Business Built Freedom

Concentrating In An Open Plan Office

Who here has ever tried to concentrate while on the phone in a restaurant? It sucks, but a lot of the open office design plans are kind of heading in the same direction. You're right next to your fellow coworkers and they're there on the phone and you're trying to concentrate. Your thoughts are going a million miles an hour and you're trying to work out how you can get this project and task finished, but all you can hear is them talking to their partner about whatever the argument they had the other night. So many people have concentration issues and I can attest to it myself. When I first started the business, we had a very small office. We had four of us crammed in there and it was like we're on top of each other. Heaven forbid someone drops a far Plan Office. We all had to go on a quick smoke or break because we'd be dead. It was quite a small arrangement. But you got to do what you got to do, and so we had to work with that environment.

Read more about Open Plan Office at dorksdelivered.com.au

What we found worked really well was putting extra insulation up in the room, so there weren't as many reflections with the voice. That definitely deadens and dulls down the sounds, which makes it a little bit easier to concentrate. The next step we did was truck on and try out some of those noise-canceling headphones, and I'm talking some decent noise-canceling headphones. You can jump down the JB Hi-Fi or your local electronics supplier and check them out. Put them on and then have them turn the music up for something else they're doing around there and see how well they work. You'd be surprised. They're quite decent.

Listen to Concentration Sounds Online

There's all these different sites and websites that you can use that give you information and songs and sounds that let you concentrate. Brain.fm is one of them that I am quite fond of. What I did was put on the noise-canceling headphones and listen to whatever it is that they're playing. It's a lot of the time very tranquil meditating-type sounds. And it works really, really well. It definitely brings you into focus. So now we've got rid of one of the annoyances, which is the ambient noise. We've put you into a mindset where you now want to work and you're able to do that, but you've still got all these disruptions and bits and pieces in front of this monitor in front of you, as well as all the people that tap you on the shoulder and ask you, "What are you doing and how are the kids?"

Take Back Your Time

So the next step is a really cool programme that we use, called RescueTime, which lets you put in focus time, where it stops you getting distracted, stops you going to those very distracting cat websites, and gives you a bit more routine so you can get the task done that you need to do in an open office environment. As per people distracting you, that can be a bit of an issue, and there are not many ways around it. The best way is just to create an environment where they understand the issues and they know they're part of the issue, as well as you are. Even if it's just something as simple as a sign that says, "Currently engaged." You can have that sign up there just like you're in the toilet cubicle and they'll be like, "Oh, that's funny. That's right. Don't distract them." And then turn the sign upside down that said, "Vacant." Hopefully, you never feel vacant in your position.

The Final Word

That's a few little hints and tips that will allow for you to work and concentrate and really have laser focus to be able to achieve what you want to achieve in a work environment that has an open office plan.

Product Scarcity 101

Hello and welcome to Dorks Delivered. You've heard that too many times. I felt cringy even saying it but I've got this fantastic thing. There's this new sale at Bugs a Billion and what we're going to be talking about is how fantastic this runout clearance sale is. They're closing down. This is legit the last time forever you're ever going to be able to get deals at this price. We're talking 50%, 60%, and 70% off. We're closing our doors. The sale is over! Bugs a Billion. That is it. No more bugs for you! 

Read more about urgency and scarcity: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/267-how-scarcity-and-urgency-can-increase-sales

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nw9oR9ICpy0

If you've grown up in Australia, you've grown up with those two very, very annoying voices that just stick in your head. You can't get them out. They're just there, eating away at you on simulcast radio, on every channel, at the same time.

Go away! I don't want any tiles and I've got enough rugs. That's enough! I just want milk that tastes like real milk.

Having just said that, they are obviously doing something right because they've been in business a long time, they've been closing down for a long time if you're talking about the second company there, and they're still around because they were never closing down

They created scarcity, and they made people come to their business because everyone thought they were closing down for some reason. The first time made sense; the second time maybe. But, it's getting a bit much. How many more times are you going to retire? This is it. This is going to be the last time. Maybe the last time. I don't know.

Anyway, people come and they buy tickets if they know that something is going to be going out. People come and people buy rugs, people buy tiles, and people buy concert tickets because they want to make sure that they're not missing out.

So many people have FOMO. Also, they want a good deal. So, you've got both things happening here. Scarcity and fear of missing out joined together into the ad campaign. Smart, annoying, and sticks in your mind. Annoying: it pays enough money so they can have it on every single TV station and radio at exactly the same time so you can't even change to get away from it. Ruthlessly annoying. But, it's working obviously because it costs a lot of money to send that sort of stuff to traditional media until YouTube takes over, and then they're going to be asking people very kindly to be on their stations because they’re slowly disappearing.

Think about how you can use the same tactics for your business. I call them tactics. Do I feel okay about them? Not really. There's very few scarce things that we do in business unless it is genuinely scarce. I feel it's a dirty way of selling things. Yuck!

But, people do it and it seems to work. Raising your prices by 30% and then putting a 30% discount on everything has people come in droves for some reason. Silly that the few people that aren't there for the sale, on their EB games, or whatever it is seem to get the short end of the stick. But it's always on special. You always feel that you get a deal and that's what it's about: getting a deal.

Make sure that you set up your business so that you're selling ethically, you're remembered and you make an impact on people's lives. Otherwise, it's going to be a lot of people that are going to be not happy, Jan. Stay good.

Website Platform Migration: Guide and Strategy

Today I'm going to talk about website migration, and it's not the type of website migration where you're going from one host to another. Generally speaking, that's pretty straightforward and only requires potentially relicensing of software that you're using. What we're going be talking about is migrating platforms. So you might be on Joomla and you migrate into WordPress; you're on WordPress, you're migrating to Joomla. Or, you're just migrating to a really, really new version of WordPress and you're on a really, really old version. Or, you might not even know what WordPress and Joomla are, and you just know that you're changing and getting a new website. Either way, if you've had any sort of traffic, you want to make sure that you are capturing those leads.

Read more about Website Migration at dorksdelivered.com.au

You have to Keep Those Backlinks

The gym that I go to has a new fancy website, and it looked amazing. I jumped on there and I thought, "Ah, this is great," and as I do, I start scrutinising it, and went through and found a bunch of broken links. But what was worse was all the links from Google, as an established business who'd been around for over 15 years, had stopped working. And the reason for this is simple. Their website name, which was businessname.com.au/timetable/thegymlocationforthattimetable, no longer worked. And these timetables and all the other information from their websites stopped working. They worked when you went to the website for the first time, but any existing people that had bookmarks in there, or any web crawlers such as Google or Yahoo! or Bing or whoever else, that have gone over didn't know of these new links yet, but it knew of the old links, and the old links had a lot of authority, and so they had great positioning in Google. The problem is, you need to make sure you link those. So when you get your website changed, check all the old links. Have them back up the entire site to another location where you can double check the naming of the links that were most commonly used there, and you can easily see this data in Google Analytics. Make sure that you put in redirects so when people go to the old links, they see the same content they were expecting, whether it be the timetables or the About Us page, or whatever it is that they're going to your site for. You want to make sure they're seeing that in the new format with the new switched site.

