their side of the story.

So if there was quality defects, if there was downtime, I’m giving you a solution where you can enter in that information now. Or it’s captured in real time and you aren’t going to have That big brother coming down from the head office to, to question you, the story is already told, right? It’s all in the approach, I believe.

If you just deploy a solution on the shop floor and don’t get that team member feedback and interaction, then I think that big brother mentality is what’s going to stick, right? Yeah, that’s, it is an important thing, isn’t it? I think for any business and automation is becoming more and more a part of, of businesses all the time now, and it is about how you manage that human interaction that is going to become more and more critical in that process of not only deploying it, but overseeing it.

Yeah, and the more lean customer, like I know a lot of companies are trying to run as lean as possible, especially post covid. I think having a solution in place like ours it eliminates that need to have You know, supervisors walking the shop floor as much as they used to pick up, say, Excel sheets, or team members writing down things on paper, and it has to get entered in later on.

It’s a huge time savings to have a solution like ours on the shop floor with companies running as lean as they do. Or at least as lean as they try to run, right? Yeah. I think that’s an interesting point too, isn’t it? That, that how lean are they trying to run? Because that’s one of the things that people are seeing is okay.

Invest in the technology, eliminate the people. Therefore, greater greater profit, but it’s not necessarily that way, is it? And some of it is also changing the changing. There might be some jobs that are lost, but there are new jobs that are being created as a result as well, aren’t there? Yes, that’s right.

Like I’ll use my perspective and my experience with our solution specifically. Like I was with Toyota Motor Manufacturing for 21 years and then I went to a Tier 2 automotive supplier as a maintenance manager and I actually brought this solution that I’m promoting to, every day into a environment where there was nothing.

And I found there was a little bit of that big brother mentality at first. I changed my approach and I was giving the team members the ability to, say, call for help in a process. They no longer had to leave the process to find somebody, like maintenance or a supervisor. They could tell their side of the story.

I as a maintenance manager was able to showcase through all the reports that I was generating with our solutions that I was understaffed. So I was inefficient because I didn’t have enough maintenance team members. That gave me some of the metrics that I needed to go to the front office and say, Hey, we need to hire somebody.

And this is the reason why. Whatever those reasons were at the time. So I got two new maintenance team members out of that. One electrician, one millwright. You can, it depends on how you want to use and analyze the data, right? You can. Promoted that you need more people, or you could use it as a time savings and eliminate some of those old outdated, antiquated tasks.

Yeah, I think it is an important perspective that people understand that it is perspective, right? That it is about how you want to drive into it, because a lot of it is fear based. That we’re bringing in the machines are going to take over, we don’t have any work, what are we going to do? And it’s actually not really that’s not a fair perspective on how things work.

Going. And as you say, there are opportunities then where if you improve efficiencies in one area, it may create new positions in order to support that drive, not only for greater efficiencies, but for increased productivity. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. And there’s a lot of fluff out there, like whether it’s marketing or I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn where they’re talking about Industry 5.

0 now, and I don’t even know what that is, right? The, Industry 4. 0, I know it gets tossed out there a lot I don’t think the majority of manufacturers out there are at Industry 2 or 3. 0, A lot of fluff. There’s a lot of over exaggeration with regard to AIs taking over everything and Yeah, AI has some pretty cool stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s just cool stuff.

It’s cool tech. It’s not a solution. It’s not a permanent solution. You need to have those team members, managers, supervisors, leads on the shop floor driving these changes, right? Yeah, absolutely. You still need that human element in there. And so talk to me about that. The human element itself, once you come in there and how much of what you’re doing is improving the balance between what the machines are doing, what the human element is doing, how does that, how do you find that blend?

Because some of it is, some of it I imagine is improving what the machines can do as well as what the human element can do. From a Consultative base, like I’ve been in manufacturing, say, all my career. Some of these pain points that some of the manufacturing leaders are trying to solve, I’ve been through.

I can put myself in their shoes. And we can deploy our solutions tailored to those pain points. Which is great. But, yeah, driving change on the shop floor. You need to have a, what’s your cause, what’s your purpose, what’s your reason for doing this? Is it just to check a box, or are you trying to improve a process for X, Y, Z reasons?

Benchmarking is a big one. Do you know your throughput, your OEE, where you’re supposed to be at versus where you are in real time. You’d be surprised how many manufacturing sites don’t know their OEE don’t know their throughput, what it’s expected to be. They know what it costs for, say, downtime.

But they don’t know their throughput. They don’t know their OEE. And if they do, it’s written in a binder somewhere and nobody knows where it is. Running into that a fair bit. Having those questions in mind or those tasks in mind. Okay, we’re going to benchmark. We’re going to try to improve this process by identifying bottlenecks, identifying, is there excessive steps in a process that don’t need to be there?

Or maybe you need to rebalance your entire line, right? Is the job that you’re doing underburdened, and the job that the person beside you is doing is overburdened, and that’s why you overcycle on that process all the time creating a bottleneck. If you don’t have tools to visualize all that, then you’ll never know.

So we try to give that ability and that visual, visual shop floor perspective where you can see all the bottlenecks right away in real time. I think most people can relate to that. I think particularly any business owners that are listening right now, is no matter what size your business is, I think you, everyone would be nodding their heads and going, I realize I’m probably a bottleneck at some point in my business.

But it’s actually understanding how. How vast that bottleneck might be and how, how easy it may be to unblock it and to go around that. And I think that’s that is such an important aspect for any business to fully understand. Yeah, and it could be something simple as you’ve been monitoring your process for a month or two.

And you’re looking at before and after data. And, hey, at the end of the day, you make a plan to save. Whether it’s a couple seconds, in some cases, or a few minutes of whatever task that team member is doing or that machine is doing. It could be as simple as an equipment, move or change.

It could be in some cases we’ve had some locations that re engineered the entire process just because it’s non profitable, but they always thought it was a big money maker. Once you start visualizing it and showing it, reporting out on these benchmarks, you’re able to make some critical changes and some, I’m not going to say smarter decisions, but some quicker decisions on specific processes, right?

I think one of the interesting things about processes for any business is there’s history, and often, The reason you started doing something was a valid reason, and it might be because of, where things were placed or the opportunities, and then everything has been built around that, and you haven’t gone back and questioned why that, or whether that decision that was made in the first place is now still relevant and could be changed, and I bet that’s something that you see all the time in business.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it kind of attitude where You know, in some cases it fits, but in a lot of cases it doesn’t anymore. The whole point of continuous improvement is it’s continuous, right? Yeah, it’s a great idea, let’s implement it, and then let’s build on that, right?

It’s, once is never enough. Let’s continue, it’s continuous improvements. Let’s continue to build on whatever that good idea was and optimize that process. And then go back to it every year, right? Go back to the changes that we’ve made. Reevaluate, before and afters and put a plan together to make it even better or more efficient.

I find, yeah, a lot of customers out there, including past businesses that I’ve been in. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it. We’re comfortable this way. So that’s the way we’re going to stick with. It’s not always the best case. No, and it’s funny because when we met, you told me a story that stuck with me.

About you walking into a particular manufacturing place and just questioning the placement of equipment. And they were looking to replicate that placement of equipment in a new facility without questioning why it was there in the first place. I don’t know if you remember that example, but I do.

Yeah. Talk everyone through it. Yeah, it was a industrial bakery and I was just getting a tour of the facility, not a customer of mine, but potential. And we walked through, and they were showing me different processes, and I just happened to glance at the end of the line where all the material comes off, and it was, being picked up by a forklift and driven about five minutes down to the warehouse where it gets wrapped up in shrink wrap, the skid does, and then brought all the way back to that process to get parked in a freezer beside that process.

So it’s just a simple, why don’t you move that Wrapping device right to the end of the line and eliminate all that travel time. And I guess, being that was the way they’d always done it, they were just nose blind to it. They didn’t see it right away as a waste, but it was about, I don’t know, what did they say?

I say, that idea, they did implement it. They did move the equipment saved them about, 20 minutes every hour of just travel time back and forth to the forklift. Just lost time, right? A double handling of material and that was a bottleneck because the product would stack up and stack up while the forklift operator was traveling around with this material.

And that was just something that I noticed being a fresh set of eyes on site, right? Now using solutions that will visualize all of your data and all of your machines and processes would have easily identified that the end of that line is a bottleneck, but they already knew that. They just didn’t know that there was such an easy fix, right?

I think that’s the key, isn’t it? So there are solutions. Sometimes you get so close to something in your business that you can’t, you might be able to see, as you said, the bottleneck, but having to see the solution, sometimes the obvious is really there and you just can’t see it because you’re so close to it.

And it was free for them, aside from hooking up some hydro, right? It was a free, they already had the equipment they just had to get their electrician to hook up a new outlet to plug that equipment in, and there, they saved 20 minutes per hour, just in travel time. It was a huge savings for them, and it eliminated that bottleneck so much that they did replicate that in that second facility, and on that second line that they were installing.

A little pat on the back to me, I feel good about it, it’s always nice to have a different perspective I don’t think any ideas are bad ideas, but I do think that this is the way that we’ve always done it, and this is how it’s going to stay, isn’t It isn’t always the best course of action.

It is a big thing to do to look at something and say, and businesses that have been around for a number of years, sometimes decades and to walk in and say what if we were starting today? How would we do it? What would we do that’s different and completely go with a blank canvas? And that is a difficult thing to do for a lot of businesses.

But this is the whole idea, isn’t it, really, that you, when you start measuring efficiencies and things, you can start to see that, hang on, maybe there is another way to do this. It could be a group effort. Nobody I’d be lying to you if I said change management in any course is easy. And never, it’s never easy, right?

It’s bad. You can’t do it by yourself, especially in a manufacturing environment. You can’t have one person trying to drive change across the entire organization. But having tools in place specific to people in the roles and it starts from the top down, not the bottom up driving some of this change and continuous improvement is definitely key for success.

And make it a group effort, not an individual effort. You’ll find that it’ll be a lot easier to follow some of these things through versus, uh, one person trying to lead the whole herd, right? Yeah, and I think you make it a really important point because Often businesses come in and they will bring some tech or something into the business and they’ll, champion that piece of tech.

But what they’ve forgotten about is the change management process because it impacts people around them. So you do need a specific change management team depending on the size of your business to help people come to grips with what is being done and what the implications are for it.

And What the positive outcomes could be. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s be honest. Once you start measuring things that you haven’t measured in the past it might look really bad. You know what I mean? It might be worse than you thought it was. And I’ve seen that out there too, where somebody started measuring something and they’re like, What’s going on here?

This is twice as bad as I thought I was doing. But it’s true, and it’s real. So let’s put a plan together and get you to the next step where you can go to your betters or your counterparts and go, here’s where we are. We didn’t know where we were. Here’s where we are, and it’s bad. But now we have a plan forward to get to that next step, all right?

And the next time that you have to present out your findings or some of those changes that you’ve made, maybe you were here and now you’re up here, right? Yeah, it’s That’s what I see out there anyway, for sure. Let me come back to that in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you about, when you’re starting to drive efficiencies in people, there is a danger as well that you, while machines are designed to operate at near optimum capacity consistently humans are not.

As much as we would like to. Walk into the office at nine o’clock on a, on any given day and say we’re going a hundred percent until five o’clock. It’s just, that’s just not the reality. People don’t perform at their optimum peak level every day. So how do you manage that?

Because there has to be some, there are always outside circumstances. There are always reasons why someone may not be able to perform at a particular, at the highest level on a day to day basis. So how do you, Manage that shift in a business on a day to day basis. From a manufacturing perspective, I say you have to build in some of that and do a process cycle time and there’s tag time.

