Stop Doing Everything Yourself and Start Scaling Properly with Elise Basillie

Today's special guest is Elise Balsilli and she's from Thrive. So for you business owners, this episode is for you. While you focus on running your business, Thryv effortlessly helps you grow and what they focus on, marketing, sales, automation, they've got SEO, management, they've got everything you can imagine. So you're in for a treat. Elise, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Lovely to be here, James.

Hey, you're here to help not just me, but all the listeners with something pretty important. When I look at what's happening, I've been traveling a lot this year and just kind of taking note of what small and medium businesses are doing around the world. And I have to say, a lot of them are struggling, A lot of them are struggling to keep up. There's so much innovation, particularly around the AI and automation space, that people are going, what do I do? Where do I start? How, as a small business, do I keep up? And of course, when I look at Australia, New Zealand, US and UK too, small business is literally the backbone of the economy. So at Thrive with you guys, you support us, small businesses. But before we get into how you support us, there's something very unique the listener needs to know. As a business, you're a global business. Every single one of you, your teammates, your staff, you don't have an office, you don't work collectively. Shoulder to shoulder, every single one of you work remotely. Isn't that right?

That is absolutely correct. So across Australia and New Zealand, I've got circa 400 employees that are all working in a fully remote operating environment.

Mind blowing. So people are going right now, how is that even possible? So how do you make that work from a cultural perspective in terms of keeping here's our standards and our values and here's how we stay motivated?

Well, I think you actually have to be very thoughtful in what you're doing. So we all moved to an operating environment that was fully remote during COVID like everyone did at that moment in time. When it came back time to moving back to the office, we actually sent out an employee engagement survey. We gave our staff an opportunity to submit feedback and input in relation to the operating style that they wanted to work in. Overwhelmingly, 98% of our staff wanted to continue to work in a fully operating mobile operating model. But there were some caveats to that. They wanted to be able to come together at least once a year as a team, celebrate our success and learn about our business. They wanted to make sure that we could find ways to be fully connected with each other. And they wanted us to help support them around other staff that may live locally to where they reside so they can have the odd coffee, catch up. So I think as a, as an organization, we've done a really great job at continuing to drive and foster the culture within our organization, but it does take a lot of purpose. So I send out a weekly video on a Monday morning that I film to all of our staff. It hits their mobile phone and the very first thing before they even log in is kind of a weekly wrap from me, where I was last week, what I saw, what customers I worked with, some of the wins we had from the week before, so that they still feel like we're having those moments we did in the office where we'd have a stand up in the morning around the whiteboard and celebrate some of the successes. So I think it does take a lot of sort of thought and measure and it's definitely not done as a cost saving measure. So I think as a business, if you're looking at transitioning to a fully operating, sort of mobile operating model, you need to ensure that some of that money is invested back in our people.

Yeah, I could see that. So I had a good fortune of connecting with you people. In Auckland, there was an amazing annual get together and the energy in the room was electric. Like when I walked in there, people were connected, they were having fun. If I walked in and thought, you know, the culture is not quite right here, I didn't sense that at all. It was amazing. It is.

And I think the great thing is to look at some of the collaborative relationships that have been built by staff that are not in the same offices together. So we have lots of fun. We still have Friday night drinks, we still have lots of games and banter throughout the day. We're just doing it in a different fashion to what you would in an office.

Amazing. And in terms of productivity, are you saying that, hey, we're still getting the results that we want as a business?

We're definitely seeing some really strong results. So I think everything is measurable today. We're in a world of technology. You know, when someone logs in, logs out. We're in a business of supporting small to medium businesses right across Australia and New Zealand and as a broader organization right across the world. But we need to be there to support those customers. We've got tens of thousands of clients across Australia and New Zealand. And as you rightly said in the beginning, small business is the backbone of our economy. They're the mums and dads. At the football club on a Friday night. They're your next door neighbors, they're the people down the road and they really are giving their all driving a business. And it's our purpose to make sure we're there supporting them. So for us it's to make sure that we're, we're on all the time that we're able to support you. And I think the added benefit is it gives us a little more flexibility with some of that support. So for some of our clients, they don't want to meet with us between 8:30 and 5:00 clock when we would have traditionally been in the office and been accessible to them that actually love to catch up with us at 7 o' clock at night because actually during the day they're on their tools and maybe they want their husband, their partner, their brother, their neighbor to sit in on that meeting with them and help them make some business decisions for their business moving forward. They've got clarity of headspace, they're not being distracted by work during the day. So it has given us some flex to be able to stretch our hours around the hours that our clients want to meet. Now in turn it means that some of our staff might be able to go and pick up the kids from school at 3:30, knowing that they can then come home, cook dinner and actually when everyone's settled for the day, they might jump back on and do another hour or two of meetings to catch up with clients at a time that works for them.

