Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf and I am beyond delighted to be here with Pod O'Sullivan. So Pod wears many hats. I'm going to share a few of those before I get him to introduce himself.
So Pod is a coach, a team coach, an author, an international leadership specialist, a business owner, an academic, the host of not one but three podcasts, including the leadership diet, Don't Let the Old Manian and the University of Sydney Coaching and Mentoring Society Podcast.
And he told me that he and his son are training for a high rocks event. So I'm pretty sure that means he's also an athlete. Welcome Pod, it is wonderful to have you. So that's my introduction. How do you introduce yourself? An athlete, I would never start with that. Let me tell you.
I think you need to own it. An athlete in development. We might say a lot of push. But thank you. Yes. My name is Pod, but everyone calls me Pod. So let's go with that. Brilliant. And so one of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast and with my clients is this idea of an elevator pitch. What's yours? Great question.
And I have to say it's changed a lot over the years. And today, if I am in my exec coaching world, because my world is divided between exec coaching, top teaming, CEO specialists as one part of my world, the other part of my world is in podcasting and media. So that's a very different elevator pitch.
But if I'm talking to a new organization or a new prospective client, I tend to talk about two things. I work with new, newly appointed CEOs to help them become as effective as quick as they can.
That's one elevator pitch. And I work with top leadership teams to help them overcome, to move beyond good to great. I love it. I love it. And that's super, super clear, which I think is really, is really helpful. So we'll just kick us off by telling us a little bit about your corporate to coach story. How did you get into this work?
I am one of these people who keeps re-menting themselves. And I have done that several times over three or four decades. My career started in healthcare originally. So my very first career was intensive care nursing, a whole long, long time ago.
I used to work in a pest called the Roy Brompton in the UK, which was leading the National Heart Hospital in the UK. So a lot of bypass surgery, a lot of heart transplant type surgery.
And then I went to come to Australia in 1995. I kind of went from that kind of role. I continued that role for a while, but I moved into hospital leadership and hospital management.
Then I moved into a first major career change, which was into sales and marketing from a medical device company, which I really loved as kind of where I realized commerciality and I were born to be together. And I did that for a number of years.
I was setting up a German company called Carol Storz, who are one of the top two in the world in terms of what's called in-dossical equipment. So basically any kind of surgical implant and cameras that most surgeons would use for a rate of like urology and gynecology and all-range of surgery.
So I did that for a number of years. I loved it. But I also realized along the way that I actually prefer services to physical products. I was part of my sales and marketing role. I was going to arrange different sales training and conferences, et cetera. And I realized actually I like the ability to customize what I do to whatever the customer needs. And we have a physical product That's impossible.
So I ended up moving sideways into a very different role. I moved into recruitment, which then became a head-on team for the medical pharmacy industry. And I did that for a number of years, which is a lot of my current roles, probably my most favorite role in my life is the idea of helping people to find the right, our next best role than the one they're currently in.
And I know we'll probably talk about sales and commerciality later on, but that's where I learned how to sell and the importance of selling. Because if you think about it, recruitment is the only job in the world where the product, the product is the candidate who's looking for a job.
The product can say no to the buyer, which is the employer. And so they think about it. Yeah. So there were recruitment person, but they've got to sell themselves to the employer to begin with. They actually get the gig, then they've got to sell to all these candidates, then they've got to sell the candidates back to the employer, then they've got to sell the job offer back to their candidates.
So I learned a lot about sales in that regard. I learned a lot about psychology and about how people make decisions, irrationally, in that regard. But when I was doing that role, I did an MBA with a major in leadership at the time, which I was really enjoying.
And because I was fascinated with this idea of I'm into the year 20 to 30 people a week, how come these two are the best? Like, what is it that they're doing in the other 20? And when I did my MBA, I stumbled across this new emerging idea called executive coaching.
I was just starting to be talked about. And I was quite fascinated by that idea. And so I went away and I hired my own coach for myself, which was a great experience. And then later on, I heard the same coach again, and it wasn't quite as good an experience for every two different reasons. But at that stage, by the time I'd done that, University of Sydney were about to start their master's degree.
And I got involved in that maybe two or three years after they started and went from there. Amazing. Amazing. Do you think that there was, do you think it was the experiences you had or a personality driver that was always there that made you well suited to this work?
Both. And I would say a third one, which, as I say, this is sounds embarrassing, but I would say in a second. And this, like, I think most coaches come into coaching because they are either attracted to helping people, or if they're coming out of some previous career, they realize that the parts of the previous career they enjoy the most are the parts where they were mentoring and developing people or their team, etc. So that suggests there's either a personality type or a preference for the kind of work that already exists. So that's definitely true.
I've found it and I've led different businesses and I've supported, you know, hundreds of CEOs and teams now at this stage. And I know for me, I actually equally enjoy both. I like leading my own team in business. But I also like sitting on the sidelines with many other teams, the businesses.
So I do like both. And exec coaching slash executive consulting of any kind allows you to sit on the sidelines of lots of businesses. And therefore, the satisfaction comes not just from senior owned business growth, where you can see other businesses and teams grow. So I definitely drive a lot of satisfaction from both of those.
But the embarrassing admission here, Ellie, is during the work. I would have been 30 or something like that. I've seen an Australian fin review, an article about jobs of the future. They had little cartoon, like I've been visually seen in these cartoons, the cartoons depicting those future jobs. And they had an executive coach, the guy was wearing a black turtleneck, and he had like an iPad in his hand.