Are you Fixing the Problem?

If you don't do this, you're kicking yourself and you're going to be annoyed. There's no point. If you're not going to do that, you end up destroying all of the authority that you had with Google. You're destroying any of the great groundwork that you already had with the previous site that can comfortably be carried forward to the new site. Now, you might be asking yourself, "Well, that's great, Josh. Thanks for that information. Really handy stuff. Not so great for me right now, though, because I've already changed sites and this happened a couple of months ago. What do I do?" Never fear, you've got some advice from Josh, here. Quite simply, all you have to do is jump into cPanel, if that's what you're using, or whatever the management portal is, and have a look at the analytics. See what people were looking at during the moment you changed to the new site. You can see in there how many different page 404 errors came up, and the pages that they were looking for. A lot of the time, that's enough information to be able to go in there and get into the htaccess file and add the redirect rules. This will mean when someone goes to, maybe it was timetables/areaforwhereverthegymwasat, and instead, maybe it's timetables/suburb/gymname you just need to make sure that you redirect that the way that it needs to be redirected. Google will be a happier camper and you will get a lot more traffic. You can set up temporary or permanent redirects, depending on if this is something that is going to be set up with the same structure in the future or not.

The Final Word

Overall, this is going to get you out of a lot of trouble, save you a lot of your ranking positioning on Google and any of the other authorities, and make sure that all that hard work for an established domain name isn't thrown in the bin. Stay good.

The Effects of a Poor Hire

So, we all make mistakes. What we're going to be talking about today is maybe something a bit more important than just dialling the wrong number, and that is hiring the wrong person. If you've experienced the effects of a poor hire, you know what I'm talking about. It's a terrible feeling. You grab them on, you already go through all the interviewing process, you've gone through Seek, you've got 200 resumes that you've looked through. You're resume-d out. You could write a book on reading resumes, and no one would read it because it's boring! But you've got there. You've gone through the process of hiring and interviewing, and you've got the person in front of you, or hired remotely, depending on how your business is set up. And you've decided that they are the best person. Then they just don't seem to work the way they interviewed. They're obviously really good at selling themself, but shithouse at performing and bringing things to the table.

Read more about hiring employees at dorksdelivered.com.au

Performance Issues

The issues that I've had all come down to performance. If you've got key performance indicators in place, you can make sure of that. One of the things that's really important in our business is attention to detail. I've changed around the way that we actually go about hiring people now. Throughout the process there is information in the summary stating to make sure you don't follow the directions that are on Seek, along with other cool little nidbits saying, "If you don't use my name when putting through your cover letter, you will not be considered for the job." You make sure that job offer on Seek is long enough that it's not just, "Please say hey to me," you make sure it's long enough that they actually have to read through and you know they are pulling that information in. That cut down heaps of people, and I've found the integrity and the quality of the people that were hired after that have always been better. So that's a little hint and tip if you have a problem with people maybe not having enough attention to detail.

Find Out How Long They Take To Do Tasks

If you find that they're not coming into work on time or the deliverables and what they're trying to achieve isn't happening as quickly as you'd like it to, the next step is also a pearler. When they email through to you, and you get your IT company to set this up, it logs a time or sends them an email asking them for information on something, and it could be anything. It could be, "Give us more information about your travel arrangements," or, "Do you have a current driver's licence," or whatever the situation is. It doesn't really matter. They then get that and then their timer starts from then until when they respond, showing you how punctual they are and how interested they are in getting the job. This gives you the knowledge that they have a high level of integrity, they are fast to respond, and if you've snuck in your name and a few instructions, they've got great attention to detail. So now we've already covered off on a whole bunch of problems that I've experienced over the last 11 years of hiring.

Documentation

The next one is an obvious one, which I bring up all the time, documentation. Make sure you've got stacks of documentation, and it takes you a lot of time and a lot of money to write it up, but it is so important. If you've got that documentation there you can see when people aren't doing what they're meant to be doing, but what's more important, the training time is so much quicker. When you hire someone you're doing it because you're trying to money or make more time available for yourself. One way or another you don't want your time to be taken up while they're costing you money to train them. So if you've got all your training documentation in place, it makes things super-simple and super-easy to jump through those hoops. If you don't have those in place it's not as easy. If you do have the documentation in place, you're able to fire them or give them a warning if they're not following it, making the ability to get rid of them much, much easier.

Something to Think About

There's so many people that applied over the years and I've tried outsourcing and other bits and pieces like that, and your mileage varies, and it varies in all circumstances. It doesn't matter if you're paying $15 an hour or $150 an hour, your mileage varies. There's no real rhythm or rhyme to the way things work like that. What's important to know is you need to get someone with a high level of integrity and a level of trust where you know they're going to be doing what you want them to be doing with you, and not against you. Make an effort to have them fill out how long tasks take them. Everything that we do in business revolves around a support system that has a service board on there and we can see how long each task is taking.

Real Life Example

I had a situation with one of the hires from last year that was taking a long time to do a task. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but a few weeks later I thought, "Wow that task, it's still a long time for this task." It's a task that only takes maybe 20 minutes but they were taking an hour-and-a-half, and I thought, "Hmm, bit odd," and 20 minutes task was taking me 20 minutes and I went, "Well, I've been doing it for a while and it's a task I have to do many, many of, so 20 minutes is 20 minutes, an hour-and-a-half is an hour-and-a-half, but you do it 20 times in a week and all of a sudden you're taking four-and-a-half times longer, they don't have enough time to do any of the other tasks. So I went through a process and said, "How are you doing this? How is this time being taken up like this?" And what it came down to was they just weren't skilled enough to do it. I created new documents and I gave it to someone who was not skilled whatsoever. Now, the document was 78 pages long, but I gave it to someone who had no skill in this area whatsoever, and lo and behold, they were able to do it faster and better, and the reason for that is the documentation. But, with the right documentation, you can make the right hires and you can make sure the people are working together.

The Final Word

Although you might have had a bad experience hiring someone, or you're looking hire someone, you don't want to have a bad experience, being able to analytically look at what everyone's doing, making sure that you have someone who has great attention to detail, is super-punctual, you won't have a problem. Anyway, stay good.

This is a special episode courtesy of the Dorks Delivered Youtube channel where Josh interviews Scott Aurisch about his life in business and what motivates him.

