060: Ronen Gafni - What If Business Didn't Have to Be So Hard?

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All right. What if business didn't have to be so hard? What if it actually just was a vehicle for your self expression, your achievement in life? What if we could make it more playful and more fun and produce more results? That's what today's show is all about, giving you access to that kind of a world, that kind of a business. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling of Business podcast. I'm your host and business growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show today we have Ronan Goffney. Ronan's the founder and game creator for Fresh Biz Global and he's the co author of a book called the New Entrepreneurs with a Z. And Ronan's whole thing is out to change the game of business and make it a whole different kind of. So you'll get a sense of that as we go through it. But I think it's going to free you up in some ways. Ronan joins us today from Israel. I'm in the San Francisco Bay area and I'm excited to have him on because I have some personal background. I lived in Israel a bit and studied there as a kid. In fact, one of my brothers was born there. So I'm so happy to connect with you today. Welcome to the show, Ronan.

Thank you, Bill. It's a great pleasure to be on the show.

So this is super cool and we're connected remotely. I know some of your teams connected remotely. We see this more and more. I think lots of things are changing in business and the way relate to business is also something to change. Folks who've been in workshops or clients of mine have with me know that I often talk about business being a game and we should play with it more. So I think folks will get a lot out of this. I'm very excited to have you on the show. Take us back A little bit. Talk to us about how you got started. Where did this notion of it being a game and playful all get started for you?

Well, I think that I always treated life and business as a game. It was always something that I could have kind of take a step forward and zoom out and see the context of the game that we can put business in. So I think that my first experience, I had some. Some kind of playing with it while I was a teenager. But I think the really real life experience, the first one that I had was when I went to the army in Israel. So I was a software programmer in the army. So I kind of had. Was kind of a desk job and I had some free time in the afternoon and I started trading on the stock market with a friend of mine. And I think that was like the first time that we actually treated business as a game. We treated this entire thing of trading on the stock market as two soldiers. Back then, our monthly salary was something around like $100 and we got from the bank credit of about $100,000 to play on the stock market. So I think the only way to do it is if you treat it as a game. Otherwise it just like paralyzes you. You can't really do anything if you think that this is like real money. So it was, it was really fun. We really enjoyed it. By the time we had to already get dismissed from the army, there was a big fall in the stock market in Israel and I kind of started my civil life with a big debt. But already at this point, I understood that this is only a game and you win some, you lose some. And everything I did from this point, from that point on was really keep treating business and initiatives and entrepreneurship as a game. So I think I already had this approach, but I actually, I really got to experience it through the stock market and then through some businesses.

For me, the thing that always landed was the notion that at the end of the day, right, we all kind of go out the same way, right? At some point, so far as we know, like, life ends for us someday and then there's a funeral for us and everybody gathers around, they say nice things and then they go have lunch. And when I sort of got the absurdity of that, I was in a self development course and I got the absurdity of all of that. And the invitation then of the person leading the course was listening, lighten up, play with it a little bit. You've got one shot at this thing. Like, have some fun with it. So I hear that also in that Insight that you had at that point?

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I think one more thing about business as a game is it's not just that you should take it lightly because it's a game. I think the game aspect is also understanding that there is. There's a game mechanism into the system that is called business. And the way we play it is just because someone structured the game in a specific way. So someone told us what winning looks like and how you win points and they call the points money. And someone just structured the game of business. Once you understand it, you really start to feel that, okay, I can play with it. If I don't like something about the way business is conducted, I can change the game. It's my game. I have some freedom within the global game of business on how I would like to play my specific game. So that gives you a lot of freedom, especially the way you think about how you structure the business, how you price everything instead of taking everything. This is the only way can be done because this is the only way it was. It has been done for the past 50 years. That's no longer relevant. You can really do. Yeah, you can really do new things. You can have new business models, you can have different products. You can price things like no one else price it before. You can. You can restructure the game. Basically.