You got to give a team member the ability to stop what they’re doing. Get a drink of water or stretch or what have you in between whatever tasks they’re doing. But you can never, yeah, you’re right, you can’t expect 100 percent out of everybody all the time. I don’t find that a lot of manufacturers out there are setting targets at 100%.

Like I know from my Toyota days, it was 95%, throughput throughout the shop. And a lot of those days we do that, nothing was ever perfect, like there was lunchtime builds, there was break builds, there was making up for downtime, there was making up for, if a team member went home sick and somebody else had to cover them and things like that.

I think it’s just having plans in place that, with the expectation that, Nobody’s ever going to operate at 100%. Now a team member operating at 50%. That’s a different discussion, like whether that’s recertifications, retraining, or maybe they just don’t want to be there anymore. I don’t know, but you’ll find that out there as well. I was going to say you must it must uncover a fair bit of What happens in every business, right? Where there are people that are not performing at their optimal level. And when you’ve got the data to understand that is happening consistently, you’ve got really a couple of choices, don’t you?

Understand why it’s happening and whether that can change in the current environment or realize that it’s the wrong person in the wrong job. With the data that you get and that you collect, if you’re analyzing it and scrutinizing it and doing it properly Yeah, you’ll be able to identify that there’s either an abnormality in the process or inconsistencies between maybe two or three people that do that same job.

And then it might be a retraining exercise that you have to do. It might be Like an overburden is, you could be, you go down to the process and see what that issue is, and maybe, I’m shorter in stature, so maybe I have trouble reaching something that somebody six foot doesn’t. So it takes me longer.

So yeah, it’s all what you do with that data. As I say, most team members aren’t trying to do a bad job, most want to do a real good job. And, You get a little pat on the back at the end of the day, week, month, whatever it might be, but everybody’s there to do their job and go home safe and sound.

It’s not always a team member’s fault. It could be the process and how it’s set up as well. But with that data that you get and that you capture and analyze and scrutinize, Go to the process and see. Watch. The team members, they do that job day in, day out. They’re going to know it better than any supervisor or engineer or manager.

They’re going to tell you or show you exactly what the problem is, right? Yeah, take that data that you’re capturing, go to the shop floor and see what the problem is for yourself. And I gather you’ve collected a lot of very interesting data. I don’t know whether that data is necessarily pulled across all all the places that you deal with, or you just look at that individually.

But tell me about some of the interesting finds that you’ve had, because there are efficiencies that can be quite easy to overcome if you’re aware of them. If you’re aware of what they are, that can happen in any business, right? I’ll give you one example that just comes to mind is I had one of my customers call me up one day and he’s I’ve had this solution hooked up to my CNC machines for two years.

And he says, it doesn’t make sense to me. It shows that I’m a hundred percent uptime every day and I can’t get it. my product out to my customers, on time, like any day of the week, and he’s I don’t understand what’s going on. So I said, all right, we’ll go to the shop floor and, ensure that the machines are actually on and running.

He says your solution is telling us that it is, right? I’m like, okay, great. Why don’t I come down to your site and take a look and see what I see versus see what he’s yep, come on site. So I made a day trip of it. Went on site to that customer’s location. They had 21 CNC machines on the shop floor and what the operators had been doing, not all of them, but some of them had been doing, is they caught wind that The way that customer was monitoring and tracking their productivity was if the CNC machine was on.

Not if the CNC machine was cutting chips, making chips, cutting the part, right? The team members would dial down the spindles, so they wouldn’t have to have, say, certain amount of change overs per day, leave it for the night shift guys, stuff like that. That’s what I saw right away is, yeah, it shows that you’re up because you’re monitoring your powers on, but you’re not monitoring your spindle load.

Showing that you’re actually being productive on that machine. So once they started tracking that, then you get into the real truth of, okay, are we really at 100 percent efficiency here? No, you’re at about 63. That’s why you’re not getting parts out. They have since changed their logics and their controllers that The operators can’t dial down the machines when it’s running these programs, unless they get supervisor passwords or buy offs or whatever it might be.

So their throughput has improved and they are able to get product out the door now. But it, yeah, their efficiency was never really at a hundred percent. They just thought it was. Yeah, I can imagine. And it’s, and I suppose it happens in any business and sometimes it’s not really meant with malicious intent.

It’s just, we can ease things up here. We don’t have to stress out and they’re not thinking about the bigger picture because there’s the element of people being employed and yes, they’ve got some some pride in their work. But it’s limited to those who are sitting at the top and are going this is about making money.

And this is about being able to pay for all of those team members that you’ve got sitting there and everything else that you want to be able to do. So it’s finding that balance, isn’t it? Between that strategic need and what is happening at a human level. On the floor. Yeah, 100%, 100%.

But yeah, at the end of the day, you gotta go and see. So you take your data that you capture, whatever that might be, whatever’s important to that specific manufacturer or individual, and then go and see for yourself You’re not going to solve any problems by sitting behind the computer, right? You need to be out there on the shop floor with that data in hand, analyzing these, whatever those metrics were that you captured, and then what’s next, right?

Continuous improvement. What are you going to do with all that information that you’ve got? Is it because team members are dialing down the spindles, right? Slowing it down so they don’t have massive changeovers. Is it because you’re expecting too much out of somebody? Is it the process is imbalanced but it’s coming up with that countermeasure or that plan for change and then seeing that through, right?

Yeah. And I imagine there’s lots of. Other interesting bits of data that you collect along the way. And in fact, I seem to recall that you mentioned to me there was one where you collected about the amount of toilet breaks that people were taking and how long that was taking up in a business and how that can drive inefficiency.

And that can happen anywhere, right? That sort of thing. That sort of thing. So you’re collecting the data about when people are taking breaks and for how long and how often that’s can surprise a lot of businesses. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, like I know that I’ll speak to me as a maintenance manager.

I’d always often oversee production as well if I was covering for holidays or whatever from production managers. I would see team members either late to line late back to a process from lunch, excessive bathroom breaks, and, one or two a day, okay, great, that’s you’re right but, if you’re gone for a half hour at a time, three or four times a day, come on, that adds up if you’re hourly, right?

And I often found that, I’ll speak to my perspective, when I deployed this solution as a maintenance manager, I found that one of the processes, main reasons for never making target or having terrible OEE was not down time, which everybody blamed it on, it was team members being late.

Returning back from lunch on afternoon shift. Equates to about 430, 000 in lost product because the line wasn’t running at all, or that machine wasn’t running at all. Not because it was broken down or missing parts or a team member was working too slow. It was idle time, right? Idle time was a silent killer.

That’s what we, I noticed and identified on that. for that. Within probably four months of just watching, right? Yeah it’s amazing, isn’t it? Because often business owners will give some liberties to their staff. And it’s not necessarily that those stuff again are deliberately trying to take advantage, but you give a little bit and that little bit extends and it continues and continues.

And suddenly, it adds up if you’ve got a few people that are consistently taking 10 minutes longer for lunch than you would otherwise have allowed. That accumulates very quickly and the bottom line can be huge. And again, that applies to any business. It doesn’t, whether it’s manufacturing or whether you’re producing a product or a different product or service, that is a consistent thing.

You lose that time multiplied by the amount of team members multiplied by the flow on effect, even from some team members being late and delaying the others. And then take that over a week and take that over a month and over a year and it can be a significant amount of drop in efficiency. Oh, absolutely.

What’s a team member rate? Hourly and then if they were gone an extra 20 minutes a day times, I don’t know how many working days you guys have in Australia, but 268 working days here in Canada. So how many hours over those course of those days? What’s that cost to you in wages where the team member just wasn’t there?

And then you start factoring in, okay, all of those hours of non runtime or ridal time at the machine that operator is supposed to be managing and running. What’s that cost to the business? It’s huge. It’s a huge input, impact on non business for sure. And you times that by however many processes or team members you’ve got, it can be catastrophic, right?

And I think this is the hard part as we come full circle a little bit in terms of you’ve got this, on one hand, you’ve got this obvious thing of that there’s inefficiencies here that’s costing the business. On the other hand, you’ve got this idea that, hang on, Big brothers watching me and telling me I’m taking 10 minutes too long for lunch or taking too many toilet breaks during the day.

It’s hard to bring those two back together. Isn’t it? I imagine that, that it causes some conflict in trying to, a be able to implement that Idea of watching those kinds of things in the first place and be what those what the outcomes of those things are. I don’t think anybody really deploys a solution on the shop floor aiming to improve productivity.

With the intent that they’re going to monitor you know how often their team members are going for break or late back to the line or you know when they swipe in or swipe out. I think that Information just presents itself over time, like all signs point to Joe who’s late every day after lunch the story told itself, it doesn’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily need to go looking for it visualizing the shop floor or a process it will identify it.

Bye. If the line is late to start or the machine is late to start or if it’s lost some productivity due to a team member being late where they can police themselves, so to speak, or big brother themselves and make those appropriate changes oh, if I keep doing this, people are going to notice, right?

But it becomes pretty self evident. Through the data that you collect, where the problems are, and whether that’s bottlenecks or whether that’s team members late back to the line you don’t necessarily have to chase after it or take that big brother approach. It’s there for everybody to see.

You don’t have to showcase it to everybody it could be strictly upper management to view that or supervisors, but yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna air itself and show itself. You don’t have to look for it. Just wanted to come back to something that you talked about a little bit earlier on. And this whole idea of moving into, you talked about whether it’s a 5.

0 version of things. Talk me through the different stages because, I think often these terms get thrown around, right? And you go, okay this is the base model. And 2. 0 became this idea, very early on that we’re just introducing some tech or some initial efficiencies. But have those lines been broken?

Those lines are very clear now at what’s 2. 0, what’s 3. 0, what’s 4. 0, and indeed what 5. 0 is going to be. At this point in time, there’s, like I said, there’s so much made up stuff out there and fluff out there and marketing, just, let’s call it Industry 5. 0 today and yesterday it was something completely different.

I try not to, fall victim to that. Um, I don’t know, I find a lot of manufacturers out there are just trying to do their best, trying to stay competitive whether that’s through cost and or profits or throughput or maybe they’re moving sites to different locations, whatever it might be, maybe it’s continuous improvement initiatives, so on and so forth. And yeah, solutions, tech is part of it. Industry 4. 0 from my perspective is getting your major ERPs in place, getting your MRPs in place, which is, managing assets or inventory. Getting your MES systems, manufacturing execution systems in place, which is some of that visual management and reporting and KPI collection type info.

But there’s, CMMS and the maintenance management systems, call it what you want. It all falls under that Industry 4. 0 umbrella. And a lot of businesses, one, don’t have, like a lot of these solutions are, like an ERP system is pretty expensive. And it’s a big job for someone to take on, you need somebody full time dedicated to it.

A lot of companies running lean out there don’t have the assets to assign to this. I’d say a lot of them aren’t close to that industry 4. gap yet. Some are, whatever 0 is. Trying to catch up with All this Industry 4. 0 stuff. I think Industry 5. 0 is more like, okay, take all the solutions that you’ve currently got from Industry 4.

0 and now add AI into the mix, or it’s going to do it all for you. I don’t think it works like that. I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen some pretty cool tech out there. We have some too with AI, where it’s AI reporting or AI scheduling, where it’ll optimize your schedule. Whether it’s to run most efficiently or make the most profit.

Things like that, which, yeah, it’s cool. But, you’ve been in business for however long without this stuff. You know, You could probably get by without all the cool fancy tech. Yeah, I don’t know, I’d just say be mindful of what you’re looking for and what you truly, really need.