Super flexible. I really like that. So as a person who runs a small business, I really appreciate the fact that say Air New Zealand as an example, I do not want to call them in the middle of my workday. It's like, it's chaos, it's full on. I've got commitments, I don't want to spend my lunch hour chatting to them or waiting on hold and eating into a client session. So being able to call them after hours means a lot. So the fact that you have set that up in that way is brilliant. So if I take a small business like myself, so I started off by myself, very small, started growing it, built a small team. We're now a seven figure business. But as a small business it's like we've still got challenges and we've got, you know, problems that kind of front facing all the time. If I come to thrive, how can you help me?

Well, I always like to sit there and say for me it would be talking to a small business owner and say what is that thing keeping you awake at 3 o' clock in the morning. Is it you worried about where your next job's coming from? Is it you worried about cash flow and money coming in and money coming out? Is it you worried that you've got a hairdressing salon and actually that chair in front of the mirror is empty more than it's filled? Is it that people are no showing on you? So I think for us we've got lots of opportunity to be able to support small to medium businesses. But I think if people are going to invest in technology to be able to support their business, it's always great to start at the most impactful spot for first. I think for a lot of small business owners there's never been a more exciting time or a more scary time in business. There are great tools available now that can support small business owners, especially with AI in driving some of those more back of house and administrative things far quicker than they've ever been able to do before. But by the same token, that technology is a little bit scary for someone that might work in a barbershop and their forte is the scissors in their hand and talking with their customers. It's not the tech in the background. So I think for us, we've tried to simplify the tech so that it's super easy, super seamless in the background and that a business owner can really focus on running their business and growing their business and we can help take care of some of those little things in the background.

I love it. So, like I think about the idea of a zone of genius and I feel that every person who has started a business has a zone of genius where when they're in that zone, they're phenomenal and it's the highest dollar rate that they're going to get paid because they're world class at what they do. But what tends to happen with someone who has a zone of genius? They build a business around that zone of genius and then they end up spending 80% of their time on marketing, on lead generation, on sales calls, on all that stuff. And they end up not having the business they want. They're trapped. So, and I'm speaking from experience here, so if I come to thrive, what are the different offerings? You can help me with that? Allow me to come back from my zone of genius and focus on the really high dollar productive time.

And I love the term zone of genius. I think the reality is small business owners entered that business because they had a passion and a desire. They loved hair, maybe they loved being outside and in the Garden and decided to set up a landscaping business more and more frequently. What we're seeing is those business owners. The world has gotten so much, much more complex. So back in the day, you put a sign on your van, you had a business card, and you could really just get going. Maybe you put an ad in the yellow pages book or the local paper, but that was the excuse. Extent of the world of complexity. You had one phone number and that was it. People would call you, book a job, you had a paper diary in your van. But today, the world has gotten really complex. There's social media, and you don't just have to be on one social media channel, you've got to be on. Many people aren't just contacting you via email anymore, they're contacting you via messenger and WhatsApp and all of these other channels. And every one of those administrative things is taking small business owners away from the craft that they love. And they didn't open a business to be spending three and four hours a night on the dining room table surrounded by paper doing administrative work. That's really bogging them down. They started a business because they had a passion, a desire, a dream, and they wanted to be able to go and fulfill it. So for us, it's really about making running their business less complicated. We can help them digitize some of those things. We can help them by using AI and using tools in the background to simplify the messaging process, to pull all of those messaging channels into one simple, easy, seamless channel. We can help them with things like responding to reviews, so that we will let you know, James, when someone leaves an exceptional review about your business online. And we will encourage you to go and respond to that review. And we might give you a couple of variations of responses by which you could go back and respond, but acknowledging the feedback that someone's taken, whether it be good, bad, indifferent, they've taken time out of their day to go and leave some feedback in relation to your amazing business online. And making sure that you go and respond to them is going to help you get future jobs, because people understand that you care. So I think there are lots of examples like that where we can help businesses, even down to the really simple ones. And I know we were talking about a barbershop before, but making sure that we can set up some automated flows so that tomorrow's appointments are reminded today and we send out a little SMS and we're reminding people. And if people aren't confirming the appointment, we've got a backup list that we can go out to. And maybe we're going to offer people 10% off a haircut just to fill a vacancy in your diary. But you're better off having a full diary full of clients than having empty seats during the day. So I think there are lots of ways to be able to embrace and use technology so that it can help you in the background. If you've got outstanding invoices with clients, you don't want to be sitting at the dining room table calling all of those customers, following up on payment. Why don't you just set up some automated flows where those triggers will automatically happen one day past due and maybe one day past due. It's quite a graceful, nice message saying, hey, James, you might have forgot just a reminder, the bill was due yesterday. But then building it out so that over the course of a month, that might have a more sort of sterner reminder about the bill that James has got outstanding. But I think building some of those flows and embracing technology is going to allow people to get back to doing what they love. Nobody set up a business to be bogged down in paperwork and admin and all of the complexity that comes with running a business. They started a business because they passionately loved what they did. And I think for us, it's about allowing people and giving them the freedom and flexibility to get back in their business, get back on their tools and start growing their business and growing that job. Joy?

Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I work with a lot of leaders and they're. They're phenomenal what they do, but they're bogged down in emails. They're bogged down and, you know, I've got to call that individual, I got to call that prospect. It's got to be me. I'm like, well, God, you've got to have better systems than this. And I work with a lot of brokers, both in insurance and home lending. So for them, the biggest challenge is lead generation. And they often go to these home shows and they stand there for an entire weekend and they pray that the right people will come in, they'll get their name and email and phone number, then they'll call them up the following couple of weeks and none of them will answer. Maybe 5% of them answers. It's a lot of work. They can't get their ideal customer very easy. Does Thrive have any capability to help them with lead generation?

We definitely do. We've got quite a number of services available to help small businesses from a marketing standpoint. And I think to your point, there is no magic pill when it comes to small business marketing. And unfortunately, you need to be in lots of places. So we'd like to really sit back with a small business and the first thing we like to do is get them to pretend that they're their own customer. Search for yourself online, have a look at your reviews. How easy is it to find you? Not necessarily by business name, but if you're a mortgage broker, how easy is it to find a mortgage broker in Auckland? Are you coming up? Have you got a great presence online and really going through and doing a client journey yourself across all of those platforms to just really inspect yourself before you double down on growing leads? Because people are always going to do their own research in the background, so. And you need to make sure your shop's tidy. So that's really the starting point where we start with any small business. And off the back of that we've got a bunch of tools to be able to help support small businesses in growing lead volume into their business, not only through traditional channels, with things like websites and social media and driving awareness through search engines like Google, but making sure that we set you up so that you're also found by AI search. AI search is getting more and more popular and people are using it, whether that be by voice or whether it be online. So making sure that when people are in there having their searches and looking for services that you're absolutely found in those channels.

I love it. So let's chat about that for a wee second. I'd really love to talk about the AI thing. So something weird happened about three months ago, so my team got an email and, hey, could James come and speak at our event? We're going to Fiji and we'd love to be our keynote. So my team says, hey, James, got this gig, can you have a chat with it? The organizer said, yeah, we'll jump on the fence. Phone. First question. Hey, how did you hear about me? He said, oh, that's easy. So we jumped on ChatGPT and we just type, who's the leading figure and keynote speaker in high performance and leadership in Australia, New Zealand. And it went away and did its thing and it came back and said, james Lachlan's the guy. And here's why. I said, well, that's mind blowing. So I started getting pretty excited about, oh, how many more leads might I get in the next five, ten years from large language models? So I got on one of the world's leading experts in, it's called aeo, which is the opposite of SEO and so he said we need to be doing a little bit of SEO, but actually doing a lot of this. How do we show up in the chat, GPTs and the LLMs?

Yeah.

Do you have any tips for anyone in terms of what they can do as a small business to set themselves up to be more visible to the SEOs and the AEOs?

