Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Leader by Design podcast. Today, I'm going to share with you a bit of a hot debrief around my last 90 days in my strategic plan, what I've achieved, the lessons I've learnt, and the adjustments I'm going to make in the next 90 days. So stay tuned.
G'day.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: I'm Brendan Rogers. I've built a thriving business creating confident leaders who achieved the results they always wanted, along with the lifestyle they always dreamed of. How do you become a confident leader? By focusing on three key developing character, building competence, and creating connection.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: This is the leader by design podcast.
Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host, Brendan Rogers. Now, the last four weeks or so has been pretty hectic in our household. That's why I haven't being able to release an episode of the Leader by Design podcast. Many of you may know that myself and my wife are foster carers and we've taken on a placement in the last month. And she's a beautiful, beautiful little girl and we already love her dearly and she's making enormous strides forward, but she certainly has some additional needs. So that's taken a front seat in the whole process of managing life and managing our household. My priorities have been to look after my current client base, which is very, very important to me, and helping those business leaders, business owners, growing their business and leading their teams. Well, this is why I'm a bit late on releasing this episode and doing the hot debrief of my strategic plan over the last 90 days. So let's dive in. And I just want to thank you for everyone's well wishes and support over this last month. That's been very challenging for us to get into it, some sort of decent routine. And I don't know if any of you guys out there have been been in touch with childcare and trying to get all that situation sorted out, but it's an absolute nightmare. We're not at the. We haven't succeeded as far as that goes yet, but it is an absolute bloody nightmare to try and get all those things sorted out. Anyway, let's move on to the core part of our journey and our episode today, which is reviewing my last 90 days. So if you want to take a bit more of a deep dive into what I spoke about and how I set out my strategic plan for for the first quarter in 2024, you can go back to episode two, where I shared that in much more detail. Today we'll have a bit of an overview of what it is, and then I can go into what I've learned from the last period. So just as a bit of a refresh, what I'm looking to do by the end of 2024 is really to scale my impact through digital programs. And the reason why this is super important for me and transferring a big chunk of my business across from my consulting face to face and off sites that sort of stuff into digital products is that we really want more time and flexibility to be able to put into caring for more children into the future, and also for myself and wife to do, myself and my wife to do a little bit more travel in between times when we aren't caring for kids, still working, still helping growing business owners and their businesses, but just doing it in slightly different ways. And how I'm looking to measure success, well, I'm looking to add an additional $100,000 minimum in gross revenue from my digital programs in 2020 2024. So a bit of work to do, but certainly committed to the cause and the areas that I'm focusing on or have focused in the last 90 days. I'm going to make a couple of changes to these moving forward for the next 90 days. Is digital products seems like a pretty obvious one. Marketing podcast and speaking now what did I say I was going to achieve in the last 90 days? Now for digital products, we're looking at 15 founding members having paid to be part of the inaugural program called Master one on one meetings. And in the marketing area, well, the leader by design website is published and leader by Design specific content is to be posted on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook at least three to five days a week from the 1 March 2024 in the podcast area. So we're going to look at having at least 2000, or aiming for at least 2000 downloads of the Leader by Design podcast by the end of March 2024. And as far as speaking went, another important pillar in the last 90 days was to be booked to speak as a guest on at least ten podcasts. Now, I'm very happy to say that we've made some progress, thankfully be a pretty disappointing last 90 days if I hadn't, but certainly haven't made as much progress as I would have liked. And I don't want to sit here and I don't want to share excuses to why this and why that and all that sort of stuff. But ultimately I learned a lot. I thought I was going to be able to achieve so much more than what I did, and I made some really big assumptions on what I thought we might be able to do in this last 90 days. It takes me back to that saying is that we seem to overestimate what we can achieve in a day, but we underestimate what we can achieve in a year or a lifetime. So that really resonated with me over this last 90 days. So let's have a look at in regards to the digital products and the 15 founding members, well, I'm very disappointed to say I haven't even got my beta program up and running. We've got now I think it's 40 plus people on our wait list to hear more. And without a doubt, there's limiting beliefs in my own, not the ability to deliver on this program. Because my master one on one meetings program and some of the details, that is what I'm sharing with clients day to day and really getting them tuned in on how to master their one on one meetings. Whether that's performance related learning and growth and performance review related. I think the thing that really I'm challenged with as a, as a leader and as a person and my personality is that it takes a long time for me to build confidence in a new process. And when I'm really refining a process like this into a digital type product, then that's where I really got to get over myself and start to move forward now. Absolutely, I made some really good progress in the last 90 days on this, but as far as achieving the goal of actually putting it out there, locking a date down to say, right, this is where we're doing our webinar and then getting people into our program, I haven't made that commitment yet. And that