There’s, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff out there, a lot of fluff, a lot of, it’s just a, I don’t even know what to call it, just a hot topic for the week, flavor of the month, maybe, visualize your shop floor, get your, whatever solution is going to organize you the best. And set you up for success and then stick with it and build on it.

Not every solution is going to, take place of say four or five or six different key individuals. You can free them up or get rid of them, I just wanted to touch on lastly Toyota, because you had a lot of experience in Toyota and we look at Toyota as being this huge, big brand.

And I assume one of the technology leaders I don’t know if, in terms of not just manufacturing overall, but in terms of as a business brand, they’ve always seemed to be a real leader in that space. What can you learn from The way a company like that is operating and what can be relevant for smaller businesses in running.

And indeed, you know how much emphasis is there on a company in a company like that to continue to improve and to continue to bring new technology in. I know that I would try to do a special project as a team lead on. We had different KPIs that we were responsible for safety, quality, cost, productivity.

team member development, right? So I would try to do a special project on each KPI every year. Which could be a huge project, or it could be just a little change in a process that bettered that process for a team member. What I find is, Toyota was really good at monitoring and tracking, their throughput, their OEE, their downtime.

But also From a team member’s perspective, always trying to make the process better for who is doing the job day in, day out. And better meaning more efficient, less steps, less burden. And, that levelness or evenness of each process along the way. So that process flow. And that’s what I find when I’m going into a, Manufacturer’s environment where they might be struggling a bit is I take some of that mindset that I brought from Toyota with me and I try to adapt that in other places.

Where would this fit in their organization or where would this fit in that organization? And then that continuous improvement mindset where, once is never enough. You always have to build on it and better it and better it, right? Absolutely. Look, there’s so much that we could continue to talk about, but we’re pretty much out of time and I just wanted to finish with a question that I like to ask all of my guests is what is the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you want to let more people know that they’re going to have it if they come and start to deal with you?

The aha moment? Yeah. When they see how much money they start saving. When they see that ROI start populating, that’s the ra ha moment, right? They can take that either money saved or, that throughput, the production that they’ve made that they weren’t making in the past and start benchmarking and proving that out across different lines, different sites or locations.

But at the end of the day, it comes to profit, right? We’re going to see more profit, less downtime, less waste. Yep. And ah ha! I should keep doing this. I love it. I love it. And look, thank you so much for being generous with your time. And I think what’s really interesting for people that have been listening in, that are even from different spaces, they may not be in manufacturing, is that there’s so much to learn from each of these industries.

And that All the efficiencies and things that you’re looking at are exactly the same in most other businesses, that they can look at the things that they’re doing. The machines, maybe a big or small factor in what they do, but the human element is there and the efficiencies that you can drive and the way you can monitor and then the things that you can bring in to change a business are huge.

And I appreciate the insights. I appreciate the time and I hope to be back soon to maybe we’ll meet up for another. I definitely look forward to that one for sure. And of course, we’re going to include all of the information in the show notes about how to get in touch with you and to look at Shiftworks, which is the business and MachineMonitoring.

com, which is the which is the website. And people will be able to get a hold of all of that information in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for being part of BizByte. No, I appreciate it. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance to the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on BizBytes.

Mastering Brand Impact Video Strategies for B2B Success. In this episode of Biz Bites, we look under the hood at the influence of video in marketing and the important role it can play in connecting with your audience and ultimately driving more people to your business. I’m joined by a thought leader in this brand story film space, Didier from Fixon Media Group, and you’re going to get some vital insights into how to influence your brand impact.

Through subtle engaging video content, you’ll discover the importance of aligning visuals with brand messaging and get actionable tips for small businesses to harness video marketing effectively. We’re going to discuss everything from what you can learn from the big brands to how you can implement on a budget.

Stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Biz Bites again, and we have a very special guest. I’m really excited about this because it’s an area that I’ve been endlessly fascinated in because it goes alongside of what we do in terms of audio production. We’re going to talk a little bit about video and the influence of video generally in marketing terms with Didier.

Welcome to the program. Anthony, thank you for having me. How’s things? Yeah. Very good. Look, I think what we should do first of all, is get you to introduce yourself to the audience and tell a little bit about what it is that you do. Certainly. So I run Fixon Media Group, which is a small little video production company down in Melbourne.

And we specialise in the production of brand story films. So what a brand story film is. Some people call it a modern day commercial. So you think back to the past decades, what a commercial looks like. It’s fast, it’s in your face, there’s graphics bouncing around everywhere. It’s very intrusive to your watching and to your viewing in your everyday life in general.

So what we’ve found is that A lot of brands and in particular the customers of these brands, they don’t want to be intruded anymore. They want to go about their life as an everyday without being bombarded with advertisements because we see 50 to 400 advertisements every single day on average. How does a brand then communicate what they need to communicate to their customers?

If customers are held back and they don’t want to be intruded by advertisements. So this is where the brand story film comes in. You communicate your message to your customers, but you do it in a way that is subconscious and unobtrusive. Yeah. I think it’s really important for people to understand who maybe listening in who get the idea of marketing and maybe you’ve heard about brand and brand story, but I think that the.

What people don’t fully under appreciate is that you have to break it up in. There’s the written message. If you like, there’s that core thing that many people focus most of their attention on, what are we going to do to summarize who our brand is and what it’s about, then there’s the way that you talk about it, which most people think in terms of a pitch, particularly because they’re the opportunities you get, particularly at a networking style function.

But of course there are opportunities around here around podcasting is another good example. But then the visual is quite a different element again, it’s a different layer. So I look at it and go that the text version is the non personality one, the audio one brings in the personality.

The visual just takes it to a different level, doesn’t it? Because visuals it’s not even people aren’t even listening as intently to the words as much as they are absorbing what they’re seeing on screen. 100 percent correct. And you’ve described perfectly the three types of learning styles, right?

The three types of learning behaviors, the written form, reading, the audio form in listening, and then the video, which is watching and learning and seeing it happen in front of you. And then you’ve got the fourth side of things as well, which is the hands on, and that’s even better for learning. So when 65 percent of the population more inclined to be video based learners, visual learners, or hands on learners, then there’s a huge opportunity for businesses to be using video and workshops even to another degree to improve the knowledge of their, the user base and engage their customers as opposed to the written form and the audio form, which of course do both have incredibly influential parts of marketing too these days.

I have a background of having worked in television for a little while and television news. And one of the things that really fascinated me about the transition from working in radio to working in television was that in radio you could report things immediately and you could definitely talk about anything.

Yeah, obviously legally speaking, but you could talk about it. You could talk about anything. Whereas the problem with television is that you can only do stuff. That you can see. So if you can’t see it, you can’t really report on it because people need to see that visual, which I always found fascinating because it’s really talking to the pictures rather than, as I said, in the audio based medium where you’re creating pictures with your voice.

So it’s really quite an interesting flip on how that goes and how. In a sense, you’re almost restricted by it. Yeah, definitely. And it’s an interesting perspective there. You think of what we’re seeing on social media these days. I don’t go two seconds on Facebook without seeing a news.

com. au article pop up, and it’s just absolute rubbish journalism, but they can report on it because it’s in the written form and it’s easily consumable. And then you take that to the next level. You go on the radio and they’re talking about Davo’s called in from Perth and he’s got a story about the Huntsman in his.

And it’s we don’t need to hear about this, but you can report on it. And then you look at the TV news, and it’s gotta be the latest thing in the courtroom, or the latest murder, or whatever it is, because it’s got the visuals there. And it’s such a contrast between each of them. And is one or the other better?

Maybe not. But they each offer their own individual positives and their own individual negatives as well. I think the big thing about the visuals is that it’s what people are becoming more and more used to, obviously with social media, particularly as you raise their, people pick whichever platform you prefer, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever it is, we’re driven by the visuals and it’s what makes you turn on to want to, Whether it’s read, listen or watch something, the visuals play an important part, but particularly particularly video based, platforms like TikTok and even Facebook and Instagram these days are driven largely by video feeds.

They are. And. I think a lot of brands when they look at social media, they think about, Oh, we need to jump on the different trends and what forth. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

Come talk to us at Podcasts Done For You. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you. So all you have to do is show up for a conversation, but don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you from the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it.

So come talk to us, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. I think a lot of brands, when they look at social media, they think about We need to jump on the different trends and what forth and I always go back to what’s the message that you’re wanting to share To your customers and are the customers actually on this platform because there’s no use trying to put out Different forms of video across each of these platforms if your customers aren’t actually there and the real opportunity lies Where your customers are so there’s no use jumping on as many platforms as you possibly can There’s this platforms coming out every second week at the moment.

You don’t have to jump on them You can just stay where you are. If that’s where your customers aren’t, you don’t have to jump on TikTok and YouTube if they’re not there. Yeah. And I think also the challenge with whether they’re there or not is also about whether they’re there for that purpose, because I think you could argue that there are, for example, we’re targeting.

Professional services, business leaders and thought leaders. Are they on TikTok? I’d be crazy to think that they’re not on TikTok at all. There’s definitely going to be a percentage of them on TikTok, but are they on TikTok to think about business? I would argue not. We don’t position ourselves on TikTok for that reason.

It’s a reason why, you know, as a business, I put more energy into LinkedIn than any of the other platforms because it is fundamentally a business based platform. And I think that’s part of it as well, isn’t it? That. It’s that some of these feeds in these videos are really about trying to escape as opposed to doing business.

So you’re right. You have to choose the right place for the right audience. Yeah. And there’s probably validity in going on the likes of TikTok and Instagram. If your customers aren’t. 100 percent there for the purpose of being in that frame of mind where they’re wanting to learn or be educated in the professional services space, definitely.

But of course, there is going to be that percentage, as you touched on, that are on these platforms. So maybe the occasional post, which is a bit more informative, educational, like you would post with WhatLeadership on LinkedIn, maybe there is an opportunity there. But then you can also look at the other side of things is if they’re 95%, they’re predominantly going to be looking to consume entertaining content to, as you said, escape the world that they’re in currently.

And then can you as a brand position yourselves without going too crazy, jumping on trends and what for still maintain your brand essence. Can you position yourself in a way that. Can create this entertaining and engaging content that could be the outlier for your customer. But they go on there, they see your brand, they’re escaping from their world, but they’re also building a bit more of a connection with your brand in doing so.

That’s probably the ideal situation to be in. Yeah, it’s absolutely, it’s different for every business, right? It depends what business you’re in and who the audience is that you’re trying to attract and for what purpose. That’s something that every. Everyone has to consider.

And it all goes back down to the brand story, right? When you’re trying to write that it’s about understanding the audience in the first place and where they hang out, because whatever you build, whether it is text, audio, video is going to be. dependent on who they are and where they are. Correct.

And brand story, it’s definitely a term that has popped up more so in the past five to 10 years or so, as opposed to previously, and there would definitely be terminologies that would relate to what a brand story of today is. But I think the key message there is you really need to understand what it is about your business that connects you to.

The ideal customer that you have as your avatar there, because it’s those core values and those core beliefs that you hold that a competitor may not hold that really make you different. And we talk about in business all the time. You’ve got to be different. You’ve got to have your key points of difference.

And that can be, that’s fantastic. But the real connection then comes from what you believe in and what you value. I like to use the example of all of our friends that we have around us. The reason that we’re friends with them is because. At a core level at base level. There’s something that we connect with them on whether that be through sport or Literature or whatever it is.

