Scale To Win with Dominic Monkhouse

If you’re wondering if there’s a silver bullet to help you grow your company and get you there with speed, ease and confidence, then don’t miss Shannon Byrne Susko discussing her latest book, Metronomics, in this episode. Shannon is a CEO and leadership team coach, bestselling business author, speaker, serial entrepreneur, and corporate director. She has distilled her extensive knowledge gained over 25 years at the helm of various companies, and coaching clients, into her new book Metronomics, a definitive How To guide to take your CEO and leadership team on a very prescriptive journey. Metronomics is the silver bullet your organisation has been looking for. Shannon’s book takes you on a journey, it guides you to where you want to go, asks what’s the goal, and shows you why the one thing people need to do - define purpose, core values and their culture - is the one thing they never want to do. In this episode, Shannon discusses her 3HAG system, why she wrote Metronomics, how Metronomics will help high performing teams win their business Olympics, why businesses need a playbook, the Coach Cascade System, and why key function flow map (KFFM) is essential to business growth.Enjoyed the show? Leave Us A Review. Follow Us and be the first to listen to a new episode each week on your favourite platform.On today’s podcast:The 3HAG systemWhy businesses need MetronomicsUsing Metronomics as a playbookThe hardest part of the systemKey function flow map (KFFM)Links:Twitter – @MetronomeEffectLinkedIn – Shannon Byrne SuskoWebsite – Metronome United, Books by Shannon

Is your company in trouble? Is your business on the verge of going bust? Then don’t miss this week’s episode of The Melting Pot with business rescue and recovery experts, Rick Smith & Ben Westoby, from Forbes Burton. Ben and Rick work with companies that haven't quite gone bust, but are in trouble and need help. What’s fascinating is following the pandemic, you’d have thought that lots of businesses would have had to shut up shop for good. But actually, here in the UK we're running at about 40% or less - almost half the traditional insolvency rate for businesses in the UK. This is thanks to government investment in furlough and bounce back schemes, as well as various other handouts, all of which have actually kept many companies afloat. In today’s episode, Rick & Ben share examples of companies they’ve helped, where they step in before the shutters come down and the creditors foreclose, what it is they do, who they help, and how they help. So if you're listening to this, and your cash flow isn't where it needs to be, or there's a gap in your funding and you’re wondering how you’re going to get back to where you want to be. Or perhaps you need some help negotiating with your creditors, or your suppliers, and you need a plan, or you need a third party to come in and help you, then let Rick and Ben share their sage advice with you. On today’s podcast:Getting into business rescue and recoveryHow Forbes Burton works The rise of zombie companiesHow to close the funding gapNot every business can be savedLinks:Twitter – @ForbesBurtonLinkedIn – Rick Smith, Ben WestobyWebsite – https://www.forbesburton.com

Have you ever wanted to just put a pin in your life, upsticks and travel the world with your family before it’s too late? Well, that’s just what Nigel Bennett did. Nigel is an entrepreneur. Just not like any other entrepreneur we’ve had on the show. Where most people work hard, scaling up their business in order to sell it, Nigel, after taking mind altering drugs deep in the Amazon rainforest had an epiphany, and decided not to sell. That’s pretty much how this episode, re-broadcast from our archives, goes. It is just story after story of Nigel’s fascinating life. It doesn’t seem like he’s had any dull moments, and he hasn’t stopped for a second. Nigel is the founder and owner and International business development for Aqua-Guard's environmental response services and equipment business. Aqua-Guard specialises in marine oil spill response. He’s the author of "Take that Leap - Risking it all for what really matters"; the founder of TruBeach, an app and a mobile platform community for reporting coastline and ocean cleanliness, and he’s the co-founder of GiftAdd.com, an organisation that works to bring awareness to the actual gift of ADHD and dyslexia. This is a truly enlightening conversation, one we are sure you’re going to enjoy. On today’s podcast:Why Nigel decided not to sell his businessThe incident with his father in an Egyptian prisonThe life goals he set with his business coach, Kevin LawrenceWhy he wrote his book - ‘Take that Leap - Risking it all for what really matters’His gap year with his familyLinks:Entrepreneurs’ organisationYPO organisationTake That Leap - Risking it all for what really mattersLynne Twist - the soul of moneyTruBeachgifadd.com

If you’ve ever suffered with your supply chain, then don’t miss Justin Floyd, founder and CEO of RedCloud, the startup looking to solve the distribution problem for B2B merchants and consumers outside of the Western world. They’ve already run a trial in Argentina, and put an e-commerce or a digital distribution platform, trading platform and finance platform in the hands of physical stores in Southeast Asia, South America and Africa. This is a truly fascinating conversation about Justin’s product and the problem they’re trying to solve. Because some of the parallels they’re tackling are currently challenging the UK, namely, tracking qualitative, consumer data. Justin’s got an incredible track record: 25 years of building technology startups, he spent some time in Silicon Valley and some time in Cambridge. He's run companies, he's built companies, he’s sold companies, he's invested in companies. All of which makes for a fascinating conversation. “The world that I operate in, it's got a product distribution problem. I mean, last year, there were just under $2 trillion worth of products that weren't available in store for customers who wanted to buy them, because there is such little ability to be able to successfully distribute at scale.”We really enjoyed it, we hope you do too. On today’s podcast:Global distribution problemThe lack of qualitative dataThe local store conundrum RedCloud’s solutionJustin’s hiring secret sauceLinks:Twitter – @Jfloyd_1LinkedIn – Justin FloydWebsite – RedCloud, Justin Floyd

If you’re wondering what you can do to improve your sales function, but you’re not a salesperson yourself, then don’t miss Steve Schrier on this episode of The Melting Pot. Steve knows sales. He’s been a salesman, he’s run sales, he’s consulted on selling. His focus isn’t on transactional one off sales, he sees sales as more deal making, consultative selling, doing deals in negotiating. In particular, as the business world moves towards an annual or monthly recurring revenue model with longer customer life cycles, rather than one off deals, Steve decided to help people get their sales function in order to write a book about it. Build Your Sales Tribe is a step by step guide for non sales managers, i.e. not salespeople, who are looking for a commercial structure to take their business on a high growth path and need to know everything about building and managing a sales organisation.In this conversation, Steve shares a little bit about his background, but the chat is mainly about the things he felt compelled to capture in the book, the things that non sales people wouldn’t know, but need to know to grow their business in the Information Age. This is a fantastic conversation with Steve, we’re sure you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Build your sales tribeDeveloping B2B salesThe need for customer success3 different types of salespeopleThe lack of sales management trainingThe issue with commissionLinks:Build Your Sales TribeTwitter – @SalesTribeLtd LinkedIn – Steve SchrierWebsite – https://www.salestribe.co.uk/

Is everything you know about business wrong? Alastair Dryburgh is a contrarian who taught himself to think differently so that he can help businesses that want to remaster themselves. For 10 years, Alastair penned a monthly column for Management Today titled, ‘everything you know about business is wrong’, which is why he’s the perfect guest for The Melting Pot. Because if your business is suffering and you can’t figure out what the problem is, maybe Alastair can help. Alastair is a recovering finance director who studied maths at Cambridge University. While becoming an FD was a natural career path, it never made him happy, which is why he segued into the world of business reengineering and crisis management. Alastair happily acknowledges he’s a bit weird as it allows him to look at business from a different perspective, a perspective that most business owners can’t see for themselves. Download and listen to this latest episode to hear Alastair discussing fundamental attribution error, which is what’s stopping people from seeing reality for what it really is. He also talks about recruitment, and whether people see curiosity as an opportunity or as a threat. And why those that are threatened by change, don't get curious, they just get angry. This is such a fascinating conversation with Alastair, we’re sure you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:WTF consultationsUnknown knownsFundamental attribution errorThe trouble with recruitment Business RemasteredLinks:Twitter – @acddryburghLinkedIn – Alastair DryburghWebsite – www.wtfconsult.comBook - Everything You Know About Business Is WrongBook - Business Remastered

“We bring all of the tools and methods into everything we do for the companies we work with. We call it technology enabled services. We help large companies like MasterCard, WL Gore, Nestle, and so on, reinvent themselves.”This is Alex Osterwalder, entrepreneur, author and co-founder of Strategyzer.com. Alex believes that innovation is what your business needs for longevity and success. He also believes that successful companies are those that compete at the level of business model, not just at the level of product, service, or price. “Innovation is not a talent or idea problem. It's a process and culture problem. Companies are not putting in place the right systems for the great innovators and great ideas to emerge. People on the ground know very well what could work, but we don't give them the space to explore. And if that doesn't change, a lot of companies are actually going to pay the price and go out of business.”Alex knows what the challenges are in driving innovation. He knows what needs to be done in terms of structure, power and resources. And he knows how company culture fits into a business model. And in this incredibly insightful episode, he shares his thoughts and actionable processes with listeners. “An invincible company has three characteristics - they always reinvent themselves, they compete not just on products, technology, price and service, they compete on superior business models. And they understand transcending industry boundaries. People who see themselves in one industry, usually that's not going to play out well in the long term.”It’s a slightly longer episode, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably, and don’t forget to bring a pen and paper, you’ll want to take notes. On today’s podcast:Creating an innovation culture in a companyRethinking business models and business R&DTranscending industry boundariesEntrepreneurial CEOs don’t have to be foundersInnovation needs money and power to succeedThe monetary value of experienceLinks:Book - The Invincible CompanyBook - Business Model Generation

