I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Wendy Corner ...
 

You keep saying you’ll write that book - or step up and be more visible - but the weeks slip by, and it never feels like the “right time.” Wendy Corner helps thoughtful, values-driven entrepreneurs finally get their ideas out there… without the pressure.

Her Promise 2 Page programme gives you structure, support, and a way to write that fits into real life, not some idealised version of it. Once you're ready to publish, she co-runs Publishing for Good, a boutique publishing project that gets your book out into the world (bookstores, Amazon, QR engagement and more).

What comes next? Visibility, on your terms. With her From Page 2 Stage coaching and podcast, Wendy helps even introverted entrepreneurs share their message with clarity - whether that’s podcasting, panels, or keynotes. With 30+ years in speech therapy, TEDx coaching, NLP, and hypnotherapy, she helps clients move from stuck to seen… with calm, grounded confidence.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Lisa Berry ...
 

Lisa Berry is a speaker, entrepreneur, intuitive coach, and podcast co-host who works with individuals and business leaders on how to restore balance and well-being from the inside out.  

Drawing from her 25-year career in information technology and leadership development, Lisa blends practical insight with heartfelt storytelling inspired by her own journey of healing, resilience, and reinvention. 

She thought she had it all - family, career, education, until the day she finally listened to her inner-voice, and she admitted she had it all wrong. Throwing her hands up and asking the Universe for help, her prayer was answered shortly after. She and her company were fired from their lucrative subcontract. Her response to the termination email was, “I’m free!”

She now teaches others how to find clarity, so they can move from fear to freedom through implementing what she calls, microshifts.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Kent Lewis ...
 

Lewis is currently Executive Director of NextNW, a non-profit trade association that unifies the Pacific Northwest advertising & marketing professionals interested in professional development, sharing best practices, and collaborative problem-solving. He is also Founder of pdxMindShare, Portland’s premier career community, with over 12,000 LinkedIn Group members.

With a background in integrated marketing, he left a public relations agency in 1996 to start his career in digital marketing. Since then, he’s helped grow businesses by connecting his clients with their constituents online. In 2000, Lewis founded Anvil Media, Inc., a measurable marketing agency specializing in search engine and social media marketing. Under his leadership, Anvil has received recognition from Portland Business Journal and Inc. Magazine as a Fastest Growing and Most Philanthropic Company. After selling his agency in March 2022, he became a CMO for the acquiring firm.

Beyond co-founding SEMpdx, Lewis co-founded two agencies, emailROI (now Thesis) and Formic Media. As a long-time entrepreneur, he’s advised or invested in a host of companies, including PacificWRO, Maury’s Hive Tea and ToneTip. Lewis speaks regularly at industry events and has been published in books and publications including Business2Community, Portland Business Journal, and SmartBrief. For twenty years, he was an adjunct professor at Portland State University, and has been a volunteer instructor for SCORE Portland since 2015.

Lewis tours nationwide, averaging 30 speaking engagements annually, including a regular presenter role with the Digital Summit conference series. Active in his community, Lewis has been involved in non-profit charity and professional trade organizations including early literacy program SMART Reading and The Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO). Industry recognition and awards include Portland Business Journal’s Top 40 Under 40 Award, American Marketing Association Oregon Chapter Marketer of the Year, and Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers by BuzzSumo.

