0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying, and, you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, 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 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Ben Wright: Hey. Hey, Jemimah. Welcome back.
0:00:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Good morning. How are you?
0:00:48 Ben Wright: I’m great. Very, very happy. I’m mostly a happy person, and today is no exception.
0:00:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: You are a very happy person. It’s actually a pleasure to record podcasts with you till the weather just decides to snap. As most people know, if you’re watching this on a video, we usually do this outside. And one of my favorite things about Noosa is the weather today. That hasn’t really happened as well as we would have liked.
0:01:12 Ben Wright: Was it the weather?
0:01:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s also the neighbors who were having the time of their life.
0:01:17 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. So we have a building site next door.
0:01:20 Jemimah Ashleigh: We do.
0:01:21 Ben Wright: And we mentioned a couple of weeks ago when we did another podcast, I actually think we’re going to be indoors for the next couple of months.
0:01:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think we might have to be.
0:01:28 Ben Wright: It’s a pretty active building site, so. But you know what? Fireplace ain’t so bad.
0:01:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: I mean, if we have to, you know, if we have to be. We’re still in Noosa. This is still a huge win.
0:01:37 Ben Wright: I agree.
0:01:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: We had to navigate this a little bit this morning. We were like, this is a little bit loud. It was a bit difficult. We started recording a couple of times. We found it was really difficult. And one of the things, I think in business, Ben, and I don’t know if you agree with this, but sometimes you have the best of intentions, you know exactly what you’re going to do, and then it goes wrong. And no matter what we tried to do to course correct, we were like, oh, we’ll just take a break. And then they bought out the power drills, and then the wind picked up and it was just. We had to kind of pivot. And one of the things you have to do sometimes is you have to do a bit of change, which is what we’re talking about today.
0:02:09 Ben Wright: Yeah, change management. Change management is reasonably close to my heart. And look, I might start here with the bad. So the numbers are against change management working within any business. And the numbers go along the lines of depending on the studies you look at, about 2/3 or 70% of change management initiatives don’t succeed.
0:02:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Big numbers.
0:02:35 Ben Wright: Yeah. For every 10 times you try and do something, seven of them don’t work. And look, I specifically remember a conversation I had with someone who went through one of our programs this year. They had heaps of experience in change management and their feedback to me was, Ben, why aren’t you using one of the commonly known proven approaches to change management? There’s lots and lots of literature out there around it. And I had to pause for a moment because it was somewhat controversial. My answer, but I really do pride myself on being upfront and truthful with everyone. And my response was that, because unfortunately, when 7 out of 10 change management initiatives don’t work, I don’t think the literature has covered it off well enough. Maybe, I think there are gaps.
0:03:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Maybe the blueprint isn’t what you think it is. Maybe this isn’t. You know, if it was like you’re going to crash the car seven out of ten times.
0:03:24 Ben Wright: Yeah. So had silence at the other end of the call. Followed up with a. Right, I kind of get it. But what I followed up with to say is, what I actually do is I take an approach from a number of change management initiatives that I’ve worked on and build out some really simple approaches. And if I have to really, really dumb it down to a super, super easy and compact level, it’s all around keeping it simple, building rituals. Right. And finding some quick wins. But we’re not going to actually talk at that level of simplicity. Today I’m going to step through five ways that I run through change management in my programs that I know works. And the reason I can say that I know works is because I’ve had results of one team. They grew by just over 80% in six weeks
0:04:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: Wow. When everyone else is closing the seven out of ten.
0:04:13 Ben Wright: Well, this was a little. Sorry when seven out of ten don’t work. But in this instance they grew by just over 80% in six weeks and they were a seven figure a month business.
0:04:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s a pretty incredible business.
0:04:23 Ben Wright: So they weren’t a billion dollar a year business, but they were tens of millions of dollars in terms of their turnover. So they almost doubled in six weeks from a change management approach. And obviously I’ve had a number of other examples at work, but I think this was a really good one because they had that turnaround in such a short period of time and actually held that for the next five months. It was a six month program.
0:04:41 Ben Wright: So five Things today around change management.
0:04:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thank you.
0:04:45 Ben Wright: What I’d like to start with is number one, which is the obvious one and that about getting really clear on what your goals are of the program. So this isn’t just sitting down and saying I would like to make sure that I would like to implement price increases into my business or I would like to move into. Let’s talk about Australia. I would like to move in from only servicing the eastern seaboard. I would like to pick up the western seaboard. Yes, right. That is too broad. These are goals of the change management program that will say if I’m looking to pick up the Western Australian seaboard, I’ve got three things that I need to do. I need to build first of all to pick up the west of Australian seaboard, I need to get a regulatory understanding of the market I’m playing in. For example, the second key part of that goal is we need to have stage two, which is to get our check out, our minimum viable product is ready to go in the market. And the third stage of that is to have a go to market plan.
