Unpacked with Ron Harvey
People Always Matter. Join Ron as he unpacks leadership with his guests.
Unpacked with Ron Harvey
Maximizing Business Growth through Strategic Partnerships and Board Participation
Ever wondered how a seasoned entrepreneur with 25 years of experience juggles multiple industries and still keeps a fresh perspective? In this episode of the Unpacked Podcast, we chat with Callum, an industry veteran whose diverse background spans recruitment, hospitality, and marketing. Callum takes us on a journey from his early hustling days to successfully building and managing an array of businesses. He sheds light on the often-overlooked small to mid-sized businesses and introduces an innovative approach to grouping these enterprises under a public company structure while keeping founder control.
The conversation gets deeper as Callum shares the power of partnerships and the strategic advantage of forming advisory boards early on. Discover how small collaborations can build massive credibility over time and the immense value of serving on other companies' boards. Callum emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence and the human element in business decisions, offering insights that can save time and resources for budding entrepreneurs. We also reflect on Memorial Day, paying tribute to the sacrifices made by military members and their families.
Rounding out this insightful episode, we explore practical strategies for scaling your business and the multifaceted benefits of physical exercise for entrepreneurs. From repetitive activities that boost problem-solving to high-intensity sports that break mental cycles, we cover it all. Learn how to proactively seek board seats and build meaningful relationships that transcend monetary gains. Join us as we wrap up with a shared passion for books, helping others, and yes, even great hairstyles. Don't miss out on these invaluable lessons and heartfelt moments.
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Just Make A Difference: Leading Under Pressure by Ron Harvey
“If you don’t have something to measure your growth, you won’t be self-aware or intentional about your growth.”
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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization or entity. The information provided in this podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered as professional advice. Listeners should consult with their own professional advisors before implementing any suggestions or recommendations made in this podcast. The speakers and guests are not responsible for any actions taken by listeners based on the information presented in this podcast. The podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice or services. The speakers and guests make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in this ...
Welcome to Unpacked Podcast with your host leadership consultant, Ron Harvey of Global Core Strategies and Consulting. Ron's delighted to have you join us as he unpacks and shares his leadership experience, designed to help you in your leadership journey. Ron believes that leadership is the fundamental driver towards making a difference. So now to find out more of what it means to unpack leadership, here's your host, Ron Harvey.
Speaker 2:Well, good morning. This is Ron Harvey, the Vice President, chief Operating Officer, global Course Strategies and Consulting, excited to be here. My wife and I run a leadership company. We've been doing that for about 10 years and everything that we do is really helping organizational leaders build the leadership skills to take care of the people that they're responsible for and responsible to. We help create a culture that people want to be a part of. So we're excited about our podcast.
Speaker 2:So, before I go further, it is for us today. I know you're going to be watching this later, but today is Memorial Day. So, for all of those who paid the ultimate price of serving the country, and for the loved ones that supported those, and those family members and kids and aunts and uncles and moms and dads that may have lost a loved one for the ultimate sacrifice we do know that for the military members, all of them paid something, but some of them paid it all and they gave their life for it. So, to all of those that are listening whenever you hear this, we want to pause briefly and just say we truly, truly honor those that have served the country and paid the ultimate price, and we honor those people that have done that we hope you had a phenomenal Memorial Day. So, with that being said, we'll dive in Today. I'm super excited to have Callum with us on the call. We've been working back and forth, our teams are trying to get us on here and I'm super excited.
Speaker 2:This is Unpacked with Ron Harvey. We don't know the next question. All we know is we're going to talk leadership. We're going to be transparent and have fun. So, if this is your first time listening, there are no pre-sent questions and I thank my guests for allowing that to happen, because most people want questions in advance. They've embraced this and kind of it's going really, really well. So we continue to keep the platform going that way.
Speaker 2:So the one thing where I will promise is we will talk openly, honestly and talk about leadership is we will talk openly, honestly and talk about leadership. We'll promote our businesses. We're both entrepreneurs. We're business owners. We'd love to do business with you, but we want to solve a problem. So this is not a pitch to you. This is just to say, if you're interested and you listen to us today and you think there's something we can help you with, give us an opportunity. We'd love to earn your business. We'd love to have a conversation with you if that's the case, so we both will share our contact information and the best way to reach us. So we'll get started and I always ask our guests to introduce themselves because they know themselves better and what's relevant and important to them. So I don't try to be perfect and read this long bio. I don't like them. I ask people not to read them for me. I know how they feel. So, calum, I'm going to hand you the microphone.