And it was like 200 to 300 k a year was the, you know, I thought, I want to be the guy who gets to wear a turtleneck. And that looks cool. So how do I get there? So it was a mixture of everything.
Oh, I love that so much. And I can, I can envision that. And, you know, you say that with a, like, a bit of a tongue in cheek, but actually there's, we've got to see ourselves in it, and we've got to think it's cool, and we've got to, you know, have that vision.
Otherwise, doing this is really hard, right in the early days. It's really hard every day. But any career that you want to work hard at and succeed at means by nature, you're putting in more effort than other people are.
So, but by definition, if you want to succeed in whatever your definition of success is, if you want to succeed in something, it requires more effort than the average person is going to give. And so if you want to succeed in executive coaching, or whatever kind of coaching, I mean, I use executive coaching just because that's what I do.
But if you use the work coaching, this broadest is a scene that you are, you know, you've got to your own little business or you're part of a group of people or you develop a firm down the track,
whatever version of it is that you do. And it requires effort. And it's, and this is where I think a lot of the coach training programs don't serve well.
And I understand why this is the case, because it's the same in any kind of other discipline. I mean, I used to teach a city business school on the massive coaching degree there. And we did this a little bit, but it was only a little bit. And we did it more than everybody else. And let's try to give the commercial reality of what it's like after you graduate.
Yeah. If you could turn up every single day into your coaching room or coaching video, whatever you do, and people just turn up magically and you just coach them, well, that is brilliant
.
But the world doesn't work like that. You know, in the same way as if you have your accounting business or your identity or whatever you do, people just don't turn up and knock on your door every single day. There's a lot more paths to the work than just the actual practitioner part of the work. And I know that's a lot of what you do, isn't that space for drug-heavy people? Get the mind around that.
The way I think about it, and I've always thought about this, is that the practitioner part of my job, when I'm actually in the room with my client or clients to be a team, that's half my time.
Yeah. The rest of my time is everything else. And I love that. And you've got to spend, and then the early days, of course, the other half is probably two thirds of your time as your...
When did you first realize that, Pott? Was it something that you knew going into business, like when you first hung up your shingle, or was this something that you had like that? I know a lot of coaches have a bit of a reality slap moment where they're like, oh, I don't get to just coach.Yeah. I have to do. So my entry point was medical product sales, then service sales being in recruitment and head on team.
And there was a transition, actually, in between that and full-time one-on-one coaching. When I left the recruitment industry, I actually set up a business with a colleague, which was an out-of-place, and our career transitions type service. When you look back and hindsight, there was a very logical thing to do, given that we went from helping people to find jobs in recruitment, now helping you overcome the redundancy part, and then get ready for your next step.
So there was a very logical move there. But when we were in that space, the part that I preferred the most was the one-on-one coaching part. But in that little company, it was a two-person startup. It was really hard to get clients, because we were working up against very established multinational providers. But trying to find a way of being niche or different was just really hard. And we had both left our full-time jobs to do that.
So it was a matter of survival, really. What I say to people, these are the things that I want people to ask me about, the question you're just asking is, is try to have six months of income put aside, allow you some bandwidth to make mistakes, to learn how to sell, to learn what you like selling. Because your training coach doesn't mean you like all aspects of coaching.
I look back now with Hilary, she'd been thinking how stupid I was. But I did a year long relationship coaching course thinking I wanted to be involved in not marriage counseling, wouldn't be that, but the closest thing to it.
And I hated the first two clients I got. And as everything about it, everything we worked with, everything in the despair that they were feeling, and I was just so bad at it. And when I look back in hindsight and I'm going, well, you should have tried that before you do the long year on course.
Yeah, I'm sure you look back now and look at all of the skills that it's given you that you can bring to your corporate work. But yeah. Well, I got divorced all along afterwards. I'm not so sure really. But I've been married 15 years since then. So yes, I think I might have fine with all those lessons.
But my point is coming out of a course, feeling very excited, very idealistic, very, I'm going to help change the world or at least some people in front of me. And it only happens if you get people in front of you.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So tell us about how your business evolved then. So from that moment, what is the growth to where you are? What does that look like?
Yeah. And it's evolved over time and sometimes very, very purposefully, strategically, Sometimes a bit fortuitous in terms of an opportunity arose and I jumped on it and then that led to elsewhere.
So like these days, I work with new CEOs, I work with leadership teams. And I'm known for working with expat leaders, expats who come to Australia or Singapore or Hong Kong.
And they tend to be the most senior person in their organization. So they've come out of, let's say, at the head office of the organization is in England and they're now doing their first
expat assignment in Australia as an example. There's three areas that I'm known for.
And in the last probably 10 plus years, I've only ever specialized in those three. I do very literally around the years, at least I don't talk about anything else. And by the way, I should say that's a secret.
That's a tip for people. Be clear about your market. As a watching position yourself, like we're really, really, really good at that. It doesn't mean you don't do a lot of stuff. You just don't talk about stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I talk about that same concept a lot when we're talking about defining an office suite. So we need to put guardrails in place so that we know
what we're talking about and we have focus.
It doesn't mean if someone asks us we won't do something because we can do all of the things, but we make a conscious choice. And we get to help people understand how they work with us. I learned that from guys, name is Dan, somebody I can't remember the surname that. He was when I knew an American based coach, but he's his elevator pitch, his specialty. He only coached Formula One drivers.
