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 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 A: Lets get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: I hear a congratulations is in order. You’re welcome.
0:00:48 Ben Wright: Yeah, thank you. I’m not sure. Yes, I woke up this morning. Is that where we’re going here? What’s the congratulations for?
0:00:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: I hear a finalist for the Australian Small Business Champion Awards.
0:00:57 Ben Wright: Ah, well then I hear a congratulations is in order for you too.
0:01:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s true, it’s true. Thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome. That’s a big deal.
0:01:04 Ben Wright: Well, I actually don’t know much about it, to be fair. Full transparency. You sent me a message saying you should enter this and I did. And how many people entered?
0:01:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: About 27,000 is what I heard.
0:01:16 Ben Wright: And how many? Do you know how many finalists there are?
0:01:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: About a thousand. Okay, so about , probably less.
0:01:22 Ben Wright: So about 3 to 4% of those who applied have become a finalist. Okay, that’s not bad. Great.
0:01:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. The Australian Small Business Champion biggest award. You guys know I love awards. Biggest award in Australia. It’s sort of the logies of small business.
0:01:34 Ben Wright: Right?
0:01:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Held over two nights at the Sydney Star Casino. Yeah, big, big, big awards night. About 1,000 people per night, plus 100 media in a room per event. And you’re on the list.
0:01:47 Ben Wright: Yeah. Great. Thank you.
0:01:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: You’re welcome.
0:01:50 Ben Wright: Thank you for the tip off. Congratulations to you. Yeah, look, I don’t have a lot of experience. Awards, I mean, we won. In fact, we were finalists in the Australian Fast Growth Company Awards a couple of years in a row when I had my last business. And that, I mean, that was a competitive process. Right. These were bigger businesses we were competing against, but we were finalists twice. So that was sensational. But nice to have entered one in this. And it was a fair process though, to go through.
0:02:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s. This is the thing about awards that I think people don’t realize is how lengthy that can be. And this is part of the reason that we do so many award applications. And this is just a small group here, not a small one. I’m pretty proud of this. Our company has 100% success rate of getting clients through the finalist stage. And then last year we were over 400 times finalist, but we took home 88 awards.
So. And I am a huge advocate for awards. I will be the first one to say there is absolutely a vanity metric that goes into this. I don’t think all awards are created equal. I think some are less successful than others and some are more beneficial. This one that you’ve entered, honestly, is my personal favorite.
0:02:55 Ben Wright: Yeah. Wow. Okay, let me just dwell that. So 88 of your clients won awards or we. Or we did last year. Yes. So not just this award. This is across all awards.
0:03:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, all.
0:03:06 Ben Wright: Yeah. Fantastic. 88 winners. Right. Well done. Congratulations,
0:03:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Founding finalists, We got to 400 and I was like, I’m out. I care, but I can’t keep track of this.
0:03:14 Ben Wright: Yeah, wow. Okay, fantastic. Well, do you know, as we reflect on this and today, it’s very rare I will talk about successes of my business. You generally have to suck them out of me. But I’ve got to be really mindful that in this podcast, people are wanting to hear this. It’s why I listen to podcasts, is to hear about other people’s successes. So there’s always that worry that you, you know, that humility isn’t present when you talk about it, but I think in these podcasts, we just have to get rid of that. Right. So for me, look, I would say if I was looking at this as to why I think first go was able to get to being a finalist, I would actually say it’s because I was able to follow a process. Right. A process that you sent across to me, but I stuck to that Protest. Ugh protest
0:03:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: He completed the process.
0:04:00 Ben Wright: Yeah. And who am I to argue with a process that had 400 finalists and 88 winners last year, Right. Just in one year. So that’s really powerful. So I followed that process. I think that has gone a long way to getting me to that final estate.
0:04:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Let me be clear. As the more chaotic one of the two, I truly live by processes, because if you don’t have them, I don’t know what I’m going to do then. Honestly, I like having the structure and having those things in order. I think that’s really important. But, yeah, part of the reason that we’ve had such success with that is we have hacked the system. One of the fun facts of having a analyst like a previous criminal analyst is I can go, what are they really asking here? And being able to reverse engineer it from that.
0:04:45 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. Wow. You can get into the deepest, darkest secrets of a small business award that’s written on the Internet through your AFP profiling space.
0:04:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: What a backwards way of going forward. But one of the questions you always get, Ben, is about why enter business awards? And some of it comes down to people want to say we’re an award winning business, we want to have the trophies on them. But also it makes it a lot easier for businesses to actually get business.
0:05:10 Ben Wright: So, Jemimah, having had my experience around the awards process, and I think you’re right, there’s a piece around self fulfillment that your company is doing some good things to get awards and that’s great. But that’s a vanity metric and vanity metrics don’t build great businesses.
