Grace Andrews: The Diary of a CEO's Marketing Genius & Steven Bartlett's Brand Director

Stephen Bartlett and the Diary of a CEO Podcast have a secret. It's a secret I'm about to let you in on. In fact I would say that this is a secret weapon. That secret is Grace Andrews, the 27 year old brand director of Flight Studio which houses Diary of a CEO and many other incredible podcasts that you would know. They're globally renowned podcast top three top 10 top 20 podcasts. She took Stephen Bartlett from 5,6000 subscribers on YouTube to we're pushing towards 10 million in just two or three years. Today we're going to talk about social media brand, personal brand, how to build it, what to look for. It's going to be perfect for individuals, for brands, for organizations. You do not want to miss this one. The Lead on purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ Grace, a huge welcome to the show. Tell me about your day. How's it going so far?

My day's good. It's what, 7:00pm here, so just wrapping up sort of the office work but in a million projects at the moment, which is my favorite favorite place to be.

Yeah, you're everywhere right now. I mean you're 27, 28 years old and you are at the tip of global brand marketing. You are able to articulate things in a way that all of us can connect with and I don't think every CMO and brand director is able to do that. Before we get into that, I want to get really tactical because people follow you, they want to know what the day in the life looks like with Grace Andrews. So what are three habits? Two or three habits that you would say are your non negotiables every day that help you perform at your best.

Gosh, I would absolutely love to say that I follow some sort of routine that I'm part of a 5am club that my sleep starts at 10:10pm on the dot. But truly every day is so different for me and I think that's where I thrive and I absolutely love waking up each day and maybe having a to do list and maybe not getting anywhere near it because that's the reality of working in the sort of the fast paced natured world that we do in production and studio work in social media. You truly think you can predict what's about to happen. You can't always. So for me I always, I come back sort of my non negotiables. I have a list in my phone if I'm ever sort of derailing a little too far and I feel a little Bit off kilter, I'll come back to. And they range from sort of making sure I'm moving my body in some way every single day. So movement is really important to me. I'm currently training for a half marathon, so doing a lot of running Pilates, like just moving my body and so grateful for the health and fitness that I have to be able to do that. And then the second one would be gratitude. Like coming back to the sense of gratitude. Sometimes in this world we can get carried a bit way very easily. And it's really important to come back to gratitude because it's really grounding and it gains a lot of perspective. And then. And then I have really silly ones. Like, for me, non negotiables are like making sure that I've got time to do my makeup and have my nails done because it makes them. As a, as a woman, it might not relate to your, as you just said, 65% male audience, but those little things that make you feel you and put together, I think are really important.

For me, the small things are the big things, right?

Well, absolutely.

I love that. And the whole 1% mentality that I can see that you adopt and that the team adopts, I can see that it kind of flows into your life as well. It's not just a work thing, it's a life thing.

I think the 1% mentality, whether I knew it before I started working here or not, is ingrained in my blood. And.

Truly, once you understand that mindset, as I'm sure sort of you and many of your audience and listeners do, it, it changes everything because you're no longer going after those unattainable, unsustainable goals or things that feel so out of reach, you don't even have the motivation to get started. You're looking for what you can do and control today to edge you closer to that end goal. And I think when you start to see it play out and build the evidence that compounds for you over time, it's very hard to think in any other way.

Yeah, controlling those controllables. I love that word that you say, that control word, because at the end of the day, there's things we can influence and things we can't. And I see that what you do, literally your world, is influence and you're controlling all of these controllables. Now, for some people that maybe have been sleeping under a rock for the last three or four years and have never heard of Diary of a CEO, what's it like to step into the office every day? What's the gratitude you feel when you step in there.

For me, I just, I can't believe that I get to work with such talented individuals. And truly, every single day is a learning opportunity. And I think that's where I've always found it so hard when people talk about my work, my career progression because really I just feel so lucky to learn and like learning is just the greatest privilege. And to be around the industry's best in every single pillar of what everyone does and to just absorb almost by osmosis, but get to spend time with these people is truly such a blessing. And I think every day someone leaves the office or walks into the office or people come and clients come and they talk about the energy and it really is this infectious energy.

Of people so driven by this shared goal to achieve what we believe is, you know, we believe this diver CEO, but also we're a full fledged media and investments company, is going to be one of the greats and we're, we're all behind it and it's a really motivating, inspiring place to be. But truly for me, it's the learning opportunity. Just like every day, the conversations you get to be a part of and the experiences you get to partake in just from being present is second to none. So yeah, I, I'm four and a bit years in and I still pinch myself every day. I mean, you know, people talk about we're five days in the office, we're technically, you know, we don't do hybrid working and all of this stuff. And I hear people talk about it like it's a chore and I just, I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't know any other way. I, I think it's what's allowed us to stay ahead and be at the forefront of our industry. But for me, just what a like incredible honor it is to be able to be around people every single day who are the best in their game. It doesn't get better than that.