Wow. Okay. Yeah. Think how niche that is. It's a bit niche. Yeah. But when you actually looked into his practice in terms of what he actually did, yes, his starting point were the drivers. And he was a high performance mindset type coach.
So that makes sense given what they do. But he actually spent most of his time working with our crews. Yeah. People around those drivers. So the crews, they had a mechanic, the head of the people put on the tires really fast, etc.
The families, that's where all of his work was, but especially as he was the drivers. And I think that's really important for us to get out. So I specialized in three things. I kind of evolved through that. In my early days, I did everything in order to bring money in the door because I had a young family, so I did everything. And I spent a lot of time learning, like I didn't come out of a learning development background.
I didn't come out of a strategy background. So I spent a lot of time trying to learn those specialities. So I would offer to work with people for free just to learn what they're doing. So I did everything for a while.
Then because I had come out of recoup an industry, and I had a good reputation in that industry, I was approached by four or five recruitment company startups to help coach them in their business, which was never my intention. So I ended up for a couple of years, specializing in small business coaching.
So the founder and then their teams. And I started out as three folks who had left the recouping industry to set up their own businesses. They knew of me from their company industry. Can you come and coach me and my team?
And then they would refer me to their marketing company who happened to be a small marketing company or to their somebody else. And small businesses will always refer you to their friends because founders of small businesses tend to be friends with other founders of small businesses.
So I did loads of that for about three or four years. I mirrored and I learned a lot from a company that were called Sherlock's who were around Australia. They no longer exist. But that's what they specialized in. So I learned from them how they set up their process, which effectively was a day a month with each organization. So that's how I built that up.
And I really enjoyed that. I learned a huge amount about being a business owner, about being a founder,about growing from one person to 10 people to 50 people to 100 people, etc.
And a small number as in three of those organizations grew from what person to 10 to 100. So I kind of grew with them.
So by nature, by the time five years later, I was working in effective exec coaching. Because those businesses were now 100 person businesses. And I was working with the leadership team who were managing teams, who were managing teams.
So that was the evolution into executive coaching. Because I had come out of recruitment and a lot of folks I had placed into middle management roles, five years later, they were now senior managers. And so they knew I was doing coaches and they brought me into their teams. And so that was that kind of relationship. And I ended up doing a lot of work in the pharmaceutical industry.
That's where I came out of a long time earlier. And I hired two people into my business who also came out of the pharmaceutical industry. One of them was now my wife, as it turned out. And because of that, we ended up doing about 70% of our business was in the pharmaceutical industry.
The one of those defining moments, I looked back and going, wasn't that a lucky break. One day, Carol and my wife and I were looking at all the work we'd done the previous year. And we suddenly realized there was a passion, which is we were hired to work with all these folks in the farm industry.
They all happened to be experts. And the assumption was that they were going to be successful or not successful because of cross-cultural differences. As it turned out, that was just a complete forefoot. When we look at the work that we actually did with them, it was a little bit about cross-cultural stuff. But most of us bought leadership transitions in terms of a new country, new role, new team, new culture, new level of leadership, working environment that never worked before.
So all of those kinds of transitions. Family moving for the first time, as an example. And so we ended up writing a paper that was the nine barriers to success as an ex-pat leader. And we gave that to a few of our clients. And they called me going, this is brilliant, I haven't heard this before.
So of course we call it research, you know, desk space. Here's a research paper we have for you. And that ended up me interviewing 10 people who go, everything you've said in that paper, we've identified on the client side has been all of our issues.
Imagine if we could mitigate against that on day one. So that gave me an idea to go, okay, how do I create an insurance policy for people when they bring your next pass to Australia, which is basically we would try to create a program that mitigates against these nine combinations.
And the advice I got from an innovation specialist who I'm really grateful for was, what would you do if you couldn't call your service a coaching service? So I really, I want you to think really hard about that because most coaches go, hey, I coach and the buyer goes, well, like, what does that mean? And so we ended up calling this the ex-pat leader insurance policy. Sorry, I started the insurance program and gave that to three or four clients to see, does this interest you? I got you a think. And it was the most popular thing I've ever done.
So I ended up writing my first book and then I'm writing three more books on the back of that. And effectively just outlined the program as he used the program. It's a coaching program by any anyone's understanding.
We just outlined those areas. And that kind of brought us away from the masses into a very neat specialty. But in reality, what I was doing, I was doing a CEO transition with a top teaming combination and a little bit of cross-cultural springing the top.
Wow, I love that. And I just want to take a moment to dive into this idea that we have to give people what they need, right? Buyers. And if what they need is for something to be called, something that they perceive to be solving an immediate pain point that they have, rather than calling it what we want to call it, right? Coaching or this is how we understand it.
It's so important. And I think that is a massive mindset shift for a lot of business owners is like that perspective shift in what we put out into the world. One percent. I mean, there's a feeling for coaches to learn here is the coaching process, the conversation, the mindset, the environment we create, that invert to come a safe space that allows learning to evolve, etc.
That is very, very important, absolutely very, very important. But it's not unique to us. In any way, shape or form, every good leader, every good mentor, every good parent, every good teacher does the same thing. So saying, hey, I'm a coach doesn't give us the same level of credibility as, hey, I'm a dentist, like only dentists do dentistry.
All the intensive care nurses do intensive care nursing. A lot of people do coaching, but a few of us get paid for it, specifically. So what we have to figure out then is, and the process I'm bringing to this problem is my coaching process and coaching methodology. What's the problem? And how do I solve the problem? That's the part that we have to get better at.
