Hello and welcome back to Resilient Entrepreneurs. This is the podcast that features business owners from around the world from all walks of life, sharing their expertise and tales of their resilient journey. Karl Schwantes is a leader in the jewellery world, his mission is to keep the industry alive and vibrant to empower people to invest in jewellery that is divinely unique and to make a difference in people's lives. He is described by those who know him as a diamond surgeon. What Karl knows about diamonds could fill a book or three, but I'm pretty sure Karl is deeply romantic as well. And I for one will be asking him how he helps a woman or a couple find that perfect ring. Karl’s calling to help people has also led him to start another business, Five Star Reviews, helping businesses grow through exactly that, getting great reviews. Karl, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast.
Good morning, Vicki. I guess it's still morning, wherever we are, we're all in the same state at the moment. So that's great.
Well, two of us are, but then we have Laura in Bermuda and listeners from all over the planet, which is always exciting. So Karl, you began your journey as a jewellery designer at the age of 12, having worked and I say ‘worked’ in inverted commas because there was no slave labour involved I'm sure with your family business since you were eight years old, sweeping floors and the like.
Yeah, there was no, there's no slave labour, just child and free labour, so that's probably slightly better than slave labour.
Do we think so? Well, as long as you keep it in the family, it's better, right? I'm sure it goes on still. And look, after some journey of exploring options for yourself, you later took over the family business right here in Brisbane. What is most memorable to you about those early days?
It's funny anyone who's from the jewellery industry knows that most jewellers have maybe a shop or something like that, but they generally have a home workshop as well. And even as a small child, I can still remember, walking many times into my father's workshop and smelling the oils and the unique smells that come from a workshop and watching him heat up these bars of metal, where they would turn cherry hot red and then quenching it into the water. It was really kind of something magical, it almost felt like the old days of King Arthur and the Knights Table and fashioning swords, so I think at some level there was a really magical attraction to turning this lump of metal into something that was really going to end up so beautiful.
Yeah, that! Oh I can imagine as a kid how that would affect you trying to figure out what you wanted to do. So when you were little, did you think you would end up in this family business? Or did you have a totally different plan in mind?
I don't think I really knew, I mean, for the listeners listening today, it's almost hard to comprehend but back when we were kids, computers and the internet weren't really that much of a thing. So it's such a different mindset now, we didn't really know what we wanted to do. At that time, as I was getting later into high school, it was computers, like that's what I thought was going to be the next big thing and for one reason or another, it didn't just didn't work out that way. I actually after school, left and did a science degree majoring in psychology. Not that it has anything to do with sales or anything like that but I just had an interest in the psychology side of things. And it's really quite fascinating when you look at neurosurgeons and neuropsychology and all that sort of thing. So I've always found that quite fascinating as well. But no, I just loved helping out, and when I say loved helping out, I think there are things with any family business, when you're growing up there are probably parts of the job that you like, and probably parts that you didn't. We used to have to do these mail outs in the old days, which was folding 1000s of letters, putting stamps and lick sealing envelopes and all that sort of thing to interact with your clients from a marketing point of view. But I think when you're around it and exposed to it, and you talk about it at the dinner table, it just becomes part of your DNA and who you are. So I think it's at some level, I guess I was always going to do something in the space, but it wasn't clear to me at that time when I was younger, what that looked like.
And it was only later on in the later years where I went on to do my gemology diploma, because I became a qualified gemologist and a qualified diamond grader and then a valuer and you start to do all of this, and it's just the power compounding of time.
I think for kids, I've got four kids now, so triplets, 17 year olds, and an 18 year old and I think as a parent, what you want for your kids is actually for them to do something that they are just good at. There's a tremendous amount of self confidence that comes when you just do something that you're good at. And for me jewellery was that was it, in terms of talking to clients, or it could have been designing something, it's something that I just love to do and the clients that I did it for really appreciated what I brought to them.
Yeah, I imagine a psychology degree would give you a special kind of insight into the people that come in and sit down with you and want to make a really big decision in life, because often you'll get grooms-to-be coming to buy that big important ring for who they want to propose to. So, I think that might be a little bit of a superpower you have, to have a psychology understanding of all that.