Speaker 3:Ron, I am so glad because the last podcast I was on, the gentleman started and somehow he got a bio from about six years ago and he was reading this long bio and I was sitting there going, oh this is horrible, and I didn't know, like, do you interrupt him at that point or do you let it go and then ask him to read?
Speaker 3:Anyway, so the up-to-date Memorial Day 2024 bio. So I've been an entrepreneur for Memorial Day 2024 bio. So I've been an entrepreneur for sort of a grown-up entrepreneur for about 25 years and was hustling as a kid. I'm actually New Zealander, originally grew up in the UK and been out in Asia for about 20 plus years now, which is part of why it's been such a challenge for us to coordinate time zones, because I'm 12 hours ahead of you or something. So my first grown-up business was a recruitment company, but I've done bars, nightclubs, restaurants, employee wellness businesses, marketing groups, crm agencies quite a sort of long path, which generally means I can't have been that good at them because I kept moving on to the next thing.
Speaker 3:And then for the last 10 years I've really been focused on putting together groups of small businesses. So we saw that there was a big gap in the market. So you've got lots and lots of media attention around startups and tech startups and venture capital and angel, and it's all very, very exciting and it makes up a tiny, tiny percentage of the economy Like it's minuscule but it gets massive PR. And then you've kind of got the other end, which is sort of 200 million market cap and above, which is where private equity gets involved. Public markets start to take over, but actually 50% of the world's economy sits between startups and 200 million in market cap. Wow, all of the stuff that we buy generally comes from boring, cash-generating old economy businesses, but they're completely neglected. There's no investment product. So if you think about sophisticated capital and there's trillions of dollars sloshing around of invest in sophisticated capital, it can't invest in 50 of the economy because small businesses are too illiquid, they're too risky, and so, yeah, it just seems nuts that you've got the entrepreneurs out there that are solving all the problems in the world and then you've got the money that's basically getting driven straight into these big, big companies and sort of more and more obscure asset classes. So, yeah, that's what we started to do. We started to find good, well cash generating businesses, well run owner operated businesses, and we put groups of them together under a public company wrapper. But we left the founders in control, running their own entities the way they've always run them. So it's your brand, it's your culture, it's your hiring and firing. But now when you go and pitch for business, you're part of a global multinational so you can win much bigger contracts. You now have the currency of the stock to go out and do your own acquisitions or to incentivize the best staff to come and work for you. So you kind of get to level the playing field a bit and you also become a part of something bigger, but without giving up the operational control of your business. So we've been doing that for about 10 years. It gives investors access to that part of the economy they wouldn't normally get access to and hopefully gives small business owners a chance to kind of take that next level up and scale, even if on their own they're too small for sort of the public markets.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of the day job, and then as an entrepreneur, I kind of always have a few things going on on the sides as well. So about 18 months ago I set up a company to help women, minorities and first timers to get their first board seats. Because I was taking all these companies public, I was sitting on a lot of boards and I was advising a lot of boards and I realized that there was a lot of people on boards that probably shouldn't be on boards and there was a lot of people that were being overlooked for boards because they didn't tick the right box, they didn't go to the right schools, they didn't look the right way, they hadn't kind of had the same background, they didn't go to the right schools, they didn't look the right way, they hadn't kind of had the same background, they weren't connected to the right people and as an entrepreneur, there's nothing more frustrating than seeing overlooked. So I put that business together that's called the Veblen Director Program.
Speaker 3:We now place about 12, 13 individuals onto boards pretty much every month. So we have a huge community, train people up on how to be really good, effective board members and this isn't kind of good corporate governance for the biggest companies in the world, because most companies aren't the biggest companies in the world and if you try to apply good corporate governance to a small business, you kill it. So we actually teach practical. How do you really help leaders like yourselves and other small businesses by building boards for them and doing that kind of stuff? So yeah, that's what keeps me busy and out of trouble most of the time.
