38. Entrepreneurs Playbook in Scaling-up. What it takes to win, Lessons from founders.

At three or four times over the course of, you know, a month, I was ready to give up. Like, I was literally crying on the couch. It was. It was awful. There was so much shit that was going on, you know, lost money. It was just a nightmare in my early times of, like, starting the other company I was part of. Like, I was always. I remember vividly, like, I was driving myself into the ground trying to prove myself to someone. I didn't actually. No, I said I was doing work with my therapist at the time because I was like, literally, like, I was. I was crook. I was like working ridiculous hours. I just could not stop because I was trying to beat someone. And, like, we went so deep on this. It's like I did not know who that person was. And it turned out to be myself. I was trying to prove to myself. Welcome back to another episode of the Bennenberg Show. Today we have a personal growth episode on the Entrepreneur's Playbook in Scaling up what It Takes to Win and lessons from founders. Burges and I have now been in the startup space for a little while. This is my second sort of major startup. I've made every single mistake under the sun and I'm starting to see some consistent winning strategies amongst everything. Now, this is not going to be completely tied to crypto. This is going to be just lessons learned. And by no means are we experts, but this is just a take from our last sort of six or seven years building crypto startups. What we've seen work, what we've seen haven't worked. And at the end, as always, we're gonna do our personal accountability updates. Berg has been trying to dunk. We'll get a bit of an update on him. I've been hitting the gym, working on some focus stuff which I'm going to touch on. But to start with. Bergs, how are you, dude?

Mate, I'm amazing. And I've been going super hard at everything. So hard. You see my red eye, mate? So if you're watching the video and you'd be squeamish, look away for five seconds. All right, check this out.

Look at that, mate. Look at that. So for those on the pod, my left eye, half of it is just bloodshot red. So this is a. Was it subconjunctival hemorrhage? This is a burst blood vessel in your eye and it looks menacing. Like I literally look like Kano from Mortal Kombat. And it's either like I look like the hardest man on the planet or the softest man who's been beaten up, depending on who you are. And yeah, look on me, right? And seriously, I woke up with this man. Like I had like a bit of a scratch in my eye at night. I was just kind of rubbing my eyes and you know, I've been hit the gym, so I'm super strong. Just must just busted through it, mate. Get up in the morning and have a look at. I'm like, whoa, that looks menacing. I. I have them like every now and then, like maybe one a year, very small one. And this one is just like, bang, half my eye. And I'm like, oh, no, I'm gonna go blind for sure. Go to the doctor. And he's like, ah, don't worry, it's just like a bruise. You'll be fine in like two weeks. Get on with it live, mate.

For the podcast listeners, it looks absolutely awful. I cannot look at it. You sent me a WhatsApp message. I had to like delete the photo because it was just like, it was just ridiculous. It looks.

Oh, mate.

But anyway, that's what happens when you do the first inter. That's what happens when you do your first. A little bit of work for, you know, in ever these things.

Because I'm carrying the team. Not only is my back broken, now I'm busting out my eyes, mate. Jeez.

It's actually because you opened your eyes and she did something once. But anyway, moving on.

So.

A bunch has happened over the last few weeks for us, Collective Shift. We're now, just for context, in year two and four months of Collective Shift. I worked at another crypto startup before this one, and we just wanted to work through some of the lessons because some of the stuff. We're starting to see some really amazing results of Collective Shift. And this is not about a puff piece episode. This is just starting to see some results. We wanted to share with you how we've sort of got to those results and. And why and some of the common themes. Before we get into that though, just want to make a big shout out to all the new listeners to the Benneberg's podcast. We have doubled our listenership over the last 30 days. Huge. All time. Yeah, huge. Our all time high episode before this month was the Chris Judd interview. If you haven't checked that out, go and listen to that. That's a epic episode. Episode 22. And for context, the last three episodes, we've gotten the same amount of downloads in a row. So, yeah, we've basically doubled our podcast downloads. Thank you so much for Everyone for listening. We absolutely love what we're doing. We're about six months in. Our goal of this is to get to 100 episodes and make sure we're having fun. So if we stop having fun, it's all over. I'm sorry, but we're having fun. So it's going to continue.