Yeah, I think at some level that maybe helps but I think for me, naturally, I'm just one of those people that just loves people. I love talking with people, I love interacting with people, I love helping people. So for me, I think that's probably just a function of who I am and how I always was, as a child growing up. You know I was on the school debating team, public speaking and I just really enjoyed all of that side of things. But at its central core, it really comes into helping people and I think that from a service point of view, whether you're a jeweller, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're an accountant, if at your core being you have this desire to help people, I think it bodes very well for whatever you do in business.
It really does and I'd love to take that conversation a little further, a little later in this episode, because a lot of people feel that sales and marketing is about convincing someone to buy our stuff. And I think the three of us in this room know that is the exact opposite of the approach that is best taken. But before we get there, Karl, I've heard you share how you help a woman or a couple find that perfect ring. Can you walk us through that process? How do you do that?
Yeah, it's a really funny process, it's a little bit of style, it's a little bit of, I mean you can see actually, I've gotten dressed for you ladies today, I'm wearing my three piece suit with the pink shirt and everything. So for me, it's a little bit of style, it's a little bit of creativity, I've always had that kind of creative flair. And I think it's also at its base level, people want to feel special, and they want something that's a little unique. They don't want a cookie cutter, you're one of 10,000. No lady who’s being proposed to wants to hear, “Here's a ring that's the same as 10 million other rings.” I'm a unique person, you're a unique person and we want something that's a little bit unique, something that's ours that we can call a special part of the design. So for me, I think some of it comes from having that creative flair. And I love drawing and designing, I think one of my superpowers in the jewellery world is that I can draw any ring that you can imagine in 3-D in under 60 seconds. So I almost just see it in my mind and I'm almost just tracing the lines. So I really love doing that and I love the ‘penny drop moment’ when, you know if you've ever had one of those caricatures where someone's drawing you and you go, “I don't see it, don't see it”, and then you go, “Oh my god, now I see it!”. And it's kind of like that with designing jewellery for me. It's like, sometimes people in the beginning, they don't see it, they don't see it and then all of a sudden they go, Oh, wow, I can see that. And I love that feeling when the penny drop happens, and then I'm sitting there going well, do you want to have a colour in there, like maybe a pink diamond or something like that as a feature in the side? And clients just love that, or it could be something around, having some special engraving. I mean, I've got so many stories of clients that just wanted something quirky. Like one of my clients loved pink and purple polka dots. That was just her thing, everything, she had socks with pink and purple polka dots, she had a tattoo with that on it, like everything that she did was pink and purple polka dots. Anyway, so I designed a ring and on one side I put an amethyst and on the other side a pink sapphire. And that was her pink and purple polka dots. And it was about taking some of her essence and some of the stuff that was really special to her and showing her how to incorporate that into her engagement ring. So I always try to make it a little bit unique, a little bit for them and it's always for them, it's never for anyone else. And I always think that jewellery is such a personal thing and it should be for you, it should give you joy when you look at it. I sometimes say that, if a picture tells 1000 words, then your jewellery is like a lifetime of novels and stories. And so what I want people to do is to look at their jewellery and remember what it symbolises. So if I'm with some some ladies and they're looking at doing some remodelling or some vision creating is, I might say to them look, Vicki, when you get to your 1000th client, let's just say, I want you to reward yourself with a nice set of diamond stud earrings. And what happens is that every day you look in the mirror, you see those earrings and you're reminded of the accomplishments and the goals that you created, and that you achieved. And you feel a tremendous sense of reward and accomplishment. It tells that story of everything that you do. So that's the way I look at jewellery and I try to create those stories for my clients, whether it's the lady because she's, you know, a power woman in the real estate scene, or whether it's a couple looking to get engaged. That's what I love to do, I love to create those special memories that's locked up in jewellery.
I love that. And speaking of stories, Karl, you've written a book called Rock Her World.