Yeah, definitely. So great. I. I kind of call it Generative Engine Optimization. So I'm geo, so I'm like another term altogether. But I think I would go on there as any small business owner and don't necessarily look for things like yourself, but people are searching in natural language, so I use Copilot, for example, and I'm not sort of wedded to using anything, but I can go on there and in really natural, plain language, type some search terms in. I've got a block toilet at home and I'm needing a plumber to come out tomorrow. Or I'd like someone local because I'd prefer that they didn't have to travel because in my head I'm thinking if they've got to travel, it's going to cost me a fortune. But I'd like someone reputable with really great reviews. Now it's going to go away, it's going to do some searches, but where it's going to pull a lot of those searches from are places like directories, which are not overly sexy. No one thinks about going to Yellow Co NZ and doing a search and it being the sexiest place to hang out online. But what it is, it's. It is a trusted site by, by a lot of those AI tools online. So it will go away and pull back in a lot of that data. And a lot of the local searches are actually pulling information back from directories platforms. So for us, a really great place to start. And whether that be that you're going to invest in a tool like Thrive, that's going to help you optimize Your profile across 40 different directory platforms across Australia and New Zealand to make sure that we've got your business really, really present and really credible across all of those platforms, but whether or not you go and do it yourself, because a lot of those platforms offer free tools and for some small businesses, they're not necessarily at a point they're able to invest in their business and get some technology to help them, but lots of these services have got some really great free listing options available. So I would say make sure your business is listed everywhere, listed correctly in the right headings, and when you're thinking about Adding content online and even down to the content that you're putting in your Google business profile. Think about it in a natural language. I think back in the day people would be like, plumber, Auckland block, toilet Auckland, and they would put in these quite robotic terms in their site, thinking that it was going to help them appear on, on Google from an SEO perspective. Now, back in the early days, it kind of worked a little bit like that, but really the world has moved on and I think people now need to think about doing things in a very organic and natural fashion. Do it in sentences like you would and like the conversation we're having now. But also make sure that you take things like reviews very seriously because that credibility is really going to help lift your presence across all of those platforms.

That's really helpful. And social media is a huge part of small business and we can't really ignore it. So I know personally, over the last four or five years our social media has started building and it takes up more and more time, but honestly, it gives us more and more leads. It's fantastic. And it gives us a bit of a finger in the pulse in terms of how our audience are feeling, what they need, what they don't need. With Thrive, how would you be able to help someone like me who goes, I want to go back into more of my zone of genius, I want to be standing on the stage more rather than engaging on social media. Is there anything you guys have as tools that could help me?

We definitely do. So one of the tools that we have that's really great for small business owners is our social media scheduling tool. You can plug in as many of your social media platforms as you want. So it might be that you're on LinkedIn, it might be that you're on Facebook, it might be that you're on Instagram, and they're kind of your, your core demographic and platforms that you're on. Our tool really does simplify things for you, so it allows you to sit back, spend about 15 minutes once a month planning through some of the posts. Now, James, yours are all about speaking, so we're going to give you some prompts and suggestions about booking some more speaking jobs for you, topics that you might like to speak on. And we're going to help you, using AI created, craft some really great posts. Those posts are then going to be rendered because all platforms render them slightly differently and you're going to be able to sit down and really just take a small moment of time, plan out your posts for the month so that they're all planned, they're all scheduled, they're locked in the system. You might upload some photos from previous speaking gigs because obviously they're things that are, that are your ip, that you're going to influence. But there are lots of great tools like Thrive out there that can help you do some of those things a lot easier. Um, I know that for a lot of small business owners, playing around on social media isn't their forte. Small business owners are also a little bit humble, so they don't want to be sitting online and be seen to be kind of bragging or talking about themselves. But whether you like it or not, people are going to be on social media looking for you, they're going to be talking about you online. So you are far better to be part of that conversation. And to your point, over time that credibility will continue to build to the point that you can actually, it'll start to organically grow, but you will be then able to start to fill some of the voids in your calendar. If you don't have a speaking gig in January and all of a sudden you're scratching your head thinking, what am I going to do in January? I've got all of this spare time. You're able to then use that audience to say, hey, I'm going to be in Auckland between this date and this date. Maybe you've got a special offer where it's going to be 20% off speaking gigs for a two week period over summer. But it gives you an opportunity to be able to use those audiences to help fill some of those gaps in your schedule. But it also gives small business owners an opportunity. If they've got excess stock, excess surplus, we're coming into the end of the year, they've ordered a whole heap of stock for Christmas and some of it hasn't sold. They're then able to use that audience to say, hey, we're going to have a post Christmas sale and it's going to be 50% off these selected items. But it allows you to use that audience to help your business grow, to drive sales. But really it allows you to a little more flexibility and a little more nimble. And those people are advocates of your brand. They've followed you because they like James Lachlan. So they want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about what you do. So it's a great opportunity to be able to network with them.

