Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

LinkedIn Brand building, how to stand out in today’s digital business landscape. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, where we deliver actionable insights for today’s business leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Pearl, and today I’ve joined by Steve Dart, who is a fractional FMO. And a creator of the Brand Salience Factor.

In this episode, you’re gonna

discover how to optimize your LinkedIn presence, build a memorable personal brand that stands out from AI generated content, and apply marketing lessons from global brands to your business. Steve shares his journey from Red Bull to helping businesses create digital impact.

Of all shapes and sizes for brands just like yours, Steve Dart is a very special guest because he has huge amounts of insights, lots of information to give you. Get your pen and paper ready. Let’s get into it.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I am very excited to be having my guests Steve Dart with me today because Steve and I have known each other for a few years now and got to know one another better and better all the time. In fact, we were just sitting in something yesterday together, so I thought, why not get him on the program?

Steve, welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Thank you so much Anthony. Great to be spending time with you and we do seem be crossing paths a lot lately, so you’re in those good circles as well as I am. It’s great to see.

Yeah, it’s always interesting, isn’t it, that you have that situation, but we’re gonna get into that in a minute or two I think.

Firstly, I’m gonna allow you to introduce yourself to everyone.

Wonderful. I’ve got a bit of a new title after working with Steve Broman. He’s an amazing guy. So I used to be a LinkedIn trainer, but look, I’ve got this and I’m I’m a fractional FMO, which is Freelance Marketing Officer, and I’m the creator of the Brand Salience Factor, and I’ll talk about that as we go through this because Brand Salience is about building a brand online that’s remembered very quickly through a purchasing or service.

Conditions. So I work with people especially on LinkedIn or who wanna know, understanding of how to use the LinkedIn platform, especially the premium products like Sales Navigator core for lead generation, but actually build your brand profile online to be the number one in the market you serve.

So that’s a little bit about what I am.

We are gonna delve into that in a minute. But firstly, I’ve, I would like you to do a bit of a shout out to Steve. He’s been a guest on the program in the past. So those of you that don’t know Steve, check it out. In a previous episode we’ll try and put a link in the show notes to that as well.

But let’s dive in Steve, because as I said, you and I go back a little while and I guess we got to know each other. The primarily initially through LinkedIn and a around that. And I wanted to ask you that as this kind of a starting point

[03:07] Evolution of LinkedIn as a Business Platform

before we go a little bit more into brand, because LinkedIn has become, the accepted place for businesses to hang out.

Is that the best way of describing what LinkedIn is these days? ’cause it’s gone through a few iterations.

Yeah, look, I had a friend of mine call me up the other day and said, you’ve been on this LinkedIn stuff for a while now, and it seems like it’s all coming to fruition. And I said, look, LinkedIn is just a place where it’s a massive my, like it’s a place where people store data, especially LinkedIn.

And I’ve always used it as a communication platform. And the early situation for me with LinkedIn is I was on the platform early when someone sent me a connection request and I didn’t know what it was. And I built a profile out. And sorry. Build a profile out and basically left the pro, left, left LinkedIn.

I just think I, I had a job. I was working with Red Bull. Everything was going good. I didn’t really need to put a CV up on there. And then it wasn’t until I came back in 2012 where actually saw it was a different platform. It looked incredibly different. So Richard Branson was the first millionth follow up person on there, and you could create content.

I was like, wow, this is quite incredible. So I actually stayed on the platform and started building out and used it to communicate with my other business professionals lead generation, and just really storyboarding what I was doing in the market. So its iterations has happened over the last 21 years.

It was just a place you had put your CV to a place now that you actually build brand and build profiling and it’s still a recruitment tool and I understand that. But you can actually have really good conversations and a lot of lead generation activity within the platform. So yeah, that’s how I see it.

Yeah, I think that’s the interesting point for people, isn’t it that posting is one part. Getting followers is another part, but ultimately it’s about the conversations, isn’t it? I think people miss the point of that, that it’s lovely to post, it’s lovely to for an ego trip to say, I had x number of people like, or comment or share it or whatever it might be.

But that is not much more than an ego trip, right? The million followers is nice, but what does it actually mean? It’s the true engagements, the one-on-one conversations that you can have through LinkedIn, which I think are the most powerful aspect of it.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know what I love about LinkedIn is when you connect with someone, you’re giving each other authority to then talk, to get to each other on the platform.

You don’t have to go to email or any other kind of communication. You can actually talk them directly on the platform and then share content and that kind of thing. I love it because it’s a place where business professionals do go to learn from other business professionals and better themselves every day.

And one of the things I love to see when people are on the platform and they are getting better and they are using it as a tool of trade, and I do call it a tool of trade because like you have a car or a computer or anything else that helps you get through business, LinkedIn should be seen as that. I call it the oxygen of business because it’s where business does.

Come to play. And if you think about it, in the market we live in, out of all those seven different apps on your phone now being Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube and all that, LinkedIn is where business happens. Why do they rob banks? ’cause that’s where the money is. And why do you go to LinkedIn?

[06:17] Personal Branding and AI on LinkedIn

’cause that’s where the people that are doing business within the social serving place. So that’s how I look.

I want to start crossing over into brand building and things as well. And I think using LinkedIn as a starting point for that conversation is a really interesting one because it’s become a playground as well for a lot of ai and trying to balance that use of AI and building your brand because they can be in conflict with one another if you’re not careful about it.

And it’s interesting to me that LinkedIn has. Really decided to embrace and even push AI to a large extent as well. And I wonder if that’s to the detriment of a lot of people and a lot of brands.

Yeah. Look, time will tell on that. I know I’m using AI every day. I am probably 10 hours in ai. I use it.

Part of my business activity, one that I’m in quite often is notebook L. And that is a fantastic ’cause. It’s an actual resource gathering where you can actually put your LinkedIn profile, you can do website and all your other assets. And when you prompt engineer it, it’s only pulling from that resource.

That’s what I love about that AI tool. But AI tool, it’s one of those things that, I think that people will discover it’s gonna be a great time saver, and I think people are discovering the more that these ai agents come into play, it’s gonna be very interesting times. One thing that I’m trying to really make stand out to most people I speak to is, you must get your personal brand out into the market.

Because the way that AI’s coming it’s now equaled the playing field with knowledge. So our brand and our personal brand has to really be positioned higher now, so people would choose us because of the experience we hold as a human being. So I wanna pick

up on something you’ve said there as well, because you referenced personal brand and I think we are in this really interesting situation because for a long time it’s been about business brands.

Yeah,

it’s the personal brand is very much taken a backseat. But that seems to have changed again, that the need to push a personal brand and trying to find that balance of where do you have a personal brand? Where do you have a business brand? And I know certainly if you go back a few years. It was, I remember seeing a statistics on Facebook and saying that on average people followed one brand only, and yet follow hundreds of people.

So it’s not a surprise that personal brand has started to build, but it’s really started to take some more momentum. And again, it’s that balance on some, on a platform like LinkedIn, how much energy do you put into the business versus the personal one? What are the risks attached to that?

Yeah, I think it’s an end story there because we know that people don’t buy off logos, they buy off people.

So that’s why LinkedIn was formed to actually put personal profiles before business company pages. But I’m seeing a real trust recession at the moment, as most people are, and people are really not trusting of brands as they’re not trusting of people these days as well. So I think by showcasing yourself as your authentic self.

On these platforms, all those seven platforms, and presenting yourself as the, the way you’re putting yourself into market and that you are trustworthy and that you’re credible, and that you’ve got competency. And that’s why I love LinkedIn, because it’s the one stop shop for displaying all that at one viewpoint is a big reason why.

You can see people are elevating into the market because they’re micro nicheing, their skills and talents. Yes. And I’ve been on a lot of presentations and podcasts recently talking about LinkedIn because I’m positioning myself as a knowledge person on that. And that’s why I’m getting asked to do a lot more of these presentations and podcasts.

[10:12] Top Tips for LinkedIn Success

And I’ve sat in on some of those presentations and I know how good you are at that. And it’d be remiss be not to ask you. Before we delve a little deeper into some of the other things what are the, probably the top three things that people should be doing on LinkedIn to really make a difference at the high level?

What are the areas that they should focus on?

Yeah, number one, absolutely publish your profile for your authentic self. And then there’s what’s called an add to profile button on your profile, which then extends it out and you can actually publish your honors and awards. You can put your, any kind of detail for projects you’ve been doing, if you’ve got any licensing, and really populate that so people get an understanding when they review your profile, what it is that you’ve actually accomplished over the years you’ve been working or in that kind of situation.

So what I have felt with the. The clients I’ve worked with is when I see them in real life and then I look at their profile and I’ve spoken to them, they’re completely different. So I want people to build out their digital twin from a, a headline that is representing of how they help people in market.

Also, a banner image that has their trust value phrasing or overlay and their photo to be up to date and current, and especially. Positioned as you would meet them belly to belly. You don’t wanna have something from 10 years old. You don’t wanna have a profile photo. It’s got glasses.

You’re at the races, it’s a professional site. Make sure you’re smiling. It’s warmth. And people want to really get a an understanding of you. They actually form a bias of you before they even met you by. So your pro profile is your digital twin, and if it’s relevant and positions you as the person they’d love to meet or do business with, it’s a great first stepping stone.

Yeah, I think that the photo is something that is actually really an interesting one because when you meet people, whether it’s physically in person or whether it’s gonna be online, invariably you’re checking out their profile before you go and have that meeting. And I had one recently where I had to do a double take because I’m going, hang on.

The person that I think I’m meeting because I did see them somewhere else and their profile photo. Were so completely different that I thought it was the wrong person and it was only when I started digging a little deeper and going no, this is the right person. Then I started looking more closely at the face and I went, okay, yes, there’s a difference here.

In the, in. In some of the other features and things, but the core of it, it is definitely the right person. And a shout out to Nancy Za as well who’s also been a guest on the podcast in the past who I know specializes in taking a look at people’s images that are there and helping you identify how best to interact with them.

So it’s, it does tell a lot and it’s interesting what you say, how often there are photographs that are. Substantially older than it, and when you start getting to photos that are 10 plus years old, then you should be going, hang on, this is, what are you hiding from? Why aren’t you showing a current professional photograph?

So it is something that’s, I think is an important aspect that is often overlooked.

Yeah, and one of the things about LinkedIn, when you actually sign onto LinkedIn, the algorithm firstly checks your in contact info card and it actually scans and has a look at the details and the photo to see if it’s a current photo.

If you can actually remove your photo, then upload exactly the same one, it actually makes you a better time value of data for LinkedIn because it’s number one client is recruiters, and if you are a better product on this and for recruiters to find you, that’s always a good thing in. In your favor.

So here’s a good opportunity to remove your photo and upload a current one, and then you get a better time value of data. So you’re doing two value exchanges there on the platform.

I wanted to ask you as well before we leave LinkedIn a little bit behind, but in ask you keeping up with. What’s happening on LinkedIn?

It’s a very difficult thing. The algorithm is one thing, and I think for the longest time people have been obsessed with how do I, crack the algorithm, which is constantly changing and almost impossible to crack. But I think it’s also balancing that with how do I keep up with what is the latest features that I should be cottoning onto?

Is it just. Fun and nice to have? Or is it actually making a difference in, the way you are going to be found and the banner image and the change of the changes that have happened with that in recent times. Is it probably a good case in point is are they something that you go, yes, you have to jump on?

How do you stay on top of what the latest and greatest is? ’cause it is literally just following someone like you. Yeah,

look, I like the way that LinkedIn has moved. Look, it is a free site. It costs nothing to join. But what it is LinkedIn is trying to upgrade people into their premium products.

’cause you get a better experience. For instance, the banner, rather than being a static placement, it actually gives you five rotating banners. And that’s good for people that have got multiple things going on within their work. Whether it be an event coming up or they’re displaying a couple of jobs that they do within their, in, in their current work situation.

So it gives you a better experience that way. It gives you a better analytics when you’re sending out connection requests on a premium product, you get to send out up to 150 connection requests. Out to somebody rather, and with a personalized note, except for the free version, you only get five a month.

So it’s really decreasing its opportunity with a free version and extending opportunities and analytics and the experience for the user in those premium offerings. LinkedIn is a business. It actually Microsoft purchased it for $26.2 billion. And it’s starting to reclaim its money, but it’s giving you a better experience in the premium offerings.