Josh Lewis and Scott from NRG Boost Fitness talk about taking the plunge in business in the fitness industry.

Watch this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1YaTk2bl0&t=22s

Josh: I've got Scott here from NRG Boost Fitness and today we're going to be talking about taking the plunge in business. My understanding is you've been in business for a while and about 12 months ago, you decided to go for some brick and mortar.

Scott: Yeah, exactly right. I've been in the fitness industry now for over 20 years but in business for myself for coming up to 8 years, and very close to 12 months in my own premises.

Josh: Right. Are you loving it?

Scott: Absolutely loving it. It's probably been one of the most tiring years of my life but certainly the most fulfilling, from a professional standpoint.

Josh: I think it's a big discipline thing. You get your own business and you take a plunge and you do something that you're thinking, should I or shouldn't I, and if you take the risk, sometimes against all odds, and it's not that you fail, you don't fail, you make sure you don't fail.

Scott: Exactly right. You sort of get rid of that safety net and you're just forced to step up and it's an enormous growth experience and I'm really pleased that I did.

Josh: That's cool. And has there been any milestone moments over the last 12 months that really stood out as a, ‘I've made it’?

Scott: Yeah! Probably no one moment, just lots of little moments along the way, where, when you do take a moment to reflect back on where things were... Pretty much 12 months ago was when I was in the planning phase for opening here, which all came together super quickly. Once I've made the decision to make this happen, things just seemed to fall into place, which is something we might talk about a little bit later on, but as the year has unfolded, just sometimes when I'm training somebody that I've built a good relationship with, in some cases over the years, but in some cases, people I've just met this year, it's in those moments that I realise what I've achieved, when you make those connections with people. So that's what I mean by what some people would regard as little things, rather than big milestones, but they're the most rewarding moments for me.

Josh: That's cool. Prior to running out of brick and mortar, how was your business beforehand?

Scott: I was working out of a local gym and I'd been there for several years, and it wasn't that I got to a point where I was unhappy, but I did feel like I wasn't growing professionally anymore, and I just needed a new challenge that would present that opportunity for growth and freedom as well.

Josh: Cool, cool. I guess you haven't looked back. You're 12 months in. What sort of aspirations do you have for the next 12 months?

Scott: Yeah, I guess I haven't looked too far ahead, which is probably something I need to get a little bit better at, but certainly, consolidating what I've achieved in the first 12 months, and I think one of the keys to that is building good relationships with my client base but also other industry associates that I have contact with. So I'll definitely be looking to build on that over the next 12 months in a way that is sustainable in terms of my energy and my own health and wellbeing because, as you would know, when you work for yourself, you can get a little bit focused on the business and some of your personal life can tend to suffer.

Josh: Absolutely, it can go by the wayside.

Scott: Yeah.

Josh: It becomes a very addictive, very addictive thing, having your own business.

Scott: It certainly can, and in my situation, where I'm preaching to people about achieving balance in your life. It's really important that I practise what I preach and set the example of having a balanced lifestyle where I'm looking after myself and looking after my personal relationships outside of work as well because your business might be firing on all cylinders but if some of those other areas of your life begin to suffer, that's going to impact on you as an individual at some point, and then ultimately affect your business.

Josh: Yeah, completely agree. It's all about having balance. Otherwise, the whole system breaks.

Scott: Yeah, that's right.

Josh: If you were to go back to the moment while you were working for someone else and you didn't have your own business, can you remember what made you take the step and take the leap towards doing everything, wearing all the hats, and doing the payroll, doing your taxes, doing everything underneath your own banner? What was the catalyst towards the move?

Scott: Yeah, probably just a couple of little moments. Again, it was nothing major. There was no massive falling out with anyone at my previous workplace, but just piecing a few things together and just some little frustrations and I thought it was time to take control of things myself and when you run your own business, you get to do things your way and you are absolutely responsible for everything that occurs. So, yeah, it was nothing major and just a couple of little things and I do distinctly remember in those moments thinking, yeah, I've got to do this because there was a lot of thought that went into it beforehand but when I eventually made that decision, like I said earlier, it all just fell into place.

Josh: That's cool, that's cool. You do a lot of stuff for communities, and I understand you've gone back to the school that you went to and you've helped them out. Tell me more about what happened there.

Scott: Well, I was fortunate enough to be contacted by the Logan PCYC who run a lot of great programmes and one of them is called the Deep Blue Line programme, which is in association with Queensland Police, where they visit local high schools and present an 8 to 10 week programme to a group of students of various ages. I was invited to come along and speak for one particular week about the importance of exercise and nutrition and, yeah, it was pretty cool. But one of the schools I got to visit was my own old high school that I had not stepped foot inside for 25 years and it was my Back to the Future!

Josh: That would have been weird.

Scott: It really was. It was a really cool experience, though. The place had not changed. It had been really well maintained over that time but it was just like going back to how I remember it. And then to go back as an adult, as a professional, and feel like you're adding some sort of value to a place that played a role in your own development. It was very fulfilling for me, and I've been back a couple of times since as well.

Josh: Was there any old teachers that you saw and you were like, ‘Oh, no… Sir, what are you doing?’

Scott: No, no. Very much a turnover of staff but while I was at the school office, I did look at the boards with all the photos and the honour boards with the kids' names and that sort of thing. And just to tie that into NRG Boost Fitness here, I've actually got three old schoolmates as current clients.

Josh: That's cool.

Scott: Yeah. So that's also something that I find very rewarding as well and makes me feel really good. Obviously, we all run businesses to earn money.

Josh: Ideally, yeah.

Scott: Yeah. You've got to earn a living. You've got to support yourself and your family, but for me, I think one of the keys to my success is that I don't focus on just the dollars. It's about a lot more than that. It's about personal fulfilment and things that make me happy and the fact that I've got three guys that I'd probably fallen out of contact with a little bit over the years but have reconnected with in recent years. They're now current clients, and I'm helping them improve their lifestyles.

Josh: That's cool. So you've been in business for a long time, you've got your bricks and mortar now, have a rough idea of where you're wanting to go. If you were to do it all again, would you change the order of events or what would you do differently?

Scott: I honestly don't think I would change a great deal. One of the things I think I got right from the outset was as professionals, as entrepreneurs, you would have to read a lot about the importance of beginning with the end in mind, having a clear picture of what you want your business to look like, and it was the clearest example in my life where I was able to come up with a very clear picture of how I wanted this place to look, how I wanted this place to operate, and doing that, and putting effort into getting those details right from the start, allowed me to almost follow that to the letter and it was amazing watching that unfold. To have ideas go from just words on paper through to, a little over two months later, from when I first decided to undertake this venture and then to actually open my doors, it was literally two months, but the reason it was able to happen so quickly is because I was clear on what I wanted and things literally just fell into place. There was no forcing or pushing. Things just sort of fell my way.