Yeah, it really doesn't. I love that you're talking about being at the forefront, being at the tip of the spear. You know, the All Blacks are kind of New Zealand's most innovative organization. They're world class and innovation is everything. It's at the core of what they do. When I look at Stephen Bartlett, Dari the CEO, I am so inspired. Almost every week there's something new happening, there's an iteration, there's a new thing. The trailer is mind blowing. It's like a mini movie in and of itself. So You've been with Stephen for a while. What makes Stephen Bartlett so unique?

He's truly just so incredibly driven.

To achieve shared. We're also driven by this shared goal of creating impact in the world. I think our mission is to create a healthier, happier humanity.

We all have this absolute itch for the 1% improvements and being at the forefront of what we do.

And I think ultimately he's able to spearhead that. And I think his superpower is really building great people around him. I think that he will be the first one to say that recruitment is absolute number one priority at all. At every stage of business and every stage of business growth. It's all about the people you bring on the journey. And I think what makes him so unique is that recognition of where his skills are and where the skills he needs to fit around him through, like, people. And he's very good at identifying sort of those people who need to be around him and which I think, you know, a lot of maybe young entrepreneurs don't realize until later in that in their journey, perhaps we. We have the, you know, privilege of working with. In the uk, we call it Dragon's Den. I don't know what you call it. A shark tank that, you know. Yeah. So Steve is a Dragon on Dragons Den in the uk, so we get to work with those of small businesses that he invests in through. Through Dragon's Den. And entrepreneurs are often very romantic about their hypothesis or their business or what they're creating and they want to do everything, and they struggle to sort of delegate and find people who are actually better than you at those skills and surround yourself with those people. And he's very. He's very good at that.

I can see that. And I geek out in high performance. And whether it's Olympians, teams, businesses, and I'm always like, what is it that makes high performers high performers? And often it's this. This word driven comes up. And when you look at psychological psychometrics, driven is the one thing needed to be a great entrepreneur. However, for some people, let's say the CEO is the entrepreneur, is the driven individual that can be really uncomfortable to be around. It's not for everyone. So I imagine that the environment at Flight Studio and Directive CEO is kind of on edge. You're constantly tipping forward, leaning forward, looking into the future. I'm sure it's not for everyone, right.

I say in every single interview, we're hiring and expanding so much at the moment. And in every first interview, I will say we are not for everyone. And Everyone is not for us. And we often try and sell them out of the job because if they still want in at the end we're like, you're our kind of person. We say it's going to be, you know, it's going to be late nights, it's early mornings, it's trips at the last minute. It's all of these things. And it takes a certain kind of person. One of our sort of cultural values that we look for is entrepreneurship because it's that yearning for more and wanting to have more than something that starts at 9 and finishes at 5 that I think has contributed to our greatness. And it's completely infectious. You're, I don't intend to, you know, and I often, I don't, I won't be working in the evening necessarily and I might be watching something and then I see something in the program and I'm like, oh my goodness, that idea there we could take and bring into our social media channel. And I'm like writing down the notes and it's, it, it just becomes part of your, your like holistic ecosystem. It's. And I think I, I, I don't know the science behind it. I don't know if you'll born with it or if it's something that develops. But I, I do think you've either got it or you haven't. And we often say, I often say in interviews, I can, you can tell because someone lights up at the thought of the things we're discussing or they hide away and think, that is not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something where I can do my part, close my laptop and I'll see you tomorrow morning. Which is so fine. Like absolutely fine. People have got to do what feels right for them at their stage in their life. But that's not fine for us at that moment. You know, it's, I always think a career or a job is like such a two way fit. We've got to be good for you and you've got to be good for us. And not everyone is going to thrive in this environment.

Yeah, you want to get the right people on the right seats and because otherwise the bus doesn't function very well. So it's, it's good that you take the time to get clear on that. And I look for obsession and people think obsessions are bad, bad thing or a bad trait. When people are radically obsessed, those are the people that do great things. You know, whether it's Stephen Bartlett, whether it's Nelson Mandela, whether It's Richard Branson. Like, these people are radically obsessed about their end goal.

And how lucky are we to be obsessed with something, that we have the time and the headspace and the care to really just become obsessed with something? And, like, I. For me, there's nothing better than being all consumed by something. Of course it comes with sacrifices, like everything does in life. You can't do everything all at once.