I think a lot of people can get the notion that there's a bit of a game at play, right? And. But then we get into two things. Our competitive spirit, which sometimes is like a positive competitive thing and sometimes it's fairly negative. And then there's the notion of winner, loser, and then our own personal feelings, emotions, thoughts about success and failure and we don't want to be the loser. And then we worry about the stakes and then we have all our history and all that. And then pretty soon the game is not so playful anymore. It's maybe still conceptually a game, but there's not a lot of freedom in it. There's survival.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that, as you said, a lot of this has to do with the competitive mindset that we grew thinking that business is. Yes, but this is, this is so far from the truth. It's such a deep, limited belief that we've been educated to believe in. But this is completely irrelevant because business is, you know, is not a zero sum game. It's not that, you know, if I make more money, then you have less money. If you paid me for my services, then now I have your money. It doesn't work that way. Economy doesn't work that way. It really works in a way that whenever you pay me for my products or my services, that means I generated new value into the ever expanding pie of economy. And everyone has more now. And this notion of ever expanding pie which the numbers show, clearly the world GDP grew from 1960s till today by 8 times. This is amazing. Everyone has so much more than everyone had 50 years ago. We just don't see it that way. So we think it's a competition and that really wastes a lot of energy. We waste so much energy on fighting and competing. When the economy around us is ever growing, we just don't stop to see it.

Absolutely. How did the current business evolve? What do you guys do? Give us a little bit of that.

So the business started about seven years ago once the fresh breast game was ready. Took me about six years to design it and test it and redesign it and everything. The business itself started like seven years ago. And what we do is we run game based workshops that develops entrepreneurial mindset, developed a different mindset that is more suitable to today's economy, to the shared economy. So through the game and through the workshops, we take people through the process of becoming more collaborative, more creative, more proactive, all those different skills that we really need nowadays to be successful. So at this point we have partners in over 20 countries. We already took over 60,000 people through our workshops. Can be anything from three hours to four days events and really anyone from MBA students to small business owners to business executives in top companies. So this is where the business is now.

So you were sharing with me before about a hotel chain that applied this and had some, why don't you give a little picture of that? So we bring this, make this real for people.

So that's really an interesting story because we've been called in by, by an hotel chain here in Israel. And you know how the tourist industry is like, it's always like a race to the bottom regarding pricing and if, if you've been to the, to Tel Aviv. So there is like about, I don't know, 20 different hotels on a very short beach line. And usually they just compete with each other over pricing because what else do you have to offer when all the buildings looks pretty much the same? So we took like 50 hotel managers with a basic workshop of the three hours and they played the game and they got to get engaged with business opportunities and what we call action cards, which are your unique abilities in the game, collaboration and things like that. And at the end of the game the HR Manager just asked all of them to make a list of new ideas based on those new skills and the new perspective that they got. And they got about 50 ideas. They started implementing one of them. And that idea alone generated over half a million dollars in profit every year since then, which is like four years ago or so. What this manager of the hotels did was something really simple. Instead of like starting looking outside and just like seeing what the competitors are doing and how we can drop the prices even more, he really spotted sections of the hotel. Just went through the hotel with fresh eyes and spotted some rooms that were, you know, kept for staff residents. But they were like such awesome real estate of the hotel. Just by the pool and everything. Historically, all the stuff stayed there. So we simply took those people, moved them to a different hotel that they had in the same city, and really renovated the entire. All the rooms, created new suites and. And created really golden real estate for the hotel, kind of something out of nothing. And that really opened the eyes for the entire chain to really see that there are so many different resources and opportunities really at our fingertips that we usually don't see because we are so occupied with competing that we don't really see the presence and the abilities that we already have when we just look inside our business instead of outside. And this was a really amazing story. So I think they got their investment back. But that's really a nice example to see what's possible when you change the perspective a bit, you know, it brings.