Josh: That's very, very serendipitous, or lucky, I guess, or fortunate that that worked out that way.

Scott: Yeah. So just to answer your question in fewer words, basically, beginning with the end in mind was the most important thing that I did and I would recommend that for anybody else looking to do anything similar.

Josh: Cool. A lot of people get into business and they think, ‘Oh, in two years' time I'm going to retire. I'm going to make a million dollars,’ and have these huge thoughts of grandeur and they don't necessarily make the appropriate planning before jumping in and understanding the depth of the water and realising how deep it goes and how much is actually involved in running your own business, especially when you're starting up and you need to be the person wearing all of the different hats. You need to be the technical person, you need to be the administration, you need to be the marketer, the salesperson, you do all of the different things all at once, and as you said, you want to have a balance in your business, you want to have a balance in your life. Was there any steps that you went, ‘Oh, shit, I need to learn more about this,’ or, ‘I need to learn more about that,’ or things that you went, ‘Oh, wasn't expecting that to be a hurdle?’

Scott: Yeah. Not really. That's probably another thing I think I got right—the scale of the venture that I took on, I think, was appropriate for that first leap. But the point you make about a lot of business people taking the plunge but not realising the depth of the water they're diving into, in my industry it might be somebody that says, ‘Oh, I can run a gym,’ and they take on this big operation and then it's not until they're in it and they realise what an undertaking it is. So I was pretty happy to start with a personal training studio that's literally a couple of hundred metres around the corner from home, so it suited my lifestyle and I've been really comfortable with the size of the jump, so to speak. There have certainly been things that I've had to learn as I went along but that was the whole point to begin with—to learn new things and challenge myself.

Josh: I think it's very sensible the way that you've gone about the business because, as you said, a lot of people might just go in and they jump straight into a lease but they don't have any clientele and they have no idea about marketing. They just think they get some business cards and then they will come, build it and they will come, and that's not how it really works. I think it's great that you're in the IT world, they call it agile development, where you try and make the smallest profitable item first and then you build upon that. A good example would be Uber. So you don't start with an autonomous vehicle that's driving everyone, tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles driving everyone around countries. Instead, you start with an app that allows for people to take in that step until they've saved up enough money to then be able to move onto the next ventures, and Elon Musk does the same things.

Josh: And you've done the same thing in where you've built up your clientele, you've created a rapport and the message is strong and your social content in strong, and the community that you've created around your business is very strong. Different events that I've been to with Scott have been 60, 70 people upwards. Your opening day here, I don't know how many people you would have had here, it was stacks, so it shows the belief and the message that you've instilled in all the people that you have come here is very strong and the allegiance of people.

Scott: Well, I think, getting back to one of your earlier questions about community, I've done things outside of here for the broader community, but I placed great emphasis on the importance of building a community within your business, in much the same way that a café might do the same thing. There are hundreds of cafes, Brisbane wide, and what makes you choose one over another? It’s generally the one where you feel most welcome and almost like it's a second home, and so that's what I try to do here, again, not in a forced kind of way but just in an organic way, and it's been another very satisfying thing for me to observe, friendships being formed and I know that some of my group members socialise outside of here, that didn't know each other previously but they met through NRG Boost Fitness and that's sometimes more rewarding than dollars.

Josh: I think just, straight on the friendship situation, it's something, it's a place... I come here myself and it's a place that I feel very comfortable in, and I've brought multiple friends here because I find it's a good time to be able to catch up and see people while having a workout, as opposed to catching up and having a beer and a pizza, which is lovely as well, but it's not as great for your waistline and your health, and I can definitely say you...we, two and a half years ago, met for the first time and I told you my goals and you said, ‘That's not achievable’, in nicer words, in the timeline that I wanted to achieve it in. You said, ‘Look, see how you go’, I think, and I tried really hard, twisted my ankle, stopped trying as hard for a while, but I continued to persevere and 12 months later I achieved the goal that I wanted to, the weight that I wanted to, the percentage of body weight that I wanted to, and I'm very impressed with the results I was able to get from you. But it was not just the journey of the weight. It was also the friendship that was made along the way, and a great example would be Scott coming over and surprising me of a lunchtime and taking me over to see the jolly old Saint Nick.

Scott: That's right, yeah. Coming up to a year ago.

Josh: Yeah, that's right. We were able to sit on Santa's lap together which was…

Scott: For the first time in probably 30 years! Well, for me, anyway!

Josh: For you, yeah! And I thought it was great that you definitely went above and beyond and I don't think there would be many business owners, or especially PTs, that would do that level of commitment towards the friendships and the bonds that were created within the community, so it's a testament to the way you create your business.

Scott: Thanks, Josh.

Josh: I'd like to cut across to a quick video that discusses more about taking the plunge and we'll talk more about that afterwards.

It's big, it's wet, it's wild. That's right. It's Niagara Falls, and if you've ever been here or any other large waterfall, you might have wondered, what would it be like to just jump in? So, there was this time when Sam Patch, who was the first daredevil to take the plunge over Niagara, all the way back in 1829. He shot to fame and his slogan became part of a popular slang. The slang was, ‘Some things can be done as well as others.’ It's a great line. You could take it to mean that our achievements are equal, or you could also take it like we are trying to do our own thing as best we can, or maybe he was telling us that we can do those things that others think are impossible.

So what about you? What's your Niagara Falls? What's that big challenge that you are scared to take on? Well, let me tell you, it's often much easier than you think once you just commit to it. For Sam Patch, he was actually pretty disappointed with the crowd that turned up for his first successful attempt. There was bad weather and he'd been delayed, so he announced that he would do it again a few days later. This time, 10,000 people turned up and he cemented his place in history. So, if old Sam can jump off Niagara Falls twice, there's nothing to stop you taking the plunge. Whoa!

Josh: Good to be back. I thought that was pretty good. So we went through that you can sort of see sometimes it's not the first time, the first step, but just taking the plunge and just being the person that commits to that can really make a big difference in your business. So it's cool that you've gone through and you've done that and you've experienced that firsthand and you didn't, in a sink or swim situation, you were able to swim and, if anything, swim very, very well.

Scott: Yeah. Well, just one point I'd like to add to that, Josh. As any person should do when making a decision to go into business or not, you're going to come up with your list of pros and cons, and you'll have your moments of bravery and you'll have your moments of fear and ultimately, for me, it came down to a fear of financial risk and when I really thought about it, I then fast-forwarded to when I'm 80 years of age and I look back, and if I hadn't done this, what would have been the reason that I didn't and would I be comfortable with that decision? And if it was just a money thing that held me back, I think I would look back and regret it and be disappointed that I wasn't bolder at the time. So, yeah, I think it's a useful exercise sometimes, to fast-forward to when you're in your final years, will you wish that you had have taken more risks?