I use Sales Navigator Core because it’s a premium sales analytics tool, which gives me 40 features or 40 filtering options, advanced search just to find my ideal client profile or person out of, 10,000 data. Data points. So if you are looking for lead generation or you’re trying to get more sales activity happening, sales navigator call is the one.

It’s about 99 USD a month that is. And I highly recommend it for someone to trial it at least.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s one of those things, isn’t it? You have to make use of the tools. I think we, that’s one of the challenges in this day and age, right? That there are so many tools and you need to make use of them in order to justify their, their value.

And I think the key is as well with LinkedIn is, as I said is I’d encourage people to follow you because. You give tips regularly on what the latest and greatest is, and I think it is important to stay on top of those things. We will absolutely make sure that those details are in the show notes, but I wanted to delve deeper into this whole idea of brand a little bit more and how you are positioning yourself as well.

‌

But let’s start off with the background. How cool was it working at Red Bull and why would you leave?

Yeah, look, red Bull’s fantastic. I was there in the early days and it was one of those brands that was new to market. They were coming out from Austria. Unfortunately the founder just passed away last year, Mr.

Mani or Dietrich Mani. But it was a very progressive brand. It was very youth orientated. And one thing I learned from being there was they were different to market. And I love that about the product. I was there in the early days when there was only six of us, I think, within the Queensland office with our energy teams, which is the little Volkswagens that drove around with a can in the back.

And they gave us the opportunity to wear many hats. We were sales, we were event organizers, we were dealing with PR teams. And it just gave me such an opportunity to have a diverse range of skill sets. And I worked with there for many years and thought after working there, I think for eight years, what could I actually take from the market working with Red Bull out to the SME market and see if the Red Bull way really worked?

And I’d worked with a couple of companies after that using that kind of methodology and had enormous success. So I loved learning one. Or a one style of skill within marketing and the methodology of being a mystique brand in the way that Red Bull went to market, and then taking across into smaller, medium brands and using the same philosophy.

To give you an idea, I actually worked writing a blueprint for the Hard Rock Cafe. And the first thing I did was I created an activation where we had Axel Roses Harley Davidson, that set up on a showcase piece. You couldn’t touch it, you could only just take photos. And I said to the general manager, why is that sitting up there?

He said, oh, people take photos of it. I said, why don’t we put on the ground with a banner of the hardware cafe Gold Coast with all the elements of the skyline for the guitar? Let’s let people sit on it and let them have the experience and then they can take Instagram shots and help promote. And we had basically a lineup down the stairs.

So people came for the activation of sitting on Axel Roses, Harley Davidson, and taking a photo and then sharing that for the company, and then they decided to grab a burger while they were there. It’s using that really cool activations to try something different in markets they hadn’t tried.

I think that the really interesting part about that is it’s an experience and I think that’s what people are looking for, right? Is they need to experience something with your brand in order to then be able to share it and to, take some kind of enjoyment out of it. ’cause the interesting thing about that is, the.

The burger just needed probably to be good and didn’t need to be great in order to get people to come back because you had this showpiece that was there, whereas the emphasis on trying to be well, are we the greatest burger place in wherever you are is a lot harder road to travel and it’s the experience that you get.

That was really what Hard rock cafes were all about, wasn’t it? Yeah. The experience.

Yeah, rock and roll even. I actually had a conversation with the general manager and the team and I said, unless we are relevant to the youth, because everything was, there was heritage, it was old, photos and guitars.

And I said, we have to be relevant to the youth, otherwise we don’t become relevant as a brand and they’re out, they’re outta business now. And I think that was one of the main reasons they just didn’t look at new activations or new markets to actually bring their product in front of. So it just became an old brand in the end.

Yeah, it’s interesting. Because it was, and for those that maybe that don’t even remember Hard Rock Cafe that might be listening it, they really were a phenomenon, weren’t they? They were, you would go to different ones in, around the world because you wanted to see the stuff, but the problem was that once you went once there wasn’t really a reason to go back because there wasn’t a rotation of things.

And so you went and you had an experience and you had a great experience. Maybe you went back a second time, but it’s unlikely you went back thir three or four times because. There was nothing new about it. And I think that’s the, that is also the dilemma with something like that is, is creating experiences but keeping up with, need to adapt and change.

Otherwise you do fall behind.

Yeah. One thing I learned from being at Red Bull was about you always had to re, you had to be relevant to the youth. And that’s one thing you can see in their marketing today. They’re very relevant to the youth market coming through because then they get brand loyalists starting at a young age and carrying that through.

Also with LinkedIn at the moment, the most engagement on the platform is 25 to 33 year olds, the Gen Z market. And it’s a, it’s an interesting stat when I bring that up. People can’t believe it. They think LinkedIn’s quite old with, its with, with its viewpoint. But no, it’s a young demographic coming onto it and they’re omnipresent across, seven of those different platforms.

They understand they’re native to these platforms. They know that they need to be on it to be relevant because attention is the asset. And so I, when I teach my programs within the LinkedIn platform is about making sure you are not only omnipresent, but definitely be on LinkedIn because that’s where the business is

and it keeps you feeling young, right?

We are definitely in that age group, aren’t we, Steve? Absolutely. Now I just finishing up on I’m intrigued. A little bit further just to push you a little bit further on the Red Bull thing because, I find it fascinating that I’m, engaged with Red Bull as a brand on a regular basis.

’cause I happen to love Formula One and Red Bull is very prominent in Formula One, of course. But I’ve never drunk a Red Bull and I don’t think I ever will. But I love the brand and that’s a really interesting thing, isn’t it? Because you do have these brands out there that are like that, that you want to champion.

Because you like what they stand for. They’re the, they’re on the edge, right? They’re a brand that is of a similar ilk to Virgin in that they’re not afraid to take risks and they’re not afraid to go out there and promote. New things, but it’s interesting. I find that it with such a prominent brand that their market is, they’re not expecting me to be in their market either.

That’s the interesting thing about it is I don’t think people my age are picking up a Red Bull for the first time. I think their target is a lot younger. Yeah I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from those kinds of experiences as well. That you have to know your market, but doesn’t mean you can’t be.

Seen in a broader sense as well.

Yeah, and obviously that was one of the big programs for Red Bull was the marketing of the sampling program, where they sampled you the product and they actually told you about the benefits and the ingredients and things like that. And so they spent a lot of money and time on educating the consumer on why the products functionality use and when they should have, and how they should actually, use it because it is just a delivery through the can.

The actual energy, it does give you wings and you might not be a consumer at the time, but if you are gonna make an energy drink or a drink consumption and you need energy because you’ve got that brand persona of Red Bull supported you, you are more likely to grab that as a product than you would as a competing product.

So just putting Red Bull in the conversation.

And I think the question then becomes for you is, as you’ve delved into this role, and I love the interesting title this whole idea of being a fractional operator, it’s become a, a trendier term. I’ve heard that used a little bit more in recent times.

So explain to me what that is and explain to me how you take learnings from. Your experiences in Red Bull Hard Rock Cafe what you’re doing with smaller businesses through LinkedIn and other places, how does that play out in what you’re doing now?

Yeah, look, I’m just coming in with fresh eyes and I deal with a lot of head of brand just to come, just speak to them about what they’re doing with their programs, their marketing strategies, managing in-house teams.

And a lot of them are, they don’t have the wisdom of seeing what brands going from, startup to being more progressive in the market. And so I just come into these businesses and I just see what they’re doing now and work with their head of branches. Just say, look, maybe you should make. Try these, you should be broadcasting your branding message across different platforms and just being fresh eyes to what they normally know.

Like when I started with Red Bull, one of the first things they said to me, if you’ve got a marketing degree, don’t worry about it. We don’t use it. We do it our own way. And I thought that was really interesting that they said that. And they were a hundred percent right. They didn’t do anything. That I was learning in marketing.

And so I actually take that into marketing teams now and I say to people, especially even on LinkedIn, make sure your marketing in the year we actually live in, doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. Have a look at what the market’s doing. Look who the creators are, look at the culture of things and make sure you are relevant in today’s market.

And a lot of people, especially with their LinkedIn, talk about the good old days. We’re not on the good old days anymore. We wanted to work with leaders who are progressing ourselves and our brands forward. And that’s what I love about where LinkedIn can place you in today’s market because you can be talking about in your content what you are doing as a business professional and you’ve learned from those scars, but you are, you’re looking forward and that’s what people are looking at.

One of the reasons, I dunno if you know this, but why is the emu and the kangaroo on our coat of arms is ’cause they’re only two animals that only will go forward. They’ll never go back. So I dunno if you know that, but that’s what I love to see if people are progressing, not about the good old days.

And once upon a time.

I love that. And I vaguely remember hearing that somewhere once before. Maybe you told it to me. I can’t remember. Okay. But I love that It is and it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we are living in an age where the rate of change, I believe, is faster than it has ever been.

Absolutely. The efficiencies that are being created from ai. In particular are allowing more space to do things. And I think that’s one of the big areas. And when you talk about marketing, it’s creativity, it’s fresh ideas. That’s the big space that marketing has an opportunity to really grow. And in fact, AI is not countering that.

It’s actually. Creating more opportunities for that to happen because the drudgery of what’s in marketing, if I can call it that, where, things like placement of content or and generating reports and other things can now be much more efficiently. Done with some AI assistance. So I wouldn’t say ai, do it on its own, don’t do that.

But you’ve got mo greater efficiencies in there, which allows more space to be creative because in the face of all of the AI and LinkedIn’s a good example of that, the face of all the AI that has been used to publish content, the way to stand out. Is the uniqueness, your unique stories, creativity, fresh ideas, which again, I’m not, I don’t wanna dwell back on Red Bull, but that’s and Virgin is the same.

They’re always about fresh ideas and new things. It’s, you’ve got to keep moving forward.

Yeah. Red Bull was never about being a copying brand. It was always being a leading brand. And I used to sit on round tables with athletes and they’d basically, they’d have to come up with something in their category that had never been done before.

So if you know that when the Red Bull air race happened, that came from the concept of downhill skiing. Going through the gates, but doing it through aerobatics and things like that. So they’re always very progressive in the market. Red Bull was never about following. It was always about leading.

And I take that into what I do every day. I’m always, I’m an early riser. I dunno, I think I think, but I’m up at three 30 every morning and I’m into the gym and I’m listening to two hours of the best podcast of business professionals and forward leading thinkers like Gary Vaynerchuk and Alex Mosey, and I’m listening to that every day for.

The whole year. So whenever I come into my first meetings, I’m talking to clients, I’m energized. I’m like, this is what’s happening, because I know that they’re being bold in what they’re doing and they’re testing the market and I’m listening to what’s happening and I’m relaying it to my clients. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m doing so well in Mark at the moment because I’m paying attention to what’s happening through leaders who are trying new things.

Plus, there’s a lot of great LinkedIn trainers out there. I’m listening to what they’re doing. I’m sure they’re listening to what I’m doing, but together. We’re all help benefiting people’s opportunity to understand how to use this platform LinkedIn in a day-to-day operation and be and to be better.

1% every day.

Yeah. And that’s the key, isn’t it? It’s taking your influences and being on the edge and not being afraid to try things. I think for so long, business has been about what’s my competition doing? And I better just match the competition or try and stay a little bit ahead. But I think you don’t even almost have to pay attention to your competition anymore.

It’s about what you can do, what you can bring to the table, what ideas you have. And bringing the audience along with you, because there’s still, and that’s the interesting thing about brands these days, is you have to almost be like Apple has been for the longest time where they’re, what they believe people will want in the future, not what they know they want now.

Yeah. And also treating your customer, not as a customer, but as a community member. One of the brands I was working with for many years is LSKD, and they’re an Australian brand out of Logan south of Brisbane. And they, every time they’re across all their socials, they’ve got an engagement officer that when they post content and there’s engagement, someone goes back as the brand and has a voice and consistently talks and nurtures that relationship.

So they’re not customers anymore. They’re community members, and I love that about that brand and that they wear that brand in their heart whenever they’re making a purchase decision, which is salience. That’s why they’re growing at an enormous rate. So the takeaway is don’t treat people as customers.

Treat them as your, as a community member or your big sister, to be honest. Go over and above every time you deal with someone.

So let me put you on the spot and tell me about some of the brands that you, whether you’ve worked with them or not, that you really love at the moment. And I think what’s important is that we can, as we have, we’ve talked about, big brands, but let’s talk about some of the smaller brands because most of the people listening to us these days are probably part of a smaller brand and want to know what they can do to make a different, so what’s inspiring you on some of those smaller levels that are making a difference?