Yep, it was the ultimate guide for choosing the perfect engagement ring, it actually won an international book award for the best “how to” book so of all my business achievements, that one's actually probably the one I'm most proud of. And I've got probably about another two or three books in me that I want to write, so that was the first one. The second one that I'm working on is… so the first one I kind of wrote for the guys, and the second one that I'm writing is for the ladies, on how to plan the perfect wedding. And it's again, it's me connecting with so many other bridal professionals and I go well, wouldn't it be really cool… it's almost like a ‘What to Expect When You're Expecting’ book for those ladies that have ever gotten pregnant and looked at that book. I want to create something like this wedding bible where it's all the questions you didn't know you needed to ask. Like, for example, if you have a wedding videographer, does your wedding videographer have a backup battery on him at all times? Now, the reason I know to ask that question is that the videographer that was filming my wedding, his battery died as my wife was walking down the aisle.
No!
Yes! So that I didn't know that I needed to ask that question, right, like so. So that's what the book will be based around, is me interviewing all of these other amazing professionals and extracting all of that sort of stuff from them.
I’m begging to ask, did he stop the wedding and ask for a reshoot? (Laugh) Or you just lost the moment?
We kind of did and didn't. Basically everyone else in those days had the camera down the aisle, or a video camera and we're able to kind of splice that in. It wasn't the same sort of quality, but it was better than nothing. Yeah.
That's a fantastic idea for a book, I love that. And having been through a wedding, I think I would have appreciated that book. There were a lot of things that after the fact that I said, “Oh, I didn't know about that.” “Oh, I'm sorry I didn't know I was supposed to do that.” But you know what, you get married for all those special memories in all the life that you lay out ahead of you. So if it's not perfect, it's not perfect. But you always do want it to be, don't you?
As good as possible. Yes.
Yeah. Wonderful. And did you also have a book in you about Google Reviews?
Yeah, so I'm kind of working on it, I'm about 20,000 words into that book. And it's really all about just getting people to understand that the way that we market today is so different. Everything evolves over time, if you're old enough to remember and you're from Australia, you probably remember that we used to have the Yellow Pages (phone directory). And they had this ad where this lady was running down the street and someone yelled out, “Not happy Jan”, because they’d missed the Yellow Pages cutoff date. And I used to hate it when the Yellow Pages would come because every year they’d put the prices up and they would say to me, “Look, it doesn't matter if you don't advertise or you do, you'll lose your spot and we'll give it to one of your competitors.” And so they really had a monopoly on it, which was terrible. But it was such high effort and work, you had to prepare all the content and the ads and all that stuff. So it was really not a very pleasant experience. From there, we moved into the digital age, which was all about links and tracking and impressions and click throughs. The problem now is we've come into an era where everybody's just become so manipulative around that kind of digital marketing where there's so much clickbait stuff out there, where people are clicking on links thinking it's one thing and finding that they're being funnelled into some sort of sales page or whatever. So people naturally have become more and more sceptical. For example, if you go to Google right now and you type in ‘dentist in Brisbane’, at the very top you get the ads, then below that you get your Google map section where you've got the Google Reviews, and then below that you have the organic listing. Whenever I speak at an event, I ask people how many people click on the ads at the top? Almost nobody does, okay? Okay, because we've just become cynical or suspicious about you're just paying for my attention, you don't necessarily know that you can solve my problem, you're just paying to be there. So we've moved from what I call the Digital Age, into the Reputation Age, which is all about reputation marketing. People are more time poor today than they ever have been and we become impatient. In the old days, you might shortlist a business to three or four businesses and go and interview them and see them. And now we just want to go, who's the best on Google? That's where I'm gonna go, and provided they do a good job of it when I meet them, I'm unlikely to go somewhere else. And I just find it time and time again, because I ask all of my clients like, why did you choose us? How did you find us? And they just say to me, we looked up on Google, I mean at the moment, Xennox Diamonds has over 1047 Five Star Google reviews, and they will just say to me, you had the most amount of reviews on Google and we weren't going anywhere else. So when a client comes to me and they say Google reviews is the reason that they found me, they generally make a decision faster, they generally spend more and they don't care about the competition. And I thought, isn't that really interesting? Wouldn't other business owners really love to know how to do that? Like what if you could generate one to three warm leads every single week for your business without spending $1 on ads? I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg and some of those other big companies have enough of our money, they don't need any more. So I'd rather get my clients to not spend money on those until at least they've optimised their Google reviews, their Google business profile and those sorts of things.