So these are two things here is what's the core problem? Well, the core problem that I kind of fell into was, expat leaders that fail, and fail means that they are sent home from their assignment 18 months after they start.
That's what failure means. And the cost to your organization is approximately nine to 11 times their base salary. That's a phenomenal cost. That's the pain. That's a huge pain there. Huge pain to the family, huge pain to a lot of folks.
So if I can help solve the pain, I just got a brand that is that the coaching process is up to me to do whatever I do. But that's the pain. Yeah. And I think, honestly, my clients get so sick of me
asking them, what's the pain? What's the pain? Use the language of pain? And I think probably similar to you, it's my background in sales, right? That has made me very comfortable with doing that.
But I think a lot of coaches feel particularly coaches who bring this lens of positive psych solution focused approaches, it is almost countercultural to spend time sitting in pain. What's your advice for coaches who are finding that to be very difficult?
The first thing you've got to recognize, and I know people won't like this, but it's just true. And if you're selling your coaching services, and the first, second word is selling, you're selling your coaching services, it's a professional service. In the same way as there are lots of other professional services.
So you have to think about that, that's the category I mean. It might be more towards the helping end of that category, but it's still the category I mean. And it doesn't mean you want to end up like you've been as big as a KPMG and that kind of thing.
I'm not suggesting that. It'll be increasingly there are coaching firms to become relatively large. I was part of one for a long time. We have to think like that. So, therefore, how does a lawyer in a law firm or an accountant, accounting firm, or whatever firm you're talking about? How do they go about selling their services and what can you learn from that?
Well, the first thing they do is they get clear on what they actually do. As in, who do I serve? What's my office of, what's the name of office here? The second thing is they get really clear on what to free GSTAM from other people. They may not say the other people, but they try to be really clear on what different GSTAM are, why you should hire them.
Third thing they do is they give you evidence as to why they're good. And evidence looks like a case study or an article or a blog or a video or something like that. When I used to mentor younger coaches, I used to say to them, if you want to go and get your teeth done and you've never been to a dentist, you're going to go and try and meet three or four dancers to get a sense of who should you go to, unless someone gives you a brilliant referral.
And if the dentist goes to go, yeah, I'm a qualified dentist and I buy by the guidelines for cleanliness and health. And that's all they tell you. Well, that doesn't give you any sense of what they do. As the dentist says, look, here's my specialty.
I do all the normal stuff by specializing crowns or specializing in teal whitening or whatever it is. You're more likely to choose them purposely or not choose them purposely. Either way is purposely.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And I'm seeing the parallel, which is that so many coaches put them out there,some of them sells out there. And the start and the end of their messaging is I'm a coach.
And I abide by the ICF processes, which really gives people nothing to make a decision. Someone sent me a proposal, he asked me if I had to look over their proposal for an organization.
And the proposal basically had their bio, a little bit about the client's background, in terms of what the client was trying to do. And then a lot about, I hear to this ethics and this ethics and then outline that there's four or five coaching methodologies, like frameworks that they would utilize.
And I read this and my first reaction was I have no idea how you're going to solve their problem, like a zero idea. All I know is you're telling me you're really good. You're telling me that you've got a coaching qualification, which I assumed is the case because it would be talked to the first place. And here's your price.
But I have no idea whether you're going to solve my problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I love that. In your journey, what have the hardest parts been of growing a business? Probably different levels of was hard. When you're starting out, there's all the normal stuff that every business owner in any kind of industry has just got to get the head around.
And that's the logistics of administration. Are you enforcing in time? Are you doing all the government regulation type stuff? Do you have a website or don't you have a website? In the olden days, do you spend a lot of time getting a logo done versus today?
You can see what you're doing for free. Yeah. Well, I look back now and I think this is how old I am. I spent $16,000 once and getting a logo done for a business. And business cards too, I bet.
This is kind of $16,000 for a logo that would be free today. But nonetheless, there's all that logistics type stuff. And we naturally spend far too much time worrying about the font of our business card or the brand name that actually means nothing to anybody, all that kind of stuff.
That's the first step. The second step in is managing the, this is even before we talk about working on the business, but it's actually managing how do I get my first clients, make sure I deliver well and to make time to get my second client. That last is important. Once you start getting into the flow of, I do these kinds of services for these kinds of people and I charge this kind of price.
And some of us that might take a year to land with clarity, but under this, well, what do you kind of land in that place? Then the question goes to how do I, like, how do I get a flywheel going in terms of what's my process of marketing with the right messages towards thatgroup of people? And that can take us quite a while to figure that out.
For some people, it's as simple as networking in business networking groups for other people. It's become an thought leader in a particular space for other people. It's partnering with different groups. There's a range of different ways, but you've got to figure that out for yourself.
And that can take time. And then if you get to a stage of, and the magic figure somewhere around 200 to 300,000, so it's, it's, it varies for people. Or once you start getting that kind of figure, then how do I bring on someone part-time to manage the administration for me so I can do more of that other stuff? It's summer around that dollar value. I mean, that varies for people,
but it's in that kind of ballpark.
And then the next step then is, okay, and now I'm bringing on my first or second or third or fourth team member to also deliver. If you want to go into that phase, and most of us don't go into that phase. And those of us who tend to build up teams or coaches to deliver, they're the same people who are very good at business development by nature.
And therefore they're developing excess amounts of business. They probably need people to help and deliver it. Or from day one, they decided that's what they would do. And so then they're, but their learning is how do you manage the team to deliver at the quality that you promised to the client and all of that.
