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How to Restructure Your Business With Tim Wilshire Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. We've got an awesome guest for you, we've got Tim Wilshire here, who is a networking number cruncher who podcasts people's perspectives. We've got him on to talk about how to restructure your business and when the right time is to do that. So Tim, first question, how do you know when to do that? I know you've come across businesses that are started as sole traders and other businesses are looking for asset separation and all sorts of stuff. How do you know when the right time is? Tim: Okay. Thanks very much, Joshua and hello listeners. But as far as restructuring is concerned, obviously, one thing that I've done plenty of over the last 20 years at my business is restructuring our clients from one structure to another. I guess, like a lot of the answers to questions these days, the answer is, it depends. Okay? You're probably hearing that quite a lot, this is the new 2020 thing, it depends. So it depends on what the different situation is. So if they're in the wrong structure to begin with, and it's not expensive to change them into the correct structure, that's usually a good time to restructure. So let's say they're a sole trader, let's say they've been going in business for a very short space of time and income is starting to come in the door, something that may potentially sell one day, then you can no longer be a sole trader anymore. It doesn't make sense to stay being a sole trader because number one, you're not protecting your assets. If you've got assets in your own personal name, all of a sudden those assets are at risk and the more at risk, the more risky behaviour that you're doing, the more at risk those assets are when you're a sole trader, so that's definitely a time to look at structures. If you're not out of the sole trader structure, get out of that particular structure. And there are two alternatives that we sort of look at, whatever the structuring is, do you want to try it as a company or do you want to trade as a trading trust? Or a combination of both types of structure as well. So that's one, I guess, time where it's quite common when it comes to restructuring. Another time might be, okay, I'm in the trading trust at the moment, but I'm basically making too much money and it's no longer viable, unless I've got a company structure. A company structure meaning, I can type my money and I can grow the business. So, a trading trust structure may no longer be applicable to those circumstances because, selling the business because you have less options. If you're in a company structure, you've got more options, easier ways to add and subtract business partners, shareholders, et cetera. If it's a trading trust, usually good for a smaller operation, up to a couple hundred thousand dollars of profit. Once you get beyond that, a company is certainly worth considering. So that's another time to consider, okay, what's it going to cost to restructure from that structure to that? What are all the processes that I need to do? It doesn't make sense to do that. So that's probably the two main ones you're sort of looking at changing structure because of the circumstances, the current structure don't fit what you're currently doing, and your medium to long term objective. Josh: And when you say trading trust, a discretionary trust and trading trust are the same thing? Tim: Yep, yes, exactly. Josh: Cool. So, you then have cascading setups where you have trusts that own companies, which I think you touched on a little bit there. And then you have companies that are sitting by themself and then you have some people that have multiple companies and asset companies, asset protection. Why would you have that? Tim: The larger you get us as an operation, the more it makes sense to. I'm not saying complicate things, but the more it makes sense to just do things that are going to protect yourself in the best way, shape or form. What you do see from time to time, not for every client, obviously, but once the clients get big enough, they might have one entity that's the training entity and then they might have another entity that basically looks after all the assets. Those items also, you might be paying staff. How do you pay staff in the most tax effective manner? And why would you do it, not in the trading company? Separation, if you're big enough, certainly justifiable. You just got everything in one trading company basket and you're growing and growing and growing, to me, you need to review that structure and you need to say, okay, well, what can we do to better utilise what's going on there? So certainly if you've got clients that are big enough that are turning over more than a couple of million dollars a year, really need to review their structures and say, okay, well, are we in the right sort of structure? Is there something going on that we can do a bit more separation? Can we protect our assets better than what they are? The moment it's all in one basket, and that company goes down, then what? What's the plan of attack if that were to happen? If you've got another company over here doing something, important stuff, whatever, you might be able to drop one or the other. So it just gives you a few more options. Yes, it's more of a cost. Yes, it's more of an administration to be able to manage more than one, but at least you're doing things. Separating and separating the risks. Josh: Okay. And you've talked about going forward, bigger, better, or potentially more complication and more administrative overhead. Is there any times that you would be pulling that back in? Going from a company structure and then going back to a sole trader or something like that. Tim: You never go back to a sole trader, unless you're not really running a business anymore. But you may sort of downsize your operations in it, if you've got too many different structures. And I'm thinking of a client right now who had way too many different things going on, different trusts. Once you stop using that particular trust, you can close it down, sort of get rid of it. So obviously if it's not getting used, get rid of it. You should be able to probably get rid of the different things that aren't getting used properly. Obviously if your sales are coming down, you're sort of downsizing the business, getting rid of staff for whatever reason, because you're downsizing the business. And then do you need that if there's no staff? I mean, all of a sudden you don't necessarily need that. Josh: Who opens the conversation to the structure? Is this something that people should be already aware of themself, where they're talking to their accountant about it, or does the accountant say, "Hey, look, you've turned over a million dollars as a sole trader, something's not adding up here. Let's look to restructure this." Or is this something that they sort of need to jump on their own steam? Or maybe they're listening to the podcast to work out the answer. But who should be opening up that conversation? Tim: I think us, as accountants and advisors, should be opening up that conversation with our clients. We've got to be proactive, we've got to see where the opportunities exist for those clients to get things right. And we've got to take advantage of those opportunities. So get the clients to think that they need to take advantage to get those opportunities. Josh: For us, I started off as the transitioning periods, as you've said, is pretty much what we did. So when everyone was 14 and nine months old and they were off getting their McDonald's job, I was getting my tax file number and registering my first ABN number. So as a sole trader, I started off just on 15 and continued through as a sole trader for a few years until I had the trust and then the company trusts and then the company trusts and then another company, to have asset protection. And then another company again, which was around some of the different grants and advantages that you can have that are pushed out to companies that are not trading as a trust. You can optimise your tax with multiple businesses and structures, but what would be the reason you'd want to have more than one company? If not for asset protection or a government grant or something like that. Tim: Why would you have more than one? Obviously, if you've got more than one business operation actually going, you want to separate them in different trading locations. There might be one location here, there might be one location there, it doesn't always make sense to put them in the same envy. That way, if things can be sold separately, you want to be able to treat them separately. Every different division of the business, you probably should have it in its own entity. And you should try to steer away from grouping them together as well. The reason you don't want to group them together is, it's definitely more messy when it comes to returning your tax. Also, if you've tried to group GST, that's messy. And also if you're grouping them, then you're losing out on some benefits sometimes as well. A good example is the government's recent cash flow boost. If you've got just one company, then you're only going to get one lot of cashflow boosts. Whereas if you've got two companies, you're going to get more benefits rather than just one. Josh: Fair enough. And you did touch on something there about if it's being sold. So when it comes down to exit strategies, if people are looking to sell their business, when's the right time to restructure. When is the right time? You don't want it to look like you've cooked the books or changed the books around or done something funky. You want to make sure there's some historical evidence there that the business is profitable, that everything is going as you would expect it to be. When is the right time to restructure if you are looking towards an exit? Tim: You don't necessarily want to restructure until it's no longer useful. So it doesn't make sense to restructure too soon. So make sure you get to what you're trying to do before you make that choice cutting these off. Josh: So, the main reasons you'd restructure is risk mitigation, tax optimization, and to allow for things to be sold off more easily or divided out. Is that right? Tim: Yeah, I guess all the reasons that I've sort of gone through. Growing, make sure you're structuring correctly, protecting your assets. You need to minimise tax, exactly what you said. And when it comes to the next step, you get to another step, keep reviewing. What's the benefit of bringing in another entity? And everything else that we've sort of discussed there as well. Are we running more than one business operation and can we separate them out? I see clients that shove three different car washes into one entity. They're all at different locations, it doesn't make sense. Josh: I'm going to say something that I think a lot of people, maybe even yourself, are going to disagree with. Companies are generally pretty straightforward to set it up. There's not too many things you can stuff up. If there's one company and then there's another company, the company as the Pty LTD, decides the division of shares and the amount of directors, et cetera, et cetera. The actual company itself, is a reasonably straightforward container. Tim: Well, I guess it's very easy to set companies up, yes. Making sure that it's set up right still requires a bit of skill. Who are the shareholders? The shareholders are a very important part of the company and how those shares are owned are very, very important. Putting mum and dad as a shareholder is not always the best way to do it. So is setting up a trust to own the shares, a better option? That's usually what we'd recommend. We'd say, look, you should want more flexibility. It's not owned by you as an individual, it's in the trust. Then we're talking asset protection 101, as far as making sure that things are done right. Josh: When it comes down to a trust though, it seems like there's a bit more of a grey area than a company. It seems that whenever I've gone to a bank or any lending Institute, they hear that you're running under a trust, they seem to think there's more complication. How come trusts inherently appear to be more complicated than a company? Tim: I mean, with trusts, once you sort of whirl into it, it's probably not as common. To some, it may not be as complicated as what you may think. So obviously it's a great structure. We're talking about protecting assets, we're talking about planning the long term beneficiaries, kids, children, that all make sense to find out about what all the particular roles are. You just need to know what those roles actually are in a trust, and a lot of people don't know about that unless they read it. So once there's a bit of understanding, then you say, well, this is not as bad as what we thought. But again, it's complicated because it's obviously different to that of an individual sole trader, different to a partnership, different to a company. So I guess that's the stigma behind it, that it is more complicated. Just requires a bit of understanding in order to make it not feel as complicated as what its outward appearances would suggest. Josh: Were they more open to abuse in the past? Or has that been sort of tightened down a bit? Tim: Self-assessment is obviously huge. So, there's a lot of trust given to people to do the right thing. And when it comes to trust, there's no exception. So just because you set up a trust, doesn't mean you're going to get an audit or anything like that. Obviously, the audits flags are going to arise if things just don't match up or add up when the ATO are looking at the back system. The government from time to time, have said they don't want trusts, but they've never done anything about that. The labour government, before the last election, tried to make some fairly drastic changes. I guess that's where we are with that at the moment. It's not like it hasn't flown under the radar, but they haven't done anything about it. Josh: What would be the advantages to not having the structure, where you have a company and then a trust and instead, you're just running solely as a company? Tim: You're talking about the shareholder situation and also the difference between having a trust as a shareholder and having an individual as a shareholder. So, the biggest issue with having an individual as a shareholder is, company makes money, makes a lot of money, it pays all its tax, there's only one person that can actually end up with that dividend. If they want to declare a dividend or get forced to declare a dividend in some cases, then that goes to one person's particular taxable income. And that could really jump their income quite high, depending on when and how they have to deal with that situation and the profit and all that sort of stuff. Whereas a trust, at least you got more flexibility. You've got the flexibility to look at the rest of the family group. Can we allocate that dividend to somebody who's on a lower tax income? It makes sense. Three or $400 you spend extra to set up a trust. It's worth it because, yes, you might have to do some dividends and you might have to split that and do another tax return but at the end of the day, it will more than pay for itself. Josh: So if I was to be a single bachelor or bachelorette and have no one that I can distribute anything to, have no business partners, I own 100% of the shares, still having it through a discretionary trust, would still put an extra level of protection there. Tim: It does protect the amount of assets that are attributed to yourself because it's a trust that owns the company. That means that, that's not a personal asset that belongs to you. Whereas if you were the only shareholder, whatever the equity in that company, is effectively your asset. If the trust has that there, then if it's not your personal asset, so it usually can be helpful in things like bankruptcy. Josh: Okay, cool. Well, I think anyone out there that's still scratching their head and has a bit of confusion, definitely make sure to contact Tim Wilshire. He'll be able to bring some clarity and hopefully leave you with the aha moments on how things should be set up. If you want more information or want to hear more about what Tim's doing there, jump onto his podcast from the Valley. We're going to chuck some links in there so that you can check out the website, check out his podcasts and find out what you're doing wrong and how to restructure your business. Tim: Appreciate you doing this, Josh. There's something I just wanted to finish off with. In 2020, and as it was in 2014 or 2015, if you're going into business with somebody else, set it up as a company. Yes, the shares held 50/50 by different trusts or what have you, but if you go into business with somebody else, make sure it's a company. It just allows a lot more flexibility, allows a lot more growth. It sort of ticks off all the common goals that two partners going into business should be looking at when they go into business together. Josh: If you were having a Pty or LTD and you had a couple of business owners, is there a restriction or any complication if you had one of those business owners that were not from Australia? Tim: We have clients where company's are wholly owned by overseas companies, it's always possible. What's required is, the operation to be here at the central management. So the central management being in Australia, one of the directors must be an Australian resident. That's the requirement. The shares can be owned 100% by overseas entities, or 50/50 here. Josh: That's good to know. Hopefully anyone out there that is thinking about their structure, has had that aha moment and is thinking a little bit more about it, how to set it up properly and yeah, jump down to you guys to get it all sorted. Tim: Thank you very much. Josh: Cool. Well, anyone out there in podcast land, if you've enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay healthy. Stay good in this COVID climate.

Improving Your Business Process Flow with Pip Meecham Josh: Good day everyone out there in podcast land, I've got Pip here from ProjectBox. She is an absolute wiz-kid when it comes to any automation around your business and process flow, and making sure that your systems are working the way your systems are meant to be working. So Pip, tell me, how do you know when a system is broken and how do you know when to fix it, if you've always been using a broken system? Pip: That's a really good question. The way you know it's broken is customer complaints, frustrated staff. There could be a host of extra time issues, which then all comes back to frustrated staff as well, at the end of the day. Any kind of bottleneck, generally, you will notice things are starting to go wrong, but it can take some time to kind of pick up on that as well. Pip: Something could break and then six months later you'll finally pick up on it. It can take a lot of time without having someone come in and look at how you're actually doing things to pick up that things are any kind of different, if that makes sense. Josh: Yeah, that makes sense. For me, my big rule that I tell all of my staff is, "Have I asked you once?" Josh: They say, "Yes." Josh: I said "Have I asked you twice?" Josh: They go, "Yes." Josh: "Okay. Then I don't have to ask you a third time because you've already automated it." Josh: If you've had a problem come up more than once or you think that this situation is going to come up more than once, then template it out and automate it. You're saying, complimentary to that information, you would also make sure that the user experience, not just repetition more so the user experience isn't broken. Pip: Yep, and most people don't think like you. Most people don't have that trigger to go, "Hey, we've done this three times." Or, "Hey, this has gone wrong." Pip: Or anything like that, they just keep going with what they're doing, and there's nothing to really trigger that until something big happens, which could be a customer complaint or someone within the team saying something. It's a really tough one, if you're not systems tuned, most people don't pick up on it. Josh: It comes down to people continue doing what they think they're meant to be doing for an extended amount of time. Not knowing that what they're doing isn't what they should have been doing. Pip: It's rare to find people who have that kind of continuous improvement mentality to go and actively look for things. I actively try and break stuff all the time but that's my mentality. Josh: Yep. You're a hacker. That's exactly what a hacker does. Pip: I'm a breaker, not a hacker. I don't get in, I just break it. Josh: It can be both. You and I are very similar in that regard. We try our best to work out what is the best way to achieve something the fastest, most efficient way. Pip: Yeah. A to B. Josh: Yeah, and automation doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of code with loops and all sorts of other stuff that has an input and an output. It can be an input and output, but it can also be just a procedural document that allows for you to know when a staff is following something, very similar to how McDonald's work. Josh: They go through and they create an ice cream, a burger or whatever it is. And when you get it, whether it be in America, Canada, Australia, it's always the same crappy burger, but it's the same burger. And it's being made by a different 14 and nine month year old child or teenager, but it's the same burger, the same process. That's just come through repetition and the document that they've read, and knowing that this is the way that it works, this is the most efficient way. Pip: A lot of people don't think like that. Josh: No! Pip: There's so much decision fatigue in business where people wing it all the time, and they lose a lot of time because they're doing that. Whereas if you've got a straight out, set out processes. First do this, then do this, then do this. Automation kicks in to do some of that for you. It's so simple and it's so streamlined. Whereas other people are just weighed down because they're so overwhelmed on what to do next or how to do it. Josh: I'm going to talk on behalf of all the bloody Australians out there and say, this is the best time to be looking at your processes. Everyone's in lockdown. I'm sure everyone's working 120% of what they were before. That's why Bunnings is full of people, because no one's actually working. Pip: I can hear so many hammers and chainsaws around my neighbourhood. Josh: Me too. I'm like, "Yeah, everyone's really working hard guys. Are you all labourers at home?" Josh: Anyway, everyone's working at home and they're working on the house, which is great, but you should be working on yourself and on your business. This is the best time. When everyone goes, "I don't have enough time for that." Josh: Bang, this is enough time for that. You've got the time to do it now and this is the perfect time. They should be engaging in people like yourself and seeing what you can do to help them out. And as you said, there's always room for improvement and I'm not going to say what I do is right. But it's going to be better than not doing it at all. Pip: The problem is as well, is that people get so caught up in their own business that they can't see it, outside. What they're looking at- Josh: Can't see the forest for the trees. Pip: Yeah. They've got tunnel vision, like there's nothing else going on except what they, used to doing, what they know they need to do. Whereas I would come in and something that I kind of love doing and it's really wrong, but I love going in and pulling people's processes apart, and looking at the ripple effect that everything has on each other as well. Pip: Because everyone always talks about, a lot of people are changing technology at the moment because of everything that's going on, they're going, "Right. We're going to use this. We're going to implement new tools to do this. We're going to do this and blah, blah, blah." Pip: They look at that as a single element and they're not thinking about what's happening before and what's happening afterwards. So people are putting these new things in place and they think it's fantastic, but stuff is still falling over because they're not taking into account what's going on around it. The ripple effect. Josh: Yeah, exactly. The butterfly effect, ripple effect. It comes down to a big thing that people don't do enough. I started doing it 13 years ago, 14 years ago and then didn't realise how much of an impact it's had, but business plans. Why are you in business? Why do you exist here? What do you want to achieve? What are you going to achieve in one month, one year, five years, we've all heard it. Pip: Hate it. Josh: I started writing them. I'm like, "Uh, this is stupid." Josh: Then I wrote it and then thought, okay, let's see how this goes. Then I've looked back on some of them and I thought, wow, I've got so much more maturity, growth, direction. And some of the things that I thought were really important then, are no longer important and some of the things that are important now, I would never have thought I was even going to be doing. Josh: But being able to look back on what you've been able to achieve, lets you see the growth that you've done. That's the same, when you create these processes that sit there and can run autonomously or be running by someone else that's not you. You're able to have these processes running and then look at them from a distance to go "Hmm, how else can I tweak that?" Josh: While you're not sitting there being the driver. If you're always driving around, you're never going to be able to really see the sites out the window. Pip: It's being able to remove that connection. Josh: That's right. Pip: Cut the heartstrings. Josh: Absolutely, as long as that's what you want to do in business. I will say, straight away when I started my first business, I was the main driving cog and I was the person that did all the things in business, and I earned all the money and I earned all the debt. it was interesting, and good and bad. But overall, I didn't want to be the cog. I wanted to own the cogs. I wanted to have the systems, have the process to be able to step back. Josh: That's not for everyone, if you read any book on business or any masterclass, that's what everyone apparently wants, but there's businesses that we work with. One in particular, he's a cartoonist and he's big driving motivator is he just loves drawing. He said, "It's a lifestyle business." Now, to be fair, his wife's in a lovely position where she's earning enough money that he could have that decision. So, lucky boy. Pip: Yeah, but I get it. People always ask me what I want to do with ProjectBox. I don't ever want to stop actively getting into people's businesses and looking at their processes. I legitimately love that stuff, as geeky as it sounds, and people look at me like I am just stupid and crazy, and I'm off with the fairies, but I love it. I get this sense of, it's like a thrill with huge endorphin rush. When you go in and you help people piece this stuff together. I don't want to lose that, but I also want to be able to grow the company. Josh: Yeah. It's always about the balance. You need to make sure that you've got that interest. As I said, why did you get into business? Work at why you're in business, and this is, you brought this up earlier, probably not everyone's mentality, but when I first started Dorks Delivered in 2007, I thought, okay, I want to do this right. I've now got a trust and I've got a company, I've got all this stuff and all these structures. Josh: Let's make sure that I'm getting rid of any of the tasks that I don't like doing. And I thought, what do I like doing? Hate doing bookkeeping, hate doing invoicing, hate doing the car logbook. I thought, this sucks, so I created a process. I created an app back then, or was it a web based app. It worked on the Symbian mobile system for anyone that's out there that cares. Josh: It allowed for you to jump in there and see, as a technician, I had contractors working with me, they'd be able to enter where they're going and would work out their home address to where they're going, the amount of kilometres, how much to charge and how much to put on that invoice. Josh: They'd then get there and they'd type any prices and it'd automatically work everything out and then click submit or come up with a PayPal and they could get credit card details straight through their phone, right then and there, and this is 2007. Josh: So I built all that out and it was because I hated all the invoicing stuff. You could take photos and attach invoices and attach expense records, all sorts of things like that. You could do all that. I built this because I hated doing it. Now, not everyone's capable of building it and totally understand that, but that's why you bring in professionals that can help you out. Josh: The actual process of building it took me several hundred hours. Now, if I looked back and thought, would it have been more beneficial for me to have just learned how to do the invoicing and just done that and in a repetitious way? Possibly, but it wouldn't have been as fun, would it? Josh: And I've learned so many more skills and that's kind of what you're getting at. You get to learn. You're always growing, expanding and being in business is about being able to delegate. Whether that be in a digital sense through scripting and automation, or through staffing and process documentation, it's being able to delegate to grow your business. Josh: If you had to pick the top three things that a business owner should be considering with the way their business is set up and what they should change, what would you say they should be? And how can they achieve those for, let's say we're in lock down 'til September, yeah? Pip: Yeah. Josh: I think that that's probably likely. So what would you say, how can they do those between now and September? Pip: Yep. The biggest one is how information is flowing from one system to another. So no double data entry, too many people, literally they'll get it in one format and then be copying and pasting it into other programs. Stupidly time consuming and massive room for human error as well, because someone has to do that. That's a really big one. Josh: Yep. If you're using a pen, remove it. Stop using a pen. Stop having customers fill out forms with a pen. Pip: Definitely another one, try and go digital where possible. Josh: Absolutely. Pip: The number of people who are still doing it, there is a place for pen and paper. As much as I'm very much a digital person, when I am holding process mapping sessions or the brainstorming creative stuff, I have a roll of butcher's paper. It ends up running down my hallway and I'm literally dragging my computer down the hallway on my hands and knees filling out this paper because that's how I work there. It's really quick for me to draw arrows and then it gets turned into obviously digital [inaudible 00:00:12:31], the paper goes away. Sounds like a waste but I know that that is how I work best. Josh: I love that because I'm on computers for hours and hours, not because I have to, because I want to. I could spend 18 hours a day on a computer just working because I love doing it. You have people like Gary Vee say, "Work harder, work smarter." Josh: Well now what? I'm like, "Well, just do what you love doing." And I genuinely love doing it, but I also love the feeling of paper in my hands. And I've got a big whiteboard inside the house, like a four and a half metre by three by two metre whiteboard. I'll write up with my partner, Sarah, any of the new processes that we're going to be going through, any of the if-then statements we're going to be popping into any of the automations and make sure that we've written that out because it's easy to modify it and it changes your perspective. And get this everyone, it removes all those, how many times have you had a push notification from Facebook while you were dealing with butcher's paper? You don't have any of that. Pip: It's no distractions. Josh: No distractions. How good is that? It's great. Pip: Yeah. But it brings out the creativity as well. It's like going back to that cave person thing where we're drawing on walls. Obviously, there are some people that entirely a hundred percent digital is going to work for them. Most people, that's not the case. I know people who will still take their to do list and then send it to a VA to transcribe it into a project management tool because that's how they work. Pip: They just can't get on and do it, so they've delegated it to somebody. Yeah, get digital where possible. The next big one, and this sounds really stupid, but clean out your computer filing systems. I'm generalising here, but a lot of people it's like going to the supermarket where all the shelves have been knocked over and everything's been stirred together and trying to find fish in the fruit and veggie aisle. It is, looking for medicine and it's down in the freezer. Josh: And after a while the whole process stinks. Pip: Yeah. So it's taking time to sort out where everything is stored so that if a client rings, same with like your CRMs and project management tools, give everything like a cleaning over. It's a really good time to be doing that now, so that you should be able to find anything within about 10 seconds. No longer. Josh: Yep. I did a podcast a few months ago on defragging your filing cabinet and then your computer, or something like that. That's probably a cooler name than what I called it. But people do, we go into people's systems, I'm not going to say who it was, but I went into someone's system, they had two monitors and they had about 500 icons now. Pip: On their desktop? Josh: On the desktop. Anyone that has two monitors, if you've ever tried to put 500 icons on the desktops, you'll notice they don't fit on two desktops. So he had icons that he couldn't even see, they were on his two desktops. And you can't scroll up and down on a desktop, so they were just in the abyss. Pip: And for a lot of people, those computers die and all of that is gone. Josh: Gone, and they use these obscure systems where they go, "Okay, let's have this cloud of files that store on the right hand side of the desktop." Josh: Then you do a Windows update and then everything rearranges to automatic, and then you go, "Oh no! This is going to take me days to fix up my icons." Josh: Just fix it up now, you've got this great opportunity. That's great advice. That's a really good one actually. Pip: Yeah, nothing should be on the desktop. Josh: No. Well, you haven't seen my computers yet but I've got eight icons and it's the things that I use commonly, and use all the time. Pip: And there's shortcuts. So the original files have safety elsewhere. Josh: Somewhere else. Pip: Stored properly, with just shortcuts. And shortcuts is a great thing too, because most people will just copy the file, so there's two copies. So I update one and then they'll go to move it and not realise what's going on and go, "What file do I use