That's it. The train keeps moving, mate. I'm definitely having fun.

Yeah, now we're having fun. And if you're new to the podcast, you know, we're here, we're talking about crypto business and personal growth. Bergs and I both basically co owners of Collective Shift. We're a crypto research and education platform or a scale up. We're venture backed and we're, we're having a great time doing it. So anyway, enough of the nonsense, let's get into it. Bergs, One of the core things that I wanted to touch on, that I've seen happens once you start getting some wins on the board is the idea of winners want to play with winners, top talent wants to work with top talent. No one gave a flying for hoosa about us for the first two years actually, you know, arguably probably got spat on in the early, you know, time of Collective Shift. Like, you know, I've got a lot of people that I could go back and look at that said we're never gonna, never gonna be able to pull this off. We're a bunch of idiots. No idea what we're doing. Like this has got no hope in hell. But it's funny how things turn once you start to get a few wins on the board. So recently we announced a partnership with the Australian Open. So we, we're supplying over 6,000 memberships to the NFTs. We recently raised 1.5 million in our seed round. Recently announced partnership with VV, the largest mobile first NFT marketplace. And a bunch of other stuff that's happened. That's not the point. The point is since those things have come to light, the amount of inbound inquiries, berg social media leads, etc. Has exploded. Yeah, winners want to play with winners. It attracts more people and it's tough to find those wins in the early days. I will admit, like the first couple of years is a grind. You're not going to have a lot of wins. You know, a lot of last year I was fundraising. It was brutal. It was many with investors, didn't have a lot going our way. The market was down. But I guess the point of all of this is you've just got to push through all that you know, we faced a lot of our fair share of challenges and there's a lot of bleak days where you wake up, you look at the business, you look at what needs to be done, and you just want to top yourself. You know, I'm not gonna lie, I know that's pretty brutal.

But like, it's all the emotions. Even this morning, like a thing we were waiting on to happen happened and we're like, yes, this is amazing, this is great. And then immediately like a piece of our tech fell over. So it's like all those highs just immediately disappear and we have to go and deal with that.

The winds last for about 30 seconds.

Yeah, it's not only the ultra highs and ultra lows, like they happen so super quick as well.

But you know what I've learned and learned from other founders as well. And you know, in our previous business that I had, we started really accelerating after year three. We basically flatlined for three years. And after three year mark, magic started to happen. And I've heard it could be the three year mark, the five year mark, the seven year mark, at the ten year mark. Those times within a business are usually the times where shit really starts to get really exciting. We're coming up on three years and I think we're starting to see some sparks. But it's been a, it's been a grind for the first couple of years. But I guess the first point I wanted to make is like, keep at it, keep grinding. If it's not working, you know, keep at it. And you know, shit's not working in our business either. We're still figuring shit out. But if you just keep going at it, being consistent, getting some wins on the board, people want to work with winners. And it attracts customers and attracts leads, it attracts more people that want to work with you. So just keep at it, get those wins on the board and things will start to come.

Absolutely. And all businesses suck in some areas. But when you own a business, at least you get to choose where you suck. And that's part of really, you know, cutting to a strategy, niching down and focusing on those specific areas. And you know, the things you talked about before is building momentum and making it so they can't say no. There was so many no's, doors are slammed in your face. You get one win, you build on that, you keep grinding, you get another one, another one, and that just starts a flywheel, a snowball that just starts to go. And it's to the point where people just cannot say no.