That's a different level of learning. And our industry tends to be one of our college-based industry. I think we tend to do the first three, one of the last one. And I'm not suggesting the last one is better or worse. It's just, we don't do that.
For me,personally, I found the first three or four pieces not difficult. It's just a matter of I've got to go through them and do them. I know there's phases here. It is. And so I remember in the early days of my first business and dedicating every Friday morning without fail as my blog writing time.
And I probably didn't see any results for about six months. I still did it every Friday. And then after a while, I started getting people emailing me and said, Oh, I like that I asked you three months ago, can you come and talk to us about this? And you start realizing, Oh, okay, that's, that's, it's not anything. Someone's radar.
I didn't know that. Or was invited to you know, you wrote this article, can you come and talk to this breakfast meeting about that piece? Okay, now it's useful. And for me, the hardest thing was, I tend to be pretty good at business development.
And the problems in the coaching industry, because it's such a personalized service is unlike the accounting or law, for example, in coaching, when you sell your service, they want you, wherever you is, like, wherever's the person selling, it's into one. Yes, I've had that same challenge.
Yeah. And then therefore trying to go, how do I bring my team in on the first conversation? So there's a, that can be difficult. And this, you know, that's probably a longer conversation around best kind of new ones, but that's difficult. Yeah, no, I, I really, I think that's such a great articulation of the stages that that we go through.
And, you know, of the coaches that that no doubt are listening and the coaches that I work with, I can see a lot of people who have no interest in expanding into bringing in team members, they just want to, you know, keep it very simple.
And, and that's fantastic. And there are folks who, you know, very early on, it becomes clear that they're going to need, they're going to need people to help them deliver what they're bringing.
And yeah, I like that neither is right or wrong. But there is, I think, some benefit in being a little intentional about where you want to go. And what actually is, is the business that that you want to build. I want to just dive in a little bit into, you mentioned this idea and I'm sort of reframing a little bit of the, the blog writing.
And what I'm taking from that is that there is a bit of, a bit of a bit more consistency, a bit more sticking with it than people might assume before we start to see the results of something like that. And I guess the, the parallel I would, I would make now is, is, you know, showing up on LinkedIn, right, posting on LinkedIn, that hopefully, you know, there's a longer form content that you've got.
And then there's LinkedIn, which is, which is a slightly different model. But, but how, how do you do, how do you stay the course, right, for six months, maybe not seeing it, getting results until
at that point? But how did, yeah, how did you stick with it? Yeah. So I should say I'm an avid, reader and researcher.
Like, I'm, I'm, I'm, someone who's just naturally curious. So I subscribe to lots and lots of different types of newsletters and blogs over the years. And I'll read them for
a couple of years and I'll, then I'll switch to a different variety of different varieties. I've always done that. And I would probably skimmer eat maybe 10 a day from different industries.
And so I've never, I've never not done that. And particularly the American geography is far better this than other countries, predominantly because the volume of people in America is so huge. You know, American writers can just serve the American audience and have a massive audience to serve.
But what I learned from those people was, and there's the consistency matters more than anything else. The arriving of brilliant article once a month or twice a year means nothing. People don't recognize your name till they've seen it seven to 11 times. So that says consistency.
And I know this from, from sales calls, I know this from communication that people need to hear something regularly before registers. So if you're trying to position yourself as any kind of an
expert, and it's gone back to what's the pain you're trying to solve. If we go back to you, right first question, the biggest mindset for coaches to get into is coaching is not the message. Being an expert that solves particular types of pain is the message.
Coaching is a process. And so knowing what your message is for what audience and what media type you're going to use becomes the real learning. And it's a guy called Matt
Church runs a thought leadership group here in in Manly.
And he's been doing that for 20 hundred years and he's a master teaching that kind of stuff. But there is, get Chris to clear your new message, which is summation is I solve x problems for x people, like whatever that is.
And then you've got to go. I need to establish myself as a thought leader in this space. Now,
you don't have to be an expert on day one. I became an expert on virtual reality education for doctors.
It took me six months, but I became, I became, when I say expert, as in people started reading my blogs all over the world on that stage, a longer story as to why I did that and why I no longer did it. But my point is you don't have to be an expert in day one, but you can become one pretty quickly.
Yeah, at least you can become one that people recognize as being one pretty quickly. And part of that process is you've got to keep writing or an I used to write writing because that's what I did, you know, you got to keep publishing something.
And you can publish in video, you can publish in podcast, you can publish in writing, but you got to publish something on a regular basis. It also means you get better and better at your craft. It also means you have stories to tell for a future perspective of clients. And then, and I imagine if someone listened to this go, yeah, but I'm brand new, I don't have all of that experience yet. You don't need experience.
What you need is the story. Yeah. So you can listen to a very experienced coach tell a story and you can take the essence of that story and apply it to one of your ex-colors and now you've got a good story to tell based upon something that you've done and a third party represent somebody else.
That becomes your art. Yeah, no, I love that. And I would just reiterate that. And I always talk about when you start out, yes, you don't have that expertise in coaching, but what you do have is this credibility from your professional world.
And when you're working with or pitching to selling to clients who recognize that expertise, it's like they're going to listen to what you say because of that. And then over time, the credibility built through your coaching expertise is going to expand that beyond that audience who already have that belief in your credibility.