is something that I am really focused on doing in this next 90 days. The overall learning of this is that I just put too much on my plate and what I did was push this one back a little bit, even though this is the most important one, which is absolutely bloody stupid of me. But hey, mindset and stuff, it can be a challenge at times for all of us. Even when we know this stuff and we're working with other leaders and other business owners about moving forward and getting over ourselves, we all have these challenges day to day. So my innate need to build confidence means that I'm really pushing forward in learning the programs and how to do certain things within the communities I'm involved in. And I feel like I've got to understand that more before I can just go out on where really I should try and trust the process a lot more. I'm guided by some very, very high level people in the digital product area of the world. So I've really got to learn to trust the process. And so that's what I'll be 100% focused on in this next 90 days. Let's get on to the marketing. So where we did achieve really well in the we definitely got the leader by design website published, which was awesome. Isaac and his team did a fantastic job from Makeweb in getting my website up and running. Also the design part of that before the website was built, done by Tom, my designer. He's an absolutely fantastic dude. And GC has got some skills in that area. So I'm really, really happy with the design of the website. It was published in time. A hell lot of work went into that. It's a big project, but we got there and we achieved the target. And my other fantastic thing is that maybe it's more about my team members achieving stuff more so than me, because some of the things that I've needed to drive individually haven't done so well, but the things that my team have been responsible for and I've worked with them on, then we've, we've got there. So in regards to posting content on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, and really starting to grow some of that reach and some of that fellowship on our leader by design pages, then Eunice, my fantastic Va, or one of my vas, who focuses on the social media side and the content creation side, she's done a fantastic job. And we're even starting to play a little bit with some of the paid ads side of things in things like Facebook and Instagram. Not something I've ever done before. So we're learning as we go, a fair bit more skilled in that than me, but we're getting there and we've achieved consistency in our posting. And so in our marketing area, which is a really good achievement, as you know, in business, if you're not marketing out to people and starting to attract the right sort of people, then it's very, very difficult to start to provide value and sell them products and tools and consultancy services that add value to their business, because, hey, they just don't know you're out there. I'm going to talk a bit more about that very soon around the lessons I've learned, because there's some key areas there that I'm really focusing on moving forward that's going to help with our messaging and particularly our marketing and attracting the right people.
Now, our third pillar was the podcast, and this is thankfully what you're listening to now. So again, thank you for all our listeners that have come on board with our new podcast leader by design. Our target, certainly in hindsight, seems very, very well. At the time, it seemed pretty ambitious. 2000 downloads of the Leader by Design podcast by the 31 March 2024. Now, let me just say, the reason why I thought I would get ambitious about this is because we've had the culture of Leadership podcast going since about March of 2020, I think it is. And that podcast has fantastic followship, great downloads, great listenership, and I really just thought, hey, well, if that's going so well, why can't I just market to a similar audience and get as many downloads? And, well, lo and behold, Brendan, that didn't seem like it. Well, they've actually, based on the data, it didn't work as well as what I thought. So we've got just over 500 downloads in our first five episodes of the Leader by Design podcast. So we fell well short. We only made a quarter of our goal of our downloads. But again, I'm so, so happy that I can sit at my desk. I have the privilege privileges, sitting at my desk, talking and sharing some of my own knowledge and some of my own experiences and things like that to people. And we've had more than 500 downloads of those episodes that we've done of our first five episodes. So I think a lot of podcasters out there would be very happy with that. I certainly have a little element of disappointment, but I'm still very happy that, hey, we've got people listening, and that's a really humbling thing to say, that people give up their time, valuable time, I might say, and have my dulcet tones in their ears day to day, and hopefully providing some value. And so I want to thank you for all of those people who have downloaded the leader by design podcast, taking the time to listen. And the very, very pleasing thing is, I have received some fantastic feedback from so many people in regards to the information that we're sharing in this podcast. And I know as I continue to develop around some of my messaging around what we do in podcasting, which is one of my focuses for the next 90 days, then I know that will resonate with more and more people. So super happy about that. The last pillar that I spoke about in my strategic plan is the speaking pillar. And again, I got on three podcasts, or three podcasts were recorded. I think two have been released, one still not yet released, and I'm booked on two more. And I have. I have also been offered an opportunity for a keynote speaking gig happening in later May, which I was pleased to take up. So I didn't get booked on to speak on ten podcasts, but we've got five podcasts. Three have been recorded, two being recorded in the next month to six weeks, I think, and a keynote speaking gig. So the thing I learned there was that once again, taking on too much. But one of my team members who had to really, the last few months, who was really going to focus on doing this part of the strategic plan for me and getting me booked on podcasts, he wasn't able to achieve that. He had to move his focus to other areas of his business, which I completely respect, and that's his prerogative. So that was something I took on and