[34:44] Making an Impact as a Fractional CMO

Look, I’ve obviously, I do love Red Bull on it and I do love Harley Davidson, some of the biggest brands in the world. But LSKD is one brand that’s doing extremely well. There’s so many that I can’t really put a name to what they are ’cause I’m not following in directly. But anyone that’s, giving it a good red hot go.

That’s the main thing. There’s many brands out there that will come and go, but the ones that you know, have resilience, they’re bold, they’re willing to have a bit of a step in the dark about trying new things. That’s what excites me mostly about brands in the market at the moment.

Obviously Virgin’s doing well. I just love brands that had that hero statement status of progressing forward even at the toughest times.

Is it achievable for smaller brands? You’re spending some, you’re spending time going in to working with smaller businesses and dealing with them.

Are the real takeaways that you can have from what some of those bigger guys are doing? Is it true that’s actually in many respects, easier to be out there? For smaller brands because they don’t have the bureaucracy and the level of decision making that needs to happen, but they may not have the, counted with the fact they may not have the budget.

Few people would have the budget of a virgin or a red Bull in terms of marketing.

Yeah social media’s been the big equalizer because people don’t have to have big advertising budgets. They can actually use their phone record content and upload it across those seven platforms. And if you do that every day and for long enough, you’ll get noticed.

Even if your product’s good, you’ll survive. And if it’s not good, you won’t survive. One of the good things about. The state of play at the moment on the internet is we’ve all got an equal opportunity to be seen and discovered. And so that’s why it’s important especially for LinkedIn, is to people not to post every now and then or frequent it.

Every now and then, it’s actually put a plan or a strategy in place to be on the platform and telling you your unique story. In a way that it’s interesting in informing for the potential client, because most people with your product in market, only 3% are interested to buy now, but 97% are looking for trust value from you and your brand.

And so across those seven platforms. Especially with LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, just keep showing up and being your authentic self and you’ll be discovered. The main thing with providing content is when you do get pro content that actually starts to get some great impressions and that, and it’s doing well.

That’s the time to boost it with some advertising spend and it’s called brand format. And that way when it’s working, you know it’s working, you put some money behind it and it does well then you can get some really good return in advertising spend and revenue starts coming back in the other way.

Yeah, I think that’s important for people to understand that you can. Compete as a small business owner, you don’t have to, in the past it was like we were dominated by big brands and felt dwarfed by them. But in truth, because of your ability to niche and to be quite targeted in what you do, and you’re talking about, LinkedIn is a great way of.

Being able to find who your, if you know who your core audience is, you can find those people on LinkedIn. It’s not just about the old days where, there were three or four TV stations and you, your chance to was to advertise to absolutely everybody and hope that you hit the right program and spent a huge fortune on it.

Nowadays it’s become more and more targeted, right? And it doesn’t have to be through advertising. You can engage with people in lots of different ways.

Yeah, a lot of brands, smaller brands are using influencers now through social media and getting huge engagement by, user generated content from these young influencers because, TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, they’re getting, hundreds of thousands of followers, and if you have your brand associated with them, you’re getting eyeballs seen on your product.

So the influencer market is becoming a big play within marketing.

So tell me, when you go into businesses these days and you’re performing this fractional role, how do you make an impact? And that seems like a, a a high level question, but it’s, if there are people that are maybe a little bit cynical about what difference someone can come in and actually make, what is it that you can see as a difference?

How do you, how does being independent and coming in on a regular basis, but. And a small way gonna work for businesses.

Yeah, look, a bit of housekeeping. Number one, making sure on their website alone that nothing’s broken, no links are broken, they’re easily found. Also, have a look over their, all their pages on a website and see where they’re actually letting the customer know where the pro, what the problem is that they actually solve.

A lot of people on their websites go straight into the, the value proposition of their products and services, but they don’t actually indicate to the potential buyer of the problem that they solve within their products and services. So that’s number one. By having a look over your website and just seeing if it’s actually speaking to the client that they’ve got the issue, that you have the problem that you, that they, that you solve for them.

That’s number one. Also, making sure that you do have a social marketing plan across the seven. Channels that we were talking about before, LinkedIn being one, if it’s B2B and just looking what assets they’ve got within the business to see what they can profile. What’s their unique value proposition?

What do they have that no one else has? And that’s a big part of just building a strategy out around that. The main thing is attention is the asset and whatever business you go to, the reason they’re in business is because they’re solving a problem or they’ve got a product that is value orientated and you just need to get that message out.

To the people that need the product or services. So it’s just some of the basic elements.

Yeah, and I think it’s, it is important that people don’t underestimate the value of someone independent that’s specializing in it. I think the beauty of these fractional roles that have started to come about and there’s certainly marketing is one area, certainly finance is another.

Where I’ve seen that happen and other parts of the business as well, is it allows to have someone who. Can have a consistent view of what’s going on, but are not encumbered by the day to day and can add, high level strategic, ongoing advice.

Absolutely. There’s a sports brand I’m working with at the moment that’s got an outstanding athletics product.

And once that gets passed through an certification, IAF certification that’s got go global distribution opportunities. There’s a few things in place that have to happen with a rule change, but once that happens, this small business they’ll be working with, who’s going over to Germany in, in a couple of weeks will then have the opportunity to sell their product worldwide.

And that’s another challenge this business is going to have from a small business doing, product and service delivery around Australia, Australasia to the going worldwide. So that creates another challenge that they’ll find. So it’s about having those different moments in time where you’re moving from one to the next challenge, overcoming that and then moving to the next.

So it’s working with someone like myself who’s been with these brands where they’ve started off small and you got larger, and what some of the challenges we faced and how they might come overcome them as well.

I think it is an important aspect that people don’t realize. They often stay with the teams that they’ve got, that they’ve built them up through a period of time and they want to keep them there.

But sometimes you’ve, you outgrow those people. And I know I’ve experienced it when I’ve been employed in the past, and I won’t say where, but I remember, the particular organization I was with that we went through a growth phase and the CEO stuck around and I think it was to the detriment of the organization.

Because as, as great as he was at getting us to a certain point, he wasn’t really the person to take us to the next level. And I think that can happen within an organization as well. And you have to recognize those things. And sometimes it, it might not be that someone like that had to step aside, but it’s bringing in the right people around to help make sure that you can take it to that next level.

Because you do need that experience. You do need those people that understand what what it looks like on the other side.

Yeah, absolutely. And, I can’t remember the book, but it’s get the right people on the bus and that’s, getting the right people in the business that’s gonna project you forward.

And I’m noticing a lot of CEOs now are coming back into businesses and sitting on the development or in the marketing teams. To get more involved with what’s happening. They’re not sitting in that high element within a business. They’re getting more ingrained with the business, and I think that’s important.

So they actually see how the business is operating from inside and they’re part of everyday activity. I think that’s a big part of the CEO’s and also GM’s role to have a look how the actual business is going in internally. Is everything cohesive and is the culture good? Most businesses struggle with culture.

Yes, that is a big area and one we might delve into another time. I’ve got a couple of final questions I wanted to ask you. Give me some tips on what you believe is where things are going, not just LinkedIn, but generally in terms of marketing. Where do you think people need to be in terms of focusing their attention?

[41:16] Future of Marketing and AI

Yeah, definitely spending one or two hours on every AI tool that they can see at the moment and getting familiar with it because technology doesn’t care about, it’s coming here and it’s arrived. So getting familiar with the different AI tools and how they work and how to start looking at giving them commands.

And also in regards to platforms like, LinkedIn, things like that. Getting familiar, how to navigate around them. They are a tool of trade and if you understand how to use them, they. They make your day a lot quicker to actually, do general tasks by communication and then posting and getting seen.

It’s interesting I believe with the advancement of ai, especially the way that it’s coming so quick, what we believe to be happening now will be completely different in the next three years. I dunno what that’s gonna look like. I’m excited for it. It’s gonna be challenging. It’s gonna be exciting, but we have to invest our time to understand what’s coming at us.

And one of the tools I’m playing around with at the moment, I said before is Notebook lm? And I think that’s an amazing tool to have a look at and if your viewers can have a look at that and getting involved with that a bit more, it’s a great tool to have as an association within your business. It

is a fun tool.

I know I used a little while back to do to consume a lot of my podcasts. And to do a bit of a review of it, which was really interesting because it delivered a conversational review of the biz Bites for Thought Leaders podcast, which was which was a bit of fun. Yes, if anyone’s interested in that, maybe I need to find that video again and repost it.

Absolutely you should. Yep.

It’s one of those things. Now just to wrap things up, a question that I love to ask all of my guests that come on the program is what are the aha moments that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?

That I give more than I take.

[43:18] Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

So I’m very generous with my time. I sit on a lot of 15 minute calls. I give a lot of advice to people. Sometimes that turns into business, sometimes it doesn’t. I can lay my head down at the end of the night and say that I gave it all my that day and tomorrow’s gonna be a better day. And I love helping people and I love spending time that they can be better at what they’re doing.

And if I can just support that I’m a very happy person.

Fantastic. I love that Steve. And we are gonna include all the details of how to get in contact with you. And people that are listening in can jump on one of those 15 minute calls with you. I know how much value you bring to those 15 minutes.

And I encourage people if you have looking after groups of people as well. Steve is a great speaker to come in and add some real value to that. And lots of things that we didn’t even touch on connected with LinkedIn and other areas. Such as my most trusted and a shout out to Scott and my most trusted as well, which is a great tool to add on to your LinkedIn profile and other things as well.

So you can ask Steve about that as well. And or just hit me up as well because I can also introduce you to that particular one. But Steve, thank you so much for being an amazing part of the program, giving so much advice and tips and insights along the way. Really appreciate it.

Thanks Anthony, and thanks for everything you are doing.

I appreciate it and it’s great having a platform like you that we can tell our stories.

Absolutely. And we’ll look, we encourage everyone to make sure you don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a like or a comment on anything that you want to see on the program coming up in the future. And we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for thought Leaders.

Thank you everyone. 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 podcast 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 biz.

Growth Hacking your wealth, how business owners can build high net worth. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, where we are gonna deliver some more actionable insights to help you grow your business and influence. I’m Anthony Perl, your host, and I’m joined today by Greg Cassar, who is a renowned growth hacker.

That’s right. A growth hacker. He’s the founder of the Collective Mastermind and he’s helped countless business owners scale their companies and transition into high net worth individuals. Through his dual black belt approach. Standby for that one. And his approach to business is not just about mentoring in that way, it’s also about investing.

So if an episode you don’t want to miss, you’re gonna discover how to leverage AI and blockchain technologies for wealth creation, how to build multiple income streams for financial freedom and design a business that gives your life. Back. So as we dive into this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, make sure you have pen and paper in hand.

There are so many tips in this episode. You do not want to miss it.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I truly have someone who is going to dazzle. I have no doubt we’ve just had a brief conversation off air and I’m so looking forward to this and unraveling so many things that Greg has to bring to the party. But Greg, firstly, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Anthony, for having me. I’m excited to be here. Look, why don’t you start off by introducing yourself to everyone? Sounds good. Like most people know me, so I’m Greg Cassar. Most people know me as a marketer. I’m a growth hacker, so I’m very good at scaling businesses. It’s been my background and technology, but in more recent years, I got good at investing and then been helping other people to do that, and it’s really been life changing.

Some people would say, I’ve got lucky, but I think luck is labor under correct knowledge. You kind of engineer that, to happen yourself. So as a result of getting good at cash flow with businesses and then building large nest eggs, I was able to figure out where I wanted to live in life and how I wanted to live.

And so like I moved to Byron Bay and a surf every day and that kind of thing. And so designed a pretty cool lifestyle that works as a long term, great work life balance as a result. I love that term growth hacker. It sounds good. Yeah. And, but that’s the first challenge is though, it’s one thing to do it for yourself.

It’s another thing to do it for other people. So how difficult was that transition? Because I was running an agency first. I was in a day. I was in a day job. Actually, what happened was I was designing computer networks for banks and insurance companies, that kind of thing. My client, who was a large seal manufacturer, they came to me and they said, Hey, we want to put in these large array of discs.

I realized that it wasn’t gonna work for them, and they were gonna run out, stroke, run out within six months. So I did this upsell. I was studying sales and marketing. I did an upsell for them and made my company that I was working for in my day job, an extra million dollars. And they said, you’re gonna go far in this company, you’re gonna be rewarded.