But I just think it's such a privilege to be able to block out all the noise and get so deeply obsessed with something 100%.

And you came into this job not with a social media background. It was journalism, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. Yes and no. I.

I studied broadcast journalism at a master's level because I wanted to go into TV and radio, which was traditionally broadcast journalism. And actually a huge segment of the course was this new emerging social media journalism. Because actually, most of us consume our news either through social media apps or through the mainstream social media apps. Like, you're getting your news through Instagram or through TikTok or through Twitter at the time was the big one. Or you're getting push notifications through the apps, or it was all about SEO. So actually, a huge chunk of the course became about, how can you turn a story into a clickable piece of content? Or how can you turn a story into a headline that is enough characters to appear on a notification? So I actually was doing a lot of the social media, hunting for the trends, writing the headlines, capturing attention within the journalism world. I really lent into that because I loved being able to break a new story, or I loved being able to be the first one to know something and be able to race against time to get it out and be against the clock. And my friends still, even though I'm not in that world, will come to me and go, do you know anything about this that's happening? And I'm like, I'm so not in that anymore. But that used to be my world, so. So journalism really led me into social media. And I then became quite bogged down by the news industry. I think, particularly in the uk, there was really one way to do it, and it was all about ultimately driving clicks, which ultimately makes money. And I wanted to take what I knew in that world about.

Spotting the emerging trends and being at the very sort of forefront of breaking that and capturing attention and put it to a slightly more aligned mission to where I wanted to go. I was working with small businesses, and that led to me building my freelance company. And at the same time, I was using my Platforms as a digital portfolio to attract clients, essentially as a lead generation tool. Here's my expertise, here's my experience, here's what I know. And ultimately that drew people in like a magnet and that it was at that point that I then shifted to working in house with Steve. So yes, it was rooted in journalism, but I actually hire a lot of people now who have a background in journalism because of the common traits between brand building, relevancy, attention capturing and really what you have to do in a newsroom now.

Powerful. And it's interesting, most people would, in your role, would get hired and be left to do their thing. And the CEO or the leader would be like Cole, you know, way more than me. You're in a very rare situation where you're walking into a company where the leader has so much deep knowledge about brand and social media. So how has he influenced you?

Oh, I mean, there was one point where I was speaking, talking, walking, Bajan female version of Steve, because I was so immersed in his world and I was building his brand. So I had to learn every single detail about him and how he speaks in his tone of voice. So massively, massively influenced me in a really positive way. And it's really funny because I do a lot of speaking now and so often I'll get the question, you know, this is all amazing, but how do I convince my key stakeholders? And I sort of laugh and go, I'm probably not the best person to answer that question because I've never ever had to convince.

Stephen of any of my sort of social media initiatives. Probably because he's already thought of them first or probably because he's seen the trend emerge and he understands, or he understands like deeply how the platforms work. So it's really the opposite way around, where I haven't exactly, as you said, I haven't had to come in and necessarily convince anyone of the need or the urgency when it comes to social media. I've never had that red table, that three day sign off period. It's been a case of, I think we need to get this out today. And Steve's going, I think we had to get that out yesterday. So what can we do to speed it up? And always acting with this sense of urgency. So I've learned, you know, ultimately his first business was a very successful social media agency. So when I saw this job opportunity came up, come up, I didn't see, see it as a job at all. I saw it as the greatest learning opportunity or the best person I could learn from an industry that was probably going to fast track my career.

And it was an absolute no brainer and I really just threw my hat in the ring, had my evidence through my personal brand that I've been growing and developing and we've been on this journey ever since. But yeah, it was, it was really interesting to come in on day one and.

Just be able to learn so much from the. Yeah, as you said, usually the person who is looking to you. And now it works both ways. Like I'm, I have a whole team and they keep me up to date. We keep him up to date, he keeps us up to date and it works really nicely. And then since then we, you know, we bought in the whole C suite and board and I now do have to sort of do a little bit more of stakeholder management. But organic social content, organic media is at the absolute core of our business. So rather than being sort of the end baton pass which is so often is for businesses where it goes through, I don't know, products remarketing and they go, hey, can you get some socials? Our media is absolutely at the core of everything we do and it provides the audience for the commercial which then creates content for the audience. So it's this full ecosystem that really thrives with the content.

As you're describing that I see like a flywheel and you've got key components and you're driving that flywheel that's really powerful. I see so many people scrambling with the social side, the content side, the media side. And personally I get three or four DMS on different platforms a week with people saying, I'll show you how to crush this, I'll increase this and it's like automatic delete, delete, delete. It's spam. So for the person that's sitting there right now that has a personal brand or they have a commercial brand and they want to try and nail a strategy. Before we get into tactics, how do we come up with a content and a media strategy that helps us grow?