Josh: Definitely, I agree completely. I've always looked at it like, who would you like to see standing there at your funeral and... as dark as that is, who would you like to see standing there, at your funeral, and what was the reason you were remembered? And hopefully, there's a legacy that you've left behind, whether that be children or even just a nice smile in helping someone out and that's there some memory that you've left there. So it's work your way back from there.

Scott: Yeah. And it might seem a little bit dark to some people but it's an extremely powerful exercise to take yourself through as well.

Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Definitely. So what would you say would be the life tip or quote that you live by?

Scott: Well, there are probably a few but one that I have been thinking about recently is not being a victim in life and basically taking absolute personal responsibility for your life circumstances. I just believe that as soon as you blame somebody else or other people for your situation, is when you give away your power. Sure, bad things are going to happen in your life and some will be other people's fault, but it's how you respond to that really makes the difference. So I really try to remember that all the time and take the appropriate action. So there might be people out there who are unhappy with their job and it's as simple as changing jobs. I understand that it's scary in that moment but if you're truly unhappy, you have the power to find a better job.

Josh: Absolutely.

Scott: And if you're overweight, you can continue blaming this, blaming genetics, whatever the case might be, but ultimately, if you eat better and exercise, you're going to improve that situation.

Josh: Absolutely. And it's all about baby steps and getting the understanding, sometimes understanding your weak points and turning them into your strengths or at least having recognition towards them so you know how to work and come out of your comfort circle, to grow into a better person, whether that be through weight loss or a change of job, or a change of marriage, or whatever the situation is, it can all make you a happier you.

Scott: Yeah, exactly right, Josh.

Josh: Cool. And we're going to do something here. So we're going to do a shout out. You've done really, really well. Public speaking and especially in a global audience, like YouTube, can be scary. It's all imprinted in stone forever. It's going to live on longer than us. This could be our legacy. If nothing else, this is it.

Scott: Don't stuff it up. Don't stuff it up!

Josh: So you've done really, really well and I really appreciate your time that you've given me today, and I'd like to see if there's maybe another business coach, leader or business that you think would benefit from having a review and that the public would benefit from hearing from.

Scott: Yeah, well, certainly one of the best things I've done in recent years in terms of developing my own business expertise, for want of a better term, is I undertook an internship with a business called Create PT Wealth. I attended a free workshop. It was probably over three years ago now, and that, in itself, was a half day, full day workshop that was highly valuable and I took a lot out of that and I realised the position my business, and I'll use the term business fairly loosely because at that time it was a fairly poorly structured business, and it made me realise what work I needed to do to make a real business.

Scott: So I then undertook an 18-month personal training business internship and it covered all sorts of things: business systems, marketing, the whole gamut of things. At the time, I could not afford it, well, I told myself that, ‘You can't afford this,’ but something in me knew that I needed to do it and it wasn't an expense, it was an investment in the future of my business. So that was another time where I took the plunge and found a way to afford it and what I learnt in 18 months has been a massive reason behind where I'm at today, in terms of having my own premises and being very happy with my professional life.

Scott: So Create PT Wealth is the name of the business and I would strongly recommend that anybody else in the fitness industry or a personal trainer seek them out and see what they can offer your business.

Josh: Cool. Is there anybody particular at PT Wealth that stuck out for you?

Scott: Yeah, well, certainly both Brad and Jason were both extremely helpful, right from that initial workshop and I also had a business coach, Leanne, through that time as well, that I would check in with, every fortnight, and just have a phone conversation, and it was a good way to be kept accountable. She would set me certain business-related tasks that I would need to report back to her on in the next fortnight and that's a really important thing, is accountability, because sometimes it's easy to make excuses to yourself but when there's somebody else that you've got to report back to, I found that that really kept me on track.

Josh: Definitely.

Scott: Thank you to Create PT Wealth.

Josh: Cool. Well, I think we should all take a deep breath and give yourselves a clap. That's awesome. Thank you very much.

Scott: No worries, Josh. Thank you.

Josh: Awesome.

Read about the interview: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/business-tips/interview-with-scott-aurisch-of-nrg-boost-fitness?highlight=WyJzY290dCJd

I hope you enjoyed the episode. Every little bit helps and a small thing that you could do, as a token of appreciation, would be to jump onto iTunes and rate and review to make sure that other people can listen and get the same helpful help that you guys had. Thank you, and keep good.

Office 365 Does Not Backup Your Data

So you might have Office 365 and that's awesome, but Office 365 don't have any backups. Thats right, think about that for a moment. They have infrastructure backup and uptime guarantees so that you know that the systems are reliable, but if you go and delete something you won't necessarily have any backup in those infrastructures.

Learn more about backups: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/369-the-truth-about-microsoft-office-365-and-your-data

Take Backups Into Your Own Hands

If you need to roll back to see what your emails where or your documents from several days before or several versions before you need to make sure that you've got incremental backups and not just disc hardware redundancy. What the difference is there is kind of like saying that you've got a cool car and it's going to be pretty basic, but incremental backups are like you’ve got this cool car and it's got all these cool settings and it knows your position or the state. When you unlock it, it knows that you unlocked it. Now that car, whatever the model may be, Tesla Model 3 or whatever you've pocketed and drop some coin on is a cool car. Having backup of that car would be like having a second one of those cars available to you.

Say for instance, the car is unusable, you've got another car sitting there ready to go in from that moment and having that sitting there is what's called infrastructure back up. Besides infrastructure backup there's other types of backup. When you go into this rental car, all your settings out there, your radio stations out there, your clock might not be the same. You see positions not the same. It doesn't even know your name. All these settings don't exist anymore. They've all gone and along with all your history log books and everything obviously, but that is what you'd be calling software backup or software or something that's going to have all your personalised settings.

Office 365 Doesn’t Do the Whole Job

Although Microsoft with Office 365 give you full backup, which is awesome, they're only backing up the car, not the settings or the emails or any of the data inside it. So you need to make sure and that same analogy, data inside of that could be your mobile phone, your wallet, your purse or whatever it is inside the car. If the car's catches on fire that's not going to be backed up. But if you have incremental daily backup and it's not something that Microsoft offer for Office 365, it's something you'd need to go through a vendor for. You can be sure that everything will be available to you. If your email address is hacked and someone jumps in, deletes stuff, grab stuff out, you can easily go back to it. The different programmes that are out there to do this, we offer some of them and they give you up to 10 years retention.