So for anyone who doesn't understand what a Google Review is, or how one gets one, can you explain it a little bit?
Yeah, so Google Reviews, Google is the predominant platform, by far, it's something like 95% of all searches online are done on Google. And Google right at this point in time, can't well that we know of, is not listening to everything that we're saying, although they probably are. And in order for Google to understand how to tailor the algorithm to help us find what we want, they need users like you and I, to give Google the data. And the way that we do that is in the form of a Google Review, or one of the ways that we do that is in the form of a Google Review. It's me saying, I'm like a little ant and I've just bumped into this restaurant over here and I’ve said,”It's great, you should try the steaks and the cocktails”, so all of those things are keywords that Google is looking out for. So when someone types into best steaks, Brisbane, the fact that I've written that in the reviews pushes that listing up the rankings. So the Google reviews accounts for about 16% of your local Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which basically just means eyeballs, it's Google's eyeballs on your business, on your website, which means more bookings and inquiries coming through to you. And 36% of your local SEO is from your Google Business Profile. Here's the funny thing, Google created this amazing tool in Google Reviews and Google Business Profile but they expect you to google how to use it.
Exactly.
That's bizarre.
So I guess for me, what I'm on a mission to do is to help 100 business owners generate over 100 Google Reviews for their business. Because I know that once you hit that 100 Review milestone, people start to naturally, organically generate new clients without spending any money on ads. And I get messages all the time, I love it, people saying to me, we got X number of dollars from our Google Review clients, or I actually have my phone linked to their Google profile. So I get pinged every time they get a Five Star Google Review, and I get excited like it's my own. But it's not, it’s my clients, but it's just seeing these things just kind of ding, ding, ding come through, and it's so transformative to a business to know that you're winning new clients from your old clients. You're getting people that are coming in because they found you through the Google Reviews and they've read your reviews, the average person reads between five and seven Google Reviews, and you have to have a Reputation Score above four, anything below four and people are unlikely to use you. A single One Star Review can cause 2 out of 10 people to not use you. And 62% of people actively look at people's profiles to find the One Star Reviews because they want to see what the worst case scenario is if they deal with you. So people want buyer safety, at its true essence that's what it is. I want to know that if I come to you that you're gonna look after me, that you're going to do a great job, if there is an issue, you're gonna support me and help me and not just tell me to get stuffed kind of thing. So there are so many aspects and there's so much research out there about the value and the benefit of reviews. And it's just amazing that at this point in time, there's still so many people not touching it. And so the bar to being exceptional on Google is still very low so it's not too late to start going out there and focusing on building your Google portfolio. I sometimes say it's like, imagine if I said to you Laura, I'm going to give you a digital marketing assistant for your business, they're going to work 24/7, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year, you never have to pay them a wage, no taxes, no superannuation, they'll never take a sick day or holidays, and they're going to get better every single year. Would you like a digital marketing assistant like that?
Of course!
Yeah. That's what your Google Reviews will do for you if you adopt this strategy. But the sad thing is that in the beginning, most people's conversion ratio is so low, they asked 20 people and they're lucky to get one, and so they get frustrated. It's one of those things, it's simple, just not easy. It's simple, you just get Google Reviews, it’s just not easy. There are some significant things that you need to do along the client journey experience, to make sure that when you come to ask the client for the review that you get it. So my goal with the clients that I work with is I want to get them up to a 5 out of 10. So if you ask 10 people, you get five Google Reviews. That's the benchmark goal and if you're not achieving that, then the issue is you probably need a better system around how you collect, transform, and get those reviews from your clients.
Well Karl, now, no doubt that is a part of your program and the service that you offer to your clients. Are you willing to reveal, say, the top three must-do’s on this episode?
