0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemimah Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemimah, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast. Ain’t nothing gonna stop me now.
0:00:43 Ben Wright: Hey, Jemimah, nice to see you. Well, not so nice. I’ve just spent 30 seconds telling you to shush.
0:00:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I was making jokes about crows, which I thought were funny, but here we are.
0:00:52 Ben Wright: Well, let’s not go down this ballpark.
0:00:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Okay?
0:00:54 Ben Wright: Let’s not go down this alley. I was going to say something really interesting that I forgot to mention to you earlier.
0:00:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: What was it?
0:00:59 Ben Wright: Right, so I happened to walk past your room this morning and a ball gown lying out on the bed. So first thing I thought was, surf club’s not that fancy.
0:01:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s a very nice venue, but no, that’s not for here. No.
0:01:13 Ben Wright: So why.
0:01:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Why do I have a ball gown?
0:01:15 Ben Wright: Why have you got a ball gown?
0:01:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: So I leave from here and I go to Sydney. Did I not tell you this? I’m going to an awards night. Yeah, I’m an awards night on Friday. I’m a finalist.
0:01:22 Ben Wright: I could have so much fun with what the awards for, but I won’t.
0:01:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: What do you think it’s for?
0:01:27 Ben Wright: I was going to say it’s an award for your personality.
0:01:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Just for being legend. No, I would love to start that award process. No, actually, no. It’s for PR Media Firm of the Year.
0:01:37 Ben Wright: Great.
0:01:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: Super fancy. Do love a good award. One of the biggest parts of my business is I teach businesses how to do that. How interesting.
0:01:44 Ben Wright: And I’ve seen you are very good at that.
0:01:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Surprisingly, actually. Yeah. But no. One of the things that you need to understand with awards is that particularly you need to look fancy when you go to them. They’re all five star gala events. So, yeah, there is actually a ball gown hanging over. And I did have to warn your wife. I was like, can I borrow some of these clippy things to hold a dress up? Because you can’t keep that in a suitcase.
0:02:05 Ben Wright: Yeah, well, I think presenting yourself in your best way is important.
0:02:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: And it was awards night.
0:02:11 Ben Wright: Well, it’s. I think more than that, I think when you’re doing business with people arriving to meet a customer. Scruffy or unshaven. You know, clearly having a beard works for some people. When I’m saying unshaven, it’s those people that don’t have beards and they walk in with scruff. Or when you don’t present yourself well enough. I mean, I’m a little bit old school in this that I always recommend people be the best dressed in the room rather than the worst dressed because you can lose sales deals over being the worst dressed in a room. But I’ve never seen someone lose a deal because they put a shirt on and were well dressed.
0:02:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely.
0:02:46 Ben Wright: So back to your awards night. So good luck.
0:02:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thank you.
0:02:49 Ben Wright: I hope it goes well.
0:02:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Fingers crossed. Keep buying social. Yeah, yeah. If I win, you won’t stop hearing about it. If I get media and PR company of the year, you better believe I’m telling everybody from the rooftop.
0:02:59 Ben Wright: That’s what you’d expect if you win the award.
0:03:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Literally what I also teach. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about awards a little bit today because it’s one of those things. I mean, I know that you don’t enter many business awards at the moment. We’re currently working on actively fixing that. But it’s one of those things. I’ve got a question for you, Ben. How many awards do you think there are that Australian businesses and Australian entrepreneurs and corporate professionals can enter roughly across Australia and, you know, internationally essentially?
0:03:29 Ben Wright: I mean, I know one, we were finalists in a growth company award two years in a row.
0:03:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: Incredible. You’ve talked about that a little bit. Yeah, I do.
0:03:35 Ben Wright: And I’m proud that we achieved those results because we’re up against some really serious competition. But how many awards do I think? Look, I don’t know, let me guess and say. I think there’s a few. I’m going to say there might be a couple of hundred.
0:03:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, great. We’re sitting around 400 at the moment.
0:03:49 Ben Wright: 400.
0:03:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: 400 business awards.
0:03:51 Ben Wright: And that’s a Australia wide.
0:03:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: So that’s for Australian businesses. So some of these are international. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about awards and particularly why you need to be entering. Because I see this as the ultimate free pr, free publicity and honestly free money. I’ve never ever gone into an award, become a finalist or one and not have made minimum a couple of clients out of the deal.
0:04:17 Ben Wright: Right.