And I thought it’s either a car or a promotion or something like that. And, but what happened was they gave me a $200 Maya gift voucher as a result from them, an extra million dollars. And I was gutted at the time and my wife went and spent it on clothes and stuff at the shop. I realized, sometimes life happened for you, not to you.

And that was exactly the motivation I needed to get out of the day job. And I ran a marketing agency. And so to, to your question, like I got experience working in a whole bunch of other people’s businesses as well as my own businesses. And so it was a great, in a way, getting paid to learn when I was young and then just went on from there to running an agency.

Then being a coach as well, I’ve got two businesses in the e-com space travel deals based out of the US with three business partners and that’s a, yeah, that and investing are the main things that I do now, it’s a big shift, and I know someone else, who’s been in the marketing space and run a marketing agency for many years.

What’s interesting about that space is there aren’t many people who still say, I run a marketing agency. Everyone used to run a marketing agency. Because it’s all adapted, right? It’s become so much more specialized than it was. That generalist marketing agency approach is very difficult to sustain over a longer period of time because it has become niched.

Agreed. I think there’s so much to know in that space also from a like work life balance and just I call it the coolness factor in work and in business. Coolness factor equals income divided by stress. And with a marketing agency, say you or my client, every time we had a meeting, I would walk away with a whole bunch of jobs, whereas if we were a coach in, I was your coach, then you would walk away with the jobs and then we would meet back and see how you’re going on them.

So it’s a little thing, but it’s a big. Thing. So I think a marketing agency is a great business to run as a stepping stone into other better business models. But, and I know you’ve done it as well with the agent on the agency front, it really is an amazing learning environment because you get to see a broad spectrum of businesses that you wouldn’t normally see on just on your own.

Yeah, it is an interesting thing and we were talking off air beforehand about the fact that, my background was in the media and what’s really interesting about when I worked in the media, it’s so different to working in an agency environment because what happens in the media is you walk in and you start your shift.

And particularly if you’re working in a newsroom, you have a certain amount of stories that you have to write that have to go to air by a certain time, like on the.to the second. And then once that news bulletin is done. You are then working towards the next one, and whether it’s a program or a news bulletin, it’s pretty similar.

So you walk away at the end of the day with stuff is done and you start almost with a clean slate for the next day. Sometimes there’s, if you are running a show, it might be preparing for an interview or something that’s coming up, but there’s this real definitive line of things that happen and come in and out.

Whereas when you start working, not just in an agency, but in most work environments. There are things that take long periods of time, sometimes months, sometimes years. Yes, there are things that drag from day to day and priorities shift on a daily basis because this comes in and that comes in. It’s a really quite different to that media environment.

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, it’s interesting what you’re doing with with your new business and we both were agency and then now morphed out of it. So shows the progression. Yeah, absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit more about that morphing out of it. How did that come about then that you started realizing.

The need to invest and to do more beyond what the agency was giving you. Yeah. Sometimes to know and not to do is not to know. So like I all along knew that I was a business owner and I should be investing, and I saw my superannuation and it was growing in like 10% a year. But then I realized, hang on a second, the inflation’s a couple of percent, and then I had a couple of percent fees.

So it was actually growing at 3% a year, not 10, when I really got down to it. And so for a 10 or 12 year period there, I was going nowhere. And that was like a big aha that I needed to do something smarter. So I started every, I’ve got this concept of the dual black belt. So get your black belt at.

Business, sales, marketing. So get good at that side. And then also focus on getting a black belt in investing. And for me, the real turning point was in 2017, I just, I would, I’d been started to learn about Bitcoin and I remember just waking up in the middle of the night, like 3:17 AM I still remember seeing it on the clock, and I was just like.

I’ve just really understood Bitcoin, the digital gold concept and the fact that there was a maximum supply of 21 million and the demand was only going to get bigger and that it would effectively by buying that asset, it was just going to keep appreciating effectively forever. And so that was a life-changing thing for me.

I woke my wife up. To say she wasn’t as excited about it as me was an understatement, I would say. But yeah, from that point onwards, that was a real changing point in my life. And as an investor and as an entrepreneur, like you’ll hear someone who’s not very wealthy, they’ll say, you need to be diversified into a whole bunch of different asset classes and all this sort of thing.

But all my high net worth friends, they all say the same thing of spar as there’s certain times in your career, whether it’s in business or investing, where you just have to back yourself and push all your chips in and go for it. And for me, that was with Bitcoin. And I did that in 2017. And I’d love to say it was an easy journey, but it wasn’t like sometimes I was really up and sometimes I was really down, but I had that conviction and that knowledge and that understanding, and I knew that one Bitcoin was going to end up multiple millions of dollars and I was getting them for.

$8,000 $14,000, $90,000, that kind of thing. So I backed up the track and went hard at it, and yeah, and then turned a small amount of money into a large amount of money into multiple millions. Really? Over, yeah, over a couple of years. So it’s been a crazy journey. And then from there.

Started helping others with that as well. Primarily, people come to me like with the collective master owners who are business owners who want to grow their business. ’cause that’s been my background. But in more recent years, I’ve been more helping people with, okay, then they might have a normal superannuation.

What about if you changed that over to superannuation to a to an SMS? And then there’s, how do you then make it grow so that it grows at 30 or 40% instead of that 10 or 12%? And one key thing there was the whole concept of, do you know who Wayne Gretzky is? Anthony? Absolute yes. Yeah. The skate, so basically for, I think you know it, but for those who don’t know it, the Wayne Gretzky, he is a famous ice hockey player and he was getting interviewed and they said, like, why are you the best?

And he said, it’s easy because everyone else skates to where the puck is. And I skate to where the puck is going. And because I understood technology really well, I was able to see. Technology trends that were happening before the masses. So with blockchain, so things like Bitcoin, et cetera. And then also now, like the.com boom is effectively happening all over again, but it’s an AI and blockchain boom.

And so by understanding what are the winning technologies are, being able to invest in those things and then really ride them up at, 20, 30, 40, and sometimes 50% growth instead of what most people are getting eight, nine tens. And if you compound year after year. That can really make a difference.

I found, I’m gonna come back to the AI thing in a moment, but it’d be remiss of me not to ask then saying, okay, where is the next big thing if AI is, we are in it at the moment. Yes. Is there another thing that’s on the back of that? I would say that this AI boom, like over the next five to 10 years between AI and blockchain, crypto, there is a massive opportunity for wealth creation.

So on the blockchain side, there’s things like Bitcoin obviously we spoke about, which is digital gold. And then there’s other, it’s really just about figuring out, hey, what are the winners? And so there’s technologies like. Solana, which is a layer one blockchain, which basically, if you think about it so many other financial apps are getting built on top of it, and it does 80% of the compute that compared to all the other blockchains.

So that that’s an example of a winner. But then in the AI side you’ve got things like Nvidia, which is, they do make 80% of the GPUs, so the chips that power ai the brains behind ai. You’ve got things like that. Then there’s other companies like Tesla who’s really leading the world in real world ai.

So if you think about a modern Tesla car, if it can navigate around on its own, it’s effectively like a robot that drives. And then you’ve got things like robo taxis which have just come out this year, and it’s like an Uber but no driver and one third of the cost. And then next year you’ve got things like the Optimus humanoid robot coming out.

And so that’s an example of a real world AI company that is just going to multiply over and over again. That’s what I mean by just figuring out, hey, who are likely to be the winners in those two different categories. And then playing the long game knowing that, hey, sometimes I’m gonna be really up, and then there’s gonna be some adjustments and that’s okay.

And then just removing all emotion from it and then just really playing the long game and doing it in both personal as well as then doing it in SMSF as well, so you can get both growing over time. I guess for those who are not not familiar with it, SMSF, self-managed super fund? Yes, definitely.

And not in if you’re not in Australia, I suppose the best way I, dunno that it exists everywhere like this, but it’s basically a percentage of your earnings that needs to be put away into a fund that is going to, only be available to you once you retire. Agreed. That’s probably the simple way of explaining it to people who may not be familiar with what superannuation is, who are listening in a 401k that you manage yourself Yes.

For the Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And I think that one of the interesting points that you made about the Wayne Re, Wayne Gretzky reference, and it’s how do you know where things are going? Is that an instinct? For you? Or is that something that requires a lot of study and talking to, and how do you come up with where you think things are going?

I think once you get good at this kind of tech investing, it really becomes like cheating in a way. So I spend an hour a day researching and learning and just investing in myself. So that’s like the first piece of the puzzle. And then. History also tells stories. So I’ll look at what are the highest producing or highest growth assets over the last 10 years, over the last five years, over the last four years.

And then out of those, what of them are really positioned well? They’ve got a roadmap of things that are coming out that are, that are very exciting. Another. A simple area for people to focus on is like the Magnificent seven. Which then has your Microsofts and Meta, so which is Facebook and Amazon, et cetera.

Those ’cause those tech stocks that are very AI enabled. Effectively, they’re going to win over and over again because they’ve just got such a competitive advantage over, over smaller companies now. So that’s where I think investing just gets very easy once you get a high degree of skill in it.

And it’s li and it literally is life changing. Yeah, I can imagine. And it’s, it, but starting off is scary, right? That’s the hard part is knowing what’s the right amount to, to invest in and how much you trust yourself. Because early on in the piece. You don’t have that knowledge and you, so it is a big leap to make initially.

Yes, for sure. And I think that all starts with that education. And they say, only invest what you are, you can afford to lose, like initially while you’re learning. And that’s certainly what I did. And then once I had great certainty and I knew what was going on, that was like when I then.

Really moved forward in with big, with bigger numbers. And I think another point to that makes a difference is I was at the surf two days ago. And this guy comes up to me here and he goes, Hey Greg, I was thinking about you this morning. And I was like, okay, cool. Didn’t know what he was talking about.

And apparently we’ve been talking at a party and I taught him a few things and he bought some Bitcoin and some other things, but he’d never invested again. And he said, I doubled my money. And I said, did you keep investing? Did you keep putting money in? He’s no, I didn’t. Just that one time.

And so like he didn’t realize to. Keep going. I’ve got a friend who we had both put the same amount of money in initially, but he never put any in again. And then I kept what’s called dollar cost averaging. Dollar cost averaging means that you don’t know necessarily when the top of a market cycle is, or when the bottom of the market cycle is.

You just keep buying regular buy. O over time, and you’ll get some of it right and some of it wrong, but it really starts to build up like an exponential curve. If you’ve got these high growth, whether it’s stocks and crypto, et cetera, and then you’ll keep feeding it what I call feeding the Beast.

It can really make a difference because there’s a difference between the way that. The rich think and the way that the poor and the middle class think and behave. So the poor and the middle class, what they’ll do is they’ll earn money. So say for example, a hypothetical a thousand dollars they’ll spend and if there’s anything left, they’ll invest, say $50 or whatever if that, thing.

But whereas what the rich will do is the rich will pay themselves first. And so invest. So out of that thousand they might figure out, hey. I can invest a hundred of it, or I can invest 150 of it, and then I’ll get by on the eight 50 to pay my bills and everything. But they invest before they pay the bills.

It sounds like a, it’s only a small change, but it’s one of those small hinges that swings a big door. If you can do that continuously over time and you’re willing to think, see, I think in eight year cycles and 12 year cycles and that kind of thing, because that’s really like everyone wants. To get rich today.

And I get that. And you still can, like at the moment we’re in a bull market. You definitely can, but real wealth isn’t built in one year. Real wealth is built by stringing together multiple cycles and also having a combination of, I think to get really wealthy, you need cash flow. So that might be your businesses.

And then you also need to build a high net worth. So like a go a golden goose. That over time when you want to, you can harvest from that golden goose and as it grows, you’re just eating the eggs without, really eating away at it. And on the income side, I like to have multiple streams of income.

I think of it like a multi-leg stool. So if I’ve just got one stream of income and then it dries up, then I could lose like all my cash flow. So I try to always have three or more cash flow sources so that cash flow. Keeps, keeps ticking along. Even if something, a problem happens with one, I’ve got cash while I adjust and then that gives me more cash to then I used to think about, ’cause I was good at business, I thought, I’m gonna use business to get rich.

And I, that did work. Like I became a millionaire out of. Business. So that was good, but I didn’t really have a path of how am I gonna get my wealth into the high multiple millions or into the tens of millions or anything like that? Just business alone. Unless I built a business that I could exit, I couldn’t really see a path to that.