You Need These Extra Backups

Everything that's come in and been sent for 10 years, you can be able to look at, monitor and analyse. So it's a really, really cool thing to have. Really, really good to make sure that you jump on top of that and have backup for things like this. Because ultimately you don't want to be in a situation where your car crashes, where your hardware crashes and in the sense of a problem happening and you don't have any ability to come back from that, and then you've got nothing to rely upon.

The Cloud Isn’t Safe

People think that this stuff won't happen. You won't get hacked. You'll get hacked more often in the cloud, than you will when it's on premise, and the reason for that is they are bigger targets and they're available and open all the time. It's not like when you had your servers in your business where they wouldn't get hacked because they were just such a small target and not worthwhile really jumping on there on a slower connection. These, they've got fast connections to the world and they can easily jump in and if you've got a terrible password, they'll jump onto it and they can get in.

The Final Word

Make sure you've got backups of all your important stuff as unfortunately Office 365 doesn’t cover everything.

Security Through Obscurity is Not Security at All

I started thinking this a little while ago about how far the world has come and going back into the days of my first job, yep, many, many moons ago at Jaycar. I was thinking abouthow many people paid and their PIN number was on the back of their credit card or on the back of their key card. I thought, oh my goodness, that's not even an obscurity, that's not security at all. You might as well use a chisel to lock your door. It doesn't make any sense.

Learn more about Business IT Security: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/368-security-through-obscurity-is-no-security-at-all

Security is Everything

The biggest problem you can face is you don't even know if your business is secure or not unless you're in the game. You need to make sure that it is secure. You want to make sure that things aren't being taken away and that those little bits of ease aren't at the expense of security. I'm sure your IT companies have told you this before, but if you want to have everything completely secure, the most secure network you'll ever find is one that has no people on it and no connection to the internet. When I was doing some support work for a school of 1,200 machines, I can comfortably say that during the school holidays after I got everything working, nothing broke, everything just kept working. It was great, but it's not a usable system.

Stay Flexible

If you have everything completely locked down and nobody's able to touch them there's no point in having them. There always has to be a bit of flexibility and that's where you need to make sure that you're staying secure, because flexibility comes at a risk if it's not done properly. If you're connecting into your workforce from remotely you should be using a VPN or something to connect in that would connect to your phone, such as a two factor authentication.You want to make sure that you have great security in place. This goes on premise as well.

Lock it Up With Good Quality Locks

You can go down to Bunningsand you can buy a cheap lock. One of my sort of side hobby that I've done in the past to pass time and get my mind away from the analytical thinking and more towards a creative, physical thing is lock picking. It's quite a hobby andit's quite interesting. It was surprising to find, when I went over to my mate's house, his parents had just built this beauty of a home, maybe 1.6 million dollar home near the water and it looked quite nice, as you'd imagine. The home was so fresh, that grass, you could still see those lines where the turf had been rolled out. We couldn't get into the house. His parents weren't home and his parents didn't have a hidden key or anything like that, again, security through obscurity. They said, "Look, we just have to wait for us to get home, we'll be home in about two hours." I said, "If you don't mind I'll just use my lock picking set." I opened the door in about 10 seconds and that comes down to shitty locks. You can't have bad locks on your doors. You've got to have good locks, you've got to have good security, otherwise you're only keeping out the honest criminals. That's what a lock is and that's what a lot of security is around IT practises.

Get An Audit

These people have just popped in antivirus solutions and they've turned a small network into a bigger network. They're still running a mumand dad practise, butthe business is now turning over sizable income and wouldn't be able to have the downtime that was associated with a mom and dad business. Have a look, get an audit. Get someone to jump in and audit your business. You'll be surprised at what they can find, anything from security patches missing, old router firmware that needs to be updated, old wireless protocols that should be disabled or even things that let them get in because you don't have the correct types of encryptions with any of the resources that you are dishing out remotely.

What About the Cloud?

Some people think, "I'm in the Cloud, I don't have to worry about security." Well here's a big, scary notice for you, you really really do more than ever if you're in the Cloud because now if someone's breaking into your shit, you can't even unplug the cord and get away from them. You have to just sit there and let it happen. How terrible is that? That is of course unless you've got the right processes in place.

The Final Word

Have talk to your IT company and see what they can do. Security should be your number one priority. Remember that security through obscurity is not security at all. Stay good.

What we're going to talk about is sleep, why that's important, why you're more productive with more sleep and not too much sleep and not too little sleep that it's not enough sleep. 

Learn more productivity hacks: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/285-how-to-stay-awake-and-productive-with-less-sleep 

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HWATT9vMh1w

So you woke up this morning, and you felt amazing or you didn't and you felt like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Either way, you're here and you're listening to me. I might be distracting you from your work. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. We're here together and we've got a few minutes to talk and I don't want to take up too much of your time.

What we're going to talk about is sleep, and why that's important, and why you're more productive with more sleep and not too much sleep and not too little sleep that it's not enough sleep. You have the right amount of sleep, just like Goldilocks. The Goldilocks amount of sleep.

When you wake up, you feel feeling lethargic and your first thing is let's get a coffee. Have a look online what coffee does to your brain, your brain on coffee. YouTube it and you will see that doesn't sound very good. You're actually making yourself worse.

And, I believe sleep works in stages. You have five stages of sleep. Not when you're actually asleep. Obviously, you have REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep, etc. I'm talking you go through a full cycle of sleep, and then another full cycle of sleep, and then another full cycle of sleep, and you get to a spot where your body is fully rejuvenated and you're actually able to function and work properly.

People that look through the day and go through the day going, "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah," and then they get this uprising pickup and then they get the 3 PM lull. The 3 PM lull? That is your body running out of energy from the night of sleep prior and then you're going from, let's say five of sleep, you're going down to stage four and then you get picked back up. And then from stage four maybe you continue, you go home, you're watching TV, and then you run out of stage four. And then when you go to bed your body goes druuuu and it pulls this up, maybe a little bit of this one, enough to get you up to 3 PM again the next day.

I know you can't catch up on sleep, but you can catch up on repairing your body so you need less sleep. Think about the difference there. I was having 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night. Huge numbers. 

Then I started cutting out all the different things in my diet, I was eating less meat, eating less wheat, eating lots of vegetables, three kilos of vegetables a day or more, an ingest of vegetables, and what I found was when I cut all that stuff out the amount of sleep required went down. I went from 12 hours and slowly it went down to 11, then it went down to 10, then it went down to 5, then it went down to 4 1/2 at night and about an hour to an hour and a half throughout the day somewhere. So about 6 hours overall and on a good day if I'm not doing anything too strenuous, I can crack out 5, 5 1/2 over a 24-hour period, and that is awesome. I have less sleep now, but it all came down to my diet and health of my body. You have to read your signs.