To mind the idea of winning in a different context. Right. I'm an expert triathlete. Right? An expert triathlete. And I've never finished in the top 10. I've never even come close. Most of the time, I'm in the bottom half of the people finishing a triathlon. So why do I say I'm an expert triathlete? Well, I've done like 40 of these events, and so I'm really good at training for them, completing them, and improving my own performance in them. Right? The performance, the winning is all relative to myself. I'm enjoying the experience, I'm developing myself and so on, but I've never even tried or thought about winning them. Right. It's just something that I've enjoyed doing over the time. And I think that that like. So I'll play with different aspects of it. I'll try on different things, but I'm working. It's a game with the man in the mirror, right? With myself, not with everybody else in the race. Everybody else in the race kind of makes it Fun creates an environment. But I'm not really racing them.

Yeah, I think business is exactly the same.

Yeah, interesting.

At the end of the day, you're not competing anyone else, you only, it's only a game of self expression. And you can also find it in the, in the fresh piece game. The game is, is not a game of competition. We grew up playing so many games of competition that we think that winning is by someone else losing. And I think there is like a total difference between competition and achievements. We are all achievers. We all want to be a better version of ourselves. We all want to be able to express ourselves on a higher level. I think that the sense of competition, having to beat someone else on your way to the finish line, this is the wrong concept. This is a concept that we've been taught just to grab our attention from actually, you know, playing our own game. But I think life, life is the ultimate time based game. You want to get to the winner's lot whatever winning means to you before the time is up. And you'll never know when the time is up. And it's not about winning someone else. I know that some people think that competition is a great motivation. I think it can serve as a great motivation only if you push yourself to be better. But we have a saying fresh bit that says that competition is for amateurs. Because if you need someone else to do better job than you in order for you to push yourself, then you're already starting from an amateur point of view. Because if you are in the game of self expression and you are in the game of providing better services and better products to your customers, you don't need anyone else to do better than you to push you forward. It's a self generator activity. You want to be better, you want to come up with better products, you want to express yourself on a higher level so you don't need anyone else running faster than you. So you can start running faster. So sometimes it's good. It's like, it's called, you know, like author's envy. It's like someone does really good work, it inspires you. But you don't need to beat anyone else or win anyone else or make someone else lose. You just play your own game, you do your own thing. And if you're good and talented, then you succeed. There's enough for everyone.

Well, let me see if I'm getting the idea both for myself and for our listeners. So years ago I used to lead these workshops, leadership training workshops. And in leading them, right, we were out to elevate the leadership of every participant. And not everybody succeeded in these things. So I was doing this, leading these personal development workshops, and. And I used to lead alongside. In some of the special sessions. I used to lead alongside a couple of other people. One guy in particular I was always competitive with. I would always be like, okay, how did you do tonight? How did I do tonight? And we would compare back and forth, but we were collectively in the same game of improving the lives, of making a difference in the lives of the people, everyone that we interacted with. So some nights I would win against him, other nights he would win against me, and I enjoyed when I beat him and all that. But. But the competition and the notion was all kind of made up, and we were collectively working to improve the whole thing. I had somebody recently doing a similar thing, reaching out to me to say, should you be my coach or should this other guy be my coach? And I said, you know, there's a lot of coaches. There's a lot of clients out there. I'm about full right now. You should not choose the coach based on my price, or you should think about which one of us is a fit. Which one do you want to play with as you grow your business, who's going to be your partner in the whole thing? So is that what you're talking about, where there's a notion of we can be playful, we can't have a competitive spirit, but it's against a sort of a bigger game of something that's made up that we can still stay light with? Yeah.

You know, definitely you can make up this game of competition if that drives you forward and makes you become a better coach. That's for sure. I think it's just the question is, are you losing energy because of that competition or that gives you motivation?

Absolutely. In that case, it was fun. Yeah.

So if it's fun. So it's your own little game that you created to really bring more value to more people. But you can see so many people losing so much energy, you know, coming back from a day at the office exhausted because they have to, like, fight all day and, you know, conquer the market and take over the competition. Like, the language that we use in business is sometimes so warlike. That is crazy. We spend so much time and energy, like, trying to win someone over that it's. This is a crazy part. If you use it as a fun game to motivate yourself. Cool. Awesome. This is just another form of. Really getting the best version of yourself so you can play against someone.