Dom has spent most of his life in sales. He was a good sales guy, a terrible sales manager, a better sales director. When he got to the point where he knew he was playing to his strengths, it was because he’d spent years dialling 300+ times per day, he’d accrued 10,000 hours in sales. Today, he often helps clients think about or fix their sales organisation, particularly technology led businesses where the founder doesn't come from sales, and needs help understanding what their sales function might look like. From helping clients hire their first salesperson through to thinking about what the structure of sales looks like, to what their sales and marketing organisation might look like. And so in this special podcast episode, we’ve pulled together a podcast of three sales experts (all the links to their individual episodes are in the show notes). We've got Jamal Reimer, who only ever wanted to be the sales guy who does multi million dollar deals, never a sales manager; David Davies, a Sandler trainer; and Justin Roff Marsh, who believes that sales people should just sell, nothing else. We’ve taken the best sales advice from all three episodes and strung it together to highlight the nuggets that were really, really interesting, to challenge you when thinking about your sales organisation. These are three great conversations, turned into one.On today’s podcast:The value of rapportSales is not about personal relationshipsAccount managers are order takersDon’t make your best salespeople managers The low benchmark for salesThe value of saying noLinks:Rethinking The Sales Process with Justin Roff-MarshSandler Training and Making Channel Sales Work with David DaviesThe Secrets Of The Mega Deal with Jamal ReimerTwitter: @Justin Roff Marsh, @SandlerTV & @Jamal_ReimerLinkedIn: Justin Roff-Marsh, David Davis & Jamal Reimer

This week we’re bringing you a special episode: a recording of one of our live webinars with Greg Crabtree, founder of accountancy firm, Crabtree, Rowe and Berger. Greg is exactly the type of person that we love to be able to bring you here on The Melting Pot. If you weren’t able to join us for the live chat, don’t panic, you haven’t missed out.Greg is author of The Simple Numbers, and is famous for cutting through jargon and making his theories accessible. He also co-wrote a chapter of Vern Harnish's brilliant Scaling Up. More recently he’s written Simple Numbers 2.0, where he’s dug into some concepts that we wanted to talk about more - labour efficiency ratio and launch capital.While Greg is an accountant, he comes at it from a very unusual perspective. As an entrepreneur himself and a small business financial expert he is such a fantastic person to listen to and learn from. “The vast majority of businesses struggle to understand financial truth. And that's really the epidemic crisis in the privately held business world. Entrepreneurs are trying to scale and they're 100% focused on revenue. But [they’re like] are we profitable? How do we make money? You can't just be changing quarters for dollars and think that's success.”We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did, don’t forget to subscribe to stay up to date!On today’s podcast:Why he’s an unusual accountantHow to run a successful businessReturn on investmentLabour efficiency ratioImportance of marketingUnderstanding launch capitalLinks:Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big ProfitsSimple Numbers 2.0: Rules for Smart ScalingScaling UpTwitter – @gregcrabtreecpaLinkedIn – Greg CrabtreeWebsite – https://simplenumbers.me/

Nick Cramp is a transformation coach and author. He challenges leaders to consider Better Before Bigger. In the past he’s been an e-myth coach, out of which came a book looking at how to build processes into your business, but now he’s written a new book, Better Before Bigger - Rethinking business success, where he shares how leaders can get out of the success trap. In this episode, Nick shares some guiding principles to help you rethink your business and how to define what success looks like. Business owners and leaders get to the point often where there are no more hours in the day, they can't work any harder. And that's when you've been caught in the success trap. How do you get out of that? How do you build teams of people? How do you build companies that can function with less, so that you can enjoy the success that you've built? What internal resources do you need? What resistance will you find within the organisation? What principles will guide you on this journey? Nick answers all of these questions and more in this great conversation. We really enjoyed it, we hope you will too. On today’s podcast:The success trapThe first hireBuild in the plateau phaseReframe, rethink, and then refocusWorking with Nick CrampLinks:Book - Better Before Bigger - Rethinking business successTwitter – @nickcrampLinkedIn – Nick CrampWebsite – www.nickcramp.com

In this special episode, the shoe is on the other foot as our illustrious host, Dominic Monkhouse, finds himself on the other side of the microphone, being questioned by long time friend and fellow coach, the brilliant podcast host, Phil Rose, of Sparks by Ignium. Dom and Phil have worked together for years and their conversation in this episode is jam packed full of advice that you can take away and put into practice in your business today. Of particular note is how Dom helps CEOs and business leaders take the mystery out of business growth, and why 7s (either customers or employees) can kill your business and what to do about them. This is a really fantastic conversation and we would love to hear what you think. We really hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Taking the mystery out of business growthBeing a coach not a consultantAdding value through learningLeadership needs leaders 7s kill your businessLinks:‎Sparks by IgniumTwitter – @MalabarManLinkedIn – Philip RoseWebsite – igniumconsult.com

Today’s guest knows all about scaling up. Not only is John Ratliff CEO of Scaling Up Coaches, he’s also a seasoned entrepreneur himself. Having started Appletree Answers, a telephone answering service from his apartment in 1995, John grew the company to 24 US-based locations and more than 600 employees, taking nearly 10 years to get to $1million in revenue, and then six years to get to $30 million, before a fantastic exit well over market value, selling the company to a strategic buyer in 2012. This experience gave John a unique perspective into the importance of culture, employee engagement, and the guidance and tools entrepreneurs need to have a successful exit. Today John spends the majority of his time defending entrepreneurs against private equity buyers - he says if you’re considering selling your company, you’d be mad not to get representation. In this episode, John shares some fantastic tips for owners thinking of selling, the time he turned a potentially $400,000 loss into $7 million of value, and how he really understood employee happiness by changing one NPS question. This episode is a little longer than normal, but it’s jam-packed full of useful insights and guidance. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Business selling advice for foundersWhy you shouldn’t start from scratchBuilding and selling Appletree AnswersJohn’s M&A playbookThe importance of happy employeesLinks:LinkedIn – John RatliffWebsite – stscapital.com, align5.com

Is your organisation a disruptor? Or is it being disrupted? Don’t miss Eleanor Winton, a consultant and expert in disruption, innovation and foresight, and founder of Foresightfully, a disruption consultancy, on this week’s The Melting Pot.Eleanor has extensive experience of working with senior teams, helping stimulate creative thought and action - she was an investigator of conduct in the Scottish Government and she was part of KPMG’s financial crime forensic function. At Foresightfully, she works with organisations to understand what the future might hold for them and helps them develop strategies in response.Because the thing about disruption is that it’s hard to spot - just look at Blockbuster, how did they not spot Netflix coming?In today’s episode, Eleanor shares some fantastic stories about clients she's worked with, ways to look at different challenges, what you can do to think about the future - i.e. where's the value? How are customers thinking about value? Because that's where companies get disrupted - the way they think about value is not always how customers see it.At the end, as well as some cracking book recommendations, she also imparts a great tip for something to do tomorrow. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we did.On today’s podcast:Disruption happens to all industriesHow to see around cornersThere is no good or bad solutionHave a vision, strategy and tacticsInnovate to create actual value for customersLinks:Book - The Disruption Game Plan: New rules for connected thinking on innovation and riskTwitter – @EleanorwintonLinkedIn – Eleanor WintonWebsite – foresightfully.com , disruptiongameplan.com

Is making sure your company is a great place to work at the core of your recruitment strategy? Are you a fixture on the Sunday Times Best Companies list of great places to work in the UK? Simon La Fosse, founder of La Fosse Associates, having had a bad experience in a previous company, where the directors there deemed his contribution not to be worthy of many stock options, decided to start his recruitment company with the goal of building a search firm centred around care and respect, coming up with a unique way to reward long service and loyalty in his team.Today La Fosse Associates grows 30% per annum - the industry average is 1-2%. He achieves this because of his firmly held belief that treating people well is not just the right thing to do, it’s a better way to do business. Simon talks about his journey to date, his plans for the future and a potential float of the business. We discuss what happened last year with recruitment and from their perspective, even in the tech sector, where they are a specialist, they lost half of their revenue. He also shares why he stepped away from being the CEO and why he doesn’t believe he’s really a leader. This is a fantastic conversation with some great book recommendations, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:The atypical recruitment firmThe top 40 Best Companies to Work for in the UK Stock ownership for employeesThe issue of WFH for maintaining company cultureThe idea of a management shadowStepping back as CEOLinks:Twitter – @simonlafosseLinkedIn – Simon La FosseWebsite – La Fosse Associatesfutureproof

