Pod O’Sullivan on the Business of Building a Practice that Lasts (and so much more!)

Hello and welcome to The Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host Ellie Scarf, and before we dive into this fantastic interview with Pod O'Sullivan, I just wanted to let you know that if you are interested in what we talk about in this podcast, or you are wanting to talk about commercialization as a coach, I will be in Sydney for an in-person event on Thursday, the 9th of July, and I'll be on a panel with Pod, who you'll hear from just momentarily, as well as Susie Skinner and Janet Horton. And in that panel, we're going to be discussing everything kicking off a coaching business, commercializing coaching offerings. We will be there to answer all of your questions about how we make our businesses successful, sustainable, and flexible as coaches. So I would love to see you there if you are in Sydney on the 9th of July. To find out more about it, you can head over to to the USCMA webpage. And USCMA is the University of Sydney Coaching and Mentoring Alumni, and they have their events page at uscma.org.au/events, and you will see, uh, that event listed there. It's called How Coaches Commercialize Their Offering, um, with Pod O'Sullivan, Susie Skinner, Janet Horton, and myself. It is going to be held on Thursday, the 9th of July, from 6:30 PM to 9 PM at Club York in the CBD in Sydney. And if you are an USKMA member, it is $20 to attend, and if you are not a member, it is $30. So I would love to see you there if you have a chance to come along. Open to everybody. With that, I'm going to now move on to the actual episode. See you next week. Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host Ellie Scarf, and I am beyond delighted to be here with Pod O'Sullivan. So Pod wears many hats. I'm going to share a few of those before I get him to introduce himself. So Pod is a coach, a team coach, an author, an international leadership specialist, a business owner, an academic, the host of not one but three podcasts including The Leadership Diet, Don't Let the Old Man In, and the University of Sydney Coaching and Mentoring Society podcast. And he told me that he and his son are training for a HIROX event, so I'm pretty sure that means he's also an athlete. Welcome, Pod. It is wonderful to have you. So that's my introduction. How do you introduce yourself?

An athlete? I would never start with that. Let me tell you.

I think you need to own it.

An athlete in development, we might say at Approach. But thank you. Yes. My name is Podgy, but everyone calls me Pod. So let's go with that.

Brilliant. And so one of the things I talk about a lot with on the podcast and with my clients is this idea of an elevator pitch. What's yours?

Great question. And I have to say it's changed a lot over the years. And today, if I am in my exec coaching world, 'cause my world is divided between exec coaching, top teaming, CEO specialists is one part of my world, and the other part of my world is in podcasting and media. So that's a very different elevator pitch. But if I'm talking to a new organization or a new prospective client, I tend to talk about two things. I work with newly appointed CEOs to help them become as effective as quick as they can. That's one elevator pitch. And I work with top leadership teams to help them overcome, to move beyond good to great.

I love it. I love it. And that's super clear, which I think is really helpful. So would you kick us off by telling us a little bit about your corporate to coach story? How did you get into this work?

I'm one of these people who keeps reinventing themselves, and I have done that several times over 3 or 4 decades. But my career started in healthcare originally. So my very first career was intensive care nursing, a whole long, long time ago. I used to work at a place called the Royal Brompton in the UK, which was the leading— it's the national heart hospital in the UK. So a lot of bypass surgery, a lot of heart transplant type surgery. And then when I came to Australia in 1995, I kind of went from that kind of role. I continued that role for a while, but moved into hospital leadership and hospital management. Then I moved into my first major career change, which was into sales and marketing for a medical device company, which I really loved. That's kind of where I realized commerciality and I were born to be together. And I did that for a number of years. I was selling a German company called Carl Storz, who are one of the top 2 in the world in terms of what's called endoscopy equipment. So basically any kind of surgical implant cameras that most surgeons would use for a range of urology and gynecology and all range of I did that for a number of years, loved it. But I also realized along the way that I actually prefer services to physical products. And I was, as part of my sales and marketing role, I was going to a range of different sales training and conferences, etc. And I realized actually I like the ability to customize what I do to whatever the customer needs. And when you have a physical product, that's impossible. And so I ended up moving sideways into a very different role. I moved into recruitment, which then became a headhunter. For the medical pharmaceutical industry. And I did that for a number of years, which is, other than my current role, is probably my most favorite role in my life, is the idea of helping people to find the right or next best role than the one they're currently in. And I know we probably talk about sales and commerciality later on, but, and that's where I learned how to sell and the importance of selling. Because if you think about it, recruitment is the only job in the world where the product that the product is the candidate who's looking for a job. The product can say no to the buyer, which is the employer.

And so the way to think about it, yeah, yeah.

So the recruitment person, they've got to sell themselves to the employer to begin with. They actually get the gig, then they've got to sell to all these candidates, then they've got to sell the candidates back to the employer, and they've got to sell the job offer back to their candidates, and the candidate can say no. Yeah, and so I learned a lot about sales in that regard. I learned a lot about psychology and about how people make decisions irrationally, and in that regard. But when I was doing that role, I did an MBA with a major in leadership at the time, and which I was really enjoying. And because I was fascinated with this idea of, I'm interviewing 20 to 30 people a week, how come these 2 are the best? Like, what is it that they're doing relative to the other 20? And when I did my MBA, I stumbled across this new emerging idea called executive coaching that was just starting to be talked about, and I was quite fascinated by that idea. And so I went away and I hired my own coach for myself, which was a great experience. And then later on, I hired the same coach again, and it wasn't quite as good experience for a range of different reasons. But at that stage, by the time I'd done that, and University of Sydney were about to start their, master's degree. And I got involved in that maybe 2 or 3 years after they, it started and went from there.

Amazing. Amazing. Do you think that there was, do you think it was the experiences you had or a personality driver that was always there that made you well suited to this work?