Of course, that would be just too mean if I left you all hanging like that.
I was thinking the same thing.
So look, the one big one is just to ask everybody. So many times, clients that I talk to just selectively filter who they're going to ask, “Oh maybe that person wouldn't give us a review so I won't ask”, or “This person is busy so I won't ask them”, whatever that is. There’s a million and one reasons why people come up as to why they don't do it. So the simple thing is, just ask everybody.
The second thing is you have to understand that if you're just giving your clients what they pay for, that's not exceptional. If I go into a restaurant and I order a steak, and they deliver a steak, there's nothing exceptional about that. I paid for a steak and you gave me one, you have to find ways that go above and beyond what the client is expecting in order to become exceptional. And when you do that, it makes it very easy to get an exceptional review. Basic service gives you basic to no reviews, exceptional service gives you exceptional reviews, so making sure that you're constantly looking to uplevel the client experience. I've got millions of stories that I can tell you about where it's just been completely average, and some, where it's been amazing.
So that's the first thing. So the first one was to ask everybody. Second one was to look to offer exceptional experiences with your clients, uplevel that and to a large part that's also training the team. So you’ve got to be training people, because do you think that just because I tell my team how to do it once that they'll just do it automatically every time after that? Nope! Reality is everybody needs constant training in this space.
And the third one is you just need to make it easy. So many times people make it difficult. Sending an email with a link to a Google Review is the worst way to do it but it's the way that most people do it. And as you think about it, an email has an open rate of 20%-30% over three days whereas an SMS has a 90% open rate within 90 seconds. So you need to find ways to make it frictionless for people to leave a review for you. There you go. There's three tips for you.
Those are good tips. And it's no different than having a culture of excellence, right? I mean, that's really what it comes down to whether you're doing the Five Star Google Reviews or you're asking for testimonials to put on your website, which is another thing we often recommend people do in marketing because people trust other people's word right. But yeah, so it's about that excellence in customer service, it’s key, so for anybody listening.
Yeah, I sometimes say the ultimate gold standard for me is having service or being of service, as one of your highest core values without judgement and the ‘without judgement’ is the hard part. Because we all do it. They say, Don't judge a book by its cover, but we all do, this person, or that annoying client, oh he was a cranky client… Oh maybe something really bad happened in his life or that morning, maybe he got into a car accident or whatever, so being of service without judgement is the hard part. But when you can achieve that, you'll always go that extra mile for somebody because you’re wanting to help them in every way without holding anything back.
Yeah, and this brings us back around to what you were saying earlier, in that your reason for being is to help people, is to always get them to that next step. And I think that's a fundamental principle of good marketing. Would you agree?
Yeah. For me, I've been in business for more than two decades. I know what it's like to be in the trenches. I know what it's like to go well, I wonder where the next client is coming from? I know what it's like to have to spend a significant amount of your available funds on ads and platforms and all that sort of stuff. And so I really empathise with business owners out there. It was once told to me that being in business is like a walk in the park, Jurassic Park, it's definitely not for the faint hearted, because if it was easy, everybody would do it, right. So I totally get that and that's why when I look at this form of Reputation Marketing, for us at Xennox Diamonds for every dollar we spend on our Reputation Marketing, it returns $326 back. I'm yet to find anything that has that degree of ROI. And so I want to help other business owners do that, you're amazing at what you do, you're just not capturing that, and you're just letting it go. It's like that old saying, Where do you hide a dead body? And the answer is on the second page of Google because nobody's looking there. Okay? And why do you want to be the best kept secret on the internet? You are amazing at what you do, you've just got to let more people know that and one of the best ways to do that is through your Google Reviews.
Because it sounds like the Google Review is the bridge, you're saying that nobody clicks on the ad, so that's not going to work for you. But if you don't do something special, you're going to end up on page two so the Google Review is that bridge that says, well, we're not really relying on the ranking as much, but then I do imagine that having more Five Star Reviews gets you onto page one?