That's amazing. Thank you. It's really, really helpful. And in terms of the marketing side, I can see so many Upsides to using Thrive, it's phenomenal if we look at the sales side. So this probably a side of the business that I don't love. And I'm not a Tony Robbins guy who'll get on stage and sell a million bucks from stage and that just. It's not my style. I like to build relationships slowly and authentically. But let's say I've got a $15,000 higher end product. So someone wants to come and spend a week with me and a bunch of other leaders in Fiji. And we've got special guests from all over the world coming in often when they appear on the website to go, I want to come. I'm applying to be a part of that. The next step is like a sales call. I actually really don't like that at all. It's not my thing. Is there anything that Thrive can do to help the sales process and might be specifically to what I've just suggested as an example, or it could be in a totally different realm.

Yeah, definitely. And I think if we're using the example you've just suggested, one of the pieces that I think small business owners, and I'm going to run a little bit further up the funnel to start with. But small business owners typically spend money on driving leads into their business. They'll spend some money on Google Ads or some social media ads, and they'll spend money to make their phone ring. What they're not always great at doing is capturing that customer data and storing it somewhere. Now, James, if you were going to do a speaking gig in Fiji and you wanted to invite all of the great CEOs and kind of heads of company that you'd worked with, you would have kept all of those details from all of your years of speaking. You would have them stored in a central repository. And that's going to be the key to helping you drive sales. Because all of a sudden you're not wildly just putting. Putting the message out to the ethos and really just crossing your fingers and hoping that it stumbles across the right people. You've got that audience locked and loaded in a CRM Now. It is amazing how many small business owners rely on their diary and their phone ringing, but they don't necessarily capture that information. Whether you're a baker, a landscape or a barber, you absolutely need to make sure that you store every bit of customer data that you possibly can because it's really going to help you down the track. It's going to allow you to send information about your event to get people excited you're going to send them out some teasers about the amazing speakers that you're going to have. You'll send some follow up teasers about the incredible resort that the speaking event's going to be at and you're going to get them excited and it's actually going to really help that sales process because putting aside the, the transactional aspect of sales, that sales almost going to be over the line before you even get to the point of having to, to awkwardly close the deal. So I think more important than anything for business owners is to make sure you understand the importance of data. When you've got a really quiet week as a landscaper, it gives you a platform to be able to communicate with your customer base and try and fill some of those voids. And it costs you a lot less over time to drive leads into your business. You paid a lot of money for that lead up front. Imagine the lifetime value if you continue to drive repeat business from that lead rather than it just being that kind of transactional lead up front and then you kind of throw it away and went on with your day. And so for us it's really trying to support people making smart business decisions because over time you want to spend less money on marketing your business, but you want to support your business in being more successful.

Yeah, that makes sense. And it's interesting to like from our own end, we've got thousands and thousands of people in our email newsletter who are either past customers or I've spoken an event and they've wanted to join the newsletter. So we've got all of their names and emails and we add value weekly by sending them amazing podcast guests like you. Here's the takeaways. We do very, very little selling to them. There'll be certain times a year we're like, hey, we've actually got an event coming up. If you want to come, come join us. But it's not like every week we're trying to sell. But it's not a CRM, it's an email list. So if Thrive was to come to me and go, hey James, we see you've got, you know, 12,000 people there's that you communicate with regularly. How could you take that data and help me bring it to life in regards to a CRM?

Yeah, I think having the data is incredible and amazing. So I'm going to say up front, well done to you on making sure that you have captured and stored all of that data. I think the next piece that goes with it is making sure that you're able to segment that data and understand things. So there is nothing worse than being communicated to, for example by a hair salon who keeps talking to me about beard trims. I'm a lady, I don't have a beard and those messages aren't relevant and pertinent for me. So one of the things that I always find is make sure you tag any of that data with critically important information. Elise comes in, she's maybe in her mid-40s and has a few gray hairs so she might like to do some disguising but be able to put things in there that are relevant to me. They're going to communicate with me about specials that have got to do with with hair colors and day spa treatments and trims for my hair, but they're not going to talk to me about services that aren't relevant for me. So I think step one with having a CRM is to make sure you've got the data, which you do to make sure that you then over time start to enrich the data. And things like being able to store the invoices against the customer files automatically support that enriching process because all of a sudden every service that I've booked with them is tagged against my file. They know me, they know what I order from the sale on, they know the services that I purchase, they know the duration of my appointments. Because that also helps if you're trying to fill gaps in a schedule. If I'm always there for a three hour schedule, I'm not the right person to fill a 30 minute gap that you've got on on Thursday with a special offer. So I think being able to use that data in a really meaningful way to your point, you can use it for email marketing, you can use it for SMS marketing, there are many channels that you can then use it for but you can also use it to help you with following up on bills that aren't paid. You can use it for many different purposes. So I think making sure that you've got that data bedded down somewhere and that you're continuing to use tools to enrich the data and make sure it is all interconnected to your invoicing system and your quoting system so that you've got all of that rich customer data.

That'S brilliant and really start segmenting. You're right. I get an often I'll get email send. James, you've been selected for the front page of a magazine for Chro so head, you know human resource magazine for top female coach of the year and I'm like delete. Like, are you serious? Come on. So I think they've clearly not segmented me very well. They're putting this out and just blanketing everyone and it just turns me off right away. It's an automatic unsubscribe job done. Now the other thing that's really bogged me down, I put a post up, I don't know, a year and a half ago and I went nuts. I put up on LinkedIn and it was just I got my phone out, took a photo of my computer screen of my email inbox with 27,000 unread emails.

And people were like, anxiety.

People are like, are you serious? You're a hot mess. And I says, well, I just don't have the time to do it. And so I ended up getting a system in and that system required a human full time to manage my email inbox and my calendar. So I don't check my emails anymore, I don't do my calendar anymore. This individual comes in, there's a very specific system. There's one folder in the email and that's the only thing I check the one, the emails that they can't answer. And it's awesome. Now not everyone's going to have the luxury to maybe to be able to do that or even the desire does thrive of any tools to help us with the email overload type of thing.

We definitely do. And I think in today's day and age, the consumers out there across Australia and New Zealand, they expect you to be on all the time. They are sitting on their couch, they're sending off email inquiries, they're doing things 24, 7. And unfortunately for a lot of small business owners, you need to be able to switch off, you need to be able to spend time with your family. Now you don't necessarily want to use technology to support with every aspect of your business because potentially the actual transaction of the sale, you want that meaningful transaction to be between you and the client. You still want to be in the barbershop, you still want to be in the gardens as a landscaper. But if I send in a general inquiry to you, you can set out some pre built cadences and some pre built email content to respond to a lot of those inquiries. Now if I'm a barber store, a lot of those inquiries are either going to be around availability of booking an appointment or they're going to be around the services and potentially wanting to know the prices and rates for those services. Now you can set up your email inbox so that when an email comes in relating to either of those two fields that there is an auto generated reply that says hey, James is unfortunately not available right now, but I can tell that you're inquiring about about the rate card and I thought I'd just send that across. James will be able to follow up with you in the morning from 8:30 when the salon opens. But in the meantime feel free to browse through the services and if you'd like to book an appointment, click on this link. It allows that transaction to take place at a time that's right for the person sitting on their couch, it's 8:30 at night, they're wanting to book an appointment at the barber store. They're then able to browse your catalog, realize the rates look quite reasonable and book an appointment then and there. That whole transaction has taken place whilst you're potentially watching TV and hanging out with your family. So there are lots of really great ways to be able to use automated workflows which sound incredibly complicated, but if you use a tool like Thrive and there are other options available in the market as well to be able to support you, they're all pre built and customized. We can make sure that we're obviously linking up to your website and things like that, but a lot of those cadences are already pre designed. So it is really an easy one that people can pick up off the shelf, plug into their business and be able to start using some of those automated flows. I think if I look at, I've got a 21 year old son and a 17 year old son and if I look at their search behaviors, they no longer pick up the phone to do anything. They are doing everything on their phone at a click at a button at a time that's right for them. So that is going to become more and more prevalent. So I think the easier we can make your life so that when you get to the salon at 8:30 in the morning, imagine you could just start cutting hair and you didn't have to worry about sitting there and going through your inbox and checking out who's contacted you because all of those activities had been sorted out overnight whilst you were hanging out with your family.

Yeah, I think it's awesome. And comes back to, you know, what is your most dollar productive activity and what is that dollar per hour figure. And I think we all need to work that out as business owners. And it took me ages to figure this out, you know, like if I know I can do this thing and it's going to be two and a half thousand dollars an hour versus doing this thing which is $4 an hour. It's like I want to be doing that thing over there all the time. And often the $4 an hour thing is the social media is the email is the lead generation. I don't want to be doing that. I want to be with my people, with my customers, with my team and serving them. So we've covered off at lead generation, marketing, sales. Is there anything else that's really important from a thrive point of view that you can help people to thrive?

Yeah, I think for my end, for small business owners, it really is encouraging them to reach out and seek help like you did with your email inbox. I think a lot of the times small business owners think they have to wear the burden of everything themselves. And they are, they're incredibly time pressured. They're not turning up to their son's football game on the weekend. They're not having time to sit down and eat dinner with the family because they're bogged down in all of the admin and all of the busyness that comes with running a business. I think I would implore anyone to sit back and be able to say I need some help because actually I started a business because I loved doing whatever my craft is and that's the thing that I'm passionate about. I would say go and look for somebody to help you manage all of that other stuff that is keeping you away from that craft. Because there are lots of great tools, there is lots of great tech and with the pace of change at the moment, it is so accessible to small business owners. And I think 10 years ago you needed to be a large corporate to invest in a big system like Salesforce to be able to have these tools. That whole market has been completely dismantled and all of those tools are now accessible for any business owner. You can be a solopreneur, you can have four or five vans on the road, but there is great tech that you can have access to without needing to have a development team, without needing to, to hire extra people to manage it. But it will give you the freedom and flexibility to be able to either able to double down and spend more hours working in your business, productive sort of money making hours, or it's going to give you that flex to spend some additional time with your family, to sit down and have dinner with them, to turn up at your son's soccer games. So I would absolutely implore any small business owner that's out there, have a look. There are some, lots of great options and I know we're coming into a quieter time of the year across December and January. So maybe it is the right moment to be able to sit back and have a look and think, you know what, I do need some help.

It's definitely the right time to be doing it. And even from my own point of view, I was chatting with Caroline this morning. I was like, okay, I'm feeling tired. It's been a big year and I'm looking at December 1st as we have recording today. But it's getting to that point where I need to slow down, I need to start thinking about, well, what does 2026 look like? What have I learned in 2025 that I don't want to have to relearn in 2026? I want to like speed up. And for me, a huge part of that is actually being able to focus on the things that matter most. And it seems like Thrive can help me take all the things I don't really want to be focusing on. Automate those have systems in place and that's really what I want to do. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes so that the person listening going, yeah, I run a small business or a medium sized business, I need help in this area. Please go and check out Thrive. The reason I was so excited about coming to meet Thrive and then walking away from when I did meet all your team was that I seen such a synergy between what I do and who you guys are and that is that my definition of high performance is that it's consistently exceeding the norms whilst maintaining healthy relationships and wellbeing. Now that is thriving. And Thrive helps me to do more of that. So just before we wrap up, one last question. If you had a small business owner who is doing the 60 to 80 hour week trying to keep things moving and they came to you and said, at least, how do I lead my business on purpose? What's the one piece of advice you would have for them?

So I would absolutely make them sit down and say, what is that one thing that is keeping you away from your family? And what is that one thing that is keeping you up at 3 o' clock in the morning and let's go and solve that problem together. Because I can assure you that if we solve that problem, it is going to lighten that mental load. And I think there are lots of things out there to support you. And I think being happy, being healthy, being very well grounded, there is no badge that you get for being a superhero that works 80 hours a week in their business and misses out on an entire life of living. So I think definitely sit back, ask for help, partner up with someone that can really support you because I think there are lots of players out there in the market that can support small to medium business owners. And I think finding that balance is really important. It's going to make you a better employee when you're at work and it's going to make you a better person when you're out of the office.

I'm with you on that, Elise. This has been so helpful for me and I know that the listeners will have loved this. I'm going to remind them one last time, go over and check out Thrive. The link is in the show notes. But Elise, thank you so much for everything that you do for all of us small and medium sized businesses.

Thank you so much, James. Appreciate it.

It's been a pleasure.