Both. And I would say a third one, which as I say this, it sounds embarrassing, but I will say it in a second. And there's the, I think most coaches come into coaching because they are either attracted to helping people, or if they're coming out of some previous career, they realize that the parts of the previous career they enjoy the most are the parts where they were mentoring, developing—

yes—

people or their team, etc. So that suggests there's either a personality type or a, a preference for kind of work that already exists. So that's definitely true. I've founded and I've led different businesses, and I've supported hundreds of CEOs and leadership teams now at this stage. And I know for me, I actually equally enjoy both. I like leading my own team in business. I also like sitting on the sidelines with many other teams and businesses. So I do like both. And exec coaching slash executive consulting of any kind allows you to sit on the sidelines of lots of businesses. And therefore the satisfaction comes not just from seeing your own business grow, but you can see other businesses and teams grow. So I definitely drive a lot of satisfaction from both of those. But the embarrassing admission here, Ellie, is I do remember— I would have been 30 or something like that— seeing an Australian Fin Review article about jobs of the future. And they had little cartoon— like, I can visually see these cartoons— the cartoons depicting those future jobs. And they had an executive coach, and the guy was wearing a black turtleneck turtleneck, and he had like an iPad in his hand, and it was like $200,000 to $300,000 a year was the thing. I thought, I want to be the guy who gets to wear turtlenecks, and that looks cool. So how do I get there? So it was a mixture of everything.

Oh, I love that so much. Um, and I can envision that. And, you know, you say that with a, like, a bit of a, you know, tongue-in-cheek, but actually there's— we've got to see ourselves in it, and we've got to think it's cool, and we've got to, you know, have that vision. Otherwise, doing this is really hard. Hard, right, in the early days.

It's really hard every day. Yeah. But in any career that you want to work hard at and succeed at means by nature you're putting in more effort than other people are. So by definition, if you want to succeed in whatever, whatever your definition of success is, if you want to succeed in something, it requires more effort than the average person is going to give. And so if you want to succeed in executive coaching or whatever kind of coaching, I mean, I use executive coaching just because that's what I do, but if you use the word coaching this broader sense, assuming that you are, you know, you've got your own little business or you're part of a group of people or you develop a firm down the track, whatever version of it it is that you do, it requires effort. And it's— and this is where I think a lot of the coach training programs don't serve well. And I understand why this is the case because it's the same in any kind of other discipline. I mean, I used to teach at City Business School on the Master's of Coaching degree there. And we did this a little bit, but it was only a little bit, and we did it more than everybody else. Let's try to give the commercial reality of what it's like after you graduate. Yeah. If you could turn up every single day into your coaching room or coaching video, whatever you do, and people just turn up magically and you just coach them, well, that is brilliant. But the world doesn't work like that, you know, in the same way as if you have your accounting business or you're a dentist or whatever you do. People just don't turn up and knock on your door every single day. There's other parts to the work than just the actual practitioner part of the work.

Absolutely.

And I know that's a lot of what you do is in that space, is trying to help people get their mind around that. The way I think about it is, and I've always thought about this, um, is that the practitioner part of my job, the— when I'm actually in the room with my client or clients if it's a team, that's half my time. Yeah, the rest of my time is everything else. Yeah.

And I love that.

And I've got— and you've got to spend— and then the early days, of course, the other, the other half is probably two-thirds of your time as you're—

yes.

Yeah.

When did you first realize that, Paul? Like, was it something that you knew going into business, like when you first, you know, hung up your shingle, or was this something that you had like that? I know a lot of coaches have a bit of a, you know, a reality slap moment where they're like, Oh, I don't get to just coach.

Yeah.

I have to do—

my entry point was medical product sales.

Yeah.

And then service sales being in recruitment and headhunting. And there was a transition actually in between that and full-time one-on-one coaching. When I left the recruitment industry, I actually set up a business with a colleague, which was like an outplacement or career transitions type of service. Now, when you look back in hindsight, that was a very logical thing to do, given that we went from helping people to find jobs and recruitment to now helping you overcome the redundancy part and then get ready for your next step. So it's a very logical move there. And but when we were in that space, the part that I prefer the most was the one-on-one coaching part. But in that little company we had, so it was a two-person startup, um, was really hard to get clients because we were working up against very established multinational providers, but trying to find a way of being niche or different was just really hard. And we had both left our full-time jobs to do that, right? So, um, it was a matter of survival, really. And my— what I say to people these days when people ask me about the question you're just asking is try to have 6 months of income put aside to allow you some bandwidth to make mistakes, to learn how to sell, to learn what you like selling.

Yeah.

And because, you know, just because you're a trained coach doesn't mean you like all the aspects of coaching. Like, I, I look back now with hilarity thinking how stupid I was, but I did a year-long relationship coaching course thinking I wanted to be involved in not marriage counseling— it wouldn't be that— because thing to it. And I hated, literally hated, the first two climbs I got, as in everything about it, everything in the environment, everything in the despair that they were feeling. And I was just so bad at it. And when I look back in hindsight now, I'm going, well, you should, you should try that before you do the year-long course.

Yeah, I'm sure you look back now and, and look at all of the skills that it's given you that you can bring to your corporate work. But yeah.

Well, I got divorced not long after, so I'm not so sure, Ellie, but I've been married 15 years since then. So yes, I think I might have finally learned all those lessons. But my point is, coming out of a course, feeling very excited, very idealistic, very, yeah, I'm going to help change the world, or at least some people in front of me. It only happens if you get people in front of you.

Yeah, absolutely. So tell us about how your business evolved then. So from that moment, like, what is the growth to where you are? What does that look like?