Firstly, you need to understand who you are trying to speak to. I think the.

The gap I see often between like people's intentions and the content they're creating and results or success or successful brands is one knows who they're going after and they go after them and the other one is trying to speak to everyone and you end up speaking to no one. I see it time and time again. You have to get really clear on who you're trying to speak to. Can you, going back to traditional marketing terms, can you imagine the Persona, can you Create a name for them. What would you talk about to them if you spoke to them in the street or if you went for a coffee? What subjects are interesting them at the moment? And how can you infiltrate their consumption habits with your content? It's not about trying to.

Grab their attention away from what they're currently doing. It's about how can you occupy that space in their brain or part of their habits of what they're doing every day with your content and how can you solve a problem for them? Because no one needs really more content. Like we are absolutely infiltrated every day with content coming out of our ears. You just have to open it up, open an app and you could get lost for hours, hours and hours and hours. It's, it's endless. And you really have to be speaking directly to them and solving for them, for them to care. So if you've got a product, best believe they're not going to care about it until you tell them why they should care about it. So it's about really understanding who they are, deeply understanding their behaviors, where they hang out, the conversations they're having, and then finding the space you can occupy within their brain through your content. Like ultimately that's the goal. And then if we're talking about strategy, it's about how can you create a consistent output of content, whatever consistent means for you. Because if you are a founder of a small business in a one man band situation, content needs to happen because organic content is free and it's up free eyeballs, but you're also figuring the finance and the P and L and the budget and the production and the logistics and you're doing everything. So you need to find what can be consistent for you. Because if that's once a day, if that's twice a day, if that's once a week, you need to be able to maintain that over a consistent period of time in order to analyze, understand what's working, iterate and start to consistently improve. Because I think what people do, okay, ish, is the input and they're able to put content out there and then they'll come to me in a year's time and go, the apps are broken, nothing's working, the algorithm is blacklisting me, it's not showing me to anyone. I'll say, when was the last time you looked your analytics or took a look at what was working and tried to iterate on that? Or are you just inputting, inputting, inputting into this machine? And they'll be like, sometimes they'll be like, Yeah, I saw this work and I still say I saw this didn't work, so we didn't do that again. And I was like, okay, well it's a good start, but have you looked what's working, why it's working and what we can iterate on that? And it's, you know, often no. Or it's even worse. It's like, oh, I don't know where to find analytics and strategies is full, you know, it's in the full ecosystem. It has to feed into the start again to keep iterating. I otherwise you're going around in circles rather than spiraling upwards, which is where you're going to start to see growth.

That's brilliant. And analytics for some people, just the word is like, oh my God, it's like a, you know, tax return time. I don't want to do that. So if we think about analytics for a second, what is it that we actually need to be looking for? So probably couple things we'll stay on like social media content so long form, let's go YouTube as an example and short form Instagram. What are the key analytics that we should look for? There are a couple of obsession metrics that you have.

It's really interesting. We and I people hate when people say this because they don't think it's real, but our team literally just finished a call with TikTok and TikTok said that and they changed this. It changes a lot. So something I say now probably, if you're listening to this in a year's time is probably still not going to be relevant.

But in terms of key metrics, if you're looking for reach also depends on your goal, right? So if you were looking for growth, your metrics that you're going to be obsessing over are going to be different than if you're looking for retention and community and conversion. So slightly different metrics that you should be paying attention to. If we're looking for growth, ultimately, you're looking for shares. You're looking for shares because every share is a signal to the system that you are willing to you as a user are willing to put your name to that piece of content and suggest it to other people. So shares are really important. Shares often dictate the level of performance of a piece of content. So a principle we always follow to increase shares is value to strangers. If I don't know you or your business and I come across this piece of content, is it going to resonate with me? Is it, am I going to care and Am I going to care enough to put my name to it, to share it? Because that's really important. Whether that happens in the dms, in your group chat, whether they share it publicly to stories, whether they reshare the whole thing to that profile, it's got to have some element of value, whether it's educational, entertainment, solving a problem, whatever that is. And shares are pretty critical. That's what I've been paying a lot of attention to.

TikTok. So to go back to my point, TikTok said comments, comments are really shares first and then comments are really important because comments suggest that you're staying on the platform for longer, you're engaging with that piece of content beyond a like, which is the most disposable sort of metric to give away.

