A healthy work environment is essential for any business that wants to increase their overall efficiency and happiness. Geoffrey Wade, the founder of Onirik, joined Josh for a deep dive about psychological safety at work. (more…)
Autocorrect can go straight to he’ll.
Heard of that new band 1023 Megabytes? They’re good but don’t have a gig just yet.
Why can’t Microsoft employees relax? Because they’re always on Edge.
What kind of computer sings the best? A Dell.
Why do programmers prefer dark mode? Because light attracts bugs.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
Why shouldn’t you fart in an Apple store? They don’t have Windows
Why are iPhone chargers not called Apple Juice?!
Where did the software developer go?! I don’t know, he ransomware!
Discover valuable business tips and insights from successful entrepreneurs, coaches and industry leaders. Thrive in today’s competitive business landscape!
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A healthy work environment is essential for any business that wants to increase their overall efficiency and happiness. Geoffrey Wade, the founder of Onirik, joined Josh for a deep dive about psychological safety at work. (more…)
We all need money in business to survive, and Aimee LaLiberte from My Virtual CFO joined Josh to talk about what a money mindset is, how to change your money mindset, and making sure that you are healthy with the way that you’re thinking about earning money. (more…)
There are so many ways to run a business, and there may be other ways to do it that you’ve never thought about before. Samantha Dean from BlueprintHQ tells us more about the innovative revenue model. (more…)
A systematic approach in business is a methodical and organised way of approaching business tasks and decision-making. By defining processes, breaking down tasks into smaller components, and establishing procedures and protocols to ensure consistency and efficiency, businesses operate in a more effective and efficient manner.
Ken Lundin joined Josh to share his expertise about having a systematic approach to business and tips on how to further optimise your business. (more…)
Finding the ideal clients in business is an essential step in building a successful and profitable company. By identifying and targeting these ideal clients, you can focus your efforts and resources on the most promising prospects, increase your chances of closing sales, and build long-lasting, profitable relationships with your customers.
Paul Kennedy from PGV Consulting joined Josh to talk about all things regarding growing your client base. (more…)
Hiring a business lawyer is a crucial step that most companies will have to take at some stage. Having a qualified legal professional on your side can provide a multitude of benefits, from protecting your company’s interests and assets to offering guidance on complex legal issues. Whether you’re starting a new business, expanding into new markets, or dealing with legal disputes, a business lawyer can provide the expertise and support you need to succeed.
Katie Richards is a commercial solicitor passionate about systematisation and efficiency who is the CEO at Law on Earth. She joined Josh to talk about why and when you should hire a business lawyer and all the tips and tricks that you need to know.
Improving your business strategy is a fundamental aspect of making your business better. It helps your company stay competitive, adapt to changes in the market, and achieve its goals and objectives. Jason Button from JB Strategic is a business strategy expert who has a strong background in government and private sector experience as well as in stakeholder management. Jason joined Josh to discuss how every business can improve their strategy so they can continue to grow and succeed in the long term. (more…)
You might be wondering why customers sometimes love you and sometimes don’t. Floris Blok from Blok Business Consulting is a customer experience expert who took the time to sit down with Josh and talk about the customer journey, the customer experience, and what it all means. Read on or listen to the Business Built Freedom podcast below to learn how to improve and measure customer experience, and what to do if you feel overwhelmed.
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Are you wondering how you can find grants, funding and support programs from the government to help your small business grow and succeed? You have amazing ideas and you know you can succeed in business if only you can get funding. Or your business has been growing and it’s time to expand. You can apply for a business grant or business growth funding.
The business world can be unpredictable, but having a well-thought-out business plan can be the difference between success and failure. Marty Lewis is a training director that helps people bridge the gap between great skills and a great business. Marty details eight steps to follow when it’s time to prepare a business plan. What Marty says is a must-read or listen for any prospective business owners, or anyone interested in starting a business.
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Are you being caught in a trap of spending heaps of marketing and getting no traction? We’ve got Lisa McLeod here from Selling With Noble Purpose, and she’s going to talk about how to make sure that you have a clear cut message.
So Lisa, what are some of the main blunders when people start marketing and trying to sell a new business? What are the things you think they need to focus on?
Lisa: There are three main things that get in peoples’ way.