now?" Pip: And end up with three, four, five, six or 10 different copies. So creating shortcuts, it's something that not a lot of people take advantage of. Josh: Shortcuts are great and I'm not going to get into heaps of detail on shortcuts, symbolic links and other bits and pieces of IT, but shortcuts are great. People should be using shortcuts. And in a filing cabinet, traditionally, you have things sectioned and it could be A to Z, but most of the time it's warranty information, ATO letters, bank statements, all that. Pip: Categories, yeah. Josh: Your computer systems, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. The way that I like to do it is, what would you share with your mum? What would you share with your partner? What would you share with your business partner? What would you share with your staff? What would you share with your nana and what would you share with the world? And then make sure your hierarchy has things in those categories and then from there then have projects inside those. Josh: For me, I've got family, personal, business, the three main ones. Then inside personal, it then stems off into different year categories for photos and things that used to go into your personal, it goes to photos. And then it has different years that these photos were taken inside each year, it then has different events for each of those years. And so if someone said, "Ah, do you have any photos from my 21st from way back when?" Josh: You'd be able to go, "Yeah, no worries." Josh: Click, click, bang, done. I had someone actually, and I've been a bit of a stickler for organisation for quite a while. I had someone say, "Oh, remember we did that school assignment on moths?" Josh: And I said, "Yeah." Josh: Said, "Oh man, if only I could see what my assignment looked like then." Josh: Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a tricky dude. I happened to have acquired his assignment through the school systems back then, so I gave him a copy of his assignment. Pip: Wow. Josh: He's like, "What the hell? How'd you do that?" Josh: And I'm like, "Yeah, no, it's pretty weird, eh?" Josh: Having a hierarchy that works for you and the reason I say that those different categories to start off with, like the personal, and then the things you'd share with your nana or your mum and things like that is because if you are using different tools like Dropbox, you can then say, share this folder out to whoever, and it doesn't matter. And you know it's not going to have personal stuff. Pip: It gives people a great place to start because half the problem with this stuff is just getting started instead of looking at it going, "Oh my God, I've got like 10,000 files I need to sort out because they're all sitting in my downloads folder." Josh: Yep. The first five minutes is the hardest. Pip: Setting up that initial structure and then just, yep. Josh: Setting up the initial structure, and this is something I would've done on butcher's paper or would have done on the whiteboard. You just write it down and go, "Okay, that makes sense. Okay, that's sensible." Josh: And then you look at and go, "Okay, who's going to have access to what? If I give access to this folder, everyone has access to that." Josh: Obviously I'm talking a bit into the security stuff as well as just the organisation, but I just find if you start with security first and then organise around that, it'll make your life very easy and harder for people to break into your stuff. Pip: Definitely. Josh: As things become harder and harder. Pip: I guess my final one would be reviewing the tools and the software that you're using. Use the time to go in and look at all the individual platforms and work out if there's any overlap, because quite often we sign up to things or people recommend things and we don't really do a lot of research around it. So more often than not, the tools are capable of doing more than what you think and you can actually condense those down, or you can start to get them to talk which brings us back to first point. Josh: Yep. I would agree completely that and tools evolve even after you build them, they evolve over time and you look at some of the things and you go, "Man, that never did that before." Pip: It's really knowing and understanding exactly what that tool is capable of doing. Josh: It's going through it, having a look. Pip: Hey, you can't break stuff. Josh: Exactly. Just have a muck around then. That's great advice, especially as I said, while everyone's at home, hopefully with a beer in your hand, hypothetically we are having a beer, possibly, unless you listen to this at 7:30 in the morning, then we're definitely not. But it's a great time to be doing that and be jumping in and making sure that your systems are ready to go gangbusters. Pip: Exactly. So that as soon as things take back off again, you're ready to go. Holes have been plugged, you know what's what, you know what's happening by when, by who and how. Josh: Yep. And the cutovers, if there are programmes that you don't have to get rid of, you can't get rid of it because one thing does something really well and then another thing. We use ActiveCampaign internally. We're using another IT programme called ConnectWise, up until recently and ConnectWise did email marketing very poorly, but it did ticketing and invoicing really well, which ActiveCampaign didn't. Pip: That's like I said to you before, I use ClickUp for my sales dashboards because I couldn't get the data out of ActiveCampaign, But it's knowing that I could do that and understanding that. Josh: Yep. And that's where having a document on what the cutovers are, at least let you know where data is meant to be stored. The flow of data is very important. Knowing where your master, your primary, your truth data I guess, where you'd say this is where everything is pure. And then if people have entered dodgy records or transcribe things incorrectly somewhere else, then you can start to work out where the other stuff is. Pip: Go back. Josh: The last thing you want is if you've got five systems that you're running, as I've heard, or in a lot of American talks, "the silos of chaos." Josh: You have all these silos and you just can't control them and can't manage them and just everything gets out of sync, and then it gets out of whack. This is a great time to be bringing in people, especially like people from ProjectBox, that's able to look at your systems, integrate your systems and make sure that your data is staying the same between all of them, and you don't have any overlaps with your processes, and you're running an efficient shop because ultimately you don't know what you don't know until you know it. Pip: Yeah, exactly. The number of people that I've met or that I've done work with, who you ask the question, "How is this bit happening?" Pip: And they look at you and they're like "What do you mean? I know how that's happening." Pip: I'm like, "Cool. Lay it out for me. Tell me what's supposed to be happening at every step." Pip: And they either can't or we start talking, they're like, "Oh, well that should be happening." Or "I wish it could do this." Or, "Someone's supposed to do this." Pip: What they think is happening in their head is completely different to what is actually happening. Now a really good time to be looking at that stuff as well. And for the businesses who is super busy right now, this is the time where they will probably start to notice where those holes are. Josh: Yep, absolutely. It's interesting times, businesses are either crazy or quiet, or crazily quiet. I think there's a lot of good take-homes there. People need to be jumping in, making sure their systems are good. Their filing processes are good, and that you are engaging in people services. So if people did want to jump in and get a hand throughout South East Brisbane, or what is your reach with ProjectBox? Pip: So South East Queensland, Northern New South Wales, but because of what I do, I can do it remotely. So realistically, anywhere around Australia and New Zealand as well, I've got quite a few clients over there too. Josh: We're going to chuck a link down there to ProjectBox so you can check it out. Is there anything else you'd like to cover off, other questions that we haven't gone through? Pip: No, I'm pretty sure we got it. Josh: Yeah, cool. I've loved having you on the show and if anyone else has any feedback or bits and pieces, I'd like to say jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some comments or a review and everyone out there stay healthy, stay well and start automating. Catch you later.  

Forecasting Your Business Numbers with Leschen Smaller Josh: Good day everyone out there in Podcast Land. We've got Leschen here from Element Business and Accounting Solutions and she's going to be going through talking about some things that are on everyone's mind, which is forecasting with your numbers. What are you doing in your business? How come so many businesses have collapsed? Where have they gone? Why didn't they save for a rainy day? Learn more about your business numbers at dorksdelivered.com.au Josh: So I guess, I want to ask you a quick question and that is, what would you say is the benchmark number? How do you work out how much is the right number? Or how do you work out your financial projections and budgeting? And I know I've asked you a mouth, which you can answer in an elevator pitch, but tell me a bit about the voodoo that you do and how you can help. Leschen: Well thanks for that, firstly. We operate on a 13-week cash flow and getting those projections for when your cash is coming in and when your cash is going out, it's certainly really important and it's been highlighted through this whole COVID crisis thing. So normally businesses might save a little bit for a rainy day. I think we were talking about that before. You might have six months' worth of working capital to see you through, but this crisis came out of nowhere and I think people have forgotten what it's like and they have forgotten that cash is king. So they need to go back to the planning. And the easiest way to get your breakeven is just to average your monthly expenses for the year and that should give you your average balance that you should have per month. |And you might have three months capital up your sleeve or six months. Six months is actually a luxury, most people can cope with three. Josh: So, that would be a little bit industry-specific depending on what you're doing. Our listeners can be anyone from doing yard maintenance stuff to hairdressers and people running a multimillion-dollar fortune 500 company. So what would you say is a benchmark if you don't know what your expenses are? What should you save to start up a business to be able to make sure that you're not going to collapse, I guess or what would you use as your safety net if you can't have that safety net? So to speak. Leschen: People say that expenses are unknown but they're not. You know if you're a gardener, you're going to need fuel. You know how much it is going to be to repair your mower, your car, buy a trailer. And so, you need to have at least half that amount up your sleeve for if something goes wrong. But having said that, if you've got people that are just going into a business and they're starting up a business tomorrow, they're not going to have given that any thought whatsoever. Which is fine when they're on their own but as soon as they get employees, whole different ball game. Leschen: And then I think you've just got to be a lot more conscious about the money you're spending. And so using this 13-week cash flow, you know what customers you have, you project when they're going to pay you. You know what expenses you have and you put those into your spreadsheet and what it enables you to do is, say you had to pay... Say you had a repair and maintenance that you needed to do but wasn't essential. You can move that out a week on a week that you're not going to get too much income because maybe it was a public holiday or there's a public holiday in there and you couldn't work or you were ill or something has happened that has not allowed you to work for a certain period. You just move your expenses out and you can... It's a really robust tool to help you manage your cash flow. Josh: Okay. And so with the 13-week cash flow, I guess you keep saying the 13 weeks, I'm going to ask you a few more questions about that, but is that something you should be considering personally as well as in business? Because obviously you've got your personal expenses, you got your business expenses and if you're the owner, they very much overlap a lot of the time. Leschen: I would prefer you keep them separate but 100%. I mean, if you're a sole trader maybe, keep them together, but if you've got a company or something, then definitely keep them separate. Josh: Yeah. I was just thinking if there's a person listening to that isn't in business, this still really, really relevant for them because they could still be put out of a job, they could still be put out on the streets and they still have, depending on the stage of business, in baby formula or golf clubs to be buying. Leschen: Both, yeah. Oh God! Yes. Josh: I guess, you need to make sure that you're forecasting and doing those things where you can and have that cash available to you. That's from a personal sense. And then getting into a business, if you're running a business where most of our listeners are, you want to make sure that you have 13 weeks. So how did you get to 13 weeks? Where did the magic number come from? Why not 12? Why not... I don't know if you remember Something About Mary thing where he said, "Seven-minute abs." Leschen: No. Josh: It's like, "You can't do your abs in seven minutes!" Leschen: Because four's too short, eights kind of in the middle. So 13 weeks kind of encapsulated... Who likes 12? I mean 12 beautiful number, I have to say as an accountant but then 13 is odd, so 13 just works. Josh: It makes sense, I guess. The average amount of wakes in three months I guess would be probably- Leschen: I was going to say it's probably about 13, yes. Josh: Yeah. Leschen: You would be surprised at what... We use it in our business. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Leschen: And we might shift around payments if we think, for some reason, that... So, for now, clients are paying slowly, right? But we still have wages to pay, we've still got rent. So if we have a discretionary spend we will move it from one week to the next. Josh: Yep. Leschen: Based on what we know, where our income is, or what week our income is going to land or cash our cash is going to land in our bank. Josh: Okay. That's actually brings up a very good point. So when you're starting up a business, and obviously depending on the scale and the size of your business, some people, they're net terms are nearly instant, they can sell a pizza and they're being paid in 15 minutes, but then depending on the level of business you're in, like for us, we have net terms that vary from anything from 15 to 45 day. Some people have, I think things are even higher than that. If you're in business and you want to make sure you have that cash flow, what is everyone else doing out there? What are the net terms and how much does that affect the bottom line? Leschen: It's so important because there are some things that you can't do much about because there's legislation around it, but again, I'll use us as an example, I'm quite transparent about what we do. So, we normally, for a client, we'll do your compliance work and then we give you a big bill, not that big, but we give you a bill at the end of the day for having done it.  Josh: Acceptable bill. Leschen: Yeah, correct. Of course. Josh: Yeah. Leschen: But then we're going, "Why are we doing that?" We would hate it if we went to you say, Josh, and went, "Can you provide us a service and then at the end of the year, give us a bill?" That would be a big bill. Right? Josh: Yeah. Leschen: But you might change it to monthly and that's what we're thinking about. So it's smaller chunks. People can absorb the cost a little bit better. People know what's coming up, they know when it's coming up, and people can then plan their cash flow a lot better. So people can do the same in their business if they've got something that they can start billing over a year or three months or six months, they should think about that. Because also then, for you, you've got a regular cash flow coming in. Josh: Oh, I think it's a fantastic idea. That's a big model that we're a huge fan of. So about 10 years ago we changed from being a per hour model to a per month model. And we give unlimited support for everything that we do and we're always available on the phone to talk to anyone and it's so much easier because you remove that resistance. Before you'd go into a business, you'd tell them what you're charging per hour and they'll talk really, really quickly. And I know I'm guilty of it. I'll go to my accountant and he'll be like, "Oh, so how's the family?" And I'm like, "Crap, am I on the time or not?" I don't know- Leschen: "Don't ask me about my family now!" Josh: Exactly. Ask me later when I know I'm not on the clock. And you start freaking out and we saw that that gave a lack of quality service because we'd go in and the receptionist would say, "I've got this problem." And the business owner said, "Not important." And I'm like, "Well that's not very cool." And so, charging a set price per month gave everyone that same thing, and I'm not going to say that this happens, but depending on your industry, when you have the likes of gyms that have popped up, these 24-hour gyms that are not doing much at the moment, but that you have this card sitting in your wallet. Isn't it weird how you don't lose weight with the card sitting in your wallet but the money still comes out? Leschen: I have a gym that I donate to. Josh: Yeah, exactly. You help fund their loans. Leschen: It's a great model that they have. Josh: Yep and so that's where I'm like, "Okay." So I don't know what you guys charge, but let's say it's $2,000 to do a returns for a Pty LTD something once a year or something like that. Leschen: Yeah. Josh: I'm just saying a ballpark number, but if it was two grand, that gives people the opportunity to go, "Ooh, shit, two grand, that's a lot of money. Maybe I should look around for next year." Where if you divide that by 12, all of a sudden, even if it was $200 plus the overheads of the additional bookkeeping and administration, and you go, "Okay, $200 a month. $50 a week, it's just coming out..." I know it's there. I know I can call you anytime. I know this is going to be done. I don't have this big expense and it's a much easier model and it's easier for everyone. Josh: But people... I'm going to use one of those terms like they do on the news when you say, "They said this is going to come." When they don't actually have any references. I mean I'm going to do one of those. I'm going to just say people freak out when they get their rates notice or their insurances too or whatever their case is in business and you go, "Oh crap. Here's an eight grand invoice that I wasn't anticipating at all." But if you're able to amortise that into smaller chunks, you're able to see the outgoings more easily, predict for that and forecast for that, for a lot of people that don't really use many forecasting applications and things like that. Leschen: It’s simple. Josh: Yeah, exactly. What do you suggest if you are new to the game and you're wanting to get a bit of an idea of, "What are I expenses next month?" Did you have any tools that you could suggest that you could do that in a live way? Leschen: Well, we use Zero a lot, but accountants love Excel, and I'm going to sound like such an accountant now, but Excel works wonders. Why make it complicated? You should know when your next bill is coming in. You should know when your rates bills are coming in. When you'd go into business, that does need to be a little bit of ownership about what you're doing. So yeah, if you're new in business, you're going to sign up for insurance. So you will know what that bill is and so you just put it into your little Excel worksheet and in the week that it's due and just have your weeks across the top and you just work it out like that. Josh: Yeah and that's easy enough. And most people don't, and I'm going to say the thing that all accounts hate, I love Excel, but if you don't have Excel, anyone out there listening in Podcast Land, use Google Sheets. It's the poo version of Excel. It's free. It's not as good. Leschen: I was going to say the same thing. Isn't it? Josh: Yeah, oh, it's okay when it gets down to.. For most uses it's going to be the same. Just when it gets down to some of the more complicated things that you're doing between them. Leschen: It's not complicated at all. Josh: Exactly, somebody can sit down there with a beer, hypothetically, and then go through and do that so that's really good advice. And when, I guess, looking to find out all your numbers and going through all your numbers, we've got a bookkeeper, we've got an account, and then I'm the business owner and a lot of people have that same sort of Three Stooges or Three Musketeers depending on how you feel about it. Where do you say is the best way to understand the cut-over between accountant, bookkeeper and business owner when it comes to responsibilities to create these documents, to know when things are happening? I'm not going to pick on any industry in particular, but some businesses sort of go, "Oh, no mate. I just do what I do and put everything in the Share Box and it just bloody gets sorted out from there. It doesn't, hey?" And then there's other people that have their finger on the pulse and I would be more closely aligned with that, myself. But I don't know if I'm... I don't want to think that I'm stepping on my bookkeeper's toes and they go, "What are you doing?" Or if the book is just meant to be there for reconciliation. So where do you say the cut-over really sits nicely to just know where your responsibilities lay as a business owner when it comes to things like this? Leschen: So if we start with a book, it's like a... What's the analogy with the cookie? Or making a sausage. The bookkeeper starts at the beginning, they input the data into your software package, say it's Zero or MYOB or QuickBooks, whatever it is, and then your accountant reads it and checks, is how I would probably put it because if I had to input anything into Zero, I would probably break it, but I could probably get my way around it, sort off, but I would not be anywhere near as efficient as a bookkeeper. Josh: Cool. So from an accountant's perspective, you're into the P and L's. Leschen: Yeah. I want to tell you how you're going, why is your marketing so high this month when you only budgeted X or why is your rent percentage of income so high? Those are the conversations that I want to have with you. I want help you interpret your numbers so that you can go away and go, "Right, okay, this is what I need to do." We're going on our plan traject trajectory or we need to change. Josh: Obviously, in the analogy of making the sausage, if the meat is rancid or the bookkeeper's not doing the job that you thought they were meant to be doing or something's wrong, let's say I just walked off the street and I was decided, "Let's start a business." Can you tell that the bookkeeper's been doing something a bit wrong? They've been claiming GST free expenses instead of other things where they shouldn't have been. They haven't got the appropriate tracking codes and things like that. Or can you go, "Maybe I should tell the business owner, this doesn't look a hundred percent kosher."? Or how deep do you get into it? Leschen: Yes, it depends how much you want us involved in your business. So we prepare a lot for clients. So it's at that time we review all the data and we go, "Well, this has got GST on and it shouldn't." Or, "Hang on a second, this insurance has GST on the full amount but it shouldn't. So can you give us the invoice?" That sort of thing. So we can certainly run a preliminary eye over what's in your books but it's not going to pick up everything but it will certainly pick up the majority of things. So we can definitely help from that perspective. Leschen: And then from a bookkeeper's perspective, it depends. We would always go back to the owner going, "Oh my God we had to reconcile your bank account. Why is it not reconciled? The bookkeeper should do that every time they come to your place." Or we would go, "Well no, we had to do 50,000 adjustments to your file." But it's just a two-way communication because we do like to work with the bookkeepers as well. And the good bookkeepers, we have a really open dialogue with so that they can ask us questions. Because the last thing you want is the bookkeeper and the accountant at odds with one another. Josh: Butting heads, yeah. Leschen: All three of us... Yeah. Because they get very protective of their work or the accountant gets very protective and it's not a good relationship. So you need the owner, the accountant, and the bookkeeper all to be on the same page, it just works so much better that way. Josh: I can say, comfortably, you're 100% correct. When I started the business in 2007 I read four or five books on bookkeeping and accounting and thought, "I can do this." Leschen: Oh my God. Were you having- Josh: Easy. Leschen: ...trouble sleeping? Josh: Ah, so 2007, start of the business, 2009 I went, "I am freaking out. What have I done? This is terrible!" And I got a bookkeeper and I'm like, "I need you to help me. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want the government to come and hurt me. I haven't submitted anything two years." And they said, "Look, don't freak out. It's all right. You're not the only person that's ever done this." I'm like, "Yeah but I don't even want to be any of the people that have done this." I don't want to be in the naughty chair. What am I doing? Anyway... Leschen: Just fix it! Josh: Exactly. So she went through it all, got it all sorted and at that stage we were using QuickBooks, got it all sorted and, oh my goodness, the weight off my chest, that was fantastic. That's something that I said, I went, "Okay, I shouldn't have been freaking out about this." The good news is though I read enough into it to understand enough about the numbers and so I definitely think everyone should... As you said, the business owner needs to take some responsibility when it comes to knowing what expenses are coming up and being aware of that. And I 100% agree because being able to do this, I was able to more easily diagnose and understand things when I was going in for an expense or going in for a loan or something like that. I understood where and how that would work and how you could better map out the chart of accounts or general ledgers. And that was great. Josh: And that, for me, definitely made the line of a bookkeeper versus a business owner a bit fuzzy because I'm like, "I don't want to step on their toes. How much am I meant to know and do?" But at the same time I think more knowledge can only be a good thing, but just know that there's other people that do what they do professionally and better, so I don't necessarily jump in. I wouldn't be expecting business owners to go and do security assessments on their companies. Leschen: Well, I was just going to say, my philosophy is you go and do what you're good at. Josh: Yeah. Leschen: I will help you interpret your numbers until you understand them, because I do like to get to a stage where you do understand them but I'll help you interpret them. I'll help you along the way, but you go and build your business and build what you're good at or do what you're good at because I wouldn't have a clue about IT. So it's just having those people... I think we're in a world where no one is an... You can't be a generalist. You can't build your business and be good at IT, your accounts, your... What else do you need? Legal. You can't be good at all of that and you don't have time to do that. Josh: It already bothers many business owners, including myself. You're kind of still expect it to be the salesperson, the marketer, and whatever the thing is that you're good at and it's still like, "Aw man, I had to learn to become..." It sounds like I'm extroverted at the moment, I assure you, I love a quality month alone with a book. Leschen: Sure. Josh: I realised in business, if you're not the person able to talk, your messaged doesn't go anywhere. You can have the cure to cancer but if it's sitting on your shelf and you don't have a voice to tell anyone about it, you shouldn't even have it. Leschen: No. If it's sitting on your shelf and you're at home trying to do your bookkeeping, instead of getting the word out there, or you're struggling with your bookkeeping and it's taking you a week to do instead of two hours, like a good bookkeeper or something like that. What a waste of time. What a waste of opportunity. Josh: Absolutely. And we've only got time once, don't we? So you don't want to be- Leschen: That's right. Josh: Spending your time doing crap. Leschen: It's the one thing you can't get back. Josh: Exactly right. So there's books out there that I have read and I'm sure other people who've read like The Barefoot Investor and stuff. Leschen: Oh yeah, I haven't read that one, but yeah. Josh: What would you say, if people are looking towards forecasting or people are looking towards some sort of material to not necessarily tell them, "This is how to do something." But just tell them how to make sure they're doing the right thing? Forecasting's awesome, the split of expenses can sometimes... My family are either teachers, business owners or engineers, all of them, my grandparents, everyone. That's the trifecta that we've got there. And dad was an engineer. So doing all of their operations and bits and pieces. Leschen: Oh, bite your tongue! Josh: This isn't just for that business it's for other businesses that he's worked with previously, but how much people generally spend on marketing, generally spend on the people in the trenches to get the work done. And I've always had a lot of trouble with that because I've sort of thought, "Well, if you want to get your message out there, your brand out there, you need to be spending money on marketing. "As much as when I first started my business, I thought like a lot of people, people will come. Rome wasn't built in a day but you build it and they will come and it wasn't the case. And that's when I learned to start talking more. Do you like review if you see some weird patterns, if you went, "Oh, that's weird that they're spending 60% of their revenue on marketing and 20% on business meetings and only 20% on staffing. That's a bit of an odd mix." Leschen: We'd certainly be having a conversation at that point in time. But it also depends on where a business's at. And so, part of our job is to, I guess, listen and we might have these set things in our head and go, "Yeah, wow, 60% on marketing. That's really high." But there might be a very valid explanation for that. So we'll play devil's advocate and make sure that strategy, I guess, is robust and that the business owner has thought through all the pros and cons. And if it's good, it's good. And if they go, "Ah, yeah, I could probably get an employee that would do..." It's all those types of conversations. So all in all, we just strike up a conversation around it. Everyone's got a filter through which they make decisions, whether there's $0 in the bank account or a million dollars in the bank account will affect how you make your decisions. So we're just trying to make sure that all decisions are made at an even keel. Josh: What was it that I saw? It was a presentation that I saw in the past and they said, "The decisions and the ways that your mind works when you're backed into a corner will be incredibly different to the ways that would work when you're thinking clearly." Leschen: Never a truer word has been said. Josh: Yeah. Leschen: I agree. Josh: So I would say every business has gone through some hairy bits. And if you haven't, you're going to, it's just inevitable. You're not taking enough risks. Yeah, that's cool. So if you are looking to make sure that you're keeping your cash flow in the right spot, what are some of the things, I guess, you can do in regards to say commercial property you might be leasing and things like that? Leschen: So right now,in this specific time, if you're starting to worry about cash, you should be speaking to your landlord. Josh: Just for everyone listening it's at the COVID time we're talking. People listen in five years time, it's the COVID time we're talking right now. Leschen: 2020 it'll go down in history. Josh: Yep. Leschen: Yeah. In this COVID time, because there's specific legislation now for it, you should be speaking to your landlords and see if you can get some relief around your rent. You should be speaking to your banks, see if you can defer payment. And at the moment they're not obviously I'm saying you can go payment free, but they're just tacking it onto the end of your loan. But it gives you a little bit more financial certainty now, just do it because your stress levels are going to sky rocket and you're not going to be able to think clearly unless you relieve some of your cash issues. And if you can, go for Jobkeeper if you haven't already. Josh: Yeah, jump into it. They've extended that haven't they? Just recently. Leschen: So they've extended applications until the end of May and you don't actually have to have paid that $1,500 per eligible employee until the 8th of May. The major banks are funding those so if you're a customer of Westpac, ANZ, NAB or CBA, you can actually go to them and they will do a short term over-draught sort of thing. Josh: Bridging loan type thing. Leschen: Yeah, correct. And at very reasonable rates and that will help you fund a lot of that. So I would be getting on the phone ASAP if you want to do that sort of thing. Josh: That's awesome advice. So Leschen, is there anything else that you'd like to go through that you think I haven't covered off on, that you think would be... Questions or information that we should be given to our listeners? Leschen: Look, if anyone has any questions, happy for you to get some notes and I'll shoot something through, but stress is a big things so look after yourselves and have a clear mind as much as possible. Yeah. Josh: Cool. It's been lovely having you on the show here. I'm going to chuck some links in the description here for Element Business and Accounting Solutions for anyone that's interested in jumping across there and hearing a bit of the voodoo that they do and how they can help you out if you are a bit or you're not sure that you're getting the right advice or if you want anything to do with forecasting and want a bit more information there, make sure to jump across and talk to a wonderful team. And everyone else out there, stay healthy and in Podcast Land, if you have enjoyed this, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and everyone stay good.

