Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Pete Daly-Dickson. Pete, welcome.
Thank you, Thomas. It’s great to be here. Appreciate the invitation for the opportunity to meet you.
It is great to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Yeah, I’d love to. So Peter Dickson. Live in Coventry in the UK. This is an unusual conversation for me because I’m usually talking to people in Australia or America or Sri Lanka, other parts of the world. I’ve been around the sun 52 times, coming up for my 53rd birthday and in that time I’ve had a pretty eclectic – I can’t even really call it a career. I’ve been a computer nerd, I’ve been an actor, I’ve been a sales and marketing professional and now I’m the co-founder and co-host of the sixth, our business podcast and the sixth our business community where all about lifting business to create a better future and to create an environment where business owners that are striving for excellence can be in a community with other business owners that are thinking about business in the same way and thinking about their own personal and business growth in the same way.
Thank you for the introduction. For the sake of definitions, can you tell me what a six star business is?
It’s a great question. That’s why we started the podcast because it’s something that we wanted to explore. they the podcast started from an idle conversation with the person who is now a co-host of the podcast, Avalon Clark and we used to get together every week and one day towards in the last year. I don’t know how or why. I kind of pose the question, why is five stars a limit? It doesn’t matter whether it’s a podcast or an app, or a restaurant or a hotel or business, it’s like five stars is the most that you can get. And I thought, well, if a sick style was available, what would that business have to be like in order to get that six star? And I suppose the question to, you know, a few business owner friends and I found that the conversations that ensued, we’re really interesting and stimulating because there’s something about breaking through and going beyond what is formally thought as, as the maximum what what’s possible kind of tapped into something really interesting and stimulating and have, and at one point I said, well, you know, these are really great conversations, why don’t we have them in public?
Why don’t we start a podcast? And you’ll know as well as I do that saying, let’s start a podcast is a dance site easier than actually doing it. But the rewards for us in terms of the people were meeting in the conversations we’re having, We have made it all worthwhile, as I’m sure it’s true for you. Well, the answer somewhat reminds me of a Tony Robbins, quote something on the lines of success in business is going one step above excellence or something like that, like the fifth star would be excellent and the six star would be one step beyond that, Have you got, what’s your best learnings from the answers of what is it to be a six star business? Oh my goodness me, you know, that could fill a podcast of its own. In fact it does, it’s a six star business. I just, I think the most interesting thing for me came up in an episode which went out a few weeks ago with Jamie McBride, et and raj, Goodman, and Jamie’s got a fascinating background, both in industry, commerce and also in sport, elite sport, and he worked directly with Carol Dweck and you may know and your listeners may know Dr Carol Dweck has the author of mindset all about growth mindset and Jamie shared, which kind of resonates with other conversations we’ve had on individual episodes of the podcast, was that five stars is the most of the business will ever be able to receive from thinking it from a perspective and external validation of the business, with a six star lies inside the business, with the employees and people in the business and their ability to grow and become to achieve their potential, become all that they’re capable of becoming.
So, just thinking about the sixth star as being, being the humans in the business, and that’s one of the other key themes in the conversations we’ve had that a six star businesses driven first and foremost by purpose, there is love in the business where they described as care or compassion or kindness or safety, psychological or otherwise an impact business has to be profitable. It has to embrace as much technology and automation as possible to free the humans up to be human to do what only humans can do when you have a purpose driven enterprise where there is love and there is a profitable impact, you then create the opportunity to create a better future, both for the business owner, the employees in the business and the, the communities around the business, both locally and you know, ultimately global. We were on a mission to small mission to change the world. You know what, go big or go home.
I guess the good answer I first like the answer because it’s sort of rejected external gratification. And then when you went on and said about the, it’s kind of like the philanthropy side of it, or perhaps something like that, you can get an additional star just by doing some good in the world. So, but there was something I wanted to ask you about in relation to the message sent before we started and that was about your story, and how you started in business in 1999 and then sold your business in 2000 and two for £1 now. Yeah. Story there. Oh man, I hit the giddy heights of business success. I sold my business. Yeah. If I end the sentence or the story there, it sort of sounds much better than the than the reality. Yeah, I’m the type of person that uh you know, I’ll jump in with both feet. I’ll run before I can walk.