And it increases your time on the platform. Ultimately, that's what these platforms are looking for. It's not rocket science. They won't need to spend longer on their platform than on any other. So another one we pay attention to, particularly on YouTube and is average watch time. Because if we can increase average watch time, YouTube are going to reward us by showing more people our content and through monetization. So it also is a really important indicator of, you know, how, where we're going wrong and right in our content. So we study average view duration probably as our key metric, wherever we can get it. It's being, is on TikTok, it's being introduced on some Instagram Reels, obviously on YouTube. So we're paying a lot of attention to that because we want to know why people drop off and how, how we can increase that. If it's by one second, that's a huge win to us. We have.

An average view duration alarm where if we see it significantly go up, we draw attention to it, we study it, we understand why it's working, where it's gone wrong, why it's gone or why it's gone right. And we're trying to then.

Implement that in future editions too. So they're the sort of ones you've got to be looking at for growth because ultimately it's about signal signaling to the algorithm that people are willing to, to share and, and push that across their channels. And then if, you know, if you're looking for something like conversion, you need to be obsessing over link clicks and profile visits and website clicks because you're drawing people into the funnel. It's a different stage of, a different stage of, of your goals or like what you're trying to achieve. So I always say, I Can't give you like a blanket metric, that's really important. But when you look at what you're trying to achieve, there should be a really clear link between the metric that should dictate that if it is engagement, like your comments are critical, if you've got multiples, if no one's engaging in your comments, it's unlikely they're going to, you know, they're not in that funnel beyond the reach section, so they're not going to convert and buy the product. So you really do need to understand what you're trying to achieve in this stage of your business and attach the metrics to that in order to measure success.

That's so helpful. And again, I said at the start you're able to distill things down to like, so I can, like an Irishman like me can understand it. I deeply appreciate it. So this is important around the conversion, growth, engagement, obviously we can't do them all at the same time because if we focus on all of them, we're going to dilute our focus, dilute our results. But could we do all of them in a 365 day cycle? Could we do like 90 day sprints? So like growth, engagement, conversion, is that possible? Yeah.

And I think you could definitely be using your platforms in a really strategic way. So maybe TikTok is your reach platform and TikTok is where you are absolutely gathering your eyeballs and maybe Instagram is your community channel. So you're really focused on engagement and retention and maybe your long form piece of content, if you have a podcast or YouTube or a vlog is actually where you're like measuring success of value, of consumer value of your customer. Because I actually believe that the marketing funnel has changed. I know a lot of people are talking about this and we're not necessarily going after reach, consideration, conversion anymore. We're all in the game of attention and ultimately we're all media companies, whether we like it or not. We're a very obvious media company. We label ourselves as a media company, but Rabul is a media company or Dove is a media company. I don't know if these brands, yeah, they're pretty international.

And we're all in the game of attention, which is the most expensive.

Thing we can try and convert or gain. It's the most expensive currency there is. So I actually would look at it more as an attention funnel. And if you can capture people's attention, best believe they're going to buy your product. You've done the hard bit so they're going to convert. If you can keep people's attention for a long period of time, you don't really have to worry about the conversion stage because you've already bought them in. So, so I would be focusing on what platforms are playing what role in that attention funnel. You've probably got your top of funnel, which is your short form, your TikToks, your Instagram Reels, your YouTube shorts that will then go into sort of a mid level which is your slightly longer form content or your more in depth content or maybe you're doing live streams or webinars or maybe it's your, you know, email or whatever it is. And that bottom of funnel really is if you can get people to stay for a long period of time with your content. So it's followers, but it's also community members, it's people coming to your live events and it's your long form podcast episodes. Are they getting all the way through and have you captured their attention? Because once people are in with that attention, it's about retention and loyalty and it's very easy to sort of convert that to purchase stage. So if you focus your attention on the attention funnel, everything else comes very easily. I think in, in 2025 that's really helpful.

It's interesting. We posted two reels, one to Instagram and one to TikTok within 24 hours. The Instagram one had seven, seven and a half thousand and the, the TikTok one I think had 180,000 or something like that. It was. When you terms like a 10x100x it was a massive multiplier and I was just blown away. So what's the difference? Like different audiences, different algorithm. I just, I'm trying to still figure that out. So I like that you brought TikTok up as that like, I mean you've.