Now to build that momentum and get those wins on the board takes me to number two. Second point of the entrepreneurs playbook and that is focus. I am a absolute stickler for the shiny object syndrome. I love a good shiny object, I love a new product, I love something shiny, I love a new adventure. And one of the things I picked up on my 2022 reflection was I spent a shitload of time following these shiny objects that never came to fruition in time. I sound like a great idea and let's start this new product and launch this new thing. But usually it's just a waste of time. The thing that has been able to give us the most results I think is our relentless focus. And I've learned that in the past as well. Like when you focus on one thing, you know, some people can focus on multiple different things. I see some founders have like 3, 4, 7, 12 businesses and that's like, you know, amazing, incredible, like go for it. I'm certainly not that person. I cannot do that. You know, if I start to split my focus rather than one thing, rather than one thing being done well, two things are being done average. And for me I think what we've started to implement bergs over the last few months is like this super in depth strategic focus. Before we do everything, do anything, sorry, we sit down and we map out exactly what our goals are, exactly what we need to achieve by when and that's the number one thing we go for. And we just keep driving and driving and we niche down and we, we are aiming to be the best crypto education and research firm for everyday people. That's what we want to be known as, that's what we want to be the best at. We don't want to become an exchange, we're not becoming a broker, we're not doing any of this other stuff, not becoming a wallet. You know, we're not, we're not a service business, we're not an agency. You're not building sites or advising, not consulting, not doing any of that. We are becoming the world's best crypto education and research platform for everyday people. And that is what we've been focusing on for a long time now.

And it's hard as well to keep that focus because people will come to you with an offer and you're a startup and you need revenue and they'll say hey, we're putting this money on the table, would you like to do this? And you constantly have to ask yourself, is this taking me away from my primary goal? Like sometimes yeah, you do have to take those opportunities because you need the money. But really, okay, I'm going to go do this. And let's say it's a kind of service agreement or it's a piece of marketing or some content, or someone wants you to run a fund or help with an exchange, whatever it may be that comes across your table, you have to weigh that up with, yes, you're getting money, but it's taking away from your primary goal. And when you look back that three or six months, you spell spent building that and working on it, was it actually worth doing or should you have spent that working on your primary goal and getting further down that track?

And we, we went through that recently, Burke's where we had a client come to us and basically like wanted us to build a website, they wanted us to manage a project, they want us to integrate on their site, they want to do all these bunch of things and you know, the money was there but we decided that that wasn't our core offering. That's not what we were trying to build. And it's going to take a lot of time away from our other resources. So we turn that down. We turn it into a product, we productized it and sold it more as a subscription based SaaS offering rather than an agency model. And that was a really good decision upon reflection, Books, because I mean, we're not trying to build an agency, we're not trying to build a service business. We're trying to productize this to really scale and you know, the money would have been nice. We still got a, you know, you know, sort of a good price on our product. Not as much as what it would have been, but what we were able to do is save our time and invest that into the product to build for the future.

Exactly. And if we didn't do that, our time would have been spent building custom websites and integrations, doing one offs, dealing with a whole lot of clients, juggling that we're essentially becoming an agency and that fundamentally changes the core focus of our business.

Yep, spot on. Number three of the entrepreneurs playbook is hard work. And I know this is kind of like a bit of a cheesy, you know, I guess idea, but I think it's really true. You know, like as an early stage startup you are walking on glass. What's Elon Musk's quote like? You know, running a startup is like basically smashing a piece of glass and eating it and like walking on top of at the same time or staring into the abyss.

You know, I've always liked the Jumping off a cliff and trying to assemble a plane on the way down.