Transcript

[00:00.980 --> 00:11.960]  Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.
[00:12.540 --> 00:18.640]  I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments,
[00:19.300 --> 00:26.080]  such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment,
[00:26.080 --> 00:33.100]  and being able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and greater opportunities.
[00:33.400 --> 00:44.520]  Welcome to today's Career Advantage Show. I'm Tony Piscinelli, and I am joined by Kent Lewis, all the way from Portland, Oregon, in America.
[00:44.800 --> 00:45.600]  Welcome, Kent.
[00:46.580 --> 00:48.700]  Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:50.120 --> 00:54.320]  Kent, I read your profile with considerable interest.
[00:54.320 --> 01:00.100]  You are a director of a number of companies.
[01:00.300 --> 01:04.020]  You co-founded a company called Anvil, which is a marketing agency.
[01:04.900 --> 01:13.720]  You're a thought leader in the world of digital marketing, and also you take a keen interest in the employee experience.
[01:14.220 --> 01:19.320]  And you're a speaker and a prolific content producer. So welcome.
[01:20.440 --> 01:21.820]  Thank you. It's a pleasure.
[01:21.820 --> 01:30.420]  Now, as you would know, all career journeys have their ups and downs, and your story is no different.
[01:30.720 --> 01:40.640]  And I'd like you to share with our audience, going back to 2000, where you lost your first job.
[01:40.640 --> 01:51.940]  And if you could share what led up to that, the moment itself, and how you sort of pick yourself up from that event.
[01:51.940 --> 02:12.720]  Yes. So in 1996, I was hired by one of my first major mentors at a PR firm where I was applying my PR background and my SEO, newfangled SEO background, pre-Google, at a large agency after being a small startup.
[02:12.720 --> 02:22.020]  And my boss, Ryan, believed in me. He challenged me in ways nobody had challenged me. He supported me in amazing ways.
[02:22.020 --> 02:31.000]  Then he left the agency abruptly, and I didn't talk to him for three months. So we worked together for more than a year and a half.
[02:31.000 --> 02:39.100]  He came and talked to me after getting his life back together. And he said, I'm going to start an agency. I said, OK, cool.
[02:39.280 --> 02:49.720]  So in late January 1999, we co-founded an agency together. So the first data point I want to say is that he wanted me to be one of two other co-founders.
[02:49.720 --> 02:56.080]  He was funding it with his retirement plan, and he brought in a gal on the PR side to run the PR team.
[02:56.160 --> 03:06.840]  And I was running kind of the Internet side, which was new at the time in 99. And I said, sure, I had my reservations about her, but she was very, very driven, hardworking.
[03:06.840 --> 03:12.340]  But she was also a little bit of a train wreck. And I was concerned that things might blow up at some point.
[03:12.340 --> 03:18.820]  And it turns out I was right. So we worked pretty well as a team together, despite the friction we had.
[03:20.500 --> 03:24.800]  And the first problem. Oh, did you have a question? No. OK.
[03:25.060 --> 03:27.740]  No, I thought I heard. Sorry, I thought I heard something.
[03:28.040 --> 03:38.540]  So the first problem was that that we had this healthy friction that our boss kind of played us off each other to help us build an agency.
[03:38.540 --> 03:43.080]  So we started with six original employees. And within a year, we were over 20 self-funded.
[03:43.460 --> 03:47.260]  That's pretty. That was pretty good. It's still by my standards, pretty impressive growth.
[03:48.240 --> 03:51.620]  And by the end of that year, we still had no equity agreement in writing.
[03:51.620 --> 03:54.440]  And we were like, we're at a two million dollar company from scratch.
[03:55.100 --> 03:56.680]  You know, I think we need to get something in writing.
[03:57.740 --> 04:04.180]  And and my my the younger partner that was my age, our boss was about 15 years older than us.
[04:04.180 --> 04:14.600]  And she was like, I'm going to go ask for more money. So, you know, about a year and a half into it, I went into his office and she said, you better start the conversation.
[04:14.600 --> 04:18.060]  I said, we have helped you build what is going to be by the end of the year.
[04:18.280 --> 04:22.980]  We're talking 2000, you know, a three point five million dollar agency.
[04:23.160 --> 04:27.960]  And we have nothing still in writing. And so we thought now would be a good time to ask for more equity.
[04:27.960 --> 04:36.020]  It wasn't it wasn't my idea, but I thought I had earned my part of it and I didn't think it could hurt to ask.
[04:36.080 --> 04:39.360]  It turns out it did hurt. Two weeks later, we were both fired.
[04:40.120 --> 04:48.480]  And I would say my fault was asking for something, not going through the thought process to think, how would he react?
[04:48.480 --> 04:53.800]  He was going to he was going to fire the other partner because they weren't getting along.
[04:53.940 --> 05:06.640]  And when I aligned with her and put myself in her aligned in her seat and asking for more equity, we're talking a couple a couple points under 10 percentage on a on a three and a half million dollar business that we built for him.
[05:07.300 --> 05:11.020]  And he didn't like it. So he decided to fire us both instead of just her.
[05:11.020 --> 05:23.640]  And I felt like I lost a job and a mentor. But what I the first reaction, because I knew I wasn't happy leading up to the three to four months because we were we didn't have clarity.
[05:23.640 --> 05:29.600]  We didn't have anything in writing. I started, you know, emotionally thinking what else which I do to prepare for the worst.
[05:29.920 --> 05:33.160]  And so I polished up. LinkedIn wasn't even really a thing yet.
[05:33.580 --> 05:39.980]  Polished up my resume, started thinking about who I would talk to if things went south and then, boom, we were fired.
[05:39.980 --> 05:55.440]  And so it wasn't a week later. And basically the first week of August, because I was mid late September in the first week of August, I founded Anvil Media as just a placeholder for consulting a shingle, if you will.
[05:56.120 --> 06:00.540]  And I wasn't I was not ready to I was definitely not going to hire employees.
[06:01.100 --> 06:06.600]  I wasn't interested in going full time as a contract, you know, as a consultant or building a formal agency.
[06:06.600 --> 06:10.260]  It was just a shingle to do little projects until I found a real job.
[06:11.180 --> 06:22.420]  And so that so the predecessor, the precursor was personalities and the friction and then the alignment was rocky and overwhelming and led to my demise the first time.
[06:22.500 --> 06:29.500]  It wasn't my performance. It wasn't anything other than, you know, aligning with somebody that was already on their track to get exited.
[06:29.500 --> 06:39.040]  And at that moment, I felt released and I felt deeply hurt and frustrated because I feel like I wasn't the problem.
[06:39.700 --> 06:44.180]  But I paid the price. I even picked up the bar tab when the whole company came over.
[06:44.240 --> 06:49.800]  We all had drinks at a local Irish pub and everybody cried and said, this is so terrible.
[06:49.800 --> 06:52.400]  And then they all left and I got stuck with a four hundred dollar tab.
[06:52.840 --> 07:01.040]  But be that as it may, I still have good friendships from my time, but I decided I'm already ready to move forward.
[07:01.140 --> 07:10.380]  I didn't ruminate. Interestingly, the converse side of that is my business partner, the gal that was the same age as me, her identity was tied up to that into that agency.
[07:10.380 --> 07:17.080]  So her getting fired, it really was the start of her decline. Professionally, within five years, she couldn't even hold a job.
[07:17.460 --> 07:22.720]  And she I won't go into more detail, but just say it. It was a devastating blow to her that she could not recover from.
[07:22.860 --> 07:25.740]  And I ended up moving on to the next thing.
[07:27.220 --> 07:33.620]  Right. So it sounds like you already had a contingency in place, Kent, before that event.
[07:33.620 --> 07:43.540]  Like, you know, you had that idea about Anvil and you saw some cracks in that situation.
[07:43.540 --> 07:47.660]  You know, the personality conflict, they didn't have a clear vision.
[07:49.600 --> 07:55.400]  So it wasn't your ideal job anyway, was it by the sound of it?
[07:55.400 --> 08:03.220]  It was on paper and it was have had, I think I could have certainly done things better.
[08:03.320 --> 08:06.580]  No question. I don't know what I would have done better, but I could have done something better.
[08:06.980 --> 08:13.220]  But I think if the three of us had done it differently, we we would have hopefully stayed in business together.
[08:15.240 --> 08:22.380]  Ironically, remember, in 2000, the bottom fell out in in April and the the dot com crash.
[08:22.380 --> 08:27.120]  And then this was set to end of September. So our clients hadn't renewed their marketing budgets yet.
[08:27.660 --> 08:34.440]  And so within three weeks of him firing us, thinking he was releasing himself and freeing up his mind.
[08:34.460 --> 08:37.800]  And he had just taken on a huge lease on 20,000 square feet.
[08:37.820 --> 08:44.280]  And he needed about three. That's ultimately what undid the agency after we left is client suspended budgets.
[08:44.280 --> 08:48.220]  They they they left the agency. They're like, we don't have money for next year.
[08:48.220 --> 08:53.960]  All the new business froze. So we went from 35 people when we were fired at our peak.
[08:54.680 --> 09:04.620]  Nine months later, he sold the agency aqua higher, meaning what was left is 11 people went to another agency and brought the if they could bring clients, they got jobs.
[09:04.620 --> 09:09.360]  And so that was that's how that ended was in in disaster.
[09:09.360 --> 09:12.720]  And the worst part in terms of what we built was magic.
[09:12.720 --> 09:17.060]  And I still have great friendships from that. And it's still the most fun I've ever had in an agency.
[09:17.680 --> 09:23.060]  Honestly, it was the best of the best because ninety nine through early 2000 was a huge boom time.
[09:23.140 --> 09:28.680]  We couldn't lose. And then when we started to lose was right at right when we were fired.
[09:28.680 --> 09:33.780]  And I think that my partner, I could have helped save the agency, but we were kicked out.
[09:33.940 --> 09:41.500]  And that was that. Tragically, our boss, Ryan, died of a massive heart attack the June of the following year in 2001.
[09:42.380 --> 09:45.760]  And so he paid the ultimate price and I still miss him.
[09:45.820 --> 09:49.740]  And I lost a mentor. I lost a business partner. I lost a friend.
[09:49.740 --> 09:57.760]  And and we never really got to reconcile. I had some peace because his effectively his common law wife told me right before he died,
[09:57.820 --> 10:03.220]  he had mentioned missing and wanting to reconnect with me. And that made the made the world of difference to me.
[10:03.780 --> 10:06.360]  So I by that time I had moved on.
[10:07.500 --> 10:12.880]  Ironically, the people that brought brought over, most of them were my team was highly cohesive,
[10:12.880 --> 10:20.460]  whereas the PR side, which is three quarters of the agency, started to fall apart with or without my partner there to run it.
[10:20.840 --> 10:25.420]  It ended up being, you know, four of my team and six or seven of the PR team at its peak.
[10:25.600 --> 10:31.180]  That agency was 30 people of PR only and my small team of five or six.
[10:31.540 --> 10:35.240]  So my team stayed together. But when he died, nobody was there to run my team.
[10:35.240 --> 10:40.820]  So I ended up running my old team again, working with my crew a year later.
[10:40.820 --> 10:50.180]  And that ended up resulting in the second time I was fired was because of the pre-existing condition of relationships,
[10:50.180 --> 10:57.140]  even though my boss was gone. That second time was where I was just kind of a director level was about a girl,
[10:57.600 --> 11:01.940]  a gal I'd worked with. I started dating when she moved over before I got hired.
[11:02.260 --> 11:08.120]  And then long story short personalities, she started dating the creative director without letting me know while we were still dating.
[11:08.120 --> 11:13.500]  And he had been there 20 years. So he just got me fired after about six months.
[11:14.280 --> 11:18.000]  So after that, I had already had Anvil and only done a couple of projects.
[11:18.200 --> 11:22.780]  And that agency experience of only six months proved to me I shouldn't be working for other people
[11:22.780 --> 11:29.960]  because I can't handle working for, you know, bad people, stupid people, unmotivated, untalented people.
[11:29.980 --> 11:32.360]  And that's what that agency was full of outside of my team.
[11:32.360 --> 11:36.380]  And so I decided I'm just going to work for myself from here on out.
[11:36.500 --> 11:38.400]  And that was April 2002.
[11:38.800 --> 11:44.840]  So I went from starting my first agency, co-founding it in 99, to getting fired 18 months later,
[11:45.260 --> 11:53.260]  to starting my new, you know, placeholder, to just being committed from having a legal entity
[11:53.260 --> 11:56.340]  to committing to doing consulting in 2002.
[11:56.340 --> 12:02.520]  And within a couple of months, I actually co-founded another agency called Email ROI
[12:02.520 --> 12:08.000]  because our clients needed email marketing support as well as search marketing, which is what I specialize in.
[12:08.640 --> 12:11.800]  And so a buddy of mine, a college roommate and a buddy of mine here in Portland,
[12:11.800 --> 12:15.380]  we started this email marketing company in early 2000.
[12:16.080 --> 12:17.340]  And I ran that for a year.
[12:17.740 --> 12:21.420]  And that's what taught me hiring employees isn't as scary as I thought.
[12:21.420 --> 12:23.440]  And I didn't really want to do email marketing.
[12:23.580 --> 12:28.180]  So that's when I left of fall of 03 and started, I'm going to run my own agency.
[12:28.300 --> 12:29.160]  I'm going to have employees.
[12:29.280 --> 12:30.380]  I'm going to do this full time.
[12:30.580 --> 12:36.460]  So it took me three years from originally hanging a shingle and then realizing I can't work for anybody else
[12:36.460 --> 12:39.940]  I don't respect, to I could work for somebody with somebody else, my buddies.
[12:40.240 --> 12:42.160]  But I didn't want to do the work I was doing.
[12:42.300 --> 12:47.740]  So I decided to do what I knew and loved, which was search marketing full time, late 03 into 04,
[12:47.740 --> 12:51.020]  and ran that until I sold it in 2022.
[12:52.100 --> 12:52.620]  Okay.
[12:52.840 --> 12:57.700]  Can I take you back to when you lost your second job, the relationship dynamic?
[12:57.900 --> 13:04.540]  So if I read that correctly, you were in a relationship with this lady,
[13:04.540 --> 13:07.540]  but then she started a relationship with this other gentleman.
[13:08.340 --> 13:13.160]  Did he know about your pre-existing relationship and saw you as a threat?
[13:13.240 --> 13:15.480]  Was that the catalyst for the demise of that job?
[13:15.480 --> 13:22.360]  I, yes, I believe he, he had to know, you know, we were openly dating at that agency for only a couple months,
[13:22.360 --> 13:26.680]  but she, she had told them don't hire him because she didn't want her boyfriend at the agency,
[13:26.680 --> 13:29.580]  whether it was because she was already interested in somebody else or not.
[13:29.580 --> 13:30.880]  She just didn't think it was a good idea.
[13:31.140 --> 13:35.180]  They hired me anyway, and ended up being by far the worst agency job of my life.
[13:35.260 --> 13:36.540]  That agency is long gone.
[13:37.440 --> 13:41.540]  It had been around 30 years when I got there, and it didn't last another five.
[13:42.220 --> 13:44.000]  It was completely dysfunctional.
[13:44.860 --> 13:48.680]  Interestingly, when you talk about, you know, we'll get into the passion for employee engagement,
[13:48.680 --> 13:56.660]  which I didn't feel until I became an employee in 2022 after signing my agency was that it was all personalities.
[13:56.660 --> 14:00.820]  And I found that agency executives, in my experience of working at 10 agencies,
[14:00.820 --> 14:05.880]  are some of the most damaged people that I've ever worked with or worked for.
[14:06.260 --> 14:09.880]  And sometimes it's the most fun, but it comes at a high price.
[14:10.060 --> 14:14.900]  But mostly it's just a drag when professional communicators can't communicate among themselves.
[14:14.900 --> 14:23.120]  And that was my experience from 1994 at my first agency job up in Seattle to my first agency job in Portland in 1995.
[14:23.780 --> 14:26.480]  There were these great, brilliant people that could not get along.
[14:26.600 --> 14:31.400]  They were almost all partners, two people up to five people, and they had major issues.
[14:31.640 --> 14:35.800]  And when in 99, I found out what that's like firsthand is I respected and, in fact,
[14:35.860 --> 14:39.460]  maybe even loved, you know, my old boss, Ryan, like he was family.
[14:39.840 --> 14:42.820]  And yet we couldn't see eye to eye, and it was crippling.
[14:42.820 --> 14:49.040]  So that second time around was literally about a girl and about a creative director that was on the board,
[14:49.120 --> 14:52.120]  decided I'm just going to torpedo this guy.
[14:52.980 --> 14:58.560]  And much like the first time at Wave Rock where I was fired, I was actually miserable there.
[14:58.700 --> 15:00.000]  Wave Rock, I had a great time.
[15:00.380 --> 15:02.420]  And it was just the two people at the very top.
[15:02.620 --> 15:08.060]  I had a – one I didn't respect, the other I love, but he decided you're gone too, no hard feelings.
[15:08.060 --> 15:11.920]  And that hurt the most was the relationship we had there.
[15:12.160 --> 15:18.400]  The second time around, this other agency that's gone was just a bunch of miscreant losers.
[15:18.400 --> 15:22.040]  And I say that with absolutely no respect to the senior team there.
[15:22.800 --> 15:25.340]  They made my life miserable, absolutely miserable.
[15:25.900 --> 15:31.100]  When 9-11 hit, which was my second day of work, September 11th, my first day was September 10th,
[15:31.100 --> 15:37.420]  I said there's planes flying into buildings, you know, all the air tropics locked down, fighter jets going over Portland.
[15:37.960 --> 15:39.520]  And they're like, you've got to finish your orientation.
[15:39.820 --> 15:41.280]  I'm like, how are we supposed to work?
[15:41.400 --> 15:42.300]  America's under attack.
[15:42.400 --> 15:43.100]  Like, are you serious?
[15:43.260 --> 15:45.980]  This is my ninth agency, and you're telling me I've got to go through orientation.
[15:46.380 --> 15:47.580]  You guys have no heart and soul.
[15:48.160 --> 15:51.600]  And that's when I decided on my second day of work that that place was not for me.
[15:52.100 --> 15:53.620]  And I stuck around for the paycheck.
[15:54.380 --> 15:59.500]  And the obligation to my old team I cared about was I tripled our revenue.
[15:59.500 --> 16:01.120]  We were crushing it.
[16:01.240 --> 16:04.020]  Just my digital team relative to the rest of the company was struggling.
[16:04.480 --> 16:06.640]  And I like to win, and we were winning.
[16:07.000 --> 16:13.260]  But those personal relationships at the top were devastating to me, to my career, at least at that place.
[16:13.460 --> 16:15.060]  A lot of these people are damaged.
[16:15.420 --> 16:19.480]  Can you just give me three or four examples of what you mean by damage?
[16:19.480 --> 16:23.880]  Because I see that beyond just the marketing world.
[16:24.020 --> 16:26.000]  I mean, people are damaged everywhere.
[16:26.000 --> 16:29.680]  But can you just give me some sort of snippets of what you mean by damage?
[16:29.680 --> 16:39.120]  So my first experience at a PR firm that also was acquired by a large global firm a couple years after I started there in 96.
[16:39.360 --> 16:41.900]  They were sold by 98 or 99.
[16:41.900 --> 16:56.120]  My first interview with one of the five partners, he was a famous reporter for the Oregonian, the local paper, but he had no management experience, clearly.
[16:56.980 --> 17:02.800]  He opened my annual review, my first real full-time paying gig with, what's your problem?
[17:03.240 --> 17:04.760]  That's how he opened my annual review.
[17:05.700 --> 17:07.880]  He's like, what is going on with you?
[17:07.880 --> 17:09.920]  Like, I'm like, oh my God, is this how this works?
[17:09.980 --> 17:11.700]  I don't know what is going on with me.
[17:11.900 --> 17:13.200]  I thought I was great.
[17:13.340 --> 17:14.620]  Am I terrible?
[17:14.960 --> 17:23.340]  And so I was so distraught that one of the five partners who originally liked me, then I did some dumb stuff as a junior untrained PR person.
[17:23.600 --> 17:25.680]  And then she still decided she liked me.
[17:26.040 --> 17:28.060]  And she became, to this day, we're friends.
[17:28.060 --> 17:30.000]  I talked to her.
[17:30.100 --> 17:33.960]  I was like, Chuck is an asshole or he's on the spectrum or something.
[17:34.800 --> 17:37.400]  And she's like, both things can be true.
[17:38.040 --> 17:40.680]  And, you know, if you're not happy here, it is okay to leave.
[17:40.760 --> 17:41.780]  You don't have to stick around.
[17:42.080 --> 17:44.900]  And there were two other partners that didn't like me out of five.
[17:45.040 --> 17:47.080]  So I didn't have a majority of support.
[17:47.560 --> 17:55.980]  And within two weeks, I ended up moving to the sister agency that was building websites for big brands like Intel and Tektronix, big printer company.
[17:55.980 --> 18:10.880]  And that next day, I realized that Chuck, the guy that gave me a really terrible in-person review that made me sour on not PR as a discipline, but PR agencies in general, he came down my first day of work, one floor down, said, Kent, I have a question about the internet for you.
[18:10.960 --> 18:22.680]  And I realized right then, the guy that didn't respect me enough to treat me reasonably fairly and humanely in my annual review suddenly thought I was some sort of genius because I'd moved downstairs and had this internet marketing role.
[18:23.320 --> 18:24.500]  And so I decided two things.
[18:24.500 --> 18:31.300]  One is I might be onto something, and two is I'm not going to disappoint him or anybody or myself, and I'm going to become an expert on this internet thing.
[18:31.460 --> 18:33.860]  And that's why I spent the last almost 30 years doing.
[18:34.820 --> 18:37.600]  And so I look at opportunities and everything.
[18:37.720 --> 18:43.780]  So he was a damaged person that he should not have been managing people, but he was good at what he did, I guess.
[18:43.860 --> 18:44.760]  I was too young to know.
[18:44.820 --> 18:45.320]  I was an intern.
[18:45.320 --> 18:51.380]  But he had deep relationships with technology press people, and it was invaluable to our clients.
[18:51.900 --> 18:56.160]  But he should never have been managing teams, you know, like HR from an HR standpoint.
[18:56.340 --> 19:02.400]  Just guide them on their PR skills, but do not give them annual reviews because it was crippling to me.
[19:02.580 --> 19:04.060]  It soured me immediately.
[19:04.060 --> 19:05.760]  So that's just one.
[19:05.880 --> 19:10.600]  Another one of the partners, we went to Palm Springs for a show called Demo.
[19:10.860 --> 19:13.260]  And it was all the tech companies and all the tech editors.
[19:13.940 --> 19:18.100]  And so our clients would pay to demo their products in front of these high-hitting analysts and editors.
[19:18.760 --> 19:20.440]  And they brought the whole company.
[19:20.500 --> 19:21.500]  This is my third day of work.
[19:21.600 --> 19:24.380]  I had no real work experience other than an internship in Seattle.
[19:24.380 --> 19:29.480]  And they're like, we're flying you to Palm Springs for the weekend, and then we'll stay, and you'll fly back.
[19:29.520 --> 19:30.180]  I'm like, what?
[19:30.300 --> 19:30.960]  This is dope.
[19:31.440 --> 19:37.100]  And so I went down there, and one of the partners, she was young, extremely bright, like Mensa smart.
[19:37.360 --> 19:43.940]  She was maybe in her mid, she was maybe 27 at the time, and she was going through some stuff.
[19:44.440 --> 19:51.820]  And so we were going to a dinner, and at the end of dinner, she laid down on this 1950s Packard or something.
[19:52.240 --> 19:54.900]  She's like, in front of everybody, wouldn't it be great to have sex on this car?
[19:55.020 --> 19:57.300]  And I was just like, what am I supposed to do with this?
[19:57.540 --> 20:00.000]  Like, in front of everybody, not to me specifically, just everybody.
[20:00.120 --> 20:01.760]  I'm like, what is wrong with this girl?
[20:02.380 --> 20:13.460]  And so that was the kind of profound immaturity that I was dealing with and that I've seen more sophisticated levels of immaturity, mostly in security.
[20:13.560 --> 20:16.200]  I've found in the agency world, it might be a little different than corporate.
[20:16.340 --> 20:18.080]  You can tell me I have very little corporate experience.
[20:18.080 --> 20:24.320]  I'm an agency guy, is that most agency people, agency heads are undereducated.
[20:24.640 --> 20:28.840]  I've only known one MBA of all the agency people that were partners or founders.
[20:29.700 --> 20:32.880]  And even she had her own insecurities, but she was very smart.
[20:33.500 --> 20:37.300]  Most of them felt like I could never hire an MBA because they're probably smarter than me.
[20:37.360 --> 20:40.920]  My whole thing was, if I don't hire somebody smarter than me, I'm not hiring right.
[20:41.300 --> 20:41.720]  You know what I mean?
[20:41.740 --> 20:42.520]  That's the whole point.
[20:42.520 --> 20:45.080]  But I've been personally disappointed.
[20:45.200 --> 20:46.780]  I've hired half a dozen MBAs.
[20:46.840 --> 20:48.740]  They weren't Harvard or Yale because I couldn't afford them.
[20:49.260 --> 20:56.660]  But they were all deeply disappointed that my street smarts with a basic bachelor degree was, I would run circles around their MBA.
[20:56.860 --> 20:57.940]  But I think it's a piece of paper.
[20:58.260 --> 20:59.600]  You know, they could be smart.
[20:59.940 --> 21:04.960]  I had one kid that never went to college and he was one of my smartest, most successful digital marketers.
[21:04.960 --> 21:12.680]  So I judge based on meritocracy and performance and not try to, every time I leaned on experience, like we hired a Yahoo guy.
[21:12.780 --> 21:16.220]  He was from the company Yahoo.com back when that was a thing.
[21:16.380 --> 21:17.440]  And he was useless.
[21:17.780 --> 21:21.020]  He had done one narrow thing and didn't know anything else about what we did.
[21:21.080 --> 21:22.360]  And that was a mishire.
[21:22.760 --> 21:29.620]  We hired a guy from, actually two from Yahoo, one from Google, a gal that never opened, had never opened a spreadsheet.
[21:29.620 --> 21:38.700]  We learned how to hire, but my point is that there were these, mainly these, like, the broken part is, like, something traumatic had happened to them.
[21:38.800 --> 21:44.000]  Or they had these massive insecurities where their lack of education or their lack of success.
[21:44.260 --> 21:50.600]  More recently, one of the partners at the agency that bought my agency said, I'll never stop wearing a suit until, what, $10 million in revenue.
[21:51.020 --> 21:52.080]  At first, I thought that was cool.
[21:52.080 --> 21:59.220]  Then I was like, you are so insecure that you feel like you have to wear a suit to cover the mask, your insecurities, to mask your whatever.
[21:59.980 --> 22:01.360]  And he's a smart guy.
[22:01.500 --> 22:02.380]  I mean, he got his GED.
[22:02.460 --> 22:03.860]  He never graduated high school.
[22:04.460 --> 22:06.100]  But that's why he had that insecurity.
[22:06.100 --> 22:08.260]  He was not even going on to college.
[22:08.980 --> 22:12.860]  He got his GED, so he got his high school degree without going to high school.
[22:13.440 --> 22:22.380]  But he feels profoundly insecure and needs to make it up in other ways by, you know, dressing nice and then putting other people down, is what my experience was.
[22:23.100 --> 22:23.620]  Yes.
[22:23.940 --> 22:26.860]  I think you've hit a couple of key touch points.
[22:26.860 --> 22:41.040]  We work with people who are damaged, who have unresolved trauma from their childhood in terms of the way their parents treated them, or conversely, events that happen in the schoolyard, bullying or whatever, Kent.
[22:41.040 --> 22:43.920]  And they carry that through into the workplace.
[22:44.340 --> 22:47.660]  And some of them become bullies in the workplace.
[22:48.820 --> 22:59.800]  And as employees, we have to interact with them on a day-to-day basis and often feel the brunt of whatever they're projecting out onto the world.
[22:59.800 --> 23:03.200]  All right.
[23:03.200 --> 23:13.200]  All those sort of events are interesting now because I think that sort of has culminated in you taking an interest in that whole employee experience.
[23:13.960 --> 23:25.100]  I read some of your information that you feel that was important that as an employer that you help your employee map out a career path for themselves, one.
[23:25.100 --> 23:31.900]  Secondly, it's they enjoy coming to work each day, something they look forward to.
[23:32.320 --> 23:44.920]  And the third key one, which is something I talk about in my material, is your career should be an integral part of your life, not an intrusion to it.
[23:44.920 --> 23:53.220]  It's something that Richard Branson talks about, Kent, when he says, I don't see work as work and play as play.
[23:53.620 --> 23:54.840]  It's all living.
[23:57.020 --> 24:01.580]  Whereas people today talk about work-life balance, which I think is a bit separate.
[24:01.720 --> 24:06.040]  It's because you're in a job you don't enjoy and you have to try and balance that out.
[24:06.760 --> 24:10.340]  Work-life balance doesn't become a big issue when you truly love what you're doing.
[24:11.360 --> 24:11.680]  Correct.
[24:12.200 --> 24:12.620]  Absolutely.
[24:12.620 --> 24:31.440]  So can you share now how your experiences in those agencies have now resulted in terms of the way you manage people from the employee experience so that what that does for you, I believe,
[24:31.540 --> 24:38.860]  is potentially attract high-end talent to your businesses and retain the talent that you have,
[24:38.860 --> 24:46.220]  whereas a lot of other companies are continually turning staff over because they really don't understand the employee experience.
[24:47.560 --> 24:47.780]  Yes.