0:05:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: They don’t pay the bills.
0:05:30 Ben Wright: They don’t pay the bills. Right. But in an age when social proof is so incredibly important. I use social proof as my lead generation source. I get enough people knowing about my business. I’m not worried about that. What I like to have is sources for people to go and validate the strength of my business. A finalist in the small Business Awards is validation that I know what I’m doing well, but perceived validation.
So being able to use awards as a piece of social proof to help you grow your business. I absolutely, if I am buying a bottle of wine and I see it’s an award winner or I go in past a pie shop, I love pies. If I go past Rick’s Pies in Noosa, shout out, I don’t know the owners, right. But I like their pies.
0:06:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s probably rich.
0:06:17 Ben Wright: It makes sense, doesn’t it, that I love seeing when they’re an award winner. Right. You know, or best vanilla slice or whatever it may be. Right. They entice people into your business. So today we’re going to talk about five ways. Now they’re not going to be the only five ways, but five of the best ways that Jemimah Ashley and the Visibility Lab have seen around leveraging awards. So this is your show again today, Jemimah. Let’s get into it.
0:06:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: You’re welcome, Ben. The first thing is that you are going to share the award. It’s so simple, Ben. Yeah, it’s so simple. You being a finalist, you entering and being nominated or being a finalist, you’re going to share that on social media because hopefully we get to share the win. Right? But the odds aren’t in our favor in a really just a logical number sense.
0:07:06 Ben Wright: Yes.
0:07:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: That we are one of 10 most likely who are finalists. There is a 10% chance. And let’s be really honest about awards here. There is going to be a one point difference between the winner and the finalist.
0:07:18 Ben Wright: Right.
0:07:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: And the winner and the loser is one point. That’s it.
0:07:21 Ben Wright: Your one point grand final.
0:07:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: And every time, I’ve been a judge for hundreds of awards, how do you think we know all this is? Because it’s one point every time and it’s not personal. It’s sometimes they just answer the question a little bit better than you. So we’re going to take the win when we’ve got it. If you’ve been nominated or you’re a finalist, you are going to share that unapologetically now.
0:07:47 Ben Wright: Cool. So we’re sharing it. We’re telling marketing to tell the world or we’re doing it ourselves.
0:07:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: Both are fine. Number two, we’re going to leverage off the fact that other people are finalists. We’re going to hit up all the other finalists that we can find that could be the potentially good business partners or potentially really good people that we could work with later. Collaborators, potentially our competition to see if we can do something together and just have a look at who else is in that pool.
0:08:22 Ben Wright: Sorry to jump in here. I love the saying that professionals have coaches, amateurs don’t. Right. When we talk about the majority of professional athletes, they have coaches. The majority of amateur athletes don’t. For me, people that are successful in growing their businesses are often the ones that are reaching out for help. Be it product, be it service, it doesn’t matter. Right. They’re the ones that are out there and they’re open to seeing and hearing perspectives from others.
So I love that piece around engaging with those who have successful businesses so that your product or service can help them. Excellent. Okay, keep going. So number one was tell everyone. Number two was leverage other award winners.
0:09:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Go have a chat with them and it can just be, let’s have a drink, let’s have a catch up, let’s have a conversation later. Those lists historically are found on the website or on the night you’ll actually see a booklet of that.
0:09:12 Ben Wright: Yeah. Right.
0:09:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: Number three, go to the awards. Sounds so silly, but go to the awards, be in the room. You have the opportunity where 1,000 people are going to hear your name.
0:09:22 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:09:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: You’re going to potentially get to walk across the stage. You’re going to get photos being there. Marketing is going to love you again. Geometry photos you’re going to get while you’re there. You’re going to sit at a table with people who are all as ambitious as you are because they’ve entered that award too. And it’s not an easy feat. The Australian Small Business Champion is by far the hardest award. We’ll talk about that in a second. But it is by far the most complicated award in Australia to enter. Except for maybe Telstra. But I have my own thoughts on that. There is a real reason you want to be in that room. The social proof of you being there in that suit, going to Sydney, the flights there. This is documenting a journey that your business is undertaking. And going through awards isn’t a little thing. It’s actually quite a big thing. So, three, I need you to be in the room.
0:10:09 Ben Wright: Great. And you know, as I think that. Do I have to wear a black tie?
0:10:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m not sitting next to you unless you’re wearing the black tie. Actually, not to be dramatic about it, but. Right, okay, I’ll apply the first round. I’ve got you.