Try to cut out any stimulants in the morning and antidepressants before you go to bed. Don't have alcohol. Don't have cigarettes. Don't have coffee. Start your morning with a beer, end your night with a coffee—don't do that. That is much worse. That's the worst advice you could ever have. Don't have coffee at all. Try to stay away from coffee for one week. If you get to the 10-day mark, mate, if you get to the 10 mark and you're around South East Brisbane, let me know. I'll come over and congratulate you and we can have a beer together, or water, or something else. No coffee. Coffee is not great in how it masks your tiredness. It masks the way that your body works. If it was good for you, you can have as much as you want.

Learn more productivity hacks at Dorks Delivered!

Watch this episode on YouTube!

Carrots, within reason obviously. If you have too much of anything, you have 10,000 kilos of carrots a day you're going to die. 10, 20,000 litres of orange juice day has been lead to cancer. Yeah, you're going to be pretty well shut down and dead drinking a third of a swimming pool in a day of orange juice. Make sure that you take things in moderation, any stimulants, cut it completely out for 10 days see what happens, see what happens to your sleep, you'd be very surprised. You're going to feel hella tired for a few days and you're still going to bounce back and then you feel better and more revived without coffee. No stimulants.

Woo! Stay good.

Tips on Employee Engagement

That was terrible, remind me never to do that again. So we're goingbe talking today about employee engagement. Now you might be thinking, engagement, yeah, okay, cool, yeah I'm pretty engaged and that might be the case and engagement is important. Engagement in the traditional sense is when you find a partner and you find someone and you get along so well you decide I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with you, and then from that you decided to become engaged. Employee engagement is no different, it's the same beast. You want to make sure that your employees are engaged with the projects that they're working on and with the company that they belong with. So you want to make sure they're engaged, buthow do you do that?

Learn more about employee engagement: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/363-5-fantastic-ways-to-boost-employee-engagement 

Give Them Work

Number one, make sure they have work to do. Make sure they have something that they're doing that shows purpose and they feel utilised. The last thing you want to do is have them become bored, because when they become bored they become distracted. When they become distracted, they're no longer utilised and they're disengaged. Whathappens next? A whole bunch of work comes in and they start stressing out, because they were just getting paid a whole bunch of money for doing nothing. You don't want a lazy staff member, you don't want a lazy workforce. So that's where you want to make sure that to keep your employees engaged you have a good flow of work.

Make Sure They Enjoy the Work

You don't want to stress them out, you want to make sure it's work they enjoy doing, that they're actually engaged with. Don't give someone who hates writing a task about writing and equally, don't ask someone to make a programme or a script for you if they love writing. Utilise your workforce so that you can keep the employees engaged and they create their ownership around whatever it is that the task is that they're doing. I've got a fantastic team of unicorns that work with me side by side and I ask them very regularly are they enjoying what they're doing, is there anything that we could change to better our processes, and how utilised are they currently? I do this so that we can then work out is there more things that they should be spending their time on. Like a lot of industries, when it rains, it pours and we can go from having weeks where we're doing the standard 40 hour weeks and then we jump up and we're cruising upwards to 110 hour weeks each. That's right, and it is absolutely crazy and a lot of the time after we've had these huge booms I don't push the workload on because I want to make sure everyone's had a bit of time to relax, no one wants to be burnt out. That's gone from being utilised and having a high level of engagement to being over-utilised and burnt out and the last thing you want is a staff workforce of fizzles and dead fireworks. You want everything to go off with a bang when it needs to go off.

Ask them if there's better ways for their work to be done or if there's things that they could see that could improve their workflow. Once you've got those two things under wrapped, make sure they have ownership of whatever it is that they're doing because it's going to be their life, they're goingbe consumed in it. So you want to make sure they're interested in it and they can see that what they're doing is making a difference. Show them the numbers, show them the stats, let them see, okay, this is sweet, I've now created this programme or I've created this process or I've spray painted this car or whatever it is and let them see that what they've done has impacted someone's life in one way or another. Maybe it's just your own life, maybe it's just impacted the bottom line, whatever it is make sure they can see that their work is appreciated. Make sure they are engaged, if they're not engaged in the work that they're doing you should shuffle them off to something else.

Encourage Ideas

One of the great things you can do for your business is keep your staff motivated, give them reasons to continue striving ahead. If they come to you and say, "Look, I'd like to do this other project that I think would really help your business out," lend an ear, see how it would help out, see if we can maybe shift it around if it doesn't fit 100% and make it a project they can work out and work with you with. Becauseyou don't know, they've walked a completely different walk than you have throughout all their life and so they may have come to you with a fantastic pillar of an idea and if you're there to lend and ear and hear how it goes down, go for it.

Find the Right Compensation

Don't be afraid to ask for some sort of system that they might be interested in working towards. All people don't work for the same money and it sounds weird to say that but there's different people throughout history as well as throughout your business that absolutely love money. They love the Benjamins, the dollar doos, the red backs, or whatever you want to call it, they love coin and they'll do anything to get some money in their hand. Then there's other people who work for praise and they just want to be respected and be seen for the fantastic work that they're doing. Some people alsojust cruise along, have no real motivation, don't really want money, don't really want to be noticed or have fame or anything like thatwho arereally hard people to work with. It's always good to run with the motivated team that is motivated towards something and discuss it with your staff. If you want to get them engaged, talk to them, maybe you'll find some people really want to become a manager. Maybe some people really want to buy that new car and get that new set of wheels or whatever it is for their car, for their home, for their family, and if that is the case and that is the type of person that you've found, that's cool. You can talk about some sort of programme that you could do with them to allow for them to buy the car through work, offset their tax or whatever the situation is and that could be something that they could be working towards if that's what they want. If they want just straight up coin, that's something else that you can talk to them and have them work towards that.

Fantastic Employee Doesn’t Equal Fantastic Manager

If they want to become a manager, that is where you may need to be pulling in the reigns. Fantastic employees and fantastic technical workers are greatat what they're doing in their craft don't necessarily make fantastic managers. Fantastic managers are fantastic managers. If you've got anengineer who isgreat at problem solving, sometimes great with people skills andthey're able to really sink in and get a lot of appreciation out of seeing the completion of a project. Meanwhile, a manager normally gets more interest out of doing things around the collaborative projects of all of the people and seeing that work come together, but not necessarily working on the tools themselves.Dometimes there's crossovers, but normally a great person on the tools, a great technician, does not necessarily mean they're goingbe a great manager andin most cases they're not. So don't always jump to that being an increase, I'm giving you more responsibility, you get to take care of a team. It may actually be more of a slap in the face and when it comes down to talking to them about it and trying to have them reengage now that they're disengaged with the work that they're doing, it's a much harder conversation. You need to think about the type of person and that comes back to what we're talking about in the last episode.