Yeah, yeah. And, and I think like, you know, there's certainly a lot of people that work, you know, a lot more hours than probably what we do. But you know, I would say that what I found is that there is just a shitload of stuff you need to do as an early stage startup and not all, not all the time you're going to feel as though you want to work and that's fine. Bloody oath. I take holidays and weekends and you know, we have. It's good to ensure your rest and being efficient, productive. But when you're on like, what I've really tried to work on myself is being as efficient and productive in the time that I'm on as humanly possible. And I wasn't good at that at the start, you know, especially, you know, social media nowadays and posting on social media, like you're always like on your phone and checking it and whatever else. Like, but if you really sit down and be self aware and keep yourself accountable and like what you're actually using or doing within those hours, you can get so much more of that. And I'm by no means perfect, but it's an area that I realized I was wasting a lot of time and I think a lot of other people waste a shitload of time as well. Like even I've just joined up at a co working space and looking around like, man, not to sort of blow my own trumpet, but like I'm the first one in and the last one out of this whole co working space and you sort of roll around sometimes you're looking at people going like the. Are you actually doing.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And I don't, like, I don't mean to be wanky, but I just mean like I think if you want to succeed and again, we're nowhere near, you know, where we want to get to but like if you want to build something of value and you need to start something from scratch, like nothing's in your favor, everything's against you, the world is against you. People don't believe in you don't have any money, you don't have any time, you've got no customers, got no product. The only way you're gonna change, turn that around, in my experience is just by fucking getting in there and working hard and working harder than everyone else.

Exactly. You have to put in the reps, you have to put in the effort. And this reminds me of Ronnie Coleman where he's like, everybody want to be a bodybuilder. But don't nobody want to lift no heavy ass weights. Like getting in the gym sucks, lifting weights sucks. But if you want to be a bodybuilder, that's what, what you have to do day after day. You have to show up, you have to be consistent. You can't, you have to make a choice. Do you want to be average or do you want to win? That is the mentality that you have to have. And just you by putting in those hours and what you said earlier, you know, people are obsessed and there's this kind of like productivity porn that's going around where it's like I meditate for three minutes, then I go for a run, then I do this, then I do that and I process my email for 30 minutes and that's all horseshit. Right? If you're or I need this app or I need that put all that to the side. You don't necessarily need to fit more into your day. What you need to do is focus on the things that are most important. You need to 80, 20 everything. What is that 20% that's going to give you the 80% of the benefit. What is the most effective thing that you can work on? Start working on that because you'll have such a wide berth for efficiency which whereas if you're trying to do too many tasks, even though you're efficient and you're hammering through them, you're not going to get to your goal. So defining that goal and only working on activities that feed that goal and execute on it, you'll be so much more successful.

Brilliant point Bergs. That leads me into number four, the entrepreneur's playbook is do something that you love. I think this is one we can all probably resonate with. I've been very lucky and grateful for my entrepreneurial business career. I've always tended to do stuff that I've loved doing. I was a semi professional basketball referee for seven years. Absolutely professionals. I, I was, I was like basically doing enough for. But basically it wasn't a national league but it was the one below the national League. I say semi professional because it wasn't my full time job. I was doing other stuff but it could have been. And the point being is like I love the first six years but the seventh year I hate it. I was over it. I was done. I was burnt out and it was so soul destroying. I hated it. Didn't want to be there and it brings you down. What I love about what I'm doing now, like collective Shift. I love crypto. I love helping people, I love building businesses, I love working with cool people. Like everything I do, I love. And if I, you know, if I couldn't do what I was doing, I don't know what I'd be able to do. So I think working on shit that you love gets you through the tough times. I went through one of the hardest periods of my life when, you know, collective shift was about four months old, I had some problems with my ex business partner and you know, at three or four times over the course of, you know, a month, I was ready to give up. Like I was literally crying on the couch. It was, it was awful. There was so much that was going on, you know, lost money. It was just a nightmare. Right. But the thing that got me through was my love and honestly my love and passion for what I did and the people were able to help and that was the only reason I got through. And if we gave up at that point, there'd be, there'd be none of this been no bit of burgers, no collective shift. There's like so much stuff that's happened after that that wouldn't have happened. So I think doing something that you love is going to get you through all those ups and downs.