If you’re struggling with resilience, if you or your business is going through change, then don’t miss public speaker, executive coach, business advisor, and founder of Vision Executive Coaching, Gerry Valentine, on this week’s The Melting Pot. Gerry has written a great book called The Thriving Mindset, a book that is part autobiography and part tool set design and delivery. Gerry grew up as a gay man in Brooklyn in the 1970s, and the adversity of his upbringing gave him the resilience he needed to succeed in the corporate world. And succeed he did. Today we talk about how the chances of him being where he is today were about 6% - a sad statistic that is as true in 2021 as it was in 1970. Gerry is a very humble man with a thriving mindset - a term he uses to teach others how to cope with uncertainty and change. Gerry also talks about why we get fearful, and how we can learn to not run away from the problem, how to take fear, look it in the eye and work out what could be on the other side of this disruption, and how to have the mindset to push through. This is a really interesting conversation with some of the most diverse book suggestions of recent guests. A truly fantastic conversation with Gerry, we really enjoyed it. We’re sure you will too.On today’s podcast:Turning adversity into advantageDisruption is a normal part of lifeThe importance of educationThe Thriving MindsetCuriosity gets you through disruptionOur response to fearLinks:The Thriving Mindset | BookTwitter – @gerryvalLinkedIn – Gerry ValentineWebsite – https://gerryvalentine.com/

Are you the founder or the leader of a fast paced organisation and you’re wondering why your once high performing team are now sort of bumbling along, barely scraping by - simply not being great anymore?Then you need Dave McKeown, founder and CEO of Outfield Leadership. Dave’s written a fantastic book - The Self Evolved Leader, and so in this episode we discuss that and the all too common issue of Learned Helplessness. Learned Helplessness is a situation where the founder, leader or CEO, gets the team over the line by being heroic and doing all the work themselves, or they’re the one everyone defers to because they have the technical, business or sales knowledge. They do everything themselves, they don’t bring their team up with them. So, if you want to be a better leader, you have to become a self evolved leader and learn to get out of your way. Because if you don’t, you’re going to stop your organisation or team developing. To learn some practical ways to become a more self evolved leader, don’t miss this latest episode of The Melting Pot. We really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, we’re sure you will too. On today’s podcast:The importance of strategic planningGetting in your own wayHow Steve Jobs instilled innovation at AppleHaving difficult conversations and effective meetingsBeing a self-evolved leaderLinks:Free guide: Six Secrets of Effective Strategic Planning. Discover how to set and achieve your strategic goals with ease, which can be downloaded from www.outfieldleadership.comBook - The self evolved leaderTwitter – @davemckeownLinkedIn – Dave McKeownWebsite – Outfield Leadership

If you’re pondering what to do when you exit your current business, or you’re thinking of a retirement project, let serial entrepreneur and self taught technologist, Rod Banner, inspire you in your next steps.Having spent years helping businesses become world dominating brands through sharp advertising, today his focus is on the architecture of business. As CEO of 3LA, he leads a collective of brains that help technology firms become more agile and relevant. Rod founded 3LA having sold his hugely successful advertising agency, Banner - the biggest and most respected B2B agency in Europe, to WPP. He's also the founder at JoyTech.org, a project that explores how to stop tech companies marketing us into madness but, instead, bring more joy to the world.But that’s not what Rod discusses in this latest episode of The Melting Pot. Today, Rod ruminates on what he would have done differently if he’d had his time again. How he’d be more deliberate about creating a plural life. Because that’s what he’s living. For example, during lockdown he became involved in a project reimagining high fashion and technology, trying to link high fashion to consumers through tech, and what that might look like - because tech is truly where Rod’s heart lies. This is an incredibly fascinating, wide ranging conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Technology and marketingThe beauty of a plural lifeThe importance of customer loyaltyReimagining high fashion and technologyCustomer lifetime valueOur content consumption preferencesLinks:JoyTech.org - Interviewing Noreena HertzTwitter – @RodBannerLinkedIn – Rod BannerWebsite – 3LA.com

If you feel like you need a coach to get you into peak performance, look no further than Eric Partaker. Eric was named CEO of the Year in 2019 by Business Excellence Awards; he's been awarded top 30 entrepreneurs in the UK by Startups magazine, and the Telegraph said he was one of Britain's most disruptive entrepreneurs. He was formerly with McKinsey. He was part of the early team at Skype. He was the CEO of Chilango, which sadly, like many other hospitality businesses, got wiped out by COVID. And now he works as a Peak Performance coach for other entrepreneurs and founders. In today’s episode, Eric teaches us that anybody can be extraordinary. Eric says we need to learn from children and their ability to adopt another identity when they role play. We just have to create our own identity, and then we can step into it. Eric also explains why we need to stop thinking about stress as something that's bad - he believes stress can be, if used correctly, something that can empower us to be amazing. And lastly, it only takes a small movement or an awareness, to unlock the door to amazing change. We thought this was a fantastic conversation. We’re sure you'll agree.On today’s podcast:The 3 things you need to scale to reach your fullest potentialThree alarmsIdentity drives behaviourProgress, not perfectionCoaching in relationshipsLinks:Book - The 3 Alarms: Transform your Health, Wealth and Relationships ForeverLinkedIn – Eric Partaker - CEO Coach & Mentor Website – https://www.ericpartaker.com/Are you looking to scale your business faster? Learn more at our 6th July Business Growth Workshop You can also get weekly insights straight to your inbox by joining our Newsletter.

Nicolaj Siggelkow is a lifelong academic, currently the David M. Knott Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is a Co-Director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management and the former Department Chair of Wharton’s Management Department. Nicolaj loves the intersection of teaching and research and getting to focus on the things he's excited about. And so he's written a fantastic book called Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage.In today’s episode, Nicolaj discusses how organisations can sell one off interactions they have with customers, he uses healthcare as his example, for a set amount of money. How do they persuade customers of the lifetime value of that asset so that they part with their cash up front for something they may not need for a long time?We talk about pricing, subscription, technology and how these things are coming together to change the way organisations compete, in a connected strategy. How can we take a transactional relationship with a customer and turn it into a lifetime revenue generating relationship?This is an absolutely fantastic conversation with Nicolaj, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Interdependencies of strategic choicesIdentifying customer pain pointsConnected strategyThe subscription modelDifferentiating yourself through added valueLinks:Book - Connected StrategyTwitter – @NicSiggelkowLinkedIn – Nicolaj SiggelkowWebsite – https://connected-strategy.com/

Are you ready to change? If so, don’t miss Greatness U founder, Gina Mollicone, on this week’s episode of The Melting Pot. Gina, based in Whistler in British Columbia, Canada is a best selling author and an agent of change. She's written Think Or Sync and The Secret Of Successful Failing.She is a product of what she preaches: having had to pivot hard in March 2020, when Covid hit and her business went to zero, overnight. Today, Gina helps clients get what they want. Because, says Gina, anything is possible. “There are only two conditions required to change anything. That is a bonafide desire to change and that desire must be burning inside the person, you've really gotta want it. And the second thing is you gotta be willing to give it what it takes.”Her business, Greatness U, trains coaches, like Dom, to be better coaches. From talking about change and her model for change and the things people need to do to see change, to how to build rapport, and why if you’re struggling, impact change can help you break out of the box. Download and listen now.You can’t spend time with Gina and not find yourself learning new things. We found this conversation illuminating, we hope you do too. On today’s podcast:Becoming the change personThe leadership gameSuccessful failingFlexibility of behavioursRepresentational systemsInductive changeLinks:Twitter – @GinaMolliconeLinkedIn – Gina Mollicone-LongWebsite – Gina ML, Greatness U