Yeah, and it's evolved over time and sometimes very purposely and strategically, sometimes a bit fortuitous in terms of an opportunity arose and I jumped on it and then that led to elsewhere. So like I said, these days I work with new CEOs, I work with leadership teams, and I'm known for working with expat leaders, expats who come to Australia or Singapore or Hong Kong, and they tend to be the most senior person in their organization. So they've come out of, let's say, the head office of the organization is in England and they're now doing their first expat assignment in Australia, as an example. So, those are 3 areas that I'm known for. And in the last probably 10+ years, I've only ever specialized in those 3. I do very little of anything else. At least I don't talk about anything else. Actually, I should say, that's a secret. That's a tip for people. Be clear in what you market as to what you position yourselves. Like, be really, really, really good at that. Doesn't mean you don't do other stuff. You just don't talk about the other stuff.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, I talk about that same concept a lot when we're talking about defining an offer suite. So we need to put guardrails in place so that we know what we're talking about and we have focus. Doesn't mean if someone asks us, we won't do something because we can do all of the things, but we make a conscious choice and we get to help people understand how they work with us.

I learned that from a guy whose name is Dan somebody. I can't remember his surname now. He was, when I knew him, an American-based coach, but his elevator pitch, his specialty, he only coached Formula One drivers. Wow.

Okay.

Yeah. Think how niche that is.

Super niche.

Yeah. But when you actually looked into his practice in terms of what he actually did, yes, his starting point were the drivers and he was a high-performance mindset type coach. So that makes sense given what they do. But he actually spent most of his time working with our crews.

Yeah.

People around those drivers. So the crews, the head mechanic, the head of the, you know, people put on the tires really fast, etc. The families. That's where all his work was. But his specialty was the drivers. Yeah. And I think that's really important for us to get out. So I specialize in 3 things. I kind of evolved through that. In my early days, I did everything. In order to bring money in the door, because I had a young family. So I did everything, and I spent a lot of time learning. Like, I didn't come out of a learning development background, I didn't come out of a strategy background, so I spent a lot of time trying to learn those specialties. So I would offer to work with people for free just to learn what they're doing. So I did everything for a while. Then, because I had come out of recruitment industry and I was— I had a good reputation in that industry I was approached by 4 or 5 recruitment company startups to help coach them in their business, which was never my intention. So I ended up for a couple of years specializing in small business coaching. And so the founder and then their teams. And it started out as 3 folks who had left the recruitment industry to set up their own businesses. They knew of me from the recruitment industry. Can you come and coach me and my team? And then they would refer me to their, say, marketing company, who happened to be a small marketing company, or to their— somebody else. And small businesses will always refer you to their friends, because founders of small businesses tend to be friends with other founders of small businesses. So I did loads of that for about 3 or 4 years. I mirrored, um, or I learned a lot from a company that were called Sherlows, who were around in Australia then. They no longer exist, but that's what they specialized in. So I learned from them how they set up their process, which effectively was a day a month with each organization. So that's how I built that up. And I, I really enjoyed that. I learned a huge amount about being a business owner, about being a founder, about growing from one person to 10 people to 50 people to 100 people, etc. And a small number, as in 3, of those organizations grew from one person to 10 to 100. So I kind of grew with them. So by nature, by the time 5 years later, I was working in executive coaching because those businesses were now 100-person businesses, and I was working with the leadership team who were managing teams who were managing teams. So that was the evolution into executive coaching. Because I had come out of recruitment and a lot of folks I had placed into middle management roles, 5 years later they were now senior managers. And so they knew I was doing coaching, so they brought me into their teams. That was that kind of relationship. I ended up doing a lot of work in the pharmaceutical industry because that's where I came out of a long time earlier. And I hired two people into my business who also came out of the pharmaceutical industry, one of them who's now my wife, as it turned out. And because of that, we ended up doing about 70% of our business, uh, was in the pharmaceutical industry.

Yeah.

And the one of those defining moments, I look back and go, wasn't that a lucky break? One day, Carol, my wife, and I were looking at all the work we'd done the previous year, and we suddenly realized there was a pattern which is We were hired to work with all these folks in the pharma industry. They all happened to be expats, and the assumption was that they were going to be successful or not successful because of cross-cultural differences. As it turned out, that was just a complete furphy. When we looked at the work that we actually did with them, it was a little bit about cross-cultural stuff, but most was about leadership transitions in terms of new country, new role, new team, new culture, new level of leadership. Working in an environment that I've never worked in before. So all of those kind of transitions, family moving for the first time as an example. And so we ended up writing a paper, it was, you know, the 9 barriers to success as an expat leader. And we gave that to a few of our clients and they all came back going, this is brilliant, I haven't heard this before. So of course we called it research, you know, desk-based research. Here's a research paper we have for you. And that ended up me interviewing 10 people who go, yeah, everything you've said in that paper, we've identified in hindsight as being all of our issues. Imagine if we could mitigate against that on day one. So that gave me an idea, go, okay, how do I create an insurance policy for people when they bring in expats to Australia? Which is basically, we will try to create a program that mitigates against these 9 common issues. And the advice I got from an innovation specialist, who I'm really grateful for, was, what would you do if you couldn't call your service a coaching service? I said, really, I want you to think really hard about that because most coaches go, hey, I coach, and the buyer goes, well, like, what does that mean? And so we ended up calling this Expat Leader Insurance Program and gave that to 3 or 4 clients to see, does this interest you? What do you think? And it was the most popular thing I've ever done. So I ended up writing my first book and then writing 3 more books on the back of that and effectively just outlined the program as, here, here's the program. It's a coaching program. Anyone's understanding. We just outlined those areas and that kind of brought us away from the masses into a very niche specialty. But in reality, what I was doing was I was doing a CEO transition with a top teaming combination and a little bit of cross-cultural sprinkling on the top.

Yeah.

Wow.

I love that. And I just want to like take a moment to dive into this idea that we have to give people what they need, right? Buyers. And if what they need is for something to be called something that they perceive to be solving an immediate pain point that they have, rather than calling it what we want to call it, right? Coaching, or this is how we understand it. It's so important. And I think that is a massive mindset shift for a lot of business owners, is like that perspective shift in what we put out into the world.