0:05:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:05:37 Ben Wright: Right. And we will generally in change management aim for three key goals. So at a broader strategic level, the higher you get in terms of the bigger your change management activity is, the easier it is to set broad goals. Then you spend lots of time below that. The smaller your change management initiative is, then these key goals end up moving into almost being action plans.
0:05:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:05:59 Ben Wright: Right. So number one is all about setting your key goals. But most importantly here is we need to be ready to involve the team. The team that’s implementing the change management needs to be all across what the key goals are. Because if they’re not and they don’t see what the end journey or the destination looks like, then it’s really hard to get them to navigate that journey. Because we’re asking them to do something different.
0:06:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, totally new. Right. It’s really great to say we’re going to Perth, we’re putting the business there, that’s what we’re going to do. And people go, well, okay, let me know how that goes. We now need you buy in.
0:06:35 Ben Wright: Yeah, great. So number one, get your goals right. Number two is map out what success looks like.
0:06:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:06:42 Ben Wright: So we talk a lot in any type of strategic planning around building action plans. And action plans are generally straightforward. What the activity is, what the next steps are, who’s responsible and the due date that is imperative in change management. That we go from a macro, here’s our three goals or our five goals or our Four goals, whatever they may be, into what our action plan is very, very important. Because without an action plan, we don’t have lots of little pots of gold to pick up along the journey as we go.
But even more important is that with each of those action plans, that we’re clear on what success looks like. So if the example here is to move into the Western Seaboard of Australia, and we know that one of our action plans is going to be to determine what Western Australian customers prefer, any idiosyncrasies with the Western Seaboard of Australia around what they prefer. So what success looks like, and let’s say that task is assigned to Jemimah and it’s due by the end of next quarter.
0:07:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: Great.
0:07:42 Ben Wright: What success looks like here is when we can decide that we’ve ticked off and we’ve achieved that action plan. And for something like understanding videosyncrasies of the Western Australian market, it would be something like, we are clear on the changes we need to make to our product or service to succeed in the Western seaboard.
0:08:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, love that.
0:08:03 Ben Wright: Right. So it’s not just coming back and going, yeah, okay, we’ve got some understanding here. It’s actually taking that to a practical outcome that says, right, we know what we need to do.
Another example here, because this can get difficult, what success looks like. If the example is that we need to have launched in the Western Australian market by X date, what success looks like would be X number of sales by this period of time.
0:08:26 Ben Wright: Or it could be 14 proposals or 50 proposals out in the Western seaboard by this date. Right. It gives us something that’s more of a smart objective to measure against, so that we are not just saying we’ve launched. Great, we’ve launched in Western Australia. There’s a whole big marketing campaign out there. We didn’t get a single sale. That’s not really a launch.
0:08:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, that’s a failed launch.
0:08:47 Ben Wright: It’s been present is what it is. Yeah, yeah, Right. But it’s not actually succeeding.
0:08:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: So the metrics part is really important here. This is, Jemimah we need you to launch by next quarter, what are the extra items? And I mean, and the one thing that I will say, this is something I regularly say is I see leaders go, we’re going to do this, we’re going to launch, we’re going to go and go do this, or we’re going to release this product or, you know, we’re going to the U.S. what does this look like? One thing I see is there’s just no plan. That follows. And there’s no. This is the next steps and the team being involved here, 10 out of 10 needs to happen.
0:09:16 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yes. You’ve ticked off the key items there. Get the team involved and build out your action plans. Okay, so here’s the third one. Here’s where we start to roll in a bit of theory. This is all about appointing champions of change and have some fun with this. I’ve had the best one I’ve heard was we had a business based out of Queensland and they called their project champions the three Llamas. If that business is ever listening, I’m not gonna name them. They know who they are and I love them. And a llama was a symbol of celebration in their business. So we had a bit of fun with the three Llamas and I’ve had some other really good ones along journey. Three Amigos was one, the Renewable ranges. It was a project around some renewables activities. It’s had some really cool ones. So what we do here. And again, if those two businesses are listening, they’ll know who they are. And great job, guys.
0:10:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: Llama is writing to the show. That’d be great.
