The Growth Concept With Keoni Upton

Four minutes left in the grand final AFL. Freo in front. Then the stadium plays Wolfie Time, and Brisbane find another gear.

Leigh Farnell has been coaching business owners, sales teams and elite sporting teams since 1985. He reckons that song was a sports psychology own goal.

In this episode we unpack why, and what it teaches every leader about emotional state, triggers and the energy inside a team. First, though, Leigh's story. He grew up in working class Eaglehawk and watched his dad lose his job and his sense of who he was. He came close to going down the wrong path with the wrong crowd. Then one mate made a single invitation that changed everything. Leigh is the founder of the CZ6 Sales & Business Growth System, host of the Leading Your Best Life podcast and author of Degrees Don't Close Deals. He's worked with more than 400 organisations across 18 countries and 47 industries, from Telstra to the WA under 18 state footy team.

CONNECT WITH LEIGH Website: https://www.leighfarnell.com CZ6 Sales & Business Growth: https://www.pdc-growth.com Book a free 15 min call: https://calendly.com/lfbb/exploratory-meeting-15mins Free 2 min Sales & Business Growth Quiz: https://leigh-ajoeneff.scoreapp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leighfarnell/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeighFarnellBestBusinessConsulting Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leighfarnell/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@leighfarnell3560 LEIGH'S PODCAST: LEADING YOUR BEST LIFE Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1fnDlrXvIj7b6P1NP4ZP3h Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leading-your-best-life-with-leigh-farnell/id1421054862 LEIGH'S MUSIC L4L Empowering Music (I Can I Will, The Champions Code, In the Zone). Search "L4L Empowering Music" on Spotify or Apple Music. LEIGH'S BOOKS (CZ6 Sales and Business Growth Series) Free ebook, Degrees Don't Close Deals: https://designrr.page/?id=661431&token=3119081602&h=2978 The Sales Management Masterclass The Team Chemistry Playbook (with Gerard McNeill) The Synergy Effect The Culture Playbook Lead, Grow, Thrive: The New Kaizen Mindset More Leads. More Sales. More Profit. (with Stefan Jadlowkier) The Sales Transformation Systems Leader (with David Horlock) Full series: https://www.leighfarnell.com/book

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey The Art of War by Sun Tzu

If this one hit home, send it to a leader who needs to hear it. Follow The Growth Concept for more real conversations. www.thegrowthconcept.com.au

Keep going!

I'm Keoni Upton, host of The Growth Concept Podcast and founder of GC Media, a Perth media company that creates story-led content for founder-led brands. Lately I've been getting a lot of questions about what it was like going from full-time employment to working for myself, so I recorded this episode to answer them properly.

In this solo episode, I share the six things I wish I'd known before I quit my job. I talk about why you need a $5,000 to $10,000 cash buffer, and the setup costs that caught me out, like insurance and company structure. I explain why setting up a CRM from day one would have saved me lost clients, and how I vibe coded my own instead of paying for one. I also cover finding where your clients actually are and getting in the room, including which networking groups worked for me and the one that cost me $3,000. From there, it's building relationships and booking meetings before you hand in your resignation, so you walk out with clients ready to go. To finish, I get into closing deals by building an offer so good people feel silly saying no.

If you're thinking about making the leap, this one will help you do it with a plan instead of just sending it and hoping for the best. Business is hard, but the sooner you surround yourself with people who want to see you grow, the sooner you will.

This is general info from my own experience, not financial advice. Speak to a licensed accountant or advisor about your situation.

Got questions? Email me: [email protected]
Website: thegrowthconcept.com.au
GC Media: growthconceptmedia.com.au
Instagram: @keoni_upton

Duncan Forbes is back for round two, and this one is nothing like our first chat about becoming a good man and holding your standards.

This time we go straight into peptides. Duncan is a trainer of thirteen years who tore his ACL playing soccer, and instead of just following the standard rehab path he spent two months researching how to come back faster and stronger.

He is now running the Wolverine stack, BPC-157 and TB-500, under a physician, and documenting the whole thing publicly.

If you have heard the word peptide thrown around the gym and have no idea what it actually means, this is the episode. Duncan breaks down what peptides really are, messengers that tell your body to do something, not magic pills.

He explains why insulin and the GLP-1s sit in the same family, why the rodent studies look incredible while the human trials are basically non-existent, and the risk nobody wants to say out loud, that anything telling your cells to grow can also feed something already in there you do not know about.