Covid Created Customers With Julie Bannister Josh: All right. Everyone out there in podcast land, I've got a cool guest for us today. We've got Julie Bannister from BforB, and she's been doing some special stuff with businesses for a number of years and several different flavours, and overall, she helps businesses grow and thrive. And who wouldn't want to grow and thrive at a time like now? So Julie, tell me, how would you say we could best take advantage of the current pandemic? Learn more about Covid created customers at dorksdelivered.com.au Julie Bannister: Hi Josh. Well thank you and thank you for having me on the podcast today. I think obviously we all are online because we cannot meet face to face and that was the whole part of our business. It was face to face business networking. So we had to pivot. I think that's a trendy word just at the moment. Josh: Isn't it? Julie Bannister: It is. I feel a little bit bad saying it, but we have had to change and we've had to go online. So that is our only option. That's everyone's option is to be online and really to support each other. But I think we all have to realise that it's not the end, it's not that we won't come out the other side of this pandemic, and it's not that we can't also grow in this time. Julie Bannister: So I think that is one thing that we really need to be aware of and for everybody to be aware of, and for us to think of ways that we can, and I've seen many of our members of BforB, and other business people just looking at how they can maybe take things online and sell their product online or doing other things so that they can stay afloat in this time and then come out the other side and thrive. Julie Bannister: So we've got lots of things that we're doing. That's one thing that I think we all need to be looking at, at this present point of time. Josh: Absolutely. Changing around the way that you do business is incredibly important and making sure that you're ready for the boom. And I think this is for some businesses, has come as a complete shock, to other businesses, they've seen this as a bit of a kick in the butt to start doing things a little bit differently. And it's all about just making sure that you're ready. And there's just been a breakneck speed that we've seen people do some of these changes. Josh: I guess what you're saying and I'll bring it to an analogy I'm very fond of which is comparing success to a Chinese bamboo tree. So the Chinese bamboo tree you can plant and for the first five years, it grows only very, very small amounts. And then on the fifth year, in six weeks, it grows 80 feet. Julie Bannister: Oh my goodness! Josh: I know. Julie Bannister: We've got bamboo in our backyard and it's been there for about four years. Josh: And using what you said as an analogy, I think all of us have some bamboo in their own backyard and one way or another. Julie Bannister: Yes. Josh: It's about working that out now and harvesting that and planting the seeds now because people right now isn't the time to bury your head in the sand. It's the time to be building relationships and helping people out and making sure that when things come good, you already have that groundwork done. You already know who you know, like and trust and you've already built those relationships up. Josh: So that you can then move forward and move onwards and upwards. Julie Bannister: Definitely. Josh: So anyone that's looking to start a business, this is the most ideal time. And I can say that with a lot of confidence, knowing that Dorks Delivered would start in 2007 as a bit of a side hustle, another one of those words that everyone overuses. Josh: And it was 2009 that we had the, I guess, mini-recession in Australia and the global financial crisis. And that was our time that we absolutely boomed. I gave up my day job, turned that into my full-time gig and I've never looked back. Julie Bannister: Wow. I didn't know that Josh. I've talked to you a lot, but I didn't know that. Yes, interesting. Josh: Yeah, and I think this is the best time that people should be growing businesses. People shouldn't be closing and they should be pivoting them wherever they can and making sure they're taking advantage of the huge amounts of time that people have available. Julie Bannister: Yes, definitely. Josh: So an example I'll use, my podcast has been running now for a bit of time and the YouTube channel has been running for a bit of time. Josh: We have over 100 videos in the YouTube channel published, I think about 120 podcasts and about 180 recorded. But I was only looking this morning at the dashboard for where we're sitting. So the podcast, just looking at it right now, the podcast, the difference in traffic between February and March increased to 30% more listeners. Julie Bannister: Wow. Josh: If we have a look at the YouTube channel, it's increased. The watch time has gone up by 47%. Julie Bannister: That is amazing. Josh: 47% for the month, just ridiculous. And the view count's gone up by 10% and so I think what we can take home from that is, going up by 10% means that I've got 10% more viewers or customers, but the current customers having watched 47% more of my content has shown that they have enjoyed what we're doing, but they just haven't had the time to look at it in the past. Josh: That's where you've got people with more time and what you guys are offering, which I'd love to make sure everyone else knows a bit more about that, but what you guys are offering is going to mean that they can build those relationships with that available time. If they have available time to watch my stupid videos, they definitely have available time to build relationships. Julie Bannister: I must say that videos, very entertaining. They're not stupid, they're entertaining. Sometimes I'm not quite sure why you said that, and why you say some things, but they are definitely very entertaining. Josh: I'm going to say something I'd normally never say, but I was told many years ago, you can have something that's boring. You can have a boring topic or something that people don't give a crap about and someone said, "They can give a crap about, you just have to roll it in glitter." And I'm like, "Okay, no worries." Josh: So you take a boring subject like IT and stuff like that, and you roll it in glitter and that's what the YouTube channel and podcast is all about. Julie Bannister: That's what you definitely do. Josh: That's right. So you've been running something called BforB in one form or another for quite a while and BforB connects people together and builds those relationships up. Julie Bannister: Yes. Josh: So tell me about what you're doing now for people that are looking to grow their business. Julie Bannister: Yes. Okay. So just to go back a step, you mentioned when you were talking Josh, that building the relationships and that's the core essence of networking and business because you need to build those relationships to actually get, as everybody says, the know, like and trust, so that people will want to do business with you. Julie Bannister: And that's what we do in networking. So now that we can't meet face to face, what we're doing is, we've gone online and obviously, the meetings are free to join in, and we're actually launching in a number of different areas. So we're launching in regional Queensland, we're launching in New South Wales in Sydney, and building extra groups near where we are here in Brisbane and Adelaide, and the Gold Coast. Julie Bannister: So allowing people to join in, in the already established network with our formatted meeting structure, it's formatted and it's professional, but it's friendly and casual if you can have that all in one. And you've attended some Josh and you understand that that's what it is. We like people to have fun when they're there. So currently, we're allowing people to take advantage of that and we're offering free membership, well we're saying three months at the moment, but that may have to be extended. Julie Bannister: We're saying the hopeful, three months, this nightmare, we'll be out of this nightmare and we'll be back to life. But that may need to be extended. So that free membership will be extended for however long we're in this situation and allowing people to join in with our network. And we have some larger meetings where all of the members all over Australia connects. Julie Bannister: So that would be people's opportunity to connect with everyone. But it's allowing people to build the relationships now and when we've got the time, as you mentioned, then when we come out of this, those relationships will still be there. And from that, hopefully, referral business can start happening for many, many people. Wonderful, I'm just so excited about it. Julie Bannister: I was sharing with my coach the other day and we got so excited about what we can do for businesses at the moment. And as you mentioned, Josh, people who are not even in business, it's a great time for people to start thinking about that. Josh: Absolutely. We've got an abundance of time. Julie Bannister: Yes, yes. Everybody's got a lot of time. And there's such an opportunity for everyone in this situation and this is the way that we feel that we can help people, help our current members as well because they get connected with other people and we're all hurting at the moment in one way or another. We're all coping in one way or another and all differently. But this is, I believe, a great opportunity for people to be building those relationships now for the future. Josh: Fully agree, as you've pointed out in different words, but your network is your net worth. Julie Bannister: Yes, definitely. Josh: And creating a good network and talking to people right now is the best thing you can do. Those without a voice, won't be heard. And if you're going to just sit there in your sorrows, it's not going to build your business or your mindset, or grow yourself personally. So jumping into a group, as you've very, very generously pushed a free reason. There's no reason, there's nothing to lose, if they just want to spend a bit of time building up their relationships with people now. Josh: When everyone comes back, as I was saying with the bamboo tree, as soon as everyone kicks back into gear, things will be striving through and thriving for them and their business. So it's sensible to set the groundwork now. Sow the seeds, put them in the ground, even if it's not five years, if it's five months that we're in this a pandemic for, it would mean that in five months' time you've hit the gas pedal and you're absolutely cracking out goals. So we'll make sure to put a link towards that because I think that's very, very important and that people do jump onto that. Julie Bannister: There's one thing else that you touched on is that, some of us, and I know even in the last couple of weeks, I've wanted to put my head in the sand or go back to bed and put the pillow over my head and forget that anybody even exists. Josh: I had a talk to my mate, Jack Daniels. We're sweet. We were pretty close. Julie Bannister: My challenge is that if I get too stressed, alcohol doesn't do me good at all. So that's not my answer. But I think we have to not be tough on ourselves because realising that some moments in the day will feel a bit like that and other moments will feel, no, I can do this. So we really do need to acknowledge that and get connected with people so that we can all pull each other through all of this and not be too hard on ourselves, I believe. Josh: Absolutely. Being able to sit down and just, if you want to do it with me right now, Julie, I think it'd be good. Just take a deep breath, and take a breathe in, and breathe out. And then just know, and recollect yourself, and recollect your thoughts and your position. Feel comfortable about where you've come from and this is something that I always try reflecting on every three months, every year, every five years, I go back and look at each of the different business plans that I've made either from the start of the year and go, okay, what have I achieved? Josh: What have I been able to achieve? What have I been able to climb out of? What's been the driving motivator and those things and go, I can do lots. I can't believe how much I've done and be excited about those things and then go, okay, how can I, in a time like now where people are thinking we don't have the resources to do things, we don't have the ability to go and see people. Josh: It's a time where you just need to pivot your mindset and think about how resourceful we have the world at the moment. Being able to do things such as Zoom. We have the ozone layer that's clearing itself up at the moment. We have a huge amount of benefits that are coming from this. Now there's going to be a whole bunch of fallout from that as well and what the world looked like when we went in is not going to be what it looks like when we come back out. Josh: But knowing that you're still here fighting the fight and you have a game plan and way to position your business, it gives you something to drive towards and thrive towards. Like your kids at Christmas time when you tell them to be good and then say Santa's coming. Like, "Oh, I'll be good then." You just got to have something to work towards and know that you can create that sparkle in your eye and your family's. Julie Bannister: Yes. I think the gem in that is, or the key point in that is being connected with other people, whether it's your family, but I think business people, we are a little bit different and we can't always talk to our family members about the challenges or the stress that we're feeling in business. So being connected with business people, is really important in any way you at the moment, I think. Yes. Josh: Absolutely. You're exactly right Julie, and we need to have people being connected with their businesses and what they're doing and also understand that your business and your personal life are two separate things and building relationships in business can help you out personally as well as in business. That's very, very important to make sure you differentiate the health of your business and the health of yourself. Josh: I paused everything to do with Dorks Delivered and I paused it for three days as I went through the personal approach and game plan as to what we would be doing and how we'd be making sure we're okay personally. And then once I was confident with the results, I then started looking at the vehicle that brings us the success that we've got in our lives. Julie Bannister: That's very interesting. I didn't know that. That's another point I didn't know, but I also didn't even think of doing that. So that's a very good point Josh. Josh: Well I think it's knowing that your family is going to be healthy. I'm a bit of a forward thinker and I'll plan for the worst and hope for the best and that's what everyone should do. Nothing out of the ordinary. I didn't go do some bulk buying or anything like that. I don't have a room full of toilet paper. Julie Bannister: I hope you've got enough though. Josh: I've got a mango tree at the back. Julie Bannister: Ooh. Josh: But yeah, just the normal amount that fits under our sink and that we'd normally buy and just knowing that we've got our water bottles filled up. I've got CB radio set up to mum and dad if something was to go wrong with the phone networks or internet or something like that. Just knowing if we have a complete blackout type situation, that you can still talk to your loved ones and where you're at with your mindset and your finances and that. Josh: That's something that I'd definitely suggest everyone doing is just having a look at what the government is putting on the line for businesses. There is quite a number of things we went through and we could see that if you were to be in an 800,000 to $10 million turnover business, you'd be pretty comfortably able to find about $350,000 worth of advantages from the government at the moment. Julie Bannister: I haven't added that up. That's interesting. Josh: Yeah. So that's the numbers that we've got too and we've been talking to any other businesses, and this was something that I went through and spent a couple of days just looking at all the different literature that's available online to see what any of the different stimulus packages include and don't include, and make sure that you're aware of them before you start stressing out thinking customers are leaving and this is happening and that's happening. Josh: Just take a moment to collect yourself, see where you're at and see what is actually available out there and you'd be surprised at what businesses are happy to help out with and in a time like now, as I said, it's about building relationships. One business, we spoke to them, someone that we buy things from, so a vendor for us and we said, "Look, we need to know, are you relaxing any of your terms? You've pretty much presented us with a bill for $3,000." Josh: And he said, "No, if you don't like it, you don't have to stay with us." And I said, "Well, at the moment we would love to stay with you, but it's an auxiliary product that we weren't using with many customers." And we said, No, we're going to have to cut you out." And he goes, "We've had 30 cancellations this month. I don't know what's going on." And I thought, "Well you're an idiot then." Julie Bannister: He needs to open his eyes and ears. Definitely, wow. Josh: I said to him, "We'd be more than happy to utilise your products more than what we have been. We definitely see value in your product. If you give us some marketing material, we're happy to promote your product to help us help you out with this situation." Josh: And he said, "Oh no, I don't have time for that." I went, "Ah well, if you're not going to invest in your customers, you're not going to invest in your relationships. You're not going to invest in your business." It's fair that businesses with that mindset will collapse. And that's again, another thing that I found in going to the BforBs was, it's not just about the business, but you have a whole bunch of other advantages where you have keynote speakers and you have people come to these groups and they talk about the importance of doing certain things in business. Josh: Whether that be setting up your business in a certain way from an accounting perspective or creating videos for promoting your business or whatever the case may be. Automating and bringing back your life, which I'm a big fan of. Julie Bannister: We do have our guest speakers and that is a great value add. And just recently, we've been having a lot of speakers talking about the different packages that the government is offering and a lot of people are doing this, but we're still giving support around your mental health and things like that. But overall, we have guest speakers who talk about marketing, sales, IT, accounting, mindset, all different topics that can help people in their business. Julie Bannister: So yes, definitely, that is a great value add. And as you mentioned, it's not just about business, the friendships people make in BforB is just, it's so valuable, you can't put a price on it. And another value add that a lot of people receive from being a member of BforB is the confidence that you build because little by little, so you might be asked to do a one-minute infomercial and that's very frightening to a lot of people. Josh: Absolutely. Julie Bannister: Yes. And then we'll ask you to do a five minute, and then a 10 minute, and many of our members who've joined and was so scared to do a one-minute infomercial, are actually doing 25-minute presentations now. So it's a confidence-building and within a very, very, very supportive environment. Yes. So that's one of the biggest benefits I believe. Josh: You were talking about some things, new things that you learned about me today. One of the things, I can't remember if I've told you this or not, but I was severely bullied at school to a spot that I wasn't able to walk and I was very introverted. I was the guy that, I'm going to call myself wicked awesome at chess. No one challenged me to that because if you're challenging me, you're probably better, but I was the guy in the library playing chess. Josh: That was my hangout. I was not confident to talk to people. I was not confident to be in the spotlight whatsoever. I was overweight and it was a battle and it was a time where something clicked and I realised that if I have developed the cure for cancer from a computer standpoint in managing and automating businesses, but I'll have that sitting in my garage. Josh: No one has the advantage from that. I'm sure someone has got a cure for cancer and it's just sitting in their garage and they don't have the voice to be able to speak, and speak and talk to people about it. And things like BforB, and being able to come outside of your comfort circle. Josh: Proud of me knowing about BforB was put onto a roadshow to talk to people about IT. It was a five-day roadshow. The first day that I did that roadshow, I recorded it because I was going to put it up on the web for people to have a look at. I watched it. I nearly threw up. I was like, oh my goodness, that's terrible. I can't believe I've done that. I've got four more days of this with no audience engagement and I've gone, oh this is terrible. This is so terrible. I was going to call in sick. I've never wanted my mum to write me a letter to say I can't come to school so much as a grown adult. Josh: I was thinking, I'm freaking out. I watched that same 30 minute video, maybe 10 times that night and I'm writing down what did I do wrong? How did I move my hands? I didn't like that. I look really nervous. How can I fix this? And I wrote down and critiqued everything. The Tuesday, I did the presentation and everyone loved it. They stood up and clapped. They gave me a standing ovation. Josh: I thought, oh, this makes Wednesday a lot easier. That's not to say I didn't watch it still, but BforB gives you exactly that power to be able to... It doesn't matter if you're a scared little mouse and you sit down. It gives you the growth to be able to talk and to know that other people are in the same boat as you. You're not just the only person that's feeling that way. Julie Bannister: That's exactly right. Yes, and that's actually the thing that rocks my boat in BforB is watching people grow and getting that confidence. The referrals, yes, because we need a return on our investment. That is still very important. But that confidence building, it's grows the person and the business. So that's so important. Josh: Yeah, well, Julie it's been great speaking with you and is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we finish this one up? Julie Bannister: We have some online meetings. As I mentioned before, we have our BforB regular meetings at the same time that we used to have our regular face to face meetings. We've got monthly networking, which is open to everyone to come on and we have a guest speaker with that one and I can share the link with you, Josh if you feel that's appropriate. Josh: That'd be perfect. Absolutely, that'd be great. Julie Bannister: Yes. And we do have our daily business, every business day from 10 o'clock till 11:30 where people can just come in and chat with us. No formal meeting, just connecting with people. So yeah. Josh: Cool. Well Julie, I'll make sure to make sure that all of our listeners out there in podcast land get those links and are able to really have a compounding growth for their business over the next few, hopefully only weeks, probably months, but likely, several months. But we'll see how they go. Julie Bannister: Definitely. Thanks for having me. Josh: No worries. And if anyone has enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, give us a review, and everyone out there, stay good.