That's right. And that's something in normal work as well. But also in entrepreneurship especially, people see these kind of stories and they want to start a business or be an entrepreneur because they see the riches and they want to, you know, have an outsized exit for the effort that they put in. But the reality of running a startup is when it's midnight and you're all by yourself and you're running out of money and you're going to have to fire people. No one wants to do this, first of all. And then what is the thing that's going to get you through? It's not going to be, hey, there might be money on the other end, that's not going to matter. It's going to be the vision you have and the goal you want to execute on the change that you want to see in the world. Having that change and that being the most important thing for you to achieve will keep you going in those challenging times.

Yeah, that's a great point, Bergs. So number five is.

The reason why you're doing what you're doing. And this is a really deep question and something I think about a lot and something I haven't really spoken about too much. But I was listening to a podcast recently about, you know, the common. There's two common traits of a successful founder. And usually the founder either has one of these two characteristic traits. One is they have a massive ego. They're the most confident guy or gal. They don't give a flame for who. They just like, they're purebred salesmen, or they can just, you know, they can win over any client. They just go out and just make it happen, Just oozing with confidence. The other one is where I fit in. I think, hopefully I don't come off too arrogant. Is the other one is like proving.

Proving yourself to someone else, that inner competitive nature. And in my early times of, like, starting the other company, I was part of, like, I was always. I remember vividly, like, I was driving myself into the ground trying to prove myself to someone I didn't actually know. I said I was doing work with my therapist at the time because I was like, literally, like, I was. I was crook. I was, like, working ridiculous hours. I just could not stop because I was trying to beat someone. And like, we went so deep on this is like, I did not know who that person was. And it turned out to be myself. I was trying to prove to myself, yeah, man. I remember the time where it came up in my therapist session, and I, like, I actually had to take a moment. I felt like there was a. There was a hand going down my mouth and pulling out something that I'd never realized it was there before. And that was like, I wanted to prove to myself that I can win. And that mix with my sort of competitive nature is the fuel that I have. Now, whether that's good energy or bad energy, that's up for discussion. But, like, the thing that I think drives me the most is, like. And I get these times, folks. And I would like to hear your perspective. You know, we've had these moments before when I like, it's like a mix of motivation, anger, fire, like, empathy, but just also, like this, like, lion. Sometimes motivation comes inside me, sometimes where I just want to win so bad. And I get pretty aggressive in my mind. I'm not just like, everyone, Like, I'm gonna win. Like, everyone's gonna lose.

And I don't really think that, but, like, that's where it comes from, that inner fight to be like, no, I want to win so bad. That's what drives me. And again, whether or not it's good or bad energy is different. But, like, you know, I'd love to hear your perspective on that. And if you also have where you think you fit in that camp.

Oh, yeah. I've massively got the same thing, mate. And it's like. It's like that whole underdog thing, right, where people are against you. They're telling you you can't do it. And you're like, you not only am I gonna do this, I'm gonna win, and I'm gonna do it the best that's ever been done. So at my old job, when I worked at the hospital, that's exactly what we were about. We were. And our whole team was like this. We were absolutely underdogs. We were super understaffed. And everyone's like, you know, you can't do that research or you can't build that piece of tech, or you never be able to connect these things and integrate and then deploy it. And I'm like, you don't put limits on me and tell me what I can do. And I went away and I went and absolutely crushed it because that was the thing that fueled me. I know what I need to do to achieve those goals. And, yeah, I'm pushing uphill, but I am willing to do it. And I want to see all of their faces. I even remember being told no in all of those, like, top exec meetings, all this sort of nonsense. And I'm like, fine, I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to prove you all wrong. And that was essentially. That was me going to them and trying to get permission, right? And it was. It was really, really difficult. So I just thought this. I built it. They were willing to let me do that, and I built the demand side. So then all the clinicians, so all, you know, the doctors, nurses, physios, everyone, they started using the tech and they're just like, this is what we want. This is the new standard. You need to build it like this. And I just thought, fuck, yeah, it's that. It's that kind of rage and fire inside you where you're an underdog, you want to win, you want to prove to yourself, but also prove other people wrong. Yes.