[24:48.860 --> 24:54.720]  And thank you for doing your homework on me and reading up on some of my philosophies I've written fairly extensively about.
[24:54.820 --> 24:59.380]  But what I would say is you can read all the math and the science around it.
[24:59.380 --> 25:06.180]  And like Tiffany Bova, I find her obsession with customer experience and her research is groundbreaking and impressive.
[25:06.360 --> 25:09.380]  And you can find her in Forbes and Harvard Business Review and so forth.
[25:10.080 --> 25:13.240]  But, you know, I know, I found the hard way.
[25:13.520 --> 25:15.480]  I thought I was the best boss in the world.
[25:15.540 --> 25:22.280]  I was committed to being the best boss in the world for 22 years, or I should say at least 20 years of managing and hiring and managing employees
[25:22.280 --> 25:30.320]  and mostly losing them or firing them, is that I felt that I had made it pretty clear what our purpose was at Anvil
[25:30.320 --> 25:39.580]  and just to help businesses grow successfully and prosper and using some digital marketing, you know, tactics and strategies.
[25:39.580 --> 25:49.600]  When I connected with people's sense of purpose, when I aligned our core values with theirs, there's virtually no friction.
[25:50.300 --> 25:53.820]  And that person can go on and be, you know, and be great, right?
[25:54.400 --> 25:59.260]  The second, beyond just aligning on purpose in general and having to live that, you know, as a business owner
[25:59.260 --> 26:05.240]  and showing that regularly to employees is allowing to have a sense of impact.
[26:05.380 --> 26:06.740]  So I am not a micromanager.
[26:06.740 --> 26:13.780]  My biggest fault, I think, was working on the business too much, getting away from the day-to-day and losing touch with what,
[26:14.320 --> 26:16.460]  how they were doing the work, why they were doing the work.
[26:16.520 --> 26:18.120]  It's just like, let's make the work better.
[26:18.260 --> 26:19.080]  Let's do this and that.
[26:19.200 --> 26:20.240]  It was, they didn't connect.
[26:20.680 --> 26:21.980]  They felt I had lost connection.
[26:22.180 --> 26:26.260]  This, we're talking after about 10 years in 2013, the wheels were coming off.
[26:26.820 --> 26:29.600]  And so I had given them, I thought, purpose.
[26:30.080 --> 26:32.580]  And I thought I'd given them a chance to create impact.
[26:32.600 --> 26:35.180]  And I felt I was very underwhelmed by their ability.
[26:35.180 --> 26:36.720]  I thought they were lazy millennials.
[26:36.980 --> 26:38.980]  And that, I realized, was not on them.
[26:39.020 --> 26:39.720]  It was on me.
[26:40.520 --> 26:44.140]  Forgetting the right people, putting them in the right seat on the boat because you all work together.
[26:44.440 --> 26:46.100]  You're not passengers on a bus.
[26:46.260 --> 26:53.700]  That's the problem with that good-to-great metaphor is that if you're not all pulling together, it doesn't work.
[26:53.820 --> 26:55.500]  And you're all actively doing something.
[26:55.700 --> 26:56.780]  You're not along for the ride.
[26:56.780 --> 26:58.640]  Nobody wants a shirt, tail, coattail rider.
[26:59.560 --> 27:01.760]  And then that acknowledgement, right?
[27:01.800 --> 27:08.980]  The roadmap, the path, but acknowledging the steps they're making towards their goals, the steps, the impact they're making towards our goals as a company.
[27:08.980 --> 27:21.360]  I think those are kind of the three areas that I was doing with all intention, but the execution was not to the point where I had the riveted group in that first batch, 2013.
[27:21.740 --> 27:23.700]  I spent six years rebuilding.
[27:23.700 --> 27:37.820]  By 2019, I started talking to other agencies about potential acquisition at a time when I was reconnected with my work and my craft of digital marketing, reconnected with my team, reconnected with my clients.
[27:38.120 --> 27:41.360]  I rebuilt my business, and I was totally happy.
[27:41.440 --> 27:47.880]  And I wanted to, like Seinfeld, go out on a high note, not sell when you are, you know, like I was in 13.
[27:47.960 --> 27:49.280]  I would have sold my business for a dollar.
[27:49.700 --> 27:51.680]  And I'm not sure anybody would have paid a dollar for it.
[27:51.680 --> 27:58.840]  But so it took me six years of pain and trudge, but I had a plan and I had a path and a vision.
[27:59.120 --> 28:11.520]  That's what got me through 100% employee turnover two consecutive years in a row, which led to me losing 45% of my income from my five biggest clients in a 45-day period and didn't take a salary for nine months of the year.
[28:12.080 --> 28:16.460]  So 2014 was really hard for me, and I came out on the other side.
[28:16.560 --> 28:19.580]  It took a couple more years, but I'm glad I did it.
[28:19.580 --> 28:24.380]  If I hadn't rebuilt the business, there would have been nothing left to fix a year or two later by that time.
[28:24.700 --> 28:27.060]  So I did the hard thing and blew up my company and rebuilt it.
[28:27.740 --> 28:34.620]  But that's when I started to get that I had the right idea, the wrong execution, that the team didn't see the authentic intent.
[28:34.620 --> 28:45.240]  So that by the time I sold and was determined to be the best darn employee ever, and I saw all the problems with the agency that acquired Anvil, that I started to get disillusioned.
[28:45.240 --> 28:50.760]  I instantly felt what it was like to be a disillusioned employee, which I hadn't felt for over 20 years, right?
[28:50.760 --> 29:03.640]  And that's when it all came back, and by the time I was fired in May of 2023, I lasted 14 months there, I was like, oh, my God, employee engagement and retention is everything.
[29:03.980 --> 29:07.460]  It's everything, and particularly in the agency business where it's not widgets.
[29:07.460 --> 29:10.500]  It's not a manufacturing line.
[29:11.020 --> 29:12.060]  It's not automation.
[29:12.820 --> 29:18.400]  AI is obviously a big part of the future of agencies and marketing, but at that time it wasn't.
[29:18.860 --> 29:30.680]  So I realized that I could have done things a lot better and that I wanted to help others do it as well based on my experience.
[29:30.680 --> 29:44.260]  I think there's almost a headline there, Kent, employee engagement is everything, and very few organizations really understand that.
[29:44.440 --> 29:49.220]  The way you treat your employees then becomes the way they treat your customers.
[29:50.760 --> 29:51.020]  Yes.
[29:51.020 --> 30:03.060]  And so obviously you've created a community, a career community, and is that something that you share with them in terms of how people go about managing their career?
[30:03.120 --> 30:11.460]  Because I found in working in corporate, my observation looking down was people work their jobs.
[30:11.560 --> 30:13.120]  They don't manage their careers.
[30:14.500 --> 30:19.180]  And then all of a sudden one day they lose their job and they're totally lost.
[30:19.180 --> 30:27.820]  And these are even battled, hardened, high-achieving executive professionals, and they really take a massive hit.
[30:27.920 --> 30:28.980]  They lose their identity.
[30:29.540 --> 30:34.900]  They lose their world, their networks, their perks, their benefits, their salaries.
[30:35.420 --> 30:41.960]  And some of them really their life falls apart and they can't handle it.
[30:41.960 --> 30:50.640]  And in some cases even their marriages and relationships break down afterwards because they lash out at the people they're closest to.
[30:51.280 --> 31:04.640]  So can you just share the philosophy behind the employee group that you've created and some of the principles that you run that by and what you're trying to impart on that community?
[31:04.640 --> 31:14.060]  Yeah, so back in 99, so a long time ago, over 25 years ago, I got some friends together during the dot-com heyday.
[31:14.380 --> 31:27.260]  So early 99, mid-99, and it was mostly a group of my bros, my brothers in arms, mostly in digital marketing or sales or whatever, but not all of them.
[31:27.260 --> 31:33.340]  And like, let's grab a bourbon and maybe we smoke a cigar and talk about the future because there's just so much money sitting there.
[31:33.960 --> 31:35.920]  And, you know, I was running an e-zine.
[31:36.040 --> 31:37.800]  That's where the name Anvil Media came from.
[31:37.840 --> 31:38.680]  It was actually an e-zine.
[31:38.760 --> 31:39.400]  I started in 96.
[31:39.400 --> 31:44.540]  And so we got together, and I just randomly called it PDX Mindshare.
[31:44.600 --> 31:45.760]  No website, no nothing.
[31:46.860 --> 31:48.500]  And everybody's too busy making money.
[31:48.700 --> 31:50.460]  And then the dot-com crash hit.
[31:50.460 --> 31:55.340]  So by December of 2000, I realized, hey, wait a sec.
[31:56.980 --> 31:58.660]  Maybe people need to get together.
[31:59.620 --> 32:01.740]  And, you know, people are like, hey, when are we getting together?
[32:01.800 --> 32:02.520]  Now we're all unemployed.
[32:03.020 --> 32:04.240]  So I started this group.
[32:04.360 --> 32:07.380]  I invited people to a different Irish bar.
[32:07.820 --> 32:08.660]  Hey, let's get together.
[32:08.660 --> 32:10.420]  There's people I know that don't know each other.
[32:10.540 --> 32:13.580]  I just, I wanted to be in Seth Godin's parlance, a connector.
[32:13.920 --> 32:15.020]  I love connecting people.
[32:15.420 --> 32:18.880]  So I invited 20, 15, 16 showed up.
[32:19.040 --> 32:21.840]  So pre-COVID, people actually would commit to something and show up.
[32:21.900 --> 32:22.440]  It was magical.
[32:23.380 --> 32:25.260]  And they enjoyed the conversation.
[32:25.380 --> 32:26.920]  We were seated around a large table.
[32:27.360 --> 32:30.160]  And like, at the end of the evening, they're like, when's the next one?
[32:30.220 --> 32:30.900]  I'm like, next what?
[32:31.200 --> 32:31.900]  What are you talking about?
[32:31.980 --> 32:33.440]  Like, this was it.
[32:33.540 --> 32:35.440]  And they're like, no, I think we should do this regularly.
[32:35.560 --> 32:35.900]  I was like, okay.
[32:35.900 --> 32:44.160]  So for 15 years, it was the third Wednesday of the month in a various, you know, one location
[32:44.160 --> 32:46.600]  per year or two for consistency.
[32:46.740 --> 32:48.680]  Same time, same place after work.
[32:49.000 --> 32:50.300]  We have a networking group.
[32:50.440 --> 32:55.680]  And one thing I learned, the first thing I learned was don't assume anything about anybody.
[32:55.680 --> 33:00.520]  So I would simply ask, and again, I only knew a third of the people that would show up every
[33:00.520 --> 33:00.840]  month.
[33:01.320 --> 33:04.240]  I'd say to the people I didn't know, tell me, you know, what's your story?
[33:04.540 --> 33:09.340]  Because they could be happily unemployed, happily employed, unhappily employed, or anywhere in
[33:09.340 --> 33:10.000]  between, right?
[33:10.240 --> 33:15.760]  So to say, I did not define people whether they, by their employment status, only by their
[33:15.760 --> 33:17.280]  level of happiness, right?
[33:17.280 --> 33:21.560]  So by telling, by asking somebody, what's your story, I allowed them to tell me what
[33:21.560 --> 33:25.860]  they felt I needed to know to maximize their time with me and anybody else.
[33:25.920 --> 33:27.740]  I'm like, they'd say, I'm happily employed.
[33:27.820 --> 33:29.140]  I'm here to just network and grow.
[33:29.280 --> 33:30.100]  I'm a salesperson.
[33:30.180 --> 33:30.720]  This is what I do.
[33:30.780 --> 33:31.660]  I'm like, got you.
[33:31.880 --> 33:32.960]  And what do you sell?
[33:33.380 --> 33:34.720]  Or what do you, who you're looking to meet?
[33:34.760 --> 33:35.780]  I'm like, here's three people.
[33:35.960 --> 33:37.920]  Go, you know, introduce them or appoint them.
[33:38.540 --> 33:40.200]  BizDev people didn't need any help.
[33:40.280 --> 33:42.180]  Like it's just a little thing, you know, here, here.
[33:42.180 --> 33:47.340]  But most people, when the economy is strong, we had a smaller crowd because people were
[33:47.340 --> 33:50.560]  happy making money and didn't feel the need to network and grow their network, which is
[33:50.560 --> 33:52.520]  a huge mistake in my experience.
[33:53.180 --> 34:01.020]  But when the economy crashed, so in 2002, and then a big time in 2008, when our, when the
[34:01.020 --> 34:07.080]  marketing, the market, housing market crashed, I went from 25 people a month on average to
[34:07.080 --> 34:08.780]  almost 100 a month.
[34:08.840 --> 34:10.980]  And we crushed the bar we were at.
[34:10.980 --> 34:12.540]  It became unbearable.
[34:12.720 --> 34:17.160]  And even people, I got so used to 25 to 35 people that I could say hi to everybody and
[34:17.160 --> 34:18.060]  have a quick conversation.
[34:18.360 --> 34:23.000]  And I got a lot out of that, even though all I was trying to do was help others, is that
[34:23.000 --> 34:28.120]  by the time there were 75, 80 people, people would come up to me and say, I'm really disappointed
[34:28.120 --> 34:30.600]  again, or email me after and say, I didn't get a chance to talk to you.
[34:30.620 --> 34:31.300]  I'm very disappointed.
[34:31.820 --> 34:32.960]  I'm like, I'm sorry.
[34:33.600 --> 34:33.860]  Right?
[34:34.060 --> 34:36.540]  I don't have a model to address that.
[34:36.540 --> 34:43.180]  And for years, in early 2000, the teens, they would say, well, what's the learning event
[34:43.180 --> 34:43.520]  part?
[34:43.620 --> 34:44.540]  And I'm like, I don't do that.
[34:44.580 --> 34:48.920]  Because every other organization for HR professionals, sales and market people, they all have their
[34:48.920 --> 34:50.580]  trade organizations, they'll do the learning.
[34:50.720 --> 34:51.600]  I'm just doing the networking.
[34:52.280 --> 34:56.720]  Eventually, I broke down and started doing workshops on career oriented ideas on how to
[34:56.720 --> 35:01.640]  you know, killer resume, killer interview, you know, career building tips, and things
[35:01.640 --> 35:06.240]  like, you know, self centered wellness, and this and that, that I agree, just to circle
[35:06.240 --> 35:10.620]  back when you talk about world health, work life balance, I agreed, having been in a group
[35:10.620 --> 35:14.960]  called EO Entrepreneur Organization, since 07 is is work life integration.
[35:15.400 --> 35:17.020]  It's not sexy, but it's real.
[35:17.240 --> 35:21.400]  If you don't, as an entrepreneur, integrate your work life into your home life, and you try
[35:21.400 --> 35:25.720]  to keep them separate, you will break one of them will break a lot of divorces on
[35:25.720 --> 35:26.960]  entrepreneurial side, right?
[35:27.400 --> 35:30.820]  So I've always integrated, brought my wife into what we're doing.
[35:30.920 --> 35:34.700]  She was an entrepreneur before I was, she, it's like marrying a cop, she knew what she
[35:34.700 --> 35:35.420]  was getting into.
[35:36.100 --> 35:40.000]  She ended up running my operations at Anvil for five years, did a brilliant job, but she
[35:40.000 --> 35:40.740]  burned out on it.
[35:40.760 --> 35:44.200]  It's like, I was here to help you not, I don't want to do this for a living.
[35:44.320 --> 35:44.740]  I was like, fine.
[35:44.740 --> 35:48.920]  So that's why main reason, a main reason I sold, even though she wouldn't want you to
[35:48.920 --> 35:53.100]  hear that, it was important to me, it was easier to sell it than to find somebody as
[35:53.100 --> 35:53.840]  good as she was.
[35:53.840 --> 35:58.180]  So in short, PDX Mindshare had no business model.
[35:58.900 --> 36:03.560]  It was, we get together once a month in person, and I try and help people, and that's it.
[36:03.780 --> 36:06.020]  I come from a place of referral-based networking.
[36:06.300 --> 36:11.040]  Like, the first thing I try to do, because I'm a talker, I don't listen enough, is I train
[36:11.040 --> 36:15.820]  myself, listen, ask questions, be curious, and find out how, as quickly as possible, how
[36:15.820 --> 36:16.700]  can I help this person?
[36:17.260 --> 36:21.360]  And it was an invaluable tool that helped me be a better salesperson when it came to running
[36:21.360 --> 36:24.240]  my business, was the curiosity of a five-year-old.
[36:24.880 --> 36:30.480]  And that business model, all PDX Mindshare did was occasionally get a spiff for helping
[36:30.480 --> 36:32.140]  place somebody in a job.
[36:32.580 --> 36:36.720]  I'd occasionally get sponsors like the local Portland State University to promote their
[36:36.720 --> 36:38.200]  classes for professional development.
[36:38.320 --> 36:39.200]  That was a nice partnership.
[36:39.200 --> 36:42.760]  I taught there for 20 years as an adjunct, so that was nice, too.
[36:43.660 --> 36:49.420]  But in the end, I just told, I was talking to Seth Godin, you know, world's most famous
[36:49.420 --> 36:54.200]  marketing blogger and a best-selling author, back in 2009.
[36:55.000 --> 36:57.200]  Seth, I want you to come and speak at our conference.
[36:58.100 --> 37:03.200]  This group that's now called Next Northwest, back then it was SEM PDX for digital marketers.
[37:03.320 --> 37:04.460]  I was like, I want you to do the keynote.
[37:04.460 --> 37:10.720]  I emailed him, but I know that we don't have $50,000, we don't even have $500, but I heard
[37:10.720 --> 37:14.520]  if you're going to stop by Portland on a book tour, then maybe you'd be able to waive
[37:14.520 --> 37:18.300]  your speaker fee because you're already getting paid for, right, by the publisher or whoever.
[37:18.980 --> 37:20.120]  He emailed me back, called me.
[37:20.180 --> 37:27.640]  I talked to him for a half hour, right before lunch, back in 2009 or 2008, and it was a transformative
[37:27.640 --> 37:28.400]  conversation.
[37:28.400 --> 37:34.940]  He, I said, hey, I can promote you through SEM PDX, through other, for their publications
[37:34.940 --> 37:38.160]  and other, you know, a couple other associations and PDX Mindshare.
[37:38.280 --> 37:38.760]  He's like, what's that?
[37:38.820 --> 37:40.000]  I was like, well, there's no business model.
[37:40.760 --> 37:44.180]  I just try and help people and I just evolve it based on what people need.
[37:44.260 --> 37:44.860]  He's like, cool.
[37:45.340 --> 37:46.060]  Hung up the phone.
[37:46.320 --> 37:47.600]  Let's, maybe I'll think about it.
[37:47.920 --> 37:48.860]  I'll do some research.
[37:48.860 --> 37:51.480]  I come back and I had 20 emails, like, what did you do?
[37:51.540 --> 37:56.720]  And he blogged about me right on the spot when I hung up the phone about PDX Mindshare.
[37:56.720 --> 37:57.580]  And I sent you the link.
[37:57.880 --> 38:01.400]  It's called, literally on Seth's blog, it's called No Business Model.
[38:01.740 --> 38:03.880]  Just got off the phone with Kent, blah, blah, blah.
[38:03.940 --> 38:04.780]  It's only three paragraphs.
[38:05.240 --> 38:07.880]  But basically, no business model isn't a bad thing.
[38:08.100 --> 38:08.460]  Evolve.
[38:08.620 --> 38:10.720]  That's what he, you know, he's such a brilliant man.
[38:11.280 --> 38:13.900]  And that led, incidentally, and I'll move on.
[38:14.800 --> 38:17.980]  A year later, I was like, this is, he's one of my idols.
[38:17.980 --> 38:19.880]  And it was a goal of mine to meet him in person.
[38:20.000 --> 38:20.720]  It wasn't a coincidence.
[38:21.020 --> 38:24.400]  It was not a coincidence that I reached out to him in the first place because he was on my bucket
[38:24.400 --> 38:25.620]  list of people to talk to.
[38:25.620 --> 38:29.940]  So I followed up and I said, thank you for considering making it to Portland.
[38:30.060 --> 38:31.280]  They actually canceled the book tour.
[38:31.600 --> 38:34.100]  That was the end of book tours, really, back in 08, 09.
[38:34.900 --> 38:38.880]  And I said, hey, in three months, I'm going to be in New York speaking at a conference.
[38:39.000 --> 38:39.800]  Can I take you to lunch?
[38:39.820 --> 38:40.320]  He's like, sure.
[38:40.840 --> 38:45.760]  So I had two hours with Seth Godin in a Midtown Manhattan vegan restaurant, which, if you know
[38:45.760 --> 38:47.360]  me, is a huge sacrifice.
[38:47.760 --> 38:50.480]  Because if I don't have meat with every meal, I get withdrawals.
[38:50.480 --> 38:54.220]  And it was the most important two hours of my career.
[38:54.920 --> 38:57.320]  At the end, he's like, you've got a book in you.
[38:57.760 --> 38:58.840]  You should write a book, Kent.
[38:59.400 --> 39:06.540]  And so I haven't, you read the articles in my compilation and there's a link in the chat.
[39:06.540 --> 39:10.280]  But it's 30 years of business advice from an entrepreneur and marketer.
[39:10.560 --> 39:16.740]  But the URL is, what's your story, which is my PDX Mindshare mantra, and write your book
[39:16.740 --> 39:18.260]  because of Seth Godin.
[39:18.540 --> 39:20.260]  So I've carried that with me all these years.
[39:20.340 --> 39:21.560]  You said I'm a prolific writer.
[39:21.780 --> 39:23.060]  I haven't written that book yet.
[39:23.320 --> 39:24.780]  I still don't know what it would be about.
[39:24.860 --> 39:26.320]  But it's probably not going to be about marketing.
[39:26.760 --> 39:29.860]  It's probably going to be about entrepreneurship or the employee engagement.
[39:29.860 --> 39:32.940]  But he inspired me back then.
[39:33.120 --> 39:37.820]  And it's full circle that he's going to be, I'm getting to host a virtual fireside chat
[39:37.820 --> 39:43.960]  with him in March through Next Northwest, my day job now, running a trade group for advertising,
[39:44.120 --> 39:47.200]  marketing, and creative professionals in the Pacific Northwest here in the US.
[39:47.620 --> 39:52.080]  I couldn't be happier with the challenge and the joy of running a nonprofit.
[39:52.340 --> 39:57.340]  To your point of your passion, Tony, about employee engagement retention, I now have to prove
[39:57.340 --> 40:02.080]  that I can use these tools that we talk about every day that you impart on your corporate
[40:02.080 --> 40:08.180]  America folks, leaders, and senior marketers or managers, is I have to get a non-working
[40:08.180 --> 40:14.580]  board in a 119-year-old trade organization, a nonprofit, to become a working board over
[40:14.580 --> 40:21.340]  the past year, and then to stay aligned and stay engaged without any pay whatsoever, right?
[40:21.360 --> 40:22.900]  It's 100% volunteer board.
[40:23.300 --> 40:27.320]  So how do I use these tools that I'm used to applying to employees where I have some leverage?
[40:27.340 --> 40:33.680]  To where I have no leverage other than aligned purpose and recognition, highlighting their
[40:33.680 --> 40:33.980]  impact.
[40:34.060 --> 40:35.360]  So I'm using those same tools.
[40:35.660 --> 40:39.440]  And I'd say I'm 60% of the way there on a good day.
[40:39.600 --> 40:40.920]  I have a lot of work to do.
[40:41.420 --> 40:46.380]  It's hard work, but it's rewarding as I see progress.
[40:46.720 --> 40:53.620]  It won't be my greatest failure, but I would consider if we pull this off where we have,
[40:53.620 --> 40:58.580]  not beyond our financial stability, that we have a fully engaged, growing membership, people
[40:58.580 --> 41:00.420]  begging to speak at our events.
[41:00.800 --> 41:07.260]  That I will consider my greatest career contribution, more so than running an agency and employing
[41:07.260 --> 41:13.000]  hundreds of people over 20-something years, is built to everything I've learned and apply
[41:13.000 --> 41:16.720]  it to a nonprofit to help elevate our entire community of marketers.
[41:16.720 --> 41:17.720]  Perfect.
[41:19.040 --> 41:19.360]  All right.
[41:19.400 --> 41:28.160]  In wrapping up, Kent, what's the one piece of career advice you would give someone in
[41:28.160 --> 41:34.040]  today's turbulent, quick-changing, we know AIs hit the world?
[41:34.660 --> 41:37.480]  What would be the number one piece of advice you would give someone today?
[41:37.480 --> 41:43.920]  So my non-technical advice is to take the intersection of four things.
[41:44.120 --> 41:49.040]  Your collective knowledge and experience over the years, whether it's five minutes after
[41:49.040 --> 41:54.480]  graduating college or 35 years of whatever experience you have, that's one bucket.
[41:54.800 --> 42:01.280]  Another overlapping circle is your areas of interest and growth where you want to go,
[42:01.840 --> 42:02.140]  right?
[42:02.640 --> 42:04.600]  And then there's your key strengths.
[42:04.640 --> 42:05.400]  This is really important.
[42:05.400 --> 42:09.560]  And that's the third circle is your superpowers, what makes you brilliant, what makes you stand
[42:09.560 --> 42:13.240]  out, what's your red nose, and where's your fog in the Rudolph metaphor?
[42:13.780 --> 42:17.700]  And the last part of what are your life goals, like your career goals, your business goals,
[42:17.780 --> 42:23.720]  your financial goals, those four things, that middle of those overlapping circles is your
[42:23.720 --> 42:28.000]  sweet spot, which you mentioned earlier, Tony, it doesn't feel like work, then you know
[42:28.000 --> 42:28.640]  you've nailed it.
[42:28.640 --> 42:34.640]  So if it's a sustainable financial model where you're like, I can put food on the table,
[42:34.640 --> 42:39.580]  and we can maybe put a little into my savings, but I am rewarded every day by playing to
[42:39.580 --> 42:43.820]  my strengths and my interests and my experience, and I'm mapping to my goals.
[42:44.480 --> 42:48.780]  Every day you should leave, you should wake up ready to go and end the day, this is what
[42:48.780 --> 42:52.760]  I've always said, with more energy than you started the day with, then you're in your sweet
[42:52.760 --> 42:53.120]  spot.
[42:53.120 --> 42:59.520]  And I would say, you know, if I can get Next Northwest where I want it to be, it will 100%
[42:59.520 --> 43:00.000]  be that.
[43:00.180 --> 43:02.580]  Unfortunately, we're an event-driven organization.
[43:02.760 --> 43:06.100]  We do educational events and learning, and I'm not good at events.
[43:06.180 --> 43:10.580]  I don't have a real experience or training in event planning and logistics, and it does
[43:10.580 --> 43:15.040]  not play to my strengths whatsoever in that I'm not a detail guy, I'm not a project manager,
[43:15.040 --> 43:16.560]  and that is totally what events are.
[43:16.560 --> 43:21.980]  So I've built a team around me to mitigate the view of my valley so that we see mostly
[43:21.980 --> 43:22.520]  my peaks.
[43:23.140 --> 43:24.400]  But that would be my advice.
[43:25.040 --> 43:30.300]  And then real quick, because AI has altered that, your knowledge experience can be completely
[43:30.300 --> 43:31.960]  gamed by AI, right?
[43:32.940 --> 43:35.460]  Your interests can be informed by AI.
[43:36.820 --> 43:40.100]  Your life goals, maybe not so much.
[43:40.360 --> 43:44.800]  Your superpowers can be heightened, or you can create a force multiplier.
[43:44.800 --> 43:48.240]  Your strengths, your superpowers can be amplified by AI.
[43:49.120 --> 43:53.620]  If you don't lean into AI, the person that does will get your job, right?
[43:54.320 --> 43:57.560]  But I have two different kinds of boys that I'm raising.
[43:57.780 --> 44:00.520]  One, a junior in college, is very data.
[44:00.820 --> 44:04.300]  He's going to a business major with a marketing concentration, just like his dad.
[44:04.700 --> 44:09.040]  And I'm telling you, you better lean in doubly hard on AI and become, you've got to train
[44:09.040 --> 44:13.700]  the old folks like me on how to use AI brilliantly to have job security.
[44:13.700 --> 44:16.440]  Create, carve a little niche out of this new AI thing.
[44:16.960 --> 44:20.100]  Have a strong point of view about it and get as much experience as you can.
[44:20.320 --> 44:23.900]  My other piece of advice for my younger son, who's been cutting his friend's hair for three
[44:23.900 --> 44:26.500]  years, is a brilliant artist, like hand-drawn artist.
[44:27.400 --> 44:28.500]  He's very creative.
[44:28.720 --> 44:31.340]  He's decent in math, but he's very creative.
[44:32.000 --> 44:36.860]  I was like, go to college for the social experiment, for the experience, for the discipline,
[44:36.860 --> 44:38.380]  for the completion part.
[44:39.620 --> 44:40.760]  It makes you worldly.
[44:40.900 --> 44:42.500]  You'll be better at Jeopardy, right?
[44:42.540 --> 44:43.000]  Or whatever.
[44:43.460 --> 44:47.720]  But then I consider, if you still love cutting hair, go back to beauty school, put in two
[44:47.720 --> 44:52.180]  more years of beauty school, and you are AI resistant, if not AI proof.
[44:52.380 --> 44:54.520]  People's hair grows, no matter what.
[44:54.620 --> 44:55.360]  Recession resistant.
[44:55.500 --> 44:56.140]  People get haircuts.
[44:56.200 --> 44:58.680]  Maybe not as many in the hard times, but they still get haircuts.
[44:58.680 --> 45:05.800]  And there will not be a Flobie or a robot haircutting thing for another 30, 40 years for his career,
[45:05.940 --> 45:06.220]  right?
[45:06.580 --> 45:10.080]  So I'm giving them two different paths, and they can do whatever they want.
[45:10.460 --> 45:15.060]  But I'm just giving them, from my experience, if I had his skills, this is what I would do,
[45:15.260 --> 45:15.960]  right?
[45:16.220 --> 45:16.600]  Perfect.
[45:17.420 --> 45:17.840]  All right, Kent.
[45:17.840 --> 45:24.180]  So if anyone in my audience wants to reach out to you, where is the best place they can
[45:24.180 --> 45:24.940]  find you?
[45:24.940 --> 45:29.960]  Yes, the very best place would be KentJLewis.com.
[45:30.340 --> 45:37.640]  It's links to my articles, my speaking engagements, recordings on things like the employee engagement
[45:37.640 --> 45:41.660]  and thought leadership, that if you're looking to build a career and become a thought leader,
[45:41.720 --> 45:45.680]  I've got a great 30-minute webinar on that, and a 30-minute webinar expanding on my employee
[45:45.680 --> 45:49.560]  engagement and retention, and tons of articles I've written about career work.
[45:50.180 --> 45:51.900]  So KentJLewis.com is the best place.
[45:53.020 --> 45:53.420]  Okay.
[45:53.420 --> 45:58.900]  Thanks, Kent, for a really brilliant conversation and sharing so powerful insights with our audience.
[45:59.060 --> 45:59.920]  Thank you so much.
[46:00.260 --> 46:00.820]  Thanks, Kent.
[46:00.920 --> 46:01.380]  It's been a pleasure.
[46:01.660 --> 46:02.200]  Thank you, Tony.
[46:03.440 --> 46:06.340]  Thanks for tuning into The Career Advantage Show.
[46:06.920 --> 46:12.680]  Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe and claim your free career confidential toolkit.
[46:12.680 --> 46:20.520]  If you've enjoyed today's episode, I'd truly appreciate a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.
[46:21.240 --> 46:27.280]  And don't forget to share it with your friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is jodi finnan ...
 