Darryl starts his talk by inviting the audience to discuss what motivates them. An unusual but thought-provoking take on work-life - Why are we here?- What gets you out of bed in the morning? What do you care about, and what are you scared about? Darryl often asks this question to business leaders and is enjoying the ways these answers have changed post covid.Phycology in threesDaryll coined his Lion, Monkey, Dog theory after a lifelong fascination with phycology, NLP and the basis of communications we use in every setting: "I think phycology fascinating, its the most fascinating thing in the world ..every communication is received by a person, its the most important thing in the world."Daryll is fascinated by the way psychology and as a large society is obsessed with grouping experience into threes; Freud's Id, Ego and super-ego down to the chip paradox- He believes this trilogy is down to the way people expense the world in 3 fundamentally different ways; our outside world, our uninternalised knee-jerk reaction and the internalised thought-based experience. This idea links into his Monkey, Lion, Dog Theory:Learned helplessnessWhen an elephant is trained, says Daryll, it starts off heavily chained to something, but as it gets used to its confinement, the efforts of chaining it are reduced, until "you can tether an elephant with a piece of string or a cord because it never tests it." This is key in Daryll's idea of changing your approach and looking at communications from different perspectives; he adds that "If your unconscious mind asks for something and you say no, enough times, it stops asking." And these things that you've been saying no to will resurface. Darryl knows that we put ourselves into containing scenarios and let the rest bubble away, but that doesn't make the background less important.Because understanding someone's motives and mindset is fundamental to how we communicate with them, whether for sales, or as a leader, or for any other reason. We can approach either side of these communications using Monkey Lion Dog to understand the other person's reactions and also help position ourselves in the most productive approach. The beauty of using Monkey, Lion, Dog to understand human experiences is that it's very versatile and can be applied in many ways.Monkey"Monkey motivations are continental" in neuroscience, it would use the primal part of the brain. It asks "Who am I" type questions and wonders; what impact am I having on this situation? Can I change it? In Daryll's theory Monkey process are interested in legacy and autonomy and the ways in which you can be yourself. This is perhaps a noticeable jump to his opening question around what people actually want from their work life. But of course, we can approach this in different ways.LionLion "processes are all the rational things" how we judge them and value decisions. It asks, is it good or bad quality, its judgemental and used in value and figures, says Daryll. Understandably marketers and business leaders are often incredibly good at these types of thought processes; used to approaching decisions in terms of whether or not it's professional, ROI etc. But perhaps, as Daryll comments, this can be detrimental as they can gain a tenancy to become over-reliant on these approaches.Dog"Our Dog interestingly is around our feelings. Feelings of connection of being on red-alert or comfortable of comradery and trust… ". This agenda may have been neglected "normally" in workplace culture but, Daryll's team has done some recent research and found a shift in what people have been valuing since covid. They found that people are looking to pay more attention to dog values in that "themes around having a chat, seeing people, those types of human connection are over-indexing about 20 to 1 since before the pandemic."What does this mean in terms of what we need from...

We met Kim Scott last year when she was on the podcast talking about how to give difficult, impactful feedback in the workplace, following the release of her book, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Today Kim is back, but with Trier Byrant this time, to discuss their latest book, Just Work, Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair. While bias, prejudice and bullying may be present in the workplace, they aren’t inevitable in the workplace, say Kim and Trier. It is possible to combat workplace injustice so that everyone can get shit done and enjoy working together. Be warned, the book makes for uncomfortable reading because it makes you reflect on times when you should have been an upstander and called out injustice, instead of not speaking up when you could have. In today’s episode, Kim and Trier highlight what injustice, bias and bullying can look like and how you can tackle it, and when you should stand up and when you can go easy on yourself. This issue is hard, they’ve written a difficult book, but it’s a book everyone should read. This is a great conversation, we’re sure you’ll find it as illuminating as we did. On today’s podcast:Why Just WorkThe importance of having difficult conversationsRecognising bias, prejudice and bullying at workBeing a bystander v an upstanderHow to respond to bias, prejudice and bullyingBias to be aware ofLinks:How To Be Radically Candid With Kim ScottJust Work (Book)Twitter – @kimballscott, @TrierLinkedIn – Kim Scott , Trier Bryant Website – Just Work

What is your employee experience like? Would your employees write rave reviews about their experience working at your organisation?Today’s guest, Ben Whitter, is an employee experience expert and a bestselling author. He works with a number of global companies helping the CEOs fix their employee experience so that it's in keeping with their preferred customer experience and their brand. “We look at everything that's connected to people, society, culture, the organisation, leadership, technology, and we say, how is this driving people forward and helping them fulfil their potential?”Today, Ben talks about his mission, how he wants to see HR own the commercial metrics inside an organisation and step away from the typical HR metrics of recruitment and sickness absence. He wants HR to instead be responsible for innovation, profitability, customer satisfaction and productivity.“If you're developing and investing in your customer experience, you would expect to see some return with new business coming in, retaining clients or customers, new customers, new referrals. And it's the same for employee experience.”From where his research has taken him, to the best place for an organisation to start, to sharing a few tactical examples from the organisations he’s worked with, to his views on hybrid work and how that’ll affect employee experience when we start to return to the office, this is a fantastic conversation with Ben. We hope you learn as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The best place for an organisation to startTactical examples of best practiceHow to measure employee experienceHis favourite CEO storyThe Timpson model for talentThe hybrid model and employee experienceLinks:First Book - Employee Experience New book - Human Experience at Work

If you need help with your recruitment, then you need Lou Adler. At 75, he’s spent the last 50 years in the recruitment game. He knows how to play it. “My name is Lou Adler. [I’m here] to talk about hiring and business strategy and how to have a successful life, and how to hire great people and how not to screw up making important business decisions.”Lou is CEO and founder of Performance-based Hiring, an end to end, four step business process for hiring top talent. Lou’s firm helps recruiters and hiring managers around the world source, interview and hire the strongest and most diverse talent. Lou is also the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head (on its 4th edition). Lou was working for a Fortune 500 company in Southern California. He moved there from New York for the weather, but hated his boss. Sound familiar? Most people would leave, Lou decided to become a recruiter because he realised there’s no point hiring great people, if you’re just going to lose them because they aren’t a fit with the manager. Now he has a business that teaches firms how to do recruitment using his high performance hiring methodology. From how to hire for fit, the ultimate question you should use in your recruitment process, and why you should hire for cultural fit, rather than just skills. Don’t miss this latest episode of The Melting Pot. On today’s podcast:Why we still get hiring wrongThe 3 buckets of hiringLou’s greatest success2 questions to ask during the interviewApproach hiring like it’s a capital investmentHire for fitLinks:Book - Hire With Your Head

If you lack confidence, or you’re faking it ‘til you make it, don’t miss the Queen of Swagger, Leslie Ehm, on this week’s episode of The Melting Pot. From TV host to advertising executive to training guru for some of the biggest global brands such as Disney and Uber, Leslie has had a few careers in her time. Today, she is a full time Swagger Coach. “Your swagger is not something external to you. It is something that you already have. And it will manifest differently in every different human being. There is not one prescribed way to have swagger.”But the episode isn’t all about swagger. Leslie also talks about swearing and why swearing is actually important, and why people who swear are smarter and happier than those that don’t, and why you should ignore those who tell you not to swear.“It's not that their ears are going to melt off, or that their brain is going to malfunction. It's that they're trying to impose their levels of acceptance on you.”She also discusses what business leaders can do to lead with swagger and what they can do to build psychological safety in their organisation. This is a truly cracking episode, full of energy and with some top book recommendations too. We really enjoyed this conversation. We know you will too. On today’s podcast:From Montreal to London to Toronto Founding CombustionFrom no BS training to Swagger CoachLearning confidenceThe benefits of swearingWhy leaders need to create psychological safetyLinks:Book - Swagger by Leslie EhmCombustion

If, over the course of the last year, you’ve come to enjoy working from home and don’t want to have to revert to the daily commute into the office. Or if you’re scaling a business and wondering how you can attract the right level of skill and experience without having to hire someone full time. Then don’t miss Romanie Thomas, an experienced headhunter, founder and CEO of Juggle Jobs, a platform connecting businesses with high-quality professionals on a flexible basis. Founded in 2017, Juggle Jobs is for people who have more to offer scaling businesses than simply their skills and experience. They understand and appreciate the need to be flexible and are prepared to roll their sleeves up and muck in, helping out where necessary. Romanie, an experienced headhunter, realised while there are plenty of platforms for low level, entry positions, there aren’t many offering these sorts of flexible opportunities to mid to high level roles. Seeing a gap in the market, she created a platform to help women who don't want to work full time, get access to great jobs. Very quickly, she realised that this wasn't a gender issue, this was a matching skills to jobs and helping people facilitate a portfolio career issue. In today’s episode, she talks about the implications of remote first versus office culture versus hybrid. What might that look like? What's the best? What's the worst? What's the best of the worst? And she shares what it's like to be a digital nomad. Where she's been and where she's worked from, and what lessons she's learned along the way. This is a fantastic conversation with a fantastic founder. On today’s podcast:Figure out the problem you’re solvingThe future of flexible workingThe problem of hybrid workingWhy more men are opting for flexible work