Got like what a perfect example about repurposing your content. I think you've got to like if you're. People often talk about like not having the time to create content if you are able to. I mean long form, long form podcast or long form media is the most helpful because it provides the most opportunity for repurposing. But if you're not sweating that asset across all your platforms, you're wasting your like precious time in terms of creation. Because that is a perfect example of how something can perform okay on one platform and take off on another platform because they are different audiences, they are different platforms, they are different algorithms. Often it will take like a slight tweak. I wouldn't necessarily go around and tell people unless you are absolutely strapped for time to take the exact same creative and replaster it across your different platforms. They often have little nuances and how you adapt that piece of content for the different platform changes. But you can take that short form piece of content and turn it into a carousel on Instagram or you can turn it into a, you know, take the transcript, use 11 labs, use some AI to draw the transcript like that. And I said 11 labs. What I meant you can take, put in Strategy Beauty, put it into Crawford and you can get your transcript and you can turn it into an email newsletter or you can turn it into a LinkedIn post and you can turn it into all these different sort of things if you're, if you're able to identify like opportunity with the asset and um, and absolutely like share that to your different short form platforms because they all have different behaviors, they all have different monetization opportunities as well. Like if you, if you're able to sign up to the creative fund. I know it's different in different countries.

TikTok monetization on short form is an incredible route to go down that you can't necessarily unlock on Instagram and same with YouTube shorts. So all these platforms serve different purposes. It just, just depends what you're going after.

It's really helpful. I've got an incredible marketing manager up in Auckland that I work with and just what you're hearing now gives me such good food for thought when him and I are conversing around what is really important. This is gold. Now podcasts, you'll know the numbers. Like they're just everywhere. There are millions of podcasts everywhere and there's millions of mini diary of a CEO's and you can see the copycats and that's quite a compliment, right? But also you guys haven't copied anyone. Like I've watched you speak so much. Steven speak so much. You've never looked to Joe Rogan. What's Big Joe doing? Let's copy him. You've never looked to Jay Shetty. What's he doing? You've done your own thing. So for the podcaster that's going, I'm in it for the long game. I'm going to get past the four episodes or the 21 episodes. When people most drop off, what's your advice to them? Should they copy Diary of a CEO or is there a way of thinking that you guys have had that they could adopt for their own mission?

Our superpower truthfully has been our naivety. We had Three people. Well, Jack, our exact producer, and Steve start this podcast having never built a podcast before. So they weren't looking to other podcasts. They were going off first principles, which is how do we get people to watch something and how do we get people to come back next time? We're paying attention to how, you know, movies and cinema attract customers to come in. That's how our trailer evolved. We weren't looking at how other podcasts were getting them, getting consumers or listeners to watch. We were going off this sort of first principle, thinking that was if you want people to come and watch, you need to share content on a discoverable platform, which was social media for us at the time. The podcast apps are getting better at discoverability now. We're sort of seeing feeds and short form video and obviously video now on Spotify and charts and YouTube is a huge one for us. So that has huge amounts of shareability and discoverability. But at the start of our journey, none of that really existed. So it was like, okay, well, we need to turn to the platforms where you can get free reach, which is social media. And how can we draw people in? Well, movies do it with trailers. So we need to provide just enough information so that people keep watching, but just enough so that they need to click through and understand what comes next. And they can't help because of the cliffhanger, be drawn in. So I think it's really interesting where people in hindsight tried to almost dissect what we've done, because the reality is it was a couple of us who'd never worked in the industry before, who had a huge amount of naivety to how something worked and went well. We know how to capture attention, so if we just use these sort of principles, we'll be able to carry it through to this new form of media. And we were always like, hell bent on video, because without video you don't have discoverability. And so I think we were always one step ahead in that, that space. We weren't ever willing to record anything if the person could not sit in the chair in our studio. Even during the pandemic, you know, we were able to carry on because we were production and people would still come to us and sit in that chat. So I think if you were starting a podcast today, the, the thing you need to think about is like, okay, how do I. As you said, I need to get to episode 20. I just need to start and get to episode 20. Because best believe you look back at the first 20 episodes of the Diary of a CEO and they are miles away from the production. The quality, the sound, the questioning, the type of conversation, just the whole quality is just there's a huge, huge distance. Because we've constantly, as we started this conversation talking about look for the 1% improvements every single day. And funnily enough, over four years, that compounds very, very heavily in your favor. But our graphs of growth, if you look at the Diablo CEO, you can find them online for the first year looks pretty much like this. And that's where most people quit, right? Most people don't see the success that we're having now in that period of time. And they quit and drop off because they lose interest, they don't think they're gaining the success. They're not seeing sort of more listenership and they're still speaking to only 20 people every week and they're thinking, this is not worth my time, not worth the effort. And it was only after that year of consistent input, consistent experimentation, trying to find the opportunity, sweating this thing as if it was being seen by billions of people that we then after year one of going every single week, started to see that compound impact. And I remember we, we just celebrated downstairs before we recorded this, handing the YouTube plaque for 100k subscribers to one of our new podcast host whose show has gone from, well, it's now well over 100k. But the YouTube plaques were always a little delay of one of our new shows. And that did 0 to 100k I think in three months. And I remember so clearly it taking us maybe 18 months to hit 100k on the diary of a CEO on YouTube. And at that point we thought it couldn't get any better than that. We'd put blood, sweat and tears into that thing to get it to 100k. And now to think we're just about to hit 10 million, it's completely surreal. But at the same time.