How to Set Your Pricing With Courtney Deagon Josh: We've got a very special guest for you today. Who here hasn't had that problem, that question, how do I price my item? Is it on what it's costing me plus a percentage? Do I look out into the wilderness and see what my competitors are doing, or do I somehow come up with some other equation? Get more tips on how to set your pricing at dorksdelivered.com.au Josh: It's always an interesting one and there's a lot of psychology into it. And I'd like to introduce Courtney here, who's going to talk a little bit more about how pricing works and why it's super important. So Courtney, tell me, what's the one thing you should never do when it comes to pricing? Courtney Deagon: Wow, Josh, that is such a big question. What's the one thing you should never do when it comes to pricing? One of the things that I always talk about is not just relying on your costs to set your price. And I know that it's such a common thing that's taught, especially to smaller new business owners, because it comes from cost accounting. It makes sense logically to calculate our costs and add on a percentage. Courtney Deagon: But in more cases than not, this can actually lead to business burnout and not having pricing that's profitable and even good for your business or your customers. The truth about your pricing is that your customers are going to pay, they show their willingness to pay and their willingness to pay doesn't change depending on your costs. Your customers don't care about your costs, they care about the value of what you do and what you provide. Josh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so how do you make sure that you put the right value on that? Does that come down to the psychology, the message, or is that making sure that you're jumping into the why, or how would you start working that out? Courtney Deagon: Yeah, so the first thing that I would always encourage people to do is just to get to know your customers more. I love to tell people to be insatiably curious about their customers. When you take the time and effort to get to know people, that means a lot to them as well. That can increase your perceived value to them and their willingness to pay. Courtney Deagon: And what I often find working with my clients is usually the thing that they think people value the most isn't the thing that the customers value the most. And so they get in and they talk to them and they find out, oh, I thought this feature was the thing that they really wanted and valued. But actually it's this thing over here that I don't even talk about. It's just something that happens to be a part of my experience of working with me. Courtney Deagon: So, that's always really interesting, seeing that happen to businesses where they discover what the clients really value. When you know what your customers really value, you can then package your offerings, and price your offerings, and organise your marketing in such a way that it's so much more clear to your audience what you're selling. So much more clear to them what the value is going to be, and they're going to have a much higher willingness to pay for what you do. Josh: Cool. So I guess like you're saying, just cut through the fodder. Maybe you've looked at your client base and they happen to be full of similar sorts of people that love either going to high teas or playing a game of golf or whatever it is, it may be both. But whatever it is, if you're able to find that you're then able to gear that message and make sure that the value of this thing and the relationship they're going to be building with you, is already getting off on the right foot. As opposed to saying, I'm selling pies, and you're a pie store, saying you're selling environmental pies that are eco-friendly or vegan or something like that. It means it's not going to apply to everyone, but vegans are going to be like, "Wow, that's where I want to go." Is that what you're saying? Courtney Deagon: Absolutely. So you touched on it before in terms of the psychology. It's really important to understand that people, I feel are going to make decisions based on their perception. And perception does not map evenly to reality. You can think of the difference between an actual map like you see on Google Maps and actual reality. They're both very, very different. Courtney Deagon: Even if you try to create a reality for your marketing and advertising, the customer is still going to come up with their own perception. It's really, really important then to make sure that you understand what kind of value they're looking for, what kind of things might turn them off? Because it could be something that you're saying, it could be something in your wording, it could be something in the imagery that you're using. Courtney Deagon: But the most important thing is to take off that hat as the professional, because we know so much about our skill and about our product or service, we know so much about it, we know the impact it has on our customers and their lives. How happy it can make them, how much money it can make them and so on, our customers have no idea. All the customer knows is that they have this problem or they have this particular outcome that they really want to achieve. And what we want to do is we want to communicate the fact that we can help them meet that outcome. It's not, "Here's my product, buy my product." It's, "You have a problem. This is a solution you want. I can give you that solution. Here's how I do it." Courtney Deagon: So you start with the value first because that's what's driving the customer to you in the first place. It's not your product. There's a quote that I love that Mark Simon always says, where he says, "Nobody cares about your product." And it's a bit harsh but it's so true. No one really cares about the product. If you buy a drill, it's not because you want a drill, it's because you want a hole. Josh: Yeah, I like that one, yeah. On pricing and making sure... So let's say you've got your message, you've got that down pat, and you go, okay, I know what the product costs me. I know at least have to charge this much. And you're thinking, how high can I go? How do they perceive the value? And I guess, I'll liken it to something that I have a lot more input on actually. Courtney Deagon: Cool. Josh: So Heineken, more recently have released a zero alcohol beer. Now the zero alcohol beer, for a six pack, is going at the moment in Australia for about 16, 17 dollars for a six pack. Now, if you have a look at what a Peroni or a comparable beer would be, the beer would be maybe 20 to 21 dollars for a six pack. So call it a five dollar difference. And if you went for a less imported beer you'd be able to get it even cheaper than that. But let's work on a $16 and $20 for roundish numbers. Josh: The alcohol tax that they're paying on that $20 for that person, is getting significantly less money. The price that they're getting for that 16 it's huge. The margins are significantly more, given that they don't have to be paying any of the alcohol taxes or anything else that are going through. So, how do you think they came to the conclusion of $16? Would you say it's because people want to have that healthy, perceived look, the ability to have a beer and go for a drive possibly, or how did they find that magic number? Courtney Deagon: So I would say for a company like Heineken, they probably know a few things that I and many other pricing people don't know. They have access to the big data that I would love to get my hands on. I would love to say that Heineken took a completely value based approach, but I wouldn't say that the second. I would say that a large company like them, it would have been a mixture of prior sales data, the amount that they've been able to get for other units before. It would also depend on what geographies it was going into. They would have run some kind of research or focus groups I think. Big companies like that are huge fans of running that R&D stuff. Courtney Deagon: That's how I think they would have done it and I think that they probably would've balanced it with the profit margins that they're going for. But even then that's not really value based pricing because it's not about what they think the customer is willing to pay, it's just what they think that the customer might pay in order for them to get some kind of arbitrary target profit margin per bottle per six pack. Josh: The calculation of it, obviously as you said, they've got a lot more data than what we could even imagine. They had spreadsheets printed over the bed sheets. Courtney Deagon: Oh yeah. Josh: I thought, just from my perspective, I went, "Ah..." And just for the record, I'm all about the alcohol beer not the non alcohol beer. Courtney Deagon: Okay. Fair enough. Josh: But I could imagine the person that would be drawn to that would be, okay and no calories, or less calories. It's got about 30% less calories. So, okay, slightly healthy for me, slightly cheaper on my pocket. If you're looking at maybe millennials that might be interested in not having, because it sounds like everyone else wants to have a hangover. That's not what I'm going for. Josh: But millennials might be a bit more health conscious about what they're doing and what they're putting into their body. They might then be more geared towards that, but also they seem to be more financially incapable versus people that have a mature income and have had a career for a number of years or decades. So I think that, I don't know, I thought that that might be how they've geared into that box to say $16 would be cheaper than getting a hangover. Courtney Deagon: I would like to think they have a really smart advertising person. They're Heineken. Because one of the other things is that a 0% alcohol might also make people think that it doesn't taste as good. So that could be another reason for the slightly lower price because they want to make a distinction between the product that they're offering there and other products that do have the alcohol in them. So, that could be another thing. Maybe I'll email Heineken and see what I can do. I would not be surprised if they came back and said, "No, we can't tell you that." Josh: Because there's lots of things that you look at and you go, "Oh..." Especially when it comes to the software as a service market, which I'm sure we're very familiar with. You have a look and you think, oh okay, it's only going to cost $5 more a month for me to have a logo on a page. That's costing them nothing at all. But people are going to pay it because they want to be able to have their brand on things. If it's a form of- Courtney Deagon: They've still got the value. Josh: Exactly, and so it's very, very smart the way that that's gone. Again, the cloud, the way that the cloud has been manipulated to make everyone feel like it's going to cost them less money. It doesn't. The total cost of ownership is significantly more by a factor of 30% or more over a five year period. And so you're looking at, okay, well that is, it's costing more money but the perceived value is high and you have less infrastructure. It's interesting. How do you, short of having a huge audience to be able to test, if you're just a green field company going out, where do you start? Courtney Deagon: You can ask friends if you have honest friends, put it that way. Honest friends, ask them because they usually are pretty trustworthy. You can use companies like Conjoint.ly. That's the one that's in my mind at the moment, who do actually conduct market research. And I think with Conjoint.ly you pay per data point or something like that. Courtney Deagon: But there are companies out there where you can actually get outsourced market research. Also, even if you have a decent sized mailing list, things like surveys, talking to customers who've used your product. If you can have even 10 or 20 or more one-on-one, half hour, hour long conversations, asking really, really good questions, that will give you a huge amount of value. Courtney Deagon: But running surveys and having some statistical good questions in there next year for Conjoint.ly, questions that are specifically related to help you figure out the willingness to pay of your audience and how much they value it. But really a mixture of surveys and having those one-on-one conversations with people who have used your product, who aren't friends or your mom or your cousin and all that, is a really, really good idea. And the more people you ask, the better quality information you're going to get as well. That is a really good place to start. Josh: I'm going to ask a question. I know a lot of people are probably thinking, asking, at least it's in the back of their mind discounting. Discounting- Courtney Deagon: Uh-huh. Josh: Never discount your product, don't do it. You're discounting your product, you're discounting your business, you're discounting everything, you're going to get discounted clients. Then there's the build a discount into the product itself to sell them at a high price and then drop them down in price. Josh: And there's a whole bunch of different ideas and mentalities around the way that it works. Sell a cheap product or it will come across as a cheap product and people are going to think that you're only going to get cheap clients and... What is the best way to make sure you position yourself accordingly, or is that very industry specific? Should you write in a discounting percentage? Courtney Deagon: Yes, I would say it's not industry specific because every single industry, whether you're B2B or B2C, your customers are humans unless you're a vet, I suppose. But even then your end customer is a human. And humans perceive value in very, very similar ways. There are some psychological thinkings that are common to all humans regardless of what industry you're in. So that would be the first thing I'd say. Courtney Deagon: I generally tell people don't discount unless you know how to use a discount properly. Because most of the time companies don't use discounts very well and they use them in such a way that, like you said, it damages their branding, it damages their pricing integrity. It can make customers very unhappy. It can have the opposite effect to what you want it to have. Courtney Deagon: There's a difference as well between internal discounting and external discounting. So external discounting is where you post publicly that you're having some kind of discount sale. So say you post up on your website, we're having a 20% off sale of all of our subscription services. That's an external discount. Courtney Deagon: An internal discount might be you email your mailing list or customers who've just bought something, and you say, "Hey, thanks so much for being a loyal customer. We would love to thank you by giving you a 5% discount off this product or this service." Or something like that. So it's internal. It's limited to a select number of people who may have bought with you before, they may be leads and you're trying to generate a deeper relationship with them. But then again, I would also mark that with an asterisk of, it really depends on what kind of perception you want to create for your brand and what position you want your brand to have. Courtney Deagon: If you want to be a high end, high ticket service or company, discounting might not be the way to go, and I would use different wording like adjustment. So, as an example, if I'm constructing a proposal for someone and they have a very, very limited budget, I'll say, "That's okay. Let me know what your parameters are and I'm happy to do an adjusted proposal for you." So it's not really discounted, but I'm using different language to indicate that I'm not a company who discounts. I'm a company who will make adjustments and change what I'm offering so that I'm giving you value, and then we can come up with a price that's fair. Josh: Okay. So if you were to be looking to adjust the price, if you adjust your whole system, you've changed around from trading time for money to trading value. Okay. Courtney Deagon: Mm-hmm. Josh: And you're going through this transition, you're trying to do this for your business and it doesn't matter, I guess, if you're a plumber or you're selling cakes. Whatever the process is, if you're going through that and you've got people that are used to the previous system, how do you go about changing that for them and having them introduced to that if they're already very comfortable with the previous system? Courtney Deagon: Yeah, so every transformation starts with language. I coach people on being able to change their language around the way that they talk about their business, the way they talk about their business model, their marketing. Everything, as well as pricing as well, and how they think about it. And then as they start to tell their customers about, "Hey, our business is changing. We're doing these great things. It's really exciting." You want to talk about it in a way that you're being transparent about how it's going to benefit them, and be really clear about what the potential changes are. Courtney Deagon: When you're bringing in things like guarantees at the same time, more transparency and less risk for the customer, it doesn't become a scary change anymore. It becomes, oh my gosh, they're transforming their business into something that's going to be better for me as well as better for them. Here are all the things I'm now going to get from that. I'm going to have less risks. I'm going to have value guarantee of price, and guarantee of other things like that. Courtney Deagon: And it also teaches them what to expect from you, as well. And it shows them that you're dedicated to having a better business so that you can give them a better experience. And that just increases the perceived value even more. Josh: Right. I know that we went through a transition a number of years ago where we were charging a set price per computer, a set price per server. And then we thought, let's change this model and just charge a set price per staff member. And it makes it simple for everyone. Like, okay [crosstalk 00:15:47]. Courtney Deagon: Absolutely. Josh: Straight, easy. Then if a guy came, okay, we're getting another server. That's going to cost this much more. So that's another overhead. It's an ongoing thing. If they're getting to a spot that they need three or four servers or something like that, they've also increased their staff head count. And so it makes it nice and simple. Courtney Deagon: Absolutely. Josh: So there's a bit of psychology that I've read on the number seven. Have you heard about this stuff? Why do you want to have a 9997 drive away or something like that. What's up with that? Why do people want to end in sevens? Courtney Deagon: So I mentioned that Mark Simon before. He wrote a thesis on price endings. And you can probably google that and find it and read it if you wanted to. When you think about our brain, we're being bombarded by information all the time, right? I'm looking at you, but I can also see in my periphery the window, and there's some things over there and my phone's there. And there's a lot of information coming in at my brain at the same time, right? Josh: Yeah.

Running the Numbers With Drue from 4Front Josh: Good day everyone out there in podcast world. We've got a special guest here, Drue, and he does some pretty cool stuff. And actually, you know what? I'm going to get you to tell me what you do, the voodoo that you do, and how that's impacting businesses around Southeast Queensland? Get more tips from Drue Schofield at dorksdelivered.com.au Drue: Yeah, thanks Josh. Nice intro. I don't know that we're that exciting. Josh: Aww, come on. Drue: But that was a very exciting introduction. We're accountants. Look, no, all jokes aside, we think we're quite personable people. Yeah, we're accountants. We're a full-service accounting and advisory taxation business or service. We deal mainly in the small to medium business space. We do self-managed super fund administration and advisory with our SMSF clients, whether they are still working, building businesses, contributing to super or they're self-funded retirees, and we also do quite a bit of work with property investors and developers, making sure they're structured well and giving them advice along the way, whilst being in a position to help our clients leverage our network. I spend a lot of time, personally, networking with allied professionals and pretty much anyone. I just like to be a conduit for business and people that are doing things and have ambition, and if I can connect you, or one of my clients, or someone with someone else that they need to talk to, to solve their problem, then that makes me really happy. Josh: Cool. Okay. So I guess you covered a couple of things there that spiked my interest. One of them was the podcast worldwide audience, in Australia, we call a small to medium business, I would have said, five to 200 employees. Yeah? Would you agree? About that? Drue: Yeah, about that. Yeah. Josh: Yeah. Where in America, anything less than 200 is small, it's backyard mom and dad shop, isn't it? Drue: Yeah, they seem to have a different view on business over there. Unless you're over 250 employees or whatever, they don't really even count. Josh: A blimp. Nothing. Drue: To a degree. I mean, I had some association with businesses and professionals over there when clients needed to utilise services in the U.S. and Europe as well. But yeah, certainly, everything's bigger and better in America. Sometimes. Josh: So one of the things that I've noticed when I've been talking with you versus other accountants, in bits and pieces that we've spoken with is, you seem down to earth, to the point, and humanable. Drue: Oh, thanks. Josh: If that makes sense. Drue: Yeah, yeah. Josh: Less robotic. Drue: Yeah, yeah. Look, accountants have a bad stereotype. Look, I like to think I'm the new wave or part of the new wave or the new age of accountants. Josh: I'm not helping the IT look! Drue: No, you look very trendy, except for the glasses that have no lenses by the way, for people out there. But no, they look really good. I was offered to wear some, but I chose not to. I'm a contact lens wearer, anyway. Drue: Look, we are. We're approachable. I don't know if fun loving is the right word, but we enjoy what we do. That said, we're serious. We give serious advice and sophisticated advice to people when they need it. We're succinct, we're to the point, we remove jargon. If a client doesn't understand what we're doing, we just go over it again and again until they do. Hopefully, not too many times, and usually not too many times. We usually get it on the first or second go, but we're not here to preach to people, we're not here to talk down to people, we're here to educate people. And if clients don't understand what they're doing and getting themselves into, you can bet your bottom dollar, that's where there's going to be problems, so we want to avoid that at all costs. We have those full and frank conversations without fear or favour. The clients know what they're doing, why they want to do it. We get a good understanding of that, and then we give the advice tailored to that particular situation. Josh: I think you listed four F's then. And I guess if everything's going right, you don't hear a fifth one. Drue: No, that's right. We won't talk about the fifth one. There's enough doom and gloom out there today and we don't need to feed any more panic or doom and gloom, I don't think. Josh: Not at all. So I can see a lot of similarities in what you guys do and what we do. We try to simplify technical problems. We try to make sure that people are able to understand and assimilate with what their end goal is. And we use technology as the fulcrum to achieve that. And in a non technical, gobbledygook, terahertz and gigaflops type words, we try and make sure it's all human understandable, readable stuff. It doesn't matter if you're a mechanic or a doctor or whatever it is, or anything in between, you're able to work out. You know there's a problem, we can see that there's a solution, and we use, as I said, technology for that. Josh: So one of the things, I know, when I first started out in business, was I was scared shitless about doing the accounting thing and doing it wrong. So I went and bought a bunch of a bunch of books and got any of the different government books that I could get on GST, and I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to read those, their ... Drue: I've read them all. Josh: They're exciting, aren't they? Drue: No, they're not. Josh: No they're not. So I'm reading all this stuff, and at that stage I was at uni reading all these books on GST and BAS, and everything else, when I'm on the train to uni. It wasn't fun and it didn't make me feel any better off, because I guess it's kind of like me trying to pretend I'm a doctor or pretend I'm a mechanic, when I'm not. Drue: Sometimes it's good to just eat the sausage, Josh, and not know what gone into it. Josh: Exactly. I agree. Drue: If you use that as an analogy. Not that we don't explain what goes into it. Josh: I like that. That's good. I've always said, "You can teach a man to fish and he'll have food for life, but some people just don't like fishing." Drue: That's right. Josh: They just don't. Drue: Some people don't like fish either. Josh: Exactly. So that's getting a professional to do the voodoo that they do, is better than you trying to do everything and wear another hat. Drue: Yeah, it's crucial. I can't underline, underscore, bold, italic, asterisk enough that it's crucial to get really good advice. Whether you're just starting out in business, or starting out doing a development, or considering setting up a self-managed super fund, or whatever the case may be. Or you've been in business for two, three years and things are going well, or you're an established business, I can't stress enough how important it is to get accurate, timely advice, from someone that wants to be a key partner in your business. I mean that's our tagline. "Your key partner in business," that's who we aim to be. I believe we achieve that all the time with all of our clients. We want to see businesses survive and thrive, and grow and flourish, and do really well. And if we can be a part of that journey and connect them to good people and give good advice, then again, as I said before, that makes us really happy. Josh: Cool, cool, cool. And I think that's important there. Key. Good advice. And knowing what's out there, one of the things that I found out about years into business, was the R&D grants in bits and pieces. Drue: Yeah, sure. Josh: Do you guys work with those? Drue: We do a little bit in that space. Those things become more technical and more specialised. What I'd rather do more so than try to do it, is we've got people we work with, people we will then refer our clients to that are specialists in that area. And then I guess that's another thing that is a benefit of myself and 4Front Accountants. If we don't know something, we're not afraid to put our hand up and say, "Hey, we've got a rough idea about this, we know enough to be dangerous, but it's now time to go and talk to a professional." Josh: Yep. Drue: And the other thing we'll do there in that situation, is rather than just push the boat out and say, "See you later, hopefully, you hit land," we'll make the connection with that person, and if needs be, we'll attend the meeting and facilitate the process. So again, we want to be your key partner, our client's key partner in business. We'll really hold their hand through that process. Drue: And R&D is a really good example. Whilst we know enough about it, again, to be dangerous and how it all comes together, there's specialists that we work with and that's all they do. R&D in grant work. So R&D is research and development. Sorry, I'm using an acronym and I should explain it. Josh: I should have as well. Drue: That's all right. Not a problem. It's easy when you're a professional and you're working with ABCs and one, two, threes, and EFDs, and ATOs, and ELDs, to just rattle things off. But yeah, R&D, research and development. And whilst I'm there, a little plug for the current government and preceding governments, that someone had the foresight to bring that sort of thing in, because that's helped a lot of our clients tremendously. And I'm not even joking, millions of dollars. Josh: Absolutely. It was a game changer for us. Drue: In real cash. Josh: We've already been developing products, already been developing integrations into LinkedIn that can speed up the process to find new clients. We've developed these different processes within businesses to be able to integrate phones in bits and pieces, and we were already doing all this stuff, and then someone told me about it and I went, "Oh shit, this exists? This is a thing? Why isn't this spoken about more?" Drue: It's an often overlooked or ill-considered thing, it feels like the ATO and the government's always here to do things to you, but when you're a small business person, within reason, it does do things for you as well. I mean, we'll probably touch on it later, but the government's