So yeah, and I love that. And I think for anyone listening in who goes, well, the messaging, the branding, that feels like an insurmountable challenge, I think what Pod's saying is, I think three to six months of consistently showing up, talking about how you can solve these very specific problems for these very specific people, you will position yourself in that time.
And combined with other obviously very strategic activities that actually get you having conversations, it becomes a very compelling light, the flywheel as part of that. So I love that. So what, what are you saying no to now that you didn't when you started out?
And that's a great question. I'm saying no to a whole lot more, which you believe it. I'm at a stage of my coaching career. I mean, I'm 56 and I've been coaching full time since I was 33. So it's quite a one. And so therefore, from an experience point of view, I know what I liked and what I don't like doing. From a passion recognition perspective, I've got pretty tuned to sensing how serious is this organization or leader.
And because I don't want to, I don't want to do any more work with folks who say this just but they're not. So I'm got far more tuned. And then I'm also very fortunate. I'm not relying on the coaching income from my day by day by day, Brad and butter.
So that's a big difference. And I appreciate if that's a very big difference. And come back to my earlier comment about when I started, I did everything you could need to do. And I look back now and go mistake I made back then was I didn't have enough income put aside to survive on why I figured out what I wanted to do.
The upside was I did so much and I learned so much and I learned how to hustle and they would forget work. I will never not need to do that again. I know how to do it. But these days, I only work at C-suite. So I work at the CEO or the people reporting to the CEO.
And I only work for minimum six months and usually 12 months. And so I don't do individual sessions. And I don't do early rates. And so I only charge for six months minimum or 12 months is the normal. And I don't negotiate on rates, where as I used to before.
Now, it's also part of I don't do as much volume of work. So therefore, there's a little bit of that. So I'm I'm trying to make sure that my answers balance here and that's kind of show up and kind of because there's a reason why I don't need to do that as well. And that's important to recognize.
I tend to only work with most of the national organizations as opposed to start up or Australia only. And there's a reason for that is that we chose the organization is at a certain level that what's happening in different countries is part of the conversation.
And because I've worked in so many different countries, I can bring value in that conversation. And it's interesting conversations as well. And it's a complexity from being in a multi geographies.
That's I just find interesting. So therefore, I do part of that. And I typically only work with the leader if I can work with them and their team. And what I mean by that is Peter Holkins who was one of the world experts in team coaching, I was looking to have him as my mentor for a while and I said to him one day, Peter, how do I get really, really good at doing
team coaching?
And he gave me the office answer, which is do lots of it. I said, thank you, Peter. Let me rephrase the question. How do I do lots and lots of coaching? And he said, like, if I were you given how much one on one coaching you to, I would in your next contract with your next client, include one day team coaching with their team as part of the price, and then put into your contract.
And the second and third day are charged with these prices and every subsequent day. So he said, I've never seen a team do a leadership retreat or an off site for one day. They always do two days.
So financially, what that means is they will take you for the first free day because it's free and they'll pay for the second day in your first engagement with them. So they've already got used to paying more than your coaching side.
But because it's even for the folks who only do one day, you still have learned how to be really good team coach. So if they're going to do team coaching, you're the guy they're going to come to.
Now that was a real game changer for my practice. What a fantastic, yeah, I think that a lot of people will take some insight from that. Yeah, it's if you have a second service that you think is
relevant for your audience, and you can wrap it up as part of your first service. So therefore, you're making their buying choice really simple.
Yeah, because they get basically to get a freemium version of the second service. Yes. And then they can choose to expand it. And it's a really easy buying choice. Yeah. Plus what I learned by doing that, not only did I get really good at team coaching, I ended up writing about team coaching and I taught team coaching at City Business School.
And so I kind of became known for that. But what it also did was it expanded my number of buyers straight away. So if you're working with this CEO and their leadership team, particularly in a multinational business, each of those on the leadership team runs out of parts of the businesses. Absolutely. And if they get a good experience, they bring you into their part of the business. Or in my case, they brought in someone from my team into their parts of the business.
So over the years of our business, we ended up having smaller numbers of clients in terms of organizational entities that I say five to 10 entities a year. But we might be coaching
hundreds of people in the organizations because in one organization, we're coaching 50 people across multiple jurisdictions. And it's because of that.
Those are we've gained gender per se. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I talk a lot about this idea that one of the reasons why I think working with corporate clients is a in some ways, an easier process than trying to pitch to individuals is that we do the business development upfront activity once for potentially, you know, years and years and expanding opportunity within that client, if we do it right.
So yeah, I really, I really have been working with seek.com at a Melbourne for 14 years. Oh, very good. Given your recruitment background as well. Well, I think that might even have been the original reason, actually.
Yes. I'm not in their office every week. I'm not in there being a month and well, in two years, I wasn't even there for in a year. But over 14 years, I think I've personally
worked with across a range of different programs.
The individual teams or larger scale leadership programs, they have worked with maybe some like four or 500 of their leaders over a long period of time. And so that goes to your first comment of this.
There's a reason, small business owners will refer you to small business owners. Quarters will never refer you to another corporate. We think about corporate as a collection of small business owners across multiple parts of your business, they'll refer you internally across that. Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. So you touched on this a little bit, but I don't want to let you go without your take on this. One of the challenges a lot of coaches experience is this idea of pricing, value-based pricing, and not feeling like they should be doing this workout of the kindness of their heart. How do you think about pricing? I'm a capitalist. Yeah.
Through a purpose driven capitalist. I love it. Absolutely. And what I mean by that is, when I, so if you go back to my original history, working in recruitment and in head hunting, the fees are a percentage of that person's salary.