Speaker 2:Wow. I mean you have a lot to share. I'm really excited. You know different time zones. We wanted to figure it out. You've had your hand on a couple of industries and businesses over time, which gives you a lot of experience, but also you remain humble throughout this entire process. So I want to dive into. You know, unpack is what I always call it. When you think of entrepreneurship and you're solving, how important is it to help that business owner understand that they got to solve a problem? Because sometimes you get caught up in what feels good, it's what you're passionate about and you like it, but is it really solving a problem? How important is it for you to understand the problems you solve so you can stay in business?
Speaker 3:great question and I think my humility comes because entrepreneurship is very humbling. Like every time you think you get the hang of it, it smacks you in the face if you realize you still got to learn. So, fundamentally, business is about solving a problem for people and creating enough value that people are willing to exchange capital for that problem that you're solving. I think once you start to become aware of that, you see problems everywhere and you can kind of choose to go and fix them. I I think this whole idea of sort of following your passion and those kind of ideas that are very easy to spread but actually don't stand up to too much scrutiny. So I see a lot of people that follow their passion and then they end up passionately hating whatever it was that they were passionate about, because actually there's a huge difference between loving yoga and being a successful yoga business, and so people struggle with that. What I've kind of learned over the years is I start with who do I want to spend time with and then find the problems that they're dealing with and then try and fix those problems, because if I can do that, then win or lose. I end up hanging out with people that I want to spend time with, and so typically, if you kind of look and over, probably was about 15 years ago that I started to really solidify that idea and one of the things for, for example, just for myself, I decided I used to love startups. I'm not so startups myself, I love that whole ecosystem. I found it really exciting, but I realized that listening to and no offense to startups here, but listening to endless startups with their vision of the future when you've been through it a few times. Actually what's more interesting is to talk to experienced business owners, and I loved listening to and meeting with successful business owners and learning about what had gone wrong and what they'd learned from it and how they'd gone from here to here and you get a lot more.
Speaker 3:For me, I was learning a lot more from that, a lot more from that, and so I made the decision that I only want to be around ambitious, driven people but who had already reached the level of success, so that I could learn from them. And then it was a question of saying, okay, what are the problems that those people are facing? So if you're a successful small business owner and you're making 10 million a year in revenue, what are the challenges that you still got, and so that's kind of how the what we call the agglomeration model, which was putting together groups of companies under a public wrapper. That all came from that. And then, yeah, again sitting on boards. I like hanging out with board members because they're thinking at a strategic level, but it was frustrating that there weren't enough good board people, and so, yeah, I decided to attract more ambitious, driven people that I could then train and put onto boards as well. So, fundamentally, if you're not solving a problem, nobody's going to give you money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you've been in a lot of businesses, you've seen a lot and you continue to do great work when you think about a small business on the calendar, and I know you have a lot of experience in boards and training and pulling companies together, so you built the platform. How important is it for business owners to be in collaboration with other business owners?
Speaker 3:So the first book I ever wrote was about 10 years ago, and it was a book called Progressive Partnerships, which went on to become a bestseller. But if you go to callumlengcom you can stick your email in and I'll send you a free copy, and that was really about everything that I had learned around how to grow your business through partnerships. The reason why big companies don't want to do business with a small company is that you're a risk, and so, even if you know, logically, that this would be fantastic for the company, you can provide an immense amount of value for this big company. You have to factor in the fact that the employee you're working for has a different objective to the company. The employee's objective is to survive, is to thrive in that environment, and it's the whole. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM concept. They'll never get fired for hiring another PLC to deliver a publicly listed company to deliver the service. They would potentially get fired if they hire a small company and it goes wrong. And so what happens is that it's nearly impossible for a small company to partner with a Google or like one of these big players, as much as you want it to happen. And so what I learned fairly early on was what you need to do is change the dynamic so that for that employee it's more risky for them not to do business with you than it is to do business with you. And the way you do that is you have to build up enough momentum on your side that they would now risk getting in trouble with their boss if they don't do business with you.
Speaker 3:So the way I teach in my book is you go out and you do small partnerships. You go and find your next door neighbor. You do a partnership that you really don't care about, but it doesn't matter. You stick that logo on your website. You say, hey, we're partnering with this company. Then you go to another company. You say, hey, can we do a partnership together? You don't really mind whether this partnership works or not. All you might mind about is the fact that you can add that logo to the website. You're now partnered with this company and you just kind of bounce up and up and up, and so you're getting this momentum, and the more companies you partner with, the more credibility you have when you knock on the door of the next company.