just neutered some stimulus package that's aimed mainly at business and it's actually really good, and it should get things going and hopefully quell some of the fear and panic out there that business owners have. God, I've had three phone calls today and two emails last night about it already. So we're actually sending out a communication and a newsletter form that summaries things clearly, succinctly, no jargon, so that clients have one source. So 4Front Accountants clients have one source to go to, look at, and say, "Okay, great, now I understand it." And we'll get more phone calls and that's fine, we'll explain it. Drue: But going back to what I was talking about, things like the R&D concessions and grants, and those sorts of things, governments are there to do things for business, not always to business. Josh: Yeah. And that's something that I was a big mindset shift that I had around 2016, 2015, 2016, when I started going for the R&D concession. I didn't know it existed, already been in business at that stage since 2007, so I'd been around for long enough that I should have heard something out there, but I hadn't. That was kind of a, "Oh I mean all this wasted money," but I went, "Well, I'm not going out of business." All this potential. And it's only one of the things that I've seen out there. Like there's advantages to employing, there's digital business grants and bits and pieces out there. There's a whole bunch of different things where the government is giving out a whole bunch of money. Josh: There was a programe which I was involved with a little while ago that would subsidise the hourly rates of IT staff, and all sorts of things like that. And I just went, "Wow, this is this cool stuff. How didn't I know about this?" And it's just everyone has that predefined thought, belief system that they're out there to take and not give. Drue: Look, it's a symptom that we see with clients all the time. They're too busy doing it, doing it, doing it. They're stuck working in their business and not on it. And that's the sort of focus that we try to shift, and a mindset we try to change with clients that, "Hey, you need to work on your business and not in it." We've got the tools, the expertise, and the advice and products to actually help clients work more on their business and not in it. And things like that come up all the time. Drue: Now it's quite possible that your accountant that you're working with at the time knew about it and didn't tell you or may not have known about it at all. But I can assure people listening that at 4Front Accountants, there are the sorts of things that we've got a finger on the pulse with. Again, we're not experts, we don't understand those things, but we're certainly aware of them. We find out enough about it. I certainly do read about it, and I know my people at 4Front Accountants do as well. We read about it enough and know enough about it to be dangerous, and then to know who to hand that on to, so that we can explain that situation to that particular expert, and then guide our client in the right path, with the right person, so that they get the result that they want. Josh: And that's what you want to get with anyone in the professional services industry. You don't necessarily want them to be the one stop shop. You want to them to know the shops you can go to Drue: You can't be all things to all people. And when you do, you will fail, immediately. Josh: Yep. Drue: And you shouldn't be. I mean, there's specialists in every field. I mean if you've got a problem with your knee, you might start at the GP, but you'll soon be referred to, potentially, an orthopedic surgeon. The GP isn't going to be there, but he's developed a relationship with that person to know that's the best orthopedic surgeon for your particular problem. I mean, we're the same. We're not solicitors, we're not finance brokers, we're not financial advisors yet. We're not R&D grant specialists or whatever the case might be, but we've got a really good network and we spend a lot of time building relationships with the people that will help our clients, so that we can continually prove our mantra or our motto, tagline, that we are your key partner in business. Josh: That's really important. Just knowing that you've got that one point of contact and that- Drue: It's terrific when people come to you and they say, "Drue, I need this," or my business partner, Carmine Decorso, they might go to Carmine and say, "Hey Carmine, we need this," and we'd say, "Yep, sure. We know someone. We'll give them a call now. We'll connect you. If you want us to come to the meeting, we can do that as well." Josh: Yep. So where would you say you sit with businesses? Do you start at anything from bookkeepers and all the way up, like a CFO type level? Drue: Yeah, we do a lot, I mean I guess our core competency is compliance work. When people think of accountants, they think of people that will do financial statements and tax returns to a solid, accurate level. They'll complete those income tax returns to a point where they're not paying a dollar more or less tax than they should. And if they're lucky, they might get a little bit of business advice. Drue: Now, we kind of turn that on its head a little bit, insofar that we recognise and realise the compliance is important, and certainly we feel our clients don't pay a dollar more or less tax than they should. And we work really hard to make sure that things are done properly, correctly, and legally. You certainly don't want to do anything that's illegal, nor do we. Where our point difference is, we do sort of act in that external CFO type arrangement, where we like to work with our clients more often than once or twice a year. We do that through something we've termed our Board of Advice programe, where we sit down with our clients quarterly, and I like to call them 90 day success cycles, which I believe is a McKinsey & Co term, the management consultants. So again, shows you the literature that people at 4Front Accountants are reading. We're not just reading the boring textbooks. Whilst they are important, they're not terribly exciting, but we've got to go through them. I'm more interested in things that are going to help our business clients survive, grow, and thrive. But yeah, we run our Board of Advice program with most of our business clients or as many as we can. They see a lot of value in that. Drue: So what is the Board of Advice program? As I alluded to, we work in quarterly cycles with our clients. We run to an agenda. We focus on the financial performance of the business and we do some business analysis around that on quarterly numbers, usually comparing the current quarter to the same quarter this time last year. And then the December quarter that we've just finished with our Board of Advice clients now, it's really interesting, because you've got six months of data this year, and you've got six months of data from the previous year, so you can really have a really good snapshot of where the business is at. Sometimes just comparing this quarter this year to this quarter last year isn't enough. Likewise, comparing the 2019 year, we've just finished it, to the 2018 year, doesn't really tell you a lot. It's a little bit too far in the past. I always tease clients that we're not here to write history with them, we're here to make history, and that's what we really try to do. Josh: I guess one of the things that I've always thought is, "Man, okay, you'll have a good quarter, you have an awesome quarter, and then you'll have a bad quarter." And when you've been in business long enough, they can't all be home runs, can they? Drue: Sadly, not. Josh: No. Well I think you can't enjoy the good without the bad, so it really lets you appreciate the good. Drue: Your sweet and savoury. Josh: Yeah, that's right. So I think and I see a lot of people around the place that are, "Oh my goodness, you wouldn't believe what happened, the line was so long at the shops." Well, there's kids starving in Africa and you're worried about the line at the shops. Drue: They're probably buying toilet paper. Josh: That's exactly right. So you have a look at these things and you think, "Okay, you need to get a bit of reality check." And I think the best thing to do is to have the bad times so that you can appreciate the good times. And not necessarily, I'm not wishing anything upon anyone that complains about mundane and first world problems, but yeah, you definitely need to have the bad ones. But if you have a bad one, sometimes that could be something that's spread further than just your business, and a lot of people are worried about a recession and things. Nevertheless, the data that you have, that you can help businesses out with, you mentioned forecasting. Are you able to see trends across the businesses that you work with? Drue: Absolutely. We see stuff all the time. Josh: So if someone said, "Oh, I've had a bad quarter," and you go, "Look, I understand. We've got five other businesses that are in the same sector as you that are also feeling the pressure." Is that something- Drue: Yeah, it is. I mean, we're growing, we're growing all the time. And we want to keep growing. We've got fairly big aspirations as to where 4Front Accountants will land in my lifetime as a business, so the more clients we have, the more data we have. Now, obviously everything's confidential so we don't share other people's information, but we can talk about things generally. Drue: So we're seeing that with particular trade's clients, or we're seeing that with medical professional clients, or we're seeing that with Josh: Retails. Drue: Clients in, yeah, retail, whatever the case may be. You get a general feel, you work with enough clients, you just end up with, as an accounting firm, you end up with a natural cluster, because if you've got an accounting business like we do, you're dealing with a lot of different businesses all the time, and we're almost solely business these days, which is the path we want to keep going on. So you see little clusters. Drue: It's really important, though, to not have a five week view of things. You need to have a quarterly, that 90 day success cycle view of things, or that six monthly, one year, three years, five years. Now, the further you stretch out, the harder it is to plan. Josh: Otherwise, it gets a bit wonky, but at least you're walking it. Drue: You can, but you've got to have a plan. You've got to have a plan. So one of the things that's really important, I think, for clients is to do some forecasting, and then you give yourself some measurements or some numbers to measure your current performance against. Like you said, Josh, you're going to have bad quarters, and that's just how things are. It might be because of seasonality, it might be because there's a hereto incurable virus sweeping across the world, who knows? But it's important to take a longer term view of things and look at your business and say, "Okay, is there anything that's fundamentally wrong with the business now?" Most business people will have a gut feeling, that's why they are entrepreneurs and that's why they are business people, they tend to go with their gut. Perhaps more. It's sort of an intuitive thing, but I think probably harking right back to the advice piece I was talking about before, you can't underestimate the power and the value of good, succinct, solid, financial advice, sitting down with your accountant or your advisor. We're becoming more advisors than accountants these days because of the number of clients that are starting to take up our Board of Advice program. Drue: And if you do it in a logical, methodical way, with some structure, I mean all our Board of Advice program meetings that we have each quarter run to an agenda. We talk about the financial analysis of the business, sure, but there are other things that come up as well. They become a bit open slather, we like to look at whatever clients are comfortable talking about, and that sway into personal issues as well, which means you've got to have a whole subset of other networks available to you. That might be psychologists and psychiatrists or other healthcare professional people. Josh: You're offering counselling, nearly. Drue: Well not quite. Josh: You're not wanting to but Drue: Well, look, unless you're in business, you really don't understand and appreciate how much it really becomes part of your psyche, and it becomes your identity. Josh: Absolutely. Drue: And we've had clients, unfortunately, that have had businesses go under, where we haven't been appointed as advisors quick enough, and we haven't been able to make changes early enough. And it's really sad. And sometimes these aren't young people, sometimes these are well established people in their 30's or 40's or 50's where industries have changed and they've been left behind. And that's really, really sad. Drue: Now in some instances, there's probably not much you can do, but I think if you had the chance to get to them early, maybe run this Board of Advice program that's quite structured, which is almost like a mini board of directors, the way we run it, given its got an agenda, and it really does add a bit of corporate governance and accountability, which is important. It's something that I think is lacking more generally in the small business world. People sort of get their hammer and level, and off they go, and they're a builder, or they take their- Josh: All the cowboys out there. They try their best- Drue: Yeah, they are. I guess there are Cowboys out there and they do try their best, but they may not have appreciated the advice that they could get off a good accountant and business advisor. And I like to think that if our clients, and future clients, start to work with us closer with this Board of Advice program, the amount of accountability adds is tremendous. And it's going to get good results, because we're spending that time to sit with our clients and we're their professional sounding board. They can throw anything they like at us. We'll have our own insights and our own observations, which we can give advice around and make changes. And I've done that with clients recently. Drue: I had a plumbing client recently that is new to the firm, and he reported a $20,000 loss last year, and he couldn't work out why. I sat down with- Josh: I bet he pulled that coin from out of his house or something like that, or a personal asset, or that's, I guess, advice that you'd be giving. Drue: Yeah, so I've sat down with him, looked at the numbers, and he said, "Okay, well there's a $20,000 loss here." Yeah. And the businesses is now in lost territory again for the last two quarters. On a quick analysis, I've worked out that his GP, his gross profit line is wrong. So he didn't have the right numbers in there. Once I put the right numbers in there, whilst it was still bad, it made the data more realistic, and it told a better story. Josh: So gutter in, gutter out. Drue: That's right. So the issue in this particular, and this is a real life example here, in this particular client situation, he was having an over reliance on subcontractors and labour hire, and we feel he wasn't marking up the materials he was buying enough. So we did just a quick little "for example" calculation of if he replaced this person with this person and this with that and perhaps got rid of some of the labour hire and some of subcontractor at work, and replace that with a more permanent workforce, and then changed the markup he was putting on the cost of sales, we were able to turn it into an $86,000 profit. Josh: Yep. Huge. Drue: Massive turnaround. That's a $106,000 turn around. Now it's easy to say, "Oh yeah, that's great, Drue, but that's all theory. You may not get that immediately." But if you change your mindset, and you're working with your advisor or your accountant each quarter, and you're looking at those things and making that the most important thing, I always say that which is measured is that which is achieved, you're going to get somewhere near it. You might not get to the $86,000 profit the first year, but gosh, you might get $20,000 profit or $30,000. Going to be better than a $20,000 loss, surely. Josh: You can't turn a ship on a dime. Drue: No. Josh: It takes time. Drue: It takes time. And I guess the Board of Advice programe we're running, it's really helping clients to see the power of accountability and meeting and taking advice and acting on it. Josh: I agree. It's something that people need to have. And this is something ... I was talking to someone else earlier on today- Drue: And if you haven't worked out, I'm pretty passionate about it. Josh: I've noticed. Yeah, yeah. Drue: Well, I want to see people do well. I mean my parents were small business owners and- Josh: Yeah, what did they do? Drue: Builder. Dad's a builder. Had some really good success over the years, but I think he could have done better if he'd had, perhaps better advice, more frequently. And I really think any business, whether you're really successful or you're moderately successful or you're doing okay, will benefit from better quality advice more frequently. Josh: Well, I found, when I first started out in business, my uncle at a company that he was running for many years, and engineers or teachers is pretty much everyone else. So I always thought you can do anything you put your mind to, but that was misinterpreted as you do everything that you can and you put your mind to. And so that then meant when I became a business, started, I'll put in my prepubescent voice, "Let's start a business. I'm really excited to see where this goes." And then I went, "Shit, there's a lot to do." And so I had to become the marketer, the salesperson, the manager, the entrepreneur. Drue: Chief cook and bottle washer. Josh: Exactly. Exactly. All and everything of the above. So I slowly, slowly worked out that this isn't for me. And then went, "Let's stop this and start employing the right people and having the right people do what they enjoy doing," and do what brings you the money in. So that was a great shift and I've never looked back. Having the right people there to give you the advice though, and make sure you are making the right decisions is important. Drue: I think it's critical. It's critical to the success of success or failure of a particular business or enterprise. It just really is. Josh: It doesn't matter the size of your business either. I think it's critical straightaway. We go into people's networks a lot and we see problems and problems and we go, "Oh, why is it set up like that?" Or, "Why is it done like that?" And it's just because the advice that they were given was they thought they know, liked, and trusted that person, trusted the advice, and it was just poor advice. And so for all of our clients that we work with, we say, "Look, we want you, every six months or however often you feel necessary, get another IT company in here and see if we're doing the best job for you." And that gives them the full input and knowledge that we're fully transparent, we're very confident in what we're doing, and we know we're doing right for businesses. Drue: The fact that you're prepared to frank your ability with that, I'd imagine no clients do that, because they know that you back yourself. Josh: Very few. And one of them said, "Oh, who would you suggest?" And I said, "That kind of takes away from the point of it, doesn't it?" Drue: Yeah, that's not independent. If you're suggesting someone, it's not really independent. Josh: Any professional services that they have that they're employing in their business, whether it be financial advisors, accountants, solicitors, IT people, anyone that is doing something that you can't touch and feel and know that the product is good and the outcome is good. Drue: Intangible. Josh: Yeah, intangible products or intangible services, you need to be able to have someone go in there and make sure that Oz behind the curtain is pulling the right strings and doing the right thing for you. Josh: So we had someone come to us about a month ago and they were asking us if we could help them out with some of their LinkedIn marketing stuff. And I said, "Yeah, we can definitely do that. We can go through the process and do the voodoo that we do." And I bought the pricing, he goes, "Oh. Okay, we'll have a think about it." And I thought, "Oh, 'have a think about it' means you're probably going to check out someone else. That doesn't matter. Josh: Anyway, he called us back a month later. So just the Monday just gone. And said, "Josh, I need you to review what's going on with my LinkedIn." I had a look and he went with this company to go through and market him on LinkedIn. And I thought, "All right." And I had a look and they were doing nothing. They bought a $50 product. They took his scripts, and they were using this $50 product to automate the messages that were being sent out, and then charging them $1,500 a month to try and make new connections on LinkedIn. And I said, "You are absolutely been being taken for a run mate." I said, "This is terrible." I said, "The product they're using is this ... " and pointed it out here. And I said, "This is what they're using. It's $50." And that's $50 U.S. I said, "But that's $50. And then you've shown me what you've given me and all of this information, they've just entered that, copied it out of your document into these fields. Then they've just set the days of when they're going to send these messages to people." I said, This is terrible. You're really spending $1,500?" He goes, "I feel sick." I said, "Maybe $500 if they're managing everything and they're doing a phone call." For what they're doing, I said, "They're on selling a product with 30 times mark up, 3000% mark up." I'm like, "That's ridiculous." Drue: Vaporware. Josh: Yeah. And anyway, what I'm getting at is it's always important to have someone there check out what's going on. I myself have had only a couple of bookkeepers over the 13 years we've been in business, and when I got the second bookkeeper, she went, "Oh man, look what the first bookkeeper's been doing," and I thought, "Oh, well that's probably what you're going to say anyway," but it's good just to have people double check, just to make sure that your work is aligned. Drue: Yeah. It can't hurt. Josh: Right. What's the hurt in it? Nothing, yeah. Drue: Look, very rarely do we have clients do that, because they're confident in what we do and how we do it. Now, I will say often I have meetings with prospective clients. It probably starts out as a second opinion meeting, but once I start talking about what we're going to do and demonstrate that, it soon becomes a first opinion meeting, because they've become clients, which is nice. Josh: Yeah. But that's what you want. Drue: Absolutely. Josh: And that just shows when you think, obviously without knowing the relationship- Drue: And it doesn't mean their advisors aren't good, it just means they're not as good as us. Josh: Yeah. Not on the ball enough or not keeping in contact enough. And that's imperative, like relationships. We're all about automation and everything that we produce is all around automation and uptime for businesses, but we'd never suggest to automate the human touch. Now we're sitting here having a podcast together, doing an interview together. Drue: In the same room. Josh: In the same room. Drue: As humans. Josh: We can high five. Drue: Yep. Josh: That was terrible, let's try one that makes a noise. There we go. And when you look at, we could have done this over Zoom, we could have used technology, we could have done all these other different things, but that's a start and end, and then there's nothing there. And I think the world is becoming too digitised in ways that they should be humanised. Drue: Yeah. It's not as organic. Our Board of Advice meetings, we have a handful, occasionally, that are done on a Zoom or a Skype call, but for the most part, I like to do them face to face, either in our office or in our boardroom, which is all kitted out and nice and comfortable and easy to have the meetings there, or at the client's premises, more than happy to do that. But I prefer and okay, yeah, it would be quicker, it would save me half an hour, 45 minutes each way in a car. It would save the client half an hour, 45 minutes each way in the car. So okay, you'd pick up an hour, an hour and a half. Big deal. In the overall scheme of things, more than happy to go to a client's premises and meet with them or their home, if that's where they're comfortable doing it. I don't mind. Drue: But the important thing is they're in the flesh, eyeballing each other. It's seeing body language, seeing expression. Josh: You can feel the emotion. Drue: And they can see, I hope, sometimes our passion or my passion for what I'm trying to do and where I'm trying to help them get with their business. And I can see their passion or their frustration or their concern or fear or panic or jubilation that they've .... We've had an action list that we set last time and they've done it all and they'll say, "See Drue, I did it all. You didn't think I would, did you?" I'm like, "No, no, I never said that." Or where the labour a point, they look at something and they say, "Well look, we didn't get this action point and here's why." And we can sit there and we can talk about it. I don't think we will ever, ever technologize, digitise, or supersede, the human to human interaction. Drue: No. Josh: If we did, the UN would be done completely via video link, and there would be no need for everyone to fly into Brussels or wherever they do, and have a face to face meeting. Drue: No G20s, none of that stuff. Josh: It'll be all gone. Drue: If you think about bigger businesses with business deals, they still fly to Japan or to China or to the U.S. or to London, wherever it is, and they sit down. They might break bread and have a meal together, but they sit in the room and they sign the papers. And there's no need to do that usually, but there's a real human need or craving to be in the company of other human beings. Josh: There's something there that you can't feel otherwise. Drue: Yeah. Josh: When you do it over the phone, you can hear tonalities in voices, but you can't really feel the impact of that person being there. It generally doesn't go longer than the, "Okay. We've started, we've had a small amount of banter. We've spoken about it. We've concluded. We've said bye." There's not that, let's get to know the real you moments that you get when you talk and catch up with people. Drue: It's like a 5D factor, I think, I call it. So not 3D because 3D's easy on the video, and we all know about 4D now, but 5D's you're in their presence, without trying to get too spiritual, you can feel their being. And it's really good. And that's what we want with our clients. We want them to see our passion and feel our passion, and we like to see theirs and feel their passion for their business as well, because that's their livelihood, that's their thing. And as I said, toward the start, that's their identity sometimes. So they're really proud of that and we want to bask in that pride as well. Josh: Well, I guess we've been going through a few bits and pieces here, and I'd like to finish up and ask how would people go about contacting you and make sure that their business is going in the right direction and they're not freaking out, their numbers are doing things wrong. How can they get that second opinion that might turn into the first opinion? Drue: Look, the best way is to send me an email or give me a call. If you go to 4Front.net dot.as, or to Drue, and that's D-R-U-E.schofield@4front.net.au, or find me on LinkedIn. More than happy to have a conversation, cost and obligation free. We can sit down, we can talk about what you're doing, how you're doing it, what your expectations are, where you think there might be some potential gaps in the advice you're getting now, and we can give you the cut of edge, and then you can see whether you think that's something that appeals to you and that you might see value in. So yeah. Josh: A yachting term, I love that. I love that. I'm a bit of a keen yachtie myself. Is there any questions that you'd like me to ask or that you'd like to ask of me? Drue: No, I think we've covered some great ground there. Don't ask me to repeat all that, because I don't necessarily know what I said, but I just hope that people listening can get a good feel and a good sense for the passion that we have. Yes, we're accountants, and we've got a bad stereotype of being boring and maybe a bit mundane, but I hope, Josh can attest to me not being like that. Josh: Absolutely. No, no, no, not at all. I'd say you'd go and have a beer with me if I offered it after the podcast. Drue: Absolutely. Or two. Josh: Perfect, it's done. Or two. Drue: But yeah, just to finish up, we are passionate about being your key partner in business. Josh: That definitely sounds like you're on a really good business and its got legs and it's going places. I'd like to ask anyone out there, if you have enjoyed this episode, to make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love, and make sure to stay good. Drue: Thanks Josh.  

