I flew to Bali using frequent flyer points a few weeks ago, which meant we were on a Jetstar flight. I think they have made a strategic decision to piss their customers off. Or at the very least to differentiate themselves on ticket price only, try to then squeeze every dollar they can out of their customers, and not care at all about how their customer's feel.

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.

I was listening to a podcast from RadioLab and heard about this fascinating study. They set up a challenging mini golf course. But before each of the subjects played, they were told "this is a test of your physical intelligence." The result - the white subjects on average played four strokes better over the course than the black subjects. Doesn't sound that surprising - golf clubs are often exclusive and expensive, maybe more whites play golf than blacks, maybe mini golf isn't a typical African-American family outing.

Here's where it gets interesting though. They made one small change to the experiment. This time they told the subjects "this is a test of your natural athletic ability." The result was startlingly different.

You may recall a blog I wrote back in October last year "What do your customers say about you ... even when you are not there?". I wrote about The Loyalty Zone - a company that surveys customers, not about customer satisfaction, but about customer loyalty. As CEO Craig Cherry says "a satisfied customer isn't enough - a satisfied customer probably won't come back, and probably won't refer anyone. You need loyal customers."

At the time I said I was ready to bite the bullet, and find out what our customers really thought about The Money Workshop. And I promised I'd let you know how we went - here's the verdict.

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.

Craig Cherry is in the business of answering this question. He runs a business called The Loyalty Zone and came and spoke about customer service at a Love Your Business seminar a couple of nights ago.
 
Most people I talk to say that word of mouth is their most important form of marketing - me included. However most of us don't know what our customers really think, feel and most importantly say about us.
 
Craig shared with us how exactly how to find out what our customers say. There are three (yep, only three) questions that he recommends we ask to find.

The first question is:

Every second week I have the pleasure of hanging out with my two nephews, Jarrah and Sam, and doing pretty much whatever they want to do. Jarrah is four and Sam is coming up to two.

Last Sunday we were sitting in a cafe sipping our babycinos and my cup-of-cino (Jarrah normally orders, and he thinks a cappuccino is a cup-of-cino, and I think that's too cool to correct), when Jarrah asked me an interesting question.

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.