Speaker 3:And so what happens is you're now trading off the value of other people's brands, and so the bigger companies start saying, well, look, if you're partnering with 20 companies, you must be a big deal. Yeah, we'll do a partnership with you. And you make it really easy for them to say yes. Like you're not sort of trying to be difficult.
Speaker 3:You try and come up with the easiest possible deal to start the relationship, and then what happens is you basically get to a point where, say, we were going for google? If google sees that you've done a partnership with Microsoft and with Yahoo, like now, it's risky for that employee at Google not to partner with you because the boss is going to say hang on, these guys are partnering with some of our biggest competitors. Why are we not partnering? So you need to flip the dynamic, and all of it kind of starts with understanding that business is never logical. There's always emotion, there's always humanity in there, and you've got to understand that the individual you're dealing with has their own hopes, dreams and aspirations and you need to try and leverage that rather than rely on good, old-fashioned logic, because it rarely works.
Speaker 2:It's rarely logical. You know we want it to be, but very rarely. Business does not work that way. I mean you're sharing some great information for all of our guests that are listening and watching the podcast is. We talk about it all the time.
Speaker 2:In small businesses, you know the idea of partnering so you can leverage what other people have done. I mean, even for like this podcast. It's because I partnered with someone to do the backend work before. I was trying to do it all and it's too complicated, it's too much. You just don't have enough time in the day, but it also wasn't productive long-term. So who do you partner with to deliver to? So when Kellen comes on him and I can just do what we're supposed to do and someone else is going to take everything else in the background for us. So you do need to have partnerships. What's the best way for small business? To have an advisory committee or somebody that's keeping them in alignment with what they should be doing. So I don't know if the word is board or the advisory committee or whatever we call it. I do think they need someone helping them have conversations at the strategic level.
Speaker 3:Is that what you think about that? Yeah, yeah, so absolutely. This is probably the number one piece of advice that I've been giving to entrepreneurs for years and it's something that I learned accidentally. I pull these advisory boards together for my business without knowing it was an advisory board. It was basically just more experienced entrepreneurs that I was trying to tap up and offer them free lunch from time to time and figure out anything I could.
Speaker 3:But yeah, basically my argument to entrepreneurs and my sort of proposal to entrepreneurs is not only do you need to create an advisory board straight away, it doesn't matter even if you're just at the ideation stage.
Speaker 3:Get an advisory board before you spend money on staff or product developments or anything else. It will save you a fortune having a few people that you can bounce ideas off, and it doesn't need to cost you anything. There's an awful lot of ambitious people out there leaders, managers and executives in companies that they want to be entrepreneurs. They'd love to live vicariously through you. They don't want to take the risk themselves, yet they keep sort of uh, wait, um, and so they would happily agree to give up an hour of their time a month just to have a coffee with you, even virtually, and just learn about your business and what you're doing, and just one introduction that they give you or one piece of advice they can give you can completely transform the trajectory of your business. But equally, I also argue that every entrepreneur should sit on at least one other company's board, and every time I say that entrepreneurs go oh gosh.
Speaker 2:I agree 100% with you. So if you listen to us, both of us are going to agree we have the same hairstyle, so we got that right. Here's another thing we're going to do. You need to be sitting on someone else's board yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And look, everyone kind of says, well, I'm already working 24 7 on my own business, like I haven't got time to think about somebody else's business. But there's a few reasons why I think it's really important. I think, first of all, we get so caught up in the weeds of our own business, like everything's on fire. We know that.