Oh, yeah, absolutely, definitely. So I haven't talked about the difference between front end SEO and back end SEO. Front end SEO is all the stuff that I teach, which is around your local SEO, optimising your Google profile, getting your Google Reviews, getting keywords ranking in your Google Reviews, all of that stuff. Back end SEO is all things like backlinks, on page optimisation and that sort of stuff. Problem with the back end SEO, it’s still really important to do and the two work really well together and so I'm always a big advocate that you should do both. But you could spend two and a half grand thereabouts, a month, with an SEO company for six to eight months and barely see any results, it takes a while from an SEO point of view for them to move the needle. With the front end SEO, a lot of clients can see results after four or six weeks and it's something that they can do individually themselves once they know how. So that's why I gravitate towards that, you see results faster, they can do it themselves. And that's the other thing with ads, right? The second you stop spending money on Facebook ads, the leads will stop, but with your Google Reviews and having that there, it's there for the rest, that’s there forever. So you know, it keeps working, even if you're not spending money on it.
Yeah, interesting. SEO seems to be something that a lot of people get very confused about in marketing, they build a website and then great, I've got my website. Now I'm going to focus on social media channels, now I'm going to focus on other marketing, and they just don't deal with that connection to Google, which is where the SEO part is so important. So I think it's a really sticking point for a lot of people, especially startups, young entrepreneurs, solo entrepreneurs, hobbyists that have built something and why is nobody coming? Why is nobody…why is it so slow? Everything is just trickling. And I think a lot of people give up at that stage as we know, a lot of entrepreneurs drop out of entrepreneurship within the first year because of those exact struggles. But struggle is part of entrepreneurship, like you said, so tell us, have you had any major entrepreneurship struggles in your career or any moments you've been ready to quit, and go become a psychologist or something.
No Laura, every day is just roses and I was just born out of the womb an absolute entrepreneurial rockstar!
I call BS. I call BS!
No of course everybody does and even for me, there's been many times looking at the Google stuff thinking, jeez, it'd be so much easier to go back and just do the diamond stuff because I'm very good at doing that. But there’s actually an interesting book I'm listening to at the moment by David Goggins, I don't know whether you've seen anything that he does, but one of the things that he was advocating, I was just listening last night about it, was really just taking that breath and it's still just about putting one foot in front of the other, and if you could just not quit this second, and just not quit this second, and all of those seconds just add up. And there's actually surprisingly, so much in the psychology behind what he talks about, but yeah, absolutely and I think sometimes you just need to make sure that you're trying, not trying to but, that you're aware of what burnout looks like. And some people see burnout in very different ways and I know for me, I used to hate referring to it as burnout because I saw that as really a sign of weakness to sort of say, wow I'm burnt out. But looking for different ways to recharge, self care, whether it's going for a massage, whether it's, one of the things that I like to do is, a friend of mine has a farm down near Northern Rivers, and we call it Bush TV. And Bush TV is basically just staring at the fire. There's no, reception is terrible out there but basically we just sit there for a couple of hours and you’re just looking at a fireplace and think there's something quite therapeutic about that, and making sure that you're surrounded by people that can help and support you through that, where you can just take a break from things for a while.
Yeah, just to stop thinking about whether you're winning or losing, right? Just to be away from it. Just leave it back there for a moment. And it's incredible how much more clarity and how much more creativity comes forward in those silent times. I guess that's the power of meditation, too. Do you have a morning routine that keeps your day starting well and ticking along?
I'm one of those lucky people, I'm a morning person. So I generally wake up somewhere between 4:00 and 4:30 in the morning and I can jump out of bed with two feet. Yeah!
What! You’re kidding me!
But by about 9:30 I’m one of those Energizer bunnies where the batteries are running down…
It’s 9:30! I wonder if this was, were you in training when your triplets were young? Were you the one that always got up?
No, no, no, my wife did the most amazing job with that side of things. I was always a morning person so for me, I never really needed anything in a mindset point of view to start the day. But what I do love to do and sometimes it doesn't happen in the morning, but usually it happens at nighttime is, I do some breathing exercises. So like there's some coordinated, circles and boxes and triangles and I find that really can help as well.