And so that's where I learned how to sell services. That was my gestation. And my first experience of a major recruiting company, sorry, a major coaching company in Australia was called the Stevenson Partnership. It's since evolved into Stevenson, Mansell, and different organization now.
But the original Stevenson Partnership, the original Stevenson, he was an ex-recruiter. He started his coaching services as a percentage of salary. That's what he knew. Therefore, all the folks who worked in his organization, that's how they charged their clients, which is, I was still working in recruitment those days.
And I was watching Stevenson's going, okay, that makes sense when I eventually get to doing coaching. That's what I would do. Along the way, and this is not in any way, I'm pointing my fingers, just going here, slash you what happened, along the way two things happened. Some of the cost training companies emerged.
And some of the psychologists who were doing one-on-one therapy charging hourly rates moved into exec coaching. So the co-stream school started, their revenue course came from training. And when they started adding on services, they basically did the same thing as the psychologists were doing, which is, we're going to charge hourly rates. So the Stevenson Partnership guys were forced out of that process, which I think is a dreadful outcome for the whole industry.
So once they started charging hourly rates, it's a race at the bottom. Because if I'm going to charge $10 less than you're going to charge, I might be more attractive to the organization. And then let's first, let's walk on.
We can see that in what's happened with all the coaching platforms that are now paying their coaches less and less every time I get more information. That's where I started. So therefore, I learned very, very quickly, do not charge hourly rates.
It was one part of my career. I didn't say to you that at one stage I was part of a franchise organization out of the UK called Priceter. And I held the Australian Singapore franchise. And they, in terms of where they sat and heard, indeed, where they still sit, they're still going to the UK.
They are top of the tree in terms of the exec coaching market. One of me but that is all of the coaches have come out of C-suite corporate careers. A lot of them come out of UK government where they're directed generals of a major department.
One of my colleagues, when I used to work in Priceter, he was the private sector to market Thatcher as the example. So that's the kind of level of corporate backgrounds that they have. And they taught me to charge value-based pricing in high-end fees.
Number one, number two, and this is a huge lesson for me, in 1997 when the first financial crash came along, they increased their prices across the board. And that was so counterintuitive to the market. Even with decreasing prices, they increased prices.
And what they said to me was, the financial crash will go. You might take a year, I might take two years. We will lose some clients, but we would be priced higher than everybody else. And therefore, the market will assume where Beth never pre-gels. And they and I have done that three times since then.
And it's interesting. I do always say when I talk about pricing is that there's this unique
scenario with coaching where pricing is conflated with quality. And so we are not positioning yourself that way. You're going to be perceived in a certain way, rightly or wrongly.
And so what you might think is a way to get in by being cheaper is in fact not. I say, if you want to go to a bank and borrow money, it's much easier to borrow $5,050,000. But there's actually a useful story here that might be used for you. And I had a major turning point in my career when Neil Zvesk, who was a brilliant innovation specialist.
I've got Neil Zves' book on my bookshelf. Yeah, he's brilliant. I've worked in this over the years. He's brilliant at turning some of your office into something completely different.
So he's the one who said to me, if you could take the word out of the word coaching out of what you do, what you have left and how do you reorganize the services completely. It doesn't sound like a coaching service, but it is.
That was mind blowing for me. And about a week later, my wife said to me, at the time I was charging $25,000 a year for one-on-one coaching. And she said to me, what would you have to do to charge $100,000 a year for one-on-one coaching as a thought experiment?
And my first reaction was, that's just so stupid. I couldn't put a hell of a pay under that one was a year like, that's just stupid. And that sat back and thought, hold on, these are
two really interesting questions. What would you have to do? So I either created a program called the new CEO program that had a hold on to stuff, a lot of coaching, a lot of consulting, either the way of service space, either way.
And by the way, I've said to you, I have never found it useful to try and distinguish between coaching and mentoring. I think it's a waste of time. That's just my non-pierist view. I love it. I've got my seven many, many troubles, long discussions and debates with our mutual friend, Tony Grant, over at this stuff.
So when I put the GoToThe CEO coaching program, it was never called coaching. It was a new CEO accelerator program. It had some consulting services in there. It had a lot of coaching there. It had team stuff in there. But I saw that to seek when they were expanding all over the world, doing acquisitions.
And I became what they called our global roving CEO coach. So they'd go and buy company in Mexico. I would then go down to Mexico and work with their new CEO. And I didn't quite get the 100 grand per program package, but it was pretty close to it. That would never have happened and not Mills and Carol's challenge week to think something completely different.
Yeah. Yeah. And so I think about what the thought experiment might be for people listening in, who are sort of at the earlier days of their coaching business. I often challenge you, what would need to be true for you to double your price that you're currently thinking? What would that need to be? And often, I'm talking about tripling or quadrupling for many people.
But maybe that thought experiment is what would need to be true. And in many cases, What would need to be true is nothing different. It's just your willingness to try.
Yeah. And then go back to the sales point of view. And then I appreciate a lot of folks coming to coaching doesn't have that background. I understand that. Just because you charge a higher rate and I, the market has changed a lot in a couple of years. It's kind of flattened a little bit at the top.
Like the other ones, it was kind of, there's been an infinity for a while. You keep going, you keep going, you keep going. That's not true any longer. But what you still pay, you still get paid a whole lot more for coaching the CEO and the CEO than you do, the first time manager by nature, opposition to the organization and by nature of the ripple effect they could have down the organization.