0:10:07 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So from here what we do is those project champions, I actually generally break them down into three areas. We have a storyteller, we have a motivator and we have a thinker. Right, so three areas. So now this is the part of change management where I’ve created a program that I know works. So the thinker, the thinkers, their job is all about keeping change management on track. From a very practical level. We take those action items, we throw them into a project management software.
0:10:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: How are we dealing with this? Are we following what needs to be done? Jemimah, by the end of next quarter, we need this done. How are you tracking with that?
0:10:41 Ben Wright: That’s right. And you set up some systems and processes around that, which I won’t go into detail today.
So think is very much your nuts and bolts, detail oriented person, your motivator. They’re all about making sure that we keep everyone motivated and we keep them positive and some momentum in the project. And generally we’ll pick some types of celebrations in here. And we’ve certainly. There’s a few episodes back we ran a piece around the three types of celebrations. Internal team, external to the business and into the team. But on top of that, there’s some really cool specific celebrations that I run with teams. Some based around nostalgia, some based around competition, some based around bonding together as a team. Right. But the motivator’s job is to keep everyone up and about and happy and focused. Then we get to the storyteller.
0:11:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Your favorite?
0:11:30 Ben Wright: My favorite. Right. So the thinker, their job is to make sure we’ve got the minds. The motivator is to make sure that people are encouraged and enthused and their mind and their hearts are working. The storyteller’s job is actually to win the hearts. So storytellers are all about finding progress, to acknowledge or wins, to celebrate and telling stories. So their job is to make sure that where a motivator is all about celebrations, a storyteller is all about spreading the word. Yeah. It’s seen those ads tell marketing to spread the word. Right. This is all about. w
0:12:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: Why are we d oing this, what is the purpose of this? How are you involved in getting people to tell the story of the business?
0:12:13 Ben Wright: So that could be a story on its own. Right. Or we could have stories around. I remember a great story from a team in the medical industry and if they’re listening, this person will know who they are.
0:12:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: And write into the show, Let us know.
0:12:24 Ben Wright: Yeah, right into the show, let us know. But they were dealing with a hospital where they were struggling to get all the stakeholders together. They managed to get all the stakeholders into the room, they got really clear on their goals, around what success looked like for that business and they were able to move forward to a clinical trial of their product. For those who know the medical industry, this will be clear. But for those who don’t, to get a product into a hospital requires multi stakeholder engagement. Right. Because you have surgeons, you have nurses, you have procurement, you have financial, but then you’re below. All of that is you have patient safety. Right. And that can override
So there’s a fair bit of work that goes into these medical products and what they did was they told a great story out of it that the motivator was able to use as encouragement and the thinker was able to use to go, hey, we’re making progress. Storytellers, jobs are hard and there’s some AI prompts that we can use to help that. But appointing those project champions is the third step of successfully rolling out change management and equally as important as step one being setting your goals and step two being really clear on where your journey needs to take you.
0:13:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love that.
0:13:31 Ben Wright: So that’s one, two and three.
0:13:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, great. Tell me those again.
0:13:34 Ben Wright: Number one, get your goals right.
0:13:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:13:36 Ben Wright: Or be clear on your goals. Number two is build out your action plans and what success Looks like with the team, if they build it, they’ll implement it. Number three is appoint your project champions or your llamas, if you want to call them that.
0:13:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: We need llama.
0:13:49 Ben Wright: I think we should put one up behind us. Okay. Number four is all about setting your review period.
0:13:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Oh goodness, yes.
0:13:55 Ben Wright: So we call this review refine or I call this review, refine and rollout or re. Rollout. So we set regular periods where as a team we’re going to review what’s happening, we’re going to refine what’s working and what’s not working.
0:14:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:14:12 Ben Wright: And then we’re going to reroll that out. Because what that does is it allows us to tweak our change management on the fly. Very similar to having metrics to measure yourselves by. But I absolutely recommend in the first three months of change management, it’s every second week you’re getting together for a quick 45 minutes on this. After three months you’re sitting down and you’re putting a couple of hours or a half day into it. Then you’re doing that at the six months and the nine months. It doesn’t take much time.
0:14:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. I will say with the review periods for anything in the business, they fundamentally shifted and added zero throw business for the simple reason of what’s working, what’s not. Just where are we on this journey? Because really is to go, hey Jemimah, can you make sure we’re rolled out that. Yeah, yeah. That’s why we have accountability sessions. That’s why we have check in. It’s why we’re checking in with our teams to go, listen, I just want to check in. How’s that going? And that’s also where you can start to tell what’s working and really what’s not. And also who’s working in this role and who’s not.