0:04:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: 100% of the time. So let me start by saying I’ve been a finalist probably over 100 times for awards and I love it. And it’s really great and I love going to awards nights but let me be very clear there a lot we’ll talk about that a little bit about costings and how awards are actually business because I think we need to be very clear on that. And it’s a marketing activity. But the point that I want to make here, it doesn’t matter if I’m a finalist or a winner very early on. Then the other week we happened to go down to BWS until to Dan Murphy’s or one of those ones and we walked in and I was looking for a wine and I pick up a bottle and it’s got a pretty picture of a duck or something on it but it had about a hundred of those little silver like medals on the side of it. Quick question, did you spend any time looking at whether they’re a finalist or a winner or did you just notice their metal foil and go that’s pretty cool, they’ve got something.
0:05:09 Ben Wright: I generally don’t care what the awards are for but do they have an influence on me? Look, probably if I’m down to choosing between two bottles of wine, am I going to go for the most awarded wine? On its own? No. But if I’m looking at a couple of bottles and I can see that there’s some awards there, I will look at it as a level of independent social proof and that will tip my decision over towards that.
0:05:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: And it always does. And it doesn’t matter who says finalist, winner, runner up, nominee, those words by themselves. The fact that you’re even in the race, you’re already doing a 1% activity.
0:05:41 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. I should qualify that because if it’s a meat pie shop.
0:05:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:05:46 Ben Wright: I will drive out of my way to go and get an award winning meat pie.
0:05:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, you get me.
0:05:51 Ben Wright: And same goes with vanilla slice.
0:05:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: Vanilla slice, right, yeah. If you’ve got the vet, you’re saying you got the best in Australia. I need to check this. I now want to know.
0:05:58 Ben Wright: We trust you but we want to verify.
0:06:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to see what the level of that person was that gave you that award. Do I agree with them or not? And I think this is where it becomes interesting because people say, you know, thousands of people enter awards, that’s 100% true. The average amount of people enter awards per national award and there’s maybe 200 of those is 79 applicants per category and a minimum 10 are becoming finalists. Your odds are extremely good for a minimum being a finalist. I have been a judge dozens of times. I have entered probably 5 to 600 awards. And I coach clients to do thousands every year and teaching them how to do that.
So I want to go through today a little bit that you need to know if you’re going to be looking at Awards. So number one, please, let’s go 400 different types of awards. They range from local awards, so think council, state, national and international. So varying levels. So if we enter the Noosa Council award for the best podcast, good chance we’re going to win. If we enter the state ones, maybe the Australia wide we’ve got a bit harder. So there are different levels of awards here in many, many ways. And when we start getting to international, you’re now competing with the billions of people, the 8 billion people on the planet. So be very mindful that there are different levels of awards that you can go for here. If you are a brand new business, people always say, I’m not ready. We’ve only been around for a year or two. Go for the new business award 100%. So there are so many different awards that you can really go for and there’s about 400 of them for Australian businesses. Right, okay, tip number one and start having a look at what’s around.
0:07:39 Ben Wright: So choose your playing field.
0:07:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, for sure.
0:07:42 Ben Wright: Got it.
0:07:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: And maybe shoot a bit bigger, I think is the other thing people go, just do the council ones. You’re making 100,000 grow a little bit bigger. I promise you it’s not going to hurt you. Number two, that I want you to know is the benefit of going into this. There are some really tangible benefits. So number one, you have to do an application, which means you’re going to have to do some sort of level of business audit where you’re going to have to look at how much money are we making, what are we doing here, what is our strategy, what is our training? Have we got a sustainability plan? They’re questions that independently we don’t necessarily look at because if it ain’t broke, we don’t fix it. This is actually a really nice audit tool and I find businesses really tend to start building these and then go, oh, you know what we could do? Have a charity we start supporting and start becoming better business owners and better humans by proxy. Number two, you’re going to get visibility, you’re going to get your name on a website, their awards, someone’s going to read your name out on a stage if you’re a finalist and if you win, you get to go on stage, collect an award, get photos taken, you will be in suit and Tie looking your best. They have professional photographers that are going to make you look like a rock star and you’re going to be in a room with hundreds of other people that are in the same boat. That there is the epitome of visibility. Now, one of the things you and I talk a lot about is ego. And some people go, I don’t feel like I can enter that. It’s not about you, it’s actually about the business and it’s the growth that you want to do. And it is a marketing activity. The visibility out. The fashion name will be an SEO on someone else’s website. There’s someone else who’s talking about you. This is marketing you can’t buy.