Speaker 3:We know that our business is held together with chicken wire and masking tape and we're running around trying to keep everything together and when we look at other people's business, it all looks really smooth and really well run and you kind of think, like, how are they doing that? And so by going and sitting on the board of another company, first of you see that every business is held together, but actually they've probably solved a few problems that you haven't figured out yet and you can see how they've solved that. And there's probably a few things that they're doing that you've already figured out, that you could help them with. And it's just super valuable to see another company to get a little bit of visibility, to start thinking at a higher level, start thinking at a more strategic level, and you start to think more as a shareholder or as a stakeholder, rather than we're in our business. We are obsessed with client value because we have to be like we're constantly thinking how can we add more value, how can we get more clients? And yet when you sit on the board, you need to start thinking about all the stakeholders. So you're thinking about the shareholders, you're thinking about the wider environment, you're thinking about, yeah, the employees and the teams and everything else, and just forcing yourself to do that for somebody else. When you come back to your own business. It's like you're wearing a whole new set of glasses and you go oh okay, why am I doing that? That doesn't actually make sense in this new world, looking at the whole ecosystem of the business.
Speaker 3:So I think it's an incredibly valuable thing to do and it's also a massive credibility boost, like when your clients see you and you're just a small business. But if you're a small business owner but you're also sitting on the boards of two or three other companies, then clearly you've got some wherewithal, you're clearly a smart person, and so there is an inferred credibility that comes with sitting on boards. It'll help you attract new staff, it'll help you attract clients, help you attract investors, and so I think there's a huge amount to be said for it, and I guess I'll finish with this point and my most recent book, which is called Boardroom Blueprint, is all about how you're going and get your first board seat. The most astonishing figure when it comes to this is that there's 330 million businesses in the world. Give or take Less than 1% of them have an active functioning board, and yet every single successful business you can think of has an active functioning board. So clearly there's a disconnect there, and I think most of the time it's just that entrepreneurs think they would have to spend a lot of money and it's a really big deal.
Speaker 3:It's a very formal thing and what we teach at the Verbal and Director Program is make it informal. So when we're teaching people how to set up boards for entrepreneurs to reach out and really say look, this is basically just a coffee once a month, just ask you a few questions about your business. If I can help you, if I can be an advocate for you, great, I'll do it for free for a year. If, at the end of the year, I've added real value, we can turn this into a more formal board if you want. If not, no harm, no foul. We each go our own separate ways, but it's a great way for entrepreneurs to suddenly have four or five other people that care about your business and can become advocates for your business and can give you some advice and save you going down those endless rabbit holes that we're prone to going down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I love that you're sharing it and being really transparent. We unpack because oftentimes it does look does look like from the outside the other business has it all together, and why I do unpack is so you understand that we figure some things out, but there's some things we're still working on, the airplane's in the air and we're just trying to navigate and not crash. So when you're serving on the board, calum, I think it's a win-win for both. The company needs you and you can learn a lot from the company. How important is it for you to be active then? I mean, if you're going to serve on a board versus just be a proxy or a vote, because sometimes you're just going in and they need to get the votes done, but it's more than just a warm butt in a seat when you're certain. How important is it for you to be active if you're going to take the time to serve?
Speaker 3:yeah, so we break it down into. So in the Veblen Direct program, what we're trying to do is train people to become great board members, and my kind of argument is look, there's enough rubbish board members out there, we don't need to add more to them. So you need to be. Well, look, it's entirely up to you. You can be a rubbish board member if you want. But if you want to get ahead, if you want to be successful, if you want to go up to the next level, then you need to be looking at how can you create value for that company, how can you create value for that founder? And look, more often than not, your compensation is going to be tied to the market cap of the company. So if you can help the company to grow, that's going to be rewarding for yourself.
Speaker 2:Yes, Thank you, phenomenal insight. Let me pivot a little bit for us. I'm going to unpack something else that I noticed businesses struggle with. I did initially how and when do you begin to bring other people on as a business owner?
Speaker 3:Bringing on an advisory board is a great thing to do from day one and it doesn't cost you anything and it instantly gives you credibility when you're talking to clients and when you're talking to staff. So that's a very easy thing to do. There is this kind of question about when you go from being a solopreneur to building a team. I've kind of evolved my thinking on that more and more. Like now, I will start companies with the CEO in mind. I will start companies with the CEO in mind. So from my network I know people that if I'm thinking about solving a problem here and I know this person would be right for running that company, I've already kind of got that in mind. But you don't start off like that. That's kind of taken a couple of decades of building it.
Speaker 3:What I do now is for all my staff across all of my businesses almost 100%, I think, of the last people that I've hired in probably the last seven or eight years I start them off just as freelancers just doing a few hours of work.