2020 Summit Special: The Rules for Aggressives Sales Growth with Justin Roff-MarshToday's Summit Special is Justin Roff-Marsh. On a wet and windy day in Wiltshire it is great to look at the video of Justin speaking at the Monkhouse & Company Summit September 2020. Justin helps people revolutionise their sales function. If the question you ask yourself is, "if I double the number of sellers, will I double my revenue?". And if you paused, or hesitated, or said no, then implementing Justin's The Machine would give you some clarity. It fixes not just sales; it might even fix many bits of your organisation. But it certainly impacts sales, marketing, and customer service—the whole customer journey. Justin looks at it from the perspective of lean manufacturing. There are a couple of controversial things: no commission, no individual targets. Those are pretty difficult for some people to accept in the first instance. They feel that salespeople are coin-operated. So, challenge your bias and beliefs in how sales works or should work, or seek a solution to the problem in your business and listen to this twenty minutes of Justin Roff-Marsh magic from the stage at the Summit.If in the end, you find yourself amazed and in need to find out more, you're in luck because Justin is running one of his workshops in the UK on 26th May at The Management Lab on the farm in Wiltshire. So if you like this twenty minutes, head over to our Prescription for Growth page to get your ticket. You better be quick because there's only a few left.Enjoy! Born in Cambridge, raised in Australia and resident in Los Angeles, Justin started his fantastic talk at the Summit, defining his accent as a "hybrid". Right after that, he jumps straight into what he calls the three-step programme. Justin and his team are usually introduced to an organisation by the CEO or private equity. "Our mandate is always the same, figure out how to grow this organisation". Then, three ideas are brought to the table. "You could think of these ideas as a three-step programme"The three-step programmeWith a mandate to rapidly grow an organisation, the first thing that Justin and his team do is work to restructure the organisation so that salespeople perform only one activity, which they call selling conversations. "And by only, I mean they do absolutely nothing else", says Justin. That means that if you work for this organisation and you come in with a card that has the word 'Sales' on it, you only have one decision to make: "will I work in this particular instance or not?". If you choose to work, there's no further thinking required. "There's only one activity that you're responsible for, and that is selling conversations". And that will go on, selling conversation after selling conversation on repeat until you go home. Achieving that requires a restructuring of the organisation. So, that's the first idea. If you want to grow your organisation aggressively, Justin's first piece of advice is to "restructure those organisations so that salespeople do nothing other than selling conversations". The second idea is that after restructuring your company, the next thing you want to do is carefully examine the activities performed in the field. "You want to look at each activity and ask yourself one question: does this activity absolutely have to be performed in the field, face to face with customers". If you are honest, you'll conclude that not every activity currently being performed face to face with customers actually needs to be. In fact, virtually none do. Justin reckons that when you identify those activities that don't need to be...

How do you solve problems? Are you even trying to solve the actual problem that needs solving? Today’s guest is so good at solving problems they named him twice, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. Thomas has developed a theory of problem-solving, but that’s not what he talks about in this latest episode. No, in this conversation, he talks about how you can deliberately spend time stepping away from the problem in order to look at it differently, how can you reframe the problem, and then how can you come up with a different solution to solving the problem, before moving on. Thomas spent 7 years studying innovation, and it was then he realised that the more things didn’t work, it wasn’t that people weren’t innovating correctly, they were solving the wrong problem. This is all discussed in his book - What’s Your Problem? (link below). The problem we have when we’re trying to solve problems is that we get solution blindness - we get so emotionally attached to something that we can’t see the solution, like a sort of learned behaviour. One of the tips Thomas shares is looking for ‘bright spots’, i.e. was there a time when there wasn't a problem? And can we use that to find our way to a solution? From how he got into problem-solving, identifying if we’re solving the right problem, the process that he uses to solve a problem, and why he brings in outside help the more important the problem is. This is an absolutely fascinating conversation with Thomas, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The theory of problem-solvingThe slow elevator problemFraming, reframing, moving forwardThe bright spots methodThinking outside the frameLinks:Book - What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You SolveBook - Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Lifewww.howtoreframe.com

Today we’re in conversation with Daryll Scott, author, speaker, consultant and performance coach, and boy did we have a wide ranging conversation covering a number of disparate topics. Daryll’s unifying theory of everything, which is leadership and culture are responsible for all of the performance gain inside an organisation. And also they’re the reason why every company that he's ever worked with, which was broken and in need of fixing, that was where the problem lay. He also talks about his behavioural economics meets neuroscience theory of Monkey Lion Dog, and how rational based buying marketing personas are pointless. “You learn that the less controlling you are, and the more respectful and mindful you are of the ecology of the other person, and what's best for them, that the better, the more effective and influencing you become.”And finally, he talks about how you can apply his Monkey Lion Dog theory to COVID, because the last year has taken spontaneity out of the UK population and left us in a state of learned helplessness. “We've got out of the habit of bustling interactions. I used to get to London, on autopilot to my office. And now going to London would seem like a big day out.”This truly is an enlightening conversation, varied, yes, but illuminating. We go all over the place, we have great fun, we’re sure you'll enjoy it. But if you only take away one thing, let it be this:“If you want to remember something really well, make sure that the conditions you do the remembering in are as similar as possible to the conditions where you're going to need to remember.”On today’s podcast:What is a performance coachCuring phobias in half hourMonkey Lion DogIQ EQ CQLearned helplessness during COVIDUsing NLP in businessLinks:Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Daryll-Scott/e/B00HR6KD2ABook - Can We Start AgainBook - Feedback Or Criticism?

Do you know anyone that’s worked with Sir Elton John and Elon Musk, sent people down to see the wreck of the Titanic on the sea bed, closed museums in Florence for a private dinner party and then had Andrea Bocelli serenade guests while they ate their pasta? Meet Steve Sims, a biker with face piercings, a goatee and a bald head. He’s heavy set, into heavy metal, yet Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine have described him as “The Real Life Wizard of Oz" for the amazing feats he’s pulled off for his billionaire clients. While he may have put a pin in his party planning days, he’s certainly not forgotten them. In fact, as a best-selling author, sought-after coach and a speaker, he now dedicates his time to coaching entrepreneurs to break through their glass ceiling and reach heights they didn’t know were possible, all by teaching them how to ask questions, have a conversation, and deliver results. This is an incredibly entertaining, lively and engaging conversation, we’re sure you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:From bricklayer to billionaire party plannerThe personal concierge serviceAggravating oystersThe Florence storyBlue FishingFind clarity in your businessLinks:The Sims Distillery - https://simsdistillery.comThe Art of Making Things Happen Podcast with Steve SimsBook - Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen

Decline At the original point of writing his presentation, Jim had been struck by the sudden realisation that he was “a man in decline’”. In a whirlwind of 00’s nostalgia, he re-examines with the audience, his thought process. Following his then-recent device, Jim was staying at his mum’s, and having been compared to decreasingly attractive celebrities, he was forced to do some soul searching. He decided that many things were to blame… mainly crisps. Confidence Looking at his bags of belongings, he decided he heeded to re-find his confidence.“So that I could achieve the things I wanted to achieve- confidence is a feeling of assurance, particularly self-assurance. It means that you can do things that you otherwise might not. We are here today, in a way, to get extra confidence.” But Jim decided that to ‘scale his life up, fast’ he wasn’t going to need extra confidence but “blind confidence”. Following a few literal car-crashes “in this period of experimenting with blind confidence”, he decided there might be something to it. The common features of blind confidence, Jim declares are “Little knowledge”, “Decisions” and “Thought” he refers to The Dice Man by George Cockcroft in a string of life decisions he put to a toss of a coin. Shame or Success “I’m the kinda guy who likes to say yes. I got married at 19, and at 27, I remortgaged my house to open a vintage clothing shop and many other things”. This brought Jim to a rather disastrous role on a rather extreme military-based reality TV programme. A mortifying mess caught on camera. Which he asserts, drew him to the conclusion that to build confidence you need to build a tolerance to shame. “You need to build your shame confidence in the open as you confess to it”, jokes Jim as he examines old webchat confessions with the audience. Blind confidence puts you in situations where you are guaranteed either shame or success “if you learn to accept shame, then you’ll be successful”. Jim concludes that “Little knowledge + Decisions ÷ thought = blind confidence. The output of which is shame OR success”. Recommended reading The Dice Man by George Cockcroft You can also find this episode on our Youtube

If you’re the owner of your business and you’re keen to improve productivity, or you want your business to run 200X better when you’re not there, why not get your employees to step up, not step back, from the challenge of running the business as efficiently as you do. Don’t miss Andrew Holm and Julian Wilson of Matt Black Systems on this week’s episode. Some of the challenges that they’ve solved are probably some of the challenges that your business is facing today. Andrew and Julian turned their business around by whittling the organisation down from 30 people to five over two years and dissolving the former hierarchical business model and creating a network of one person businesses. The result? Two employees now produce the same turnover each year as 30 people used to do. They spent £250m trying to improve productivity by implementing lean and then agile processes, but every time the consultants left, the business reverted back to how it operated before the change.So they decided to change some stupid rules, triggering an awakening in their employees, encouraging their employees to think for themselves:“On a roundabout, every car has a controlling mind in it. In a traffic light, there's only one controlling mind.”This episode is slightly longer than normal, but it’s worth it. Julian and Andrew explain, in detail, precisely the experiments they undertook to create their current business model. This is an absolutely fantastic conversation. On today’s podcast:Lean and agile are outcomes, not processesNatural human behaviour at workThe invisible managerTraffic lights vs roundaboutsCreating a central marketLinks:Book - 500%: How Two Pioneers Transformed Productivitywww.fractalwork.com