We get into the uncomfortable stuff too. Why the fitness industry resents GLP-1s and why Duncan thinks that is the wrong take. The clients he has trained who lost weight and lean muscle at the same time with no one warning them.

If you are curious about peptides, weighing up a GLP-1, or just trying to work out what is real and what is hype in the recovery and longevity space, you will walk away understanding what these compounds actually do, what the trade-offs are, and what still has to be in place around them for any of it to matter.

Personal trainer of twelve to thirteen years, Pilates instructor and nutrition coach based in the US. Currently studying the peptide space while rehabbing his own ACL reconstruction and sharing the results as he goes.

Connect with Duncan

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forbes_healthandwellness/

Connect with The Growth Concept

Website: www.thegrowthconcept.com.au

This one hit different. Martial specialises in the subconscious mind, in getting your conscious and subconscious in sync so you actually take action instead of finding six reasons to make a coffee first. But the real story in this episode is what happened in 2007, when he lost roughly $350 million in 27 days. He walked into his house that night planning to end his life. Seeing his wife and baby daughter changed everything, and what followed was a full rebuild, from a shed and Aldi shopping trips back to running businesses again.

What we get into:

Growing up inside the personal development world from age nine, being mentored by names like Zig Ziglar and Jose Silva as a teenager, and turning down Tony Robbins' offer to train him full time because it meant moving his family to America. The 27 days that took his business from 56 staff to 8, and the advisory board member he fired on the spot for telling him to file for bankruptcy. Why he believes asking for help is one of the most selfless things you can do, not the opposite. How he trains resilience like a muscle and builds a plan B into every business he runs, including using AI to stress test his own company structure. The simple gratitude and goal writing ritual he does every single morning, and why he reckons celebrating your losses teaches you more than celebrating your wins.

If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to rebuild after losing everything, this conversation is it.

Connect with Martial:
Instagram → instagram.com/martialpeter

This episode on The Growth Concept, Brittney Hall runs The Revenue Agency out of Texas with her husband, working with founders in the coaching and personal development world.

Her mission is dead simple: help the good guys win. It's an industry full of smoke and mirrors, where anyone can call themselves a coach and a lot of people end up burned, so she's built her whole name on integrity. The way she puts it, if you see her working with someone, they're one of the good ones.

Most of this one is about something every founder wrestles with: how to actually work on your business instead of in it. I brought her four things I've been chewing on. Trust, ego, self-awareness and delegation. She pulled each one apart from years of doing this with real businesses. We got into why you delegate your weaknesses first instead of hiring an assistant for status, why the very first thing she outsourced wasn't even in her business, and how "what's scheduled is what gets done" runs her entire life.

About Brittney

Brittney Hall is the co-founder of The Revenue Agency, which she runs alongside her husband out of Texas. She works with founders in the coaching and personal development world, from coaches and speakers to authors, helping them grow through strategy, sharp systems and honest communication. She built her own coaching business in the health space before moving into personal development, and integrity has been her non-negotiable ever since. Alongside her one-on-one clients, she runs a weekly coaching group for entrepreneurs.

Connect with Brittney

Website: therevenueagency.com

Follow The Growth Concept

Website: thegrowthconcept.com.au

Sponsored by: Growth Concept Media

It's been almost six months since my last solo episode. Far too long, if you ask me. In this one I'm telling the full story of how I quit my three-year electrical apprenticeship at 19 to go all in on my business, plus the five lessons I've actually learned scaling it so far.

I get into the real stuff: the people who told me I was stupid for walking away from a secure paycheck, the burnout that put me in bed for days, the moment I realised I was just a number to a company that didn't care, and how I went from an unpaid real estate shoot I can barely watch back to running my own company with a team behind me. The five lessons cover networking, why relationships come before the pitch, pricing and knowing what your time is actually worth, building your professional and personal brand, and setting up a lead engine that brings the work to you. If you're stuck in a job you know isn't it, or you've got something you want to build and the fear's in the way, this episode's for you. It's everything I've lived so far, including where I got it wrong, so you can skip a few of the same mistakes.

Sponsored by: Growth Concept Media

Growth Concept Media is my content and personal branding service for service-based businesses and founder-led brands. If you're great at what you do but you're invisible online, that's the gap I close. Whether it's building out your personal brand or capturing your next event properly, the work's the same: get clear on your story, create content that actually sounds like you, and turn it into work that builds trust and brings the right people to you. No vanity metrics, no posting for the sake of it, just story-driven content that makes you the go-to in your space. Find me at growthconceptmedia.com.au.