Stewart Fleming Interview Josh: All right. Everyone out there in podcast world I've got a very special guest for you today, I've got Stewart. He is from Logan, and actually know what, I'm going to let you tell me about what it is that you do in the voodoo that you do. Learn more about the interview with Stewart Fleming at dorksdelivered.com.au Stewart: What do I do in Logan? I do a lot of stuff. I'm involved in about four or five different, organisations as a volunteer. I run multiple businesses. I'm on the board of a number of different organisations in the city and currently running for mayor. So I keep myself pretty busy, man. Josh: Do you have time to sleep? Stewart: I get probably three to four hours sleep a night. Now, I'm pretty controlled to be very consistent about making sure I get at least five hours when, when possible. but look, you know, you do what you can with the time that you got. Josh: I know I've gone through periods of time where I'm going, okay, I'm going to get something down and just working. And you, you're getting no sleep, no sleep, no. So you can get used to having no sleep, and then you have that one opportunity to have an eight hour night. And you feel like you've slipped the four days. Sometimes you have to be in the candle at both ends. Stewart: I think there's also that, if you are used to running at that speed, sometimes if you have too much sleep, you get crazy tired at that point. It's like, well, you've had that now I want that four days in a row. Like, yeah, I dunno. Let's just keep running. Josh: The way the body works. So, we've been talking a lot of different business owners through this channel and, which is something that's on people's minds, whether they're saying it or not. And that is around the recession is the recession coming isn't coming. And we want to talk about how to recession-proof your business. Today we're going to be talking a bit about specifically keeping things local. So I've been running a business for 13 years throughout Logan and been in business in one way or another for, for around 20 in Logan. I've only more recently found out about a whole bunch of advantages to making sure that you are staying local, running your business within the local area that you are running a business. So what have you seen out and about around the traps in regards to a business, the overall health of the economy. What are your thoughts on that? Stewart: Logan is uniquely positioned at the moment to grow. So obviously, we're halfway between Brisbane Gold Coast. We have a very large amount of land available to us. We've got some very good infrastructure. The M1, as much as we hate being stuck in the traffic, it brings millions of cars passed. We've got train lines coming through, and access to some pretty good infrastructure at the moment. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Can get better for sure. But from a business point of view where uniquely positioned, Brisbane and Gold Coast have come from our sort of higher socioeconomic background and are starting to shrink in, as you say, this recession, the economy is shrinking and I think it's changing. And we had someone talking to the most recent chamber of commerce about going from a materialism environment to a postmaterialism environment. And what he was talking about was the idea that we start to share resources. So rather than own a thousand shirts, you might only own 30 shirts and you switch them around more rather than own a car you use over rather than own a holiday house, use Airbnb. And I know those are two right there. Two very specific examples. But the examples sit behind our mindset and the mindset is that we don't need to own everything anymore. What you're talking about doing business locally is one of the things that we were talking about at a fairly high economic level. When I started to put my hand up to run for mayor, I wanted to reach out to those that had some fairly significant influence in the economy of Logan. So some of the more significant business owners, some of the more significant landowners, some of the property developers now. Yeah, property developers. Ooh, terrible. You can't take money from them. You shouldn't be listening to them because what they understand is some really cool stuff about how things are developing now and the changing way that we're looking at. We should be looking at economies. Sure. We should be making sure we get great roads, but if we had fantastic internet, I'm not talking good internet. I'm talking fantastic internet. Would you need to leave your house to run a business? Do you need to go to an office? If you are fully automated running from home, what does that do? Can you spend more time with your kids? Can you spend more times in the local parks? This is the kind of economy that we're moving towards and Logan is set to take advantage of that because we haven't overcapitalised yet on the infrastructure that Brisbane and Gold Coast have. We're still growing. And so the reason I put my hand up from there is because, the opportunity for a there I saw for Logan needed someone that had some innovation ideas in their head. I'm on the board of Innovate Logan. It's a little group that represents manufacturers, state government, local government, chambers of commerce, and it looks at how do we get more innovation happening in the city. There's some very, very cool stuff going on, but I think the idea of more people working locally we'll reduce the load, and it also helps us start to recession-proof our businesses. Josh: Well, I couldn't agree more. You said it perfectly at the start. From a geography standpoint, we've got the Gold Coast, they've got the beaches and bits and pieces. You've got Brisbane. It's, it's, I guess the, the original, Mecca hub for working Logan is positioned in a perfect environment where it's growing from either edges. You've got all of the manufacturing and an industry coming up from the gold coast, edging into Logan, and then you've got a lot of the other industry coming from Eight Mile Plains and so on and so forth. Building up as it's coming more and more within Logan and from an investment standpoint, it's the best place, in my opinion, to buy any, house, anything like that. Because if you do have a business that is shrinking because of the recession and you need to be tighter with your dollars. The dollars go further in Logan, the dollars allow for you to achieve more things in a localised area. With investment properties, there's a hell of a lot of people that are moving to Logan because instead of buying a place in Brisbane that's gonna set you up for $1 million or more, and then you have to, you have to walk around with traffic everywhere. In Logan, you still have beautiful parks. You can still get something that's more than living on top of each other. It's at an affordable price with, as you said, that the end one there where, and at an intersection as well, where you're able to go out to Ipswich if you need to go and go wherever you need to. It's perfect, from a location and drivability standpoint. I think innovate is fantastic. Some of the other cool stuff that I've seen around the place, Substation 33, that's something that they're using to, I haven't seen anywhere else where they're up-cycling old laptops, old gear. You think you're going to throw at that record player because no one's going to use it. There is someone down there, brainy ethics going to turn that into something cool and then they're going to upcycle and start utilising that to bring more money to Logan. You probably know more about it., some of the signs that they've made out of old, old gear and they look professional, schmick as for looking at the water levels and turning on flood signs along with, they made a bucket for giving power to third world countries. These are super innovative things. I've only just started to dip my toe into some of the cool stuff that's happening around Logan that I wasn't even aware it was happening. I've been recruiting people. Okay. So I've got a friend that was in Tenerife and I was talking to him about some of the cool stuff. Substation was doing, Substation 33. And he thought, oh, that sounds really awesome. Let me check that out. And came down and was talking to them about making PCBs and all this other electronic stuff that he's building together with them. He was so interested, he moved two streets away from them so he could be spending more time building stuff. So you've got your coffee shops in bits and pieces, in Tenerife. And he's like, no let's go to something that's making a difference and actually changing around the way people's minds are working. Stephen: Yeah, we have this, and you're,100% right. Things are changing here in Logan, and I think we're on the, on the tipping edge of an absolute explosion in business in Logan. Now, we've already been growing in incredible, rate, without population, but the business opportunities that we have here, you know, in real estate, you say, buy the worst house and the best street. Well, we're on the best street. And realistically, Logan is probably the worst house in the best street. If you look at Brisbane, Gold Coast, Logan. Josh: On a 10 year plan, If you look at where Logan was 10 years ago versus where it is now versus where it was 10 years prior to that versus where it is going to be in 10 years it's all on the up and up. The worst house in the best street, so to speak. You can find a lot of bad houses and you could find a lot more before, but so many people are moving in. There's young blood moving in and it's similar to a lot of areas, I guess that did have a bit of a stigma or had had a couple of things that happen. Like we had that fence fight thing that happened years ago that was just a small thing that got blown out of proportion and overall bad things happen everywhere. One of the things that I always say, and I stand up for Logan pretty heavily off of friends who, hell, why do you live in Logan? I said, well, because if I lived in a nice house down, in the areas that you're living in, two, $3 million houses, it'd be too, too much of a reason for people to come in and break in and steal all my stuff. No one's going to come up here to do that. Obviously being facetious, but the reason why I love Logan is it takes good people in bad areas to make a change and to make an area, a good area. And you can have good people in good areas and they do nothing. But if you had these, these people that are actually the movers and the shakers, the people like Tony from Substation 33, and that the systems like Innovate where they are helping businesses locally and they are giving people the step up it really makes a difference. And, that is what it's all about. Just putting your name out there, listening to what, to what is available to help you out if you are struggling. Stewart: Yeah. We also have here one of the most giving communities I'm sure in Australia, the amount of volunteers, people that volunteer to help other people in this city is higher than anywhere else. We've got the social enterprise global forum coming to Logan. Why? Because this is where people give. It's such a given community. It's such a sense of that there is this sense of community here, but it's not integrated. And one of the things that I have done as part of this campaign is going out and talking to these various groups, finding out what their problems are. Because as a coach, that's what you do. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want as the constant question. Okay. Finding out what they want, and then talking to the next group and realising that all of these groups and whether it's a seniors group, whether it's mental health, whether it's a domestic violence, whether it's the homeless people working with the homeless, they are all working towards the same thing. Most of them have the same problems. They're not working together to solve those problems. And I think this is sort of the cornerstone of what I want to do as mayor of Logan is to create these, groups that champion and bring together the group guys that are already doing it. Like we should not be putting our hand up and saying, we're going to try and solve mental health as a council. What are we doing? What we can connect the groups that are already doing it. There are at least 13 different groups in the city, work with men's health, but then don't talk to each other. Hmm. Now if we counseled and put someone on as a men's health coordinator, and it doesn't have to be, you know, there aren't any jobs but someone has to do the administration. Because if one group tries to do that, it falls over. And this is actually what Logan together is based on, is a model called Collective Impact. 3.0 came out of California. And it talks about how you heard the cats, all of the organisations are doing fantastic things. But if you asked any one of them to coordinate with the others, it's too much. The straw has broken the camel's back. But if you have a central backbone organisation called like Logan Together, they can coordinate. They can actually do the coordination, but also they can collect the statistics. The moment we don't know how many homeless that are on the city. Now, if I talk to every organisation, I might be able to get some idea, but even then there's going to be crossovers, so we don't know how big the problem is. And as you know, you can't solve the problem unless you actually know how big it. Josh: Data in or data out If you don't have any data to work on, you can't really make a decision. Stewart: If you think the problem is 100,000 people that are homeless, you apply a solution for that amount of people. When the problem was a hundred people, if you think it's a hundred. And it was actually a thousand you've applied the wrong solution, and you're never going to get anywhere, and then you'll say, we shouldn't have even tried. You've got to find out what the size of the problem is, whether it's seniors, whether it's the sporting clubs. We don't have a peak sporting body for Logan. It’s not a hard thing to organise. Council could do that very simply because they're great organisers. The sporting club then gets representation as a peak body. I've spoken to a bunch of these sports, whether it's squash or rugby or soccer about this idea, and they're like, yeah, yeah, that'd be fantastic. We could say, would you be part of it all? We can see how it would work. Yes. The seniors groups, national centers are structuring, how do we do this? Now I've moved away from business, but the business side of it is the same sort of thing. If you've got some vertical businesses that are doing business automation or they're looking after finance for foreign companies. I know we spoke before we went on air talking about the multicultural aspect of Logan. We have access to get into 200 and over 217 different cultures. I'm pretty sure if we've got some really good to sell, we have it really big market to sell. This is the strength, man. This is, this is where I get really excited because we're doing some stuff in the schools at the moment. Mosman High has piloted a program where they're recycling all of their waste. Okay. So there was a $7,000 a month bill, now, they're making either a zero or making a small profit, or sometimes they pay $100 for it. So to outsource to ups to send that, that amount of waste to landfill 100 bucks, or they make a small profit because they're recycling the green waste, they're recycling, all the plastics are recycling the white paper. Josh: That's not just beer money we're talking about that's some serious money. Stewart: There are 17 high schools. It's now been gonna push into Mabel park. They're looking to roll it. It won't be rolling out into every school. I think, and I honestly believe this hand on heart, we could be zero waste for all our schools now. That's pretty exciting in and of itself. We're saving the planet a little bit. Yeah, but hang on, it gets cooler. The kids coming out of high school have a cert three. We could upgrade that to a cert four so they're coming out as recognized recycle experts, right. We have 217 nationalities, and I'm pretty sure that the nationalities, they are the cultures that represent all have a problem with recycling and green waste and all that sort of stuff. If we can teach our kids to do it. Then we can teach other countries kids to do it. We could be exporting recyclers. You're talking about what are the jobs are going to be, Oh no, I'm going to go big on you, man. I'm going to go big, go big or go home. If we're exporting recyclers, we are the center of recycling. If I can get the schools to be zero waste, guess what business is next. Yeah. If you get the kids that end currently in school to be lifelong recyclers, assuming they're going to live for another 60 probably 60 years, once they leave school. There are 55,000 kids in school in Logan at the moment. It works out to be about 3.3 million years worth of recycling. It's huge. 3.3 million years. If I only got the kids that are in school right now, I'm not, the ones coming in next year are the ones that left last year. Just the ones that are in there. 3.3 million years of recycling. Someone said to me, how are you going to change global warming and the certificate four at a time and seriously, no, no, and the guy that was moderating said he's running for mayor. He can't do that. I'm like, let me try. Maybe try. I honestly believe we can be the center for recycling. But that's just one of the innovations we've got in the city. As you mentioned, some safe station 33 and the upcycling and stuff that's going on there. Josh: They're replacing back to the TVs to create filaments to 3D print stuff. How sick is that? Stewart: Cool. You know there's a manufacturer in Logan that creates the nuts for nuclear reactors. If you want to build a nuclear reactor anywhere in the world, you will buy the nuts. For those nuclear reactors from Logan, how cool that is, and that is something that should Josh: There's been over the years, obviously some, some stigma around Logan and some of the different names that happen to rhyme with the word Logan. Stewart: It should be a new slogan for Logan. Is that what you're trying to say? Josh: Sounds much better Stewart: Anew slogan for Logan. Josh: I did exactly that. That is where we have these cool stories, like these nuclear nuts and the flow hive. It's been a huge, huge success or being manufactured within the Logan and that, that's something that was developed within Australia. That's been a fantastic new way of harvesting honey. There are all these really, really cool bits and things that people are doing that needs to be really pulled together to have people go, Oh wow, this is what they're doing. And we sang on recycling 200, so 217 different pods, Watts of life's ways, backgrounds and belief systems that have all been bought together underneath one roof. The spans, I don't know what the radius is of Logan off the top of my head. But it spans the theory that Logan does and, and all these different people will be eating different things and have a different idea on the foods that they're buying and the different plastics, and they're all be able to take that back to their Homeland to talk to them about how they would be able to do this. Maybe there's a, a certain enzyme within Rogan Josh, for instance, that gets broken down differently to what it would if you'd be having a kebob. And so that is what is awesome. Being able to have those many minds work to that. And that's an advantage that you, you don't have it anywhere else in Australia. We are the most multicultural area within Australia. Stewart: I don't think we've taken advantage of it though. And look, there's some, some things that I've done. I'm a businessman, but on the community focus, business matters. How are we going to do five different things? But one of the things I looked at was one of the questions I got asked was, where is the CBD? Where's the CBD? Logan, what's the center? Josh: If I had to pick a spot, it wouldn't be the bit that I would say would really represent Logan as much as I'd wanted to, but I guess it'd just be with it. The council building is, I guess. Stewart: Logan central. Yep. Okay. Right. What about Springwood? What about Beenleigh? What about Jimboomba? We have opportunities. We are, uniquely placed to have three, possibly four, possibly five different hubs within our city. Now you've got Chermside for Brisbane, which is sort of the Northern hub, and you've got Mount Gravatt, sort of the Southern hub. We had the opportunity to do the same sort of thing, and so what I did was I actually went and found a guy that's created. I managed to meet Joe Versey who set up a park road, several fair, the coffee culture. He created the coffee culture for Brisbane. Late-night coffee was not a thing until Joe came along and created it. Now Joe drives Ferrari's and he still does that sort of stuff. He was instrumental in getting James straight off the ground. He has bar spritz on Kangaroo Point cliffs and was talking recently to council about putting a zip line between the top of Kangaroo Point cliffs and the botanical gardens because he is a visionary that sees things before they exist. Yeah. I brought him down and drove him around Logan Central. We went to Springwood, Logan Central and Beenleigh and I've got his take on what do you do to create a scene? Yeah. What do you do to create a precinct and it was interesting because I've taken the ideas that he gave me and then I've taken them to the businesses in those areas and the property guys that own the land in those areas and the residents around those areas to see does this actually make any sense to you guys in front of Springwood? The Springwood hotel. The very large copper, which you can see from the highway. Yup. If there was a function there every Friday night with a live band and laser lights and spotlights and food, you've got to have food. You've got to have beverage. We would get people coming off M1 on a Friday night. I may meet my mates at the Gold Coast or Brisbane, let's meet in the middle. Let's meet at Springwood. Make it easy to get off, easy to get back on, great food, great entertainment and know it's there. Yup. You've now got a precinct. Now that precinct will grow because corporations will want to have their office workers where they can let off steam on a Friday, Saturday night if it's open longer. There's an opportunity being lean, different perspective. Logan central. The global food market at Logan central should be the entire area of Logan central. But what it was saying was you don't let just any old person come in and start stumping up. You have to foster culture. You have to get, if you want to have a food present, you get a restaurant that's already really good somewhere else. They know how to run a business and know how to market. They, they've got that bit sorted. Bring them in. Entice them in, bring a few in, and then make the local businesses come in around them and learn from them. Yep. So you're fostering local business based on the models that actually currently work. People will come for the big, big ones, and then they will also visit one of the local ones. And so what you do is you start to build this presenter and everyone wins. Everybody wins. Logan is so uniquely placed to do this sort of thing. But you've got to have someone with a vision that can drive that vision forward, and that's why I ran for mayor, not for one of the divisional seats, because the mayor is the person that sets that big vision and then brings everyone along for the ride. For the last eight years, I've been doing executive coaching, working with the leaders of TAFE or Queensland government or Domino's. Big organizations to work out how they fix their culture, and that's what I teach them how to do the culture in the council. It needs some work, right? So again, applying my skills to my schools then better serve me. Representing the people as a divisional counselor, what do my skills better serve me at the top? Trying to set the culture from the top down. Because when you try and set the culture from a mid-level, it really is hard if you've got toxic people at the top. Then what tends to happen is that they learn really good lessons about managing up, but there's a struggle and you're never going to get there until you've got the right person at the top. Josh: Richard Branson and the more close to home Dick Smith. Had the idea of the culture of a business and how it should run and that that is. Dick Smith said one day, a month, no matter what level of business you're in, you need to be in one of the stores looking and servicing the people to make sure you're making the right decisions for the right people and see the impacts and the effects of a decision that you've made. You know, just pushing paper and ticking boxes. You're actually able to see the flow-on effects and how that has affected that business with the council and with the people that, that sits within that council. There is a, I don't know if the right terms or hierarchy, but there is definitely, if you've got a, a toxic environment that will flow down and if you have a great environment, the people within the environment will promote and back up that that council or business or boss or whatever the case till the cows come home. And that's where there definitely needs to be a bit of a shift in the mindset of, of the people that are making these big decisions that are impacting the smaller guys. And definitely the smaller guys will, we'll carry that through and have a lot more respect for the location that they're in. And as I said, I love Logan. I see no issues with Logan. I'd love to see more people have the same approach and the same thought on it. And anyone that has lived in Logan, they got, you know, it's not that bad. It was Stewart: It’s not bad, it's awesome. One of the things I think we're missing though, and I'll finish up here, is that the Logan has to be the easiest place to do business. We want our economy to grow. We've got to be the easiest place to do business at the moment. Brisbane is giving a wave waivers to business. They are waiving application fees. They're doing all sorts of stuff to attract more business. We're not. Yeah. We have to not only match them, we have to get smarter at that than them. Then we have to use things like your business automation skills and get that. How do we get that into 100,000 businesses? We've got 15,000 businesses in the city, but let's say I went big, well, let's say there's 15,000 businesses. How do we get 15,000 businesses? And this is one of the things that I've learned very early on work the solution to the size of the problems we spoke before. If the solution is 15,000 businesses, and you said, I'm gonna run a workshop and you can put 15 people in it. Yeah. You've completely messed them up. What are you doing? You know, you've turned on the light. I want you to get hit the sun. How do we do that sort of stuff. And I think that's the big vision thing that I'm trying to bring into council. The guys that I'm running at currently they're all set in the past. They're talking about the 80s. They're talking about the 90s that they're, they don't realize things like, Josh: I'm investing in the yellow pages. Stewart: Drone buses are coming, you know, two years away. We'll be able to get in a little pod, a drone. We'll pick it up and we'll take you somewhere. So, uh, we were doing, uh, measuring distances. It's so crazy. Yeah. You're planning by big league, big arose and the, the. Academia will tell you that smarter roads, if you manage the roads with a different way, like you think about how to make the roads, who's carrying what lanes they're in, all this sort of stuff, you get a 30% return on your investment versus a 3% return building a bigger road. Josh: Yup. Man of my own heart. I was going to say, you've touched on a topic that, I think if we actually had smarter control of the way that the lighting for traffic flats worked without, throughout the area, along with not throughout the area being pretty, well, Queensland, probably Australia, but then also took advantage of paint. It sounds like such a weird thing to do, but that made the lanes a little bit narrow, except for, as you're saying like a heavy haul vehicles that might need the left lane. It's a wider lane. If we did things like that, you'd be able to squeeze, if you look at the road from here to Brisbane and extra lane, the entire distance along. Now, I think if you look and you said 15,000 businesses throughout Logan, if you are running events fantastic, absolutely jaw, jaw-dropping, amazing business in Logan. People would come from Brisbane to Logan, and the beautiful thing is they'd be coming to work at a time. You'd be burning those greenhouse gases. You wouldn't be burning the brakes. You wouldn't be burning in either of the, the other resources around your car and run consumables there. You'd be running a more efficient lifestyle and be able to spend more time with your family and friends. So that's, that's, that's my sort of 2 cents on that. Stewart: Look, I think if we can, if, if we can hit the goal of making Logan the easiest place to do business, the economy will look after itself and we've got to set those big priorities zero way schools. Let's try and do that. The upside is all acute, or a lot of our kids will come out with some, a little bit of an extra certificate and maybe we can export that. Like it's big, I get, it's a big dream. Josh: It carries onto their mentality and mindset at home. And that then carries through the parents and see what their children like doing and why they like doing it. And that then affects the whole community. The home is located close enough to the school. So you know that. The impact of changing around the, their mindset within the schooling system will change around the mindsets within the homes, which are change around the amount of landfill that's going to change around the amount of rubbish, It's just a carry on effect, butterfly effect, domino effect. Stewart: If we do it really, really well. We become the center that others copy. I don't want to do this just for Logan. If we do this really, really well, we can show Townsville how to do it with all your schools. We can be the template for how, who changed the planet. There's this idea of life one recycling. You're absolutely right, the parents start picking it up. But we're also starting to talk to the schools about how to get more entrepreneurship into the schools. So we've got Logan cha junior chamber of commerce kicking off. So it's how to get the kids, and not only just get them to think about it now, but provide a pathway for them to move into the adult world of business. Josh: That's perfect. And that, that's going to get it, set them up for success. As someone who went to school in Logan. Stewart: What school did you go to? Josh: I went to winder high school. While I was there, I had my ups and downs, but overall it's set me up with information, technology, and it put me into an environment or I started doing the IT work for the school. I was very, very happy to be able to automate and better a lot of the processes there and have people come underneath me and learn, learn what I had to do and, and what I was doing. And it's, it's something that is a great opportunity. Things, as I said again, that are just there that you, your kids can start doing now. It was much better for mum and dad, to be honest. I was doing the training ship instead of a friend's going off to McDonald's and having to do the backwards and forwards driving. Then you get traineeships, upskill them and all the good stuff. Is there anything else, any finishing notes, final thoughts? Stewart: No. Look lower than amazing. I really hope that whoever wins. Hopefully, it's me, but whoever went actually has the vision and that brings innovation in. If we can bet the innovation and tie that to the multicultural tie, that's the precincts, tie that to the schools. It's kind of the same thing. It's not like I'm not trying to invent seven different things just to solve seven different problems. It's the same sort of problem. Staring at the same, yeah. Rinse and repeat. Let's keep going here. I think in, you know, in three to four years, Logan will be. The place that people travel to for work. Logan will be the place that, sorry, you should've invested four years ago. We're not the worst house in the best street anymore. We're not a drive through. We're a destination. Josh: I could not have said it better. Well, it has been great talking with you and I'm really happy to have had you here. Anyone else that's listening, if you'd like this, jump across to iTunes. Leave us some love. Give us some feedback. Leave us a review. Let us know what your thoughts are. Other than that, Stay good.

Fr. Josh answers questions about why some Catholics seem to think traditional Latin Mass is better than the Norvus Ordo, whether witchcraft is demonic or fake, and why only some saints have mystic visions. If you have a question, comment, or response for Fr. Josh, email us at askfrjosh@ascensionpress.com. You may hear your question or comment in an upcoming podcast episode! Snippet from the Show “Just because a priest celebrates one of the liturgies sloppily doesn’t mean that liturgy is bad [traditional Latin Mass or Norvus Ordo]. It means that priest needs to be reformed.” SHOWNOTES Glory Story (2:08) Fr. Josh recalls the very first Catholic book he ever read outside of the Bible: The Mystical City of God by Venerable Mary Agreda. Read it. It will rock your world!! Listener Feedback (5:59) Witchcraft (8:29) Hello Father Josh, Could you please explain what the Church teaches on witchcraft and tarot cards and all that creepy stuff. I know it’s something we as Catholics shouldn’t be part of in general. However, I want to understand the Church’s reasoning behind this. Do we believe witchcraft is not real and it’s all fake? Or do we believe it’s the devil working in this world and that’s why we stay away? Do we believe tarot cards really reveal the future or do we believe it’s all fake or do we believe it’s real but it’s evil? Lol it gets pretty confusing. I mean I know we are not supposed to be superstitious... whatever that means... but being from Africa, I’ve seen some really crazy things happen in this life, that can low-key only be explained through witchcraft (which a lot of people still practice). Anyway, I just want to know what to think about all this and I trust the Church to guide me. Thank you Father Josh! I’ll be praying for you! And pray for me too! -Ozigbo Mystic Visions (17:04) Father, I’m reading the meditations of Christ and each day there is a new meditation about a saint. I’m reading all these saints and their experiences with miraculous appearances of Jesus or Mary or another holy figure and they instantly feel that change of heart and have immense faith. My question is, if we are all called to be saints how come some people have those miraculous visions and others don’t? Because you do need a miracle to become a saint, right? So it seems like Gods’ choosing specific people? -Andrew Traditional Latin Mass (22:15) Hi Fr. Josh, My parish priest has always made his opinion known on the Latin Mass following, like they are cultish, think they are better than people who follow the New Order Mass, etc. At first I wasn't sure what to think, but after some personal experience I'm a bit worried. It seems like Latin Mass followers go around saying that they are basically better than us: they refuse Communion if it’s not administered by the priests, say that the Novus Ordo celebrations of the Mass aren't valid, and even say that women should only wear dresses and are meant to stay at home to raise children. I get the feeling that they "groom" or "brainwash" people into following this extreme and fanatical form of Catholicism. What are your thoughts on this extreme Catholicism following? A google search leads to Novus Ordo Watch, Ad Orientum Masses--how the New Order Mass isn't really worship and isn't really Catholicism, etc., and I am so confused. There is so much division in our world--and now I come across this? I love being Catholic, but just feel that this is so wrong. We are all Catholics in the same universal Church, aren't we? Fr. Josh I'm sorry this isn't very articulate, but what are your thoughts? Thank you so much for your time!! -Maria Universal Call to Holiness (29:40) Resources Want to browse the previous resources Fr. Josh has recommended? Click here to select an episode and view the shownotes. Broken and Blessed (https://shop.ascensionpress.com/products/broken-and-blessed-an-invitation-to-my-generation) book by Fr. Josh Johnson The Mystical City of God (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+mystical+city+of+god&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIot3iqfOT4wIVxYCfCh3FogRCEAAYASAAEgI2yfD_BwE&hvadid=241632173712&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9007348&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=e&hvrand=2610248537695113693&hvtargid=kwd-404619486&hydadcr=8264_10374934&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_3j0e4kts7l_e) by Venerable Mary Agreda

The wonderful world of DATING. Love languages, online dating, horror stories, and the other woman??? **Shania Twain voice** let's go girls Follow us on Instagram @anniethepope and @earthtoamanda and be sure to rate and subscribe! Leave some nice things if you want in the reviews and of course if you have any suggestions or questions, send them over to girlsclubapodcast@gmail.com!