Bang on. So for all those out there listening, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're trying to start a hobby like a starter startup, or you have a side hustle, I find that if you can tap into that energy and find what really fuels you and. And push that towards the thing you're trying to deliver on, that will get you through the hard times. That's what got me through living in Dubai for six weeks on my own, trying to raise capital. That got me through meeting 180 investors and having three VCs convert had 177. People say, no. Like, you just get up and you just drive on that fuel. Because if nothing else, you're not going to have that motivation and room, sort of like energy or memory about why you're doing what you're doing. Yeah. Because at the time you feel like giving up, it's just around the corner that you'll start to see success. And I can say that as a fact that that's happened with me in two businesses now at the time that you want to give up and it's all too hard and there's no way the business is going to work, it's just around the corner, I guarantee you'll start to find success.

Doesn't that happen with everything in life? This is in life that's like this Jack Butcher thing here, where it's a little graph and you just stop and you're like, this is pointless. And just after that point, there's like exponential growth.

Yes.

And people do this with podcasting, where they give up after six episodes. They do it when they go to the gym after two months or something. They're like, nah, I'm not getting the gains. But, you know, the gains happen like eight, nine, 10 months, two years. Like, you know when you really see those changes in your body and just a simple thing, like, it's. You don't get fat overnight. It's the same thing. You don't get fit overnight either. It takes time.

Yeah.

And really, it's just putting. Making those hard choices. Yeah. Because like, hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. And when you're talking about Dubai, I remember the day you landed and you gave me a call, and you're just like, this is. I don't want to be here. I think it was around the AFL finals time and usually got there on.

The grand final day, like, with all my buddies. And I was like, in this place. Didn't even know where I was.

You're in the middle of the desert. You got no idea what's going on. Usually you be with your mates down the pub having a good time. They're all texting you. You're in this random desert you have to go to these conferences with, and then you got translators there you never met. You have to hold an entire booth for like 10 hours a day, talk to all these people, work out how to speak to them, like culturally with the translator, then talk to all these investors just getting belted every day. And at the end of the day, you're in some random Hotel in the middle of the desert, you got no mates. It was just, it's horrendous. Like, who would want to do that? I remember you looking at me going, who would want to do this? And on top of that, we actually had challenges in the business and we had to let some staff go that were really, really good staff members. And we're just like, on top of everything going on, who the hell wants to do this? This is just like no human should have to go through this. It sucks.

That is a great point. Which leads us into. I don't even know where I'm up to. I think we're up to six or seven of the entrepreneurs playbook is making the difficult choices, making them early. Don't be soft. Hard choices equals easy life.

Easy. Hard life equals easy choices. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what this means is like, and for context, I am naturally.

I avoid having the hard conversation. I don't like it. I don't like confrontation. I will avoid a little cost. And at every point, I've avoided having the hard conversation. It gets worse in every, in every aspect. It always has one of the things I'm really trying to work on. And I know deep down, you know, my gut is usually spot on. You know, whether it be ex relationships, whether it be ex employees, whether it be a deal, whether it be, you know, whatever. Always, deep down my gut has told me the right thing. But doing the hard thing is a whole nother thing. And I empathize with anyone having to have hard choices. Hard conversations, it sucks. Hats out to everyone that's doing, making them, whether you, you're a manager, family conversations. Hard is just like, it's just not fun. Yeah. But on the other side, Burges, after you make that hard decision, you make that hard choice, you do the hard thing. In every single circumstance. Life has gotten so much better.

Yeah.

In my experience.

Oh. And even with, with us in the business, like, we had a hard choice to make early on and I think we only made like half the choice and we should have made the full choice and we thought things were okay, but then we ended up suffering even longer. And if we would have made that choice earlier, we would been so much further ahead. But because of. I don't even know what to call it, maybe our feelings and us not wanting to make that hard choice because it was so difficult and it's so uncomfortable, we only did the half choice, not the full choice. And yeah, that was. That came back to bite us.