The first thing is what they think it means to sell. This is over-describing what they do.
Secondly is their expertise. Most people start a business because there are some customers out there who are not getting their needs met. What gets in their way when they are trying to sell is that they are too deep in their expertise.
Lastly, they don’t have clarity and purpose. They think their purpose is to sell, but the purpose is to make a difference to your customers. This should be the centre of your marketing message and not your product. How do you make a difference to customers? What is your impact?
I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of doing that previously. I’m an engineer who thinks very much in detail. I was in a spot where I knew I had a great product, but I thought, what if I have the cure for cancer but not the voice and the clear message to tell everyone about it. Do you have an example of seeing businesses that highlight what they do instead of why they do it?
Lisa: That’s right! It’s what they do versus why they do it.
Let’s say with the cure for cancer, the fact whether it’s injectable or it’s a pill, all we care about is the cure for cancer. We need to think this way as sellers. We had an IT company we were working with, and it’s an American company, and you can outsource all your IT to them.
So when I started working on it, we said, what impact do you have on customers? One guy in the room stood up and said, we help small businesses be more successful. That’s what happens when you have that clarity of purpose.
Every time you interact with a customer, that’s what you’re trying to help them: be more successful. And if you’re a business owner, one of your challenges is getting your people to have the right behaviours with customers.
Absolutely. We changed our marketing messages around after addressing the question of what we are actually doing. We’ve redefined the message of what we do in business and what we do for people’s lives to challenge their operations by creating kindhearted personal relationships driven by cutting-edge advancement. We changed our marketing message and said we guarantee your uptime, and if you go down, we pay you. The message is very clear—we guarantee that your business will run perfectly with technology—and we’re happy enough to put our money where our mouth is.
Lisa: The exercise you have done is really important. Finding your “why” can be easy if you have a small business with a handful of employees, but if you go to a mid-sized business, you need to be explicit.
Why? Because you want a competitive differentiation.
Even if what you are selling is not unique, you’ve got to show that you do your business differently.
Second, you need an emotional engagement with your people. You have to drive emotional engagement with your team to motivate them to try new innovation. As a leader, you have to articulate the impact you have on customers and make that the north star of the business.
As your business becomes bigger, the message shouldn’t get watered out. What is the differentiator between copycat-like businesses, such as McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks?
Lisa: You’ve got two key ways to differentiate yourself.
1. Product
2. The experience of doing business with you
I was running the session for a group of leaders and we were talking about this. McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks can’t be differentiated from each other. What interests me during the session is, I asked who stands out among these organisations? There is an east coast of America company called Chick-Fil-A and a west coast company called In-N-Out Burger. I thought people were going to come to blows arguing about which one is better. The reality is, is the food better at either one of these fast-food chains?
The place of true differentiation is the experience that you were creating for your customers.
If you’ve got a business and you’re trying to try and work out how to make sure that you are targeting your audience appropriately and being separate from your competitors, what’s the best way to do that?
Lisa: If your response to competitors is the basis of what you’re doing for your business, you are not going to create a differentiated experience. If you want to create true differentiation and be clear with your message, you need to find your purpose in the way you do it. You have to answer these three questions:
When you answer these questions, this creates the story of your business, and that’s the story you go out to the market with.
I always say the best way to find out how you make a difference to your customers is to ask them, would that be fair?
Lisa: Totally. If people are buying your products or renewing their contracts with you, this means that you are doing something as simple as creating a great experience or maybe helping them to be more successful because as an IT company, you are doing all their back up IT. Company owners can sleep at night knowing that you take care of the technical side of their business. It’s not just about the product but the impact you are making on your customers.
We’ve had a customer who had to leave, and so I asked them, what could we have done differently? So if you’re selling something that’s not very much a commodity and not like a burger, like IT Support Services, how do you make sure that you understand your competitors? How do you make sure that you know them well enough to know that you’re doing the right thing and you’re doing it differently from the competition?
Lisa: Instead of asking your customers, “Why did you buy from us?” ask, “How did working with us impact you?” They can say you were cheaper, you were the first one here, or you had more widgets, but what matters is to know the impact you have on them. This is how you will differentiate your business from the competition.