Emotional eating can be a real challenge in finding balance. Sometimes there is a sense of helplessness to it. In today’s podcast, Josh Hillis shares his emotional eating coaching strategy to help our listeners find new ways to cope with stress that doesn’t always revolve around food. What you’ll hear in this episode: How effective are cravings control strategies when you have emotional eating issues? Is the answer to emotional eating more control? The emotional release effect when you emotionally eat after tight control The role of acceptance in emotional eating Normalizing the existence of uncomfortable emotions. Diffusing uncomfortable emotions - what does that mean? Gaining perspective around the perceived urgency of feelings The role of mindfulness in managing negative emotions Defining emotional or disinhibited eating Learning to let the monsters ride the bus Being in the driver's seat of how you deal with feelings Introducing a waiting period to delay emotional eating The value of taking time to identify feelings Ways to scale and create distance between you and your feelings Three ways to feel comfortable with your feelings without using food Managing expectations of emotional eating - moving past all or nothing Psychological flexibility as a goal, defined. Identifying and being aware of your “monsters” Thought suppression and the health and wellness industry sales tactics Frequency and emotional eating Rules vs Self-Loving Guidelines Tracking progress - things you can track   Resources: Josh’s Blog Fat Loss Happens On Monday Everything You Know About Emotional Eating is Wrong - blog post Annie quotes Mothers, Daughters and Body Image - Hillary McBride’s book Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Episode 13: How Your Body Image Impacts Your Children With Hillary Mcbride Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we have coached thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. I am so excited for today's guest because today's incredibly smart and talented guest goes way back with Balance365, so far back in fact that he knew Lauren, Jen and I before we were even a business. Josh Hillis has been a longtime friend and mentor to the three of us and I'm so excited for you to hear his wisdom on today's episode. Josh helps people beat emotional eating using a skill-based not diet-based approach that allows people to create a new relationship with their bodies and food and get results that have previously never been possible. Josh is the author of Fat Loss Happens on Monday and the upcoming lean and strong and yet untitled emotional eating book coming out in 2020. Josh has been writing for his blog losestubbornfat.com since 2004 and he currently attends MSU Denver and is doing his thesis on contextual behavioral science and emotional eating. He's the perfect guest for this topic. The current standard answer to emotional eating and the health and fitness industry encourages individuals to just have more control, more control over their diet, over their thoughts, over their emotions, more control over your cravings. But on today's episode, Josh shares why that advice usually doesn't work. For those who struggle with emotional eating and provides multiple practical tools to help you overcome it, I think you're going to love it and joy. Annie: Josh, welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. We're so happy to have you. You go way back with our team like way, way back. How are you? Josh: I'm good. How are you guys? It's so cool to see you guys again. Annie: I know, like, we're still, like, we're still together. The last time we were Facetiming was under a little bit different context. We were Healthy Habits Happy Moms then and we were, you've kind of helped us mentor us as far as like habits and skills and philosophies and you're just a really great coach. Just flat out really great. Josh: Thank you. From you guys, that's awesome. Annie: So we're so happy to have you and Jen and Lauren are here too. How are you guys? Jen: Hi- Lauren: Good. Josh goes way back to like before we were even a thing. Jen: We met Josh the same time we met each other. Lauren: Yeah. Josh: Wow. Jen: Years ago. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Oh Wow. That's awesome. That's amazing. Annie: So you're kind of a big deal to us, are we making you uncomfortable yet? Josh: That's awesome. Jen: When our book comes out we're going to have a page for acknowledgements and I was just telling the girls last week, like Josh Hillis is going to be my number one acknowledgement. Josh: Are you serious? Jen: Yeah, just like all your work and your blog, like it's been so insanely helpful to me. And even just watching you in conversation with people, like, as creepy as that sounds, but just how you handle people, how it's just and you're just so objective and, and really what we try to embody at Balance365 as far as there's no right one right way for every single person and just being open to tools and helping people build a, just a more varied toolbox and they currently have for their health and wellness. Jen: And also the other big thing that we come up against is that, because we're all about self acceptance and embracing oneself, we also often get lumped into a segment of this industry that we all know about, which is basically the anti weight loss movement, which is like weight loss is so bad. Why? Like nobody better talk about this. And a lot of dietitians are on that train as well as psychologists. And so it's just, it's like frightening for me at times. And I found myself questioning, you know, cause you go to the, you see these other professionals and you're like, "Oh man, like, she makes a good point, like what's?" And you've question your own values and what, but ultimately we have risen as like, look, we're just, we're just trying to take a messy middle approach. And there is really nothing inherently wrong with weight loss, changing your behaviors. Jen: And I so appreciate that and you, because I see you as a real leader and professional, not just in the health and wellness industry. Well the health and fitness industry I should say, but you are now a part of the psychology industry. Lauren: Say, "Hey, this is okay. Come on" Annie: And you're not a jerk. Like you're not, like you're not out there shaming people and you're like still able to like help them achieve the goals that they have in a really like compassionate, positive way, which is awesome. Jen: Yeah. And you've got a couple of clients I was reading yesterday on your page that you have a couple of clients that have lost over a hundred pounds. That's like, that's a, that's a life changing, values altering like those clients, like you've totally changed their lives. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Annie: So now are you uncomfortable? Josh: No, this is like the coolest, most thoughtful, most wonderful compliments I could ever get because you guys are acknowledging me for the things that I've worked the hardest at and that mean the most to me, like in the world. So I totally appreciate it. I totally, totally, totally appreciate it. Annie: Yay. Well, we're like, we can just be your ultimate hype women when you're having a bad day. You can give us a call. Okay. Josh: Can you guys introduce me on every podcast? Annie: We can. But peaking of podcasts, we should probably talk about the topic that I, that you actually wanted to talk about because we've been trying to get you on the show for a while and you're a busy guy. So, when I said, are there any topics that you wanted to jam on and you were like emotional eating, like top on your list. So what is it about emotional eating that you love so much? Josh: I think, so a couple of different things, on like the bigger, like zoomed out level, I think it's access to making the kind of difference that I want to make with people. If they can get, what's really neat is if someone really struggles with emotional eating and they can get that under control it tends to spiral out into other areas of their lives and they have like better relationships and do better at work. I mean like it's, it's really like I don't coach any of that stuff and that kind of thing shows up. The other thing that I like about it is I think it's a place where people feel so out of control and they feel like they can't be this kind of person that they want to be and like they're like, they're being driven by this other thing. And so I like it cause I want to put them back in the driver's seat. and then also the framework that I study, which is contextual behavioral science is just really good for that. And so that's- Annie: I think it's great because I, you have, you have an incredible blog. One of the blog posts you shared with me, you noted that the typical response in the fitness industry to emotional eating is like control, like just control more things and then like, you'll be fine. And,in order to control emotional eating, individuals just they need to control their diet, then control their thoughts, their emotions, their cravings, and you think that that's pretty much crap. Josh: Yeah. Annie: So tell us why, why do you think it's crap? Tell us more. I mean, we agree. Josh: Yeah. So, one thing I just want to preface this with, because it's the most surprising cause I do think it's totally crap and I've gone that way for a while, but I was really surprised this year that I found some studies where they separated out people that had a high degree of emotional eating and cravings, eating and external eating, which is like, you see food and you want it versus people that scored really low on that. And for the people that scored really low on that control was actually fine. Control actually totally worked just just fine. But that's not the clients that I get, you know, they don't hear me. So, the flip side is that control, if you do have issues with cravings or emotional eating, tired eating or and you're procrastinating or any of those things, then control will have an opposite effect. If it works, it always rebounds and the rebound is always, pretty un-fun. Like people really feel like a really, really bad loss of loss of control and they feel kind of gross and they don't feel good about themselves. Jen: So it's sort of that the more tightly wound you are, the faster, harder you'll spin out. And applied to eating, I think people get that release, like they're so tightly wound around food trying to control everything then getting out of control, they just, I mean in the moment it's like a release, right? Josh: Yeah. So you bring up these two really big points. Oh man, it's so cool. So on one hand you've got this like rule based way of living and the problem with having a totally rule based way of living is you break the rule and you're like, I'm off. I'm like explode. Like do it all because this is the last time ever. So, there's that huge like explosion release thing there. And then the other side is that, like, food really does work temporarily for numbing emotions. So, those two things kind of spiral together where people, like, break the rule and they're like, "Oh no, I'm, I'm off my diet and I'm going to go into all the things." And then they start to feel guilty about it. And then they actually are eating to numb the guilty feelings they have about breaking the rules. It's like- Jen: layer one and layer two. Lauren: Wow. The plot thickens. Josh: Totally. Annie: So I understand if you have emotional eating issues or cravings control strategies backfire, like they aren't helpful. What does work? Josh: Great question. So, it kind of all fits in the world of like acceptance based strategies and I get, I like, I have some clients to kind of freak out when I say, like, "acceptance", you know, cause they're like, "I don't want to accept." But that's just kind of like a family of strategies. And what kind of falls inside of that is, the first thing is actually normalizing. It's just recognizing every single time that you have uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable emotions, that it's normal to have uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable emotions and, like, the foundation is people, like, believe that that's not okay. You know, cause they've heard so much about, like, positive thinking or controlling their thoughts or all of these things or they were, maybe it wasn't cool growing up for them to have emotions or whatever. Josh: But for whatever reason, they think they're supposed to be a shiny, happy person. And just recognizing it's normal to feel sad sometimes. And the number of coaching calls I get on where something really bad happens to someone and I have to say like, "It's okay. It's okay to feel to feel bad. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay. It's okay to have all these feelings." So recognize that it's okay and normal and healthy. Sometimes we can even pair with, well, that's jumping to the next thing. So the next thing is getting a little bit of distance from uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, in act and acceptance commitment training they call it diffusion or fusion. So if you're fused with your thoughts, you feel like they're coming from you, you feel like they're true or true or false, and you feel like there are a command, you feel like there like something that like urgently needs to be fixed. Josh: Diffusion is getting enough enough distance from your thoughts. You can see that like these thoughts might have come from my parents or the media or magazines or whatever. But like, my automatic thoughts aren't me. Right. They aren't true or not true. They're just thoughts. They aren't an urgent problem that needs to be fixed, right? It's normal to have these thoughts and feeling and so diffusion is a matter of, if people have done any kind of like meditation or mindfulness and like, noticing your thoughts and like not so that's where people get caught up. A lot of people have done, I've tried to meditate or do mindfulness in such a way that they were trying to change their thoughts and not have thoughts. So, it's not that, but it's like being able to notice like, "Oh, here are these thoughts and these emotions." Josh: And it could be as simple as saying, "I notice I'm having the thought that blank" versus just treating the thought like it's true. Or probably a little later we'll get to, there's a metaphor for all this called, let the monsters ride the bus and it will kind of pull this together, but, basically get it, get enough distance from those thoughts that you can be with them and that they're not driving and then the third thing is you've got to drive. Like you're the bus driver, but like you can have these thoughts and still take actions that fit your values in your life. And then the last thing is that requires having actually, like, clarified your values. Jen: Right? Right. Annie: This is like my therapy. This is what I discuss with my therapist. Josh: Do you have an acts therapist? Annie: I don't know. But there's, it does feel very similar into that, like just acknowledging like, these are my thoughts. These are my emotions. What is this? Where did this come from? I don't have to act on them. I can just acknowledge them and, and then sitting with them, not like trying to numb them, not trying to run away from them or like avoid them. Yeah. Lauren: I've realized recently that my, I'm very prone to, what did you say? Fusion? Josh: Yeah. Lauren: Where I'm like, this is my thought and I have to fix it right now. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: We know that about you. Annie: We could've told you that, Lauren. Jen: She's doing that thing again. Lauren: Well, I recently found this about myself. Jen: This is like my inner Spock. Like when my inner Spock is like, "Halt." You know what I mean? When we have to, "Let's analyze this." Yeah. Annie: So, okay, so Josh, what does this, what does this look like? So people have stress, they have an emotion. They have like, I mean, it could be emotional eating, it can be a wide continuum of emotions. It could be happy. It could be- Jen: We didn't define emotional eating either at the beginning. Annie: Yeah. Do you have a definition, Josh, that you, or a way to define emotional eating? Josh: So most of what I'm looking at is disinhibited eating. So that's, like, a feeling of loss of control with food related to strong emotions, good or bad? Good, good or bad. Wanted or unwanted would probably be more accurate, external, like, seeing things and cravings and so it'd be eating in response to any of those things. With my clients I also lump in, to me it's all the same thing. I also lump in procrastination eating, tiredness eating. Those are the other two. Yeah. Annie: Tiredness eating being that you eat when you're tired. Josh: Yeah. Annie: That's me. Annie: I do that I think. Yeah. Okay, so you experience these emotions, any of them. And then you have a behavior around food. Is that- Josh: Yeah. Annie: Any behavior or it could be a wider range of behaviors? Josh: Oh, it's typically like feeling some degree of loss of control. Like you're not, you don't feel like you're choosing to eat the Brownie, like, I woke up and there was brownies everywhere. Jen: It would be different than happy eating cause we had someone in Balance365. I feel like her emotional eating was out of control. She ate when she was sad, but she also ate when she was happy. But it's more of a loss of control aspect to it. Not a, "Oh, I'm so happy. Let's grab a cake. Celebrate." It's right. Josh: Yeah. It's not, "Let's have a bottle of wine at on date night." It's not, "It's my grandma's hundredth birthday. I'm going to have a chocolate cake." It's not that at all. Should I get into stuff like what, what we do about it? Annie: Yeah. Go for it. Jen: If you want to. Josh: So the simplest thing to do is to put in a waiting period. Right. Could be waiting. 10 minutes, could be waiting a minute. Does it matter? All we're trying to do is they've got this really, really ingrained pattern of have an emotion, eat and if we can separate that, we're good. So that means, like, if I've got clients with pretty legit emotional eating problems, we'll start off with, they have an emotion. They wait 10 minutes, they eat the thing anyway, almost every time. That's fine. We can totally start there. Jen: Progress being the waiting period. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So, the progress is it's not automatic, they might have to like struggle with it for that 10 minutes or they might have to think about it for that 10 minutes, but at some point, but they've got enough time, they get to choose in that case where they're having it all the time, they don't, they don't have a lot of choice. But it's at least we're breaking that pattern where it's automatic, where they might not even know what they're feeling. They might not even know what they're thinking. Which is actually really common, which is really, which is why, another really, so things you can put in that 10 minutes, you can put it in like looking at a feelings wheel and being able to just like pick out this is what I'm feeling, which actually creates some diffusion that creates some separation. And there's something really magical about people being able to figure out like going from, "I feel bad" to "Oh, I'm sad. I'm sad because this the, you know, my boss yelled at me and that sucks." Right? Maybe it's normal to feel sad when my boss yells at me or whatever. Jen: I do this with my kids like they, but Brene Brown talks about how she has some research that shows, she's done research on college age students and they can only, they only identify three emotions and that's like- Josh: Really? which ones? Jen: Happy, mad and sad. And so she talks about how, you know, in order to be in touch with our emotions, we need to be able to identify emotions and we just aren't taught how to identify. I do this with my kids and we, like, talk about all these different range of emotions outside of mad, sad and happy because you can feel so many different things. But it's so interesting for you to talk about this because I also see so much child psychology stuff that actually applies to two grown ass adults as well. Like we need, you know what I mean, because we weren't taught in childhood. So it, yeah. So it needs to be brought in. Josh: All of the emotion regulation stuff for kids I use with adults. It's awesome. Annie: There's Josh Hillis' coaching secret. Kid psychology. Jen: Go grab your feelings wheel. Annie: Where are you on the spectrum? Jen: Next time Lauren has a meltdown I'm going to say "Go grab your feelings wheel." Annie: All of our slack community, our corporate communication is now going to be, "I feel because" statements, so Josh, you, so you create some distance, you identify some feelings or what your feelings, you get really clear on what that is and then you can eat the thing if you want to still, right? Josh: Yeah. And so they're sort of like these, like, kind of guideline-y things, like waiting 10 minutes. Another like guideline-y thing that I'll start off with, like, either don't do it, do whatever you want. If someone is eating the thing every time then we'll add in like a 50% guideline where 50% of the time they'll eat the thing and 50% of the time they'll find something else. And again, that's just sort of like some training wheels to have to like think about it and choose and be like, you know what, I ate the thing three days in a row. Maybe today I should try going for a walk. Jen: Right, right. Annie: And the point is to really just disrupt the autopilot, right? Josh: Yeah, yeah. Jen: Yes. Right. And also sounds like scaling a little bit. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: Rather than, again, what we see big, big, big problem is people try to go from zero to 60 and it never works. It never works. And Lauren had a really good idea for bridging the emotional eating gap. She said if eating a piece of cake is your coping mechanism, try pair it with a bath, go eat your cake in the bath, and then eventually your association can be more, can become about the bath and then remove the cake and then have it be about the bath, right? It's about scaling that towards a healthier coping mechanism. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: Yes. Go Lauren. Annie: Are there, Josh, do you have any other ways to create distance or to even just feel comfortable feeling your feelings without food? Josh: Yeah. So there's always going to be three different things that you can do, three different effective things. One is you can create distance and just sit with it. Like, just accept this is normal. Right? And a lot of times that's really cool. If you're in a situation where you can't do something else, right, Like maybe you're at work and you've got to keep working, and so what you do is you notice those feelings and you come back to being present with your work or your family or whatever's going on around you. Like, you actually get present with that. The other thing would be to have a menu of different self care things that you can do. And so you notice you have those feelings and then you take a walk or do some deep breathing or take a bath or read a book or whatever. At this point I think I've got a list of like 70 different things in like 15 categories. Jen: I want to just say one thing for the moms who listen and the dads, when I find myself emotionally eating, my kids are often a trigger and alternative forms of self care are not available to me. Right? Like I can't go take, I can't check out of parenting and go take a bath or even go meditate or whatever. And so sometimes I'm just freaking eat a bowl of chips. One thing I would say is that I've scaled it from diving headfirst into a bag of chips to like getting out a little bowl and putting some chips in there and then just eating them and going, "Yeah." So I would say like, I mean my emotional eating skills are not, but they have greatly improved over the years. Josh: Well look at that. So there's a couple of great things about what you just said, right. Number one, parenting is a great context for, like, being able to just, like, accept it and be there. Also, you, you did look at, like, separating out the chips and, like, having a certain amount versus just, like, grabbing from the bag, which works for all kinds of treats all across the board. And then the third thing that that brings up is, it's actually, and this is another thing that's such an important thing. It's normal to eat to chill out your emotions sometimes. Jen: I totally agree. I don't think the goal is like 0% emotional eating. It's like, really, how often are you doing it and how, what is the loss of control there, right? Rather than- Josh: Yeah. Jen: Like emotional eating isn't all bad and it's like, really? Is it? Josh: Yeah. Jen: A couple of chips when my kids are losing it? Is that so bad. Annie: Is it problematic for you? Josh: Oh, and it's one those things where like, like the goal is psychological flexibility. So psychological flexibility is the ability to make different choices. Right. It's just an ability to make different choices. Jen: Right. Right. Josh: Like, never emotionally eating is rigid. Jen: Totally. Josh: Always having to, like, where most of my clients had is they've got like a rule, they don't, they don't say it as a rule, but like they've got a rule that if they have emotions they eat, totally rigid. Jen: Right. Josh: If we can get in the middle we're rocking. Jen: Totally. Yes. Annie: That sounds so familiar, Jen. Jen: The messy middle, yes. That's where we like to hang. Josh: I loved that so much. That is like the best phrase in the world. Jen: Brene Brown, I've brought her up a few times now. You can see I really like her. Josh: I like her too. Annie: But- Jen: Yeah, she talks about being in the messy middle, but when you're in the messy middle you get arrows from both sides, which we have also experienced as well. Being in the messy middle between hardcore health and fitness and hardcore body positive anti weight loss. Hanging out in the middle is can be quite lonely and you can get arrows from both sides. But- Josh: I get that. Annie: Okay. So say you're finding yourself, like, face deep in, like, cake or chips or whatever it is and you're, like, you have this, like, moment of, like, "Whoa, what am I doing?" Josh: Yeah. Annie: Like you're like in this middle, like an emotional eating extravaganza. Josh: Yeah. Annie: What do you do? Do the same thing, like, create some distance still or are there different rules? Josh: Oh no, that's, you nailed it already. It's the exact same rules. So, you notice you're in the middle, you separate yourself from it geographically. You give yourself some time to think about it. You do some sort of diffusion exercise. Whether that's, well, where I talked about, like, a feelings wheel, but also I've got some clients that will journal, they'll write out everything that they're feeling and just writing it out gives them a lot of distance. The biggest thing my clients use actually a metaphor called "let the monsters ride the bus" so we might as well dive into that now. So, it's a really, really common act metaphor and the metaphor is, you're a driving a bus and sometimes you get really cool passengers that get on the bus and they're like, "hey, you're great and we love you and high five!" Like that. Josh: And they get on and off when they want. And sometimes they get monsters, they get on the bus, they're like, "Hey, you're ugly and stupid and you always do it wrong" and they get on and off when they want. And your job as the bus driver is to drive the bus and you could always make a left turn towards, like, numbing and controlling, or you can make a right turn towards your valued actions. And what this allows people to do is allows people to realize like, "Hey, I've got these monsters that will get on, will ride along with me and I can still take a right turn towards my values. Even with the monsters on the bus. Like, my job isn't to get rid of the monsters. It's not to not have monsters. It's to let the monsters ride the bus." Josh: And my clients have identified, they almost always have identified, like, what their most common monsters are. And my clients get to a point where they have identified the monsters that they have in the middle of emotional eating. I've got a lot of clients that have a monster that's like, "One more will be fine, one more will be fine, one more will be fine." Or they might have a monster that's like, "You've already ruined it. Might as well go for broke. Let's start again Monday." And so when they have those feelings, again, they don't treat them as true. They don't treat them as, like, them. They're like, "Oh, there's that monster again. And that guy can ride along the bus. And I know that when I'm in, when I catch myself in the middle, my monsters are super loud." Annie: Are you familiar with Pema Chodron's work? She's a Buddhist nun. Josh: No. Annie: This is feels very similar because you have in that blog post, and I think, I think I pulled this quote from your blog posts it said, "The irony is that when people accept cravings as being normal" or I'm assuming these uncomfortable emotions, "they have an increased capacity to tolerate cravings" and that's just very similar to her work. That's like you actually, by just acknowledging the feelings and emotions you suffer less, like, and that's, like, instead of trying to avoid it or like do all these things like this contortionists, like, "I'm going to avoid it in any way possible. I'm going to do all these things so I don't have to feel the thing that I'm trying to avoid feeling." If you just like feel it and like acknowledge it, like, "I see you, monster, you're on the bus, I hear you, but I'm not going to listen or I'm not, you know, whatever." Josh: Yeah. Annie: It's like you can still take action as you notice, what did you, how did you say, that aligns with your values? Josh: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. Even though you hear them, even though they're on the bus- Josh: You nail. Yeah. Yes. The same. And that's a really, really, really big. So, here's the paradox there. You're 1000% right. The paradox is that when you allow the monsters to be there, it is a lot less painful and it's a lot less intense. The paradox is that you don't want to approach it as, "I'm going to allow the monsters" to like force it to be less intense because then it doesn't work. And so that's not actually doing it. But what you're talking about, which is really cool, it's really, really cool, is that there's two kinds of pain. There is normal human pain, which is like the feelings and an uncomfortable thoughts that we all have. And then there's like the added pain that comes from trying to, like, control and fore and not, you know, and so, you do get to avoid all of the added pain and you're not the first person to be, like, you know, there's this Buddhist that kind of sounds a lot like these acceptance and commitment training people. Annie: Well I think it's, I think it's, I don't know if it's just the universe, like, I've been doing kind of this emotional work to like make these messages become really clear to me. But it seems like I've been trying to, and I've talked about this on other podcasts, outsource feeling good or feeling great all the time. Like you said, like we get this message that like, "Maybe I shouldn't be feeling these things" or like "Everyone else feels great all the time and they never have bad days" or "They never have self-doubt" or they never have body image issues. And it's like, "That's actually just not the case. Like, just acknowledging that like you get to feel all the things and you still live, we're going to be okay," like that. It's like, that feels really powerful to me. But I like that you say like, I love that analogy of let the monsters ride the bus. I could see that becoming a big phrase in our community. Can't you Jen? Jen: Yeah, I was already picturing it as a hashtag soon. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: The other thing is I think when I was hearing you say, Josh, is because we have this other guests, she's been on twice now. Her name is Hillary McBride. We have to, we're going to call her Doctor Hillary McBride soon cause she's almost done her Phd and she is also psychologist and she works in body image and she has a book called Mothers, Daughters and Body Image. And so she has sort of encouraged the same process as far as thoughts about your body, like kind of stepping outside of it. But, and then I think her version of monsters on the bus is to acknowledge the monsters on the bus. But to say, is this really true? Just that simple question, is this really true? And I just sort of have this vision of being a driver on a bus hearing all the monsters in the back, but being able to say, "Is that true? Like, do I have to do that? Am I, you know, am I helpless to this? Is that true?" And you know, the answer is often, like, "No, it's not actually true." And then you can kind of just, yeah. Keep doing what you were doing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Yeah. Josh: Just to, like, it's, like, notice. Jen: Yeah, just notice. Yeah. Josh: Like it's, it doesn't, yeah. Cause we, it is so normal for us to treat it like it's true. Like it's, like, it's so true. Jen: Right. It feels true. Right? Josh: That's awesome. Annie: Okay. So Josh, we discussed, being aware, creating distance, normalizing the experiencing of different emotions. Is there anything else that comes to mind when I'm addressing emotional eating? And again, I do want to recap that this is like as you, as you said at the beginning, that those are tools that work for people that have emotional eating issues. If you don't have emotional eating issues then, like- Josh: You probably don't have to- Annie: Then it doesn't apply. Or what was the difference that you said? That thought control or thought suppression would work for people that,- Josh: yeah. So, here's where it gets really funny. Cause I got really spun whenever the research that thought suppression worked for cravings and emotional eating for people that don't have cravings and emotional eating issues. And but, like, at first I was like, "thought suppression is always bad. Like how does that work?" And so I actually talked to my friend, Amy Evans, who's this brilliant behavioral analyst and she's like, "Well, of course not because the function is different, right? So if the function of that controllers is trying to like push away these uncomfortable emotions and cravings, then it's like an avoidance strategy. But if you don't have issues with those, then it's actually kind of like, maybe it's just like conscientiousness, right? Like it's a totally different thing." And I'm like, "Oh!" So it's good to have genius friends. Jen: Right? So can you give us an example in context? So person A doesn't have ongoing emotional eating issues, so we're talking about, but then something, a craving pops up or, or they're feeling emotional and they're feeling some kind of urge to eat if they don't struggle with ongoing emotional eating issues, then suppression works. Josh: Apparently. Yeah. I mean I don't coach that, but in the, in the research, yeah. Jen: So what would suppression look like for them? Josh: Yes. So, I'm guessing if they didn't score very highly than it's just a simple guideline that they're just like, "Oh, I don't, I don't eat between meals." I don't eat from the, you know, which is, which is totally fine. Jen: Right? Yeah. We call these self-loving guidelines in Balance365. They're not rules. They're flexible guidelines that keep you in a place of self care kind of thing. Josh: Yeah. So like- Annie: Oh, sorry, go ahead, Josh. Josh: I was just going to say if someone doesn't score really high on cravings and they have a little craving, it's pretty easy for them to go like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that." Jen: Right. Josh: "If someone scores really high on cravings- Jen: Then it's a bigger deal to say, "No, I'm not doing that." Yeah. Okay. Annie: I think it's important to note though, as you noted, as we noted in the beginning of the podcast is that that can work for some people, but right now the majority of the health and fitness industry are selling thought suppression. Josh: Yeah. Annie: To everyone. Like, that is, like, the widely accepted common answer versus, "Hey, like, maybe this is normal." Jen: They're also selling emotional eating at any point as as unacceptable. And so, you know, a person who is has an emotional eating episode one day, that's, you know, we're trying to say in this podcast that that's not wrong. And really, if you don't struggle with emotional eating, whether you do or don't engage in emotional eating is not a make or break for anyone's life. Right. It's not, whether you choose the chips or don't, it's just not really an issue. Like it's really a small, tiny little rock that really, you know what I mean? Like we're talking about, there's people that have real loss of control that going on, you know, sometimes daily for them around emotional eating. So, and it comes down to the frequency. How often are you engaging in these behaviors and ultimately what does that end up? What does that look like for you? After three months, 12 months, three years, 20 years, right? Josh: Frequency's everything. Jen: Right. Annie: Josh, you're so much fun to have on our podcast. Do you have more? Josh: Can I throw one other thing out there? The other thing that, the biggest misconception that I've gotten when I've talked to people about this and I've got it so much that I want to make sure not to miss it. This is still a behavioral approach, right? Like they're like, "Oh, you're like deal with your thoughts and like that" but you still, like, you still have to clarify your values and attach behaviors to that. But it's like, so self love guidelines was that? Jen: Self loving guidelines. Josh: Self loving guidelines, or like kind of like more, more intuitive skills or like, all these different things. The whole point of all this is to be able to do those things more frequently. Jen: Right? Josh: Right. So, all of my clients, I shouldn't say all of my clients. The majority of my clients track behaviors, right? So they track how often they have like a mostly balanced meal or how often they have vegetables or how often they, you know, snacked between meals or how often they noticed their hunger before they ate or how, you know, like how often they were full and stopped and like, they track actual behaviors and things that we can count the real world. Monsters on the bus is another thing that they track and count how often they use it. They also track if they didn't need it, like, "Oh, I didn't need it today," but- Jen: Oh interesting. Josh: If they're like, "Oh, I didn't need it and I used it" or "I didn't need it and I didn't use it." Those would be different things and it seems really weird maybe to use like a metaphor as a behavior to track, but it works really well. Jen: So ultimately you're tracking, the behavior change that you have people track is not necessarily emotional eating episodes, but how they dealt with those, whether they dealt with it in a manner that is more healthy than bingeing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Right. Okay. Josh: Yeah. And so that could look really differently for a lot of different people, but it's like how often did you use this metaphor? How often would you use a diffusion technique? How often did you use your menu of things you can do? Jen: Right, right, right. Annie: Great. So, so you're putting behaviors with it. That's great. Josh: That's what grounds it in the real world. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Otherwise it goes way. Jen: Josh had a thread on his page, several months ago where you said, "sometimes I think" as far as your weight loss clients, you said "If we changed nothing at all except working on stress reduction methods, people would lose weight without changing anything at all." And then I had mentioned or just sleep, like, just a sleep habit, which is, you know, kind of goes hand in hand with stress- Josh: So good. Jen: Isn't it? So it just sort of like, yeah. So imagine if people just, so what we find is people hyperfocus on food, like they just are hyper focused on it and if you zoom out and you get back, if you just laid your foundations for say stress reduction, better sleep hygiene, anything you identify that helps your wellness wheel go, the food just doesn't matter. People will kind of eat until they're satisfied. Do you know what I mean? Like it's often these, the overeating tendencies we have are often a result of these high stress, sleep deprived, poor coping mechanism, lifestyles that we're living, the rest of the overeating issue. You don't have to be so hyper focused on the food or crank the wheel to the right and jump on the Keto wagon or cause you're really never getting to the underlying issues of why you're overeating in the first place. Right? Josh: Yeah. With my most successful clients, all these things we're doing show up as self care. Jen: Right. Totally. Josh: And it's like, and then the people that struggle are the ones that keep trying to do it as punishment. Jen: The food, the food. Yeah, totally. Josh: And the thing about sleep is no one makes phenomenally great food decisions when they're exhausted. Jen: Nobody. That's right. Yeah. Josh: I will throw out there in case there's any people that work like swing shifts or anything like that out there. For a while I had a ton of clients that were nurses that worked overnight and so for them, a lot of it was just acceptance of every time their schedule shifted they were going to be like unusually hungry. And so that is workable. But for everyone else, if we can just turn off screens like an hour earlier, like, man, this all gets easier. Jen: Totally. We just interviewed a sleep doctor before we interviewed you. Josh: Oh really? Annie: Yeah. He said the same thing. Jen: Same thing. Our podcast is the best. Josh: Your podcast is the best. This was so much fun. Annie: Are you always this energetic? I mean, every time, I've talked to you twice in five years, like you always have such great energy about you- Jen: And smiling. You're always smiling. Josh: You're super great. It's fun hanging out with you guys. Annie: You are welcome back here anytime. Josh: Also, this is, like, my favorite stuff to talk about. Annie: So yeah, you are, you're welcome back here. Anytime. Anything, any projects you're working on that you want to tell us about or where can we, where can our listeners find you or keep up with your work? Jen: You're working on a million books. Josh: I am working on a million books, so, losestomachfat.com is still my blog. I still do celebrity workout stuff and emotionally eating research, which is now a weird combination. I've got two books coming out. Lean Is Strong is coming out at the end of this year. And then the untitled emotional eating book is coming out next year. And that's my big stuff right now. It's top secret. Annie: Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Alright, well thank you so much, Josh. Josh: Thank you. Annie: We will talk soon, hopefully. Josh: Okay, cool. Thanks guys. Annie: Thanks. This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.