I’m Jodi Finnan — the Business Weapon.

I started out working behind the scenes for some of the biggest names — James Packer, Jamie Oliver, and other high-profile CEOs — learning what it really takes to build something extraordinary.

Ten years ago, I didn’t just want to start a business.
I wanted to build freedom.

Since then, my business has grown from strength to strength with every challenge, every mistake, and every win shaping me into who I am today.

Because every mistake is a free business coach.
And I’ve got a lifetime of lessons and stories to help others do the same.

Transcript

[00:00.980 --> 00:11.960]  Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.
[00:12.540 --> 00:18.640]  I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments,
[00:19.300 --> 00:26.080]  such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment,
[00:26.080 --> 00:33.100]  and been able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and greater opportunities.
[00:34.040 --> 00:42.400]  Right. On this morning's Career Advantage Show, my special guest is Jodie Finnan. Welcome, Jodie.
[00:43.240 --> 00:44.880]  Thank you. Lovely to be here, Tony.
[00:45.540 --> 00:52.540]  Thank you. Jodie, you describe yourself as the business weapon and also a person who
[00:52.540 --> 01:01.020]  wanted not only to start her own business, but wanted freedom. Can you share with our listeners
[01:01.020 --> 01:07.580]  a little bit into that and the background in terms of how that all came about?
[01:08.680 --> 01:15.960]  Yeah, absolutely. So I was, back in the day, an executive assistant to some high-profile CEOs.
[01:15.960 --> 01:23.360]  So back in the UK, I was chief of staff to Jamie Oliver and his team. And then when I first arrived in Australia,
[01:23.360 --> 01:30.780]  I was working for James Packer as his EA and chief of staff. And even though that gave me great clarity
[01:30.780 --> 01:38.180]  into how high-profile people actually get really structured and organized and make their business go
[01:38.180 --> 01:46.540]  from strength to strength, it also gave me, it just gave me a sense of knowing that I was capable of
[01:46.540 --> 01:52.800]  more. And I'm one of these individuals that, you know, sometimes don't like being told what to do.
[01:53.160 --> 01:59.160]  So, you know, starting my own business seemed the, you know, the best opportunity and route for me to go down.
[01:59.160 --> 02:05.080]  And as I say to all my clients, because I help businesses now get ahead, as I say to all my clients,
[02:05.220 --> 02:11.220]  there's no perfect moment. The key is just starting and then you can fine-tune everything as you go
[02:11.220 --> 02:16.240]  along. A lot of people wait for perfection, but there's no such perfect time. People are just scared
[02:16.240 --> 02:22.380]  of failure. But the failure is generally just not getting started. So you really need to just take the
[02:22.380 --> 02:28.520]  ball by the horn, start and fine-tune it as you go along. And I didn't just want to create a job,
[02:28.520 --> 02:35.920]  you know, I wanted to create freedom. So with my business now, I can take my laptop. I travel solo
[02:35.920 --> 02:44.460]  to many places on the globe. And yeah, it's a freedom. So I'm working under my conditions
[02:44.460 --> 02:51.940]  and I've never looked back since. It's interesting, as you mentioned, the likes of Jamie Packer,
[02:51.940 --> 03:00.120]  they would intimidate most people. How did you go about your day in terms of interacting with the
[03:00.120 --> 03:06.940]  likes of the Jamie Packers of this world? Yeah. I mean, I'm a big people person and networker. And
[03:06.940 --> 03:13.580]  it's funny that you say intimidating because he actually isn't. It's actually people below him
[03:13.580 --> 03:18.320]  who think that, you know, they've got some form of power because of who they work for,
[03:18.320 --> 03:24.700]  who try and put that power trip on you. James is lovely to work with. And he actually had a team
[03:24.700 --> 03:30.720]  of, there was five EAs and we all had our different areas and people that we managed and
[03:30.720 --> 03:37.660]  looked after. So it was a really good sort of team community feel. But again, you were working for
[03:37.660 --> 03:43.640]  someone else. And essentially it was, you know, even though I'm very proactive in everything that I do,
[03:43.640 --> 03:49.760]  there still are ways you need to be compliant when you work for someone else and it doesn't give you
[03:49.760 --> 03:57.140]  the freedom that you desire. What would have been one important piece of feedback that James Packer
[03:57.140 --> 04:04.160]  would have given you along the journey? Jodie? Don't sweat the small stuff. Absolutely. There are so
[04:04.160 --> 04:11.580]  many people that really sweat the small stuff. You know, I'm very similar in James Packer in terms of,
[04:11.580 --> 04:15.960]  I know I'm always going to get the result for myself and my clients if I set out to do something.
[04:16.440 --> 04:23.080]  Some people are very, very structured and processed. You don't need to be. That's the best piece of
[04:23.080 --> 04:31.100]  advice that I can give that works for me. All right. Another catch cry or a phrase that you use is
[04:31.100 --> 04:40.980]  you're someone that makes things happen. Yes. Okay. Do you want to share a story where maybe you've gone
[04:40.980 --> 04:46.080]  into someone's business and they were stalled and they were stuck and they just couldn't get past
[04:46.080 --> 04:52.720]  something and you actually helped them move forward? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, that's essentially what
[04:52.720 --> 04:59.320]  my business framework is all about. Seeing when people are stuck in a business, they don't necessarily
[04:59.320 --> 05:07.040]  see the gaps that I see from an outsider and every business has a lot of roadblocks and, you know,
[05:07.220 --> 05:12.240]  they're stuck in certain things. So, that's my superpower, coming into businesses and seeing things
[05:12.240 --> 05:20.340]  that they don't. I can give you an example for, I worked for an amazing activewear brand, which has
[05:20.340 --> 05:27.900]  now gone gangbusters across the globe. But it was actually, unless you have an experience for your
[05:27.900 --> 05:34.400]  clients or customers that is un-Googleable, for example, anyone can copy your business model.
[05:34.700 --> 05:40.940]  What they can't copy is how you make your customers feel. So, before anything, before any sales
[05:40.940 --> 05:46.000]  marketing or anything that you want to find you in there, it's really the customer experience that
[05:46.000 --> 05:52.640]  needs to be number one of your priority. And so, you know, I came in and was really helping people
[05:52.640 --> 05:58.360]  identify something that no one else was doing. For every piece of activewear that we were sending
[05:58.360 --> 06:06.140]  out, we sent a personal note from the CEO and the why she was doing what she was doing. People want
[06:06.140 --> 06:11.140]  to relate. People buy from people and not just a business. So, there was a handwritten note that
[06:11.140 --> 06:18.360]  we got duplicated that went out with every purchase and that really resonated with a lot of, you know,
[06:18.420 --> 06:27.440]  a lot of customers that no one else was doing. Okay. Yes. A lot of, I see a lot of small business
[06:27.440 --> 06:36.420]  owners, Jodie, who don't have sustainable businesses. And I always pinpoint it to one
[06:36.420 --> 06:44.520]  reason, one important factor. They treat their customers as a lot of transaction and not as an
[06:44.520 --> 06:50.180]  experience that they give them that can then take them on a journey and then help them sustain their
[06:50.180 --> 06:56.440]  own business long-term and also become a source of referrals. Is that a fair assessment from where you're
[06:56.440 --> 07:02.700]  doing? Absolutely. And I've worked with a range of small businesses, entrepreneurs, businesses have
[07:02.700 --> 07:08.800]  been established for many, many years. And it's a common denominator for another example, whereas,
[07:10.140 --> 07:16.120]  no, I'm not going to obviously name no names, but it was a marketing agency and they were actually just
[07:16.120 --> 07:20.860]  more concerned about numbers and getting clients through the doors. But it's all about attracting and
[07:20.860 --> 07:27.700]  retaining those clients, you know, and the customer, I know the customer journey for them wasn't one that
[07:27.700 --> 07:32.280]  was great, but they were more concerned about getting more clients on their books. It looks great if
[07:32.280 --> 07:37.180]  you've got, you know, all these clients, but that's actually not true. You really need to providing them
[07:37.180 --> 07:43.600]  with a top level of service so that they stick with you and talk about you to their friends, family,
[07:43.600 --> 07:49.700]  and other potential clients. Okay. So, Jodie, clearly you apply that principle to your own
[07:49.700 --> 07:56.960]  business, obviously. Now, another challenge is that coaches and consultants have in their business
[07:56.960 --> 08:07.060]  is actually generating a constant flow of leads into their business. What's your secret to being able
[08:07.060 --> 08:14.140]  to achieve that in your business? It's probably reflecting back to what I just said. Unless
[08:14.140 --> 08:20.220]  you're doing a good job, people aren't going to refer you. And I'm in the great position that every
[08:20.220 --> 08:25.540]  client that I've had in my 10 years actually has been on referral. I don't advertise. I mean,
[08:25.540 --> 08:31.320]  obviously I've got my website, but I'm in that fortunate position. At the moment, there's another thing as
[08:31.320 --> 08:37.680]  well. Whereas they say, unless you can, you know, step out of your business and it can still run
[08:37.680 --> 08:43.800]  without you, you don't have a business, you have a job. So, I'm in the, again, it could be a, you know,
[08:43.840 --> 08:49.300]  a fortunate position, whereas people are paying, I do have a team, but people kind of pay the premium
[08:49.300 --> 08:55.920]  for me and my direction. But I'm working at the moment, which I find quite exciting to be able to
[08:55.920 --> 09:00.860]  step away from the business and have it run without me. So, that's something to bear in mind,
[09:01.040 --> 09:06.900]  you know, unless you can step out of whatever journey you pursue, you don't have a business,
[09:07.020 --> 09:14.340]  you have a job. Yes. I always go back to what Michael Gerber said, who wrote the E-Myth series
[09:14.340 --> 09:20.140]  of books. You're supposed to work on your business, not just in your business. And that's exactly what
[09:20.140 --> 09:25.860]  you're doing by the sound of it. Yeah, totally. I actually blocked my diary out. If you saw,
[09:25.920 --> 09:31.280]  I'm an organised person, I like to think, but my diary is literally three days in the business,
[09:31.420 --> 09:39.600]  two days on the business, and I do that without fail. So, Jodie, another thing that I think coaches
[09:39.600 --> 09:46.140]  and consultants and small business owners need to consider as part of their business is the
[09:46.140 --> 09:53.800]  importance of having a network around them. Would you say that along your journey, you've put that
[09:53.800 --> 10:00.660]  solid base into position as well? Absolutely. And it's funny how I look back at things because
[10:00.660 --> 10:05.680]  I've always been a big traveller, hence why I wanted to start this business so I could travel
[10:05.680 --> 10:10.120]  and work. But I look back at some of the opportunities and events across the years that
[10:10.120 --> 10:16.080]  I have been invited to. And it really pains me because, you know, I'd be in these very
[10:16.080 --> 10:21.660]  high-powered events. And, you know, you make the polite introduction of, hey, how are you? What do
[10:21.660 --> 10:27.140]  you do? I didn't really care back then. And now when I ask that question, I really care what you do.
[10:27.260 --> 10:32.680]  I really care what your roadblocks are. I really care about how we can collaborate, who I know that
[10:32.680 --> 10:37.060]  maybe I could introduce you to, to help you along the way and vice versa. So, it's a completely
[10:37.060 --> 10:39.780]  different ballgame when you run your own business in asking that question.
[10:39.780 --> 10:47.620]  So, for example, would you have a Rolodex of people like James Packer still in your
[10:47.620 --> 10:52.400]  contact list? Oh, absolutely. I've got my little black book, basically.
[10:53.600 --> 10:58.060]  Because a lot of coaches think, oh, I really don't need that person until I need them. Well,
[10:58.060 --> 11:01.080]  you actually should be nurturing that relationship all the way through.
[11:01.780 --> 11:06.600]  Absolutely. You know, and it's one of those things I say to clients as well. So many people are trying
[11:06.600 --> 11:12.540]  to put funnels into place to try and get new leads and new clients. But in essence,
[11:13.140 --> 11:17.520]  think of all the people that you've been in talks with over the years. Have you revisited those
[11:17.520 --> 11:22.120]  clients? There's so many people that, you know, over the last 10 years, I don't actually need.
[11:22.220 --> 11:27.340]  Because some people haven't been ready. Some people, you know, unless you're nurturing that old
[11:27.340 --> 11:31.260]  lead system and that old network, you know, you're probably missing out on a goldmine.
[11:32.620 --> 11:34.560]  Do you belong to a lot of networks, Jo?
[11:34.560 --> 11:41.640]  Yeah, I actually yesterday just joined. I'm a member of Cub. I yesterday just joined the Pillars
[11:41.640 --> 11:46.320]  as well, which I'm really excited about because I got the tour yesterday and it was fantastic. So
[11:46.320 --> 11:56.260]  I've actually just joined that network. Yeah, there's lots of events. I'm off to an event tonight by
[11:56.260 --> 12:02.560]  a network called BOA, which is for a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners and a lot of
[12:02.560 --> 12:07.900]  brands. They're attend and they're great mentors and we learn from them a lot.
[12:09.180 --> 12:16.320]  Okay. All right. Jodie, as we wrap this conversation up, a question that I ask most of my guests,
[12:16.320 --> 12:25.640]  if you were to go back in time and speak to Jodie 20 years ago, based on what you've learnt,
[12:25.800 --> 12:31.300]  the experiences you've had, the people you've met along the way, what's the number one piece
[12:31.300 --> 12:33.640]  of advice you would give to a younger Jodie?
[12:33.640 --> 12:43.220]  I would give this advice to a younger Jodie. Do not care what anyone thinks of you. It's what
[12:43.220 --> 12:49.100]  you think of yourself. As long as you're moving forward every day and making better decisions,
[12:49.200 --> 12:54.700]  it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of you, you know, just go forth and believe in yourself.
[12:55.980 --> 13:00.360]  Perfect. That is a brilliant piece of wisdom. Thank you, Jodie. And thank you for being on the show.
[13:00.360 --> 13:09.320]  Thank you, Jodie. Thanks for tuning into the Career Advantage show. Visit thecareeradvantage.show
[13:09.320 --> 13:15.640]  to subscribe and claim your free career confidential toolkit. If you've enjoyed today's episode,
[13:16.060 --> 13:23.120]  I truly appreciate a five-star review on your favourite podcast app. And don't forget to share
[13:23.120 --> 13:27.600]  it with your friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Peter Wright

Peter Wright describes himself as a podcast host, writer, speaker, blogger, contrarian thinker.
His topic is inspiring people to Overcome and Thrive on Adversity. He does this by asking questions about, and sharing ideas for, thriving in a changing world.

Born in London, England, Peter spent most of his life in Rhodesia and South Africa. His corporate career included marketing management in large and small companies, starting and running his own businesses. He travelled extensively in Southern and Central Africa, before returning to his roots as a farmer in Zimbabwe.

In 2002 he became a casualty of the government's illegal and violent policy of driving commercial farmers off their farms. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned to force him off his farm. He lost the farm and all his assets.
In 2004, Peter and his partner Sue moved to Canada with 2 suitcases and a horse saddle each, 6 cats and enough cash to buy a used pickup.

Peter ran ultra marathons, played Polo and Polo-Crosse. In 2010 he survived a heart attack which stopped most of his farming activities. In 2017 he had bypass surgery which enabled him to increase his physical activity and walk 250 km on the Portuguese route of the Camino de Santiago
He is a past president of Woodstock Toastmasters.