We’ve got some form of connection there So we can bring that into business as well as a business if you value Let’s take a brand Qantas, for example I don’t know if they’ve had some negative pr in the past 12 18 months, of course, but at the core they value Connection and they value families and bringing them all together so if I as a customer look at Qantas and I see that in their marketing and in particular their video marketing where that emotion can be so easily conveyed as opposed to audio or the text if I see that I’m going to be a lot more convinced that I need to go with there as opposed to a brand like Virgin which Through the advertisements it’s a little bit more funky, it’s a bit more pop, they’ve got the pinks and the purples coming in everywhere, and it’s a bit more of a funny environment.

If I lean that way then 100 percent I’ll go version, but if I’m looking for more of that connection and that, that family orientated approach, then I’m going to lean towards conscious a bit more. I want to explore this a bit more, but I just want to point out to people that are listening in. What we’re going to do is bring it back to what you can do, particularly as a smaller brand, because it’s all very well to talk about your Qantas’s and these people who have, multi million dollar advertising budgets that they can do lots of different things.

If you’re a small business, that’s a little bit harder, you’re not operating on the same scale, but there is stuff that we can learn from that and bring back to those small business and make it You know, do things like what you’re doing in a more affordable fashion. But I think what’s really interesting about what you’re talking about is that, that these big brands spend a lot of time trying to create a story.

And I think the great example is probably two great examples for me is this. The banks often like to tell a story about family or business, depending on who they’re trying to target. And so you see these wonderful ads where they try to have everyday people and tell a bit of a story in a 32nd bit. The other ones that I think are really obvious to me.

Car ads. It’s the minute they choose who is going to be in the car is the story that they start to tell. Because if you see a, let’s say, a 20, 30 something year old female driving a car, the likelihood that the 50 year old male is going to want that same car is going to be lessened because the visual relationship is with someone who’s younger and female.

And so those choices are very deliberate. And why you see at times that they’ll marry the two that probably won’t put a 20 year old. Don’t tend to put a 20 year old male with a, sorry, 10 year old female with a 50 year old man. Although interestingly enough, I do recall, and I can’t remember which brand it was, but there is certainly a, an ad out there at the moment, which shows a family growing with a car to the point where the, I think the P plates are going on or that they’re taking to a, clearly taking to something where there’s a band and they’re putting a whole lot of equipment in there so that the child has.

Grown older and it’s potentially then driving the car and there are variations of people, male and female sharing utes and I always find those things are endlessly fascinating about the story that they’re trying to tell in a very short space of time and very conscious of who they’re putting in the vehicle.

I 100 percent agree, Anthony, and car advertisements for me, when I look at them. They’ve got some parts of it which is amazing and then other parts I look at and I think they probably should be doing things a little bit differently there and the connection side of things and the relatability side of things that you touched on just there is what they do incredibly well and even to the degree of A situation that is by no means relatable at all, you think of the old Toyota Hilux commercial back in the day where the car falls off the cliff and then it ends up in the water and he’s on the beach and he finds it again.

Obviously that’s not going to happen to anyone and if it did it would be one out of a trillion chances of that happening. But the message there is the connection to the car, the connection to the brand, the love of the Hilux and all the benefits that it brings with that. That, that, that purchase of a car.

That’s what they do incredibly well, not just Toyota, but across the board at all the car brands. But then the side of things that they don’t do so well is they still lean towards that older day method of, this is a commercial. Because they’re all the same at the end of the day. A person jumps in the car.

They turn on the ignition, they start driving through water, or forest land, or bumpy roads, or whatever the situation is, and then they have a shot at the end of the film where it’s just six cars in a row, and the brand’s logo on there. So from the start, you still kinda know that it’s a commercial, and you know it’s a car commercial, but they do an incredibly good job.

Of bringing that tone down a little bit by introducing the female 30 year old driver or the retired grandparents taking on IKEA or something like that. And they bring that brand essence in, in that way. They do that incredibly well, but the commercial side of things, making it not so much of a commercial, they still got room for improvement there, I think.

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because essentially what they’re doing is he’s making. The vehicle that they’re promoting aspirational and aspirational in the sense of people wanting to relate to the circumstance, whether it’s it used to be driving fast, which they can’t legally do anymore unless they’re putting it on an actual racetrack, but it’s.

That whole scenery, that idea of, having a road to yourself and driving along, or whether it’s, four wheel driving or taking the kids down to the beach or whatever the relatability section of it is. And of course they then, as you say, often tie it back in the end going if you think that this is, Too aspirational.

We’ve actually got a range. You, this might be the top of the range, one that you’re looking at here, but there is a range. So trying to bring people in nevertheless regardless of whether they think it’s looking too expensive, because I find that’s the really interesting challenge when you look at some of what traditionally have been lower end brands.

And I think key is a great example and something that I’d encourage people who are listening in right now to have a think about, because Kia’s undergone a huge transition because when Kia came into the market, I don’t know how many years ago, it really was the base brand, it was if you’re just think, I just need a car to get me from A to B, and I hope that it’s going to work for a few years, then, That was Kia.

But Kia is not in that category anymore. It’s helped by the fact that there have been multiple other brands that have entered the market since then. But if you look at the way Kia has positioned itself now, it’s trying to up The impression of the brand that it is much more, it’s much more of an accepted quality brand and that they can be inventive and leading in certain areas so that way they can charge for that as well.

But it’s a nice balance, isn’t it? Because no key is not going to say they’re Mercedes Benz. And I don’t believe that they’re trying to get to that level off what you would expect to pay for a vehicle. But it’s interesting how that transition has happened, and that even with their branding, if you were to, Google it and look back at their logo at what it started up and where it is now, you look at the where they enter the market in the ads and where their ads are now.

They’re vastly different in the shape of the cars and the things that they’re doing with it are incredibly different. So I love that what the visual does. As well as anything else is it really helps that transition of brands because often that happens in business, whatever size you’re at, that there are, you don’t necessarily always stay aimed at the same segment or that segment may grow and alter.

So there are other opportunities. And I think it’s a great example to see how that. Transitions and happens. I agree. And if we compare those three formats, written audio, visual, and the, their ability to convey a transformation of a brand, I’ll use the example. There’s a guy that I follow on LinkedIn and every week I see his posts pop up.

And I feel like every three or four weeks, he’s got a different headline and he’s got a different message. I think it’s my stuff that he just pivot again, every four weeks. And it’s in that written form, so that’s all I’m seeing, and I’m getting very confused every time I see this different message pop up.

That’s a very small example, but if there was a video that conveyed a transformation, as a watcher of that, as a viewer of that, I’d probably be a bit more understanding of why the transformation has occurred, and why the pivot has occurred. And maybe he’s not pivoting every four weeks, and maybe there’s a reason behind changing that message every couple of weeks.

But if there is a major transformation, having that video there to convey that message of what’s the reason behind this, why is this happening, how does this change my relationship with you as a customer or a potential customer, how does that change that relationship, it’d be a lot more easier to understand and a lot more easy to communicate.

As opposed to doing it in that written form where there’s lots of room for interpretation and lots of room for misunderstanding. Yeah. And it’s interesting that you say that as well, because I think there’d be plenty of people who are out there listening at the moment who have either been involved or are involved or about to be involved in a transformation of a brand.

And that happens on many levels. So often it’s a change in ownership of a business. Or there’s an opportunity to move as I, I’ve worked with a brand a couple of years ago now, and they’ve just undergone the final part of the transition. So we’d mapped it out where initially that they had started with, okay.

That had a brand that was a sub brand for them. That was really a product more than a brand that mother rather than a master brand they’ve. They wanted to transition that to that being the master brand. But what they did was the tagline for that became the old brand name. So it was still that people could see the relationship between the two.

And there was a degree of. Being comfortable in being able to transition completely to removing that link to the old brand almost completely in the footer of their letterhead. It still has a reference to it because it’s a the registered entity. But other than that. They’ve transitioned completely out of it now.

And it does. And sometimes that does take time. And sometimes people walk in and can just change overnight because that’s necessary. Completely changing. Restaurants are a classic case for that because, one restaurant shuts down, a new one opens. They don’t want anything to do with the old ones.

New name, new logo, new menu. It’s a new restaurant, but sometimes there’s a change in management and it undergoes a slow change in doing that. And that happens in all types of businesses as well. And I think that visual those little things and explainers as you talk about are really important for people to understand.

What is happening because initially in the particular case I talked about was to reassure people that, Hey, we’re still the same people we’re just think that this better represents who we are and what we’re about. Get used to it for a little while. And then there’s a point where, Hey, you’ve become really used to it.

We’re just going full on now this, and we think that our new tagline is this. And by the time you’ve introduced the new tagline, you don’t even have to remember the original brand anymore because people have got so used to the master brand. Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the recent examples of a transformation or a brand that we can look at, and this is again, a very big brand, but let’s bring it down to the more small business level Jaguar, what a mishap of a brand transformation that they’ve had over the past couple of weeks, they’ve gone from this somewhat premium brand car brand, and they’ve introduced this completely off putting forefront of a brands that people were just like, Hey, this is a car brand anymore.

Like what’s going on here. And I think the lesson for small businesses that Jaguar have gone away from what built their brand and as important as it is to occasionally have to transform and change yourself and pivot, I think you still need to bring the core of the brand previously and keep bringing that.

As you move forward, even if it’s only a small little piece of that, bring that in there. And I don’t think Jaguar have done that with their new transformation. They’ve gone completely to the opposite side of the spectrum in terms of potential branding opportunities. And they’ve gone from this brand that people respect and recognize and think, this is quite quality.

And they’ve gone from premium and they’ve gone right down the bottom of people’s minds to thinking, are you premium anymore? Or are you entry level? Cause that’s what the branding looks like now. So the message there is, sorry, yeah, the message there is, where’s the 5 percent from previous, where, what have you taken from previous and brought it into the current day?

I can’t see it. And maybe you’ve got another opinion on that, Anthony, but where’s the continuity of the brand? Yeah, I think that it’s a case of sometimes people get too close to brands and you can see that what’s happened in a lot of cases. And there are some classic cases over the years where brands have transformed and it might just be a logo rather than the full brand story.

And someone internally has thought that it was a good idea and it’s suddenly it’s. gone wrong or they’ve not enabled enough of their audience to give an interpretation of it to understand whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing. And they release it and suddenly they have to backtrack a couple of weeks later because they realize they’ve made a big mistake.

And I think it’s one of the lessons that I would give to people in business. And I’m sure you’d echo this is that the P once you decide on some changes to your brand story, Don’t go and ask your family and friends whether it’s a good idea or not. And yes, ask your team about it, but you really need to get some research from your core audience.

Let them decide for you. If your audience is a particular group of people, grab some of those people that you trust, have conversations with them. Yes, you can. If you can afford it, do proper market research. But if you can’t afford to do that, you can have some very structured closed door conversations with a few people you trust, let them, don’t give them all of your biases presented to them and say, Hey, whether it’s a, whether it’s a video, whether it’s or whether it’s a logo say, Hey, we’re thinking of making some changes.

I’m not going to say anything, give us your reaction because the minute you say anything, you bias them and you don’t want to say, Oh, this is our choice or anything else. Just let them go because so many mistakes can be avoided by doing that. And there’ve been some classics over the years where people have got their logos completely wrong, where there are amusing cases where they’ve got them so wrong that people have seen things in the logo that for some unknown reason people internally didn’t see.

And they definitely can’t go forward with those brands because there’s a, serious mistake in what people are visually seeing. But there are also ones where people just look at it and they go, why? I don’t like it. Why would you change what’s been iconic? And so you do see a lot of brands that.