One of the products we sell was by far the cheapest in the industry. It is selling us as the hook to get you in the door. It is not a high-profit product. It is up to think about possibly what if their current provider isn’t doing what they meant to be doing and starting to dive in to see how we are different from their current provider.
“Companies with a purpose bigger than money outperform their competition by over 350%.”
Lisa Mcleod
Lisa: I once asked the customer, “Why did you pick us”? They said we picked you because we could tell that you were really excited about our business. And so I started saying that we only go for businesses we’re really excited about.
You have to be specific on what you sell and make sure you have a lens on it.
It’s the frame of mind. When you are excited, that rubs off on other people. Once you have a purpose in business, what’s then the connection to profit?
Lisa: Companies with a purpose bigger than money outperform their competition by over 350%. People that sell with purpose, whose purpose is to improve life for customers, outsell people who are focused on targets and quotas. And this is important if you’re in any kind of a sales function or if you’re a leader in the business, the reason why is flip it.
Who would you rather have calling on you? Someone whose purpose is to help you or someone who’s just trying to close you?
It shows up in every aspect of the business because you’ve got to have really clear systems and processes just to be a successful business.
But you will not be a differentiated business, which is the most profitable business, unless you have clarity about how you and your team make a difference to customers if you’re just sort of running your business in that transactional way.
Profit is the test of your validity. The purpose of a business is to improve life for customers. Profit tells you whether you’re doing it or not.
So you’re focusing on the right information. A good example is Apple. What they’re selling is the experience of selling the support. They’re selling a beautifully crafted product. Their message is clear.
Lisa: That’s right. Steve Jobs was very famous. He had a conversation with John Sculley, and he was trying to persuade John Sculley, who was the CEO of Pepsi, to come work for him. With great excitement and honour, I got to interview John Sculley a couple of weeks ago for a piece I did for Forbes. And he said, I remember Steve Jobs saying you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or you want to change the world?
Apple is a good example. And you might be listening to this, and you might sell ice cream or concrete, but there is innovation in every space. And the reason Apple has innovated, the reason the customer experience is amazing, the reason the products are always on the cutting edge, the reason they look beautiful, the reason that out-of-the-box experience is great is that they’re not selling technology…they’re selling making a difference to you. They’re selling you on having a beautiful experience. And that’s where everyone’s eyes are pointed to.
And where that comes from is the language of the leader. If you point your team towards revenue targets, you’ll only be mediocre. If you point your team toward something bigger and then use those commonplace metrics as a way to measure your progress, you’ll create what I call the tribe of true believers.
I’m going to ask you a question. It’s probably going to be an easy one to answer, but we ask most of our guests, what’s your favourite book?
Lisa: My latest book is Selling With Noble Purpose. I will tell you a book that has influenced me greatly, which is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. And there’s a connection between that and the work that I do. Some people don’t think a man searches for meaning is about finding something to tether yourself to during challenging times. And he was a victim of the Nazi concentration camps. The thing that I realised in reading that book years ago was people need to tether themselves to something bigger than themselves and that that was the key to surviving a challenging time.
While my circumstances are not as dramatic, there’s a story in Selling With Noble Purpose about when my husband and I lost a business and I had to dig deep and find a way to come back from bankruptcy.
Selling With Noble Purpose is a lot of how I did it. I’m not comparing myself to Viktor Frankl. I’m saying I was inspired by him and I thought about him a lot. I thought about what I didn’t know 10 years ago when I was having to come back from the recession, but I realised in hindsight that tethering yourself to helping your customers versus tethering yourself to your revenue number, that will give you the tenacity to prevail.
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That’s good advice. I know that I found that a long time ago that I love helping people with technology. But what I really love doing is making a difference in their lives. And the book that changed my life is The Go-Giver by Bob Burg. He’s changed my mindset about business and how people hold your information.
Lisa: There is now reviewed data that says that everything that you’ve just described about helping others and putting them first results in you. Winning your market, having a more profitable business and enjoying your life a lot more.
Living for something bigger than yourself. Hopefully, that means you’re leaving a legacy behind or you have set a good example. If anyone is looking to better their business and make sure that you are selling with a noble purpose, you can jump across Selling With Noble Purpose and jump onto the assessment. Otherwise, stay good and stay healthy out there.
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