You need to analyse and see are they going tobe the best person for this role? Do they want to become a manager for money, or do they want to become a manager just because it sounds cool? Or do they actually want to manage people and teams and the projects. Ifthey want to become a manager for the money, it's not a problem to have the people underneath the manager getting paid more than the manager. The hierarchy of pay does not necessarily have to mean that the people that are underneath the manager get paid less than the manager. The manager needs to know a little bit of everything about everyone on the team, meanwhile everyone on the team needs to know a lot about thing or a couple of things. So it's the skillsets and you make a decision. I would much prefer have a super engaged, happy engineer working for me than having a disengaged engineer that was fantastic that's now managing staff members and he's able to absolutely know every single problem and solution to everything, but he doesn't get to put that in place and it's disheartening. You don't want to be in that situation.

The Final Word

So make sure you keep your employees engaged. Keep them happy, keep them all together as a group, a nice, big, sound, happy family. If your employees want to become managers because that's what they see as the next level of pay, or the next logical conclusion in their lifeline of their career, then talk to them and say, "Is it just for money?" Because if it's just for money then change it around. If you have enjoyed this make sure to email us at the podcast at dorks.com.au with any feedback. If there's anything you'd like us to do an episode on, I'd love to hear from you and we're actually running a competition. So if you have listened to this episode and you jump across to our Facebook page, Dorks Delivered, and you like the episode and mention it with your name in there we'll put you in the running for a competition where you win 50 bucks. So, can't go wrong. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this and stay good.

Learn more about employee engagement: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/363-5-fantastic-ways-to-boost-employee-engagement 

The Qualities of a Great Leader

What are the qualities of a great leader, you ask? Well, this is my opinion. There's lots of things people go on about. Who's a leader? Are you a leader? We all need to be a leader, everyone needs to be a leader, and that's probably good. Everyone should be able to be there and collaborate with their peers, their staff members, and everyone. You shouldn't just be a leader in one area, you should be a leader across all areas. You should be a leader in your life, a leader with your wife, a leader with your kids, but probably not a leader when when you get in a strife, that wouldn't work. But, a leader is just someone who people look up to, and that's what you've just got toremember. It doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means. I couldn't find a leader on the topic of being a leader, I had to take from my own personal experience.

Get more tips on how to be a good leader: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/362-the-qualities-of-a-great-leader

What I Think a Leader Is

So, a leader is someone you can go to for advice andthat understands when they're wrong. They are happy to teach you anything and everything, and understand that if you did something wrong, they'll help you through it. They don't point fingers and say, "Oh, you did that wrong?" They ask, "So, do you like the outcome?" If they say, "Yes," you say, "Do you think we could have done this any way differently?" They sort of step around the situation, in a sense, to make sure that the person that is doing the task is learning, and not just being reprimanded and put into a box. If the person's learning, and they're learning from you in a way that is positive, they'll remember that a lot more easily. Negative reinforcement is bad, you shouldn't be doing that.You should be making sure you're a leader in your field andwith your family.

You Need Experience

Experience was once described to me as that you can never call yourself truly experienced unlessyou've broken and failed at whatever you're doing more times than everyone else. That is what gives you God level in the experience off of whatever things you're learning. You've got to learn to stuff up.You can't just be told no, people have to try and stuff up for themselvessometimes. If you're jumping into a school situation, if there's a student that's having trouble doing something, try and find out how they're going about learning that, and you'll be able to use that information to jump ahead as well, and see, okay, it makes sense the way they've got to this conclusion. Let's try and introduce this other bit of knowledge. You can use things such as Khan Academy, or pairing them up with another of the student in the class to allow for them to thrive, and relay off each other's positives and negatives. But ultimately, you need to be a leader, you need to be able to show that you have the ability to see problems like that, take those problems, and turn them into positives. There's so many things that I've stuffed up within business, so many things. I'm lucky enough to have been in business for 19 years, so I've been around long enough to understand that I've stuffed them up, but I've also fixed them up. So I understand how they are not meant to work, and how they don't work, and how they do work. That's a great situation to be in, and being able to learn from those experiences, great, being able to pass that information on is great, and being able to be there to teach people is great.

Documenting is Vital

Documenting processes, and showing people that they can read this document, but also let them know that is not set in stone. You are only one mind and one person from one perspective, that's the other great trait of leaders. It's not my way or the highway.All the information and people and processes all flower because of that. They all mature and become much, much, better, and then they become owned, which is really important.

Own It

Ownership of a situation is great. If you have employees that are able to own a situation, they will make sure it's taken care of. If they're able to say, "This is something I put in place," they're going to be happy to make sure it stays working, and that's a great thing as well. Because it's not just, "Oh, I'm just doing it, because I'm told to." They're doing it because they have now enjoyed doing it, and that they've made this thing theirs, so they don't wanna see anyone else break it. It goes throughout all aspects of work.

Not Everyone Has to Be a Leader

So, being a leader is important, and anyone can become a leader. Some people we hear, "Oh, they're a natural born leader," yeah, maybe. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. But, knowing if you are or not, or the traits that you have, really important. Jumping the line, doing a Myers-Briggs test, finding out where you sit, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. There's a book from Larry Little called Animals, and it goes through and discusses a different perspective for every person throughout your business, and how they relate to animals. So you have these lions, which are normally the leaders of the pack, and then you have turtles, which are slower at doing things, but very, very, detail-oriented. What my point is, whatever the situation is, if you know what you are, you can then know what you can act and become like. Understanding that, if you are a turtle, and you wantact like a lion, you can. Just know that you're a turtle, and know that the details are very important to you when you're looking at things, and when you're going through the process of things. So know that when you're delegating a task to someone, if they're also a turtle, they're going torespect the same work as you. If they're a monkey, and they're going all around the place, and changing things up and working on 15 projects, know that they may not do the work the way that you anticipated on it being done. It might be 90% done, and done 10 times faster, but you might have to dish that to the turtle for the other 10%.

The Final Word

Have a bit of a think about it, because being a good leader and having those skills to be able to see the types of people and communicate with them, will make an environment and an ecosystem that's very comfortable to work with. You'll be able to chat with everyone, and know what your strengths are, and what your weaknesses are, and what you need to actively focus on to become a leader, and make sure that you aren't getting caught up in the details that you know that are important to you, but might not be important to others. Just make sure you continue teaching, learning and understanding. Hope you've enjoyed this, and if you have, make sure to jump across to iTunes, and give us some love. Stay good.

Get more tips on how to be a good leader: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/362-the-qualities-of-a-great-leader