If they want to make some changes or become a little bit more modern, the refinements are minimal. If you go back and you look at Woolies is a good example you know how that brand has changed over the years is subtle. It’s, if you were to go back and look at Woolies, 40 years ago to today, yes, there’s a significant difference, but if you track it over the last sort of 10 years, year by year, there are.

Subtle little changes that they’ve brought in, which is just modernize the brand without it being dramatically different from where it began. Just a nice modern approach to it. But then there are ones that trans transition and you just go, Oh my goodness, what have you done? And so it’s an interesting exercise and as marketers, we get too close to brands as well.

So sometimes we also have to take a step back, 100 percent taking that step back and be so positive just having a different perspective on things And I love that example that you just provided there. Don’t show your family and your friends your thoughts on changes It’s no different to when you’re starting off a business.

Why go and ask your friends and your family Hey, what do you think of this new venture that i’m going on? Of course, they’re gonna say it’s good because they’re there to support they don’t want to let you down, right? Go and find 10 50 100 if you can thousands of people and test out That’s that theory get them to do a pre sign up get them to give them your their debit card as a a prepayment to say, yes I’m actually interested in this and I would purchase this because that’s going to be your true market research to say, okay, this is a viable option going forward or it’s not, and bringing it back to the brand transformation, the same thing, find a small little minute audience, test it out there.

Is it going to be viable? Yes. Let’s move forward. If it’s not, let’s take a step back, rethink, see if we can bring some other perspectives in and then make the change going forward. I think color is one of the biggest things that sees people unravel. Often I’ve seen it and been part of it where people internally, and it could be the CEO, it could be the business owner, it could just be senior management have said, Oh, but I really like this color and.

I’m like, yeah, but you are not the target audience. So what you like, even if you are the business owner may not be relevant at all, because if your audience is X and your Y, your opinion matters very little in that sense. And that’s a difficult thing to do as a business owner sometimes, because you have to, throw out your own opinions.

because you’re not the target audience. And I think, and that same can be said for family and friends more often than not, they’re not the target audience for your business. So if they’re not the target audience for your business, then unfortunately their opinion counts for nothing. And that is a difficult thing to get across with people because how many times have we all heard it in marketing going?

Yeah, but my wife says, Oh, but my, and it’s. Yes, but in a polite as possible way, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one bit and colors are really interesting area. When I was first getting my business organized and probably still to today, I got so engrossed in color theory and the psychology behind colors.

And even when we’re doing. Video production stay for different brands. Color is still such a big part of that. You can see in the background here I’ve got my little blue light hanging there. You’ve got your purples behind you there And you’ve got the blue coming through the window up to your left side there Every color’s got a different meaning to it and That needs to be considered when undergoing a brand transformation, or producing a video, putting a text copy out, or a photograph, whatever it is.

It’s all got a subtle meaning behind it, and it’s all going to be interpreted by your customers in a specific way. And look, ultimately there’s going to be, if you’ve got a thousand people in your audience, there’s going to be a thousand different opinions on what that color means to them. But you can group them under certain specific areas and say, okay, this is going to be in the 90 percent dominant thought and message behind it.

That’s what we need to lean into and do we like that? Do we want that to be attributed to our brands? Maybe not. So let’s go for different color. Blues have got a big trust factor behind it. Green’s got a really renewing and, and growing meaning behind it. You think about, trees and bushes.

They’re all green and plants, right? So it’s got this growth element behind it. Do we want to lean into that? And again, this goes back to, who’s your customer, what do they think, what are they going to be interpreting your business of, and your brand of. Based on the colors here and it comes out in all the media that you put forward and you can own a color as well.

As we’ve seen with some brands where and no matter how outrageous that color can be sometimes on them, if you own it and you get associated with it, it triggers your memory to to going back to that. And certainly I see certain colors and it immediately triggers a brand. I wanted to bring this back to smaller businesses and perhaps a little bit more about what you’re.

How your business operates because you’re doing a lot of videos from what I’ve seen that are much more for Local brands and and doing ads and things for them. So tell me a little bit, firstly, how important do you think it is for smaller brands to still have a video presence and for that video presence to actually be Managed in a particular way that it’s not just someone editing something using their phone and doing something decent because there is a, there is an inclination for people to do that because they’ve got this tool in their pocket that they think that there’s suddenly they’re a videographer.

So how do you combat that spending money on video production and how affordable is it for smaller businesses to do? I think if we look at the small business side of things, there’s very much a. Demand out there and we see it across social media and linkedin etc. Etc. You have to be doing a video and Even though I’m from the video background.

I don’t think that is the case I don’t think you have to do it if you’re a small business and you’ve only got one two Maybe you know three people involved in the business. You probably don’t have the time to actually go out and produce videos yourself and that’s okay. And maybe you don’t have that skill and that ability to do that either.

So look at where you’re best placed to be doing your marketing. Do you have a really good copy ability? If that’s the case then focus on your blog posts and writing articles and what forth. If you’ve got more of a And audio background and podcast is probably the best way to go about it. And if you’ve got the time and you’ve got the ability to do video, then go for video.

So I don’t think it’s a case of you have to do it as a small business. If you’ve got the time and you’ve got the resources to do it, then by all means do it. Going back to what you first asked the question there. How they go about doing that. I think your phone is definitely more than capable. And for small business where marketing resources are incredibly limited, there’s probably not much of a reason to go to someone like myself, who’s a professional and pay for those services when you can achieve 80 percent of the results.

On your own and it’s that last 20 percent where you do need to get a professional in to get that final little result that you’re after. So what that 80 percent would look like is if you’re producing videos for Instagram as an example, then you’re going to want to know the platform inside out. You’re going to want to know what are the best practices for posting reels.

You need to know what time your audience is going to be on there, or around about what time they’re going to be on there. You need to understand the message that your brain is putting forward, what you value, what you believe in, how you can connect with people. You’ve got to understand that you’ve got to get a hook in the first three seconds of the video to get people engaged.

That hook can be a visual hook, it can be a text hook, it can be the type of captions that you use, a whole different range of things. And if you can understand. All of those metrics and variables first off, then you can achieve 80 percent of the results and you can get the following, you can get the views, you can get the engagement.

And look, I’ll be completely honest, the views and the engagement, the follows, they’re really not that important at the end of the day. They’re vanity metrics. The real results are they coming through your website? They’re contacting you, they’re purchasing from you. That’s what we’re really wanting to track, but you can still achieve 80 percent of those results by doing everything yourself using the best practices.

And I think that’s probably really important to be clear about is you don’t have to go and pay for a professional to come in and do all of it. Once you achieve those 80 percent of those results yourself, and you can’t go any further because you actually do need to go to that next level now, then go to that next level.

Because by the time you get there, you’ve probably got the resources available to invest. Without it being too much of a hit on your profit margins. I think the big lesson for business owners is really that a lot of websites. are devoid of personality. And there’s only so much you can do in written text and often video is a great way to introduce that personality because people do business with people and That is, yes, despite all of the advance of AI coming in and they’re doing all sorts of things these days, including, selling to you and all the rest of it.

But when it comes down to it, in most of the businesses that are probably listening into this show is that you’re very much service driven. And if you’re a service driven business, you’re a people driven business, and therefore people want to see who the people are behind it, because how do you differentiate yourself from one business to the next is really about the people, the experiences and the stories, which gets back down to the brand story and being able to convey that.

And what I would ask is that. If you’ve got some tips for people who are wanting to convey a brand story, because it’s not, it is an art form to be able to do that, and yes, we talked about the multi million dollar budgets of the car companies and the Qantas’s and banks and all the rest of it.

And. They spend a lot of time and money and trying to get a brand story done in a 30 second ad or a series of 30 second ads. If you’re a smaller business, you don’t have that luxury and you may not have the expertise at hand. So are there some tips and tricks that people can have for getting a brand story across in a Small amount of time.

Definitely. So we could go really in depth to this. So I’ll keep it at the service level for now, if you look at what the big brands are doing in terms of their video marketing, they’ve got the longer form pieces, which are maybe 60 to 90 seconds, if not longer. And then they’ve got the really shorter form pieces, which are going on their social media.

And it’s like a top down approach. They have the big videos as I do first, and then the shorter form content comes from that. But amongst that. That funnel down, if you want to call it that, the same four variables are coming up time and time again, and these four variables can be answered by any size of business and made relative to that size of business and what they sell.

So the first question that is always worth asking is, what is it? That you actually sell as a business. What is it you actually sell? I love using a restaurant as an example because it’s a really easy business to understand. A restaurant doesn’t sell food. That’s the surface level. We want to go below the surface.

We want to really dig deep and what is it that you actually sell as a business. The restaurant, what they really sell is a location. A place for people to connect with each other, for families to come and connect, for friends for dates, etc. It’s a place for people to come and connect. And look, this is generalised, every restaurant you can give the same answer for.

But this is a really good starting point, and just Get people thinking about things. So what do you really sell as a business? What’s your true product or service? That’s the first question from there. It’s what is the impact of your business? And this is where it goes a little bit more individualized and unique because you’re going to have a different impact than what.

Your competitor will have a different business in another state, whatever the situation is. So what is the true impact of your business? And that’s going to stem from what is your product or service going generalized again, with the restaurant idea, what’s the potential impact while the impact is. A grandparent, they come from overseas to visit their grandchildren for the first time, they’ve never seen them before, because they’ve been overseas for six years, and they can connect in that restaurant, and they can make them for the first time, and they can have that experience.

That’s an example of an impact there, a very generalized example again, but you can see where that The final is coming. The third question is then what are the associated emotions of that? And it’s the emotions that you’re wanting to aim to convey through your videos. Whether it be a longer form brand story film or in those shorter content pieces.

What are the emotions? Going back to that impact, there’s going to be a lot of joy. There’s going to be a lot of elation. There’s going to be a lot of happiness. That’s the after. That’s after the impact has been experienced. Then there’s also the emotions of beforehand. And the before is probably more important because this is where you’re going to be able to hook people in, really get them engaged in your business.

The before is, there’s going to be a fair bit of guilt in there, it’s, they’re going to feel guilty that they’ve been away from their family for so long, they haven’t been able to welcome their grandkids into the world for six years. That’s pretty guilty, you’re going to be feeling pretty bad about yourself.

There’s probably a little bit of anger, there’s probably a little bit of sadness, sorrow. These are the emotions that you can use. In your shorter form pieces to create a story that hooks people in and gets them engaged in what they’re watching and then finally the fourth question and this is for me probably the most important aspect of all four is what are the core values and beliefs that your business holds because as we touch on at the start of the episode.

It’s this, it’s these connections and these, sorry, it’s these values and these beliefs that connect you to your customers and vice versa. And if you can identify those and find someone that holds those beliefs to a similar degree to you, then they’re going to be the perfect customer for your brand. So that’s probably the four questions I would ask for any size of business to start on this journey of video marketing.

What Is it a true product or service? What are the impacts of it? What are the associated emotions both before and after experiencing that impact? And then finally, what are your core values and your beliefs as a business? Fantastic. There’s so much value in, in what you’ve talked about just there. I want to point out to people that we’re going to leave some contact information, of course, as we always do in the show notes and also particularly some some show reels for Didi and what he’s done, particularly it’s a, there’s been some community type businesses that you’ve worked with as well as small businesses.

So there’s a lot of examples there of what you can do. And I think whether you end up being able to work with. With Didier or you just get some ideas from that. I think it’s fantastic. And I know there’s a a fact sheet that people can also get access to through that. If you just want to explain what that is we’ll include the link in the show notes.

Definitely. So it’s like a little cheat sheet, if you will, to, to video marketing, the 10 best practices that you can implement straight away. And that can be downloaded from our website fixonmedia. com. au. It just gives you a little rundown of the best practices. So it’s got ideas like use a call to action.