still tried to make it happen, but I just couldn't make it happen. What I also did learn, though, which was really interesting concept, is that there were a couple of podcasts that I was asked to speak on, and it turned out they were paid opportunities. And when I mean paid opportunities, it was that their model was me paying to be on their podcast, to contribute to some of their investment in editing and all of those sorts of things. So I like the model. It's something that I hadn't come across before. Maybe it's something we'll look at doing in other episodes of maybe cultural leadership or something like that. I'm not saying we will, but hey, it's something to consider at some point in time. There's certainly some pros and cons for that. I'm not going to unpack those in this episode, but I wasn't budgeting for anything like that. So I do follow. Even though I'm a small business owner, I don't have any direct employees. I have a number of contractors who are very, very important parts of my team. And I treat them like not just contractors, like specific, important members of my team, because they do fantastic jobs. I just hadn't budgeted to pay to go onto podcasts, so I politely declined those opportunities. But I do. The more and more I think about the model, I do like the model to some extent. So what can you say overall about my last 90 days? Well, I guess if you look at it, we did achieve a number of things. There's still a lot that we didn't achieve. So we learnt what we need to do for this next 90 days, which is most important. And what we learnt is that I'm really going to scale back what I'm doing, particularly in the fact that we've got a little one in our care now, and she will be with us for in a different period of time. That could be up to one to two years. So I really need to manage my time even better than what I did before. We've still got a bit of structure to get in our personal life and our household, and bit of logistics sorted out around childcare and all those sorts of things. So once we get that done, then I know that I'll get a bit more time to focus on some of these areas. But what I am going to do in this next 90 days, and that's really now where we're at, really, given the last month, has been a bit of a show stopper with the change in personal situation. So really from this time forward, May and June, July. So these next three months, I'm really only focused on two things, maybe three. But what they are is digital products. Absolute continuing and rolling out my beta program, mastering the one on one meetings program. And if, look, if you haven't heard about this program before, then, hey, mastering one on one meetings is one of the most critical skills that you can develop in leadership and leading people. Our three pillar model about developing character, building competence and creating connection. Those three things are covered just by mastering one on one meetings. So if you're a business owner who wants to learn our complete a to z system on how to use one on one meetings to maximize the performance of your own employees, then you can join our waitlist for the master one on one meetings program at Leaderbydesign. AU waitlist so what does our next period look like again? From May, June, July, digital products 15 founding members in our inaugural program around mastering one on one meetings. That is the number one focus.
The second thing, pillar marketing is staying. So for us, the marketing side of the leader by design business. I have invested recently in a fantastic, absolutely fantastic program run by Brandon Lucero. And it's around the new generation entrepreneur mastery program, around messaging. Now, those two things, my digital programs and I'm involved in the business by design program with James Wedmore, who's another fantastic digital entrepreneur. These guys are all out of the States. I've found that you can't go past the US. That's where the, that's where the people who really know their stuff are. So that's why I've invested in some programs there. So the business by design program by James Wedmore, absolutely fantastic. He's got a podcast as well. And Brandon Lucero has also got a podcast, the new generation mastery podcast. I am diving deep into improving my messaging. Why did I even take this step? Again, this wasn't something that I'd planned to do specifically, I've been following Brandon for some time, but what I really dialed into and what he taught me was that my messaging is not good enough, pure and simple. I need to improve my messaging. And what I mean by that is how I communicate the offerings that I have, how I build bridges for people around me. Messaging, that is where they're at today and help them understand where they need to get to tomorrow. Because I know I deal. I've dealt with a lot of business owners and a lot of businesses over the years, and I know that there is so many out there, actually, many, almost all out there, need some sort of support. Now, some need more support than others, but my journey of helping, battling business owners and moving them to empowered entrepreneurs, that's what I do. And I know that every single business owner out there can do with the support, which is why I need to scale my impact through my digital products in order to help them. I know what I do works because I've been doing it since 2015, since I left the corporate space, and I've made a good income and created great value for my clients and helped them grow their businesses really, really well. So I know it works. I know people like the flavor of how I work with them, how I teach, how I support them and my experience on the ground. So I'm not one that has a coaching certification. I'm not knocking those things. But my coaching certification isn't a theoretical coaching certification. It's based on real hard life experience and 20 plus years in the corporate space and then eight plus years having my own consultancy business and working with real business owners, doing real things on the ground. So the third pillar is the podcast. And I'm absolutely keeping that because this is what I'm talking to you on today. The leader by Design podcast is my podcast to help share the knowledge that I have, share the experiences, and to help people, business owners out there become attracted to some of the information that I have, show them that there is help out there and I can offer the help through my consultancy business or through my digital programs so that