We'Ve just gone day after day and it just with everything in the performance world, consistency compounds in your favor over time if you're willing to consistently improve and consistently feedback and learn. And it's what we've been obsessed with, it's in our DNA. So I think I've derailed quite a lot from your question. But we, if I was to sort of give any advice to anyone, starting today, it's, it's get past that mark where you think this isn't working because just on the other side of that, I promise you it's going to be the biggest opportunity. And there's a crazy statistic like 80% of podcasters don't get past episode three. So if you get past episode three, you're already in the top 20%. And imagine if you get past episode 20, I'm sure the statistic goes down to, like, the top five. So it's, it really is one of those things where it's, it's a long game. You're not going to get the results overnight. I mean, classically, like, imagine the iceberg picture. Best believe the iceberg that. The tip of the iceberg that everyone's saying right now. You're not seeing the years and years and years of effort and learnings and experiments and, oh, my goodness, all the failures. Like, no one's talking about all of that, but that's sitting there underneath as our base. And only now, really, you know, we're just, we're just about to break into the top three in the US but that's been four and a half years of consistent, fierce, compounding effort and now also a huge team behind that. I think that can't go understate. You know, under said, like, we. People look to us and look to copy what they're seeing, which is ultimately the tip of the iceberg. They are not seeing everything else that goes into that over the last four years. So it's.

Very flattering and honestly a little bit humorous for us to see that people are imitating our thumbnails on YouTube or trying to replicate our trailers and like, obviously a huge form of flattery, but ultimately we're just trying loads of things and seeing what works and changing as much and often as we possibly can. The idea that there's one right way to do something is completely bizarre. And actually, to us, our greatest threat right now is being probably at the front because it's when complacency starts to kick in. And that for us is the enemy of all great success. So we just keep going. We don't really get distracted by what's going on around us. And we are looking at how the greatest movies of all time or the greatest Netflix shows are trying to capture attention, or fashion brands are trying to capture attention. We're not really focused on necessary podcasting because we're in the game of attention like everyone else is. So we're competing with everyone, not just podcasts.

I love that. So, yeah, much bigger thinking and I want to be mindful of your time. I've got a couple of questions to kind of hone in on that. So you've got this idea of Diavis CEO, you've got flight studio, These are brands. But you've got Stephen Bartlett, then you've got Social Climber and you've got Grace Andrews, you've got Virgin and you've got Richard Branson. So how important number first part of the question, how important is it that we build our personal brands? And two, what are a couple of things that we need to nail to start that journey?

I can't overemphasize how critical building a brand has been to, like, every stage of my career. But equally, building the brand has led to the opportunities that have allowed me to be on shows like this. So the way I see it is a personal brand is your digital reputation and it's an extension of your offline identity. So it's not your whole self online. It's a very intentional, strategic extension of who you are trying to be and where you're trying to go. I think the biggest mistake I see people making with personal branding and I, I hesitant to put that in inverted commas because it's developed such an icky, cringy reputation, but the reason for that is because people are misunderstanding the brand part of personal branding. Personal. If it was just personal, it would be the pictures of your dogs, the selfies we see on LinkedIn. It's the, here's my day in the life and this is what happened to me today. That's, that's all lovely. That's you and your person and maybe your friends care or maybe a couple of people on the Internet care. A personal brand is about setting a goal and being very attentional about how you use yourself to get there. So I'm very, very sat on developing myself in this industry, becoming a sort of a household name within the marketing brand and content world and becoming a respected figure. So my content is all centered around achieving that. I want to be able to, for, for to be people's goto in this space. So I will try with my content to get there. You're not going to see sort of, I don't know, generic selfies about this and that. Yes, it builds connection, which is helpful, but I'm. I can build connection through the content that I create. I can bring myself into that through tone of voice, through imagery, through video. That allows that connection to be built with the intentional direction of where I'm heading. So when we talk about biggest mistakes, I think people misunderstanding the brand, part of a personal brand is, is where I see most people going wrong and then understanding why it's not working. But I'm not really sure what they're trying to achieve in the first place. So that's probably the biggest issue there. Really understanding that it's very different from being an influencer I think is pretty critical. I think I'm a 27 year old female, so often my content can, or I can get, you know, named or labeled as a, and as a content creator or a, an influencer. And yes I am for sure. You grow an audience, you generate influence, you have responsibility without a doubt. But my job or my mission is not set on influencing people. My mission is set on being a figure that's looked to for advice and education and developing thought leadership within that, that space as well. So everything I do is very intentional around achieving that goal. And I have my own metrics of success, what success looks like for me, how I measure that, and I am analyzing, I'm treating my content as a brand and understanding if I'm edging myself closer to my goals or not on a very regular basis. A personal brand is not just putting yourself online. You can do that if you want. I don't know where it's going to necessarily get you. I don't know where the opportunities lie. But for me.