But whereas by doing a combination of B plus I, so business plus investing, I’ve found that has really been the path to building a higher net worth than 99 or whatever percent of people would achieve. And, but anyone can learn it and do it. I feel, I was gonna say, there’s so many questions outta here, but I wanna start with one little basic one.

There’ll be people that are sitting there listening and rolling their eyes when they hear Bitcoin and crypto and finding it all too hard to understand and thinking, ah, it’s not real. It’s all gonna come crashing down. What do you say to, to those people, to who may be just it, and it may just be ignorance or it may be a genuine fear of it.

Yeah, I think often they haven’t done, they haven’t spent the time like to learn it. I honestly believe everyone is going to need to learn about Bitcoin at some stage in their professional life. And the reason why is because every reserve currency of the world. Back, whether it was like in Roman times or whether it was English Times when they were dominant, or right now it’s been the US time, but every reserve currency of the world at some stage has dropped off.

And what’s happening right now is you’ve got. All the governments, nearly all the governments of the world are broke. So the Australian government has like roughly $1.3 trillion worth of debt. That means that they’ve spent $1.3 trillion more than they’ve earned. So that’s like you going crazy on your credit card and then having to use more credit cards to pay it off.

The US government is $27 trillion, and so it’s such a big number now that they have no way of ever paying it off. So they just print money to keep paying, yeah, to keep paying their debt. But what happens is if governments keep printing money forever, then the real purchasing power of that money it doesn’t really store value like it used to.

And so if you go to the grocery store with $200, you don’t get as many groceries as you used to, or $500,000 for a house doesn’t get you into a house anymore, that kind of thing. But it, if you, that’s with resources like. Paper money that’s getting printed by governments, but then if you, that’s what you call soft money.

If you then go to hard money resources like Bitcoin, because it has a limited supply of 21 million, it can never be changed, or gold could be considered. Similarly, because it’s got a very limited supply. What happens with those sorts of resources is as the governments of the world print more and more money, those things keep going up and up in value, and their purchasing power goes greater and greater.

So say for example, if you go back 10 years ago, you might’ve been, it might’ve cost. 30,000 Bitcoin to be able to buy a house. And then right now it might be three or four Bitcoin to buy a house. And if you fast forward another two years, it might be 0.4 Bitcoin to buy a house. So because of that limited supply, I think with Bitcoin, the way I look at it is it’s just digital gold.

It’s a, it’s got value because people want it. Okay. And then I look at is the world going more digital or less digital and the world is going more digital. And that’s like with, yeah, like with the AI stuff, with the tech investing, is the world going more AI or less? That’s the way I think about it.

And a really, for the average person or the average business owner, it is the greatest opportunity, in my opinion, to build real wealth because you’re already working, you’re doing your business. But if you just save it in cash, it’s going down in real purchasing power over time. Whereas at least if you save it in Bitcoin, it’s going up in real purchasing power over time.

It’s life changing once you understand it, but you’ve gotta really spend the time to go down that rabbit hole and learn it. But it’s amazing. I’m not very excited about it, but passionate about the subject. I think, I think it’s it’s quite refreshing actually to, to hear someone in business talking about it in the way that you are.

And I think that’s the interesting thing about it as well, is that it’s been this thing that is sitting almost. Independent of business, it’s felt but it’s starting to integrate into businesses more and more, isn’t it? Yes. The whole idea of utilizing the blockchain and I don’t think we are yet at the point where crypto’s becoming a currency that people are using no to pay.

To pay for products and services, but there’s going to be a time when that will happen. Sure. But certainly utilizing the technology behind it all, which is the blockchain is becoming more and more advanced and more and more businesses are getting involved at different levels.

Absolutely, and I think a lot of people don’t understand what a blockchain is as well. So in the simplest form, if we think about it’s effectively just a big digital ledger. So imagine I’m now, it’s now 19 hundreds, and I pull my ship into port. And I sell to you bananas and I buy from you apples, that would those, that entry would go into a ledger, a logbook.

So effectively a blockchain is just a big ledger, but there’s multiple nodes on the network and they all have to verify, yes, this transaction is correct. About sold this, bought that. And traditional databases that, for example, Google has and Facebook has, et cetera, those become honeypots for hackers where they, it’s a one centralized source and.

Hackers go after it. And how many times have you seen this company lost your data? This company lost your data, that kind of thing. It happens all the time. But if you look at Bitcoin, it’s the first technology in history that’s never had a software update. So if you think about Microsoft brings out a piece of code, they were patching it all the time to stop hackers.

So Bitcoin is worth $2.2 trillion. Something to that effect. And it’s never been hacked. And the reason why is because the amount of power that it would take to hack it is ridiculous. Like more than it takes to power the New York City sort of thing. And because every node on the network has to verify Yes, that is a real transaction in they don’t agree, then it doesn’t, yeah.

Then it doesn’t get written in. So the security of it is yeah. Is amazing. They call it getting orange peeled. And I just think even if you only got one thing out of our call here today, which was like. Just start learning more about that because that one thing can unlock a whole bunch of wealth in your life.

I’ve made so many crypto millionaires in my life, and something just takes, one idea and kind of to, to get it that aha, and then it can be life changing from there. Tell me about the investing side of things in terms of a business, because you’re doing you, you’re doing things Yes.

Investing in Yes. In crypto and the like and Bitcoin. But what about the business side? What makes you want to invest in particular businesses? You talked about e-commerce and things at the moment. Why are they the obvious places to go for you? Yeah I’ve primarily, when I was working as a growth hacker, so a growth hacker is an individual who scales companies and then does a profit win, share, win-win with the business owners.

So by make a gain, then we’re share in that. So that was like how I ended up working in multiple businesses and getting shares in businesses. But, and then. Some of those, like the travel companies then became an owner. That’s like how that piece has happened. But then as far as investing in businesses, whether it’s with through my company or through my personal or through my superannuation, that has just really been about that whole wing, like knowing where the technology was going.

So think you spoke about e-commerce. Shopify is a great example. The clear winner. Amazon is another example. Clear winner. So just that’s the lens that I look at everything is this the category winner, number one or two in its category? Yes. Then I’ll put money in it, and then I’ll write it long term, because when the.com boom happened, I knew Facebook was a winner.

I knew Google was a winner. I knew Amazon was a winner, but I wasn’t smart enough. Back then to know, yes, I’m using these tools and they’re amazing, but to buy their stock and hold them over a 10 year or 12 year period, I’d be a lot wealthier now if I had that wisdom, but I didn’t. But now that I’m 50 and I’ve been through that cycle, the same thing’s happening all over again.

History’s repeating itself and, but right now it’s happening with ai. So technology that’s AI enabled and it’s also happening with blockchain. So by just learning those two areas for business owners, that’s. Really the greatest wealth unlocked that I can see because business is getting harder. The cost of traffic, the more competition.

Yeah, business is getting harder, but investing is getting easier, so that’s why I do a combination of both. But dual black belt. Get your black belt in business, get your black belt in investing. I love that because it’s such a, you’re absolutely right. It is getting harder and harder in business. And it’s, and particularly in a time when you talk about ai, ai, which is supposed to make life easier, just creates another layer of complexity for business and the most businesses now, there’s an expectation of the response rates being quicker and the level of sophistication of which you’re supposed to be able to respond is.

Greater because the AI that’s come into the equation has become, okay, everyone’s just using an ai, which is not actually the case that everyone is, but that is the, that is a lot of the expectation and owners that’s been put on businesses. So how do you in the businesses that you talk to and along the way, how do you manage that kind of expectation around AI and where they should be in terms of investing in their own business, in those kinds of tools?

Yeah, we are finding it to be a great unlock and a significant advantage with technology. If you, as it comes along you can either lean into it, meaning embrace it and I, maybe I don’t understand everything about it, but I’m gonna learn it. Or you can do like what you were talking about with the Bitcoin and the blockchain where people are like, Hey, it’s just too hard for me.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. History has proven that effectively. Those that lean in and say, you know what, I don’t know it, but I’m gonna learn it. Those people generally win. The risk with AI is if you don’t learn it, if you don’t embrace it, you run the risk of being rolled by it. Like having your job replaced or your business being irrelevant, that kind of thing.

If I look at what I, we do with our travel companies, all our ads now, all the images are created by ai, so like the, all the banner ads for Facebook, et cetera. A lot of the video ads are created by Google VO three, which is a video ad it’s a video content tool, and we u use that for video ads at GBT.

We use for everything from writing sales copy to. How do we connect this to that? Just like asking it questions. So we use that like really on a day-to-day basis. And then even our developers now are using tools that help them to write their code and. Basically get their jobs done quicker.

Even my executive assistant, I, and unfortunately I had to put her off recently because there was no more work anymore. And the, this came about because of a $12 a month AI tool. There’s an AI tool called Whisper Flow, and you just hold down the function key on your computer and you talk to your computer and it turns it into type text for you.

Whisper flow is spelled WIS. PR and then flow. It is a very big deal because you spend hours a day typing and then if you just change that habit and you just hold down that function key, you talk to it, you let it up, and it types automatically for you, and it’s got it under, it’s got AI in it understands your intent.

So if I said, if I held that function key down and I said, Hey Anthony, how are you to meet on Tuesday at three? No, let’s make it four o’clock. It’ll write a message. Hey Anthony, how are you? For me at Tuesday at four, like it’ll really figure out what you wanted to say. So just by doing all that, I wasn’t drowning in emails and SMS and all this kind of stuff anymore.

And so I said, I’m happy you to stick around, but there’s no work anymore sort of thing. And basically that one AI tool effectively got rid of my executive assistant. It is very powerful if you embrace it. And that concept of lean in, I think leaning out and saying this is not for me, is a very dangerous game I believe.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s the thing is it’s leaning in and knowing where to go. And I think that’s the challenge for a lot of businesses is where do you start? And you’ve given a great tool there as a bit of advice on something that people can use. And, I think people get swallowed up by this, chat, GP T’s got the name right, that’s the one that everyone talks about, but it’s not necessarily the be all and end all.

And it’s not necessarily where you should start or even go depending on what your business is. Yeah we do use it more than anything else I would say. Chat, GBT, but obviously Google’s got Gemini and there’s Claude and there’s other ones out there, so it doesn’t have to be that one, but it is pretty amazing for $20 a month.

The way I look at it is it’s effectively like an assistant that I can ask. Very intelligent. Assistant that I can ask anything to. And I think learning how to prompt it better is a, is an area that’s like worth spending time at because it’s that whole Geico, garbage in, garbage out. If you don’t ask it good questions, you may not get good answers out of it.

So being able to you to use that. I think on the, IM on the image side is amazing. I know you used the script, which is a video editor that’s very smart, like ai, where you’re just modifying words in, in the transcript and trimming things out. So it really is a game changer if you get this area right.

And I think everything starts with education, whether it’s the business growth stuff you and I have talked about, whether it’s the blockchain, the AI technologies, it all really starts with one, that desire to, Hey, I’m going to, I have a mindset of a top 1%. So okay, I’m going into this. Except for sport, I’m absolutely rubbish.

But if it’s not sporty, it’s like these intellectual sports are like, okay, how am I gonna be top 1% of this? What do I need to learn? Who do I need to become? And I think that mindset and emotional intelligence, just to the resilience, just keep going, keep learning, keep trying and testing different things out.

I’ve tried a heap of different AI tools and a lot of them I’ve got rid of. And then I’ve just come back to a. A core set, so just embrace it. But really starting with the education, keeping going on that and intact a little bit the collective, talk to me about that. I love the name in itself because the, that, that whole, idea of bringing everyone together and that consciousness of doing that talk to me about what.

It is and the logic behind it all. Thing, so after the agency, we morphed to an. A coaching model and we’ve been doing it for eight years and it’s really worked well. So the, I you’re a hundred percent spot on with the name, the Collective ’cause the idea was that the collective intelligence of the group is greater than any one individual.

So when we do masterminds and we get together like four times a year everyone will get up the front at one stage and they’ll have the hot seat and they’ll get up and explain a problem or an opportunity in their business. And sometimes they’re gonna go down one path. But then the rest of the group says, Hey, it’s maybe not so great, have you thought about this?

So sometimes what comes out of it is like really great options for a different way to go, or they just avoid going down the wrong rabbit hole, which I think we’ve all done. Do you know what I mean? Which is a six month rabbit hole. And then before you have to say, Hey next and move on. But the other thing is just wicked fun.

So hanging out with like your fun to hang out with because you and I have similar mindsets, like we think the same, we both. Wanna see people succeed, but not everyone in society wants to see other people succeed. So it’s hanging out with other positive like-minded people. And then we basically look at businesses as far as, okay, there’s a chain of conversion, so I’m a growth hacker.

For businesses in there, I’d look at their business and say, okay, how can we. More traffic. How can we get more awareness? How can we then get more leads? How can then we get more and then what I call the profit triad? Three things. How do, how can we get more customers? How can we get them spending more, and then how can we get them coming back again?

If you can get those couple of things happening together, then that really grows the business. And then how can we drive more profit? And often profit isn’t necessarily about growing more profit is often about how can we reduce our expenses? Because if we earn a thousand dollars, that’s not a thousand dollars profit because we might have cost of goods and taxes and all that, so we might only really make three or $400 on that a thousand dollars.

But if we can reduce our expenses by a thousand, that’s a thousand dollars worth of profit. So we look at all that and then really focus on cash flow. And then from that B plus I, how do we then grow the investing and then. Work on how do we inject more fun into it? So building that amazing life resume.

So like in two weeks, a couple of weeks time, I’m off to Queenstown and we’re gonna do a business mastermind there, but we’re also going snowboarding together, that kind of thing. And the, ideally, if you can do some of these fun things using the business, then that’s even better, like more tax tax friendly, so to speak.

So how do you build an amazing life resume with a couple of really cool things through the year? But not just that really, like through your week or through your month, what are fun things like I literally schedule surfing and free time in my diary. I manage my time in such a way, and this is how I, what I teach people to do so that you’re not doing meetings in the morning, you are keeping that time so that you can work on what’s the most important thing you need to do in the mornings.

And then you help people and that kind of stuff and work in the business. In the afternoon, I try to keep my Thursdays and my Fridays free. I teach other people how to do this as well so that I think everyone you’ve met, a business owner where they’re just always busy, always swamped. But if you look at my diary, it’s.

Not really that bad. Like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday afternoons. I’ve got things on, but the rest of it’s clear. And then I’ve taught my team how, and I teach others as well, how to do like this self-managing team. So I use Monday, the project management. It’s a visual like project management tool, and anyone can project manage with it because green equals done, yellow means it’s in progress, and then red means there’s a problem and then you have comments beside it.

And we give it priority orders. And then with the teams, I’ve taught them how to do that. But with all my teams, I meet with them at the start of the week and then I meet with ’em later in the week. And if you go back to school, if your homework was due tomorrow, you’ve gotta scramble and get it done right?

So by meeting with the team at the start of the week and everyone knows their priorities and they let me know if there’s any questions. They know come Thursday we’re going through that exact same list again, so they don’t want me to get up to their thing and they haven’t done anything on it. So the whole, like one of my business partners said, Greg, you’re the only guy I know who runs multiple companies.

That doesn’t do anything. But it’s not about that I don’t do much myself. I’ve just very good at teaching people and getting people to do what they need to do and empowering them so that they hit their deadlines. Don’t get me wrong. If there’s a lot of things due, we’ll meet more regularly. But as a general rule, Monday and Thursday and everything just gets done without me having to get involved, which is awesome.

And so I help people to get their life back, with that, which means you have more time to record podcasts with people like me. Absolutely. Which is the fun stuff. It is, yeah. I do enjoy it. I do enjoy that. And also just get out and about. And like health, I’ve been really like focusing on the biohacking and the.

Health, because I think health is wealth. And so if we’re all work, that’s not great for us. So what can we do to look after the body? How can we slow down the aging? How can we keep lean, all these kinds of things. So spend time on some of those things as well. Couple last things just to wrap things up.

One of those is ’cause I’m fascinated because what you’re doing is effectively a lot of mentoring of people. Yeah. Who do you classify then as your mentors? Over the years I’ve had many for, I was traveling from Australia to the US four times a year for five years. And primarily it was in the marketing space initially where I was going to business and marketing masterminds.

And while I still am in one or two of those now I spend more of my time on the in investing side. So on the business side, I had coaches like. Ryan Deis and Frank Kern. So these are famous marketers. Ezra Firestone was my coach. I was in Russell Brunson’s Mastermind Perry Belcher. So all these kinds of big marketers.

And in Australia, mal Emery was an another one for me. I’ve always invested in that side. And then now it’s probably more online where I’m learning the investing. I think if you know the right areas to go, then YouTube is amazing. I learn a lot from YouTube now, and I learn a lot from TikTok actually as well by training the algorithm so that it’s not just showing me girls dancing it’s now showing me, like I still do enjoy that, don’t get me wrong.

But yeah, I want to feed the brain as well. So using it. As a business tool where you teach it, Hey, I’m interested in AI and the te a whole bunch of AI coaches. I’m interested in blockchain, I’m interested in, so by what searches you give it and what likes and like you can train the algorithm so it just gets better and better.

So I learn a lot that way. I think that is such an important tip, by the way to people that you do have to train the algorithm. And I, I was only commenting to someone this morning because of some stuff that I’ve been doing. I looked at my feed on one particular platform and went, it’s just rubbish.

Ah the people that are, that I’m getting stuff in from are not a value to me. And I know why it’s happened and how it’s happened, but actually then. Untraining that and training what you want to do, it requires a bit of effort. And I think that’s one of the points too, that we often just sit there and feel like we’re at the mercy of of these social media platforms, but you can train them to start finding what you.

Need to be seen. Agreed. Because I think social media is morphing now to what’s called interest media. If you think about your feeds, often, it’s not really a, it used to start off about, Hey, what are your friends doing? And that kind of thing. You still see a little bit of that, but not as much as you see.

For example, you’re really into podcasting and broadcast and all that kind of stuff. So you’ll see a lot of folks that are exactly in your market. Whereas I’ll see a lot of folks that are exactly in my market ’cause that’s what you are interested in. The good thing about it is like for people who then want to be on this content creation side, there’s never been a better time to put your message in front of the exact right target market because AI makes it easier to edit and to.

Get your message in front of the exact right people with these interest media and the way that the world is going with the transition on search. So historically it’s been Google search and then now it is changing more to chat GBT and other large language models, their recommendation engines. So it’s not what you know anymore, it’s what you show.

So if you are not putting your expertise out into the world. You’re not going to be recommended by these large language models like chat, GBT. So I do think if you’re not doing any kind of amplifying your message, you do run the risk of decline in the future. Wow. There’s so much we could explore further, but we are running outta time.

I just wanna ask you one final question. Sure. That I like to ask all my guests, which is what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you? That you wish more people knew they were going to have? The aha moment really is that it’s a sliding door, so they don’t know they’re coming in for one thing and then their life changes in so many different directions.

I think my real superpower is helping people get their life back and transition business owners to transition into high net worth individuals. I don’t think there’s enough people teaching business owners, Hey, you’ve done all this work. You’re good at that. Keep doing that. Let’s rev it up. But how do we now make you a high net worth individual so that when you get to retirement or when you wanna slow down, you’ve got the money there to make those amazing choices in life.

That’s what I believe has been the ahas, and it’s been really cool. To be honest. I like, I leave a massive. Trail of change behind me in a good way. It impacted a lot of people’s lives and it’s it’s been very rewarding because now I’m not so much just about what can I get out of it. I needed that when I was young and I was hustling and I was broke, I think we all started off that way. Like I’m sure you’ve had times in your career as well where. Things are flying and other times when really not going so well. But yeah, now I’m coming out the other side of things. So it’s great to be able to have a positive impact on other people and really give them freedom by showing them how to get wealthy.

So that’s been pretty cool. Fantastic. I love it. And you’ve shared so much. There are so many little tips and things that people will have got through this episode, so I really appreciate it. We, of course, we’ll include in the show notes all the information and how to get in touch with you. But Greg, thank you so much for being an amazing guest on the program.

Oh, thank you so much, Anthony. I really enjoyed this. Your great host and awesome questioner. Fantastic. Thank you so much and to everyone listening in, don’t forget to subscribe and we’ll catch you next time on the next episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes.

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Holistic financial advice, why your business might be your best investment. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, where we deliver actionable insights to help you grow your business and influence. I’m your host Anthony Perl, and today I’m joined by Duncan Perkins, who is the owner of Tax Time Account.

And home loan essentials. And he brings a rare combination of expertise across banking, finance, broking accounting, and financial planning. And in this episode, Duncan reveals his innovative hub and spoke approach to financial services. Challenges the traditional investment mindsets and explains why your own business might be your best investment opportunity.

You’re going to discover why fitter financially could transform your wealth journey. So as we dive into this episode with Duncan, I want you to understand that here is a man. That owns multiple businesses is challenging the norm and is gonna make you think not just about his business and in terms of the financial side of things, but also the way you think about your business and your business model.

So get ready for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I have. A wonderful guest with me today, Duncan, who is gonna introduce himself in just a moment. But we are going to cover a whole range of topics here today from really from someone who has built multiple businesses and joined them in a unique way.

I’m gonna let Duncan reveal also Duncan, firstly, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. As we’d like to do, why don’t you start off by introducing yourself to everyone. Hello everyone. My name’s Duncan Perkins. I’m the owner of Tax Time Accountants and Home Loan Essentials and part owner of Bit of Financial Services.

And I suppose, how far back do we want to go? I started in this game back in 1984 when I left school and joined the bank and followed in my father’s footsteps. I stayed. A loyal bank officer all the way up until about 2000 when I escaped and was poached into the world of finance broking which I truly loved.

And I ran and set up my own company called Home Loan Essentials. And oh, I suppose one of the early forebearers of financial finance broking. It was fairly new to the industry in 2000, and then I rolled into, being convinced to buy an accounting practice by a mate of mine who was a financial planner.

And we set up an accounting practice. I, we didn’t set up an accounting, we bought an accounting practice and then I thought accounting can’t be that hard. So I then went off to university and turned that into a double degree in accounting and financial planning. And then I went into financial planning.

‘Cause I found finance and doing home loans. Not so challenging. Before the 2008 one of the requirements to get a home loan was you had to spell mortgage. And I think you could basically get yourself a home loan low dock loans and reverse mortgages and other things. I grew a little bit disillusioned and I went more into the financial planning and and the accounting and that’s where it’s leading me today.

So I. I’m one of those rare, I don’t know, rare accountants that have many hats and many degrees. And the, when a client sees me, they, from a simple tax return to a SME client they get the whole, they get the whole pitch. So they get lending, they get financial planning, they get they get taxation advice.

And I’ll probably even give them the future. Horse tips for the weekend as well which probably don’t get them anywhere. So anyway, so yeah that’s how I roll. I’ve got a staff of about four or five, and I’ve got I’ve outsourced some teams overseas. And yeah, just looking for my new challenge now, which is what I call getting fitter financially.

So I’m trying to write a book set up an app and trying to drag a few people along on the way and yeah. Just keep helping people, I that’s the bit I like, so I do everything. So anything to do with I love that. Yeah. I love that. It’s I guess that’s what I wanna ask you about from the start is that you’ve just pointed out a career path that.

Has multiple disciplines to it, because it’s not that common that people sit in. What is three different camps? The the mortgage, the financial management and the accounting side of things. There are three quite different disciplines in many respects. So how does that actually work in terms of keeping that under one umbrella?

Legally. Legally it doesn’t. There’s quite a conflict of interest. So if, and this I believe is one of the big problems with the profession in accounting in financial planning, and also in, in mortgage broking. The rats seem to scurry over to where they can find their most money.

And it seems to be at the moment in the, giving professional advice around property investment because you don’t need a financial planning license to give advice so much in regards to property. And so when I sit down with clients, I try and help them out from a holistic perspective. I’ve got a bit of a saying in that there’s skills, knowledge, and attitude.

Everyone’s got skills. So one plus one equals two. As a financial planner, they will sit there and they’ll try and build the client’s knowledge to understand what they. Feel is best for them to invest in. And so once they’ve got enough knowledge, then they understand that maybe one plus one equals three.

But it doesn’t matter. I find how much knowledge a person has. It’s the attitude that they have that doesn’t take them over the precipice to invest. And that was my great frustration from a financial planning perspective, is that I would sit there and work with clients to try and build their knowledge.

But if they had the attitude that property was the best investment, then it was very hard for them to consider anything else, like building up their superannuation or trying to reduce their tax or minimize tax and other things like that. So the frustration that I see at the moment is that financial planners wanna do financial planning.

Mortgage brokers, finance, financial finance brokers, they want to do property and get people in as much debt as they possibly can or arrange their debts and get the clients the best debt deal that they can. And then from an accounting perspective, from the tax agent’s perspective we tend to be, and this is no offense to any account out there, we tend to be very proactive in our.

Efforts and not oh, sorry. Very reactive in our efforts and not so proactive. And unfortunately the the way I see the industry going is that it’s very sec it’s very individualized. So if you want to know about property or lending or debt reduction or debt recycling or any of that type of thing, you’d need to talk to a mortgage broker.

’cause the financial planner. Connor says we don’t do, we don’t do lending, we don’t do finance. And then if you wanna know about I don’t know, negative gearing through, through property, the accountant will tell you how negative gearing works and capital gains tax works, but they won’t then broach the subject of finance.

And and then from finance planning perspective, how do you protect that? How do you ensure that? The financial planner would love to talk to you about all of those things, but then tends not to as well. So it’s, so where I look after the client is I try and help them out in all of those areas.

And then when the specific need arises I then bring in the financial planner or I bring in the accountant, or I bring in someone from my accounting team, or I bring in someone from the mortgage broking team. And a lot of the time I bring in lawyers as well. When you have a situation where you have a, we, we had a situation the other day where we had a gorgeous lady. She’s a client of ours. I’ve actually never met her before because we only ever dealt with her husband, but they’re going through a divorce and he’s 74 and she’s 73 years of age and. When you deal with a client that has multiple investment properties and residential property and superannuation and pension and kids and wills and estates and multi, different marriages and they’re going through a divorce.

So you have to bring in an accountant in regards to the investment properties you have to bring in. Finance a lot of the time. ’cause she wants to help the kids out in regards so when the divorce comes through, there’s a lot of money coming her way. So you gotta bring in finance broking, then you gotta bring in a lawyer, obviously because there’s a divorce there.

And then you’ve got probably two lawyers. One in regards to one in regards to the divorce, and then you’ve got another or family lawyer, and then you’ve got another lawyer a lot of the time involved in regards to the property sale. And then you’ve got a financial planner involved in there because at 73 years of age you’re talking pensions and superannuation and investments.

It really does get very messy and there’s no. Individual person that can rally the troops to to do all that, which that’s the bit I really enjoy. I don’t like getting down, doing singular things. I like to expand out and do it. And I think the industry is really calling out that.

I think one of the big spaces that the a big growth area is anything to do with the the baby boomer age. Anyone over 65 is a huge market. For financial planning, accountants, finance brokers, believe it or not. ‘Cause the bank of mom and dad and lawyers yeah, granny flats and all sorts of arrangements like that.

So it’s a massive space and a lot of people have concern over ai and I do as well. One of my staff, she’s a receptionist, she’s not a, she’s not an accountant, and I said to her, just type into ai, what is my capital gains tax. And AI actually worked out what capital gain tax would be on a, a fake sale of a purchase of a home, et cetera, et cetera.

So AI is a concern to me in the future. If you are a business that concentrates in one of the spokes of what I call the wheel, so if you look at a business like a hub and spoke, and you are the hub. You are the person of influence in the middle, and you’ve got all of your spokes to the side, which is accounting, financial planning fund.

If you concentrate on just that one thing, I think you’re in a bit of trouble from an AI perspective because it’s amazing what you can find out there in ai. So yeah, so I’m trying to change the way that the business operates into more of a holistic approach. So when someone comes in.

They, they have the option to get everything all types of help in regards to finance thrown at them. And I think a lot of practices are or should be looking at that type of model from here on in. Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack there. And I want to get into the shifting mindsets part of it, because you’ve touched on that in a few different areas, but I just wanna ask from the beginning bit, because it’s where we started the conversation.

How do you. Because of those, because those things traditionally and in, in some respects legally, you can’t pass from one to the other. That straightforward. How do you manage that process of having those different areas under, working together? Yeah I mentioned it before of a hub and spoke and it’s a concept that I’m trying to bring into the office.

So like a wheel of a push bike you, the center part is the hub and then you’ve got all of your spokes that push out from the side of it. And so the hub and spoke model that we would have at our office is normally kind of me in the middle. And then I’ll talk to a client, find out what their situation is.

So I’ll find out their their income, their alco, their equity in their home, their, how many kids they’ve got, how long they’ve been in the job. And then I’ll find out problems that they have that they don’t even know that they have, and I’ll work out solutions for those problems. Before they even knew that they had those problems.

So for example, I was talking to someone the other day and they don’t have wills, but they’re on their second marriage now and they’ve got two kids to their first marriage and the second marriage that he has, he’s got two kids, but he doesn’t have a will. But he’s got. He’s got a property business worth half a million dollars and he is got a home worth two and a half million and he doesn’t have a will.

So that’s where I then will move along that spoke and pass them on to a lawyer. But then I’ll also move along to the financial planner where that will need to speak to them. Yeah, so I work very much. As the hub and I may do, I’ll, I’ll do nothing to do with the will. I’ll do nothing to do with the financial cleaning, but I’ll direct the traffic.

So the client, I’m tending to find people want to tell their story once, and if there’s one person that they can talk to, that’s great. And then that one person can be the conductor of traffic or the ring master or whatever you wanna call ’em, the puppet master, or. And the shepherd and then they can then control what’s going on.

So we are doing a, we are doing a, we’re looking after a client at the moment. They came in and saw me about setting up a business, but we’ve found out that he’s got a property in joint names and his brother’s got a property in joint names, but one property is supposed to be in his name only, and the other property is supposed to be in his name.

The brothers his name only, and it was absolute mess. So we’re talking about capital gain tax. May actually have to happen. We’ve gotta do a private ruling in regards to tax. We’ve gotta line up a lawyer that sets up transfers to transfer both properties across. And that just came from a simple business conversation in regards to him setting up his business.

And so there’s no one individual that can look after all of that. You need to bring in a team and and AI is not gonna give you the answers for it. I think that there’s great opportunity, great potential out there in the accounting and finance space and financial cleaning and law, but not as, I don’t think as individuals.

So there’ll be some real changes coming in the case and that, so trying to get on, on, on front of it at the start and see where comes from. Yeah. And I think it’s such an interesting approach because building that relationship and then being able to, as you say, coordinate conduct the whole bit, bunch of different services and bring them all in through there, it does make a lot of sense for people and it’s interesting that’s not been a model that traditionally people have.

Built before it was a model. It was a model. It was a model for a very long time. And it was called your bank manager. Yes, of course. So back in the day when you had flowing hair down to your shoulders you had to, when you had to go for a loan, you had to walk into the bank and you saw the bank manager and you may had to make sure you had a shirt and tie on.

Brew cream in the Yeah I remember my dad talking to, talking about, I’m having, lunch with the bank manager, and that was a big deal that you were the one actually going to lunch with the bank manager, this mysterious person that could, make or break you in some respects.

Yeah. And so they they approved the loan. They had their own lending authority. They didn’t have to push it into a computer to get a result. They might have known your dad, and they said we know your dad and you’re a good character, so we’ll write the home loan for you.

And we know your employer and Mary out the front, she’s gonna look after you. She’s gonna prepare all the loan documents for you and John the solicitor down the road, he’s gonna look after the law the settlement software, and there’s an accountant next door. We’re going to introduce you to him.

And then internally we’ve got a financial planner, so he’s gonna look after and make sure that you’ve got insurances and other things like, and it was just like one thing after the other. And so that model was there. And I think everything old is new, so I think it’s actually gonna come back again.

The segregation of roles, but someone needs to take a slack. The bank doesn’t want take up financial business.

Just got a funny feeling that I think that the hub in most of the situation will be the finance person. So it’s the person that wrote your home loan for you or helped you out with your lending. They’re that person throughout the journey of your life. And I’ve got a funny feeling that the person of influence, the main person that people will go to for trust and advice will be the finance person.

If they. And the terminology that you’re using there, which is really interesting, is advice. And it’s, that comes because you can build a relationship with people and offer that. And we had a recent episode of Biz Bites for thought Leaders where we talked about the whole sort of advisory.

Arm, particularly for accountants in being, in, being built up. But what you’re talking about is a bit even more holistic than that because it’s across different disciplines. But it is that advisory thing, which is that human connection, which is completely the opposite of the AI approach, right?

That it is that human element of understanding and being able to manage where people should go because of an understanding of who they are and their situation. Great. Yeah. I said before, one of the big spaces is that 67-year-old and over throughout Australia, there has to be a lot of people in this situation where you have a single lady, 70 years of age, husband died 10 years ago $1.5 million home, 800 square meter property house built in 1975.

It’s now falling down around her. She’s got a full age pension, no money in the bank three kids in different parts of the state or even different parts of Australia. And she’s all alone and all she has is the local bowls club or her bridge club or the next door neighbor, but there’s no one else to help her.

So what, what hap what? How does that help come to that person? Is it a financial planner that helps that 60, 70-year-old lady? Is it the finance broker that helps her? Is it the accountant that helps her? Is it the lawyer that helps her? Or is it a builder that says, I can build a granny flat out the back of your property, but how are you gonna afford it?

Then that’s the finance person. But then the financial planner gets involved and says you can’t do that. So it just it’s a great market and it’s a great area to, to build in. And so yes, there’s no person that, no one person that can really give the advice and give the help there.

But, so if there’s any, if there’s any brokers out there that are listening to this or any accountants out there listening to this, you tell me the answer of who is the best person to look after old barrel that’s sitting in the house. As soon as something bad happens to her, there’s no one there to really help her.

And the kids dunno. Kids dunno how to talk. Yeah. And it’s interesting too because I’ve looked at this in terms of the marketing space. It’s not dissimilar to that sort of concept where you’ve got so many different disciplines and you’re trying to work out which is the right one for a business.

But it’s very similar, I think, in principle to the idea of, oh, medical support. You go to, you build a relationship with your local gp. They’re the people that. Understand your situation, your family history and your history and all of those things, but they’ll refer you to the knee surgeon or to the ear, nose and throat person or to whoever else it needs to be.

And they’ll still be there as a bit of a linchpin, but they’re not the person that’s going to do the surgery on your knee, but. They’ll help you understand perhaps what the implications of it are as part of it. So I think it’s a natural gravitation towards what you’re thinking about, and I think part of it is because of the specialties have grown, even more niched than perhaps they were in the past.

Yeah. So with all of this said and done, I’m gonna come back to this idea of mindset shift because you’ve talked about needing to shift mindsets of firstly. Clients and people that are coming out there to, to what might be possible because you, lots of people have a bias towards a certain thing, depending on how they’ve grown up.

So I’ve gotta invest all my money in property. I’ve or I’ve gotta put all my money in shares. It tends to be coming in, in that way. You’ve gotta a mindset shift in, in in the industry as well, in this whole idea of being able to work together. So how do you actually go about that?

Concept of changing people’s mindsets. Yeah. So it it comes back to skills, knowledge, and attitude. As I said before, one plus one equals two, and then you build your knowledge and then you find out that one plus one equals actually three. But again, if you don’t have the confidence or the skills to then take you to that next step, which is that leap of faith Zig Ziglar, I can’t remember his exact quote, but it, if you build your, there’s no point having attitude if you don’t have the aptitude, but once you have the attitude your income will create altitude or something like that. So too many big words there for me, but I’ve really seen it over the years is that and so what I try and do with people is there’s.

There’s a question that I say to people if I gave you a hundred thousand dollars today, so great Aunt Lords passed away and you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars coming your way, would you invest that based on an informed decision, or would you simply invest it on an educated guess?

Yeah. You know what that’s an interesting thing of even defining what the difference is Yeah. Between those two. So most people say an informed decision. They go an informed decision is that you don’t want to make an educated guess on something because that’s gambling, that’s punting.

Yeah. And my, my, my advice to clients is you’re best off spending that money or using that a hundred thousand dollars from an educated guess. So my my, my frustration, is that an informed decision, you take that a hundred thousand dollars. Think about property. So you go, okay we’ll talk to buyer’s agents from the real estate agents.

We’ll have a look at REIQ. We’ll find out what’s going on in the market. We’ll have a look at the local sales. We’ll go to a few options, we’ll see what’s going on. You’ll speak to a real estate agent, you’ll speak to a finance broker, and what they’ll do is they will give you a heap of information for you to make a decision.

So there’s your informed decision there, and that decision or the information that they give you is for them. A lot of the time for them. So they’re not going you go to real estate and they’re gonna tell you about equity markets. They’re not gonna tell you about dollar cost averaging into ETFs.

They’re not gonna tell you any of that. Then you go, I got a hundred thousand here. Now I’m gonna go and talk to a financial planner. They’re not gonna tell you about real estate. They’re not gonna tell you about negative gearing into property and other things like that. Investing in mining towns or self-managed super fund invest, they’re not gonna tell you any of that, right?

They’re going to give you information for you to make a decision based on what they think is best for you, but what’s best for you. Go out and build your own education. So there’s a lot of people that are self-employed that I’ve dealt with over the years, and they wanna buy investment properties.

And I say, you put a hundred thousand dollars down as a deposit into an investment property, but what for? You’ve got a great business here, but it’s struggling. You don’t have a tax problem, so you don’t need negative viewing. You don’t need an investment. You’ve still got a home loan and you want to go and take equity outta your home loan and put it in.

Why? Fomo, probably fear of missing out. So I say to them, if you put $50,000 into your business. What would that return for you? So a big question is that it’s return on investment. People don’t understand a return on investment. So once you can start getting them thinking differently it’s changing that mindset.

It’s getting the, to look at things differently and it’s then they can make an educated guess on what they can do with them. And there’s so many, look, there’s so many small business people. It was the young fellow I spoke to the other day. He came in and he said, what do I need to do? Do I need to do a business plan?

How much money should I put into the business? And I said, stop. He said, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to tell me what you need to live off on a monthly basis. I need you to tell me how much you need to take outta your business on a monthly basis. Then we can work on how much money your business needs to earn until we do that.

And so many people. They go into their bank, they go into their lenders. They go for a loan and they all talk about what your business earns, but they never ask you what do you need to earn? And so we keep doing things as a society as a whole based on people tell us that we should do, and a lot of the times that they need to look at things differently.

So there’s a saying in the. In the buyer’s agent world, I suppose you might call it, or the real estate world positive gearing. You’ve heard of that saying, obviously that property is positively geared. It’s actually not even a, it’s not even an investment term. It’s not something that we use in the accounting world.

It’s in financial management, we use the term, what’s the return on investment. We don’t care if it’s positive geared or negative geared. If it’s negative geared fantastic, we still wanna know what the return on the investment is. And you know that most of the return on investment in property investment is 5% gross per rent.

It’s no better. And it’s a lot of people might be sitting there saying, oh no, mate, you’re an idiot Duncan. I bought a property for a hundred thousand dollars and it’s giving me $10,000 a year rent now. So that’s a 10% returnable money. That’s not true. You’re actually only getting a 5% return on your investment because the value of that asset has increased so much that if you sold it today, you would get enough money to basically say, oh, it’s giving me a 5% return on investment.

And so this positive and negative and avoiding tax, it’s it’s like I wanna change the mindset of people. And it’s so damn, remember the saying years ago about, there’s a guy walking along the beach and there’s all of these starfish laying there dying because the tide cat went out so fast.

Remember that one and the guy’s walking along? Yes. Yes. And he’s picking up these starfish and he’s throwing ’em back into the water and someone goes, said, you’re an idiot mate. He said, why are you doing what? There’s so many, there’s millions of starfish here. What are you doing? He said it made a difference to that one.

And all I’m trying to do is get the message out there to people, to, stop making your investments based on an informed decision and start making an educated guess. And then that changes your attitude as well. Yeah, once you build enough confidence in yourself, you can actually go out there and do a few things, but yeah look at things differently.

And that’s what I’m trying to do. And, I’ve got that saying fitter. Because getting fitter financially is the same as getting fitter. Physically I think I might’ve mentioned that to you once before, is that fitter stands for Finance, insurance, taxation, trusts, estate and Retirement Planning.

A bit of an acronym in there, but that’s all of the things that we have in our life and we are not very fitting financially. One of these days I’ll get a book out and that’s what it’s gonna be called, getting Fitter Financially. But it talks about all of those things in it.

Yeah, I’ll try and get that out there. One, one of these days. We look forward to that. And but I think that there’s so much in what you are saying and there’s this difference between, informed and educated guests. And a part of that is a bias that we all have because of the way we’ve been brought up.

It’s, we are influenced by the people around us. And some people, as I said before, some people will be saying property is the way to go. And they’ve got that bias built into them, and so getting them to actually shift and go, is there another opportunity here?

Because part of the interesting thing about the loan stuff that you talked about as well is that the questions you get asked are about what’s happening historically, but they don’t really look at what are the possibilities and the possibilities of what can drive a business is where the game changing stuff happens and being able to invest, as you say, potentially in your own business because of the possibilities is a different way of thinking.

Yeah. So one of, one of the things that frustrates me is, and it’s a great sales tip, so if you hear it out there, it’ll be around about self-managed super funds. So the easiest way to sell a self-managed super fund is easiest way to sell anything is sell on fear. So if you are trying to sell a car to someone and you wanna sell the more expensive car you sell on fear.

If you wanna sell insurance, you sell on fear. If you want to set up a very complex accounting structure, now a company is trustee for a trust and beneficiaries and you’re rolling back to a corporate, if you wanna sell that, you sell on fear, which is sad, but. That’s a sales tip 1 0 1 for all you people out there.

It’s taught by so many business coaches, by the way. There’s this, the fear of missing out of that. If you wait to in to do this, whatever it is that is being sold to you, then you are going to be further behind. Yeah. Fear of missing out in six months time. So again, so you still on fear?

Yeah. So the, one of the, one of the big ones that I’ve seen is in the superannuation. So you go along to a SP Bruker seminar. They tell you about your superannuation and they say you’ve got your superannuation. It’s in a dirty old industry fund. It’s not doing any good for you. And again, you’ve got no control.

Now control is an awesome word, right? So once you are told that you have no control over your money, you then go right. And they go, you shouldn’t have you. You want control over your money, you now need a self-managed super fund. Do you know how complex it is to look after a self-managed super fund and to be the trustee of a self-managed super fund?

It’s flaming hard. And but what they do is they say to you, now you’ve got control over your money. Now you can take it out of there, which was earning you 8% or doing quite well for you, and now you’re gonna put it in a self-manage super fund and you’re gonna put it in property. You’re gonna get a loan against that.

So you’ve gotta set up a bear trust and it’s very complex. And it doesn’t ever work out very well. And now you’ve gone down to a 5% return and there’s all sorts of arguments for and against it, but you’ve now got 100% of your money and you’ve got control over it. Congratulations. The problem is you don’t have control over the market that money is in.

So to give you an example, if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares and you don’t like what Commonwealth Bank are doing in China, good luck. What’s the point of your a hundred thousand dollars? Where is your power to make change? You’ve got no control over the market that your money is in.

Whereas a large super industry super fund that has, I don’t know, a billion dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares, they actually do have a little bit of control over the market. They have a little bit of control over what Commonwealth Bank does in China. So don’t be fooled that you have control over your money.

It’s the control over the market that you invest in. And so if you’re self-employed, Anthony, how much. Control do you have over the money that’s invested in your own business? A hell of a lot. Yeah so if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in Commonwealth Bank shares, ideally having that through a big industry fund is simpler and easier to do.

If you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars invested in the property market, it’s an investment. How much control do you have over the property market? Little to none. But how much control do you have over what you do with your property that you live in? Probably a fair bit. So and how much control do you have over your own business?

Oh a lot. You make the decisions of how many staff you’ve put on, which, what more capital that you need to inject into it and other things like that. Yeah, changing that mindset is very important. But people don’t, and people don’t do it because. Where’s the money in it for the accountant to tell you that?

Where’s the money in it for a financial planner to tell you to invest in your own business? Where’s the money in it? For a finance broker to tell you to not buy an investment property, but to invest money into your own business? There is no money in it for those businesses to tell you to invest in yourself.

Where’s the money? Where’s the money in it? For a financial planner to tell you to go out and educate yourself or spend, I don’t know, educate yourself more so that you can get that promotion within the job that you’re doing at work. There’s no money in it for the financial planner to tell you that.

So these advisors and these trusted advisors that are out there. Including myself, you’ve gotta remember there’s no money in it for them to tell you the right thing that might be right for you. A lot of the time they’re telling you the right thing. That’s probably right. More so for them. So ask any financial planner what their largest investment is.

Ask any accountant what their LA owner of a business, what their largest investment is, and I guarantee. It won’t be in the share market, it won’t be in property. If it’s a real estate agent, it won’t be in property. If it’s a finance broker, it will be in their own businesses every time. And you can’t invest in your own business without investing in your own education.

So there’s my tip. Boy the Beast. The best investment you can ever make is in your own business. And you can’t invest, or you shouldn’t invest in your own business without investing in your own education. So we come back to that full circle, educated guess and just keep building your education in whatever you’re doing.

If you wanna be, if you wanna be a great landscaper, that’s great, but keep educating yourself and some of the best education you’ll ever have to invest in yourself. And you would be agreeing with this. I would say a hundred percent is invest in understanding how to sell, because I think 80% of what I do is having to sell to, to move them from that knowledge point to the attitude and changing the attitude.

And that’s a lot of that is selling. It’s getting them to take the lead. Absolutely. And yeah, and it starts with, as you say, starts with the education side of things and and building the relationship with people over a period of time as well. And that. That period of time might be, days, it might be months, it might be years in some cases.

But being able to invest in that and keep educating your audience on a consistent basis is such an intrinsic part of business and indeed why you stand out as well. Why they should come to you versus. Why they should go to the next person. All of those things Yeah. Are so important. And it is, as you say, it’s a, it’s the, it’s part of a marketing, sales environment that you need to create for your business, regardless of what industry you’re in.

Yeah. And look, every industry that you’re in, doesn’t matter if you you’re a landscaper or you’re a lawyer you, you have to sell it. You have to understand your client and, yeah, marketing, selling it’s very important. But to do that, you have to keep educating yourself as well.

One of the some some of the best lessons that I’ve learned in life are from failure. One of the, one of the things that I learned years ago from a mate of mine, and I didn’t end up writing a loan for him, but he did ring me and he said, don’t. A tip for you all, every person that ever wants to talk to you, all they want to hear is yes.

They don’t wanna hear no, they don’t wanna hear about all of the different products out there. They just wanna hear. Yes. And once you say yes to them then it’s on, right? Then they’ll listen to you. So that was, even though I never wrote the business for him, I’ve written a lot of business just from that one little tip.

And that was a great piece of education. I never got that outta a textbook or anything. I got that from him. I put lending and taxation and anything to do with finance. I put it down to that good looking girl at school that you want to have a dance with or you want to take to the school formal.

Why don’t, or why didn’t you ask that girl to dance with you, Anthony? Why didn’t you, why didn’t you? Yeah. It’s because the fear of no, the fear of rejection, the fear of being made with the fool. Yeah. And so the same thing happens in regards to taxation and finance and financial planning. People don’t like to be made to look silly.

They don’t like rejection. So the first thing you’ve gotta do if you are in this space or any business really is understand that the person that you are talking to doesn’t know what you know. And if you make them feel inferior or uneducated you’ve lost them. And so if.

Don’t feel that a no is the best thing to say to a person. It’s never the best thing. It’s maybe not now, maybe one day, but yes is always the first. That’s yes, is what people want to hear. Take me to the dance. Yeah. I’ve enjoyed this dance that’s for sure, Duncan. And it’s been a lot. It’s been very revealing and there’s so many great takeaways from all of this, but I, we need to wrap things up and I want to ask you, the question that I do ask all of my guests on the podcast is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

It’s when they, the aha moment for me is not when I know that they’re listening and they’re going to take to the next step is when they they stop having, they stop. They start off sitting there with their arms folded and it’s when they unfold their arms and they lean forward, that’s when I know the aha moment for them.

We’re gonna take this further and yeah. And I just tell ’em what the journey is and then I just stay on the journey with them, so whichever, which way that goes. Yeah, keep them on the path. For people that are listening into this podcast, I’ve been leaning in the majority of this time, that’s for sure.

But. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Duncan, thank you so much for being a part of the Biz Bytes for thought leaders program. I really appreciate you coming onto the show. No problems. Happy to be here. Happy to be here. And of course, we will include all the information on how to get in contact with Duncan in the show notes.

Thank you everyone for listening in. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave your comments and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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