If there's a problem in your organisation, but you can’t put your finger on what it is, have you considered it might be a trust issue?Today’s guest studied trust as an undergraduate and 23 years later, David Horsager, CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute, has dedicated his career to researching trust, looking at the data, and seeing how trust is built with individuals, in companies, in countries, with brands. Every year he publishes an annual trust survey in the US and this year he’s got a new book coming out called Trusted Leader, which provides a framework for building trust so that you and your organisation can perform at your best.In today’s episode, David talks about what the 8 pillars of trust are and how his publisher wanted him to make it a more catchy number, but how he wouldn’t be swayed to change them, because that’s what the research revealed - the data says there are 8 things that underpin how we trust each other. And, says David, trust is usually where the issue lies. When companies say they have a sales problem, they really have a trust problem - there's something about the character or the clarity of their message that's not getting through to clients. When a leader can't bring his team with them. It's a trust issue, etc. As well as delving into the 8 pillars, David also shares some case studies, some observations and some hints and tips along the way. This is a fantastic conversation. And we’re sure you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. Below, listeners will find links to some assets that David has made available to fans of this podcast. On today’s podcast:The real issue in an organisationResearching trustThe impact of trust on salesThe 8 pillars in Trusted LeaderHow to bring about change in your organisationLinks:www.trustedleaderbook.com/meltingpotBook - Trusted Leader

If you’re tired of being overworked and underpaid, If you lack the ideal clients, or you don’t know how to find, attract and close clients, If you keep experiencing project creep,If you’re an expert in what you do, but you’re constantly overlooked and having to explain the value of what you do,Then you need to listen to Pia Silva on this week’s episode of The Melting Pot. Pia is a partner and brand strategist at Worstofall Design where they build entire brands in 1-3 day intensives. But these days she is just as focused on helping other small branding and marketing companies build profitable, lifestyle businesses using her No-BS model. She’s a TEDx speaker, a Forbes contributor, author of Badass Your Brand and host of the podcast Show Your Business Who’s Boss. And on today’s episode, she talks about how she went from being $40,000 in debt, working 100 hours a week for clients she didn’t want to work for, delivering work she wasn’t happy with, to 12 months later, making $500k, being profitable and working with a client she wants to work with. Pia does the work she wants, her way, and she charges proper money for it. This is a fascinating story about the benefits of niching, adopting a no-BS approach and creating authority to drive business in. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Pia as much as we did.On today’s podcast:How she built her own brandFrom debt to success with Worstofall DesignNiche downDefinition of badass brandingCreate authority building contentCharge proper pricesLinks:TedX talk - When You Bank True Confidence, Anything Is PossiblePodcast - Show Your Business Who's BossWorstofall DesignBook:Badass Your Brand

Do we really need another book on leadership? Well, when it’s been written by two global heavy hitters - Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer, yes we do.Adam was a 30 year journalist and editor at the New York Times where he did a weekly column called From The Corner Office, where he chatted to CEOs about the transferable skills that they've learned, not so much about their industry or their business, but about what lessons life had taught them that were transferable and that they could share. Kevin is the former CEO of Amgen, the world's largest biotech company. He was an extremely successful CEO who went on to teach strategy at Harvard Business School. What these guys have done isn’t write just another book on leadership, no, what, what they’ve done is put together a book - The CEO Test, which is, if you want to be the best as a leader, top of your game, not the table stakes, then these are the seven hardest things that the best leaders in the world managed to get good at. Can you develop a simple strategy? Easy to say hard to do. Can you build a culture? Can you build teams that are true teams, not just a collection of individuals. Can you lead transformation? Can you learn to listen? Can you handle a crisis? And can you master the inner game of leadership? This is a really great conversation about what Kevin and Adam think are the hardest of these tests. We also discuss which are their own personal kryptonite, and then we get some fantastic book recommendations. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.On today’s podcast:Why another book on leadership?From 150 - 7 testsBuilding a diverse teamCreating the culture you want The simplification of strategyThe hardest testLinks:The CEO Test

If your company is an early stage or scaling startup looking for support to help you hire and attract the best talent when you don’t have a brand. If you need help building a highly engaged, productive, high performing team, (and that’s not the destination, it's a journey). Or if you’re wondering how to create another layer of management underneath the founders and management teams, then don’t miss this insightful episode with Anouk Agussol, founder and CEO of Unleashed. “So my name is Anouk Agussol. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Unleashed. And we work with early-stage and scaling startups on all things people and culture to make sure that their scaling journeys are successful, speedy and sustainable.”Unleashed started life as a lifestyle business for Anouk to run from home a couple of days a week. Today, Unleashed is a team of 10 and they’ve helped 90 high growth companies over the last few years solve their challenges. To find out how Unleashed work and how they can help you and your team, download and listen to this latest episode of The Melting Pot. On today’s podcast:How Unleashed help companies growThe unexpected problems startups faceCommunication can be a core problemHow to hire for greatScaling culture remotelyLearning FridaysLinks:https://www.linkedin.com/in/anoukagussolhttps://twitter.com/oz_anoukhttps://unleashed.company

Does your team need training and coaching to help people find a fit, alignment, productivity and clarity to exceed their potential? Do you feel like you were made for more? Are you ready to take your team’s communication up another gear?Then you might need Bert Robinson, President at Inpowering People.“I do coaching and consulting with my company Inpowering People. I'm in Firestone, Colorado, out in the Rocky Mountains, and have been doing this for over 12 years now. And basically, when I'm at my best, I inspire and align people to be their creative best.”Twelve years ago, Bert had an epiphany relating to the notion of positive psychology - if you can harness the talents and the job you're in, and those two things come together. You’ll never work another day in your life.Bert and his team help people and businesses discover their untapped talents and potential, building them into performance that achieves tremendous success professionally and personally. In this genuinely insightful episode, Bert talks about CliftonStrengths, how to help an executive team develop the language to have difficult conversations and the positive elements of strengths. We rattled on for a bit, so the episode is a bit longer than usual, but we thoroughly enjoyed the conversation; we hope you will too. On today’s podcast:The Inpowering People toolsetFinding your strengths with CliftonStrengthsUnderstanding your top five talent themesWe all think differentlyLearning to ask for helpInpowerULinks:Listeners discount

Happiness vs workNic Marks grew Friday Pulse from a career-long passion for work-life happiness. He draws from Daniel Kahneman's 2004 Day Reconstruction Methodology, in which people were asked to divide their day up into activities they did and then rate each in terms of how happy they felt. The data shows that the time spent on the activity is almost exactly opposed to the amount of happiness gained from it. Nic says, "I found this kind of desperately sad for the human condition. You know, we spend a lot of time at work, and we find it the least enjoyable activity."Feelings are dataTherapists often look at feelings as data and information we can use in decision making. Nic discusses Antonio Damasio's understanding of feelings as a way of receiving signals from our environment. And how feelings help motivate us and adjust to our environments. These elements can help measure happiness "in every data set there is. It's called an Eigenvalue, but basically it's the structure of the data. So in the middle there's a big Good/Bad signal". Friday Pulse Friday Pulse grew from Nic's passion for finding the Good/Bad signal for happiness and translating it into something usable. "We can look at happiness as our Good/Bad signal, and we can put numbers on that... we can say give me a 1 for this, give me a 5 for this, and suddenly we've translated a feeling into data". Friday Pulse collected data on happiness across all client teams in the run-up to 2020, and through the first lockdown. This allowed clients to monitor their happiness each week. Positive and negative emotions It is important to point out the different forms of happiness. Emotions have multiple meanings and evolutionary formations - anger to deal with threats and sadness to deal with loss. So in assessing happiness at work, you also have to understand what type of happiness, and what forms of happiness you want to promote. For example, you want your team to feel curiosity as a form of happiness that is really intellectually engaged. These types of emotion are often harder to measure quantitatively and, as a result, require qualitative data and looking for trends against more obvious measures like staff retention and success. Success = happiness We all want to build happier, more successful teams to scale our companies faster, and Nic's data shows that you can't really maintain one without the other. "If you're building an organisation, don't think that team building and happiness is a nice to have, it's essential". Of course, happy unproductive teams may exist - but as you would expect they will quickly collapse and some teams may be successful even though they are unhappy, and members are likely to leave. "There is a correlation coefficient. It's true that success does lead to more positive feelings...but the other way round it was twice as strong." To grow though the pandemic at a continued speed, teams will need positive energy for a creative, successful environment. As "in a world that demands more and more innovation from us all the time, mood is massively important." Recommended ReadingThinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel KahnemanThe Strange Order of Things- Antonio Damasio <a...