Transcript

[00:00.980 --> 00:11.960]  Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.
[00:12.520 --> 00:18.640]  I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments,
[00:19.300 --> 00:26.080]  such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment,
[00:26.080 --> 00:33.100]  and been able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and greater opportunities.
[00:33.940 --> 00:42.200]  All right, today I'm joined by Peter Wright, who is a speaker, writer, and a podcast host who currently lives in Canada.
[00:42.880 --> 00:44.220]  Peter, welcome to the show.
[00:44.880 --> 00:47.900]  Thank you very much, Tony. Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
[00:47.900 --> 00:56.660]  Yes, I know you've got a rich background in both corporate, farming, and also all sorts of things.
[00:56.860 --> 01:05.620]  So today's a wonderful opportunity for you to share your story, particularly around the adverse circumstances that have occurred to you,
[01:06.100 --> 01:08.560]  and how you bounce back from that.
[01:08.560 --> 01:18.320]  And hopefully for our audience who are going through their own adversity or have gone through that, let's say, job loss or they're burnt out
[01:18.320 --> 01:29.800]  or they just had enough of that world, how they can draw on the lessons that you came up for yourself as a result of your own challenges through life.
[01:30.260 --> 01:37.340]  So, Peter, I just want to just share, you did spend some time as a corporate marketing executive, correct?
[01:37.340 --> 01:39.740]  Absolutely. Yes, I did.
[01:40.420 --> 01:45.620]  And obviously you learned a lot about how to promote yourself and sell and everything.
[01:46.360 --> 01:49.920]  What was the biggest learning from your time in the corporate world?
[01:51.700 --> 01:56.300]  The biggest learning, and it's not a sarcastic answer, is that I didn't belong in the corporate world.
[01:56.300 --> 02:05.920]  But having said that, I did pick up a lot of very valuable skills, management skills, accounting skills, budgeting skills,
[02:05.920 --> 02:10.220]  which were very valuable when I started my own business and then went farming after that.
[02:12.080 --> 02:13.140]  Okay. Yes.
[02:14.840 --> 02:22.080]  Was your departure from corporate world something of your own choosing, Peter, or was it something forced upon you?
[02:22.080 --> 02:27.740]  It was my own choosing with some influence, if you like.
[02:28.740 --> 02:30.640]  I worked for a very large corporation.
[02:30.980 --> 02:32.220]  I worked for one of the divisions.
[02:32.800 --> 02:39.280]  And the corporation was the result of a merger of two very big conglomerates in South Africa.
[02:39.280 --> 02:44.860]  And I was in the one that was essentially taken over and the culture changed quite a lot.
[02:45.000 --> 02:52.220]  And I was a marketing guy in a very production and accounting oriented business where they really thought marketing people were on a different planet.
[02:52.420 --> 02:57.560]  So I got good promotion over a period and then I knew that I'd hit that glass ceiling.
[02:57.680 --> 03:02.380]  There's no way I was going to get any further as a marketing guy.
[03:02.380 --> 03:05.100]  And I was just enchanted with the whole corporate thing.
[03:05.160 --> 03:06.880]  I was feeling burnout and everything else.
[03:07.340 --> 03:14.500]  So I had an opportunity to join a partnership, which was an export trading house, exporting to various countries in Africa.
[03:15.200 --> 03:18.580]  So when that opportunity arose, I was already thinking of leaving.
[03:18.940 --> 03:19.560]  I did it.
[03:19.800 --> 03:26.140]  That opportunity didn't turn out too well, but that gave me the momentum to start my own export trading house, which I did.
[03:26.140 --> 03:32.500]  So basically you're saying your job loss was more of an opportunity than a devastating event.
[03:32.780 --> 03:35.280]  You'd been tithering with the idea of leaving.
[03:35.880 --> 03:36.200]  Sure.
[03:36.400 --> 03:37.560]  That was not devastating at all.
[03:37.700 --> 03:38.900]  I'd been thinking about it.
[03:39.700 --> 03:40.080]  Okay.
[03:40.580 --> 03:44.040]  Were you fully prepared or in hindsight, if you went back to that, would you have said,
[03:44.120 --> 03:46.720]  I may be able to put a few foundations in place?
[03:47.940 --> 03:48.200]  Yeah.
[03:49.260 --> 03:52.780]  Yes, with hindsight, I think so.
[03:52.780 --> 03:57.140]  But, you know, if you wait to put too many foundations in, you can wait forever.
[03:57.280 --> 03:58.420]  That's the other side of it, right?
[03:58.900 --> 04:08.240]  So the devastating bit came later when after four years on my own with this export trading business, having done really, really well,
[04:09.420 --> 04:12.220]  my civil war broke out in my two major markets.
[04:12.680 --> 04:17.960]  And within weeks, my whole business crumbled because I worked on a bank overdraft.
[04:17.960 --> 04:27.360]  I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cargo on the ships going up north and on trucks on the road, some of which I salvaged, most I didn't.
[04:27.980 --> 04:31.820]  And I ended up going bankrupt because I personally guaranteed everything.
[04:32.840 --> 04:34.160]  I went bankrupt.
[04:34.620 --> 04:36.880]  And I walked out of that without even a car.
[04:36.940 --> 04:39.160]  The only car I salvaged I gave to my ex-wife.
[04:39.260 --> 04:41.660]  I also was going through divorce at the same time.
[04:41.660 --> 04:44.900]  And that was devastating.
[04:45.700 --> 04:52.640]  Couldn't sell my property because things had changed politically in South Africa and squatters were moving in to where I lived on a country estate.
[04:53.500 --> 04:55.060]  And that was the second time.
[04:55.140 --> 04:59.280]  When I left Rhodesia, I couldn't sell my property because the situation, I gave the keys to the bank.
[04:59.840 --> 05:01.780]  Very small mortgage, South Africa's same.
[05:02.520 --> 05:05.740]  And went to Zimbabwe where my brother was still.
[05:05.900 --> 05:07.940]  And he said it's fairly stable.
[05:08.100 --> 05:08.560]  Come back.
[05:08.560 --> 05:13.620]  And I started yet another business, worked for him for a while, started another business, and then went farming.
[05:14.720 --> 05:17.960]  So that was my first go around of a devastating loss.
[05:18.080 --> 05:19.780]  And that was quite hard to get over.
[05:19.840 --> 05:20.220]  But I did.
[05:20.360 --> 05:22.600]  We can talk more about some of the lessons I learned.
[05:22.720 --> 05:28.400]  But the real crunch was the farming political fiasco or chaos in Zimbabwe.
[05:29.400 --> 05:35.540]  Before we get to that, in terms of lifting yourself out of that devastation of bankruptcy,
[05:35.540 --> 05:39.360]  did you seek counsel or advice or mentoring?
[05:39.540 --> 05:43.560]  How did you work your mentally out of that situation?
[05:45.400 --> 05:50.620]  I'd been very active, an active runner, not at school.
[05:50.740 --> 05:52.300]  I was pretty hopeless at school sports.
[05:52.420 --> 05:53.200]  I played rugby, of course.
[05:53.300 --> 05:56.320]  But apart from that, I was much more interested in equine sports.
[05:56.320 --> 05:59.000]  I had horses as a kid, played polo cross, put a polo.
[05:59.660 --> 06:02.960]  But in my mid-30s, in the corporate world, I started running.
[06:03.200 --> 06:05.520]  And then I got the bug, and I started running marathons.
[06:05.580 --> 06:08.640]  And I started running ultramarathons, 50 milers, 80 kilometers.
[06:09.480 --> 06:12.200]  And that's not – it's fairly tough to do that.
[06:12.960 --> 06:17.260]  And the big lesson I learned from that is no matter how tired you are, you can take one more pace.
[06:17.400 --> 06:21.980]  So when I was feeling really run down on the marathon, I'd think, let me just run one more pace.
[06:21.980 --> 06:25.520]  And then when I did that, I'd say, let me run to the next telegraph pole.
[06:25.620 --> 06:27.080]  I never thought about the finish, right?
[06:27.440 --> 06:31.340]  Let me turn to the next electricity pole, telephone pole, that bush up there.
[06:31.700 --> 06:32.900]  Little steps, little steps.
[06:33.300 --> 06:37.040]  And suddenly, those little steps mount up to 50 miles, and you've done it.
[06:37.220 --> 06:38.000]  There's the finish line.
[06:38.080 --> 06:38.420]  You've done it.
[06:38.880 --> 06:45.480]  So when I was going through all this business and emotional and turmoil, I kept thinking back to that.
[06:45.560 --> 06:49.900]  And I said, you know, at the age of 40, you were running 50-mile ultramarathons.
[06:49.900 --> 06:52.560]  You know, if you can do that, you can survive this, right?
[06:52.880 --> 07:02.940]  And that was a big thing, tying the physical achievement into the – using that to overcome the emotional and mental hurdles.
[07:04.040 --> 07:06.260]  One step at a time.
[07:07.560 --> 07:08.220]  That's it.
[07:09.200 --> 07:09.640]  Perfect.
[07:10.160 --> 07:10.580]  All right.
[07:10.640 --> 07:16.380]  Let's take you into that farm situation and how you lost that and what was the aftermath, Peter.
[07:16.540 --> 07:18.580]  Do you want to just go into that story for us?
[07:18.580 --> 07:18.720]  Sure.
[07:18.720 --> 07:23.820]  Well, so having got back to Zimbabwe, this would be in the early to mid-90s.
[07:24.780 --> 07:26.240]  I'd been divorced for a couple of years.
[07:26.380 --> 07:34.020]  I met a woman that I'd known as a kid and I'd known as a teenager and I'd known as a young adult, and we never really got together for all sorts of reasons.
[07:34.640 --> 07:42.080]  And she was recently divorced, and she was living on a farm, which had been her family farm, where her parents had brought it just after she was born.
[07:42.080 --> 07:47.860]  Well, so we took over the farm, her mother died.
[07:47.860 --> 07:48.920]  Her father was quite sick.
[07:48.920 --> 08:02.040]  And we developed it into a thriving little horticultural production operation where we employed 180 people in summer and we exported peas and granadillas and a few other things to Europe for hard currency.
[08:02.520 --> 08:03.720]  It was going well.
[08:04.400 --> 08:08.420]  It was a bit of a struggle because the farm needed a lot of development and we didn't have a lot of capital.
[08:08.420 --> 08:11.800]  I'd sold my business that I'd started in Zimbabwe to finance that.
[08:12.460 --> 08:15.740]  And then in the year 2000, the politics changed completely.
[08:15.740 --> 08:20.060]  And the government decided they didn't want any more white farmers.
[08:20.240 --> 08:23.900]  They were trying to appease the very poor indigenous population.
[08:24.180 --> 08:30.920]  So they started transporting in trucks hundreds on thousands of tribal people onto the white-owned farms.
[08:31.520 --> 08:32.660]  And these people couldn't survive.
[08:32.760 --> 08:35.560]  The only way they could survive is by stealing off the farm owner.
[08:36.440 --> 08:43.460]  So the intimidation, we went through three years of intimidation, death threats, and the government ordered us to leave the farm.
[08:43.460 --> 08:48.700]  And after three years, we were the second last farm still operating in a district of formerly 43 farms.
[08:49.280 --> 08:53.260]  And the police tried three times to get me, to arrest me, to get me off the farm.
[08:53.300 --> 08:59.320]  And they got me on the third time, put me in jail for three days and three nights under really bad conditions.
[09:00.100 --> 09:03.440]  And I never went back to my home again.
[09:03.720 --> 09:07.920]  They let me out after three days on condition that I didn't go back home.
[09:08.500 --> 09:13.380]  So Sue, my partner, had three days to move all our personal stuff off the farm.
[09:14.060 --> 09:15.520]  A lot of stuff had been stolen.
[09:15.680 --> 09:17.780]  I'd managed to get a little bit of equipment off beforehand.
[09:18.500 --> 09:19.780]  But we lost our crops.
[09:19.980 --> 09:25.860]  We'd been locked into our security fence for days at a time by a mob of government supporters threatening to kill us.
[09:25.860 --> 09:29.920]  And what we could salvage, we moved to my mother.
[09:30.080 --> 09:33.760]  My mother had moved to England, but to the cottage she used to live in on my brother's place.
[09:33.760 --> 09:39.120]  So when I got out of the prison, the police cells, I got back to the cottage.
[09:39.120 --> 09:44.400]  And there's all the contents of a four-bedroom farmhouse spread on the lawn of this tiny little two-bedroom cottage.
[09:44.820 --> 09:50.200]  What I could salvage of my fertilizer and farm chemicals and equipment strewn all over the place.
[09:50.900 --> 09:55.160]  And my first thought was, how are we going to survive without all this stuff?
[09:55.340 --> 09:56.700]  That's all I could think about.
[09:56.780 --> 09:57.440]  What are we going to do?
[09:57.440 --> 09:58.940]  We were 54 at the time.
[10:00.400 --> 10:03.860]  Inflation there was running in the thousands of percent.
[10:03.980 --> 10:08.100]  It was even worse than Germany after World War I.
[10:08.100 --> 10:13.480]  So we had to sell everything we could to survive, paid off our bank loan.
[10:13.860 --> 10:20.220]  And my eldest son had moved to Canada a few years before, and he said, come and look at Canada.
[10:20.300 --> 10:20.880]  We had no money.
[10:20.960 --> 10:25.940]  We would have liked to come to your country, but at our age and with our skills that weren't in demand,
[10:25.940 --> 10:28.920]  we would have had to put up a huge bond, and we couldn't do that.
[10:29.300 --> 10:32.700]  We couldn't go to America because we couldn't afford a lawyer or a green card.
[10:32.700 --> 10:39.780]  So we came to Canada, and I had to take a job as a farm laborer doing work that I used to pay people to do
[10:39.780 --> 10:45.060]  and working longer hours and under worse conditions than any of my black guys in Africa ever worked.
[10:45.240 --> 10:48.040]  So talk about pride before a fall.
[10:48.220 --> 10:49.540]  That was a real wake-up call.
[10:50.140 --> 10:53.460]  But we survived, and I'm still here 20 years later.
[10:55.720 --> 10:59.520]  So certainly you've hit rock bottom, Peter, a number of times.
[11:00.220 --> 11:00.480]  Yeah.
[11:02.700 --> 11:07.700]  Three days and three nights in prison seems like a short time, relatively speaking.
[11:08.160 --> 11:10.580]  But what were some of the thoughts going through your head?
[11:10.620 --> 11:14.220]  I just couldn't even contemplate the thought of going into prison, to be honest.
[11:15.140 --> 11:20.600]  Well, the start was when they arrested me, they interrogated me for five hours.
[11:21.120 --> 11:23.420]  They were trying to find something to pin on me.
[11:23.860 --> 11:27.700]  So they accused me of being – trying to overthrow the government.
[11:27.860 --> 11:29.420]  They accused me of collecting arms of war.
[11:29.660 --> 11:30.640]  We all had guns.
[11:30.640 --> 11:31.960]  I had licenses for my gun.
[11:31.960 --> 11:36.980]  And they dragged me back to the farm and searched the farm, confiscated my guns and licenses,
[11:37.160 --> 11:39.080]  which I got – my wife got back the next day.
[11:39.080 --> 11:43.400]  They couldn't pin that on me.
[11:43.400 --> 11:46.300]  So – but they were – I thought they were going to beat me up.
[11:46.380 --> 11:50.080]  And a lot of farmers did get severely, brutally attacked and beaten up.
[11:50.120 --> 11:50.660]  A lot were murdered.
[11:51.120 --> 11:51.640]  They didn't.
[11:51.720 --> 11:56.900]  But I had five security policemen in a little room threatening to beat me up and accusing me of all these things.
[11:56.900 --> 11:59.320]  And I managed to hold my ground there.
[11:59.840 --> 12:01.240]  But then they shoved me in the cell.
[12:01.300 --> 12:02.660]  It was 12 foot by 12 foot.
[12:02.820 --> 12:05.040]  And on one night, there were 27 of us in that cell.
[12:05.640 --> 12:06.720]  You couldn't lie down.
[12:06.800 --> 12:08.300]  There were so many – and I was the only white guy.
[12:08.300 --> 12:15.880]  And I thought that they were going to come back and either kill me or sort me out because, as I say, many farmers have been murdered.
[12:16.000 --> 12:16.380]  They didn't.
[12:17.020 --> 12:18.840]  Conditions were not good.
[12:18.980 --> 12:20.920]  But the black guys were fine.
[12:21.340 --> 12:22.340]  They were really helpful.
[12:22.740 --> 12:23.740]  They asked my advice.
[12:23.940 --> 12:29.200]  I had to be careful because the police used to put plants in the cell to try and get you to incriminate yourself.
[12:29.200 --> 12:33.080]  And I got through it by playing a game.
[12:33.400 --> 12:36.720]  So we weren't allowed to smoke in the cell, but everyone smoked.
[12:36.860 --> 12:42.320]  So I smuggled a whole lot of cigarettes in in my jacket, gave all these other guys cigarettes, and we smoked away.
[12:42.600 --> 12:44.860]  And I kept demanding stuff from the police.
[12:44.960 --> 12:47.280]  I said, I've got to be allowed to clean my teeth in the morning.
[12:47.360 --> 12:53.640]  I didn't have a toothbrush, but they took me to a garden tap outside, and I could get some water and rinse my mouth out.
[12:53.980 --> 12:56.440]  And then I kept demanding this and that and the next thing.
[12:56.440 --> 12:59.620]  And every time they gave in, I said, well, I've got a point.
[13:00.260 --> 13:01.680]  And that was it.
[13:01.760 --> 13:02.740]  I turned it into a game.
[13:03.300 --> 13:14.180]  And I let my anger at the injustice and what was happening to the country, that prevented me from being paralyzed by fear.
[13:15.800 --> 13:16.800]  That anger helped.
[13:17.840 --> 13:23.740]  And then I kept thinking back, as I said earlier, to the marathon, thinking, well, I got through the marathon one step and one kilometer at a time.
[13:23.780 --> 13:25.300]  I can get through this at an hour at a time.
[13:25.300 --> 13:27.260]  So I just focused on getting through the next hour.
[13:28.380 --> 13:29.540]  And I did.
[13:29.620 --> 13:40.280]  Peter, would you say going through these setbacks, devastating events, are actually battle-hardening you for life?
[13:40.860 --> 13:43.760]  You become a tougher individual.
[13:44.900 --> 13:45.260]  Absolutely.
[13:45.600 --> 13:46.040]  Absolutely.
[13:46.300 --> 13:46.640]  Absolutely.
[13:46.640 --> 13:55.060]  And here in Canada, which is a fairly peaceful, although it's changing very rapidly recently, people tell me, oh, we're so concerned about this, that.
[13:55.120 --> 13:58.180]  And the next thing I said, you don't know what you're talking about.
[13:58.240 --> 13:59.740]  You've got nothing to worry about.
[14:00.000 --> 14:01.500]  You're living a sheltered life.
[14:02.160 --> 14:05.160]  Believe me, I know what it's like to have things to worry about.
[14:05.160 --> 14:09.080]  People worry here because they can't get a new car this year.
[14:09.140 --> 14:14.940]  They've got to wait until next year and they can't get a bigger TV and they can't afford a ticket to the football game.
[14:16.080 --> 14:22.440]  Get some perspective on life because you can lose everything like that and you're worrying about nothing.
[14:22.440 --> 14:27.340]  Yes, we can lose ourselves in the materiality of life, can't we?
[14:27.500 --> 14:28.700]  Yeah, absolutely.
[14:29.080 --> 14:29.480]  Absolutely.
[14:30.460 --> 14:30.740]  All right.
[14:30.800 --> 14:36.140]  So today, if you'd like to share with our audience what you do as a podcast host.
[14:36.980 --> 14:37.380]  Sure.
[14:37.580 --> 14:42.560]  So before COVID and the lockdown, I was doing quite a bit of public speaking and some internet marketing.
[14:43.320 --> 14:46.640]  And then, of course, when that came, public speaking just stopped completely.
[14:47.600 --> 14:52.920]  So I had a business partner in another business venture, a woman, younger woman, and we said, let's start a podcast.
[14:53.280 --> 14:53.740]  So we did.
[14:54.100 --> 15:01.260]  And we initially started to help out other small businessmen who'd lost the ability to network and all these events we used to go to.
[15:01.820 --> 15:04.000]  We didn't get a lot of traction on the business side.
[15:04.200 --> 15:10.580]  So we switched to health and wellness about two years ago and then we rebranded to, we call it Health Declassified.
[15:10.820 --> 15:12.260]  It's all about holistic health.
[15:12.260 --> 15:19.000]  So we interview guests once every two weeks and then we do a wrap-up video, a wrap-up episode every week, just the two of us.
[15:19.120 --> 15:24.300]  We pick a health topic and we research it and we explore it and then we talk about it on the show.
[15:24.540 --> 15:25.800]  So that's what we do.
[15:27.280 --> 15:27.800]  All right.
[15:27.860 --> 15:34.300]  And obviously, you are an author and you've got your book there over your right shoulder.
[15:35.440 --> 15:36.120]  I wrote a book.
[15:36.220 --> 15:37.160]  Yeah, it's on the back.
[15:37.220 --> 15:38.700]  You can see it there and I have it here.
[15:38.800 --> 15:40.760]  It's called Five Steps to Thriving on Adversity.
[15:41.540 --> 15:47.280]  The reason that I wrote the book is when I was doing the public speaking, everyone kept saying, wherever I went, you've got to write a book.
[15:47.340 --> 15:47.860]  You've got to write a book.
[15:47.940 --> 15:48.240]  So I did.
[15:48.340 --> 15:48.900]  I wrote a book.
[15:49.500 --> 15:53.860]  And I mainly sell it when I do a speech.
[15:54.900 --> 15:56.600]  People at church ask me for the book.
[15:56.860 --> 15:57.760]  It's not on Amazon.
[15:57.760 --> 16:03.220]  I had it listed and they dropped it, presumably because I didn't let them do the facilitation.
[16:03.400 --> 16:04.600]  I wanted to distribute it myself.
[16:04.660 --> 16:05.340]  I don't know, whatever.
[16:05.920 --> 16:09.180]  But it's on my website, PeterWritesBlog.com.
[16:09.180 --> 16:13.000]  It has its own website, FiveStepsToThriving.com.
[16:14.280 --> 16:19.360]  Or people can email me at Peter at HealthDeclassified and I can do that.
[16:19.880 --> 16:21.140]  That's the background to the book.
[16:21.340 --> 16:24.200]  And what it is, it's a whole lot of stories of my life.
[16:24.400 --> 16:30.720]  But there's five steps to how I thrived on the adversities I've been through, illustrated by a couple of stories from my life.
[16:30.880 --> 16:31.440]  It's all in there.
[16:32.020 --> 16:32.260]  Okay.
[16:32.380 --> 16:32.620]  All right.
[16:32.620 --> 16:36.080]  Well, you've given the details of where people can find that and find you.
[16:36.240 --> 16:48.880]  So if anyone there is listening or watching today, then they've got the opportunity to reach out to you because obviously you've gone through a hard road and you've come through the other side, Peter, to tell the stories.
[16:49.880 --> 16:50.240]  Absolutely.
[16:50.240 --> 16:53.660]  And I'm so grateful that people say, what would you change?
[16:53.700 --> 17:04.580]  I say nothing because as tough as some of those parts where I wouldn't be where I am now physically, emotionally, and I had a heart attack a few years ago, got through that as well.
[17:05.140 --> 17:08.420]  And it just helped me get through everything else in life, right?
[17:10.040 --> 17:10.480]  Yes.
[17:11.320 --> 17:18.160]  Everything, as I say, is a bit of an apprenticeship for us to become stronger figures in life.
[17:18.720 --> 17:18.960]  Yeah.
[17:18.960 --> 17:28.200]  And if you look at some of the most successful, sorry, successful people, most of them have been through some unusual level of adversity.
[17:29.100 --> 17:29.500]  True.
[17:29.740 --> 17:30.040]  Yes.
[17:31.020 --> 17:33.100]  Challenge is what makes us grow in life.
[17:34.260 --> 17:34.620]  Absolutely.
[17:35.660 --> 17:35.960]  Okay.
[17:36.160 --> 17:36.600]  All right.
[17:36.680 --> 17:39.900]  Thanks for joining us, Peter, and I hope people want to reach out to you.
[17:39.940 --> 17:40.680]  They've got the details.
[17:40.960 --> 17:43.480]  So by all means, reach out to Peter.
[17:43.560 --> 17:45.100]  He's a wealth of experience and knowledge.
[17:45.260 --> 17:45.680]  Thank you.
[17:46.760 --> 17:47.440]  Thank you, Tony.
[17:47.440 --> 17:47.520]  Thank you.
[17:48.960 --> 17:52.360]  Thanks for tuning into the Career Advantage Show.
[17:52.920 --> 17:58.200]  Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe and claim your free career confidential toolkit.
[17:58.200 --> 18:06.520]  If you've enjoyed today's episode, I'd truly appreciate a five-star review on your favorite podcast app.
[18:07.240 --> 18:13.280]  And don't forget to share it with your friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration.
[18:13.280 --> 18:13.820]  Bye.
[18:13.880 --> 18:14.080]  Thank you.
[18:14.140 --> 18:14.860]  See you next time.
[18:14.860 --> 18:14.920]  Bye.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Warrick Bishop ...
 

Warrick Bishop is a cardiologist with special interest in cardiovascular disease prevention incorporating imaging, lipids and lifestyle.

He is author of "Have You Planned Your Heart Attack?" with over 20,000 copies in print; the book is a discussion for patients and doctors about how we can be most precise about cardiovascular risk and save lives! He has recently released "Atrial Fibrillation Explained", a resource relating to a common cardiac condition affecting over 1% of the entire population.

Graduating from the University of Tasmania, School of Medicine, in 1988. He worked in the Northern Territory and South Australia before completing his advanced training in cardiology in Hobart, Tasmania, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of Physicians and Member of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand in 1997.

Working predominately in private practice. In 2009 Warrick undertook training in CT Cardiac Coronary Angiography, being the first cardiologist in Tasmania with this specialist recognition. This area of imaging drives his interest in preventative cardiology. He holds level B certification with the Australian Joint Committee for CCTA and is a member of the Society of Cardiac Computed Tomography.

Warrick is also a member of the Australian Atherosclerosis Society and regularly contributes to education, guidelines and industry in this area. He has also developed a particular interest in diabetic-related risk of coronary artery disease, specifically related to eating guidelines and lipid profiles.

Warrick has acted as an accredited examiner for the Royal Australian College of Physicians and is regularly involved with teaching medical students and junior doctors. He has worked with Hobart's Menzies Institute for Medical Research on projects in an affiliate capacity and is recognised by the Medical School of the University of Tasmania with academic status.

For more than a year, Warrick has been a member of the Clinical Issues Committee of the Australian Heart Foundation, providing input into issues of significance for the management of heart patients. Warrick has been a member of the HFA expert writing group to produce a position on coronary imaging with CT and also a member of the CSANZ/AAS writing group to produce the Australian/ New Zealand lipid guidelines.

In his free time, Warrick enjoys travel and music, he surfs and plays guitar with his children.