Erin Pavlina is a professional intuitive, blogger and author who has written more than 800 articles on the topic of spiritual, psychic and personal development. We talk about intuitive counseling, past life readings, astral projection, and what happens on the Other Side. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ...past lives, past life readings, astral projection, the Other Side, the veil, paranormal investigation, spirit guides... GUEST LINKS - ERIN PAVLINA erinpavlina.com The Astral Projection Guidebook by Erin Pavlina HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I have an interview with Erin Pavlina about past life readings, astral projection, and the Other Side. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. BEFORE I FORGET I'd like to say a quick thank you to Heather Becker, my newest supporter on Patreon. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Today’s guest, Erin Pavlina is a professional intuitive, blogger and author who has written more than 800 articles on the topics of spiritual, psychic and personal development. Just before the recording started, I took a moment to tell Erin about the impact she’s had on my own career as an intuitive and author. Way back in 2006, I had no intentions of becoming a professional intuitive, but my guides were really pushing me to write and publish about my experiences with the paranormal. And at the time I was writing the first articles for Shift Your Spirits, I discovered Erin's blog which she had just launched. It was a huge synchronicity for me. Erin set a real, tangible example for me to emulate — just as a blogger, not to mention as an intuitive. I had no idea what it would lead to… Back in the day, I wrote her emails asking for advice, and she was always encouraging, inspiring, and she treated me like a peer. I am forever grateful for that. She gave me a print interview on Shift Your Spirits 10 years ago. So, for me, sharing this conversation is a full circle moment. Whether she knew it or not before today, I consider Erin one of my mentors. INTERVIEW SEGMENT Erin: That's really cool. Yeah, I've heard that from some other people. And that, I think is the part that's most gratifying, is creating and inspiring people who also create the drops in the ocean and send the ripples out. Slade: Yeah. Erin: Because the more people we have doing this, the better. Slade: Right. It's kind of like nodes in a network and you raise a tower and a bunch of other people can connect to those as well. Erin: Exactly. Slade: Well for those listeners who may be discovering you for the first time, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Erin: Okay. So I'm an intuitive counsellor. So what I do is I connect to my clients' spirit guides and get information that will help them on their path, whether that's career, relationships, finance, health, spirituality, whatever they want to ask about, their guides will answer. So I consider myself a conduit. Just a relay. And I've honed my abilities to the point where I am able to clearly receive information from people's spirit guides and then I just pass it on and they kind of go from there. Slade: Awesome. So you've written about a turning point in your life and I was referring back to 2006 and you've called it a kind of Emergence. So how did you become an intuitive? Where was the story, the origin, for you? Erin: So I was intuitive my whole life. You know, when I was four years old, I started to notice things. I would have premonitions. I would have dreams about deceased people coming to me and giving me information that turned out to be correct, and I kind of went through my life just having intuition for myself, and I never considered that I could do this for other people. And one day I was watching a reality show, Beauty and the Geek, and my second cousin who I hadn't seen since he was a little kid, was on the show and I noticed that every time he came on the screen, I would hear a voice telling me things. Like, tell Josh I'm sorry, tell Josh it's not his fault. I'm like, Who is talking to me? And I really didn't understand what was happening because I certainly wasn't expecting it. But I started writing down everything I was hearing. And then when the show was over a couple of months later, I got in contact with him and I said, I don't know if you're into this stuff, but I gotta tell you what this voice is telling me. And I told him everything that this female voice was giving me. And there was silence on the other end of the line. I'm like, Josh, are you still there? And he said, I'm shaking right now. I said, Why? He said, Because I know exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly who you're talking to. My finacee had a suicide six months ago and everything you're telling me is stuff that I found in her suicide note, which I didn't share with any other person in the world. And so we were both kind of sitting there going, Well... well... well... what is this?? And it occurred to me that I had been speaking to a deceased person. Then I thought to myself, If I did that once, maybe I can do it again. So I started trying consciously to tune in to other people's deceased relatives. And I also discovered at the same time other guides that would come to me and that I could tell were not deceased people. They were spirit guides. And I just very boldly and courageously and with no other intent other than to help people, started passing along messages to people from their guides. And that's really how it started. Then I decided to start writing about some spiritual topics. Again, with no intention of it really turning into anything. And as I was talking about this thing with my audience, my growing audience, people started asking me to give them a reading. I'm like, Well I don't know how to give a reading, per say. I don't know how that functions. But again, I thought, I might as well try. So I tuned in to my guides and I asked them for help doing this work and they taught me how to do it and I started doing this professionally in 2006. And here we are. Slade: Wow. It's so similar to kind of how it happened for me too. I thought, Oh, I'm just going to write about these experiences that I have and then all the people reading kind of drafted me and said - Erin: Exactly! Slade: ... Can you connect for me? Yeah, so I was like, months behind you, but also observing you to some degree, you know, having it happen as well. And I think that's one of the reasons I attach to your experience so strongly. So I'm wondering though, since it has been, what, it's like almost 12 years for you? Erin: Yeah. Slade: That you've been doing readings... How have your readings evolved over time, like, are they different now then back when we first discovered you? Erin: I would say that the mechanism of how I receive information is exactly the same. But I've gotten faster and better and more clear at getting the information. So I used to do like, a 30-minute phone reading or 1-hour phone reading, but I'm very to the point. You know? I'm not all out there and I don't meander around. I get right to the point and I discovered that I could answer a lot of questions for people in just 15 - 20 minutes. And so, gradually, I have honed my reading skills to the point where I can do a 15-minute reading for somebody and still cover all the areas of their life that they want to cover. And then I also was able to start doing readings by email, which I remember trying that long time ago, but people have follow-up questions, and then it turned into this back-and-forth email exchange. But later, probably around in year seven or eight, I decided to give it a try again because after speaking with my guides about it, they told me how to do it so that a person would get a full reading by email. So I had people send me their questions by email and I sit in my meditation, connect with their guides, and I can answer their questions just as well over email as I could over the phone and I have found that very, very, very few people need any kind of follow-up because the reading is still very thorough. So I would say that I've gotten better and faster, and even more clarity than we had before. Slade: Okay well I'm very impressed with all that. Not only for myself, but I know that there are a lot of other intuitives who are listening right now who, one of the questions I get a lot of times about doing email readings is how do you handle the back-and-forth, so I'm very curious that that just isn't an issue. Erin: Actually one of the things I think happens is, when they send me a question, I don't just answer the question. I use that as a launching point to talk to their guides about their entire situation. So if somebody says, you know, should I move to L.A. and take the job, or keep the one I have in New York, it's not just a yes or no question for me. I talk to the guides about their career path and they show me all the different trajectories that the person could be on and which ones will likely lead to the best outcomes for them. And I also talk to their guides about what the person most wants to experience in their lives. So when I send back the reading, I don't just say, Yeah, move to L.A. Slade: Right. Erin: You know? I'll talk to them about what they truly wanted when they incarnated, what their current trajectory is taking them, and also what they want to experience. And so I look through all of their possibilities, pick the one or two that the guides are very much in favour of, and when I send back the reading, I not only tell her why she should go to L.A., but also why she should go and what she's going to experience there, what challenges she might face and how to overcome them. So it's very complete. Slade: That's very cool. I'm curious, Is there a particular type of reading that you tend to attract in your practice? Have you noticed any patterns? Erin: Yeah, I mean, the types of questions people ask, after doing thousands and thousands of readings, there are a few questions that are sort of at the top. The top one is definitely how can I transition to a career I'll enjoy? Which I find interesting and I guess a lot of people go through that, you know? You get out of college or high school, you pick a career path and somewhere down the line, five or ten years later, you are not happy. You've had a shift and your career has not shifted with you. So a lot of people want to know what they can do to be happier in their careers. So that's a big one. Slade: Yeah. I notice that you also do past-life readings, correct? Erin: Yes. I've just started doing that. Slade: How did you - Well, that's cool because I was wondering how you discovered that you were receiving past life information. Was it prompted by a question someone had about it or how did that emerge? Erin: For the most part, during the last 11 - 12 years, most people did not ask me about past-life stuff. So past-life information would only emerge in the reading when the guides felt it was necessary for the person to know what had occurred in previous lives. Usually there were some kind of trauma that was carried over. So I never really gave it a whole lot of thought because my personal opinion was that getting a past-life reading doesn't help them a whole lot this life unless there is some kind of carry-over. But one day when I was in meditation with my guides, they gave me the idea to just do it. And I don't really question them after this many years. They said, Do some past-life readings. You're going to see some really interesting patterns. You're going to see some really interesting things, and it is going to be very helpful to people. So I thought, Alright. So really, on a whim, but with great delight and joy and curiosity, I offered the past-life readings. And I ended up getting like, 300 people signed up in the first week and it was a little overwhelming, because it takes a long time to do those, but as I got going with them, I realized how valuable they are, how important they are, and what would happen is when I would tune in to their past life, the guides would show me their entire life, like a video, and I could fast-forward or rewind or pause at various points and what I did, because obviously a life is very long, I would grab the key salient significant experiences of their life and express those to them. Otherwise, obviously it would take many, many, many pages to go over a past life. And so what we discovered together, me and my clients, is that knowing how you were in a previous life often informs what you're doing in this life, whether it's a reacting to something bad that happened and you say, I'm never doing that again, or it's an opportunity to replay and redo things that happen in your previous life where you didn't like the outcome. It's like re-doing a dream in a way. You get to change the outcome. It was really cool. Slade: Well, one of the main reasons that I wanted to talk to you at this time was because one of my listeners requested a show topic covering the Veil of Forgetfulness or The Veil, as some people call it. And when I heard that, I immediately thought of you because I remember the tagline that you had years ago about remembering where you came from. And I thought you would be the perfect person to ask about this topic. So what is the Veil? How would you explain it? Erin: To me, I guess the Veil is like a blanket covering your memories so that you cannot remember who you really are and where you really came from. And I think a lot of intuitives have pondered, Why bother with a veil? Why can't we remember that we come from love? Why can't we remember who we are, who we were and everything like that? And I don't know that I have the definitive answer, but the way that I view incarnations is kind of like playing a video game where you create a character, you give him or her certain attributes, certain strengths, certain weaknesses, and then you hit Play. And so, if your character knew everything, if your character knew everything that he was going to have to do and everything he was going to have to be, he would probably, you know, fall on his sword and say, Forget this, I'm not doing it. So part of it is to have, part of the Veil is to have the experience, to have it be clean, to have it not be informed by who we've been and who we are and not remember where we come from. But I think it's very important and very helpful if you can remember where you came from, and you know, where you're going to return to, because I have to imagine that if we were all living in a world where we remembered that we're connected, that we're all One, that we come from love, we would treat each other differently, and we'd treat the planet differently, and very, very different things would happen. Slade: So do you think, and I mean I'm just asking you to kind of philosophically ponder a little bit, do you think it's something that we're meant to overcome, that it's sort of maybe a soul chosen... like you said, if it's a video game, is it a survivalist game that you are agreeing to go into with the limitations because of those limitations, or do you think it's the intention of a higher power that we come in forgetting... Erin: I think it's both. Slade: Yeah... Erin: I think that the system is set up so that we don't remember. But I want to clarify that by saying, Some people do remember. There's a lot of people that remember but they're told by society and by how they're raised and everything that it's probably not real or not true. Kids have a very strong grasp of cooperation and love and being very unconditionally loving. And then our societal structure often changes their nature to be, I don't want to say selfish, but looking after oneself. Not sharing. But I think it's all, I don't want to say it's all part of the game, because that sounds, I don't know, I don't like that, but it's part of the system and I'm not 100% sure why it is but I do know that it's beneficial in some way or we wouldn't keep doing it and I also know that some people do remember and that's... When people have their awakening, they remember and then it's very... it feels very important to share that memory with other people, which is why I kind of started my blog. Slade: Yeah... Erin: Is to wake people up. And to help them remember that they're a spiritual being having a human experience and that we can design and structure this playground any way that we want. Slade: You've written a lot about The Other Side. You have an e-book actually available on your website called The Other Side, which is a collection of some of the information that you've brought through, specifically about the other side and what happens when we die, what happens before we incarnate, the in-between. I'm just wondering, Is there anything that you've discovered about the other side that was particularly surprising to you, that you hadn't heard before from another source? Something that might have been unexpected or peculiar? Erin: Yeah, I think usually when I would do a reading and I would connect with a deceased individual, they would send love and they would send hope and all kinds of ideas to make a person's life better. But there was one situation where I was speaking with a gentleman on the other side and his client was, his daughter was my client and he was very intelligent and he was coming through very clearly. And when I got off the phone with my client, I continued talking to this guy because that's how strong a connection we had and how interested I was in speaking to him. And he was very interested in speaking to me. So he was at a real high vibration and I kind of asked him, What do you do over there? What's going on? And one of the things he said is, It's sort of like a creation experience. There's a lot of different things you can create over there. Different experiences, but one of the things that he was doing is engaging in sort of philosophical discussion, sharing of wisdom with other beings on the other side. So that sounded really cool to me. It was a little unexpected. Some people on the other side want to create sort of a fantasy-realm for themselves where they re-live a little bit one of their most recent life and they set things up to see what would have happened if they had taken a different road. So it's almost like you seem to get an opportunity to say, What would have happened if I had taken that job? Or what would've happened if I married that guy? And all the curiosity you ever had in your life, you're allowed to kind of see what would've happened if you had taken a different road. So there are apparently people spending time doing that a little bit. The other thing I saw which was, I was not expecting is some times, and this is very, very, very rare, so I don't want people to worry about this. Sometimes, if a person crossed over and they had either suicided or there was some mental anguish going on with them, they, I saw, had a tendency to re-live a lot of the anguishing experiences, hanging on to something that they really did not need to hang on to but which they could not seem to let go. And in those cases, what I saw over time because I would read for the same client and we'd kind of check in to see what people were doing, there were angelic energies around them that were helping them to heal and helping them to close those wounds so they could properly and fully cross over and release their life. The life that they had just had. Because there's something about they don't want them to cross over until they're able to drop that persona and be back at One, in peace and kind of become their higher self again. Does that make sense? Slade: Yeah, interesting. So I wonder if, do you think that corresponds with what we call earth-bound spirits and spirits that are trapped or do you think it's something else? Erin: Yes, I do think that some spirits have a difficult time crossing over but I really, really, really, really want to stress that that's a teeny tiny percentage of people. Because most people easily slough off the connection and are able to cross over completely and fully, but I have seen some energies that are either too afraid to cross over because they fear judgment or are a little bit confused and they need a little extra help working on releasing and cutting the cord with this life. So yeah, that happens sometimes. Rarely. Slade: Cool. Well, you know, the thing is, you do so many fascinating things including, you have a whole paranormal investigation team which we'd have to do a separate episode about. Erin: Yeah. Slade: So I won't take you down too many rabbit holes. But I was curious about the connection between the things that we're talking about. The readings, the mediumship, connecting with the other side, communicating with spirits, and then astral projection, which is another really big topic for you that you've written about. You have a book about astral projection. So, what do you use the astral projection for? What's the application? Erin: Yeah, okay that's a great question. When I was young, when I was 15 to maybe 18 or 20 years old, I used to astral project because I was getting attacked by lower vibrational entities on the astral plane. And it wasn't something I was trying to do and it certainly wasn't something I was trying to attract, but it kept happening. I finally got to the point where I said, You know, if you're going to keep attacking me, I'm going to go on the offense because I don't like this. So I started projecting three or four nights a week, and I would go on patrol and I would remove and clear lower vibrational entities that I saw either around my house, not inside but outisde, and then I started doing that for other people. And then that kind of died down a lot. I got real focused on college and dating and marriage, children, business etc. And so my astral projection experiences now are focused very differently. So now when I go out, I'm either helping a spirit who is having difficulty crossing over. I do some astral projection work on my paranormal investigations to identify and look at the ghost or entity that is plaguing our clients and I communicate with it to see what its deal is. And also sometimes I'll visit friends because that's fun. Also I will visit either another dimension or go up to the, oh let's call it the Ether, where I'll communicate and commune with my own deceased relatives, friends and loved ones from this life and previous lives. Slade: Awesome. Okay well that makes me want to get the book now. So I assume that the astral projection guide book is about mastering some of those techniques for those purposes, correct? Erin: Exactly. Yeah. The book really covers a lot of detail about how to prepare yourself to astral project because you really want to be mentally prepared and then some techniques to achieve it faster and also troubleshooting some common problems people experience when they first start projecting. Slade: Very cool. I'll put a link in the show notes and on my blog as well so people can go check that out. I'm curious what's next for you. Do you have anything special, project-wise, coming up on the horizon? Erin: Yeah, I'm working on an intuition development program. It'll be an audio program. This is something I've been wanting to do for at least five years, but I have not had the time to devote to doing it. And now I finally do, I have completed the script so all I need to do is record it and get it produced. And in this program, people will learn how to use their clair-abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, sentience and cognizance. And we'll also go over the practical ways that you can use it in your daily life because a lot of people don't realize they can use it for everything. And it will also go over how to prepare yourself to be able to hear your guides and receive intuition whenever you desire, where you don't have to just wait for it to strike you. Slade: Very cool. You'll have to come back on when you get all that up and running and share it if you'd like. Erin, it's been a real pleasure catching up with you and finding out what you're up to. Tell everyone where they can go find you online. Erin: The website is erinpavlina.com and I'm sure Slade will post it up somewhere. There's hundreds of articles on there that you can read for free, which I love. I love to hear people's feedback on the articles, and often we go over to my Facebook wall and talk about each article, so that's available for people as well. Slade: That's wonderful. Thank you, Erin, for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Erin: Thank you. It was great catching up. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Do you have issues with faith? Are you guilty of trying to plan out every little detail of your life? This is a little reminder for you to trust in something greater than yourself — it can be the natural world, the universe, a higher consciousness, God, or even just the Mystery. Having this kind of faith is about trusting that the outcome will be exactly what it should be, no matter what it is, and it will happen in its own perfect time. Give your divine timing over to the divine — it’s better at it than we are. You can take a break from the impossible job of coaxing the universe. Take a break, take a breath. And I’ll talk to you later.