I think about Some of my most profitable, most successful clients and even some of my own moments, and they're moments where we differentiated sufficiently that we weren't. We weren't really directly competing with anyone. We sort of stood in our own little playground doing our own thing. I can think of a friend who had a very common kind of a business, and she was in an accelerator program that I ran and she did a web development business. Then she changed to a behavioral sciences company. She shifted the kind of game she was playing. Everything else changed. I have another client who I had on the show once, and he, he does a kind of mechanic service. And you know, it's a terrific business, but it's because he does a kind of auto mechanic work that has very little. There's some competition, but very little competition. And so he's serving in unserved areas, found a little piece to do something better with. And those seem like the moments where we're in, say, Blue Ocean. We're not in Red Ocean, if you know that reference in that world of strategy. Right?

Definitely. Yeah. I think that, you know, whenever someone asks us or our competitors in the market, we also always say that, first of all, we don't know, we don't care, and we don't think that we have competitors. Not because there aren't any other coaches or training companies out there, is because that what we do. Yeah, there are a few. But you know, I always look at this that, first of all, people ask me, you're not afraid that someone will copy your game and it will do the same thing or whatever? I said, look, even if you copy the game, you can't copy everything I do. You can't copy the game and the book and the workshops and our global experiences and the team that we have and the content that we develop. You can't copy all of that. So as long as you keep being really unique, really bringing yourself and your uniqueness into the market, no one can copy you. And sure, maybe I can compete on a specific deal. There is one company looking for an activity on December 5th, and maybe I'll get it, maybe someone else get it. But when I look at the entire business, no one is competing over my business because really, there is an endless market out there. There are trillions of dollars out there. There are 7 billion people out there. I can never serve everyone. It's. It's never a game of, can I get more of someone else? It's just like how good I am to actually get something of the market. And that's about me and My abilities and my marketing and my uniqueness. And it has nothing to do with someone else. No. It's like finding a wife. Does 3.5 billion people out there reach our potential? I'm not competing with someone, just looking for the one who's, like, my best fit. So I see customers at the same thing. There's so many out there. Any way you can serve everyone. So just, like, focus on what makes you unique. Talk to those people. Those who really like you will come in there and walk with you, I think.

You know, the other night, I was at dinner with my wife, and we were talking about a friend of ours who's having a very difficult set of life circumstances. And we were looking at the whole thing and, you know, how could we be of help and. And understanding and sharing what we knew about it? And a dinner conversation with your wife? And then we both sort of looked at each other, and we were like, oh, thank God. We are not having that kind of drama right now. But there have been plenty of moments where I've had some big drama in my life, some unfortunate times. Right. So we were being thankful in that moment that we didn't have those particular circumstances right now. And we're like, oh, wow, we're so fortunate. We have all these good things going on right now, but not necessarily always and maybe not forever. And we recognize both that. And then we're like, oh, yeah. And think about all those other times where we look at another friend with jealousy or envy over their house or their life or something like that, you know, everywhere around us, all the time, we can think of people who are more successful, more attractive, more fit, getting better sex, having more money. You know, all of these. We can find people that make us feel stupid, inadequate, unattractive, unsuccessful. Or we can look around and we can find things to be grateful for and fortunate for. And most of us have plenty of both category. And yet we choose to focus on one or the other. Right. And unfortunately, we too often choose to find the things that make us feel lacking in some way, rather than looking at the world, as you're pointing out, from a place of abundance. It's a big, huge world of opportunity, of money, of people, of things like that to go play with. Right.

Yeah, definitely. It really is.

Yeah. So what are some of the things that people do? Or can you give us a taste of what happens in the workshop, how that goes? I know we've been talking all around it and some of the core ideas.