Don’t use your product and service as the main, variable in your marketing. Try and go a little bit deeper. It’s very basic tips, but they’re incredibly important because most businesses don’t do it. They don’t do the simple things. They try and go from level one to level 10 straight away. But as you touched on earlier with Woolworths, Instead of doing that massive transformation, they’ve done bit by bit by bit over the years.

So that’s probably the lesson for a lot of businesses is You can’t get to level 10 straight away when you’re at level 1 You’ve got to go level 1 to 2 to 3 So yeah, have a read through of that And if you want to learn anything further from there, then yeah Please do reach out be more than happy to share any information that you’d like to hear Fantastic.

I’ve got a final question I’m going to ask you in a minute, but just a reminder to everyone as well as all of those links in the show notes the way that Didi and I connected originally was through LinkedIn and and that’s a great place if you want to hang out with either of us and and see some of the things that we’re posting all the time you’ll get lots of great tips and things on there.

Also you’ve got your own podcast as well. So a quick shout out to that, to, to that what’s the name of the podcast? So people can have a listen in as well. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. Marketing for the modern brand. So we interview a number of guests across marketing and branding across Australia.

And each week we’re diving into their specific individual area of expertise within marketing and branding and really diving into the juices of their expertise. Fantastic. I love it. Obviously I’m a bit biased as far as marketing is concerned, but it’s great to have you part of Biz Bites, which really continues to try and bring thought leaders to to the fore and and give people those little one percenters that can make a difference to their business.

So on that note, the final question that I have for you is just. What is the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they would have in advance? The aha moments?

I think a lot of it is to do with

The messaging side of things and that you don’t have to be flashy in people’s face all the time. You can get the same results by being a little bit more laid back, a little bit more subconscious and just being subtle through your communication to them. I think that’s probably the big aha moment that the days of being flashy and in people’s faces have gone.

People are sick of it. I’m sick of it. You’re sick of it. You’re and your listeners are sick of it. We can get the same result as a business by. Being subtle, being respectful and just engaging with people, connecting with people. And that’s a buzzword going around at the moment, connection and authenticity.

But there’s a reason for it. It’s because people are craving it. And the more we can lean into that as a business, the more success that there’s going to be. Fantastic. Really appreciate that. There’s some great insights. I hope everyone listening in has enjoyed that taking a lot of notes. down because there’s certainly some things that you can do with your brand at a local level that can make a real difference to it by just implementing some of these ideas.

So thank you so much for being so generous with your time and really appreciate you coming on the program on BizBytes. Anthony, thank you so much. It’s been phenomenal. And yeah, really looking forward to hearing more about what you’re coming up with over the coming year. So thank you. Appreciate it.

And thanks everyone for listening in. Of course, stay tuned for the next episode of this. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

Contact us today for more information. Details in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time on BizBytes.

Adapting business leadership for the AI era. In this episode of Biz Bites, I welcome Bardeep, an accomplished business and leadership coach to share his inspirational journey and insights on redefining business culture and leadership. He’s had incredible journey across multiple contents, including a personal life changing battle.

And we discussed the importance of self leadership, purposeful living and adaptability in the workplace, especially in an era, increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence. Biz Bites. Don’t miss the bonus content. And the details in the links in the show notes where we explore the future implications of AI on human purpose and identity.

You really don’t want to miss that one. Stay listening now of course for an enlightening conversation filled with personal anecdotes, expert advice, lots of ideas for you, forward thinking they are, and leadership and business. Concepts that are really going to make a difference to your business. So all that on Biz Bites, the destination for professional services, business leaders to learn about those 1% ers that will transform your business.

Please don’t forget to subscribe and you, so you never miss an episode of Biz Bites. Brought to you by podcast done for you.com au, where you become the voice of brilliance. Now for Biz Bites, let’s get started on changing the world one person at a time.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and we have a fascinating guest who has a great journey to tell us about that he’s been on, but also more importantly, to give you some fantastic insights into. Things that will change the way you think about your business and mindset in particularly.

I’m looking forward to this discussion. Let me welcome Bardeep to the program. Welcome. Thanks, Anthony. It’s great to be here. Wonderful having this little chat beforehand and now getting into it. Looking forward to this discussion. We’ve had a bit of fun off air before we’ve even got started.

So we’ll have to recapture that as we get into the program. We had to cut it short, didn’t we? We had to cut it short. We did. We did. We’ll still be talking otherwise and not recording. So let’s bring the listeners into the into some of the discussion. But firstly, why don’t you give a little bit of an introduction as to who you are and what you’re about?

Absolutely. Great. Great. So I’m, I’m really terrible at speaking about myself. I’m a business and leadership coach, a purpose coach, and I help my clients define their purpose, get really great in their businesses, get really great at leadership. And it’s been a journey for me to get here. My name is Bardeep, which we were just laughing about because it’s two English words, bar and deep.

And I am a recovered alcoholic. So it was prophetic when I was named that I think my parents knew what was going to happen in my future. So I’ve been sober for more than 10 years now. This is where you applaud. We’re applauding. We’re putting in the, we’re putting in the fake applause. So I was born in in Africa, in Kenya, East Africa.

I went to university in England. After that, I moved to Australia. I had a stint about seven years doing IT in Australia. Then I moved back to Kenya and founded a furniture company there, furniture design and manufacture. And then seven, not about seven and a half years ago, I moved back to Australia because I really wanted to.

And this time I moved with my family. And when I got back here, I went, I really want to now follow my own purpose. So when I was studying engineering in university in England I found myself in the library reading about metaphysics. rather than mechatronics. I’ve always been really interested in the human mind and what our purpose is and why we are here.

What it’s all about. And I was obsessive about that, but growing up in an Indian Kenyan family, you’re either going to be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer pick one. If you fail, you can become an accountant. So I went. So no disrespect to any accountants who are listening. But I went and became an engineer and a very poor accountant because I did an accountancy major, which I just scraped through, accountancy minor.

But yeah, so my interest was always in humans. So when I got back to Australia seven and a half years ago, I went, okay, now I’m going to give myself to what my purpose is to help my fellow human beings uncover their purpose. and live better lives in however they want to express that. Is that a good enough summary for you, mate?

That is a great summary and I want to delve into the into the idea of purpose and leadership, but I’m fascinated firstly to ask you about that incredible journey that you skipped through rather quickly and and where life started and You’re part of family that had already moved countries before.

Is that right? So that’s correct. And so that whole that’s not something that many people experienced in terms of moving country to country and doing it with intention as well. But I’m interested in how that sort of initial upbringing and that idea of moving countries and even trialing it and living in different places.

What does, how easy is that to work out and what to do and how do you. Pin the point on the map to where you’re going like that difficult things to try and get your head around. I admire people who do it. I think you admire my granddad then. So my granddad lived in a little village in the north of India and Punjab and under British rule when they got independence, just about when they were getting independence in India.

There was a big, a lot of demand in Africa, where the British still had protractorates like Kenya. They still had colonies, and they wanted skilled, a skilled workforce to come in. And my granddad was an engineer. Family trade, right? And he went over to test it out to try the waters, to test out what it was like.

So in those days you had to take a three day journey by train to get from Punjab to Bombay or Mumbai. And then I think it was a couple of weeks on a, in a boat to get over to Mombasa in Kenya and then further really tortuous journey to get to Nairobi. So he did that and he came to Kenya and he saw, there was a bunch of them a community had formed there.

And they started to they started to get into enterprise and business. And then he went back and brought his entire family with him. But here’s the interesting story. There was a point at which my grandfather was a bit of a hothead. So when he went back to India to bring his family over, he had an argument with his wife who was resisting and didn’t want to go.

And he said in that case, I’m going back on my own. And he took off and he went back to Mumbai, three days on the train, went back to Mumbai. Had a change of mind and then came back to Punjab. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.

And so here’s another little part of that story. One of his brothers, so my granddad from Kenya, sent mail called one of his brothers and said, come over. It’s really great here. We can do great. Great. We’ll do wonderfully here. And so his brother traveled from Punjab to Mumbai, same thing, three days on the train, got to Mumbai, got on the wrong ship, ended up in Malaysia.

So I’ve got cousins that I recently met who are in Malaysia Isn’t that it’s like the store. It’s like the stories of people who buy a ticket from somewhere overseas to sydney Yeah, and don’t check that. It’s sydney australia and end up end up in the other Sydney in the other part of the world.

Yeah. There’s a London in Ontario as well, isn’t there? There is. Yes, you can, yes it’s it’s not as easy as when, these days, even you, when you punch your destination into Waze and it tells you here, and suddenly you realize, hey, I’m going in the wrong direction. Why is this taking three hours when it should only be taking 20 minutes to get there?

Yeah totally. Yeah. So anyway, so he’s, he’s the man who brought us into Kenya and then living and growing up in Kenya. It’s very interesting. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the biz by its podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

We’ll come talk to us at podcasts done for you. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you. So all you have to do is show up for a conversation, but don’t worry about that. We’ll We will do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course, helping you share it.

So come talk to us, podcast done for you. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to biz bites. Living and growing up in Kenya. It’s very interesting being Indian. Living and growing up in Kenya. I was a minority. We were minorities, right? So we grew up as a minority there now going back to visit India.

I’d never lived in India going back to visit I feel like a foreigner in India. So I don’t feel like I belong there either. It’s very foreign to me I speak the same language, but in a different way. I don’t have quite the vocabulary I’m seen as a foreigner when I’m in India It’s easy to spot me to go that guy’s not from here.

And so I feel foreign there So growing up a minority in Kenya, I feel like a minority in India. I started in England where I felt I was a minority. I live in Australia now. So I’ve always had that thing of kind of being, I’ve got to craft my own identity because my roots, where they’re from, I’m not from there.

It’s like my roots have been planted, but they’ve never really grown. In that sense. Yes. Yes. They have an, they clearly have an influence on who you are and what you’re about. A hundred percent. But but you’re right. It’s, um, and particularly in Australia where minorities are the majority in, in many respects.

So it’s there are so many people that are first and second generation in Australia. They have similar experiences. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It’s totally about, redefining who you are culturally. That’s one of the, some of the work I do with my clients is in their company culture, in their business culture.

And I totally love that because I have a, because I’ve had to move around and adapt to different cultures. I have this knack of being able to smell culture, to be able to walk into somewhere and go, what is this about? What does this place feel like? What’s working? What’s not working?

And being able to get, get a sense of that very quickly. So that luckily has set me up for that kind of work, that kind of success has given me a little bit if you like of a superpower there, which I really love, I love using that. Yeah. Culture in a business is becoming more and more important, isn’t it?

Then, and particularly, I think with the it, That whole idea of how a business looks physically now is so different because people aren’t usually all together in one place all the time. Totally. There are a percentage of people that are working from home. There’s people that are working in different destinations altogether.

Overseas, et cetera. I remember doing some work. Maybe 10 years ago, a bit more with a business who didn’t have any employee in the same city and they came together like once a year to to be, and that was so unusual for a small business now that’s becoming more and more the norm that people are everywhere because having a physical destination that everyone has to be in isn’t always needed.

Yeah totally. And it’s a massive challenge, right? Because culture used to be the stuff that formed around the water cooler or the coffee machine. And now we don’t have that experience anymore. It was just work together. And I think what the interesting thing here is for, for employers, for for corporates and stuff, for instance, Amazon have recently mandated that everyone goes back to the office, you got to be in the office five days a week.