Transcript

[00:00.980 --> 00:11.960]  Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.
[00:12.540 --> 00:18.640]  I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments,
[00:19.300 --> 00:26.080]  such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment,
[00:26.080 --> 00:33.100]  and being able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and graver opportunities.
[00:33.660 --> 00:40.100]  Welcome to today's Career Advantage Show, where I'm joined by my very special guest, Warwick Bishop,
[00:40.500 --> 00:46.900]  who is a cardiologist, an author, and a podcast host. Welcome, Warwick.
[00:47.580 --> 00:48.880]  Thanks for having me, Tony.
[00:49.920 --> 00:55.760]  Now, Warwick, as I've just briefly mentioned, that is a very interesting set of capability sets.
[00:56.080 --> 01:04.920]  How does a cardiologist who specializes in a particular field, and without doubt is an extremely busy person,
[01:05.480 --> 01:09.920]  find time to also write books and host a podcast?
[01:10.240 --> 01:12.060]  How did that journey all come about?
[01:13.920 --> 01:16.340]  Well, thank you for asking, Tony.
[01:16.340 --> 01:27.360]  Basically, a decade ago, I had the opportunity as a cardiologist to look at some emerging technology,
[01:27.520 --> 01:34.520]  and the technology that I went to go and find more information about was a technology
[01:34.520 --> 01:42.500]  which we could loosely call cardiac CT imaging or coronary artery calcium scoring.
[01:42.500 --> 01:50.320]  And a decade ago, I was the first cardiologist in Tasmania, which is where I'm based, to have done that training.
[01:51.160 --> 01:59.340]  And I was really taken by the value that this information, this new technology could give us.
[01:59.340 --> 02:10.120]  And in a nutshell, Tony, to be fair to say that if we could take an individual before they've had a heart attack
[02:10.120 --> 02:14.680]  and look at their heart, we could, by using cardiac CT imaging,
[02:14.820 --> 02:21.120]  identify those people who are at unacceptably high risk in the future and implement therapy,
[02:21.120 --> 02:29.100]  which could, I believe, be life-changing, but we could also identify people who are at low risk or risk somewhere in between.
[02:29.280 --> 02:33.260]  So it was really a crystal ball into someone's future heart risk.
[02:33.340 --> 02:35.180]  Well, I got super excited about that.
[02:35.240 --> 02:41.840]  I saw this as a holy grail, and to a large degree, as I started to share this with my colleagues,
[02:41.840 --> 02:48.720]  the old story of the pioneer gets the arrows, the settlers get the pastures,
[02:49.340 --> 02:53.400]  really applied in my local environment here.
[02:54.180 --> 02:56.440]  There was a lot of pushback to change.
[02:57.080 --> 03:04.540]  And honestly, I ended up very frustrated and wanting to empower patients
[03:04.540 --> 03:11.380]  to have the conversation with their specialist, their cardiologist, around this technology.
[03:11.840 --> 03:17.040]  And so I wrote a book about it, and that first book was called Have You Planned Your Heart Attack?
[03:19.620 --> 03:21.700]  Right, that's an interesting title, Warwick.
[03:24.080 --> 03:29.020]  Also, the reason for the title, of course, Tony, is no one actually plans a heart attack.
[03:30.540 --> 03:38.640]  Historically, we all go along on our day-to-day, and then when a heart attack occurs,
[03:38.640 --> 03:42.620]  we either die, one in six chance, or we get taken to hospital,
[03:43.140 --> 03:46.500]  and we just sort of accept that as a way of life.
[03:46.920 --> 03:53.100]  And you will know, and your listeners will know, of people where we say things like,
[03:53.160 --> 03:57.960]  well, he just had a heart attack, he had a bad family history, or he died too young,
[03:57.960 --> 04:09.720]  all these sort of things, which obviously the title of the book was an irony around that idea
[04:09.720 --> 04:14.120]  of having no ownership of what can happen to your heart health.
[04:14.240 --> 04:19.560]  So I think the title probably did scare off some people, but that's where it came from.
[04:19.560 --> 04:32.520]  So it's interesting, like yourself, in particular fields, and I'm very big on the preventative dynamic.
[04:32.820 --> 04:34.320]  In your case, it's the heart attack.
[04:34.420 --> 04:39.180]  In my case, it's devastating job loss that a lot of people never get over,
[04:39.320 --> 04:42.160]  and it's something that stays with them forever.
[04:42.160 --> 04:49.740]  As a society, have we come further along that journey in terms of managing things like diet,
[04:50.880 --> 04:56.740]  exercise regimes, and managing our stress to better look after our heart health?
[04:58.080 --> 05:05.280]  I think that's a great question, Tony, and I think there's probably two components to that.
[05:05.280 --> 05:11.820]  I think there is probably a greater awareness of health, well-being,
[05:11.920 --> 05:16.460]  and there's certainly a subgroup within the population who are interested in
[05:16.460 --> 05:22.880]  how to maximise current science to get the best out of their health journey.
[05:24.300 --> 05:27.860]  But there's also a lot of people who have a lot of awareness and don't take action,
[05:27.860 --> 05:37.920]  and so we see both, and my own experience in that space of imaging the arteries
[05:37.920 --> 05:45.120]  has been one of recurrent frustration, actually, Tony, because as I share with people
[05:45.120 --> 05:50.320]  the value of getting a calcium score, coronary calcium score, a CT scan at their heart
[05:50.320 --> 05:56.240]  so they can see what's going on, people seem to push back.
[05:56.240 --> 06:01.080]  People seem to say, well, you know, I feel well, my cholesterol's okay,
[06:01.200 --> 06:08.960]  there's no family history, or I ride a bike, and they'll deflect, and it challenges me,
[06:09.060 --> 06:13.640]  and yet I get people who will contact me, want to find out what they can do,
[06:13.680 --> 06:14.680]  and they will action it.
[06:14.780 --> 06:22.160]  So I'm still on the journey of trying to understand how to really find
[06:22.160 --> 06:28.320]  what motivates those people who seem to have an inertia around being truly proactive.
[06:28.900 --> 06:30.440]  So it's a complicated space.
[06:31.960 --> 06:32.200]  Okay.
[06:32.460 --> 06:38.040]  So we've discussed that cardiology aspect, but in terms of you stepping
[06:38.040 --> 06:43.400]  into this entrepreneurial world of the books and the podcasting,
[06:43.400 --> 06:51.900]  is that why it all come about, because you felt that there was an important message
[06:51.900 --> 06:53.320]  you needed to get out in the world?
[06:53.420 --> 06:55.400]  Is that what was the driving force behind that?
[06:56.100 --> 06:59.240]  Well, as I said to you, Tony, the book was a stone in my shoe,
[06:59.320 --> 07:03.980]  and I really felt obliged to write that book to put good information
[07:03.980 --> 07:06.680]  into the hands of patients.
[07:06.680 --> 07:15.080]  When I wrote this book, the standard practice of care was if someone like you
[07:15.080 --> 07:19.560]  and I at our age were concerned about our risk of heart attack,
[07:20.460 --> 07:24.800]  we would go and talk to our GP who'd send us to a specialist, a cardiologist,
[07:24.940 --> 07:28.660]  and that cardiologist would put us through a treadmill test.
[07:28.660 --> 07:36.940]  Now, a treadmill test is a really good way to find out if you've got narrowed arteries,
[07:37.900 --> 07:40.400]  and it's a good way to get a feel for how fit you are.
[07:40.940 --> 07:44.360]  But a treadmill test doesn't tell you if there's rust in the pipes
[07:44.360 --> 07:49.760]  that might cause a problem in the next 3, 6, 12 months or beyond.
[07:50.480 --> 07:52.600]  All it tells you is if there's a narrowing.
[07:52.660 --> 07:55.320]  If anyone's interested, I've actually done a TEDx on this.
[07:55.320 --> 08:02.120]  So if you look up Dr. Warwick Bishop, TEDx, and the heart, you'll find it.
[08:02.740 --> 08:05.740]  And there's diagrams and all sorts of things associated with that.
[08:06.760 --> 08:16.080]  But the occurrence of cardiac CT, Tony, meant that if you or I went and saw a cardiologist
[08:16.080 --> 08:17.580]  and said, what's our risk of heart attack?
[08:17.580 --> 08:26.120]  And they suggested a treadmill test that as soon as cardiac CT imaging became available,
[08:26.280 --> 08:32.340]  that treadmill test became redundant and not the test that answered the question about your future risk.
[08:33.060 --> 08:39.600]  And so I felt compelled to give people that information so they could have the right conversation
[08:39.600 --> 08:44.740]  because it was taking time for my colleagues to swap over.
[08:46.060 --> 08:53.680]  Well, as part of that, I realised fairly quickly that I was getting really nice feedback from the books.
[08:53.800 --> 09:01.320]  I was having individuals from other parts of Australia and even other parts of the world
[09:01.320 --> 09:09.440]  letting me know that that information had led them to have testing that had changed their lives.
[09:09.680 --> 09:14.520]  And that sort of feedback from people you don't even know is extraordinary.
[09:14.840 --> 09:22.220]  So I felt very humbled and motivated by that and felt like it was the right thing to do.
[09:22.220 --> 09:32.260]  And that really, really gave me the momentum to look at podcasting again to try and share information
[09:32.260 --> 09:38.720]  in a way that was balanced and thoughtful and potentially applicable
[09:38.720 --> 09:45.800]  because those listening and yourself might be aware that these days there's so much information
[09:45.800 --> 09:54.580]  on Google and ChatGPT and various other social media platforms that you can be overwhelmed
[09:54.580 --> 09:57.320]  with the amount of information that's available.
[09:58.320 --> 10:03.760]  And so I started to move to bring balance to that information,
[10:04.620 --> 10:07.740]  give people what I thought was really useful information,
[10:08.860 --> 10:13.620]  a bit filtered and a bit contextual from a professional,
[10:13.620 --> 10:16.040]  not someone with necessarily an axe to grind.
[10:17.300 --> 10:21.120]  And I realised there were some other areas of medicine which were super important,
[10:21.320 --> 10:23.500]  particularly in cardiology, where I could contribute.
[10:24.500 --> 10:31.100]  And there was a lot of opportunity to help educate patients
[10:31.100 --> 10:33.100]  through their best healthcare journey.
[10:33.240 --> 10:37.280]  So I wrote a book on atrial fibrillation, which is a very common condition,
[10:37.740 --> 10:41.800]  a book on cardiac failure, a book on cardiac rehabilitation.
[10:41.800 --> 10:47.520]  So for people who've had a heart attack, a stroke, bypass grafting or a stent,
[10:48.260 --> 10:52.520]  I've written a book on 10 commandments of heart health,
[10:52.640 --> 10:56.540]  so how to keep fit and well and avoid problems in the first place.
[10:57.000 --> 11:03.100]  And I'm currently right at this very moment, I have a copy of Cholesterol Explained
[11:03.100 --> 11:05.900]  sitting on my kitchen table and I'm editing that.
[11:05.900 --> 11:07.940]  It's the final edit before it goes to the printer.
[11:09.500 --> 11:09.940]  All right.
[11:10.020 --> 11:15.200]  That is a massive work undertaking that you've gone on.
[11:15.500 --> 11:22.900]  So Warwick, it sounds like you're not just in the business of operating
[11:22.900 --> 11:24.820]  and working on people's hearts.
[11:24.880 --> 11:27.680]  You're trying to advance the field, correct?
[11:27.680 --> 11:33.260]  So, look, a while ago when I started this journey,
[11:33.360 --> 11:36.900]  I had the chance to work with a coach, who I still do.
[11:37.220 --> 11:39.400]  I work with a coach and a business manager.
[11:40.200 --> 11:44.660]  And one of the things that he got me to do, his name is John,
[11:45.300 --> 11:48.300]  he suggested that I try and figure out my why,
[11:48.500 --> 11:53.900]  which obviously for someone who's near, I was in my early 50s,
[11:53.900 --> 11:57.600]  had been a cardiologist for my whole career.
[11:58.180 --> 12:02.560]  Someone suggesting that I figure out my why made absolutely no sense at all
[12:02.560 --> 12:05.580]  because I knew what I did and it was pretty simple.
[12:06.880 --> 12:11.080]  But it was, as it turned out, Tony, a really valuable exercise.
[12:11.640 --> 12:13.500]  And as I worked through the process,
[12:13.540 --> 12:17.840]  and it was a process that's been constructed by a guy called Simon Sinek,
[12:18.200 --> 12:19.580]  who you may or may not have heard of,
[12:19.580 --> 12:28.220]  what I got to was a final distillation of my why,
[12:28.640 --> 12:32.780]  and that was to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible.
[12:33.800 --> 12:39.460]  And that really informs what I do these days.
[12:39.560 --> 12:40.960]  And it works really well.
[12:40.960 --> 12:45.500]  I'm now with my wife, run two businesses in Hobart.
[12:45.500 --> 12:50.160]  One is a wellness centre for strength, balance and bone health.
[12:50.640 --> 12:56.220]  And we're just building a business upstairs where we're doing breath work,
[12:56.380 --> 13:00.280]  meditation, hot and cold exposure, IV therapies.
[13:02.720 --> 13:10.120]  It's a really nice way to feel that I'm staying within my why and contributing.
[13:10.120 --> 13:18.760]  I, Warwick, add another element to people's heart health,
[13:18.820 --> 13:23.360]  which I don't believe is well understood or fully recognised,
[13:23.880 --> 13:26.340]  which is a little bit out of left field.
[13:27.720 --> 13:31.800]  I believe if a person loves the work that they do,
[13:32.400 --> 13:34.920]  that makes a massive difference to their heart
[13:34.920 --> 13:37.140]  versus someone who hates what they do.
[13:37.560 --> 13:39.960]  Would you agree or disagree with that, Warwick?
[13:41.060 --> 13:45.680]  Look, I think what you're basically saying is that stress, anxiety, depression,
[13:45.680 --> 13:50.480]  which is associated with being caught in an environment such as a work environment
[13:50.480 --> 13:54.320]  or even a marital environment or whatever,
[13:54.980 --> 13:57.100]  can be detrimental to heart health.
[13:57.220 --> 14:00.300]  And, Tony, there's absolutely no question that that's the case.
[14:01.000 --> 14:05.280]  We have the benefit of the Harvard Longevity Study,
[14:05.580 --> 14:08.020]  which is now several generations.
[14:08.020 --> 14:10.640]  I think it's run, I could be wrong,
[14:10.740 --> 14:14.400]  I think it's run 80 years, four or five generations.
[14:14.860 --> 14:19.960]  And that Harvard Longevity Study boiled down to two things
[14:19.960 --> 14:28.080]  that are clearly associated with a long, healthy life or a long life.
[14:28.080 --> 14:33.800]  The first is, or those two things are health and relationships.
[14:34.540 --> 14:36.580]  And when they drilled down on that, Tony,
[14:36.740 --> 14:40.160]  it was relationships that drove good health.
[14:40.400 --> 14:44.460]  So absolutely key to our wellbeing is relationships.
[14:44.640 --> 14:46.520]  And because we spend so much time at work,
[14:46.640 --> 14:49.640]  if we don't have a good relationship at work, it's toxic.
[14:49.640 --> 14:56.320]  And through my own experience, I've had times in my own work environment
[14:56.320 --> 15:04.080]  where I've been very aware that it's not been as comfortable as I'd like it to be.
[15:04.140 --> 15:08.640]  It's fantastic at the moment, but you're absolutely right.
[15:08.640 --> 15:16.060]  If your work environment is not good, it will lead to stress, anxiety,
[15:16.840 --> 15:21.060]  and it will have detrimental effect on your heart health without question.
[15:22.480 --> 15:24.200]  And as we wrap this up, Warwick,
[15:24.200 --> 15:29.180]  if you, in terms of where you sit today,
[15:29.780 --> 15:34.440]  were to have a conversation with Warwick 20, 30 years ago,
[15:35.060 --> 15:37.820]  what would be the number one piece of advice
[15:37.820 --> 15:40.600]  that you would partake to a younger Warwick?
[15:43.840 --> 15:44.980]  That's a great question.
[15:44.980 --> 15:55.460]  I think what I would share is to try and get a better understanding
[15:55.460 --> 16:01.180]  of personal growth, balance.
[16:02.640 --> 16:06.380]  And I guess in my own experience, my last five years,
[16:06.380 --> 16:15.900]  I've been working really hard on things like meditation,
[16:17.040 --> 16:24.920]  control of stress, an attitude which is more open
[16:24.920 --> 16:29.840]  to the challenges that confront us on a daily basis.
[16:30.160 --> 16:34.540]  So my last couple of years have been around personal growth
[16:34.540 --> 16:37.780]  and connection with others as well and valuing that.
[16:38.240 --> 16:42.960]  I think my younger me was hardworking, very focused, very determined.
[16:43.240 --> 16:44.700]  I didn't have time for gratitude.
[16:45.340 --> 16:48.600]  I didn't have the time for relationships that I should have.
[16:49.060 --> 16:50.600]  I don't think I was particularly wise.
[16:50.740 --> 16:54.480]  I was strong-willed and determined to a fault, actually.
[16:54.480 --> 16:59.060]  So to quote Billy Joel, I probably would have said something like,
[16:59.220 --> 17:01.260]  slow down, you crazy child.
[17:01.460 --> 17:02.500]  You're so ambitious.
[17:02.500 --> 17:06.200]  So I think I'd...
[17:06.200 --> 17:09.420]  But it's much easier to be older and wiser because you do slow down
[17:09.420 --> 17:10.780]  and you have the chance to do that.
[17:10.920 --> 17:14.080]  So my younger self probably wouldn't have listened, is the truth, Tony.
[17:15.540 --> 17:20.220]  That's a brilliant piece of wise advice to pass on to people, yes.
[17:21.400 --> 17:24.440]  You see a lot of people today in a rush, in a hurry, and I'm thinking,
[17:25.200 --> 17:27.940]  you know, so you get to the set of traffic lights
[17:27.940 --> 17:30.540]  and you're just waiting at the red light for a little bit longer.
[17:31.100 --> 17:32.020]  What was the point?
[17:32.560 --> 17:36.900]  And unnecessary stress, I would call that, Warwick.
[17:37.060 --> 17:39.000]  So, yes, that was a beautiful piece of advice.
[17:39.260 --> 17:39.660]  All right.
[17:39.780 --> 17:43.680]  Warwick, if people would like to know more about you and what you do
[17:43.680 --> 17:47.440]  and your books, where can we direct these people to?
[17:47.440 --> 17:51.320]  Look, the easiest place, and thank you for the opportunity to share, Tony.
[17:51.440 --> 17:55.420]  The easiest place to find me is on my website,
[17:55.700 --> 18:00.560]  DR for Dr. Warwick, W-A-R-R-I-C-K, Bishop.
[18:01.120 --> 18:03.660]  If you search Dr. Warwick Bishop, you'll find me.
[18:03.720 --> 18:09.260]  If you want to find my TEDx talks, just Dr. Warwick Bishop TEDx.
[18:09.260 --> 18:12.120]  If you'd like to find me on YouTube, I'd love you to do that.
[18:12.200 --> 18:15.960]  I've got hundreds of clips informing people.
[18:16.060 --> 18:17.700]  I'd love you to subscribe and share,
[18:17.860 --> 18:21.820]  and my podcasts are available on every podcast station.
[18:22.120 --> 18:23.940]  If you want to get a heart scan,
[18:24.200 --> 18:27.420]  I've got a website called Virtual Heart Check.
[18:27.980 --> 18:29.900]  You can go there, put in your details,
[18:30.160 --> 18:32.960]  and book a heart scan anywhere in Australia
[18:32.960 --> 18:35.780]  without the need to see a GP or a specialist,
[18:35.780 --> 18:39.500]  which I believe is an Australian first and quite possibly a world first.
[18:39.660 --> 18:42.060]  So there's lots of ways to get hold of me,
[18:42.160 --> 18:46.120]  and I'm pretty sure that even if they reached out to you
[18:46.120 --> 18:48.520]  to get in touch with me, that would work as well.
[18:49.800 --> 18:50.240]  Brilliantly.
[18:50.440 --> 18:51.360]  Yes, indeed.
[18:51.940 --> 18:54.380]  Don't underestimate the importance of your heart health.
[18:54.520 --> 18:55.920]  You may only get one chance.
[18:56.780 --> 18:57.560]  Oh, you've only got one.
[18:59.560 --> 19:00.160]  All right.
[19:00.220 --> 19:01.360]  Thanks for joining me today.
[19:01.500 --> 19:02.160]  Thanks, Warwick.
[19:02.800 --> 19:03.500]  Pleasure, Tony.
[19:03.500 --> 19:04.620]  Thank you so much,
[19:04.620 --> 19:07.660]  and I'm really happy your listeners got something valuable from this.
[19:08.060 --> 19:08.860]  I'm sure they did.
[19:08.940 --> 19:09.460]  Thanks, Warwick.
[19:12.000 --> 19:14.840]  Thanks for tuning into The Career Advantage Show.
[19:15.400 --> 19:18.180]  Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe
[19:18.180 --> 19:21.160]  and claim your free career confidential toolkit.
[19:21.940 --> 19:23.800]  If you've enjoyed today's episode,
[19:23.800 --> 19:29.000]  I truly appreciate a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.
[19:29.740 --> 19:32.760]  And don't forget to share it with your friends and colleagues
[19:32.760 --> 19:35.780]  who might need a little career inspiration.
[19:35.780 --> 20:05.760]  Thank you.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Henry Wong ...

Henry Wong is an award-winning advertising professonal, author of Telling Your Story, Building Your Brand, and sought-after speaker on Narrative Intelligence. Formerly EVP, Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi, he’s helped shape some of the world’s biggest brands. Now as a brand strategist, board advisor, and keynote speaker, he helps leaders and organizations find clarity in their own stories. His journey reflects a shift from chasing success to designing significance and helping others do the same.