0:15:05 Ben Wright: Yeah, absolutely. Great. So that’s number four. Done. Number five. Last, last one for today.
0:15:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: Is it about llamas again? Is it more farmyard related stuff?
0:15:15 Ben Wright: Oh gee, could I, could I make it look like that? So we plant an avocado tree. Do you know how long an avocado tree. This is your farming analogy you want, so I’m giving you one.
0:15:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: I don’t really want a Farm yard, animal based, but that’s on me. Okay, great. Avocados take a very long time to grow
0:15:28 Ben Wright: You know, on average, how long before you get abercard?
0:15:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: Three years, Four years?
0:15:32 Ben Wright: Seven. Seven years. Tomato plants. Do you know how long it takes to get tomato plants up and Running about a year. Nah, it’s a few weeks. Yeah, right, few weeks. So Jemimah’s clearly not a farmer.
0:15:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: No, I was just talking to your wife about your plants and I was trying to make her feel better.
0:15:47 Ben Wright: And we’re learning about those from personal experience. So tomatoes are a few weeks. So a tomato is a quick win plant.
0:15:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, they are.
0:15:53 Ben Wright: An avocado is a long term strategy.
0:15:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: So can I ask a question is number five, quick wins.
0:15:58 Ben Wright: Yes, it is, Jemimah. So you asked for an example, gave you one off the cuff.
0:16:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: So you’ve done really well.
0:16:04 Ben Wright: And I can genuinely say that as all of our podcasts are, these are not pre written, these are podcasts where we talk with each other because we think we get the most out of it. So we want to find quick wins. The reason we want to find quick wins is because it builds momentum. And whenever we’re learning to do something like, we think about your children learning to ride a bike. Right. Or your children learning how to swim or your children learning how to walk. Once they get those first little pieces of momentum, they get encouraged and they want to do it more and more and more.
0:16:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:16:33 Ben Wright: So if we can, as a team, find quick wins, couple of things happen. First of all is we get the encouragement.
0:16:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:16:39 Ben Wright: But the second piece is we start to see the strategy work, which means everything builds from there. So the earlier we start self improvement, the sooner we get to where we want to be, the earlier we find wins in change management, the sooner we get to where we want to be. And. And I would say this is the number one reason where change management initiatives fail.
0:16:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:16:59 Ben Wright: And that is because we go and do our beautiful plan. We sit out, it’s perfect, it’s ready to go, and then tomorrow gets in the way of today. And what I mean by that is that we don’t allow ourselves the time to implement these plans, which results in a significant delay before we get to them. So my encouragement is to every team out there is to get some wins really quickly.
0:17:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Keep that momentum going
0:17:24 Ben Wright: A nd then we build that momentum.
0:17:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Great. All right, hit me with those five again.
0:17:28 Ben Wright: Okay. Number one is get your goals right.
0:17:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:17:30 Ben Wright: Number two is with your team.
0:17:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:17:32 Ben Wright: Build out your action plan and what success looks like. Number three, project champions. Storyteller, motivator.
0:17:40 Jemimah Ashleigh: Get a llama.
0:17:42 Ben Wright: Storyteller, motivator and thinker. Every time I went to say each one of those words, I almost said llama. So number three, that’s done. Number. Going to go back again because people might have missed These set your goals, action plans and key what success looks like. Your project champions Number four is all about setting your review, refine and reroll out periods. And number five is quick wins.
0:18:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:18:01 Ben Wright: All right. Your number one from today
0:18:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Get a llama really is. No, I will say just really want a llama now. I will say the quick wins is really, really important. Where I’ve seen anything really succeed is getting those wins really quickly and getting the momentum and getting the buzz and the excitement. If you get your team on board and you have those wins early on and they’re seeing progress, those days where it feels like you need to have more grit than others just are just a lot easier. When we manage to get through that, we can do this great.
0:18:28 Ben Wright: So for me, my number one is I’d pair that quick wins with having a team involved and engaged in that change management program. You get them involved in it, they’re more likely to build it and that’s where momentum comes. Excellent. That has been a very friendly episode from Friends in Business.
0:18:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: It has.
0:18:45 Ben Wright: I’ve enjoyed it. It’s really chunky. That podcast, I will say that’s a full day program I run out with the teams I work with. Right. So please give yourself some time to implement it. It’s not click of the fingers and you’re done. But as always, as we are your friends in business, get in touch if you need anything. Otherwise, we’ll see you next week.
0:19:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Hopefully outside again. We’ll see.