0:09:17 Ben Wright: It’s a free media we’ve spoken about a number of times.
0:09:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And you know how I feel about that and I’m 100% for it.
0:09:22 Ben Wright: I absolutely am. And for me, look, what always pulls me back around awards is how much time you have to invest into those, into doing the applications.
0:09:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:09:30 Ben Wright: Oh, look, I’m probably learning something new here and not as hard to win an award or be a finalist an award as you think. But I’m assuming it’s. There’s ways that you can get smarter at.
0:09:40 Jemimah Ashleigh: How you have absolutely no number three tip that I’m going to give you about this. Number three.
0:09:44 Ben Wright: Sorry.
0:09:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, no, no. I was like, oh, perfect timing actually. And I know we don’t talk about our tips before. Number three, did you know you only need one application and you copy paste? Yes.
0:09:53 Ben Wright: Yeah. Right.
0:09:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: So let me be really clear here and I’m going to give some real tips about what I would tell my clients do here. Number one, you’re going to go to the Australian Small Business Champion Awards and you’re going to get their questions. They are the industry best practice and industry standard that we tell our clients to go and do. Because in awards they are the godfather, if you will. They’ve been around for 30 years. They’re incredible. They have over 3,300 people who are finalists over across the Australian Small Business Champion Awards, the Women’s Awards and the Trades Awards. It is a brilliant night. 10 out of 10 recommend going. 1 of the things with them though is that they’ve created this incredibly deep application process, but giving you very minimal words in 350 words, you have to explain what your business does, why you do it, how you do it, where it came from and where you’re going in the future.
0:10:47 Ben Wright: Yeah, right.
0:10:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s all you can.
0:10:48 Ben Wright: It’s not A lot of words.
0:10:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s not a lot of words. And I have been applying since the day you could write whatever you want to try. You could even post your applications in. The point is, with this, we have 100% success rate of getting our clients through on this for the simple reason we answer the questions thoroughly, quickly get to the point. But all of our clients use this really in depth like application and repurpose it.
0:11:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: There are only so many ways or different award platforms and all 400 of them have to ask you, why did you start your business? What are you doing that’s different to somebody else? Why do you care? How are you training your staff? How do you market your business? These are questions that every award platform is going to ask.
0:11:27 Ben Wright: Not a bad opportunity. If you’d actually look in your business and say, I’m actually doing this anyway. Yeah, where am I short? We talk about sales process. We did that just our last episode. But when we talk about looking at gaps which came out of that sales process analysis, sorry, two episodes ago. So back in episode 11, when we have a look at that. For me, I love the outcome of a sales process investigation being where are our gaps? Same thing here with an awards process. If we can find out where the gaps are in our business through that awards process application, that is an unintended benefit.
0:11:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: It is a huge unintended benefit. People go, it’s really difficult to do them. If we do one, we’ll actually see the gap straight away. We can repurpose it. We know exactly what we need to fix and it really is as easy as fixing it once and it says set and forget. We review our application every six months. That’s it. Because we have it so down pat now. A few little things might change. I’ll be, you know, when the podcast started, I included that and then I’ll just go in and adjust the numbers when we have to.
0:12:24 Ben Wright: Yeah, get that.
0:12:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. What are you doing to market yourself? We’ll start a podcast series. This is what we’re doing. This is what happens.
0:12:29 Ben Wright: Ice.
0:12:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:12:30 Ben Wright: Awesome.
0:12:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: So final thing I want to talk about here, Sorry, number four, marketing in the room. Not only are you going to get to go to this room, so just want to paint the picture of you being a finalist for a second. You turn up to the star in Sydney, which is where I’m going to be on Friday night with the beautiful gown currently hanging in your spare room. Turn up to this ballroom. There is a thousand people in there who are all finalists or business owners and all taking their Business seriously. If you want to talk about some of five people that I know is, we talked in probably episode four on that, you start looking around that room. Those are your people. They’re taking their business seriously. They’re well connected. They’re putting the extra mile in. They’re going the 1% straight away. You’re in the right room. Secondly, there’s gonna be a book on the table that’s right in front of you that will have everyone’s name in businesses. You want more LinkedIn connections? Have fun.
0:13:18 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:13:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: You wanna sit with people. I was sitting next to a chicken shop owner who ended up winning the award. 10 out of 10. They weren’t the funnest people ever. I went to the chicken shop the next day when we were all hungover from too much wine. Again, why I don’t drink anymore.