0:10:22 Ben Wright: Well, then my brain goes, they’ve actually got to wear shoes. And I think that comes down to my biggest problem. In fact, at my 40th, one of our friends there on the night, she actually said, Ben’s wearing shoes. Heaven forbid. But, hey, we’re digressing. So, number one, tell everyone. Number two, leverage finalists. Number three is actually get out there and take the opportunity to network. Yes, great.
0:10:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: Number four, leverage the award application you’ve already done. Fun fact about all awards. There’s only so many questions they can ask you. It’s one of my favorite things, actually. You, the Australian Small Business Champion, is by far my favorite award because it’s the most thorough.
0:10:56 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:10:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: They ask you all of the questions that potentially anyone’s going to need to know. But all awards, really, this one’s been around for 20 years. Why would you reinvent the wheel? They’re going to look at the questions of the most. Like the precedented best award in Australia. They’ve just used the same questions. And really, how many other questions can they ask you? That award really goes through. Why did you start your business? How did you start your business? What’s your marketing been like? How do you train yourself and your staff? It goes through all facets of your business. That award can be leveraged into dozens of other awards across Australia.
0:11:34 Ben Wright: And also helps you articulate better what you do in your business.
0:11:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. 100% great. I think it’s really, really important and I think it’s to look at them. Remember, 450 awards in Australia each year that are run.
0:11:46 Ben Wright: Yeah. Wow.
0:11:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: That you could potentially go into.
0:11:48 Ben Wright: Okay, excellent. So number four. Done.
0:11:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Number five, we have to Put it everywhere. So not just the social media of the share. We’re going to put this into our website. We’re going to put this into our signature block. We’re going to put this onto our social media. This is going in our LinkedIn. It’s going into our banners. It’s going in our pull up banners. If you’re a finalist or a potential winner, you are going to want to put that everywhere.
0:12:11 Ben Wright: So how does that differ to number one which was tell everyone.
0:12:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s really the announcement. That’s like an announcement situation. This is more of now we’ve got collateral that we can use forever.
0:12:22 Ben Wright: Right. Okay. So that’s things like updating your social media profile
0:12:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: That says award winner, finalist, this award. our website will always have a banner where it has the awards that you’ve been finalist for. Should have. Then we’ll work on the website later. We should have these across the bottom.
0:12:40 Ben Wright: Got it.
0:12:40 Jemimah Ashleigh: We should have it in our signature block when we’re responding to emails. Have it on the pull up banners that we’re taking. Say that we’re a finalist of places. If you’re a winner, you should get its own banner. So not only we are really looking at not just the social media share that because that’s really one and done. That’s a 6% of your network is going to see that.
0:13:01 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:13:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Like that, like social media. I would not trust that’s going to let everyone know. This is going to be social proof for the end of days.
0:13:08 Ben Wright: Okay. So this is systemizing that you’re able to advertise to your potential customers or your existing customers that you are good at what you do.
0:13:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:13:18 Ben Wright: Yeah. Awesome. Got it. Okay. Number one, tell everyone.
0:13:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:13:23 Ben Wright: Number two, leverage other finalists.
0:13:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Just as simple as having a conversation with them. Send the emails, look at the lists, get the book on the table. Really, really helpful. And if there’s not enough, take a photo of it. That’s my bit advice.
0:13:35 Ben Wright: Great. Number three is get to the awards.
0:13:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Be in the room. It’s really important. You meet other people. But more importantly you get to get the social proof that you were there.
0:13:44 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You can see that journey right where you’re taking photos as you’re on your way. Excellent. Okay. Number four, leverage on other awards. Yeah, yeah. All about getting out and using that award application again and again and again into other applications. Yeah.
0:13:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: And five the collateral.
0:14:00 Ben Wright: Great. Okay. So consistently putting the collateral out.
0:14:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And that positioning tool like that, real social proof. We’re a finalist. We’re a winner. We’re one of the top in Australia. If you’re entering that award, you’re only in the top point five of Australian businesses.
0:14:13 Ben Wright: Yeah, okay. Okay. Excellent. So I think that’s fantastic advice. Very practical. Right. I’m going to say there’s one but. The but is you’ve got to get to being that finalist. Right. So a lot of these areas. So how do you get to being the finalist? How do you. And do you know what? This is one of the rare times Jemimah and I have quite a strong agreement where we don’t market our businesses through this podcast. I actually think you need to tell people what the Visibility Lab does because, you know, we talk about progress. Getting in the way of perfection or getting stuff done. Done is better than perfection, I think, is one of your key lessons. Right. It’s giving us, ourselves, the confidence that we can become a finalist. Because I’ll say this is the first award I’ve entered. Right. So, you know, the process must have helped. So tell me how to help. Yeah, yeah.