100%. 100%. I mean, there's a feeling for coaches to learn here is the coaching process, the conversation, the mindset, the environment we create, you know, that inverter comma safe space that allows learning to evolve, etc. That is very, very important. Absolutely very, very important. But it's not unique to us in any way, shape, or form. Every good leader, every good mentor, every good parent, every good teacher does the same thing. So saying, hey, I'm a coach, doesn't give us the same level of credibility as, hey, I'm a dentist. Like, only dentists do dentistry.

Yeah.

Um, all the intensive care nurses do intensive care nursing. A lot of people do coaching, but a few of us get paid for it. Specifically. So what we have to figure out then is, um, the process I'm bringing to this problem is my coaching process and coaching methodology. But what's the problem and how do I solve the problem? Yeah, and that's the part that we have to get better at. So I believe there's two things here. Is what's the core problem? Well, the core problem that I kind of fell into was expat leaders that fail, and fail means that they are sent home from their assignment 18 months after they start. That's what failure means. And the cost to your organization is approximately 9 to 11 times their base salary. That's a phenomenal cost. That's the pain. That's huge pain there. Huge pain to the family, huge pain to a lot of folks. So if I can help solve the pain, I just got to brand it as that. The coaching process is up to me to do whatever I do, but that's the pain. Yeah.

And I think honestly, my clients get so sick of me asking them, what's the pain? What's the pain? Use the language of pain. And I think probably similar to you, it's my background in sales, right? That has made me very comfortable with doing that. But I think a lot of coaches feel, particularly coaches who bring this lens of positive psych solution-focused approaches, it is almost countercultural to spend time sitting in pain. What's your advice for coaches who are finding that to be very difficult?

The first thing you've got to recognize, and I know people won't like this, but it's just true. If you're selling your coaching services and the first, second word is selling, you're selling your coaching services. It's a professional service.

Yes.

In the same way as there are lots of other professional services. So you have to think about, okay, that's the category I'm in. It might be more towards the helping end of that category, but it's still the category I'm in. And it doesn't mean you want to end up like being as big as a KPMG and that kind of thing. I'm not suggesting that. Albeit, you know, increasingly there are coaching firms becoming relatively large. I was part of one for a long time. But you have to think like that. So therefore, how does a lawyer in a law firm, or an accountant in an accounting firm, or whatever firm you're talking about, how do they go about selling their services? And what can you learn from that? Well, the first thing they do is they get clear on what they actually do, as in, who do I serve? What's my offers of my suite of offers here. The second thing is they get really clear on what differentiates them from other people. They may not say the other people, but they get— they try to get really clear what differentiates them or why you should hire them. Third thing they do is they give you evidence as to why they're good. And evidence looks like a case study or an article or a blog or a video or something like that. And when I used to mentor younger coaches, I used to say to them, you know, if you go— if you want to go and get your, your teeth done and you've never been to a dentist, you're going to go and try and meet 3 or 4 dentists to get a sense of who should you go to, unless someone gives you a brilliant referral.

Yes.

And if the dentist you go to goes, yeah, I'm a qualified dentist and I abide by the guidelines for cleanliness and health, and that's all they tell you, well, that doesn't give you any sense of what they do. So the dentist says, look, here's my specialty, I do all the normal stuff, I specialize in crowns, or I specialize in, in teeth whitening, or whatever it is. You're more likely to either choose them purposely or not choose them purposely. Either way, it's purposely.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I'm seeing the parallel, which is that so many coaches put them out there, some of themselves out there, and the, the start and the end of their messaging is, I'm a coach, right? And, you know, I abide by the ICF processes, which really gives people nothing to make a decision.

Yeah, someone sent me a proposal recently. I asked me if I had to look over their, their proposal for an organization, and the proposal basically had their bio, a little bit about the client's background in terms of what the client was trying to do, and then a lot about, you know, I adhere to this ethics and this ethics, and then outlined, I think it was 4 or 5 coaching methodologies, like frameworks that they would utilize. And I read it, and my frustration was, I have no idea how you're going to solve their problem. Like, zero idea. All I know is you're telling me you're really, really good. You're telling me that you've got a coaching qualification, which I assume is the case because I wouldn't be talking to you in the first place. And here's your price. Yeah, but I have no idea whether you're going to solve my problem.

Yeah, I love that. In your journey, what have the hardest parts been of growing a business?

There's probably different levels of what's hard. And when you're starting out, there's all the normal stuff that every business owner in any kind of industry has just got got to get their head around, and that's the logistics of administration. Like, you know, are you invoicing in time? Are you doing all the government regulatory type stuff? Do you have a website or don't you have a website? In the olden days, do you spend a lot of time getting a logo done versus today ChatGPT will do it for free? Yeah, I mean, well, I look back now, Ellie Scarf, this is how old I am, I spent $16,000 once on getting a logo done for a business and business cards too, I bet. A business card, $16,000 for a logo, you know, that would be free today. Yeah, but nonetheless, there's all that logistics type stuff, and we naturally spend far too much time worrying about the font of our business card or the, you know, the brand name that actually means nothing to anybody, you know, all that kind of stuff. But that's the first step. And the second step then is managing the— and this is even before we talk about working on the business, but it's actually managing how do I get my first clients make sure I deliver well and make time to get my second client. Yeah, that last bit is important.

Yeah.