Transcript

[00:00.000 --> 00:11.960]  Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.
[00:12.340 --> 00:26.060]  I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments, such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment,
[00:26.060 --> 00:33.100]  and being able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and greater opportunities.
[00:33.800 --> 00:39.560]  All right. Welcome to the latest Career Advantage Show.
[00:39.860 --> 00:45.080]  Today I'm speaking to Henry Wong, all the way from Toronto, Canada.
[00:46.040 --> 00:51.960]  Henry is a brand strategist, author, and speaker. Welcome, Henry.
[00:51.960 --> 01:00.800]  Thank you, Tony. Thanks so much for having me. Actually, I wish I was in your country hanging out because the weather is quite cold here.
[01:01.260 --> 01:07.080]  So hopefully send some warm vibes my way and we'll have a good session today.
[01:07.940 --> 01:14.700]  Yes, indeed. There's plenty of sunshine in Melbourne, Australia at the moment, so we've got a perfect 20-degree type day.
[01:14.700 --> 01:28.640]  Wonderful. All right. Henry, personal branding has fascinated me now for a number of years, and it did because I started to appreciate as a career coach
[01:28.640 --> 01:41.760]  that people should start identifying less and less with some sort of company title and start connecting to their own personal brand.
[01:41.760 --> 01:50.180]  So I want to explore that in our conversation today. So firstly, let's take you back in your career, in your early days.
[01:50.660 --> 02:00.340]  When did you come across the idea of the importance of a personal brand and storytelling and how those two elements fit together, potentially?
[02:00.340 --> 02:08.580]  You know, I think it was probably in my mid-career, a political group approached me.
[02:08.760 --> 02:16.920]  They had a candidate that they were hoping to put front and center, and they loved the campaigns I was working on for Toyota.
[02:17.560 --> 02:24.360]  And they said, can you do this same sort of idea or notion for our candidate?
[02:24.360 --> 02:29.680]  And I gave it some thought, and I realized that people and products are pretty much the same.
[02:29.840 --> 02:35.660]  So I began structuring a lot of my thinking around people brands as much as product brands.
[02:36.180 --> 02:40.440]  And the answer was, yes, I could. And I helped develop a brand around it.
[02:40.460 --> 02:43.120]  And I realized the commonality was very much the same.
[02:43.180 --> 02:51.540]  And I think it's what you were alluding to, Tony, that a lot of brands are based on a story, some sort of way of connecting with people.
[02:51.540 --> 02:58.060]  So that's really how I got started in this whole area of helping people manage their personal brands.
[02:59.300 --> 03:09.200]  Okay. But was there, before then, was there an experience either very early days of your career or childhood even,
[03:09.780 --> 03:14.820]  where stories started to become seeded or anchored in Henry?
[03:15.620 --> 03:19.880]  Yeah. I mean, I didn't realize it until I connected the dots later in life.
[03:19.880 --> 03:22.620]  But I grew up in the back of a Chinese restaurant.
[03:22.720 --> 03:24.860]  My parents didn't speak a word of English.
[03:24.860 --> 03:30.500]  So I was thrust to front of the house, you know, with barely a command of the English language myself.
[03:30.500 --> 03:40.040]  But I found that by sharing stories, by talking to the customers, not only did I find out a lot about life and people who surrounded me,
[03:40.040 --> 03:49.760]  but the more I shared stories, the more I shared stories, the more personable I was, the more I filled that tip jar that was on the counter.
[03:50.280 --> 04:02.400]  So it was a little bit of an eye-opener for me that stories could lead to better things or a way of shaping even my job and later on my career, of course.
[04:02.400 --> 04:12.980]  I worked in the world of advertising for well over 25 years, and we know the best commercials, the best advertising, the best communications are often story-based.
[04:13.140 --> 04:24.340]  So little did I know back then how much that would inform the career and the life that I'm now leading based on just simple storytelling.
[04:24.340 --> 04:32.780]  So back to that childhood event, they used to tip you when you shared a story.
[04:34.540 --> 04:40.300]  Is that because they really appreciated the story and got something out of it and they connected with you?
[04:40.780 --> 04:42.560]  Because stories do that, don't they?
[04:42.580 --> 04:45.940]  They form a connection, a trust connection, ideally.
[04:46.880 --> 04:48.080]  Yeah, very much so.
[04:48.080 --> 04:57.000]  And I think the ability to share some, I guess, insight into my life opened up that empathy on the other side.
[04:57.060 --> 05:03.720]  Because there are a lot of people who tell stories, and they're not often good stories, but the good stories are the ones that can connect emotionally.
[05:04.440 --> 05:11.180]  And by, I guess, intuition or a heightened sense of EQ, I mean, I was all of 11 back then.
[05:11.180 --> 05:20.440]  And so I just knew by sharing certain elements, I could, you know, connect well with people, and they would like me as a result of that.
[05:20.860 --> 05:31.480]  I could see, and later on in life, as I began dissecting and deconstructing storytelling, I realized these are often the skills that even con artists use, you know, to try to connect people.
[05:31.480 --> 05:38.780]  So I was just using it as a way of, hopefully for good, as opposed to something nefarious.
[05:39.640 --> 05:43.700]  Yes, ethically rather than mischievously, obviously, Henry.
[05:45.100 --> 05:55.960]  Were there TV programs that you were drawn to as a child that, again, reinforced and gave you this story theme for your career journey?
[05:55.960 --> 06:04.220]  Yeah, you know, I think as a child, I mean, just even now to this day, I simply love film, I love movies.
[06:04.580 --> 06:17.320]  And there's a very common structure within movies that I've always applied to helping people and products with their brand, which is there's a problem that's put together that is thrust to the main character.
[06:17.560 --> 06:22.080]  It puts them into a journey, what we often refer to as a hero's journey.
[06:22.080 --> 06:34.600]  They overcome that obstacle, and in doing so, there's a wonderful resolution that is enacted, and people wonderfully identify with it.
[06:34.940 --> 06:42.700]  So it's a very common structure in terms of a story where problem, solution, and then resolution or answer to it.
[06:42.700 --> 06:52.600]  So if you can sort of capture that, even as a person or even as those within business, a case study, it connects well with people.
[06:52.780 --> 06:58.200]  How you do it, how the style of it is enacted really is the magic behind it, of course.
[06:58.340 --> 07:11.820]  But I was very, you know, to answer your question, I was very much influenced by all those wonderful adventure movies, the James Bond movies, the sort of superhero movies of the past.
[07:11.820 --> 07:16.540]  They were just sort of wonderful ways of lighting my imagination up.
[07:16.840 --> 07:21.800]  And I could see it as I trace back in my career and many of the commercials that I created.
[07:21.920 --> 07:35.160]  I could see sort of send-ups or imitations of those James Bond movements, you know, and things of that sort that helped to propel my career, but at the same time helped me structure a story.
[07:35.160 --> 07:44.260]  Yes, on that, I was really captivated by the Indiana Jones movie series.
[07:45.520 --> 07:50.000]  They were very much around the hero's journey aspect of that.
[07:50.340 --> 07:56.620]  I mean, you talked about and led me to my own childhood of that, you know, that little boy behind the counter talking.
[07:56.620 --> 08:05.620]  I was very much like that short-round character, very fast-talking, animated, and was very keyed into what was going on.
[08:05.720 --> 08:12.520]  But I was a little bit of a character for a part of my life as a little Chinese boy growing up.
[08:13.400 --> 08:13.920]  Perfect.
[08:13.920 --> 08:34.240]  All right, so if I was to go back and look back in my corporate day, I rubbed shoulders with a lot of engineering, IT, technology people, finance people, and I would attend presentations about whatever was going on in the company.
[08:34.240 --> 08:49.980]  And, Henry, I would have to endure these presentations that were dry, factual, a lot of PowerPoint slides that really put you to sleep, to be honest.
[08:49.980 --> 09:03.940]  How do we get these people to appreciate the importance of stories and develop the ability to share them?
[09:06.080 --> 09:10.460]  You know, it's very much based on who the audience is.
[09:10.460 --> 09:30.660]  And it can be difficult simply to manifest a story when you're just showing facts and figures and that where the story can come from is a little bit of the behind the scenes, the backstory to it, the background, why it's important for the audience to pay attention to.
[09:30.760 --> 09:34.460]  So there's a context for which it can be presented.
[09:34.460 --> 09:46.440]  But I think as people become better and acquire the skill of storytelling, they'll find ways in which they can make these drier presentations a little bit more friendlier.
[09:46.700 --> 09:52.940]  A lot of it, as you know, particularly where it becomes a lot of data-driven things, it's often top line.
[09:53.600 --> 10:02.400]  People would often gravitate more to what is the essence of what you're presenting, and that can be much more interesting than the facts and figures.
[10:02.400 --> 10:11.280]  Those can be presented later in a structure of telling a story or when you're making a claim through a lot of the work I've done.
[10:11.420 --> 10:15.720]  I find that it's important, but it supports what the main story is.
[10:16.120 --> 10:24.880]  So I think the key to answer your question is really to find the thread by which this information is important and how that story might be weaved in.
[10:24.880 --> 10:41.740]  And that data, that information can be the hero to it, but what brings people along that can help support it would be a terrific way of breaking it down and reconstructing it as a narrative and something that people will be a lot more interested in.
[10:42.600 --> 10:42.780]  Okay.
[10:43.080 --> 10:43.860]  It's interesting.
[10:44.680 --> 10:50.820]  Stories have many uses in a person's career, not just presentations.
[10:50.820 --> 11:08.660]  I remember many years ago working with a younger gentleman, and he was about to go for an interview to be a salesman for a luxury car manufacturer, car dealership.
[11:08.660 --> 11:21.420]  And I knew that at some point in the interview, Henry, they would ask him the question, well, why do you want to, you know, sell cars?
[11:22.400 --> 11:24.220]  And you better have a very good answer.
[11:24.220 --> 11:33.700]  Not only a good answer, preferably a story of why this gentleman was passionate about cars.
[11:33.700 --> 11:40.600]  Because a lot of people now are looking for your passion, not just your skill of being doing anything or something.
[11:41.080 --> 11:43.280]  Because when you're passionate, you're totally committed.
[11:43.600 --> 11:47.080]  When you're committed, you're connected, and you're actually invested in that job.
[11:47.800 --> 11:57.780]  So he, during my conversation with him, our coaching session, he shared a story of as a 17-year-old, his father took him to the Australian Grand Prix.
[12:00.080 --> 12:01.160]  Oh, that's really wonderful.
[12:01.160 --> 12:08.360]  And he had the opportunity to sit behind the wheel on one of the practice days of a Ferrari.
[12:11.060 --> 12:14.160]  And that's where his love of cars came from.
[12:15.440 --> 12:17.700]  So I said, you've got the story.
[12:17.860 --> 12:19.660]  How about you share that at the interview?
[12:20.980 --> 12:22.980]  And I think that's a wonderful take, Tony.
[12:23.040 --> 12:25.540]  I think that was just terrific advice.
[12:25.540 --> 12:32.220]  I've found with many of the people I've worked with, a story really is that conduit to getting to know people.
[12:32.380 --> 12:35.660]  Because I can share with you a resume, which just has facts and figures.
[12:35.660 --> 12:40.200]  But if I told you a little bit more of a tale, like your client, that would be quite wonderful.
[12:40.560 --> 12:43.300]  If I was doing that interview, I'd share a similar story.
[12:43.400 --> 12:48.100]  Mine was really based on all these wonderful road trips that my father used to take the family on.
[12:48.100 --> 12:52.760]  So I have this love affair with cars because it represented a great feeling to it.
[12:53.000 --> 12:59.500]  And this is the sort of feeling that I would bring to the job and help pass on in an infectious way.
[12:59.500 --> 13:10.560]  So as much as story is important, and hopefully what he shared demonstrated his passion and enthusiasm for cars and that,
[13:10.620 --> 13:16.020]  but at the same time translated into what it means for this audience, in this case, the employer.
[13:16.320 --> 13:21.460]  What would it mean to him if he took on that job with that level of enthusiasm?
[13:22.020 --> 13:25.140]  And this is, again, how story comes to that conclusion.
[13:25.140 --> 13:30.140]  And if he can find the right way of doing it, then you can connect very well with people.
[13:31.020 --> 13:35.700]  Yes, no doubt he went on to win that interview.
[13:35.820 --> 13:41.720]  And that story was a key part of it because he was someone who recognized, Henry,
[13:41.840 --> 13:45.700]  that people just don't buy cars for the car just to get around him.
[13:45.920 --> 13:48.180]  There's some deeper meaning to it.
[13:48.460 --> 13:50.520]  Yeah, it fits within the story.
[13:50.860 --> 13:52.600]  Exactly, very much that.
[13:52.600 --> 13:55.140]  For you, it was time with the family.
[13:55.420 --> 14:01.580]  For him as a seven-year-old, he came away and stepped out of that Ferrari feeling more confident
[14:01.580 --> 14:04.860]  that, hey, I've just been behind a Ferrari.
[14:05.520 --> 14:14.680]  And some people derive confidence and status and a feeling of success because they drive a particular car.
[14:16.280 --> 14:17.320]  Very much so.
[14:17.320 --> 14:25.080]  And I think, I mean, to your point, the whole idea of a story is just to unveil an element of yourself.
[14:25.400 --> 14:33.840]  So for those listening, it is really important to have a stable of stories and a way of demonstrating your skill,
[14:33.980 --> 14:41.020]  not simply by saying, yes, I'm a very organized, detailed person or I lead with strong authority.
[14:41.020 --> 14:46.000]  It's having those examples, those little stories, those little stories are really case studies,
[14:46.120 --> 14:50.000]  but told in such a way that they're engaging, told in a not engaging way.
[14:50.080 --> 14:57.260]  They simply become facts and figures and nothing more than data on a screen or rhyming off traits.
[14:57.260 --> 15:08.660]  So the ability to storytell is very paramount to many leaders trying to move a group or lead a organization
[15:08.660 --> 15:12.860]  or simply to connect with people in a more profound way.
[15:13.660 --> 15:14.340]  All right.
[15:14.380 --> 15:20.280]  So just as we wrap up, Henry, if you were working with someone who's listening to this,
[15:20.280 --> 15:27.220]  who says, look, Henry, I'd love for you to sit down with me and unravel my brand story,
[15:28.280 --> 15:33.360]  what would be the three key areas that you would look at to help him do that?
[15:34.380 --> 15:40.980]  You know, I think the most important thing is to be able to stand for something, represent something.
[15:40.980 --> 15:47.860]  And the work I do often delves into very deeply how, what that person stands for.
[15:47.920 --> 15:50.700]  Because once you work out what your unique positioning in the market,
[15:50.700 --> 15:54.560]  then hopefully you have an advantage over your competition,
[15:54.560 --> 15:58.140]  whether it's in the job market or whether it's in the business market.
[15:58.580 --> 16:04.980]  From there, you center on what that key message is that revolves around that positioning.
[16:06.000 --> 16:09.380]  Once you have that key message, then you can build the story around it.
[16:09.380 --> 16:12.600]  So it's a little bit of a process at the same time,
[16:12.600 --> 16:19.840]  but it's going through very much what a product does in terms of unveiling what it stands for.
[16:19.840 --> 16:26.900]  If I said to you, Volvo, you would probably think safety, Apple, you might think innovation.
[16:27.280 --> 16:30.820]  Each of those have a very strong key word in which it stands for.
[16:31.180 --> 16:36.480]  But all the stories that wrap around those key words, that key message, that key position,
[16:36.980 --> 16:39.340]  often will emulate from that.
[16:39.380 --> 16:46.660]  So anybody who is trying to determine what they stand for can create a story once they arrive
[16:46.660 --> 16:50.300]  to what that position and key word and message will be.
[16:50.940 --> 16:53.520]  And is the other element in that the who?
[16:53.860 --> 16:59.620]  Because a lot of these professionals identify with a title rather than with themselves.
[17:01.360 --> 17:01.880]  Yes.
[17:02.400 --> 17:04.580]  How would you bring out the who element, Henry?
[17:04.580 --> 17:13.400]  I think that can be often not dangerous, but confining, because if you are only represented
[17:13.400 --> 17:20.920]  by your title, then if you lose that position or you move on to another one or you're assigned
[17:20.920 --> 17:24.740]  another position, then are you still the same person?
[17:24.860 --> 17:26.200]  Are you still Henry Wong?
[17:26.280 --> 17:28.120]  Are you still Tony Pisanale?
[17:28.120 --> 17:34.160]  What is it about you that can carry forth to each of those positions?
[17:34.320 --> 17:36.860]  And that's really what the personal brand is, because it's portable.
[17:37.360 --> 17:43.900]  You may be defined by a new job, a new company, but your brand should stay the same, which is
[17:43.900 --> 17:49.120]  often based on the things you stand for and the personality that supports it, of course.
[17:49.120 --> 17:50.760]  Well put.
[17:50.900 --> 17:51.300]  All right.
[17:51.640 --> 17:56.720]  So, Henry, you've shared some very powerful insights during our conversation.
[17:56.720 --> 18:02.540]  If people want to find out more about you, and as I mentioned earlier, you're also an
[18:02.540 --> 18:08.500]  author, do you want to just share with people how they can get access to your book and what
[18:08.500 --> 18:09.560]  the book is about as well?
[18:10.340 --> 18:10.760]  Well, sure.
[18:10.760 --> 18:20.280]  Yeah, so I actually have a book that I wrote during the COVID years when I had some downtime.
[18:20.500 --> 18:22.700]  It revolves around storytelling.
[18:23.040 --> 18:25.840]  It's titled Telling Your Story, Building Your Brand.
[18:26.000 --> 18:30.600]  So, it's a playbook for people looking to bring their personal brand to life.
[18:30.800 --> 18:32.260]  It's available on Amazon.
[18:32.580 --> 18:36.480]  Happy to share a link if you have a means to do that.
[18:36.480 --> 18:42.300]  But a lot of what I do these days is talks and keynotes.
[18:42.620 --> 18:48.240]  So, I'm a speaker as well as an author around these very topics in terms of leadership brands,
[18:48.340 --> 18:49.400]  in terms of storytelling.
[18:50.000 --> 18:53.880]  You can find out more about me on henrywong.co.
[18:54.240 --> 18:56.740]  And there's a link to my book there as well.
[18:57.860 --> 18:58.200]  Perfect.
[18:58.360 --> 18:58.760]  All right.
[18:58.940 --> 19:00.580]  Thank you for joining us, Henry.
[19:00.660 --> 19:01.400]  Much appreciated.
[19:01.620 --> 19:02.000]  Thank you.
[19:02.760 --> 19:03.380]  Thank you, Tony.
[19:03.380 --> 19:05.200]  Really great spending time with you.
[19:06.480 --> 19:10.400]  Thanks for tuning in to The Career Advantage Show.
[19:10.960 --> 19:16.740]  Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe and claim your free career confidential toolkit.
[19:17.500 --> 19:24.560]  If you've enjoyed today's episode, I truly appreciate a five-star review on your favorite podcast app.
[19:25.280 --> 19:31.320]  And don't forget to share it with your friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is Marques Ogden ...
 

Marques Ogden Bio

Marques Ogden is a former NFL player who is now an inspirational keynote speaker. He's also the founder and CEO of Ogden Ventures LLC, three-time best-selling author (Sleepless Nights; The Success Cycle), business coach and consultant and the podcast host of Authenticity With Marques Ogden; although his journey didn't come easy or without unrelenting adversity.

After retiring from football, Marques pursued a career in construction and contracting. At 27, he founded a construction company with fast growth but eventually went bankrupt, losing almost two million dollars on one project in 90 days. He pulled himself together during his darkest hours and got a part-time job as a custodian.

Marques rose to the top again with hard work and determination, using his struggles as inspiration to blaze his own trail forward. Now, he shares his powerful story to help others learn how to fail forward and achieve success in their lives. Marques' story and insights as a thought leader have been featured in top publications such as USA Today, Forbes, News Nation, Cheddar News and Authority Magazine. As a speaker, he's landed jobs with over 80 Fortune 500 companies and over 20 Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Intel, JPMorgan Chase and Home Depot.

Marques hopes to continue reaching new levels in his professional career and positively impacting as many people's lives as possible through doing what he loves; speaking on stage and sharing his experiences and knowledge with others.