I believe com bank have really recently done that here as well. I heard about that. I haven’t verified it yet, but I heard about that and to me, I think that’s a massive going to be a massive problem for them because, the younger people are going to go I don’t want to work like this and the top performance who have options are going to go I don’t want to work like this.

So henceforth, there’s going to be this pool of people who are left, who just going to accept it because they don’t have another option. It’s going to be really interesting. Now, in terms of setting up culture for a remote workforce, what’s really interesting is what are the basic formation blocks of culture?

And I totally love looking at that because in my opinion, culture is about the joint beliefs you hold. What is it you believe to be true as a group? What is the purpose of you coming together and what are the cultural stories and myths you pass around each other in order to form that culture?

So in a sense, it’s very much about the campfire stories that form the culture and as employers understanding that you can actually seed those campfire stories. If you know the right beliefs, That you need your workplace, your company to be about. Unfortunately, culture is not really understood that well.

People think it’s very airy fairy. I’ve recently actually written an article in matters magazine here on the Sunshine Coast about family culture in business, how to develop that. And it’s really about seeding that taking those joint beliefs and turning them into culture. Now, a lot of people think culture is about values and I disagree with that.

I think values form a part of it. But beliefs are much more important because the beliefs are really the formation of what we believe to be true or what we believe we’re here for and why we’re doing what we’re doing. So beliefs and purpose are, in my opinion, the founding the foundation of culture.

Yeah, I can absolutely see that. And I think people. Don’t pay enough attention to culture and and where that where that has an impact on things. When you do come from different places, it’s hard to find that middle ground sometimes and to develop what is the work culture. And I think the idea of what culture was in workplaces not that long ago, but certainly 10 years or more ago.

Was very different to what it is now, because particularly around the whole idea of bringing, of leaving your personal stuff at the door, which is what was the big sort of go to that businesses would say to you, I don’t care what happens, in your personal life, you leave that at the door. You come in here and you focus on work and that’s, you can’t do that.

And you can’t do that anymore. And you shouldn’t even try. Absolutely. You shouldn’t. And that’s, and I think that’s one of the challenges if the that’s come about through the work from home thing is that whole idea of I can go and pick the kids up from school because me going and taking a 20 minute break at, three o’clock in the afternoon is not a big problem.

When I’m working from home, when you’re in the office, it’s not it’s actually leaving the office at three o’clock in the afternoon or probably two 30 in the afternoon. And the chances that you’re going to come back at a meaningful time, but it’s too hard to manage. And so do you throw out That family idea that people have become accustomed to over the last three, four years.

I don’t think that’s that easy to do. I think you’re absolutely spot on. Like in the 80s, early 90s as well, the whole focus was on management. There was management consultants there, and there was most of the conversation in boardrooms was around management, and that’s now shifted because our conversations nowadays in terms culturally in businesses are about leadership and self leadership and the difference between management and leadership is management was about tasks and leadership is about people.

So when we shift to a leadership focus, it’s like what Branson Richard Branson used to say. You look after your people and they look after your customers. And if you don’t do that, you’re not going to have customers and every business, this is one of the things I argue with some of my clients is that they see themselves as the center of their business and then their team, and then their customers out there.

And I tell them, we’ve got that completely wrong because the model of your business that you should be living by and preaching and dedicated to is that your customer is the center. Then your team wraps around that your team, your services, your products, and then you have somewhere on the periphery, but everything points inwards.

Everything that you do has to have a purpose to deliver a benefit to your clients, to your customer at the end of the day. And that’s the thing. If we don’t focus on our people and essentially when we’re telling them, you can’t have this anymore, you get back into the office and you stay here five days with the message we’re giving them is we don’t care about you.

We don’t care about you. You’re just a function. Get in there and do your effing job. What do people do when they’re told what to do? They rebel. Not a lot. So we’re going to see a lot of quiet quitting. We’re going to see a degradation of culture. We’re going to see all this fun stuff come about.

And it’s very interesting. And I was thinking about this the other day. I was actually talking to someone about this and going, Could this be, could this move, these moves happen because the businesses, the companies think they’re going to replace people with AI functions anyway. And henceforth, let’s start making this transition now.

Get a workforce who’s happy to be here, because we don’t need our top performers. We’re going to replace them, mostly, and we don’t need the people who are doing repetitive tasks. We’re going to replace them. I don’t know. It was just a thought that came to me. I thought because I don’t see how that strategy comes about.

Anyway, it’s interesting. Yes. Look, we’re going to delve a little bit more into the AI discussion. Oh, nice bonus content at the end, because what’s going to be the future with AI and is this whole idea of humans and purpose being replaced by AI. We’re going to have that in the bonus content.

So people will have to click on the link below in the show notes to be able to access that. So we’ll come back to that later on. But I do want to talk to you a bit more about leadership and this whole concept of it, because it is a term that gets thrown around a lot. And and we’ve tacked on this idea of thought leadership.

I’ve and then potentially there’s another level above thought leaders, which are the idea creators that are sitting above that as well. Where do, Defining those different levels, I think, is one thing. But before we even go into that, what, to put it bluntly, what gives you the right to be talking about leadership in that way?

How do you get into a situation where we talked a little bit about your journey, but we skip more around the countries and the basics and things. What’s got you into a position of leadership? What have you done to be able to speak about leadership? Sure. Okay, happy to answer that. I believe. All leadership starts with self leadership and self leadership is about taking 100 percent responsibility for the outcomes that you’re seeing in life.

So I find people tend to operate in two ways. One is that they take full responsibility or they sit in a position where they’re able to blame things and blaming circumstances or blaming a system or blaming the weather for poor performance. Or not getting what you want out of life is essentially moving responsibility away because we say responsibility lies with that circumstance, not with me.

But when we become at cause, which is what I say, self leadership is, we take a hundred percent responsibility for the outcomes, the impact we’re having and for our entire journey in life. So the reason I’m sitting here with you today and being, we’re able to have this conversation is because of millions of things that have happened in the past for both of us.

That have come together this network of things has happened and we’re here today And we are responsible for that entire network of things to come here to get to this point So like I was saying for instance, I spent Quite a few years of my life being a practicing alcoholic and that practicing alcoholic is Essentially a way to blame something else for my problems And saying, I’ve got these problems is because of that, here I am.

I’m going to numb myself with it. And the shift that had to happen. And that’s the reason why I’m here today, that I’m actually alive today. It was because I had a moment where I knew I had to make a choice either to change or to die. That’s where I was at. And I was with my kids, my young little kids at the time, who were like 7 and 10 at that time.

This is actually a little hard to talk about. But I was looking at them and looking at family pictures on the wall in a projector in my office in Kenya. And I just had another massive argument with my wife. This is another great thing. Practicing alcoholics like myself are very good at doing is causing arguments and circumstances and then going I’m going to go and drink now because you’ve stressed me out blame, not taking responsibility.

So there I’m with my kids drinking, looking at this and I looked over at them and I had a moment of realization and that was that I didn’t have very long before they were going to be orphans. As in they were going to be fatherless and that, um, the way I was heading, if I didn’t take responsibility for myself and the outcomes in my life, that I wouldn’t be able to give them the life that they actually deserved.

And that was the moment that changed. That was 10 years, one month ago, pretty much. Today was 28th September is my day. The day I count as my non belly button birthday. So everything, the move back to Australia and all of that happened as a result of that. So going back to what you say about leadership, like I said, I’ve always been interested in humans, always been interested in culture.

I’ve studied with the best of the best in, in, in training myself up after I moved back to Australia and somewhat before in coaching, in NLP and hypnosis and in leadership. to make sure that I’ve got the skills, the capabilities to deliver what I talk about with people. So in Kenya, I had, I built up a fairly large business where 65 people at one time and very well recognized furniture business that came, it was myself and one carpenter who started it.

And in, by the, at its peak, I was recognized as one of the best designers in Kenya. I’m sorry, in Africa. And I, I was being flown around to New York to go to galleries and this, that and the other and starting to exhibit internationally. And then the drinking brought me down from my high horse where I was so great and I ended up that hangout.

I was just a broken gutter drunk, covering up my insecurities with it. So the climb back from there is what my leadership journey is about. It’s not about, it is about what I did before, but not. quite to the extent of climbing out of that and rebuilding myself. Like I said, I trained with the Mind Academy here in Australia for NLP and hypnosis, which is one of the best NLP courses.

It’s the Mind Academy run by a very great friend of mine, Alistair Horscroft. He’s one of the world leading trainers in that. And NLP is what helps me reframe my mind and helps me very quickly reframe the minds of other people that I’m working with. That gave me almost like superpowers to be able to help people and to be able to change beliefs on a single and cultural collective basis.

So that was the starting point of my practice, my coaching practice. And I also did some life coaching with the Life Coaching Academy certification with them. Then I discovered a couple of giants in the leadership world. One is John Matone. John Mattones considered the world’s best executive coach, and he was Steve Jobs old coach.

And the reason I went to him is because we talked the same language in terms of purpose. The work he did with Steve Jobs was very much about purpose. Let me tell you a little, this is a great story that John told me. I just, I totally love this story. He says when he started working with Steve Jobs found him because of a book that John Matone had written.

And when he first started working with John Matone, they started doing the purpose work, yeah digging in to find out what purpose was. And he says there was this one time when he was sitting with Steve and Steve was looking out of the window, with a far away look in his eyes.

And he turned to him. Steve turned to him, Steve used to call him Matone apparently, and he said, Matone, you know what? This is the work I wish I had done at the start of my life rather than towards the end of it. Cause at that point he knew what he was facing. And when I heard that story, it gave me goosebumps as and that’s my leadership practice is about the very first thing you’ve got to work on is your purpose.

You don’t have your purpose. You don’t know which direction you’re heading in. You don’t know what you’re here for. You don’t know what you’re alive for. And I’ve taken what John Matone built and I’ve put my own kind of purpose methodology on top of that to deliver what I think is probably one of the best purpose and guidance tools not just for executives, for anyone right now to be able to discover what it is that they’re here for.

And it, it borrows on the Ikigai methodology, but expands on that. And it takes what the word John Matone did. So I discovered John, and I became certified in his intelligent leadership methodology. He’s a very good friend of mine. We’re looking at perhaps doing some stuff together in the future.

And he calls me, what was he? He’s giving me this presentation. Title it’s master certified, intelligent leadership coach, executive coach, something like that. It’s just a mouthful. Everything John Matone does is a mouthful. It’s brilliant. Just love the guy, and he’s Italian. So when he told me now you’ve, you’ve graduated.

Now you’re part of the family. And this Italian guy with a New York accent said that to me, I popped myself, so it’s I’m going to get whacked as soon as I’m in the family.

It’s a whole different connotation, doesn’t it? When you think of it that way. Yeah. I didn’t tell him that just in case it upset him. Anyway, then, the second leadership giant that I work with is John Maxwell who’s considered the world’s foremost leadership expert. So there’s John Matone, the number one executive coach and John Maxwell, who’s the, number one leadership authority who’s written, I don’t know, I don’t know how many books over 20 something books.

He’s got 50, 000 people in his organization that he trains. I’m a speaker, a coach, a trainer within John Maxwell system. off leadership as well. So those are the tools to help humans discover how to become really great at what they want to accomplish in life. And when we talk about purpose, Life purpose and our purpose at work has to be synergistic.

In the old days when you had, we used to have to go into the mines and we were just told go in there and just dig for 12 hours. That’s your shift and then come out. And we didn’t have a choice about it. Things have changed. Like we’ve been talking about. So getting our purpose aligned personally and with the work we want to do is really critically important.