0:13:30 Ben Wright: Good chicken.
0:13:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: 10 out of 10. The chips and gravy were the thing for me, but the relationships that you got to build were outside of your realm. But here’s the thing. They’re entering awards for me from visibility perspective. They know other business owners. That’s the only people we talk to are the business owners. So straight away you have other connections.
0:13:49 Ben Wright: Yeah. Referral partners could come out of that.
0:13:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Every person in that is an ideal client, a referral partner or someone that can recommend you to someone else.
0:13:56 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:13:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: And they’re all taking their businesses seriously.
0:14:00 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah.
0:14:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: And not only that, your name, your photo will be up on a wall. I have video footage of Andrew Datto saying my name, Lee Sales saying my name. I have walked across stages. I have had the ability to have photo taken with a trophy on stage. I can’t buy that sort of publicity.
0:14:18 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. I’d love to know what you do with that type of publicity.
0:14:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: Social media. Firstly media releases.
0:14:23 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:14:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: Tell other people about it. And then I keep telling about it. Websites. It comes in signature block. It becomes something that I actively post in my social media matrix.
0:14:32 Ben Wright: So what it actually does is it forms part of your social proof. And so often we know that people will make decisions based on Google reviews. People will make decisions based on being able to research you and find out you’re actually real. They’ll make decisions based on word of mouth, what other people say. But often people will make decisions on third party influences. So that might be an influencer for example, or it might be an awards company. So like we spoke about the wine or the meat pie or the vanilla slice.
0:14:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: All of the above.
0:14:59 Ben Wright: Yeah. So okay. Really powerful. I like that. It’s Another level of independent validation that you know what you’re doing.
0:15:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. Final thing I want people to know about entering awards. Awards are a business. I want to be very clear on this because this is a marketing activity that you are going to have to put some budget behind to enter awards. 9 times out of 10 is completely free. This should be something that you can just simply fill out online, cut and paste, job, upload. You’ll have a supporting document if you’ve claimed it in the award application. I could go into this forever. If you claimed it in the award application, prove it in a supporting document. You should never be providing P and Ls. You should never be doing any of that. But what you should be able to do is once you hit that send button and they say, congratulations, you’re a finalist. And it’s not hard to get a finalist. It’s not complicated, but it is. You have to have a plan in place to do that. You have to answer the questions right. Which is why we’re able to say we have 100% success rate at the lab. Because we have that social proof. Because here’s the formula.
0:15:59 Ben Wright: Yeah, okay, got it.
0:16:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: But then you’ll get an email back and it’ll say, hey Ben, congratulations, you’re a finalist. And you’ll say, that’s amazing. Thank you so much. Here’s the problem. These awards are a business. They’re making money out of it. If you haven’t, some of them will have application fees. Anything above 250, you are looking at starting to pay for the award. Be mindful of that. But these awards nights, they’re not free to go to some of the awards tickets. You’ll get a $50 and you can go and sit in a nice little ballroom with someone that knew someone, that plays a guitar, that will be on stage. You can eat your very questionable chicken and you can go home and get McDonald’s on the way home. And you feel much better about yourself in a nice dress or what we’re seeing more and more of is 3 to $400 for a ticket.
0:16:40 Ben Wright: Yeah. Wow.
0:16:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: So this is now marketing activity. This is where we have to start taking this seriously as an arm of our business. It is not just a night out. And some businesses I think really do enjoy the fact that it’s free flowing beer and champagne’s at your table. And it is a really fun night. You’re in a ball gown. But ultimately, if you’re going to be in that room, you should be talking to people at table, not just the people that you know there not just your date. You need to be looking at that brochure, looking at the other businesses who were the winners. This is a marketing activity that is just to be said, three to four hundred dollars a ticket. That’s not the flight, that’s not the hotel, that’s not gents. You can get away with suits a little bit better than women can for a longer period of time. Women have to buy dresses very regularly for these things. This is all a very expensive and pricey activity if you’re going into that, but one that can absolutely reap benefits should you want to go down that route.
0:17:37 Ben Wright: And I think there’s another level here and that’s around preparing to effectively network in that matter again. Perhaps it’s another topic here, but we talk about knowing who you’re going to target, having your questions ready, having unique value proposition ready to go so that when you walk into that room that night, you prepare. So love it.