Building a personal brand has unlocked doors and opportunities that I didn't even know existed. Because ultimately, if you imagine LinkedIn like one massive conventional conference center or meeting room, you're in a room with people you would never ordinarily get to be in a room with.

And you gain visibility to sort of all these sorts of people, you become visible to all sorts of people that ordinarily you might go about your day and you might come across, I don't know, 20 people. In an ordinary day, you might go to a networking event, you might meet 30 people. But if you shared your views from that networking event onto a platform like LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok, you could reach 30,000 people, you could reach 3 million people. And for me that's what's so.

I guess like why it's such a non negotiable for me because if I'm in the business of developing that authority, I want to be able to share that interest in the industry far beyond the four walls of my room. And social media allows for that. Social media allows you to reach all the corners of the Internet. And almost every opportunity I've had has essentially come off the back of some form of piece of content. And I've seen it play out. You know, I developed my personal brand, I created this reputation, it led to my role here. Without that, I would have just been another application in the inbox. And it's something I look for when I'm hiring now as well. I. It makes my life a lot easier. If I can see your passion injected through your content, I immediately know that you're someone who really cares about this industry beyond just necessarily working, you know, for the Dirab SEO, working with Stephen Bartlett. And it makes my life a whole lot easier. It's far more interesting to me than reading a CV or a cover letter. I want to get a sense of who you are and your passion and we, you know, we really encourage it here. We often have a lot of people coming to us and saying, oh, I've seen all your stuff, or your, you know, I've seen your social media manager posting about it on LinkedIn. And I think there's this real fear from companies about allowing that sort of employees to maybe build a personal brand. But it's a truly a net positive for your business. Obviously, humans carry risk like we, we are humans, we make the state. But I think if you're able to put some sort of transparent parameters in that, whatever that means for you and your business, ultimately it becomes another marketing channel. So we are able to harness these incredible personal brands with very intense niche followings, you know, following them for their certain expertise and harness that for our launch periods or our launch moments and create this thundercap effect. It also works in incredibly well for recruitment. If people are seeing passionate people being able to share their opinion and share their voice and share what's working and share what's not, people want to be around that. So for me, I've shared a lot there in some sort of wiggly, waffly way. But for me, your personal brand is your, your digital reputation extension of your online identity. You must, must, must be clear on why you're doing it, because otherwise you're going to get lost in the noise and you'll become forgettable. And the reason it's so powerful and you know the examples you gave before about Virgin and Richard Branson and in the uk, we've got Amy Smith is the founder of this fashion brand called Muse, which is absolutely taking off at the moment. And she in tandem is building her personal brand and that is taking off and people know her as the brand and Grace Beverly, or we've got of Tyler, or we've got our perfect TED founders who are all building their personal brands and ultimately goes back to the old age adage like people buy from people. If they can build a connection with you, them far more likely to buy your product. So it's an incredible tool and I think far too many people are still sitting on it. But we're starting to see sort of roles emerge, like.

Social media manager, bracket founder. People are hiring people dedicated to building their brands because they're starting to realize the absolute unlimited potential that it can drive your business. So as you can tell, I'm, I'm a little biased, but I think it, I think it's an absolute no brainer.

Yeah. And you're not wiffly waffly. That was a masterclass, Grace. That was so powerful. I loved it.

I just have so many. I. This is why I love doing. This is why I love doing things like this because I just get to talk about all the things that are in my brain uninterrupted. I go home and like, my friends and family boyfriend are like, oh my God, please no more talk. And parcel branding. I'm like, oh, it's this, this. So now I'm, I love it.

I can see that a passion is there. I want to get you down to New Zealand here, get you on a stage and get you to share that message with some of, some of my people. So let's, let's chat about that off air.

I would love that.

Awesome. Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for what you do with Diary of a CEO and Flight Studio. You're changing lives. Keep on your mission. I'm one of your avid followers on LinkedIn and I'm sure that everyone else that's listening listening will want to connect and follow and learn. I'll put all your socials in the show notes, so people please go and follow. Grace Andrews, what a pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you so much. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz.