In this 2026 YouTube video, Gareth, the founder of Performia Australia, recounts his journey from running several businesses in his 20s and 30s to discovering Performia at an Australian seminar in 2006. He explains how his earlier approach—focused on controlling staff, fearing pay‑rise demands, and dealing with legal and quality issues—was fundamentally misplaced. After meeting Performia’s CEO Martin Runow, Gareth adopted the Performia methodology, which shifted his attention from policing employees to attracting, filtering, and developing "champion" team members. He outlines Performia’s three‑pillar business formula (product demand, strategy/processes, and people), describes the concept of a "safe, fun, and productive" team (where safety means full attention on delivering value), and emphasizes that cultural change must start at the top. Gareth details the suite of Performia tools, training, and systems that enable performance hiring, elite‑team creation, and ongoing coaching, arguing that without the right people even the best marketing or strategy fails. He concludes with a personal reflection on the joy of working with elite, motivated colleagues and his desire to deliver the same experience to his clients.
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Hi, I'm Gareth from Performia Australia. I brought the product to Australia back in 2006 after successfully and to some degree unsuccessfully running my businesses in my 20s and to mid-30s. And when I saw Performia for the first time at a seminar in Australia, I realized how wrong I'd been with building my teams. It's like I got to a point where I didn't trust people. I was always scared that they might want to come and ask me for a pay rise or You know, you'd get all sorts of horror things happening, like people really working against the company and creating, you know, legal issues and poor quality customer issues. And then when I saw Performia for the first time, in the first 15 minutes, I realized that my whole attention and focus had been in the wrong place. And from that first contact, I met up with the presenter, which was Martin Runow, the Performia Performia International, CEO and founder of Performia, and that grew into me deciding to take on this business in Australia. So at the time I was starting my business, which was just great timing, gave me a new thing to go on to, and I went to Taiwan and I did all the training for Performia and just brought so many angles and aspects to the way I've been running my business wrongly, but there were just slight little changes. I didn't really need to change much at all but just put my attention where it needed to be. You know, really know how to really select and filter people, attract people into the business, and especially create the culture that a business really should be. There's a business formula that goes together. It's just made up of 3 things. One is having, you know, a product or service that's in demand. People want it, they want you, they know about you because your marketing is in place. You need to obviously have some strategy and processes to build that. But most importantly is you need people. You need champions. You need people that will come in and they want to make things just go right. They love what they're doing. They love that feeling of attainment more than they do pay in their bank account. And it doesn't mean people don't want pay or want to have financial success. But if pay is a motivator, it's not fun. Really, what Performia created for me and what we want to create for you as our prospective clients is having a team of really fun, safe, and productive people. By safe, it's not occupational health and safety safe. It's safe in the point that 99% of their attention or 100% of their attention is on just getting the product or service out to the clients. Doing a really good job and growing the business and, you know, high-fiving when things are going well and, you know, crying with you when things aren't going so well and basically putting their shoulder to the wheel to make the business the best it can be. A team that's like, you know, with all people that are on board, they're in line, they're production orientated and, you know, it makes it really easy to run a business. It makes it fun. It made me personally love Building businesses again and hiring people and having people around me that just, you know, we can discuss anything, we can make anything happen. We don't have to hide anything about the profits or the problems or the issues or the challenges. You know, everyone comes on board with them. And then for most business, it's like, and for me as well, but for most businesses, it requires a cultural change. And that cultural change really starts at the top. You would get from Performia what I got from it. Which is to see that it's like, you know, just putting all your attention on problems and putting your attention on, you know, poor quality staff and those sorts of things is totally wrong. The way to put your attention is actually on, you know, creating that production-focused team, creating that team of champions that can build a championship business. And it's not easy because it's like, you know, it does take time, it takes some tough decisions, it takes a little bit of learning. But, you know, it takes some patience. But there's like— with Performia, we have a whole process in place that allows you to know how to attract the right people, how to filter in those people that, you know, you would normally pass over and be able to see that they should work for you. Also, you will filter out those people that definitely you don't want in your organization. They're going to create lots of problems. And it creates a management culture that's really focused on You know, winning and that good feeling of winning, that crappy feeling when things don't go so well. But everyone's feeling the same things and everyone's enjoying the toughness and enjoying the winning that you have in your organization. Performia has tools and processes and training and knowledge and systems to create this culture that, you know, I know that as a business owner, I didn't even know it was possible. Probably when I first started in business when I was 21 years old, you I had this whole ideology of being able to just bring anyone in and be able to make them the best they could be. But that ideology doesn't work. It's like I learned the hard way, you just can't bring anyone into your organization and change them to what is needed. It doesn't matter how enthusiastic they are or what they tell you, it just doesn't happen. This is really what the Performia journey is about. It's about just making that tiny adjustment in the mind of leaders so So that they know better where to invest their attention and get people into their organizations and run them in a way that they feel great and they want to basically push the whole purpose of the organization, solve the issues. Because it doesn't matter really how good your marketing is, if you can't get a team to deliver, then the marketing gets wasted. No matter how good or bad your strategy is, with the right people, that strategy will come together. So really, the first major step of the Performia journey is the performance hiring It probably has 100 concepts in it that will, every one of them by themselves, can create a change in the organization, a change in that culture. And the biggest thing it really does is it firstly shows that it's possible. It's like people come out of that first training and they go, it's really, it is possible that I can build a, you know, a really elite champion team of people. The Full Performia journey for a business Or a business owner really starts off with that yearning to want to take your business into the elite level. That really means that it's like you need to have a whole bunch of elite people. You need to know how to create a team of elite people. And that means that you need to create a culture where elite people want to come to it, where people want to play at that level, and then knowing how to manage or— Coach those people through to continually create, you know, better and better and higher and higher productive outcomes. As someone that's been in business now over 35 years, it's like, it's the best feeling as a business owner is to know that, you know, you have a whole bunch of friends that work around you that love working with you. And, you know, the conversations are all about how to make the business better, and the personal conversations are about how to make their lives better. And, you know, I love that and I want that for all our clients.