So once you start getting into the flow of I do these kind of services for these kind of people and I charge this kind of price, and some of us that might take a year or two to land with clarity, but nonetheless, once you kind of land in that place, then the question goes to how do I, like, how do I get a flywheel going in terms of what's my process of marketing with the right messages towards that group of people? And that can take us quite a while to figure that out. For some people, it's as simple as networking in, in business networking groups. For other people, it's, it's becoming a thought leader in a particular space. For other people, it's partnering with different groups. Like there's a range of different ways, but you gotta figure that out for yourself. And that can take time. And then if you get to a stage of— the magic figure is somewhere around $200,000 to $300,000. So it's, it varies for people. Or once you start getting that kind of figure, then how do I bring on someone part-time to manage the administration for me so I can do more of that other stuff? Yeah, it's somewhere around that dollar value. I mean, that varies for people, but it's, it's in that kind of ballpark. And then the next step then is, okay, now I'm bringing on my first or second or third or fourth team member to also deliver, if you want to go into that phase. And most of us don't go into that phase. Those of us who tend to build up teams of coaches to deliver, they're the same people who are very good at business development by nature, and therefore they're developing excess amounts of business, therefore they need people to help them deliver it, or from day one they decided that's what they would do. So then their learning is how do you manage the team to deliver at the quality that you promised to the client and all of that. That's a different level of learning. Our industry tends to be more of a cottage-based industry, i.e., we tend to do the first 3 rather than the last one. And I'm not suggesting the last one is better or worse, it's just, you know, we don't do that. For me personally, I found the first 3 or 4 pieces not difficult, it's just a matter of I've got to go through them and do them. I know there's phases here, and so I remember in the early days of my first business and dedicating every Friday morning without fail as my blog writing time. And I probably didn't see any results for about 6 months, but I still did it every Friday. And then after a while, I started getting people emailing me saying, oh, I like that article you wrote 3 months ago. Can you come and talk to us about this? And you start realizing, oh, okay, that's now hitting someone's radar. I didn't know that. Or I was invited to come— you wrote this article, can you come and talk to this breakfast meeting about that piece? Okay, now it's useful. For me, the hardest thing was I tend to be pretty good at business development, and the problems in the coaching industry, because it's such a personalized service, is unlike, say, accounting or law as an example. In coaching, when you sell your service, they want you, whoever you is, like whoever's person is selling, they tend to want you.

Yes, I've had that same challenge. Yeah, yeah.

And then therefore trying to go How do I bring my team in on the first conversation? So there's a, that can be difficult. And there's probably a longer conversation around that kind of nuance, but that's difficult.

Yeah, no, I really, I think that's such a great articulation of the stages that we go through. And, you know, of the coaches that no doubt are listening and the coaches that I work with, I can see a lot of people who have no interest in expanding into bringing in team members. They just want to, you know, keep it very simple. And, and that's fantastic. And there are folks who, you know, very early on it becomes clear that they're going to need, they're going to need people to help them deliver what they're bringing. And yeah, I like that neither is right or wrong, but there is, I think, some benefit in being a little intentional about where you want to go and what actually is the business that you want to build. I want to just dive in a little bit into— you mentioned this idea, and I'm sort of reframing a little bit of the blog writing And what I'm taking from that is that there is a bit of, a bit of, bit more consistency, a bit more sticking with it than people might assume before we see, start to see the results of something like that. And I guess the parallel I would, I would make now is, you know, showing up on LinkedIn, right? Posting on LinkedIn. Hopefully, you know, there's a longer form content that you've got and then there's LinkedIn, which is a slightly different model. But how did you stay the course, right, for 6 months, maybe not seeing it getting results until at that point? How did you stick with it?

So I should say I'm an avid reader and researcher. I'm someone who's just naturally curious. So I subscribe to lots and lots of different types of newsletters and blogs over the years, and I'll read them for a couple years, and I'll— then I'll switch to a different variety, a different variety. I've always done that. And I would probably skim read maybe 10 a day from different industries. And so I've never, I've never not done that. And particularly the American geography is far better at this than other countries, predominantly because the volume of people in America is so huge. American writers can just serve the American audience and have, they have a massive audience to serve. What I learned from those people was, and is, the consistency matters more than anything else. You're writing a brilliant article once a month or twice a year means nothing. Yeah. People don't recognize you, your name, till they've seen it 7 to 11 times.

Yes.

So that says consistency. Mm-hmm. And I know this from sales calls. I know this from communication that people need to hear something regularly before it registers. Mm-hmm. So if you're trying to position yourself as any kind of an expert, and this goes back to what's the pain you're trying to solve. If I go back to your very first question, the biggest mindset for coaches to get into is coaching is not the message. Being an expert that solves particular types of pain is the message. Mm-hmm. Coaching is a process.

Mm-hmm.

And so knowing what your message is for what audience and what media type you're going to use becomes the real learning. And it's a guy called Matt Church who runs a thought leadership group here in in Manly who's been doing that for 20-odd years and he's a master at teaching that kind of stuff. But there is get crystal clear on your message, which the summation is I solve X problems for X people, like whatever that is. Yep. Then you've got to go, I need to establish myself as a thought leader in this space. Now you don't have to be an expert on day one. No. I became an expert on virtual reality education for doctors. It took me 6 months, but I became an expert as in people started reading my blogs all over the world on that space, right? A longer story as to why I did that and why I no longer did, but my point is you don't have to be an expert day one, but you can become one pretty quickly. Yeah, at least you can become one that people recognize as being one pretty quickly. And part of that process is you've got to keep writing. And I use the word writing because that's what I did, you know, you got to keep publishing something. Yeah, you can publish in video, you can publish in podcasts, you can publish in writing, but you got to publish something. On, on a regular basis. It also means you get better and better at your craft.

Yeah.

It also means you have stories to tell for future prospective clients. And imagine for someone listening to this going, yeah, but I'm brand new, I don't have all of that experience yet. You don't need experience. What you need is the story.

Yeah.

So you can listen to a very experienced coach tell a story, and you can take the essence of that story and apply it to one of your examples. And now you've got a good story to tell based upon something that you've done and a third-party reference from somebody else that becomes your article.