So many of us are waking up to the fact we no longer have to live where we work. COVID has shown us that we can be just as productive, if not more so, WFH. And Paul Bennett, co-founder and CEO of PerchPeek, the AI-powered relocation agent, is cashing in on this realisation. Prior to COVID, Paul and his co-founders set about trying to solve the problem of relocation, having suffered through the process themselves. They initially described their startup as the ‘Tinder for rental’, before pivoting the business in 2020, in response to the specific pain points many people experience when relocating.“People tend to underestimate how many moving parts are involved in a relocation process from deciding the area, to finding your home, to shipping your stuff, to getting your transport, to settling in when you arrive, setting up your utility bills, council tax, bank account, finding friends, finding community.”And so in this post-COVID, hybrid, closed offices, new normal world, if you’re considering relocation, perhaps you might want to draw on Paul and his colleagues’ expertise to get you to your dream location, and maybe without having to change jobs. “I think what people love, and you'll see this in our reviews, is people just love having one place to coordinate and be guided by the relocation experts through all of those different verticals of the relocation.”This is a fantastic conversation. We talk about everything from what's going to happen in the world of employee engagement, to office space and the implications of that. As well as some of the lessons that they've learned in their own business, and how and why they do unlimited holiday and various other perks. We really enjoyed this conversation with Paul, we hope you will too.On today’s podcast:The genesis of PerchPeekPivoting the businessRelocating via PerchPeekThe issues of remote workingManaging unlimited holiday

How is it possible that somebody who (in his own words) literally couldn’t lead a silent prayer, become a Hall of Fame speaker and a speech coach to Verne Harnish, author of Scaling Up and Rockefeller Habits?In today’s episode we speak with Joel Weldon about how and why he became Verne’s speaking coach, because Verne has been public speaking for decades, so why would he now need someone to help him with speaking publicly? But that’s a story he saves until the end of the podcast. Plus, the episode isn’t about Verne, it’s about Joel, a man who brings life to the phrase: find a job you love and never work another day in your life.Joel is 80 and still working full time. He shares some of his backstory: how he thought he would never be the kid that would go on to speak in public. He didn't go to college, he didn't think he was smart enough. He was a former construction worker who was too shy to speak in public and too shy to sell, until he had his transformational awakening.This is a really fantastic conversation, much of which you can put to work today or tomorrow or whenever you listen to this podcast. There are so many takeaways that can change your business in big and small ways. As Joel so succinctly said: “Let me give you 22 words. If you had to take everything that I've learned about communicating, speaking, and put it in one sentence, here it is - speak to your audience about what they need, in an organised way they can follow and get yourself out of the way.”For more gems like this, download and listen to this week’s episode. On today’s podcast:How Joel got into public speakingSpeaking is a learned skillThe ‘you’ factorHow Joel tweaked Verne HarnishThe importance of CTAKnow your audience Love Joel's work? He has been kind enough to offer subscribers a fantastic 50% discount on his Ultimate Speaking System! To take advantage of this brilliant offer, subscribe to The Melting Pot and get the discount code here on our website. Links:Toastmasters International

If you’re looking for a virtual, hybrid and in-person meetings software that maximises audience engagement, retention and monetisation, then don’t miss this latest episode of The Melting Pot, with Mike Piddock, founder and CEO of Glisser, the award-winning audience engagement software.Just over a year ago, Mike’s original platform was all about how to drive interactivity in a physical meeting, but like a lot of companies, with physical meetings reducing to zero, he’s had to pivot. Now Glisser is a hybrid events platform. But how do you run an amazing virtual event? How do you make a virtual event as good as it can be? And in a world where hybrid or blended is the future of events, how can you take in-person visitors to an event and blend them seamlessly with people who are coming in virtually? “I think the most common driver bringing prospective clients to us is that they want to go beyond the Zoom meeting, or they want to do more than just another team session.”So if you’re a marketeer, or the CEO, thinking that you won’t ever get to run corporate events again, or you're bored with Zoom meetings, or you want to spice up your internal training by turning it into amazing, interactive, responsive virtual training for your organisation, don’t miss this great conversation with Mike. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Glisser - a virtual and hybrid events platformThe four Rs of event trainingThe hybrid training scenarioMental health and remote workingDifference between live event and contentThe premier league football analogy

In this episode- Decision making against disasters- Growth mindset- Choosing to grow is even more challenging with a team- Lead by example Re Empowering the team "This is where I had to step up as a leader, the first time I'd had to deal with something like this, and you know we'd done a bunch of psychometric tests before the race.... you know they'd said your good at dealing with crisis" – he jokes – "But you never really know until you're there right?!"He noticed that, as the leader, his emotions were really impacting on those of the team. When he portrayed his struggles negatively to the daily huddle, he noticed the day's morale followed suit. That is until one of them pointed out the team's attitude. The jolt forced them to "get their act together". Growth mindsetBrendan had a jolt realisation that his team member was absolutely right. They had to stop feeling sorry for themselves. Overcoming a disaster isn't about the good decisions, bad decisions, or karma, or fate - it's about what you do with it.Many companies and teams have a lot in common, Brendan's race was against identical boats, but what separates them is their ability to handle disasters. "We don't learn from our experience on its own, we learn from reflecting on our experiences. It's a deliberate practice". Acting in this way is difficult when you need to learn from your own disaster - it's even worse when you have other people's opinions, egos and input to consider. No one wants to feel blamed. But the best teams have to sit down and learn together. It's not about shared trauma its about the openness to constructive communication. Brendan remembers the excellent advice of "we need to make a promise to each other, that we will only learn the hard lessons once". Blame After finishing a disastrous leg of the race 7th out of 10 boats, Brendan hosted a debrief to try and work on the team's mindset. Emotionally, defences were up. "We go to great lengths to recoil from blame". To re-set, he gave the team a new value: "In this team, we only use blame in the event of gross negligence or malice, everything else is a learning experience" Then all they had to do was live it, he used his own emotional position to "plant a flag in the sand". In starting a conversation about how to constructively growing from an experience, he allowed the team to relax and follow suit."There's a hierarchy to speaking up. The higher up you are the easier you think it is to do."You have to lead by example when setting your growth mindset - to enable the rest of the team to feel vulnerable. In the end, Brendan's team came back from the disaster to win the race, but it was the decisions they made in the debriefs that changed the outcome, not the sailing. "It came down to us treating this race as a race of 10 teams not a race of 10 yachts".Recommendations-Growth Mindset by Joshua Moore and Helen GlasgowYou can also find the video version of this talk on our youtube channel HERE

Today’s guest needs no introduction. Essentially, if you run a startup and you haven’t heard of Steve Blank, can you even call yourself an entrepreneur?Steve is the ultimate serial entrepreneur, retiring in 1999 with eight high technology startups under his belt. He coined the term ‘customer development’, codifying what that was in the inaugural start up book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany - the start up book that kickstarted the lean startup revolution. He then went on to teach a course at Stanford based on what he had codified around startups and what makes the successful ones successful. And one of the guys on his course was a chap called Eric Ries, who you might have heard of for writing a book called The Lean Startup. Then he found himself on the front cover of Harvard Business Review with his book and that, as they say, is history. Steve went on to change the way the world thinks about startups. This is truly a fascinating conversation, we talk about what the job of the CEO is, what customer development is, why innovation is so hard and why established businesses hit a plateau. On today’s podcast:The Lean StartupEric Ries & Alex OsterwalderThe difference between search and executionThe personality of a founderThe job of a CEOExecutioners and innovatorsLinks:Book - The Four Steps To The Epiphany

If you’re wondering how your team’s happiness is, or how you can support employee wellbeing and sustain team morale, then you don’t want to miss Nic Marks, CEO and Founder of Friday Pulse, Dom’s employee engagement, employee happiness, employee measurement tool of choice. “When I ask how engaged you are, people don't know. You know, it's like, if you ask people, how meaningful is your work? It sounds great. But people don't know what the top of that scale is. Do they have to be Mother Teresa? Do they have to be Nelson Mandela?”Nic's been on the show before (link below), and in that episode, he talked about the work he did previously, and the TED Talk he's done. But today, we're digging into, (again, link below) a chart that Nic and his team have put together, which looks at the weekly employee experience for 2019-2020. It’s as clear as day to see how it fell off a cliff in March. So we talk about that and we also talk about why it's come back up. Where are we now? What are the thoughts and hopes for 2021? “The evidence suggests that Homo Sapiens defeated Neanderthals because they out-teamed them. And I think if you bring human beings together, physically together, you get a team that you just don't get, when you're on Zoom.”As usual we discuss book recommendations, and Nic shares fond memories that he has for Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, who passed away recently. This is another great chat with Nic, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:Measuring employee experience and happiness at workWhy Gallup can’t measure engagement (but Friday Pulse can)Unhappiness at work is a signal to moveWhich jobs are suffering more than othersTony Hsieh CEO ZapposLinks:Nic’s first podcast episode on The Melting PotNicmarks.org