Yeah, I know that box breathing from yoga. Very, very helpful. Oh, I can't get over the 4:30 in the morning thing, I’m dead to the world.
I wake up every day without an alarm. I wake up well before any alarm, I've got it there just as a backdrop but I wake up every day without the alarm, before the alarm.
What does it give you? That early morning, it's still dark, those moments, that time? What does that give you? What does that do for you?
I don't know, this is when I'm just mentally alert and awake. So when I was writing the book, I used to actually, and the hard thing was, I wrote the book in 30 days, and one of the things that I did was just religiously sit down between 8:30pm and 10:30pm and write every single day for 30 days. And so after we’d put the kids to bed, brushed their teeth and all that sort of stuff, cleaned the kitchen, got lunches ready for the next day, I would sit down and from 8:30 to 10:30 I would write. But I knew that come 10.30 the laptop went down and I was out. Sometimes I didn't make it to 10:30 but it was always about writing between one and 2000 words a night and I just did that religiously for 30 days. So there was no TV, everything was unplugged and that was part of a really powerful routine that just really helped me get the book done in a short period of time. I could have easily done it in the morning as well but again, the kids at that stage were also a lot younger, so it makes it harder when you've got kids, that's for sure.
Yeah. So are you a man of methodology?
I think we all are creatures of habit.
Thank you.
I think we're all creatures of habit. Some of the habits that we do are positive, some are not so positive, and I think there's real power in creating routines. So I try to create routines where I can, but one of the routines that we have in our house is that every Sunday, we do a Sunday roast. It becomes tradition, it becomes routine. I think maybe at its core, I'm just kind of maybe lazy, it's like, I don't want to have to keep thinking about it every week, if I can just diarize and put it in there, make it a regular, then I just know the first Sunday is this, the second Sunday is that, whatever that is.
Yeah, there's a lot of power in that. And a lot of really exceptional entrepreneurs speak to that, and how they simplify their life through routine, whether it be wearing the same outfit every day, or eating the same lunch every day, there's one less decision that needs to be made. I think there's so much power in that and we often forget, we want novelty and variety. But yet that takes more brain power, takes more, when we can use that to build our businesses. So yeah, maybe we should all pay attention to our routines and habits a little bit more. What do you love most about being an entrepreneur? What's your favourite part?
I think for me, it's that whole creative side. It's really about being creative, testing, measuring, seeing what works, what doesn't, tinkering under the hood and seeing what that works. And I think it's just one of those things that I've always had the ability to see things from a fresh perspective. And I think as an entrepreneur, that's a really valuable skill is to see things differently to everybody else. And I think that's just something that I've always innately had. And I guess, I've travelled and I've done such a wide variety of experiences from being at uni to spending 10 years in the military as an artillery captain to having triplets, to all of these things, that you just get this really broad degree of experiences that allows you to see things in different ways. And so I think when I'm with somebody, if I'm hot-seating them or I'm trying to help them brainstorm about what they can do differently in their business it comes from that creative place. And that's what just excites me, I could just do that all day long.
And you're very good at it, we have experienced it firsthand, having had you as a mentor in a business accelerator program that we were all part of, Dent, run by Glen Carlson and Daniel Priestley, we're big fans of their work of course, and we really appreciated that creativity and kindness that you show as a mentor. So aside from the two businesses that you're running, and everything else that happens in your life, you're also a mentor and giving back on that level.
Yeah, I generally enjoy doing it. And again for me, it's that whole light bulb, it's when I'm helping somebody and then they go, Oh, my God, that's so cool, I could use that in my business. I think when you're younger you derive significance and fulfilment from different things and as you get older… when I was younger the significance was all about chasing the sale, ringing the bell, I got the sale, and all that sort of stuff. And then I think when you get older, you move into that next chapter of your life where it's all about giving back and adding value and sharing your experience, whether that's with an apprentice, whether it's with another business mentee, from that side of things and being able to share that. It becomes less about the money and more about the impact that you can help create in different spaces. There's a concept called precession. Have you heard of precession?