Episode 5 of 5 on On the Streets of Perth. The open mic podcast where I chat with someone out in the wild and we just talk. No studio, no script. We shot this one down in Freo. Bailey and I go way back. High school, skateboarding at fifteen, a few Muay Thai spars over the years.

A few weeks ago he got home from Thailand, and the way he ended up there is next level. Fresh off a breakup, sitting in the gym on a Friday after work, he realised nothing was keeping him in Perth anymore. So he booked a one-way ticket to Phuket in about ten minutes, right there on the gym Wi-Fi, before he'd said a word to his boss or his parents. Paused his whole electrical apprenticeship to do it.

If you've ever talked yourself out of a leap, listen to this one.

Connect with Bailey

• Instagram: @baileytonkinfitness

Connect with The Growth Concept

• Website: thegrowthconcept.com.au
• Sponsored by: Growth Concept Media — growthconceptmedia.com.au

Episode 4 of On the Streets of Perth. My open mic series where I sit down with guests out in the wild and just talk. No studio, no script. Just a real conversation.

This one's different though. Sam G is back for round three, but Sam and I go way, way back. Macca's days, both of us at 15. So before we touched any of the business stuff we got into how we actually met, the dumb things we got up to as teenagers, and why neither of us would take a second of it back.

Sam G is a 20-year-old online fitness coach in Perth. He helps skinny guys put on muscle and get the structure most of them never had on their own. He came up through a Sport & Business diploma with the Perth Wildcats, then went from eight clients to twenty-six in under a year by coaching blokes through the exact same road he walked himself.

Connect with Sam

• Instagram: @samggym

Connect with The Growth Concept

• Website: thegrowthconcept.com.au
• Sponsored by: Growth Concept Media growthconceptmedia.com.au

Episode 3 of On the Streets of Perth a open mic series where I sit down with guests out in the wild for unfiltered, real conversation. No studio, no script.

This week I caught up with Levi out in Freo.

What most people don't know is the story behind it at 11 he was diagnosed with leukemia, spent years in daily chemo, and walked into high school as "the cancer kid." Instead of breaking him, it built the emotional intelligence he leads with today.

We get into where his ability to read people comes from, how motorbikes became his escape during treatment, why he reckons genuine connection only gets more valuable as AI takes over online, and some real talk on relationships and look within yourself.

If you've ever felt like the thing that was supposed to hold you back is actually what made you, this one's for you.

Connect with Levi

• Instagram: @levi.surjan
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/levi-surjan

Connect with The Growth Concept

• Website: thegrowthconcept.com.au
• Sponsored by: Growth Concept Media

Episode 2 of On the Streets of Perth a open mic podcast series where I sit down with guests out in the wild to capture unfiltered, real stories and experiences. No studio, no script, just honest conversation.

This week I caught up with Christian Rusli on the streets of Fremantle a self-taught photographer and videographer who's carving out a name in the automotive and sports space here in Perth. We get into how he went from growing up around cars in his grandpa's Indonesian showroom to recently shooting the United Cup, one of the biggest pro tennis events of the year.

We dig into the messy middle of building a creative business: finding a system that actually works, the tension between studying engineering and going all in on the camera, and the family pressure that comes with choosing the "less safe" path. Chris also shares his take on whether energy and confidence can outweigh experience (spoiler — I tell the story of how I bluffed my way through my first real estate shoot in full auto focus). We close with the card game and two questions that hit harder than expected — what you want but are afraid of, and the last time you felt deeply happy.

If you're in that in-between stage of trying to balance the safe path with the creative one, this one's for you.

About the Series On the Streets of Perth

An open mic podcast series bringing unfiltered, real stories and experiences from creatives, founders and everyday people out on the streets of Perth. No edits to the truth — just real conversation in real settings.

About Christian

Christian Rusli is a Perth-based photographer and videographer specialising in automotive and sports content. Self-taught, currently studying engineering, and building his media brand on the side. Recently shot the United Cup pro tennis event in Perth.

Connect with Christian

• Instagram: @christianr.media
• Portfolio: christianruslimedia.mypixieset.com

Connect with The Growth Concept

• Website: thegrowthconcept.com.au
• Host: Keoni Upton — Growth Concept Media