Chris Croft is a writer, a keynote speaker and a bit of a guru on Linkedin Learning, with 34 video courses on subjects including Project Management, Time Management, Process Improvement, Assertiveness, Negotiating, and Happiness, with 20,000 views a day and over 11 million views in total. His Project Management Simplified course is thought to be the most viewed project management course in the world. He also teaches leadership. And he’s currently teaching other people how to be trainers. “So I'm teaching them how to be self-employed, how to write a training course, how to sell a training course and how to deliver a really good training course. And just generally sort of how to be me, only better is what I think of it.”Today we chat to Chris about the differences between management and leadership, and what the key elements are of those jobs, why they're different, and how delegation is absolutely critical, but why some people find it so difficult and what you need to do to master delegation.“I think delegating is probably the most important skill. And I think most bosses are bad at delegating. To delegate something important is really hard. And I absolutely think that the world divides into the good and the bad delegators.”This is a really insightful conversation with Chris, we hope you get as much out of it as we did.On today’s podcast:How to train to be a trainerDefinition of sellingDifference between leaders and managersVisions, systems and peopleThank peopleHis 8-point Management CharterPut your prices upWrite down your goalsLinks:www.free-management-tips.co.ukwww.successfultrainers.comchris@chriscroft.com - email Chris for his 8-point Management CharterProject management by Chris CroftTime management by Chris Croft

David Tudehope is co-founder and CEO of Macquarie Telecom Group in Sydney, Australia, providing telecommunications, phones, data, data connections, data centres and cloud services. He co-founded the company with his brother, Aiden, back in 1992 and throughout their existence, they’ve tried to strike the balance between being entrepreneurial and running a public company with risk management and governance. But there’s always going to be a tension between those two things, because they don’t want to lose the essence of what makes them special - their entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time, they have to be a public company. The last time we spoke with David, their market cap, and this was a few years ago, was $350m Australian dollars. Today, their market cap is $1.13 billion Australian dollars. They've had a fantastic year. “We've had a year where we really had to focus on what's important, on our core customer experience, which talks to our company purpose. At a time like this, people will value great customer experience, even more than the normal.”In this really insightful episode, we talk with David about what underpins their business success. Because for them, it's their Net Promoter Score. We also talk about what David’s purpose is, a purpose that he’s remained true to from creation in 1992 through to today. And that purpose is to provide outstanding customer experience.On today’s podcast:Building on customer experienceHaving a purposeNet Promoter ScoreStorytellingThe World Communications AwardHiring for great customer experience

Are you wondering how your business can innovate better? Are you confusing methodologies and activities with the process of actually keeping and creating a pipeline of innovation? Then don’t miss this hugely insightful episode all about innovation, with the internationally recognised innovation expert, Pete Newell. Pete finished his 32-year military career with a 3-year tour running the US Army’s skunkworks - or in layman’s terms, he was the Director of the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF). He had a remit to go and find problems and solve them, using commercial technology to solve a battlefield problem. Out of the 300 problems he was tasked with solving, he found resolutions for 20 of them. An incredible hit rate.When he realised he couldn’t stay in that role indefinitely, Pete retired from the military to found BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early-stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in US national security, state and local governments, and beyond. Pete is also founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic programme originally taught at Stanford University. “[This is] the only class they take in their academic career that allows them to use everything they use in university or network they build to work on a real problem with real people to give them real experience that leads to real jobs.”So to find out what the fundamental things are inside an organisation that you need to do to drive innovation in your business, don’t miss this fantastic conversation. On today’s podcast:The work of BMNTRapid Equipping Force (REF)Hacking for Defence (H4D)®H4X® - the operating systemWhen Silicon Valley met the militaryThe innovation pipeline

What have you done today that pushed you to your limits? For today’s guest, Nick Hollis, getting over COVID is testing him. But it won’t stop him from working his hardest to set a new world record for his ultimate world challenge - the 721 challenge. Nick wants to be the fastest man to climb the world’s Seven Summits (he’s already completed this stage of the challenge), ski to the North and South Poles unaided and row the Atlantic Ocean.The reason? To help him on his true mission - to promote sustainability and work for a greener future. Backed by The World Land Trust (of which Sir David Attenborough is a patron), Nick is putting the environment at the centre of his challenge. As well as being a mountaineer, athlete and entrepreneur, Nick is also a circuit speaker, and one of his most popular topics is around purpose and resilience, two key skills for business leaders. In today’s episode, Nick shares which of the seven summits was the hardest, which one was the easiest, which one he enjoyed the most and which was the most beautiful. He talks about his motivations for leaving his job at HP, and why following your passion is something everyone should do. Back yourself, life is short, says Nick, who’s currently recovering from COVID. This is a truly inspirational conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:From HP to mountaineerCorporate adventure trainingWhy Everest isn’t the toughest mountain7 summits on 7 continents 721 ChallengeCatching COVIDWorld Land TrustLinks:https://721challenge.com/Facebook - 721 ChallengeTwitter - @721ChallengeInstagram - @721_challenge)

Here's a podcast treat to be enjoyed by the fire this festive season our second look back at the glorious sunny summit we hosted in September. Our bouns episodes are bringing you the wonderful live speeches in reverse running order so today you have the brilliant Alex Barker. Alex's invigorating talk is on the "Be More Pirate" movement that she is now spearheading following the almost unexpected excellence of Sam Conniff's original book "Be More Pirate". A book which, as Alex discusses inspired ordinary team members in a wide variety of companies and organisations to implement improved cultures for change. Sam and Alex have since co-written an equally excellent follow up "How To Be More Pirate" so if you too can see your company benefiting from innovative value-based change definitely give it a read. When Alex Barker decided to join Sam Conniff on his "Be More Pirate" journey, she began researching historical pirates and life in the Navy in the 1600s. Putting the ideas that she discovered in context changed the way she framed pirates: "People became pirates not because they were more bloodthirsty or because they were greedier... people became pirates because they wanted to be less miserable". She, like many readers of the original book, was inspired by the secret history of ordinary people's innovation. She points out that in terms of team culture and social values, pirates were often "ahead of the curb" in comparison to their law-abiding counterparts. "On a pirate ship is where you saw the first form of social insurance" and that their own norms and rules were actually organised, they simply were not the norms of the time. An unknown example is that pirates had same-sex marriages with practice "so sophisticated that it even had an inheritance clause - so that if I died my partner would get my share of whatever booty we were allocated". Also inspired teams, form companies around the world have been writing to Sam and Alex about their decisions to undertake their own Pirate Code. They are using a set of principles to define what they stand for. Allowing them to not only look at where their company is going but to evaluate the direction of travel. A reader told Alex " I knew when I read it, I don't need another strategy or 10-year business plan - I need a pirate code." Companies and organisations may also decide to hold a "facilitated mutiny"- this is to capture the energy and insight of the team, to find fast fixes to unnecessary issues. Alex feels that business can change their culture by giving people permission to improve; by "redistributing power"so that someone who knows the detail of the problem but might have otherwise been afraid to speak up. Alex gives an example of a marine biologist who was bold enough to ask if the 5000 attendees to The International Corral Reef conference should be flying in for it—pointing out that the act of flying for a conference so centred on global warming "doesn't sit with our values". Here, by creating a culture that allowed conversation and also by being bold enough to "fly a flag" fo the idea, they inspired a change and a whole new approach to audience outreach that would otherwise not have been discussed. Being more pirate is about being bold enough to change a norm, giving voice to the people that might have the solutions to a problem and improving culture. "We all know that we now sit in a moment where there is more possibility than there ever was to make changes - there's never been a better time to be more pirate". To consider not just your approach to scaling-up your business, but the values that you want to grow.

When was the last time you met somebody who’d spent 30 years in the same company? Meet Brian Coburn. Brian started at Stagecoach as a 16 year old trainee and went on to be their Chief Technology Officer. Today, Brian is CEO of payment orchestration service for e-commerce enterprises, Bridge. With that information alone there are so many questions to be asked: how do you go from being the trainee to the CTO? What changes do you have to make along the way? What jobs do you get that allow you to go from 16 year old trainee to Chief Technology Officer at a multi billion pound turnover global business like Stagecoach? Did we mention Brian has done all of this without ever going to university? So what does the school of hard knocks look like? What does it teach you along the way? One of the most fascinating parts of the conversation is where Brian explains that his business inspiration at Stagecoach and now, at Bridge, come from being in a rock band in his youth. This is a really fantastic conversation with some great insights from Brian. We really enjoyed talking to him. We’re sure you will too.On today’s podcast:A 30 year career at StagecoachDigitalising StagecoachPlaying in a bandCEO of BridgeStartup business adviceLinks:Stagecoach