Speaker 3:So basically using Upwork and stuff, and this is something that I kind of evolved over. But I would hire a virtual assistant and the good ones. I just keep giving more and more work and more and more responsibility to and more often than not, I think the CEOs of two of my companies started off as virtual assistants or like just freelancers. That were just really good. I just kept giving them work, and the advantage with doing that is you're not caught into this very expensive, timely process of trying to guess, based on a CV and a couple of interviews, whether this person is going to be a fit, because basically they don't know and you don't know, and they could have been absolutely phenomenal in their last job, but it just doesn't gel with you, with where the business is. So rather than kind of beat yourself up on that and get into these expensive hiring and firing problems, I just do everything by freelance now and then, yeah, I'll ultimately just give more and more responsibility and more time, and that's been incredibly effective for me.
Speaker 2:I love it because you know your challenge back in the days is hey, I want to get the job you couldn't get hired because you didn't have the experience. But you couldn't get the experience because you couldn't get hired. And so it eliminates this thing of OK, don't need to pay me, you don't need to hire me, but allow me to come in for a year and give you and add value without me being on your payroll, without a vote. But over time you put yourself in a position where you become indispensable for them and so I will take that. I love the idea. Now we've had a lot of conversations. We took people down several paths about advisory boards, about solving problems and understanding who you have and when you bring people on and when do you make decisions about expanding your company. Are there three lessons that you've learned? You've been in several companies, other things you know. You hear that question. What do you learn that has been the most helpful for you that you're still using today as an entrepreneur?
Speaker 3:unfortunately I'm not very bright, so I typically have to learn these things several times. All right, wait, I remember I learned that before. There are certain things, obviously, that travel with you as businesses grow, there's a lot of things that you have to let go of, because what works when you're just starting out doesn't work at the next level, and you touched on it earlier this kind of that shift from being a solopreneur to hiring your first people. There's a great line that to build a good business, you need to delegate everything that you're not good at to build a business you
Speaker 3:need to get everything that you're good at and that's the hardest bit like the stuff that you're good at giving it to someone else and watching them do a different job. Well, hopefully, that can be hard, so, but I think that's definitely one piece that I've been very, very conscious of. I'll always look for partnerships, at whatever level, leveraging what you've built so far, what you've got so far, to try and build the next partnership and then leverage that partnership to the next level. And then, I think, really for the last 10 years, I've just sort of been fascinated by this intersection or probably a failed intersection between small business and the capital markets. And yeah, you would have thought that investors and business owners should be so aligned like investment and business. It just should be like all the same, and yet it's really not.
Speaker 3:And not only that where it does meet, there's often a lot of friction, because entrepreneurs have very different values than investors. Entrepreneurs are always looking for how they can create more value for their clients, and so we sacrifice profit in the short term to create value. So if we land a big client, we take all of that profit and, instead of putting it in our pocket, we go and hire more staff, or we go and spend more on marketing, and so we're constantly sort of reinvesting. Now investors create value by making profit, and so to them they're thinking short term, they want the cash out because they need to deploy it, they need to give it back to their LPs, and so you kind of get this really fundamental clash between entrepreneurs and investors when a lot of companies go public, and so a lot of what we've been doing over the last 10 years is trying to square that circle and figure out how you marry those in a way that works for everyone.
Speaker 2:So you're still working the details out on how to do that. The other thing I want to unpack before we wrap up and then we'll talk about contact information and the best way to reach you and if someone wants to invite you to do different things.
Speaker 2:Mental health is showing up a lot and entrepreneurs are normally burning a calendar at both ends. I mean overworked, always busy, always figuring out the next thing, and it takes a certain degree of that to be an entrepreneur. To be honest, it really does. How do you help entrepreneurs understand and to do self-care and pay attention to mental health?
Speaker 3:so. So I wrote an article for the next web about 10, 12 years ago which got quite a lot of traction, and I was talking about the importance of exercise for entrepreneurs and I said that there was three things that I found really useful. So one was to do boring exercise like running, cycling, swimming, something repetitive. So if I had a problem, I go right. So the next hour I'm just going to think about this problem with the extra blood running through my brain. It's going to give me a much better chance of figuring it out than if I'm sitting at my desk. So it's almost like a meditative process.