Yeah, totally. And I have a lot of conversation. We're not perfect, you know, by any stretch. And I will still continue to struggle to have these hard conversations. But I think once you go through it and you do those conversations, you realize you needed to do them. It gets. You learn and you move forward. And I had a conversation with another founder this morning who is having some troubles with or you know, whether or not troubles or some complications with their co founders. And yeah, they haven't had that. They haven't had the hard conversation. You know, it, it's. And I, and I've been there. You just go for it and just figure it out later because what's, what's something of nothing if you don't have anything. But then as you, the longer you get, the more you build, the different, you know, feelings people are having. People think they're on different levels. It becomes really complicated. It becomes really hard to deal with. So, yeah, I'd urge you, if you're starting a new business, if you've got business partners, you've got whatever. Although you might not think it, I've. I 100 from 100% from experience can tell you have something written down, have a contract, speak with your lawyer, have the difficult conversation early because I guarantee it will save you if things go sour. And it also set you up for success. You don't need to have an even harder conversation down the line.

Yeah, there's. I saw an interesting tweet where it was like, trust your. Or have the relationship with your co founders like you trust them completely, but write your contracts like you don't trust them. And I thought that was great.

That's perfect.

With us at the, we have a weekly strategic meeting and at the start of that, I've put a thing at the top that says, are there any elephants in the room? We need to point to them. We need to kill them straight away. Because even though there's a little thing like you just go on with your normal meeting, you go through the motions, you talk about stuff, you be strategic. But there can be little things that are bothering you. And the earlier you bring them up, the easier they are to fix and kill, the longer they fester, they get stuck in your mind, they keep recurring. You need to bring those up, even if they're the smallest things and they can seem awkward and weird. Some of them are really difficult conversations that you just need to have. No one wants to have them. This is what leadership is, right? It's a series of conversations that no one wants to have.

That's perfect, man.

Yeah.

Perfect, perfect, perfect. So last but not least, the last of the entrepreneurs playbook that we've put together. Hopefully you've liked them so far. Last but not least is storytelling.

And I like the idea of storytelling. It's something that I didn't have in my.

Arsenal, my toolbox. And I'm still working on it. Something that's a goal of mine to work on this year. But storytelling has helped me a lot. Storytelling can help you in a bunch of different ways. And Berg's got a lot of thoughts on this. But from my experience, storytelling can captivate someone who doesn't know you at all and take them from nobody to friend, nobody to a customer, nobody to a co owner. It can explain things in much better ways. It can engage people much better ways. It creates better content. People can relate with storytelling. And I think that's one of the things that was was key in us being able to raise capital last year was my storytelling. Because I started to raise capital, tried to without storytelling. It failed miserably. As soon as I added it in, people were willing to talk to me and they were willing to listen. So storytelling is a big one. Burgs now you have thoughts on this.

