I've recently spent a week in Sydney with Matt Church becoming an accredited Thought Leaders Mentor ... another string to add to my business coaching bow.
 
Consequently I've been thinking a lot about how thought leadership can help small business.
 
Thought leadership in a particular field means being an expert, but it's more than that. It's actually about extending the thinking in that area.

You may recall my last blog about getting on the phone and making cold calls - with exceptional results.

Well, we actually held the seminar last week, which was also really the launch of our new business Pure Bookkeeping. The outcome we were looking for from the event was to sell licenses to the Pure Bookkeeping System at the reduced price for our launch of around $4k. We had 12 people along on the night. Of those 2 had already bought the system, 2 were partners and one was an employee of Deb's, so we had seven prospects. A good rule of thumb for these sort of nights is to convert one in four, so I said to Deb that two sales would be a good result. So how did we go?

 Last month I met with a client 2 days before the end of the month, and he
was three sales short of his quarterly target of 30 sales. We could have
been satisfied with that, but instead we decided to keeping going full out
for the target until the end of the quarter.

We came up with the great "Get my business coach off my back" sale. 

We ran The Money Workshop on the weekend. We ask for feedback at the end of the workshop, including what we can improve. We had a few comments like "nothing comes to mind. that's a first!" and simply "all good," as well as "open window was too cold" and "bring an espresso machine." I think if we've got it to the level where the only complaint someone can come up with is that we only have filter coffee and not an espresso machine, we must be doing a few things right!

Our two month Bali adventure is over, so I thought I'd share some of our lessons.

You may recall we were on a 10 day holiday in Bali in May last year, and I was staring out to sea reflecting on my business. I realised that while the business had grown (the team was up to ten people), I was working harder than ever, feeling more stressed, and not really loving my business. As I watched the fishing boats sailing back into shore I thought I need more of this.

I then said to Trish what would we need to do in the business to be able to be a way for two to three months and still have everything run?

Trust in business is completely critical. In his book, Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts writes about trust and respect being the two precursors to a Lovemark. I agree - for someone to love your business, they must first trust and respect it.
 
It's interesting being in Bali, thinking about the cultural aspects of trust in business. In Australia the government basically trusts us to pay our tax. We may get audited, but its largely an honour system. And the vast majority of businesses do pay their taxes. On the other hand, retail stores don't trust the public (and often the staff) not to steal stuff. If you were leaving your shop for five minutes you'd lock the door.
 
Here it's the opposite.

Our experiment to live and work in Bali is underway!
 
A little background ... a six months ago we came for a holiday to Bali for 10 days. I did some reflecting on my business, and realised that while we had grown, had a beautiful office and a growing team that peaked at 10 people, I wasn't loving the business any more. I was working harder to pay everyone, more stressed and had lost my mojo. I was staring out to sea thinking I could get used to this, when I thought 'why not?'
 
Fast forward six months - I've gotten rid off the office, reduced the team, and I've just landed in Bali for a two month experiment to see if its possible to run my business and do my coaching from Bali.

I was part of a very interesting conversation about leadership last week facilitated by Sean Richardson. Sean is the high performance coach and sports psychologist at the St Kilda Football club. He proposed that great leadership strikes a balance between support and challenge.

I think it’s a great model. I remember a team I was leading many years ago when I was working as a business consultant with Accenture. It was a software development team, and there were two guys in particular that I remember. Daniel was a gun, and Jeff was considerably less so.

My leadership style (although perhaps "leadership style" is overstating it slightly) was very different for the two of them.

A key leadership distinction in the Love Your Business Method is creating your core values; and it's one of the first things that I work on with my coaching clients.

However it sometimes seems like a futile exercise - we create a great set of core values and then ... nothing happens. They aren't discussed, they aren't displayed, they don't seem to make any difference.

I have to somewhat sheepishly admit, looking around our office walls I can't see our core values displayed anywhere. Like the plumber with the leaky tap I guess.

Last week we ran the first ever Love Your Money Workshop - and it sold out. It was pretty amazing for the first one we'd ever done, especially given we only came up with the idea six and a half weeks earlier.

It was the first time I've ever had an event sell out, and at times we've struggled to get numbers to other LYB workshops, so it got me thinking. What was it that had this event sell out? Here's what I came up with.