So right now, having done all this work and being able to be a vessel for my clients with this work, I’m completely on purpose. To me, this is what I was born to do, and my entire journey has brought me to this point where I can sit here and quite proudly say that.

You’ve achieved an enormous amount with all of, the accreditations, the moving and everything. But there’s one specific thing that I think makes you stand out is that as well, is that ability for introspection, because that moment when you made the decision that I think to stop drinking that moment when you were thinking about where you were heading and what, and where your own purpose was, and perhaps you didn’t, equate it in terms of purpose at that point in time.

But that’s, takes an enormous amount to be able to do that and to then run with that and say, okay, I’ve pulled myself out of this, but now I can do more and I can give people more as a result of that. I think that puts you in a pretty unique position to talk about to talk about leadership. No, thanks.

So I’m kudos to you for achieving all of that. Oh, Thank you very much. I’ll just make one brief point there. That moment, that one moment of clarity, what we call, it’s the BFO, the blinding flash of the obvious, that happened. I do. It was like one moment of clarity in an entire fog.

Like lightning came down and struck me in this fog that I was living in. And to this day I can remember it so clearly, like it’s happening right in front of me. And that is what I think would be so serendipitous that I’d call it grace. It’s a moment of grace in my life. With whatever was meant to be, that’s what set me up on my path to say, Hey, Enough of this BS mate, get on with it.

What I, what I’ve been lucky enough to record lots of these episodes of Biz Bites. And I’ve had a handful of people that have had those kinds of moments in their life. And it really, it what, Amazes me is how many great things they’ve gone on to do as a result of it, that they’ve made it count.

And I think that’s what the difference is too, because at that point you have a choice to make. And part of that choice is also Helping others achieve their own greatness as a result of it, making it mean something to other people as well as yourself. So all that being said, let’s come back to this concept of leadership.

And, it’s, as I said before, it’s a term that gets thrown around a lot. Just because you’re in charge, does it make you a leader? Yes. Does it make you a great leader? No. Does it make you a thought leader? No. Does it make you, does it make you at the next level where you’re the one generating the ideas in the first place?

No. And I think trying to, how important is it to differentiate between those different levels and how do you actually. Drag people along find where they should where they should sit, find where they should sit. Perhaps drag is the wrong thing, but allowing themselves to make a decision and fight, find their own purpose in terms of where they sit in leadership and what that ultimately looks like.

Absolutely. Okay. So I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple of quotes here. The first one is John Maxwell. John Maxwell says leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And the second one, I don’t know who said this, I can’t remember the name, but it’s That you don’t need a position to be a leader So leadership is like when I started the you know talking about leadership.

I talk about self leadership. It doesn’t matter where you’re at You are there. That’s where you’re starting from and leadership is about how do you Become the greatest version of you that you can be. How do you maximize your potential whatever your position is? Doesn’t matter. So when, whether I’m working with a CEO or I’m working with the janitor, it doesn’t matter.

It does not matter because it’s about that human and all humans have their challenges, have their blockages and all those challenges and blockages are self generated. Normally, it’s about the perception of what something is. Not really what the thing is. I was having a conversation just before I was actually where I was coaching someone who had who he the this guy had convinced himself That in order to be able to give and be of service that he needed to sacrifice himself He’s a lovely man.

He’s you know had a heart transplant a while ago he’s so genuine and caring one of the most generous souls I’ve ever met and yet You He had framed his life in such a way that he was going to sacrifice himself in order to be able to give. So the obvious question was when you sacrifice yourself, you end, right?

And then you got nothing to give. And we talked about Martin Luther King, life cut short, wasn’t able to give. Gandhi achieved a lot life cut short, though he was still, killed had a lot to give Mandela lived out a full life. But these are the, leadership icons that I love to look at.

So when you’re on purpose and you’re giving, it’s not really about that. It’s not about sacrifice is, the reframe. So he got a lot out of that conversation. Um, coming back to what you’re saying, how do you drag someone along? So I, I like to think of it as a four part process.

When I work with anyone and if I’m working within the context of leadership. So the first thing is inspiration. They have to have something that comes from within that inspires them. Yeah. So inspiration is the first thing that, and then that inspiration leads to insight. Insight is what creates a vision that this is what I want to be in the future.

If we’re not inspired, we can’t have the right kind of insight because we’re still looking from the same state. As not being inspired, so creating inspiration leads to this insight, which creates this vision from that insight, then we start to create proper leadership influence the ability to go to get there to that vision together with others to have things happen towards this joint vision.

That’s very inspiring and the last part of it is, of course, impact because as we become leaders and we do more and we’re able to have more impact in the world. very much. So at the end of the day, the inspiration leads to insight, leads to influence, leads to impact, and impact is what all leaders want to create in the world.

They want to make some sort of positive difference. So that’s the journey I take people on, and it doesn’t matter who they are with. See, in leadership development, we have a whole bunch of tools that we use. So we do a lot of assessments. That’s, self assessments. I use a lot of tools like I use John Matone’s proprietary tools.

called the Matone Leadership Enneagram Inventory. I told you that everything was a mouthful with Matone stuff. That’s called the MLEI. I use the DISC methodology. We use some Myers Briggs, use strengths profiles, but we get someone’s assessment of who they are on the inside. That’s them answering questions about themselves.

And then we do a whole bunch of assessments from the outside, where we look at the person from the point of view of others, and we get them to fill in 360 feedback, et cetera, about them. About what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what, where their blind spots are. So we build this massive, beautiful picture of who this person is.

Because one of the things John Matone says is, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. So first, we must get the diagnosis right. Then we take them on the journey where we start to, we have an agreed coaching plan. These are the changes we need to make. Here’s all the assessments. This is what they’ve led to.

These are the insights we gain. This is the changes that need to happen. So we put that together in a very a really beautiful thing called a leadership development plan. Then we go on a coaching journey where we are measuring against that. We take them on this journey three, three months, six months a year, whatever it is.

And we remeasure at the end, we assess again, and we go, okay, have we hit our goals? What’s left? What’s not left? And we go back to the start. We do look at the assessments again. What’s changed? What hasn’t changed? And do we need to go through the process again? So it’s actually, there’s the internal inspiration, insight influence and impact.

And then there’s the external journey that’s going on at the same time. And we can do the same with individuals, teams, cultures, got all the tools. To do all of that to actually make scientific level kind of measured impacts on humans and on teams and on cultures. I want to ask a couple more questions before we have to finish up the main episode.

But just a reminder to everyone, we’re going to have a further discussion about AI and and purpose and humans and where that’s going into the future. And that’s going to be fascinating. So that’s in the bonus content with the link in the show notes below. But let me just wrap up the main part of the conversation with asking you about.

what people can do to decide to have that introspective nature. To examine where they are in terms of leadership and purpose. What is it that they what are some tips and things for people that are listening in to say, how do they take that initial step to start going down that path?

Totally got you. That’s, and that’s a great, I think that’s a great question. So there’s a few things. And I think the first thing is people need to work out why they’re here, why they’re alive. What are you here for? And. I think people have succumbed and given their agency away to some extent by saying that their purpose is actually to fulfill a corporate or commercial purpose in the world.

As we come, we’re trained, educated to go and fulfill a job role. And then we end up going doing that. And then we get to the end where, we’ve got this promise that retirement’s gonna be great. And by the time we get there, we’re old and decrepit and the best days are behind us. We enjoy ourselves, sacrifice our health to get here, our families, our relationships to get there.

And there’s no promise at the end of it. So I really encourage people to ask very deep questions and I love as a coach to hold the space where they can’t escape from that question. They have to go really deep. I love doing identity level questions like, who are you? What are you really about?

And people will come up with this is my name. No, that’s a label. That’s a label. That’s all you are. Who are you? And getting them to really dig inside until they get really uncomfortable. And it’s the discomfort that leads to a breakthrough. So the first thing I’d recommend is, get some real, ask yourself the deep questions and see if you can work out what your purpose is, what your identity is.

And what your beliefs are about what life is about, why you’re here. You can, if you can start to tackle those three things, that that’s a great big start. I love going away on meditation retreats. I went to Vipassana, that’s a couple of years ago. Vipassana is 10 days. You’re meditating 10 hours a day and you don’t talk to anyone.

Oh my God. For the first three days, my mind went insane. It’s like I had, I had someone in a padded cell in a straitjacket in my head, just running around. Because my head, my, my thoughts were so intense. So I love meditation for that reason. Because the realization is my thoughts are all going on all the time.

I’m not really thinking them. And my thoughts are all based on this external stuff. They’re going into the past, the present, I’m sorry, the past or the future. And they’re, this is good or this is bad. And they’re just circling around that. But where am I in all of this? What agency do I have about what I’m thinking about?

So that helps people come out of the conditioning self. The second thing I’d recommend is get some feedback. We can’t read the label from inside the jar. We’re like inside the jar, we’ve got this label. So asking people questions like what are my best qualities? What do you think my gifts are?

What about me annoys you? What don’t you like? You know getting this external feedback from people you trust who are close to you can be really helpful I did that with some people and I you know I ran this leadership group and I got them all to do it and I did it myself and I got some really good feedback And that made me realize that actually the central tenet Of where I sit and what I provide people is wisdom And I hadn’t quite caught on to that.

And that, that, that said, Oh yeah, of course it made sense to me that for me, everything falls within the umbrella of wisdom. So that can be very beneficial because inside, when we go into our minds, we are a bit crazy. I’m about 80 percent crazy and going in there to find truth with that noise going on is very difficult So that’s why coaching really helps is because when you’re in coaching and someone asks you the right question That right question can get into your depths like you wouldn’t believe and you can’t escape it When you’re coaching when you’re sitting on your own you distract yourself when you’re in coaching.

It’s amazing. Sorry You want to say something so powerful to be able to do that. And I’ve been lucky enough to be part of doing that with a few people as well. And it’s when you see the results and they have those moments yeah. And that’s the, that’s what I was, that’s the last question I wanted to ask you in the, in this main part of the podcast is what is the aha moment that people have when they’re working with you that you wish more people knew that we’re going to have.

Yeah. That’s great. I love that question. That’s a beautiful question. It’s a great question to end on actually. So when I talk about, conditioning and people not knowing purpose, it’s almost like they have a compass inside them that’s just going round and round and then they run in one direction following that, then it’ll change and they run in another direction.

So doing this internal work gives you your true north. You know where it is when it’s almost like that needle settles. And you go, Ah, that’s what it’s about. That’s what I’m about. That’s why I’m here. And that’s who I am. And to be able to accept that fully, it’s almost like you feel it from, the top of your head to the depths, the core of your being.

And that alignment it’s like a laser focus. A laser is like 50 watts. It’s like the bulb I have ahead of me, above me. But if that’s focused to a single point, it can cut through steel, it can cut through anything. It becomes, you become laser focused then. Because all the stuff that’s, the shiny objects and all the stuff that’s distracting us goes away.

We know what we’re about and we’re able to do that. And then we’re able to have the impact in the world that we want to. What a fantastic way to end the main part of the podcast. And just as we were about to say, thank you, reminding everyone, bonus content, humans and and AI the future. Let’s talk about that.

But for now as the main part of this podcast, thank you so much for being not only so generous with your time, but so open with your journey. And I think people will have appreciated listening to that. I know I certainly did. Oh, thanks Anthony. I really appreciate the opportunity. I’m here to serve.

That’s what my life is about, and I’m so glad that we’ve had the opportunity to have this conversation and, your own generosity in providing a platform for us to do, so I really appreciate that. I’m very humbled. Thank you, and to everyone listening in. Hit the button so you can hear the bonus content.

And of course, join us again for the next episode of Biz Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe. So you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You. The service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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