0:17:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thousand people and they’re all listed on a website. You’ll be able to go through literally one by one and be like, who are the finalists here? They will also announce the winners as well. They’ll actually also on the website later, they’ll have the winners. And that is the minimum. If you don’t even win. If you win, you are looking at television interviews being literally. They have media at the back of most of these rooms, but we’re just waiting to find out who the winners are.
0:18:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s incredible.
0:18:16 Ben Wright: Let’s go through those five.
0:18:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, those five things again. Number one, 400 business awards.
0:18:20 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:18:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: And most of them are free to enter.
0:18:22 Ben Wright: So there’s lots out there for you to enter.
0:18:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. Number two benefits, the visibility, getting yourself out there, the free PR, the free media, the free SEO. That’s all going to be built in there.
0:18:32 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:18:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: 100% applying. You have to get serious about your application and it will also help you fill other gaps in your business that you didn’t necessarily know were there.
0:18:40 Ben Wright: But once you get that down pat once, it’s like a tender document. Once you get it down pat once, you can do it over and over and over again.
0:18:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. The next thing is like knowing who’s in the room. Get ready for that networking opportunity, get ready for having those conversations and know that you’re going to have SEO for days and that’s going to absolutely take its place and you can market your business moving forward.
0:18:59 Ben Wright: Great.
0:19:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Number four is preparation and five awards nights. Be ready to go to them. They’re a marketing activity. You need to invest into these.
0:19:07 Ben Wright: Yeah. Okay. So it’s training awards as part of your business.
0:19:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. 100%.
0:19:11 Ben Wright: Great. All right, so lots of things in there. I think for me, my silver bullet probably that came out of that. I’ve actually probably got two really important things. Number one is there’s 400 awards out there. So there will be awards that apply to your business. Pick the ones that apply and have a go.
0:19:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: I cannot tell you the varying level of awards.
0:19:32 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:19:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: The graphic design art, there’s a landscaper award. The trades awards, I think is incredible because they literally go hairdresser, like lash technician, hairdresser, tradie electrician. You know, they go through this list.
0:19:46 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:19:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Concrete supplier of the year.
0:19:48 Ben Wright: Yeah. Great. Excellent. Okay, so find your award that works for you.
0:19:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:19:52 Ben Wright: The second piece for me was actually was go through that process. Right. And build out your award application and look for the gaps in your business. I love it. If we can take a learning out of everything we do. And for me, really clearly there is. If you can go through that awards process and find something that you’re not doing well enough at, forget the award just for your customers.
0:20:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:20:12 Ben Wright: What a great unintended consequence.
0:20:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And I mean, from a business perspective, it’s great to have awards, but you get to become an employer of choice. You get to become, you know, if you’re. For those of you guys who are speakers out there, I get to say things like, she’s won multiple awards and been named this, this, you know, she. We’re an entrepreneur of one of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Australia.
0:20:31 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:20:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: I can’t pay for that.
0:20:32 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:20:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: Like, you know, she’s the best selling author. These things added zeros not only to my bank account, but to paychecks.
0:20:38 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:20:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: It was wild. As soon as you start saying that, because again, this is a 1% activity that people don’t take advantage of.
0:20:45 Ben Wright: Yeah. Cool. I like it. Excellent. Your number one before we leave.
0:20:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: Number one for me is just the absolute volume that are out there that businesses aren’t taking advantage of. I think for me, this is the number one silver bullet. It’s. You go and have a look what’s there. There are so many different awards and so many different varying levels. Wherever you are in your business journey, you are fully capable and fully probable that you’re going home with a minimum of finalist.
0:21:10 Ben Wright: Yeah. Great. Okay. Excellent. I like it. And so, Jemimah, before we go, tell me what else could happen out of an awards night.
0:21:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think, Ben, you might be able to make some friends.
0:21:20 Ben Wright: Yes. I knew you were going to get me on this one. If you don’t though, we’ve been your Friends in Business. We’ve loved chatting with you this week and can’t wait till next week.
0:21:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thanks Ben. That was another spicy exit.
0:21:30 A: I’ve been trying and you know I’ve been tested. Thank you for listening to the Friends in Business podcast. This episode was brought to you by your hosts Ben Wright and Jemimah Ashley, recorded in beautiful Noosa, Queensland. For more insights and resources, visit [email protected] and Jemimah jemimaashley.com if today’s podcast has helped you, we’d be so grateful if you could leave a review you and share with someone you know.
0:22:02 A: This will help more people in the world benefit from the hard work we are putting in to bring you the best content we possibly can.