Yeah, no, I love that. And, and I would just reiterate that. And I always talk about when you start out, yes, you don't have that expertise in coaching, but what you do have is this credibility from your professional world. And when you're working with, you know, or pitching to, selling to clients who recognize that expertise, it's like they're going to listen to what you say because of that. And then over time, the credibility built through your coaching expertise is going to expand that beyond that audience who already have that, that belief in your credibility. So yeah, and I love that. And I think for anyone listening in who goes, well, you know, the messaging, the branding, that feels like an insurmountable challenge. I think what Pod's saying is, you know, I think 3 to 6 months of consistently showing up, talking about how you can solve these very specific problems for these very specific people, you will position yourself in that time. And combined with other obviously very strategic, you know, activities that actually get you having conversations, it becomes a very compelling, like, the flywheel.

Exactly right.

So I love that. So what do you say no to now that you didn't when you started out?

And that's a great question. I'm saying no to a whole lot more. Would you believe it? I'm, I'm at a stage of my coaching career. I mean, I'm 56 and I've been coaching full-time since I was 33. So it's quite a while now. So therefore, from an experience point of view, I know what I like doing, what I don't like doing. From a passion recognition perspective, I've got pretty tuned to sensing how serious is this organization or leader. Because I don't want to, I don't want to do any more work with folks who say they're serious but they're not. So I'm far more attuned. And then I'm also very fortunate that I'm not relying on the coaching income for my day-by-day bread and butter. So that's a big difference. And I appreciate that's a very big difference. And I come back to my earlier comment about when I started, I did everything because I needed to. And I look back now and go, the mistake I made back then was I didn't have enough income put aside to survive on while I figured out what I wanted to do. The upside was I did so much and I learned so much when I learned how to hustle and therefore get work, I will never not need to do that again. I know how to do it.

Yeah.

But these days I only work at C-suite, so you work with the CEO or the people reporting to the CEO. And I only work for a minimum of 6 months and usually 12 months. And so I don't do like individual sessions and I don't do hourly rates. And so I only charge for 6 months minimum or 12 months is the normal. I don't negotiate on rates, whereas I used to before. It's also part of— I don't do as much volume of work, so therefore it's a little bit of that. So I'm trying to make sure that my answer is balanced here, Ellie, and not just kind of show off and kind of go, there's a reason why I don't need to do that as well, and that's important to recognize. And I tend to only work with multinational organizations as opposed to startup or Australia only. There's a reason for that, is that the maturity organization is at a certain level that what's happening in different countries is part of the conversation. And because I've worked in so many different countries, I can bring value to that conversation. And it's interesting conversations as well. And there's a complexity from being in multi-geographies that I just find interesting. So therefore I do part of that. And I typically only work with the leader if I can work with them and their team. And what I mean by that is Peter Hawkins, who's one of the world's experts in team coaching, I was lucky to have him as my mentor for a while. I said to him one day, Peter, how do I get really, really good at doing team coaching? And he gave me the obvious answer, which is do lots of it.

Do some team coaching.

Yeah. I said, thank you, Peter. Let me rephrase the question. How do I do lots and lots of team coaching? And he said, look, if I were you, given how much one-on-one coaching you do, I would, in your next contract with your next client, include a 1-day team coaching with their team as part of the price. And then put into your contract, and the second and third day are charged at these prices, and every subsequent day So he said, I've never seen a team do a leadership retreat or an offsite for one day. They always do two days. So financially what that means is they'll take you for the first free day because it's free and they'll pay for the second day in your first engagement with them. So they've already got used to paying more than your coaching assignment. But because it's even for the folks who only do one day, you still have learned how to be a really good team coach. So if they're going to do team coaching, you're the guy they're going to come to. Now that was a real game changer for my practice.

What a fantastic— yeah, I think that a lot of people will take some insight from that.

Yeah. So if you have a second service that you think is relevant for your audience and you can wrap it up as part of your first service, so therefore you're making their buying choice really simple.

Yeah.

And because they get basically they get a freemium version of the second service.

Yes.

And then they can choose to expand it. And it's a really easy buying choice. Yeah. Plus, what I learned by doing that, not only did I get really good at team coaching, I ended up writing about team coaching, and I taught team coaching at City Business School. And so I kind of became known for that. But what it also did was it expanded my number of buyers straight away. So if you're working with the CEO and their leadership team, particularly in a multinational business, each of those on the leadership team runs other parts of the businesses.

Absolutely.

And if they get a good experience, they bring you into their part of the business. Or in my case, they brought in someone from my team into their parts of the business.

Yes.

And so over the years of our business, we ended up having small numbers of clients in terms of organizational entities. So let's say 5 to 10 entities a year, but we might be coaching hundreds of people in the organizations because in one organization you could be coaching 50 people across multiple jurisdictions.. And it's because of that, that, that was a big game, game changer for us there.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I talk a lot about this idea that one of the reasons why I think working with corporate clients is a, in some ways, an easier process than trying to pitch to individuals is that we do the business development upfront activity once for potentially, you know, years and years and expanding opportunity within that client if we do it right. Yeah. So yeah, I really—

I've been working with Seek.com out of Melbourne for 14 years. Mm-hmm.

Oh, very good fit given your recruitment background as well.

Well, there are— I think that might even have been the original reason, actually.

Yes.

I'm not in their office every week. I'm not in there every month. And then, and it's one or two years I wasn't even there for, for in a year. But over 14 years, I think I've personally worked with across a range of different programs, be individual teams or larger-scale leadership programs. I think I've worked with maybe something like 400 or 500 of their leaders over a long period of time. And so that goes to your first comment of is there's a reason. I mean, small business owners will refer you to small business owners. Corporates will never refer you to another corporate. But if you think about corporates as a collection of small business owners across multiple parts of the business, they'll refer you internally across that.

Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So you've touched on this a little bit, but I don't want to let you go without your take on this. One of the challenges a lot of coaches experience is this idea of pricing, value-based pricing, and not feeling like they should be doing this work out of the kindness of their heart. How do you think about pricing?

I'm a capitalist. Yeah, through and through.

A purpose-driven capitalist. I love it.

Yeah, absolutely. And what I mean by that is when I— so if you go back to my original history, working in recruitment and in headhunting, the fees are a percentage of that person's salary.

Yeah.

And so that's where I learned how to sell services. That was my gestation. And my first experience of a major coaching company in Australia was called the Stevenson Partnership. It's since evolved into Stevenson Mansell and it's a different organization now. But the original Stevenson Partnership, he was an ex-recruiter. So he started his coaching services as a percentage of salary because that's what he knew. And so therefore, all the folks who worked in his organization, that's how they charged their clients, which is interesting. I was still working in recruitment in those days and I was watching Stevenson going, okay, that makes sense. When I, when I eventually get to doing coaching, that's what I would do. Along, along the way, And this is not in any way me pointing my fingers, just going, here's actually what happened along the way. Two things happened. The— some of the coach training companies emerged.

Yes.

And some of the— a lot of the psychologists who were doing one-on-one therapy charging hourly rates moved into exec coaching. So the coach training schools started, and their revenue, of course, came from training. And when they started adding on services they basically did the same thing as the psychologists were doing, which is, I'm going to charge you an hourly rate. So Stevenson Partnership guys were forced out of that process, which I think is a dreadful outcome for the whole industry. And so once you start charging hourly rates, it's a race to the bottom. Yeah. Because, you know, if I'm going to charge $10 less than you're going to charge, I might be more attractive to the organization.

Yeah. And then we can see that in what's happened with all the coaching platforms that are now paying their coaches less and less every time I get more more information.

And then that's where I started. So therefore, I learned very, very quickly, do not charge hourly rates. And there's one part of my career I didn't say to you, that at one stage I had— I was a part of a franchise organization out of the UK called PriceStep, and I held the Australian Singapore franchise. And they, in terms of where they sat, and indeed where they still sit, they're still still going in the UK, they are top of the tree in terms of the executive coaching market. What I mean by that is all of their coaches have come out of C-suite corporate careers. A lot of them come out of UK government, like where they're director generals of a major department. One of my colleagues when I, when I used to work in Proust, he was the private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, as the example. So that's the kind of level of corporate backgrounds that they have. And they taught me to charge value-based pricing. Yeah, and high-end fees, number one. Number two, this is a huge lesson for me. In 1997, when the first financial crash came along, they increased their prices across the board, and that was so counterintuitive to the market. Everyone was decreasing prices. They increased prices. And what they said to me was, the financial crash will go it might take a year, it might take 2 years. We will lose some clients, but we will be priced higher than everybody else, and therefore the market will assume we're better than everybody else. Yeah. And, and they and I have done that 3 times.

Yeah.

Since then.

Yeah. And it's interesting, I do always say when I talk about pricing is there's this unique scenario with coaching where pricing is conflated with quality. And so if you are not you know, positioning yourself that way, you're going to be perceived in a certain way, rightly or wrongly. And so what you might think is a way to get in by being cheaper is in fact not at all.

Not at all. And it's why if you want to go to a bank and borrow money, it's much easier to borrow $5 million than $50,000 for that reason. But there's actually a useful story here that might be useful for you. This is, I had a major turning point in my career when Niels Vesk, who is a brilliant innovation specialist—

Yes, I've got Niels's book on my bookshelf.

Yeah, he's brilliant. I've worked with Niels over the years. He's brilliant at turning something obvious into something completely different. So he's the one who said to me, if you could take the word out of— the word coaching out of what you do, what do you have left? And how do you reorganize a service that completely doesn't sound like a coaching service, but it is? Yeah, that was mind-blowing for me. And about a week later, my wife said to me— at the time I was charging $25,000 a year for one-on-one coaching— and she said to me, what would you have to do to charge $100,000 a year for one-on-one coaching as a thought experiment? And my first reaction was, that's just so stupid. Like, who the hell would pay $100,000 a year? Like, that's just stupid. Yeah. Um, but then I sat back and thought, hold on, these are two really interesting questions. Like, what would you have to do So I ended up creating a program called the New CEO Program that had a whole lot of stuff, a lot of coaching, a lot of consulting. Either way, it's service-based either way. And by the way, I should say to you, I have never found it useful to try and distinguish between coaching and mentoring. And I just, I think it's a waste of time. That's just my non-purist view.

I love it.

Yeah. I've got myself into many, many troubles, long discussions and debates with our mutual friend Tony Grant over this stuff. Yeah. And so when I put together the CEO coaching program, was never called coaching, was it was a new CEO accelerator program. It had some consulting services in there. It had a lot of coaching in there. It had team stuff in there. But I sold that to Seek when they were expanding all over the world doing acquisitions. And I became what they called our global roving CEO coach. So they'd go and buy a company in Mexico. I would then go down to Mexico and work with their new CEO.. And I didn't quite get the $100,000 per program package, but it was pretty close to it. Uh, that would never have happened had not Nils and Carol challenged me to think something completely different.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I think about what the thought experiment might be for people listening in who are sort of at the earlier days of their coaching business. I often challenge you, like, what would need to be true for you to double your price that you're currently thinking, right? What would that need to be? You know, often, often I'm talking about tripling or quadrupling for many people, but, but maybe that's the thought experiment is what would need to be true. And, and in many cases, what would need to be true is nothing different. It's just your willingness to try.