No, I'm not familiar with it.
So the concept of precession is that, if you think about the old story of the little bumblebee, and the bee flies from the hive to the flower and it's just going backwards and forwards every day, backwards and forwards. But something else really interesting happens is that along the way to its journey backwards and forwards, is it stops at other flowers. And what's happening when it does that?
It’s pollinating.
Cross-pollinating, right? That concept is, the cross-pollination happens at 90 degrees to the bees true purpose. And so when I talked about fresh perspectives, precession says that when I help somebody, something amazing may happen in that person's life that I may never know the full extent of. So with us in the Google space, I believe that as entrepreneurs, we're here for three reasons.
The first reason is that we're here to make money because ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're not interested in that, then it's just not sustainable. With money you can do more and better things for more people.
But the second reason is that we are here because we genuinely love delivering an ultimate result to our end user, our clients, we love seeing, so for me I love it when I help clients crack the code, and they start getting Google Reviews, or I help a client get a beautiful engagement ring. That's the second part.
The third part is that I think we're here to make a bigger impact on the planet. So for me what I try to do is, I try to tie everything that we do to some sort of bigger impact. Now in the Google space, what I do is that for every Google Review we help our clients get, we donate one day of education to a young woman in the Philippines, to help pull herself and her family out of poverty. Because what the research shows is that if you look after the women in an economy, they generally look after the whole economy. They look after the mother, the brother, the cousin, the sister, the brother, all of that sort of stuff. But let's say one of those girls goes on to be the President of the Philippines, I would never know. So that's what we call a processional effect, it's that you're doing something in the ideal world that's of a positive nature and it could have a second or third order benefit that you'll never see.
Powerful, yeah! Do you have a mentor?
I’ve got lots of them. I’ve got lots of them. Whether I'm catching up with Glen, or Daniel, or another gentleman by the name of David Dugan, or Bruce Campbell, I've got lots of people that I look up to and that inspire me and that I go to for counsel. So I think everybody should have a coach or a mentor. Well, I mean, if you're wanting to achieve the results of what you want faster, ultimately, you can probably get there on your own, but at best it’ll probably take you an extra 5 or 10 years. But if you want to save the brain damage and find out, like what did they do? How did they do it, because even with the Five Star business, if I had to set that up again, I'd do it faster and better and quicker, just because I've already done it once. And I look at it like that with a mentor is, I try to go to people that have achieved the result that I want to achieve, and get them to basically shortcut the time, to buy back my time.
Sage advice, sage advice. So we call this Resilient Entrepreneurs, this podcast. So we must ask you the question, although we have touched on it. What does resilience mean to you?
I think resilience is not about trying to avoid stress, as much as we all try to on some level, I don't think it's about avoiding stress because stress is everywhere. And stress can actually be a good thing, if you harness it and use it in the right way. For me resilience is about the internal dialogue that you have with yourself about what that stress means. So someone once said to me that your mind can be a scary place, you should never go there alone. And it's really about what does that inner voice mean? Because sometimes it can be very unforgiving. “Ah you stuffed that one up”, or this or that or whatever. And it's being able to listen to that voice and realise that that voice isn't you and how can you turn that and reframe that so that it becomes something that's positive and that you can show kindness and compassion to yourself through that inner voice. And just making sure that what you're seeing, you're not interpreting in a way that's harmful or negative.
That inner voice, that inner critic, she's always so mean, it's so hard. I do believe the more that we do get mentors, like you said, work on that clarity, work with others, help others, pay it forward. I love the precession that you talked about, that's amazing! I'm really going to hold onto that concept because I think that's a really cool thing to remember and to keep putting out in the world. It just all has such a great impact and I do think it will change this world for the better. And people like you Karl, are the reason why entrepreneurs get out there, they make it and they strive and they become creative and do good things and create their own impacts. And just by talking to us and who knows who's out there listening, we might be creating lines of precession that go on for hopefully decades and generations to come. So thank you so much for your time. We really, really appreciate you, it's been a great conversation and I look forward to having more in the future.
And it's certainly been fun. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks, Karl.