Going back to the swimming analogy, if I jump into the deep end and I and I think then, you know, fair play, but I’ll certainly give it a good go. and as with most situations, I learned more about business and myself from that first proper business of mine going down the pan, if you like, then then anything. and actually on reflection, it took me a lot longer to get over it and I do that. I put that in quotes because it’s not, it’s not really about getting over it. It’s about fully embracing the, the experience and the learns that that you get from those kind of experiences, but the reality is that I took on too many people I abdicated rather than delegated.
So, you know, you know, the difference between the two kind of just gave things to people to do and kind of just let them get on with it. So the business wasn’t well managed, it wasn’t well run and we didn’t have a lead flow, so, you know, all those things combined together with the fact that one of our biggest clients was a dot com, and we were just starting to take off when dot com went dot bomb at the beginning of two thousands, and so they disappeared as a client and, you know, we couldn’t we couldn’t sustain it, but, but even in that, I kind of just my entrepreneurial blind optimism, so I just kept me go, yes, he’s gonna be okay, and I don’t need to let anyone go, and, you know, that business might still be going if I’d had the balls, if you like to make the tough, tough decisions that have the tough conversations, difficult conversations to keep that, keep that business.
I remember a friend of mine, right, well, I actually don’t know where I heard it first, but it’s something that goes along the lines of your success, and again, in inverted commas, you know, whatever you constitute to be success in life, can be determined as much by the difficult conversations you’re prepared to have, as anything else, and I think as I look back on my life, that is that’s a truism that I think I can, I can, you know, put my hand up and say, yeah, that’s true and it works for me well, thank you for sharing. there was one thing I really want to pick up on because perhaps I’m potentially guilty of it and I think it would be value of valuable to other people as well, which is you said abdication versus delegation. If you were to teach someone or attempt to teach someone that skill of what the difference is there, what would you say and what was your business in?
So what were you doing? The business was in websites, web development, which nowadays, you know, uh, you got people working out of their bedroom doing it. You know, it’s, it’s easy to, to get started back in the day at the end of the nineties. Um, hard to believe, but a lot of people don’t even have an email address, but it’s interesting, I will come back to your question and if I forget it because I go off on a tangent, which I’m, I want to do then bring me back. But that was another learn from that experience. Is that what we, what we take for granted in ourselves, either in our abilities or skills and experience is, is is not the same for other people, basically don’t discount what comes easy to you and what, what comes naturally to you. You know, there are plenty of web design, web development businesses that started a decade, two decades, even after us that are thriving and doing well.
So, you know, I could quite easily have made different decisions and part of those decisions were around, well, everybody knows how to design websites because it’s so, it’s so easy. But coming back to your question is I think, and you said you’re potentially guilty of this, I don’t know whether you’re guilty of what I’m about to say now, but I think it’s true of a lot of entrepreneurs that at heart we are lazy, but it’s the right kind of lazy. there’s a saying which is attributed to Bill Gates, but I think it’s one of these things which, you know, Bill Gates, his name was put to it and that kind of stuck is that when he when he’s got a difficult problem to solve, he will give it to a lazy person because they will, they will find a way of doing it in a way that allows them not to not to be busy.
And I think this whole sort of abdication delegation thing comes in, that when you delegate something, you asked me to attempt to teach it, I just made it up on-the-spot, Thomas say, come on, but I guess this is where my acting training comes in, being able to ad lib, I think of those to teach delegation. It’s a you delegate, you entrust someone with the outcome that is required for the business. So there’s a very clear agreement about what is what is desired, what is the output, what is the, what is the benefit that is going to come to the business? and so the what is agreed, but the howl is up to the person who sort of, the task has been delegated to, or the outcome has been delegated to, but at the same time as that kind of passing on a responsibility, there is still very close accountability between the person that has delegated and the person that has received that responsibility.
And I think this is the accountability piece which is missing when you just look about abdication. So the abdication, there’s still potentially an agreement about what, what is, what is required, what the outcome is, what the output is. but there is the accountability piece is missing. So you’ve effectively just, you’ve abdicated the task and you’ve effectively abdicated responsibility for it. I think that also comes back to this thing about having difficult conversations, because to keep someone accountable, you potentially have to have a conversation which might involve, you know, okay, you said you’d do this or you said you would deliver this, this hasn’t been delivered, what’s happened, and I guess at the time, I didn’t, I didn’t know, I didn’t know myself well enough and I didn’t know how to sort of interact in, I guess ultimately is a coaching conversation I’ve learned I’ve learned the importance of a coaching mindset in in managing people now subsequent to experience in that business.