they can achieve in their business. They can become better people, more confident people. That means they can spend more time with their family, they can be more connected with their family. And my experience is, and particularly through the foster caring side of things and our own families, where we can spend more time with our family, creating connections. You actually feel better about yourself, you feel more confident, and you actually become a more thriving member of the community that you're involved in. And you connect better with your own friends and people in the community. And that's what I love to see. That's what I love to do. That's why I'm in business. That's why I do what I do. That's why we're also involved in foster care. So we can help young people, we can help families, we can help families better, connect, hopefully, and grow and develop better so that we're all creating better leaders and a better society and better communities. So the fourth pillar of speaking, well, I'm going to take it off my strategic plan for the next 90 days, but some organic opportunities happen with speaking, then I'll certainly take those on. And as I said, I'm booked on a couple more podcasts for this quarter, and I've got a keynote event coming up towards the end of May. So those events will happen. If other opportunities come that I feel are right, I'll certainly take those up, but I'm not going to be proactively putting time into that and reaching out to other podcast hosts in order to try and get episodes. Those things will happen organically. And to be honest, the best thing is that I have my own platform, whether that's leader by design podcasts, whether that's culture of leadership podcast. And myself and my wife also started a fostering together podcast. So there's so many opportunities that we've already created or I've already created myself in order to speak to people and share some of the knowledge that I have and for people to get to know me a little bit more and whether they hopefully get to know, like and trust me, then that's fantastic. If they don't, then feel free to switch off and move on to someone else because there's plenty of other great people in the leadership development and business growth space. So that's it for today's episode. I want to thank everyone again for listening to me sitting here in this hot debrief of the last 90 days. What I learned, well, what I learned, in summary, is that taken on too much, tried to bite off more than I can chew, and we just need to scale that back some more. This is what little people do in our life sometimes, is they really help us sit back and say, hey, is this really important? Because we seem to feel the time that we're given and we've got, when we've not got a lot of time, we start to really think more closely about, well, hey, do I really need to be doing this? Do I need to be doing that? Let's get back focused. Let's make these things happen. So we will focus on our digital products or our digital product, our mastering one on one meeting program, the marketing side, the messaging information. And hopefully you'll see that in some of our messaging, even some of our episodes moving forward, how how I'm speaking, some of the messaging I'm sending through to people, and hopefully that's resonated. We're going to be trying and testing a lot of stuff and that'll come through in our socials as well. So really excited about that. Lots of stuff to happen. And the podcast, well, the focus of the podcast is for me to get back to some consistency in releasing the leader by design podcast. I've had a three to four week hiatus, so I apologize for those loyal listeners out there, those many people that have downloaded the first five episodes. But this is the focus. I'm not worrying about downloads. I'm worried about getting some consistency back in improving my messaging within the podcast and consistency around the releasing back to weekly. So that's the focus for the next 90 days. Thank you very much for listening again. And also, if you are a business owner and you want to learn our system, complete a to Z system about our one on one meetings and how you can use those to maximize the performance of your own employees, then please join our waitlist at Leaderbydesign. Au waitlist, our master one on one meetings program will be out very, very soon and you'll get the opportunity to pop on a webinar, check it out, make some decisions about whether you think this is going to be right for you at the right time. And we'll get on and we'll deliver that to you and we will increase, I guarantee we will increase the performance of your employees within a couple of weeks of you starting to implement our frameworks around one on one meetings and having those the discipline around doing one on one meetings. Thank you very much. If you love the show or if you want to develop your leadership and grow your business, make sure you follow or subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. It's also, it's always super helpful if you leave us a five star review. So just by doing that, you can help other business owners as the algorithm will push the show out to more and more people. Thank you very much. And our next episode. Well, I think what I'm going to talk about is coaching. I'm just going to give you a couple of stories linked back to our fostering experience recently with our little one with us in our care now about how it relates to coaching. I think if you're a parent, if you're a business owner, then that will resonate with everyone. So stay tuned for episode seven, where I'm going to give you some real life examples of real life coaching. Until then, always remember, leaders aren't born. They're designed by developing character, building competence, and creating connection. Be a leader by design. Today.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: In the hybrid working world, I've seen too many business owners and their businesses suffer because of poor performing employees, leading to below average results.
If you want to improve your employees performance to deliver consistent results for your business, you have to master one on one meetings. The doors to our master one on one meetings training program are opening soon. I'll teach you how to improve employee performance and deliver consistent results using one on one meetings. To be one of the first people notified when the doors open, go to leaderbydesign au waitlist. Don't wait. Sign up now.