Yeah. And again, going back to a sales point of view, and I appreciate a lot of folks coming to coaching don't have that background. I understand that. And just because you charge a higher rate and I, Now, the market's changed a lot over a couple of years. It's kind of flattened a little bit at the top. Like, it was kind of— there's a bit of an infinity for a while. You keep going, you keep going, keep going. That's not true any longer. But you still pay— you still get paid a whole lot more for coaching the CEO and the C-suite than you do the first-line manager by nature of position in the organization and by nature of the ripple effect it can have down the organization. Yeah. But— and I've lost my thought now where I was going with this. Oh yes, I do. Even though, like I said, I've been doing this for almost 30 years, I'm well positioned in many parts of the industry, this doesn't mean that people won't try to negotiate pricing. Sure. And they will. Yeah. But my standard reply when people say to me, look, you know, they've got my proposal, they go, you're, you know, 25% more than this proposal, and then, you know, what do you want to do, etc. And my reply is, look, which part, which 25% of our offering do you want me to not give you?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

They never, they never ever tend to take stuff out. No, but all that says to them is I'm willing to stand by my pricing. I'm willing to say the offer I'm giving you is worth that price. If you don't want all of that stuff, we can take stuff out, but not discounting the price.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That idea of don't make discounting your first port of call, make scope, scope the first discussion point and Yes, I agree.

Now, I learned from a great guy at McKinsey, a consulting firm, who said to me once, rather than discount pricing, I would say to my client, I would much prefer to do this for free. Yes. And I will do it for free rather than discount the price. So clearly we'll do all the work, but I'll do one day for free so you get value, but I'm not going to discount the price. And I've done that more than once, and with very, very few exceptions, and I'm going to say very few, I mean maybe 3 exceptions over 20 years and clients will go either, hey, I really appreciate that. Let's go for that one day and I promise you will do more. And they do. Or they go, okay, don't worry about the, don't worry about the freight, let's just go.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love it. Look, I've kept you for quite a while, Pog. Can I ask you a few rapid fire questions to wrap us up? If you could coach anyone in the world, who would it be?

Yeah, I thought about this. I thought you might ask me that question. I'm going to give you two answers. The version of myself when I was 25, I wish I could go back now and go, "Oh no!" But then I kind of go, then I wouldn't be who I am today without all those mistakes. So maybe not. I don't know if this person needs to be coached, but I would love to be in a conversation with them. So therefore, they're the person. That's Bono.

Oh, interesting. Interesting.

I don't think they need to be coached. I think he's a very enlightened human being. But I suspect the conversation would be extraordinarily illuminating on many levels.

Agree.

Agree.

Do you have a podcast or a book that you would recommend for coaches earlier in their career?

Well, your podcast, clearly.

Thank you. And yours. Yes.

I think if you are using podcasts to help you learn, what I would say is there's different types of— there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of podcasts. So don't do 10 of the same type, as in, like, your podcast is all about how to think commercially about your business. So go deep into your podcast and maybe one other. If you want to go deep into content and different coaching disciplines, then something like Coaches Rising is a great podcast for that. And I host, as you know, the University of Sydney coaching mentoring podcast. It's called AusCMA Connect. That's a variation of that. So, you know, pick one of those kind of podcasts to go deep into content. But then I would suggest go wider into podcasts that are not coaching, but they are starting your own business type stuff or sales, service sales techniques type stuff or organizational strategy. So, you know, if you want to work in organizations but you don't come out of a strategy background and learning strategic conversations and ways of thinking are really important just to have in your back pocket. So that kind of stuff. So Yeah, pick 3 or 4 coaching podcasts, but then go far away from that.

Yeah, brilliant. And what is the most essential tool or piece of software that you would recommend to make business life better or easier?

So to make my business or to make my coaching, which one?

Oh, maybe either, either or both.

So the best coaching tool I've ever used, and I'm a bit biased because I was in the organization for a long time, is the Leadership Circle. I think to me that's the best framework, but I appreciate not everyone loves it. I think it's brilliant. As a framework, way of thinking. I love, absolutely love Claude.ai. It's changed my business dramatically. It's changed what I do. And in our, in our media business, our podcasting business, I have 4 agents, AI agents that we've built in the last month, and they are doing jobs that I can't afford to hire for. So we're not getting rid of people, we're hiring people that we can't afford. And that's quite extraordinary. And that's just going to change everything in so many ways. So I love Claude. I did have a really existential moment maybe about a year and a half ago. I'd done about 25 360 debriefs in a tech business. And 10 of the leaders came into my second session. They had run their 360 debrief through— was it Claude or was it another one? It was one of the LLMs. To get feedback and to get a development plan. And the plans were extraordinary. Wow. As in brilliant. And the reason why they were brilliant was because all of the material from Leadership Circle, in this case Leadership Circle 2, is freely available. So therefore the LLMs can access the best, the best anywhere in the world and develop a plan very quickly. So for new coaches who are relying on their money to come from interpreting 360s and giving advice, that day is long gone, but you can certainly still use Claude in many, or any of the tools, in many other ways to help you elevate how you come across with your clients and help them in different ways.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. I mean, gosh, we can start a whole nother discussion about the use of AI as part of our coaching practice. Okay, Pod, thank you so much. I'm so grateful for your time today. The insights, they're hugely valuable. I will summarize some of them in the newsletter that goes out with this episode, so we'll have lots of, lots of gold out there for people. If people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do so?

My own website is paulasullivan.com, and that's, that's probably a good place to go. And can I encourage anyone who's age 40 to 60, who's either a man or a woman, and there's a podcast called Don't Let the Old Man In, and that might be interesting. And so you hear me there. And if you do want a, let's say, University of Sydney podcast, go there. And of course LinkedIn, you can get me on LinkedIn where everyone is. Hey Ellie, thanks for the work you do. I wish I had someone like you 30 years ago when I was starting out. I think it would have saved me at least 5 years of heartache and learning. And so anyone who's starting out, the insights that you're offering are invaluable.

Brilliant. Well, yeah, thank you so much. All of those links we'll include in the show notes and yeah, really appreciate your time, Claude.

Thank you.