So that’s what you would do differently now. Look at it more like a as if you were a coach or a mentor. Yeah, I think as I’m kind of making stuff up on the fly here now during this conversation I think, which often where the best stuff comes from, you know, when you just thinking and talking and being stimulated with great questions. I think, I think I think that’s it, yeah, I think high performing, high-performing teams, well I know from the research and working with people that work in the high performance space, that high-performing teams have coaching mindset and coaching philosophy in that because coaching is all about achieving potential. We’ve just started just on that we started watching a great series on Apple tv plus at the moment it’s been around for a fair while, its into its second season now called Ted Lasso, I don’t know if you’ve seen it it’s about an American football coach, a college so amateur American football coach who comes over to coach a Premier League Football team in the UK.
Obviously FC Richmond, I don’t I don’t know my football, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a Premier League football club and yes, he doesn’t know the first thing about soccer, you know, he just doesn’t know. So, so on the one hand, it’s a, it’s a fish out of water story, which is always interesting. It’s a comedy, it’s Jason Sudeikis. So, so, uh, you know, it’s bound to be a comedy, but we were just in the last episode, he was, you know, lambasted in a press conference about not caring whether FC Richmond win or lose. And he was interviewed by one of the journalists separately after the press conference and he called him on it and he said, no, I stand, I stand by that. He said, my, my job as a coach is to make sure that every single one of the lads in the dressing room is becoming every much of the best possible version of themselves that they are capable of becoming. Uh, and I think that’s the, that’s the essence of all or great leadership.
You know whether you’re a coach of a football soccer team or whether you’re the leader of a company or, or a team inside a company. It’s what, what can I, what can I do to ensure that everyone that I’m responsible for is able to become the best possible version of themselves and that kind of feeds back into the Six Star because the best possible version is a little bit better tomorrow than you are today. So that’s how, how you kind of grow and go, yeah, I really like that because I mean it’s sort of a win/win, I suppose, isn’t it? Because I think owners look for best performance, but if you look for making the individual better is in that person’s interest, but it’s also in your interest as well, like a cart before the horse kind of thing. Yeah, definitely. I’m also reminded of another episode we had on the sixth, our business podcast with Robin Miles and Joanna Jang. So Robin is a coach, high performance coach.
Originally trained as a civil engineer, worked on massive civil engineering projects in Africa and whatever. And he talked about, he told a story about, I think it was one of the last jobs he had in enterprise before he went out on his own as a coach as he came into this, this company or this department, he was director of the company and he was, he was heading up this department and you know, there, I think there are at least 100 people on the, on the team. And he asked himself the question, you know, on quite literally the first day of the job is how can I, how can I make this the best possible? We’re not the best possible, how can I make this, this a team be the place that every single member of the team recognises it as being the best work environment they’ve ever been in and if this is their first job and they will, they will struggle to find a team in a work environment better than this in the rest of their career.
And if they’re close to retirement, they’ll be able to look back and say, you know, this is just the most incredible work environment. So he put that question to the team, he said, what would you need to see, feel hear experience for this team to be the best possible environment for you to work in and by extension for you to be able to, to grow in in who you are. And he took everyone on board and sure enough, you know, they just smashed through every single target that had previously been previously been set. So if you focus on the human, again, coming back to that six star approach, if you focus on the humans and treat them with love and as if they are humans as opposed to cogs in the machine. As you said, Thomas, it’s a, it’s a win/win for when, when, when, when, when all the way, regardless of what stakeholder you are or where you are in the, in the whole equation. Thank you. Good reminder for me before we move on from take him in what, in what way reminder?
I think I’ve heard the principal before. but I think it just, you know, certain points, they resonate with you. So like I’m much more inclined to focus on someone. I don’t know. Bettering themselves or feeling good about themselves rather than I am attempting to get better performance from someone has much more motivating for me. And I feel like I could do a bit more of that. So I appreciate the point is what I’m trying to say mm thank you. Before we move on from the web agency, how does a conversation come about where you sell the business for £1? It was one of my clients. So we were doing quite a quite a bit of work with them. I had a relationship, a fairly good relationship with a couple of the partners in the firm. It’s a nominal one part.