0:15:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: So we have a whole portal that’s dedicated to exactly this. It’s called the Awards Portal. @the awardsportal.com but we offer editing of your award application, but we can also write it for you. Yeah, that’s the other thing. And we again, that 100% success rate anytime we run our eyes over something. But the portal itself is $30. And the beautiful thing about this portal is it actually has all the questions in there for any of the awards that you’re going for. It also has a traffic light system. So if you. What awards are coming up? What can I go and have a look at? It also has notes and tips and tricks on how to enter each of the awards. And also a recommendation. Do we even recommend it? 450 awards. There’s a lot out there that I would say please avoid because it’s not worth your money, it’s not big enough, and there’s no backing to it.
0:15:48 Ben Wright: Okay, great. I love it. So we’re going to join the Visibility Lab or something else out there if you can find it. Visibility Labs. 30 bucks a month, right? That is. That is nothing. It’s not even worth thinking about. So we go and join that. We start to look at the awards that are out there. You’ve got a service where you can do it for people or help edit them. For those that are out there that have joined the portal and they want to do it on their own. How do we increase our capability to be able to enter an award you know, reasonably proficiently, I. E. Without taking a day to get success
0:16:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: There’s so the great thing in the bottle getting really into the nuances here. There are videos that I go and explain how to answer the questions and how to answer them properly and also how to use AI to actually assist you with those questions and how to get really the best out of it. I mean, heavily edit and absolutely make sure it’s not AI’d. But there are ways that we can use the resources out there, including like ChatGPT, to help us with these things. We also provide a full list of every question that you’d need and the actual dot points that they’re actually asking.
0:16:49 Ben Wright: Okay. Reasonable expectation for someone. How many awards do you think they’d need to enter and practice writing of the awards before they could hope to be a finalist? Reasonable expectation.
0:16:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: If you used the tools and resources that we provide you, we have 100% success rate.
0:17:04 Ben Wright: Yeah. Let’s assume you don’t get it. Right. Right.
0:17:07 Jemimah Ashleigh: Straight off, I would say that if you go and get our cheat sheets and you use ChatGPT to help you write an application and it fits something extremely reasonable, you should be expecting to see a finalist, maybe not the Australian Small Business Champion. Within the first three months, you would probably have to enter three awards.
0:17:26 Ben Wright: Okay.
0:17:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: To really like that. But that being said, if you gave yourself eight hours and use the cheat sheet and the video, we have absolutely had people just do that first one off the bat.
0:17:39 Ben Wright: So we’re talking about jumping onto a portal. Three awards over a three-month period, few hours each. We’re talking about a day’s time commitment. Right. To get you out there, expect if you devote a day to this over the next three months, you could realistically hope to be a finalist. Right. Then my question becomes that day, what can that day you’ve invested do for your business when you get to consistently use it to tell people as a point of social proof, right. How your business is going? I’d have to say that personally, it’s not something I’ve ever thought about until recently around jumping onto awards.
0:18:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: What changed, Ben? What change? Me badgering you?
0:18:16 Ben Wright: It certainly did. And look, to be fair, I recognize the value in seeing other businesses promoting their success within awards. And I also have reminded myself that we use the Fast Growth Company award finalist two years in a row. Right. We use that quite significantly and it really helped our business.
0:18:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s incredible. Like there are so many great awards and there’s some absolute rubbish ones too. The trick is here, knowing how to leverage so you don’t have to do it 100 times. You just one and repeat.
0:18:45 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, understood. Okay. Well, I think it’s important that I’ve been driving this episode today because I’m very objective on this. Right. I have nothing to do with your business, but I think the awards process is worth investing the time in. We are not going to have many of these episodes where we talk specifically about either our businesses. So please be assured on that surprise.
0:19:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: We did it this time.
0:19:03 Ben Wright: Well, that you didn’t actually know about it this one, so. And for those listening, we actually had a different topic of the podcast today, but midway through our discussion around how we’re both finalists in the Small Business Australian Small Business Awards, I actually stopped the recording and actually said to Jemimah, do you know what? I think we actually need to talk about awards a little bit more because people are interested. So thank you for listening in today, Jemimah. Thank you for your pieces of expertise. As always.
0:19:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: It was a pleasure, Ben.
0:19:29 Ben Wright: We are your Friends in Business. We cannot wait to have another chat with you next week. Look after yourself and we’ll see you soon.
0:19:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Bye.
0:19:36 A: I’ve been trying, 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 Jemima Ashley, recorded in beautiful Noosa, Queensland. For more insights and resources, Visit [email protected] and [email protected] if today’s podcast has helped you, we’d be so grateful if you could leave a review and share with someone you know.
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