Speaker 3:But the other thing that I think is even more important was to do something where you have to be in the now, and so, for me, I play five-a-side football every weekend, I do Muay Thai boxing.
Speaker 3:Because, as an entrepreneur, we get stuck with the same problem going round and round and round in our heads and we're supposed to switch off. But we're sitting at the dinner table with our family and they're talking, but we're just thinking about this, this problem, and you can really get stuck in it. And what I found was in a kind of high intensity competitive sports game, you can't. You have to be present, especially like in boxing or something you get punched in the face that you soon focus. So I think that's it's really important to do something like whatever that is for you that can force your brain to get out of those cycles.
Speaker 3:And the third one is to do something like lifting weights or fasting or something that has a direct impact on your physical body, because in entrepreneurship, so much of what we do is not in our control. We like to think that we're in control. We're really not. We've got this tiny fraction that we can play around with. But there's the economy, there's what our staff are thinking, there's what our clients are like. There's so much stuff outside of our control and when things are going wrong it can feel like you have no control over anything and it's really useful just to go well okay.
Speaker 3:The one thing I do have control over is I can go and lift some weights this morning, or I can not eat until 4 pm this afternoon or whatever. It is like something that just gives you back that sense of control, which otherwise it can feel a little bit overwhelming sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and I'm glad you said that, because you know people start businesses. They'll leave corporate America organizations. I'm going to be an entrepreneur, so I have to work for anyone. I'm like, well, you better stay where you are. You don't have any control. So if you're listening and you're paying attention, don't think that leaving a job means you don't have to work for anyone. That's a lie, it's not accurate.
Speaker 3:You're not working for an idiot.
Speaker 2:Yes, so, callum, phenomenal information. Thank you for coming on. If someone's listening, what are the top three reasons or things that are happening in their organization or in their life that says they may be able to use the service? What's happening that says they should pick up the phone and reach out to you or send their email?
Speaker 3:so right now I'm helping a lot of people to get trained up and get onto board seats. So if you're ambitious and you're driven, I think that's an amazing next step. I don't think like sitting around for the next 20 years hoping someone taps you on the shoulder and gives you a board seat is a good approach. I think you can be more proactive. So if you're interested in that, then definitely tap me up. But, like I said, we do a lot around investing and investing in small businesses, so investors and entrepreneurs and the best place to reach out to me is on LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:But make sure in your message you mention Ron and the Unpacked podcast so that I know to accept your connection. Otherwise get a little bit lost in the messages. But or just leave a comment in one of my posts. I post on there most days, so, yeah, that's the the best way to find me. Books are on Amazon, but, like I said, I think if you put your email address into callumlangcom, I think you get most of the books for free now anyway, so we can. Jeff Bezos has got enough money, so I think we're most of the books for free now anyway, so we can. Jeff Bezos has got enough money, so I think we're happy to send free copies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's done a phenomenal job. I mean, it's amazing, though, and for entrepreneurs that are listening, like, continue to grow and see what's next, what can you do? And what I will say as you shared, like why people should call you. One of the things I had to learn is not chasing money. Now, you do want to be compensated properly, but it couldn't be my driving motive, because it would put me in a position to take advantage of people as long as the money was right.
Speaker 2:I had to get out of that mindset, and I'll tell you, I grew up low income with my parents and I wanted to be able to close the wealth gap. That's huge for me, and it still is huge for me that my kids can and it's not have to be wealthy, but they can enjoy the life they want to enjoy, and so, for me, I had to get out of like don't chase money. You know, sometimes I do take a smaller contract to build a relationship and to help somebody solve a problem. Then there are times when the contract is bigger than than what I thought it would be, but please, entrepreneurs, don't let your primary focus of this being I got to go get rich.
Speaker 3:The way I think about it is if I need them more than they need me, then I'll offer my services for free. So if I'm trying to get on the board ladder, I need that board experience before anyone will offer me money. So I need to give a year or whatever it is of my time to get that board experience. When somebody comes to me and asks me if I'll be on their board, then I ask them what the commercial terms are, because I'm busy, I've got lots of options. If it's attractive enough, then I might look at it, if it's not, then no problem.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's that dynamic yes, yes, you got to volunteer somewhere. As we wrap up, you've already shared the best way Go to LinkedIn. Your bell will reach out to Callum and he'll send you books and everything, because we want to add value to you. The other question I want to ask and then I'll drop my contact information for those that are listening how do you know when to say no?