Storytelling is everything you need. You need a chief storyteller in your business. And this is just how humans connect. You think about back in the day, what would you do? Sit around a campfire and you tell stories? It's how you get to know people. It's how things are passed on through time. It's just, it's a fundamental human function. And you think about the pitch you were talking about. You go through, you do a pitch. Great. I've seen a million of them. But if you start talking about your history, your story, what fires you up, where you want to get to, it puts people in a completely different space. And as much as people don't like to admit it, emotion is what drives our decision making. You look at any decision science, we are not perfect, rational robots. We don't do that. You need to activate that emotive part of the brain. And if I can connect with you as a human and I could be like, oh, that guy feels that. That's amazing. He must be like really getting after. Oh, I've felt like that before. Now I understand you at a deeper level. And this is incredibly powerful. And I've had probably over a decade of one of the best storytellers and this was Fiona Wood at my old job. So she's a plastic surgeon, invented spray on skin. And even just being a woman, incredible. Like she's the first female plastic surgeon in wa. You can't even imagine how incredibly hard that was. I remember the second female plastic surgeon where she was telling me a story and she went to a conference, was presenting on this new thing. She'd just done her PhD. It was amazing. Audience is just filled with men and. And then it comes to question time and hand went up. The first question was, what are you doing for dinner? Like just the amount of like disrespect in that area. So you think about this. You have a woman in a man dom, male dominated area and how do you succeed? Obviously she put in all the reps, she did everything. She was just crazy. But it was her storytelling ability and ability to connect with other humans. And when she would get to it, people would just absolutely captivated, like listening to her stories, just about, you know, some things in her life or her surgical journey. But the main thing was where she wanted to get to in the future, like how we're going to use technology, science, AI, like just making this really like visceral future about how we can heal human beings. It was incredible. And just having even like sayings of like, you know, every intervention from the point of injury affects a scar worn for life or the quality of the scar must be worth the pain, pain of survival. Like just those two things. Like people can see where they fit in with that vision. And then coupled with, you know, a talk about, like she does motivational talks and about, you know, how to achieve greatness and just putting in the effort every day and what it actually takes. And that's actually self selecting. Like people want to be that, they want to be part of that team, they want to be high performers. And being around that and seeing what it can do like this, this is one of the key skills for transformational leaderships. Transformational leadership. If you want to get from, let's say a 1 out of 10 to like a 8 out of 10, this is what you need to really drive that team. Those stories that stick in your head. And if, if people think back in their lives as well, it might not necessarily be stories, but it'll be shared challenges that you've overcome as a business where you thought you were going to die and you all got together or you had a crazy deadline and everyone worked away weekends and you achieved it. And then you go, you tell those stories like you remember them. You're like, hey, remember that, like you face the next challenge. You're like, yeah, but remember that time we all banded together and we achieved this thing and it was just absolutely amazing. Remember how we felt. We can absolutely do that again. These are just those things that just drive performance and bond humans together. Storytelling is absolutely everything.

Brilliant. So that's our entrepreneur real.

Oh, hold on, mate, hold on. We've got a book. Got a book, mate. So yeah, got a book. So this book is called Storyworthy by Matthew Dix and I've only read about 30 or 40 pages in it and it is cracking. Like he teaches you how to put a story together. He's a 36 time moth story slam champion and five time grand slam champion. And storytelling is not just for business. It can be telling people about your life. It can be when you're on a date, it can be through. If you're doing a negotiation. Storytelling is absolutely everything. It takes you from just telling people what you've done or your point of view to them really understanding and feeling what you're about. And storytelling helps a lot in things like persuasion as well. If you want to get someone across to your point of view, highly recommend doing this. And if you need to grab a book, story worthy by Matthew Dix.

Brilliant man. So that's our. I think there's other seven or eight there. I'm not sure how many of the Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurs playbook in scaling up what it Takes to Win and Lessons from Founders Again, Bergs and Icon is a collective shift. We're building scale ups. We've been doing it for a long time and that was our lessons. By no means are we experts. Take or leave it. Agree, disagree. That's our personal opinion. Hopefully that's helped and yeah, that's basically it. So before we wrap up though, as always, we have our as our personal growth episode, we do a meme of the week which Burks always finds a cracking meme for us. We have meal of the week. So our best meal of the week where we give it a bit of review. We love our food. We throw that in as well. Plus Bergs and I also try and keep each other accountable on the podcast. So I'm going to give a bit of an update on my gym. My goal was to try and get to the gym five days a week and also my social media and ramping that up and also Bergs has been trying to dunk so we're gonna try and get into that right now.

All right, let's do it, mate.

Bergs, I'm busting for a pierce. All right, can you give me one minute and then we'll do.

Sure.

Thanks, man.