Transcript

[00:00.980 --> 00:11.960]  Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.
[00:12.540 --> 00:18.640]  I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments,
[00:19.300 --> 00:26.080]  such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment,
[00:26.080 --> 00:33.100]  and been able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and greater opportunities.
[00:33.340 --> 00:40.180]  On today's Career Advantage Show, I will be having a conversation with Marcus Ogden,
[00:40.760 --> 00:48.980]  former NFL player, business owner, and today a speaker and business coach,
[00:49.280 --> 00:53.640]  all the way from North Carolina, from the US. Welcome, Marcus.
[00:53.640 --> 00:56.940]  Why are you, Tony? Thanks for having me on, my friend.
[00:58.160 --> 01:00.020]  Likewise. Thank you for joining us.
[01:00.840 --> 01:11.260]  In looking at some of your story, Marcus, you're big on systems and the importance of systems in terms of winning the game.
[01:11.700 --> 01:17.660]  Now, can you take us back to your NFL days and share with our audience
[01:17.660 --> 01:26.160]  how you first came across the importance of systems, how it was applied at the game level,
[01:26.620 --> 01:34.060]  where you potentially went from a defeat scenario to creating a victory because everyone followed the system.
[01:34.060 --> 01:37.740]  If you can share a story from that history of yours,
[01:37.780 --> 01:43.860]  and then we can look at how people need to apply the importance of system in the way they live their lives.
[01:43.860 --> 01:50.520]  I remember when I was playing for Baltimore, we were playing one of our rivals in our division,
[01:50.620 --> 01:54.460]  the Cleveland Browns, and we were down, I think, 14 to 10 at halftime,
[01:54.620 --> 02:00.180]  and we were really just not executing at a high level that we should have been.
[02:00.580 --> 02:04.620]  I remember our head coach, Brian Billick, talked to us about,
[02:04.620 --> 02:12.020]  hey, you all, you guys are out there working hard, you're playing hard, but you're not following the system.
[02:12.340 --> 02:16.460]  You're not doing the plays the way that we design them during the week,
[02:16.460 --> 02:22.700]  and you're not executing at a high level because you're not really doing the system effectively.
[02:23.220 --> 02:27.160]  So for about 10 minutes, he kind of talked about getting back to the basics,
[02:27.160 --> 02:32.880]  getting back to the systems, how we all need to work together, how we all need to have continuity,
[02:32.880 --> 02:39.500]  and that really got us thinking about how we would practice hard and do well with systems,
[02:39.500 --> 02:45.220]  and when we don't play well without systems, the missing link is the systems.
[02:45.680 --> 02:46.980]  So we were able to turn it around.
[02:47.160 --> 02:51.540]  We won that game 28 to 14 against Cleveland,
[02:51.540 --> 02:57.840]  and I just remember Coach Billick talking about if we're going to win this football game,
[02:57.960 --> 03:03.000]  we got to get back to the basics and we got to get back to utilizing the systems
[03:03.000 --> 03:07.840]  that we've been really working on all week here in the game in the second half.
[03:07.900 --> 03:09.440]  And again, when we did that, right, Tony?
[03:09.580 --> 03:12.100]  We had a positive outcome in that game.
[03:13.140 --> 03:17.920]  What was a key component of what was happening in the first half?
[03:17.920 --> 03:22.940]  For example, was everyone just doing their own thing rather than following the system?
[03:23.040 --> 03:27.000]  And what specific element in the system turned it around, Marcus?
[03:27.740 --> 03:35.480]  So in reality, Tony, we just were not executing the system as far as being all working together.
[03:35.660 --> 03:38.160]  Like, again, people weren't doing their own thing.
[03:38.520 --> 03:42.360]  The timing of what they were doing was not in rhythm, right?
[03:42.360 --> 03:48.840]  So if you're playing a game, especially a game of football, timing, rhythm, and execution
[03:48.840 --> 03:54.340]  really is the makeup of the system, the plays you call against the defense.
[03:54.440 --> 03:55.480]  I'm an offensive lineman, right?
[03:55.720 --> 04:00.260]  But as a whole, the offense and the defense are going to have great timing,
[04:00.760 --> 04:02.820]  great rhythm, and great execution.
[04:03.080 --> 04:05.160]  So our timing was off.
[04:05.340 --> 04:09.420]  Guys weren't doing their own thing, but they were doing it a little bit slower.
[04:09.420 --> 04:12.440]  They weren't doing it, like, you know, at the speed that was needed.
[04:12.740 --> 04:18.260]  And when your timing's off and the rhythm is off, then you're going to play off.
[04:18.420 --> 04:19.580]  I mean, that's just the way that it is.
[04:19.640 --> 04:22.120]  I don't care how much you're trying to do that, right?
[04:22.180 --> 04:25.820]  Tony, but if your timing and rhythm is off, you will be off.
[04:26.000 --> 04:30.540]  So what happened is, in the second half, our timing got better.
[04:31.000 --> 04:32.420]  Guys were running faster.
[04:32.740 --> 04:36.840]  They were actually moving at the right speed and routine that.
[04:36.840 --> 04:42.300]  And then our rhythm being in sync or being aligned, things got better.
[04:42.600 --> 04:43.660]  And we were able to execute.
[04:43.820 --> 04:47.800]  We actually ended up scoring, like I said, about, what was that, 18 points, you know,
[04:47.840 --> 04:50.600]  in the second half and winning that football game.
[04:50.720 --> 04:53.440]  So, you know, when it comes, I can always speak for football.
[04:53.620 --> 04:54.680]  I mean, I love basketball.
[04:55.340 --> 04:56.180]  Baseball's okay.
[04:56.320 --> 04:57.460]  But football's my game.
[04:58.240 --> 05:04.000]  Rhythm, timing, execution, all these things are critical to your long-term success
[05:04.000 --> 05:08.240]  and winning, you know, a sustainable amount of games throughout an NFL season.
[05:09.280 --> 05:09.880]  Okay.
[05:10.000 --> 05:17.880]  So, Marcus, moving on from that, we know that systems don't just play an important part
[05:17.880 --> 05:19.540]  on a football field.
[05:20.440 --> 05:23.400]  They're also very important in business.
[05:23.400 --> 05:30.720]  Did you carry that on in the business world or did you forget that and then something happened
[05:30.720 --> 05:35.180]  in the business world where you thought, you know what, I need a system.
[05:35.760 --> 05:37.280]  Can you share that with us?
[05:37.740 --> 05:37.980]  Yeah.
[05:38.080 --> 05:43.720]  So what happened is, Tony, from my construction company, we actually, when I started out, I
[05:43.720 --> 05:47.060]  was starting in, like, concrete, small concrete work.
[05:47.060 --> 05:52.900]  And then we ended up getting pushed into large earthwork and dirt work and utilities, which
[05:52.900 --> 05:58.320]  is like earth grading, digging up, dirt removal, hauling, all those things.
[05:58.620 --> 06:00.240]  And we really didn't have a system.
[06:00.380 --> 06:04.500]  And then we put one in place and the company grew substantially.
[06:05.160 --> 06:13.460]  The problem I had was the company did not sustain itself because my ego got so massive that I
[06:13.460 --> 06:20.700]  forgot my system, I forgot my people, I forgot how to actually do the things that got me to be a
[06:20.700 --> 06:23.020]  $25 million a year company.
[06:23.620 --> 06:30.860]  And as a result of my ego, see again, right, Tony, my rhythm, my timing, how I was doing was off.
[06:30.860 --> 06:39.220]  And because of that, it caused the system to break down because my key team members, employees,
[06:39.220 --> 06:46.640]  they were feeling off, they were kind of vibing off my rhythm, off what I did or what I didn't
[06:46.640 --> 06:47.000]  do.
[06:47.160 --> 06:52.360]  And as a result of that, that's when I ended up losing everything in that construction
[06:52.360 --> 06:58.620]  company in 2013 and having to move from Baltimore down to Raleigh, North Carolina.
[07:00.460 --> 07:00.940]  Right.
[07:01.080 --> 07:06.300]  So how did, obviously losing a lot of money, Marcus, is never a pleasant experience.
[07:07.200 --> 07:07.640]  No.
[07:07.640 --> 07:10.540]  So how did you pick yourself up off the ground?
[07:12.220 --> 07:17.760]  So when I got down here to Raleigh, right, Tony, I was feeling sorry for myself from April 2013
[07:17.760 --> 07:19.900]  until September 2013.
[07:19.900 --> 07:27.500]  And what happened is I ended up having a rock bottom moment where I ended up having someone's
[07:27.500 --> 07:35.320]  spoiled milk and nasty protruding garbage in this horrible, rotten smelling meat all over me.
[07:35.320 --> 07:43.460]  And that made me realize that I was the one that put myself on this curb, on this corner.
[07:43.660 --> 07:47.020]  And if I'm going to get my life back, it's going to take accountability.
[07:47.440 --> 07:48.640]  It's going to take responsibility.
[07:48.760 --> 07:49.740]  It's going to take humility.
[07:50.020 --> 07:55.200]  Like, I got to stop thinking that the world owes me something because the world owes me nothing.
[07:55.200 --> 08:02.240]  And so once I had that mindset shift, I started to work towards getting my life back.
[08:02.540 --> 08:05.020]  Now, I'm not going to tell you it was easy because it sure wasn't.
[08:05.400 --> 08:09.680]  But that shift happened as a result of my rock bottom moment.
[08:09.680 --> 08:15.960]  And once that moment really hit me like a ton of bricks, right, Tony, that's when I said,
[08:16.080 --> 08:20.040]  okay, if I don't change, I'm going to be here for the rest of my life.
[08:20.160 --> 08:22.940]  And that's when I started to make the change at that time.
[08:24.880 --> 08:32.000]  It's interesting, Mark, is because that moment is obviously a catalyst for throwing us into
[08:32.000 --> 08:40.880]  the world of I'm a victim, and I see that when someone loses that all-important job.
[08:41.600 --> 08:47.600]  And a lot of people stay there for a long time, years if not decades.
[08:47.980 --> 08:53.960]  You were able to lift yourself up in months because you realized, hey, no one's going to
[08:53.960 --> 08:54.840]  come and rescue me.
[08:58.300 --> 08:58.860]  Correct.
[08:58.860 --> 09:04.540]  So that's an important lesson for those listening to this from a career perspective who lose
[09:04.540 --> 09:05.980]  their job or become burnout.
[09:07.040 --> 09:09.380]  Staying in victimhood doesn't pay.
[09:10.540 --> 09:12.540]  You need to wake up and move on.
[09:13.220 --> 09:21.700]  Tony, nobody cares about your hardships, your failures, your problems.
[09:21.820 --> 09:22.860]  They have their own.
[09:23.320 --> 09:28.200]  And so I tell people all the time, if you aren't going to help yourself,
[09:28.200 --> 09:30.420]  why would anybody else?
[09:30.420 --> 09:36.740]  So you have to take the mentality, you have to take the disposition that if you want your
[09:36.740 --> 09:44.760]  life to come back from a hardship or adversity or a struggle, that you have to be the one that
[09:44.760 --> 09:47.600]  gets the train rolling down the tracks.
[09:47.980 --> 09:52.480]  People don't mind helping you, but you have to help yourself first.
[09:52.480 --> 09:58.440]  I don't mind helping people who are struggling as long as I know they're trying to help themselves.
[09:59.320 --> 09:59.960]  Perfect.
[10:00.640 --> 10:10.720]  So, Marcus, we're going from NFL player, business owner, and now a speaker and business speaker and coach.
[10:10.720 --> 10:15.600]  How did that transition occur?
[10:15.800 --> 10:17.440]  Was there someone you met?
[10:17.860 --> 10:20.960]  What was the motivation for that career shift?
[10:20.960 --> 10:30.040]  So what happened was, Tony, I was actually listening to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts by a guy named Tony Robbins.
[10:30.420 --> 10:36.800]  So I said, wow, if Tony Robbins, who was a janitor at some point in his life, he met Jim Rohn,
[10:36.800 --> 10:42.460]  he turned his life around, he became this world-renowned, inspirational speaker.
[10:42.960 --> 10:45.780]  If Tony Robbins could do it, so could I.
[10:45.920 --> 10:55.760]  So in reality, right, Tony, it was just me at that time being open to something different that I'd never done before.
[10:55.880 --> 10:57.940]  And I heard about it through podcasts.
[10:58.280 --> 11:02.180]  And again, I really fell in love with Tony Robbins and his message of, you know,
[11:02.180 --> 11:06.600]  make the mindset shift, the power of the mind, things of that nature.
[11:07.180 --> 11:13.000]  And once I decided I was going to pursue that, I didn't let anything stop me.
[11:13.080 --> 11:19.240]  And again, like I say, it took me two and a half years to get my first paid speaking job, but I never gave up.
[11:19.540 --> 11:21.660]  I never stopped pursuing it.
[11:21.760 --> 11:22.560]  I never quit.
[11:22.980 --> 11:25.340]  And I got my first paid job.
[11:25.520 --> 11:27.580]  I started September 2013.
[11:27.580 --> 11:30.980]  I got my first paid job in April 2016.
[11:30.980 --> 11:35.980]  And that began the journey to where I'm at today.
[11:37.140 --> 11:41.980]  What's the greatest satisfaction that you get out of speaking?
[11:43.800 --> 11:50.280]  Tony, the best thing is when I see people and they're like, have like that aha moment,
[11:50.680 --> 11:54.580]  that light bulb moment that they can do something better.
[11:54.720 --> 11:56.320]  They can be something better.
[11:56.460 --> 11:58.080]  They can achieve something more.
[11:58.140 --> 11:59.780]  They can be something greater.
[11:59.780 --> 12:08.880]  When people have that moment, that is satisfaction to me because I remember when I started speaking,
[12:08.880 --> 12:10.460]  it was really hard to get started.
[12:10.780 --> 12:17.000]  But for me, I had that aha moment when I met Mel Robbins in 2018.
[12:17.000 --> 12:22.180]  And when I met her and she was like, motivation is garbage.
[12:22.540 --> 12:25.520]  Inspiration is long and everlasting.
[12:26.100 --> 12:28.300]  That was my aha moment.
[12:28.600 --> 12:35.120]  So I love to see people develop and or have that light switch turn on in their brain.
[12:35.340 --> 12:37.740]  And they say, yep, I can do this.
[12:37.820 --> 12:38.720]  I can be more.
[12:38.780 --> 12:39.760]  I can achieve more.
[12:39.760 --> 12:40.920]  I can go for more.
[12:42.420 --> 12:51.860]  Isn't it interesting, Marcus, that we reach a point in our lives where it's not our own success that gives us our greatest joy,
[12:51.860 --> 12:57.820]  but it's how we trigger the success in others where the true satisfaction comes.
[12:57.820 --> 13:01.720]  Is that a fair call as we wrap up this interview?
[13:03.100 --> 13:09.500]  Absolutely, Tony, because to me, when other people are doing well, are being great,
[13:09.620 --> 13:14.340]  then at that time and that moment, to me, that's what matters most.
[13:15.520 --> 13:15.840]  Perfect.
[13:16.320 --> 13:22.520]  All right, Marcus, if people listening to this want to reach out to you and know more about what you do,
[13:22.520 --> 13:23.840]  where can they find you?
[13:24.660 --> 13:35.360]  They can find me on our website, www.MarcusOgden.com.
[13:35.480 --> 13:36.820]  You can go to our app.
[13:36.900 --> 13:40.360]  We have an app that's on an Android or an Apple phone, Marcus Ogden,
[13:40.580 --> 13:46.220]  or just shoot me an email, Marcus at MarcusOgden.com.
[13:47.880 --> 13:48.600]  Thank you.
[13:48.600 --> 13:53.500]  All right, well, that's been another episode of the Career Advantage Show,
[13:53.880 --> 13:56.620]  where we had a conversation with Marcus Ogden.
[13:57.100 --> 14:05.300]  If you got a lot out of today's session, please leave us a five-star rating,
[14:05.940 --> 14:11.760]  and don't forget to subscribe and share this communication with others.
[14:12.300 --> 14:12.860]  Thank you.
[14:12.940 --> 14:17.400]  Until next time, make sure you're always reclaiming your power.
[14:17.400 --> 14:18.260]  Thank you.
[14:18.600 --> 14:22.720]  Thanks for tuning in to the Career Advantage Show.
[14:23.280 --> 14:29.060]  Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe and claim your free career confidential toolkit.
[14:29.820 --> 14:36.880]  If you've enjoyed today's episode, I truly appreciate a five-star review on your favorite podcast app.
[14:37.600 --> 14:43.640]  And don't forget to share it with your friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

My very special guest today is John North ...
 

Transforming Entrepreneurs through Cutting-Edge Publishing and Software Solutions...
John North is a 9 Time #1 Best Selling Author (Amazon,USA Today and Wall Street Journal) multifaceted and seasoned entrepreneur, boasting a robust background in Accounting, Banking, Business Management, Finance, Personal Development, IT, Software, and Strategic Marketing..

As the CEO of Evolve Systems Group, John has earned a reputation as a serial entrepreneur by spearheading numerous innovative products and services aimed at empowering business owners and entrepreneurs.His diverse ventures focus primarily on Book Publishing and Software Systems, which are designed to make a tangible difference in the lives of entrepreneurs.

Fueled by a passion for enhancing the marketing intelligence and strategies of business owners, John consistently pushes the boundaries of what's achievable in today's fast-paced world. He is widely acclaimed among his contemporaries for his inventive and highly creative approach to problem-solving.

Transcript

Tony Pisanelli: Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms. I’m Tony Pisanelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who’ve faced career-defining moments—devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, even workplace harassment—and turned those challenges into bigger opportunities. You’re listening to the Career Advantage Show. I am your host, Tony Pisanelli.
My mission is to help professionals reclaim their career power and design a working life on their terms. Today’s special guest is John North. Welcome, John.

John North: How are you doing?

Tony: Great, thank you. John, you’re a best-selling author.

John: Yep—nine so far.

Tony: And a seasoned entrepreneur. You worked extensively in finance and banking. How did those early days shape what you do today?

John: The funny thing about working in a bank is they make you follow a process. You can’t just do whatever you want. You balance the cash a certain way, speak to customers a certain way—everything has a process. That gave me a solid grounding in systems. Handling customer complaints was another big one.
The bank also kind of convinces you your skills are only useful there because they trained you. What I realised was those skills—trustworthiness, keeping confidences, operating professionally—are incredibly valuable in the broader marketplace. I joined the bank at 15, so I got an education in how business actually works that school never gave me.

Tony: Can you pick one defining moment in your banking career that you still carry today?

John: I worked in the bank for about 12 years. Toward the end I was building a side business. I’d landed my dream role—one of the youngest manager’s assistants in Queensland, a couple of years earlier than the age-based system would normally allow. The trouble was I didn’t get my dream manager.
He was terrified of lending money. As a commercial lending manager, he wouldn’t lend. He was always checking, second-guessing—drove me mad. We called him “Bladders” because he behaved like an old woman, writing the address on every side of a parcel “just in case.” In the end I quit and started my IT business.
People say you join for a manager and you leave for a manager. As the manager’s assistant, I spent 90% of my time with him. If you can’t work with that person, it’s untenable. His focus was: no risk, don’t lend, refer everything up so it’s not on him. That’s not banking—that’s career protection.

Tony: So the bureaucracy got to you?

John: The people did. I’d had my share of bad managers; he was the worst for me because he blocked the very work we were meant to do.

Tony: For someone listening who feels constrained in their job and is thinking about jumping ship—what’s the number one piece of advice?

John: Stack as much cash as you can before you start. Cash flow is the single biggest stress in business. Whatever number you think you need, double it—you’ll burn through it.
With less money, you’re more likely to take misfit clients. That creates more problems. If you’ve got cash, you can be fussy. The more successful you get, the more often you say “no.”
Two more tips:

1. Make the reserve a little hard to access—so you have to think before tapping it.

2. Pay yourself first. Don’t live out of the business. Put yourself on a wage and manage your personal life separately, then gradually increase it to apply healthy pressure to sell.

Tony: The place I’ve burnt the most money is marketing. Agree?

John: Yep. You can blow a fortune there. Strangely, the cheapest marketing often works best—low-risk, guerrilla tactics. Referrals are gold, but you only get them if you serve the first client brilliantly. Do what you say you’ll do, keep the client number one, and protect the relationship. That’s straight out of banking—more accounts, happier clients, longer tenure.

Tony: Is it easier to keep an existing client than find the next one?

John: Absolutely. And you can sell more to existing clients. We’ve had authors do second and third books with us—one did four. That happens because the first job was done properly.

Tony: You help authors become best-sellers on Amazon. Is that what gives you the most joy?

John: Partly. As a kid, aptitude tests said “policeman or journalist.” I liked finding things out—so publishing scratches that itch. But the real joy is when a book sells and someone reads it—someone’s helped, maybe even changes their life. A book is also a legacy. And if you’re starting a business, write the book now. It becomes your marketing, your system, your processes—your proof of credibility.

Tony: You’re big on building assets. A book is a key pillar, right?

John: 100%. Think of renting vs owning. Social media is renting—they can evict you any time. Own your website. Own your content. Too many business owners build funnels and sites, then tear them down every six months and start again. Build on what you’ve built.
And don’t host your entire programme on platforms you don’t control. Running your whole community on Facebook? That’s… unwise. You can be locked out for months over a password reset. Same with course platforms—stop paying and your catalogue disappears. Own your assets.

Tony: So the core advice is: own and control your asset base?

John: Own your stuff and focus. Stop chasing shiny tangents that don’t fit your core. Learn to say no—even when the money is tempting. I started my publishing business with a free project (terrible idea—free clients are the least appreciative), then charged a little, then more, until we priced at the value we deliver. It took a year or two to get traction; now we’ve produced hundreds of books. Persistence, aligned to your core, pays.

Tony: So pick your core focus and stay with it—even through a bad month?

John: Ask: did you make a good decision at the start? Do you believe in it? Until you believe in it, no one else will. There has to be a market—or you create one—but keep it tied to your core. I’ve launched offers I thought were brilliant that landed to crickets. That’s fine if it still strengthens the main business.

Tony: How important is knowing your ideal client?

John: Vital—but you often learn it in market, not on a whiteboard. When I sold accounting software, I assumed the buyer was the bloke who owned the business. In reality, the decision-maker was often his wife doing the books. Once I started addressing her needs, sales moved.
Ask clients what they really want. With authors, I always ask: what do you want from this book? Some just want it published—no sales goals at all. Good to know before you map an elaborate marketing plan they don’t want.

Tony: In my case, it wasn’t just about the book—it was the business behind the book.

John: Exactly: the “why.” The money isn’t usually in the book—it’s beyond the book. For non-fiction, build the business in or behind the book. One client gave away thousands of copies at conferences—the book built instant credibility, and the services made the money.

Tony: Do years in organisational life translate into a consulting or speaking business later?

John: They can—if you’re thoughtful about it. You may not see it at 15, but your career builds capabilities you can package. Look at what you do now: what piece could you break off that you enjoy and others value? Don’t start a firm in something you already dislike—you won’t have the energy.
Also, be honest with yourself: if you wake up several days in a row dreading the work, do something about it. Change the business, sell it, or pivot. Nothing’s set in stone.

Tony: If someone wants to write or publish a book, or build and own their platform, how do they find you?

John: The best way is johnnorth.com.au—my personal site that links to everything I do. Whether you want to publish a book or build a platform, it’s all there. Connect on LinkedIn and I might even send you some books for free.

Tony: John, thanks for joining me and sharing the journey from banking to running your own business.

John: My pleasure. If listeners take just one useful idea and act on it, that’s a win.

Tony: There are definitely a couple of gems in there. Thank you.

That’s a wrap on another conversation here on the Career Advantage Show. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d be grateful for a five-star review. Share it with a friend or colleague who might need a boost, and make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe and claim your free Career Confidential Toolkit. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I’d truly appreciate a five-star review on your favourite podcast app—and don’t forget to share it with friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration. Thanks for listening.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/

I am your host, Tony Pisanelli

On this show, we dive deep with our guests to uncover real stories, practical insights, and proven strategies that will help you reclaim your career power, navigate transitions, and design what’s next with confidence.

Welcome to the Career Advantage Show, where we help you reclaim your career power and design your working life on your terms.

I'm Tony Piscinelli, and each week I sit down with leaders who have faced career-defining moments, such as a devastating job loss, burnout, stagnation, or even workplace harassment, and being able to turn these difficult circumstances into powerful and greater opportunities.

The 12 words that empowered my career.
It was 6.30 on a Tuesday evening, after a long, gruelling day in Corporate Australia.
I was walking down a narrow corridor from my office toward the elevator.
I exhaled. I'm finally going home.
Home to my family, a warm, delicious meal, and a moment to breathe, after a day of following one order after another.
Then, a voice cut through the silence behind me.
Where do you think you're going?
I haven't finished with you yet.
It was Doug, the Deputy Chief Finance Officer.
Doug was ambitious, desperate for the top job.
He worked long hours and expected everyone beneath him to do the same.
So, instead of stepping into that elevator, I turned around.
It felt like I was being pulled by an invisible chain.
I sat down at my desk, fired up my computer, and gave Doug another hour of my life.
And in that moment, it hit me.
I was powerless.
A servant to someone else's demands.
You felt it too, haven't you?
Maybe your Doug is your boss, your company, or the system itself.
Someone else decides how late you stay, how much you give, and how much of yourself is left at the end of the day.

Welcome to the Career Advantage Show.

I'm Tony Piscinelli.
If you are facing a major obstacle in your career, a demanding boss, impossible deadlines, burnout, or even the looming axe,
this show is about rising above it.

Here's the truth.
If you don't manage your career, someone else will.
And their plan will not be about your growth, your freedom, or your future.
It will be to serve their agenda.
That's why so many people become trapped, burnt out, and powerless.
Living someone else's story instead of their own.
There is another way.
Most people think the only way out is to quit and find a new job, a new boss, a new company.
That's what millions did during the pandemic.
The phenomenon was called the Great Resignation.
But for many people, the Great Resignation turned into the Great Regret.
Because they traded one employer for another.
The poor problem never changed.
Someone else still held the power.
So I took a different path.
I stayed.
But I changed how I operated.
I asked a career advisor one powerful question.
Who stole my power?
His answer stopped me cold.
No one, he said.
Not even Doug.
You gave it away.
And he was right.
We all do it.
We trade power for a paycheck, for benefits, and for our security.
If I had given it away, then I could take it back.
That's when everything began to shift.
I accepted responsibility.
I stopped seeing myself as a victim.
Because in the victim chair, you're powerless.
Instead, I moved into student mode.
And Doug became my teacher.
That extra hour I gave him, that was my wake-up call.
From that night forward, I refused to be a passive player in my career.
I would begin to manage myself, my career, and most importantly, my life.
That was the turning point.
And years later, it became the foundation for my coaching system.
Helping others reclaim their power.
Because I believe power, or the lack of it, is the core issue underlying almost every career problem.
When you reclaim your power, the dugs of the world no longer control your destiny.
So how do you start reclaiming your power?
Firstly, recognise who holds the power right now.
Is it you or someone else?
And secondly, if it is another person, begin to take it back.
Because it won't be simply handed back to you.
And thirdly, stop seeing yourself as an employee trapped in a system.
So, start becoming the leader, the designer, and the owner of your career story.
Because if you don't, nothing changes.
You'll keep living under someone else's rules, sacrificing your nights, your energy, your future, for their ambitions.
But if you do reclaim it, everything changes.
You create leverage.
You attract opportunities.
You'll live a career that serves you, and the life you want to build.
If this story resonates, don't let it fade.
The first step to rewriting your career story is reclaiming your power.
Download your free Career Confidential Kit.
You'll find the link in the show notes.
It's your starting point for designing a career on your terms, not Doug's.
I'm Tony Piscinelli.
Subscribe, share this with a colleague who's stuck, but more importantly, he's smart enough to know they need to do something and leave a review so others can find the show.

Thanks for tuning into the Career Advantage Show.
Visit thecareeradvantage.show to subscribe and claim your free Career Confidential Toolkit.
If you've enjoyed today's episode, I truly appreciate a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.
And don't forget to share it with your friends and colleagues who might need a little career inspiration.

About The Show

Too many smart professionals feel powerless at work—burned out, boxed in, and living by someone else’s rules. But here’s the truth: no boss, no company, no system owns your power. You gave it away—and you can take it back.

The Career Advantage Show exists because the world of work is shifting faster than ever. People everywhere are questioning their careers—feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and searching for real answers.

Each episode will show you how to reclaim your power, redesign your career story, and build a future on your terms. Because in today’s world, if you don’t take control of your career, someone else surely will.

👉 Subscribe now—and start taking your power back.

Also, visit https://thecareeradvantage.show  to subscribe and to grab your free "Career Confidential Toolkit"

Subscribe and get immediate access!

Want to be a guest on the show?

Apply here:   https://thecareeradvantage.show/page/guest-application

Sponsored by The Career Advantage learn more at https://thecareeradvantage.com/