Speaker 3:Because you can't say yes to everything and entrepreneurs will get caught up in that race of you, don't want to let anybody down, you don't want to seem like you're not supporting, but you can't say yes to everything, which can be difficult sometimes, yeah. So I got a lot better at it and I'm kind of a bit of a people pleaser. So saying no was quite difficult. That the busier you get and the bigger projects you're working on, the easier it is to say no to stuff that, just because you can't, you've got too many other people relying on you. So one of the things that I struggled with in the early days as I was building my profile so you build your profile because you want opportunities to come to you. Then you get everybody reaching out to you saying, hey, can I buy you a coffee? Can I pick your brains like, like all these obscure sort of requests for your time.
Speaker 3:And I actually learned this lesson because I was on the other side of that and I'd reached out to a guy that had just taken his company public and I really wanted to learn from him something about that going public process. And I reached out to him and he sent back and he said thanks for getting in touch. I'm really busy right now. For the next couple of months I'm working on deals. I'm sure you understand. Was there something specific you wanted to ask me? And it was polite, completely reasonable, so it forced me to actually think. Well, hang on, yeah, I kind of had a vague idea. If I want to learn about this going public thing, what's a specific question that I actually wanted to ask?
Speaker 3:and I thought about it and I sent him one and he connected me to somebody in his team who responded and gave me the answer as well. It's perfect. So I do that all the time now. So like two or three times a day, somebody will say, hey, can I have a chat with you or can we jump on a Zoom call? I'll say exactly the same thing. I'll say look, I'm really busy, I'm doing deals at the moment, taking companies public. Was there something specific you want to talk about? Ninety, nine times out of 100, I will never hear from them again, them again. And the reason is they can't even take the time, their own time, to formulate the question, to think through what they want, to even put that down into writing and get it across to me. And, quite frankly, if they're not willing to do that, there's no guilt on my side for not showing up, for giving up half an hour of my time for them. So, yeah, that's kind of probably been one of the most effective ways I've found to avoid that problem.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, love it, Because coming back and helping them be specific in their question, so you know, and you may not need to be the one to answer the question you can actually hand it off or delegate it to someone on your team and Callum said it I want to reinforce, learn to delegate effectively, consistently. You can't do all things all the time, so I love it, callum. So you said LinkedIn. You also have a website. You know anything you want to share that you want people to go out and take a look at before we wrap up Anything. I've got the LinkedIn. I've got a YouTube channel, callumlangcom.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit out of date, but yeah, look, if I can help in any way, feel free to doing things. So we don't want you to waste your time, but we also don't want to waste our time. That's not being mean. That's like how do we help you get what you want to get? Because some things we know work for sure. We've tried it and tested it and improved it, so we're giving you answers. How do you get access to people that you really want to get access, to Be very, very specific in that one thing that you ask them, if you ask them to pick their brain. You're probably not going to get that call back. Nobody wants their brain to get picked, but they don't mind adding value to you. So find a way to be very specific on what you may want to ask me or Callum or anybody that you're trying to reach. It'll be more helpful and it'll give you a quicker, better response a lot faster.
Speaker 2:The best way to reach me is also LinkedIn. I use it as a platform, professional, where you can reach me. If you go out there, you'll see me out on LinkedIn and you can go to my company website. The two best ways if you ever want to reach me, go to LinkedIn. Go to my company's website. I push everything through there. It helps me manage my systems. So if you want to reach me, do those two things. There are books out there on the site as well. Both of us have books, both of us love to help, we both talk about serving on boards and we both have a really good hairstyle. So please, please, please. If there's anything that we can do for you, we'd love to. For today, on this Memorial Day of 2024, caleb and I are signing off. Thank you for joining us and spending time with us. We know it's valuable, but hopefully we added some value to you and made a difference for you and your organization.
Speaker 1:Well, we hope you enjoyed this edition of Unpacked Podcast with leadership consultant Ron Harvey. Remember to join us every Monday as Ron unpacks sound advice, providing real answers for real leadership challenges. Until next time, remember to add value and make a difference where you are, for the people you serve, because people always matter.