But, and I've lost my thought now, wherever I was going with this. Oh, yes, I do know. Even though I'm, like I said, I've been doing this for almost 30 years, I'm well positioned in many parts of the industry. This doesn't mean that people won't try to negotiate pricing. Sure. And they will. Yeah. But my standard reply when people say to me, look, you know, if they got my proposal to go, you're, you're 25% more than this proposal than what you want to do, etc.
And my reply, look, which part, which 25% of our offering do you want to just not give you? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. They never, they never, every time take stuff out. No. But all that says to them is, I'm willing to stand by my price. And I'm willing to say, the offer I'm giving you is worth that price. If you don't want all of that stuff, we can take stuff out. Yeah. But not discounting the price. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
That, that idea of, don't make discounting your first port of call, make scope, scope the first discussion point. And yeah. Okay. Now I learned from a great guy, McKinsey's, the consulting firm who said to me once, wrought and discount pricing, I would say to my client, I would much prefer to do this for free.
Yes. And I will do it for free, wrought and discount the price. So clearly we'll do all the work, but I do one day for free. So you get value, but I'm not going to discount the price. And I've done that more than once. And with very, very few exceptions, and I want to say very few, I mean, maybe three exceptions over 20 years, and clients will go either a I really appreciate that.
Let's go for that one day. And I promise you will do more and they do. Well, they go, okay, don't worry about the, don't worry about the free. Let's just go. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Look, I've kept you for quite a while, Paul. Can I ask you a few rapid fire questions to wrap us up? If you could coach anyone in the world, who would it be?
Yeah, I thought about this guy. Talk to my last question. I'm going to give you two answers. The version of myself when I was 25, I wish I could go back now and go a little bit. But then I kind of go, then I wouldn't be who I am today without all those mistakes. I mean, maybe not. I don't know if this person needs to be coached, but I would love to be in a conversation with them. So therefore, they're the person that's Bono.
Oh, interesting, interesting. I don't think they need to be coached. I think he's a very enlightened human being. But I suspect the conversation would be extraordinarily illuminating on many levels.
Agree, agree. Do you have a podcast or a book that you would recommend for coaches earlier in their career? Well, your podcast clearly. Thank you, and yours, yes. I think if you're using podcasts to help you learn, what I would say is there's different types of hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of podcasts. So don't do 10 at the same type.
As in, your podcast is all about how to think commercially about your business. So go deep into your podcast and maybe one other. If you want to go deep into content and different coaching disciplines, then something like coaches rising is a great podcast for that.
I host the University of Sydney coaching mentoring podcast called Uskly Connect. That's a variation of that. So one of those kinds of podcasts goes deep into content. But then I would suggest going wider into podcasts that are not coaching, but they are starting your own business type stuff or sales, service sales techniques type stuff or organizational strategy.
So if you want to work in organizations, but you don't come out of a strategy background and learning strategic conversations in ways that are really important, just to have in your back pocket. So that kind of stuff. So pick three or four coaching podcasts, but then go far away from that. And what is the most essential tool or piece of software that you would recommend to make business life better or easier?
So, to make my business or to pick my coaching, which one?Oh, maybe either, either or both. So the best coaching tool I've ever used and I'm a bit biased because I was in the organization for a long time is a leadership circle. I think to me, that's the best framework, but I appreciate what everyone loves about it. I think it's brilliant as a framework.
And I absolutely love cloud AI. It's changed my business dramatically. It's changed what I do. And in our media business, our podcasting business, I have four agents, AI agents that we've built in the last month. And they are doing jobs that I can't afford to hire for. So it's not, they're not doing author, they're not, we're not, we're not getting rid of people, we're hiring people that we can't afford.
And that's quite extraordinary. And that's just going to change everything in so many ways. And so I love cloud. I did have a really existential moment, maybe by the year and a half ago, I'd done about 25, 360 debriefs in the tech business.
And 10 of the leaders came into my second session. They had ran their 360 debrief through. Was it cloud or was another one of the yellow limbs to get feedback and to get a development plan? And the plans were extraordinary. Wow.
As brilliant. And the reason why they were brilliant was because all of the material from the circle in this case, the circle to is pretty available. So therefore, the LMS can access the best, the best anywhere in the world and develop the plan very quickly.
So for new coaches who are relying on their money to come from interpreting 360s and give
advice that day is long gone, which you can certainly still use cloud in many or any of the tools in many other ways to help you elevate how you come across with your clients and help them in different ways.
Yeah, I love that. I love that. I mean, gosh, we can start a whole nother discussion about the use of use of AI as part of our coaching practice. Okay. Pod, thank you so much. I'm so grateful for your time today.
The insights, they're hugely valuable. I will summarize some of them in the newsletter that goes out with this episode. So we'll have lots of gold out there for people. If people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do so?
My own website is http://podosullivan.com That's probably the best to go. And can I encourage anyone who's 40 to 60, who's either a man or a woman, and there's a pod class called Don't at the Old Man in. And that might be interesting.
And so you'll hear me there. And if you do want a university city podcast, go there and of course LinkedIn, you give me LinkedIn where everyone is.
Hey, I think thanks to the work you do. I wish I had someone like you 30 years ago when I was starting out. I think what it's saying to me about these five years of heartache and learning. And so anyone who's starting out, the insights that you're offering are invaluable.
Brilliant. Well, yeah, thank you so much. All of those things will include in the show notes. And yeah, really appreciate your time, Pod. Thank you.