I can’t remember if any any money changed hands. I doubt it’s probably an accounting exercise. And they wanted to buy, you know they wanted the goodwill of the of my company, they wanted the client list. And they wanted they wanted me in their business as well. God knows why what he proved that I could run one business in the ground. Did you become an employee after that? I became an employee after that. Yeah but I think there’s a universal truth Thomas I don’t I don’t know if you’ve always been self-employed if you’ve been being employed in in in the corporate world or small business world have you? I think I know what’s coming, but I was once employed. Are you about to say that once you go self-employed, you can never really you can never go back into employment? Well, I was actually gonna say from my perspective, anyway, I became unemployable, you know, once you experience the, regardless of the outcome of what happened, and obviously we’ve already touched briefly on what the outcome was of my first business is once you experience the complete autonomy, you have to I have an idea and execute it and to do whatever the hell you want, when you want to go into an employed position, I’m gonna say, can’t be done.
And that, you know, if you’ve done, if you’ve been self-important, you go back into employment, there’s something wrong with you, I’m not suggesting that in any way, shape or form, but something, I think, I think the reality Thomas is that I was I was that I was that unemployable person right from the very beginning, which is what kind of drove me out. So, what led to me started my first company was I’d I’ve been working as an actor, as I said, that was in my in my past life, acting is just the best job in the world, it really is when you’re when you’re in work? But I describe it as from the point of view that my work as an actor was off and on, and it was more off than on. And it got to a point where it gets to the point, it got to a point with me where, you know, they say if you don’t if you don’t get a part in audition, don’t take it personally, it’s not judging you, you just weren’t right for the part, but there comes a point in time when it’s really hard to not take it personally, you know what I mean?
And I was I was living in Birmingham at the stage and I just thought now I’ve had I’ve had enough. I mean, ironically, if I if I knew then what I know now about networking and relationships and marketing and you know, building connections, I would probably I would probably still be an actor, you know, because you go to drama school and you do the movement and the breath and the voice and the, you know, everything else. It’s part of the the how to of your career, your business as an actor, but the business of being a one man business when you leave that touched that at all. The next question, in terms of the steps towards your SAS business was a lot of experience in sales and marketing. So one of the questions I was going to ask was regarding any principles or things that you fall back on in relation to sales and marketing. Yeah. Questions, questions questions just you just keep asking questions.
And I’m very heavily influenced by a particular sales methodology, a sales process called Sandler sales as any of you have you have you come across that I haven’t come across that particular term, but it made me think of consultative selling is that kind of yet, there’s an aspect to that, but Sandler sales is a particular methodology. It’s a franchise business. And as part of my career, let’s just use that as a as a placeholder for my evolution to where I am now. I was an associate for a couple of franchises to two guys owned a sign of sales franchise and I was an associate for them. So I was I was exposed to that that environment and that that method of selling for for quite a period of time. And I think one of the things that really attracted me to it was at the time, I was also doing a foundation course in transactional analysis, which is a a mode of well it’s often used in therapy.
You have t a transaction analysis therapists but fundamentally transactional analysis is a way of explaining the and analysing the transactions between humans and transaction is typically expressed in the way of communication. and it uses ego states, you know, we’re in one of an adult parent or child ego state in any, in any interaction with another human. And when I stumbled, I guess across Sandler, I realised that today was one of the, one of the things that David Sandler back in the day that the guy that pulled this sales methodology together. That was one of the things that he used to create the sort of foundation of the sales, the sales conversation. But it’s, it’s all about, it’s all about the questions. Uh, and you know, just, you just keep, keep exploring and keep asking questions as well as going through a very clearly defined process.