Yeah. So, you know, most of what's going on in the basic workshop is people playing the game. And usually when people play the game for the first time, the game serves as a really good reflection on how they play life. Because the amazing thing about a game is that you can't cheat in a game. I mean, in the sense of cheating who you are, you can only be yourself. So for example, if you're very competitive, you'll see it in the game. If you can't see opportunities, then you cannot hide it. You cannot play like someone who actually sees opportunities. If you don't, or if you're very careful for your money, then you play like this. So you get a really deep reflection on how you play business and life. And people really find themselves sometimes really see things that they don't like to see about themselves, like really being skills full for money and not creative enough and things like that. And sometimes people really reveal awesome things about themselves, like they had no sense that they are so good in communication, or they had no sense that they really understand business. We see a lot of people sitting to play the game and they already in advance say, I don't like games, I don't understand business, I don't like money. And they start finding out that they actually understand money and they actually understand business just in the form that it was presented to them in the past. They thought they are not good at it. So that's really interesting. They really get to discover who they are just by playing the game. And when you play the game and you go through an experience and then we get to the debriefing part, which is how you can take the insights from the game and implement it into your life and your business, then people at this point are way more open to listen to it. Because it's not just like a talk that you can say, okay, okay, I get it. It's like you just experienced something which is very deep. It's under your skin. You already know that. No, you could have been a better collaborator, but you didn't. This is why you lost the game. Or you know that if you'll be able to train your brain to see opportunities and act on them, you can get so much more in life. So after the part of the game we do the debriefing and really show people how the different dimensions of the game presents different dimensions in life and just show them what we call multidimensional thinking. How you can think in a different way that opens up, really expand the view and expand the pie for you. And I think that like the last part really shows people that really today in the new shared economy that we live in, as we said before, there are so many resources out there, so many opportunities, so many potential partners, like really everything is available. We just need to rewire our brain to the one that really see and act on all those opportunities. And that's really what happens in the basic workshop and in the longer workshops, especially in the, what we call the global experiences where we take business owners through four day experience. Then we really go deep into what's possible in, in today's world it can be anything from business architecture and new business models to really being able to redesign your business and do really crazy things with what's possible nowadays, how you can do better marketing, how you can do smarter collaborations. Because we are really at a phase that we are reinventing business at the moment. All those Airbnbs and Ubers and they reinventing business. And that's like a perfect timing to just look at your business and say, okay, if I have to start from scratch, if I put all the old school methodologies and structures aside and I have to redesign my business, how would I do that? And that gives people a lot of freedom to really have a fresh look and then, and do something different and really succeed with it. So that's. Do you know what happens in the workshops?

Do you know Salim's book, the Exponential Organization or the Singularity University?

Yeah, yeah.

It's really speaking to a lot of what you're talking about where you take in your long form workshop and expand out. So I, I think we packed in a lot of stuff for, for the show. I want to point people to a couple things for you. Wrap it up. So once again we've underscored the power of playing with something, of modeling something. The insights that arise from that when we role play, when we model, when we simulate, when we do practical exercises, all of these things help us to see things about ourselves and our way of doing things that are really helpful and can expand our approaches. And I hear that going on in, in your, in your game, in your workshops. Ronan's website is freshbizgame.com freshbiz bizgame.com and he's also got a free copy of the book for our listeners, the New Entrepreneurs. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes here. For the listeners so that you can go link to that. It's too long to reproduce, right? It's like Upvir AL29934 or 29334 Freebook. But we'll put all that in the show notes so they can get to it and that's terrific. Of course, as always, you can go to scalingupbusiness.com and subscribe to get our weekly updates with these shows, other tips and tricks and things like that that we've got for you every week. Just the really useful stuff that you can put right to work in your own business and in developing your own leadership style. That's@scalingupbusiness.com Go there. Subscribe. You can also get our free ebook on how to start to run your team meetings and get your strategy growing up once again. It's been a pleasure to have you on the show today and I want to thank all our listeners for tuning in. Come back, see us next week. Talk to you later. Thanks. Thanks Ronan.

Thank you Bill. Thank you very much.

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