It’s a good way to know whether or not what you’re offering is beneficial to the other person as well, because if it is the case that someone is not the right prospects, then it’s very easy to tell that I would say. Yeah. And also, there’s things like, I mean, even now I hear Sandler rules come into my head when I’m in a conversation with someone. Uh, but the first, the first step in a sales conversation is what they call in the sign of terms, what they call an upfront contract. In other terms, it could, you might call it an agenda. So when you, when you start a ostensibly a sales conversation with someone, you get agreement with the person you’re talking to about why you’re both there, how long you’ve got to have the conversation and what acceptable outcomes are at the end. And then you get agreement on that and then you, you go through the, go through the process. And just little things like that and one of the, one of the key sayings, which I’m sure I will never forget in the side of the world is that if you don’t have a system for selling, you are at the mercy of the buyers system for buying and they’ve got a heck of a lot more experience at doing that than you do.
So, you know, anyone listening to this, if you’re involved in some way in in sales either because you’re a business owner and there’s no, no one else to do it or you, you are in sales then get a system in a way, it doesn’t really matter what that system is, just have one and stick to it. You know, if you can prove it some way that empirically that system works, then um, then then stick to it. Great point. So, um, at what point do you consider or start your business? It’s a great question. So earlier I mentioned about your success in life being partly predicated by the number of difficult conversations you’re, um, you’re prepared to have. It was a difficult conversation that I had back in 2000 and further than 2009, 2010 and it was with my accountant at the time. Well, I couldn’t afford to pay his bill. But I sucked it up if you like and asked her to meet him and just had an open frank conversation and from that conversation he and I shared with him you know what I was what I was doing at the time I was I was working with Infusion Soft and ID I think by that stage I know I hadn’t become a partner.
That was that was still to come, there must have been 2000 and 10. So I had I had come across Infusion Soft when I was working with the franchisees, a Sandler franchisees and then then ended up spending more time kind of implementing their infusion soft system that actually doing what I was supposed to be doing as an associate. So they said okay well why don’t you leave our employment and we’ll be your first client if you like as a as an infusion soft consultant. So I did that and then just going back this conversation with my accountant from that conversation he opened up his the training room in is in his office is for me to use to run some seminars and he opened up his client bank for me to be able to phone them to invite them to a seminar at this guy’s, this guy’s office all around the importance of automation in marketing, you know what the problem that infusion soft cells and as a result of that one of the one of the people that came to one of those seminars, I ended up working with him for quite a bit.
And it got to a point where relationship had developed, where he was actually willing to pay for me to do the training to become an infusion soft partner and infusion soft consultant. I had to fly myself out to phoenix, but if I did that then he paid for the course fees. So I did that in 2011, December of 2011 became a fully-fledged infusion soft consultant, infusion soft partner. But because of my technical background, I was always working more on the kind of back end of infusions. Often I was on the on the on the front and helping businesses with their marketing. So I was typically helping my clients integrate infusion soft with something else. So they had another system in their business and they wanted the two systems to talk to each other and when you’re involved with and whether it’s just my mindset or whether it’s the entrepreneurial mindset, I I don’t know, I suspect it’s more the entrepreneurial mindset than anything else. Is that when you see a problem, repeated, you think you start to think well maybe there’s an opportunity here, you know, if enough people seem to be having a problem then you know, maybe I can create something to solve that.
So I did that in 2000 and 16 I started working with my developer and the Philippines who had by that stage. I’ve been working with them closely for a couple of years and we started developing it wasn’t a SAAS product at the time, but it was an add on for infusion soft. So if you had if you had infusion soft and you had this particular problem then the add on that i that we created could solve this problem. But then fast forward to that was 2016 and fast forward to 2000 and 19. And it got to the point where I recognised that it wasn’t an infusion soft problem, it was a business problem. So that was a time where we sort of disentangled my software from infusion Soft and set it up as a stand alone SAAS product in its own right. And that was that was the end of 2019, beginning of 2000 and 2020 that was that that little journey, I appreciate this question is going to give me an opportunity to a to reminisce if you like, therapeutic.
It’s great. Well done for solving that problem. Anyway, do you mind talking about your exit the process and how that was for you? Yeah, it’s still it’s still quite it’s still quite current, had an email from along the journey. I say picked up that kind of done a great relationship. I found myself working very closely with, with a couple of people and they became co-founders in the company that we set up to be the SAS sort of standalone SAS product. And I just got an email from, from one of them yesterday, you know, about the terms of the, of the exit. So it’s still very current. It’s still raw, is probably a bit, uh, you know, the, the, the thespian and me, the melodramatic and me will say, yeah, it’s incredibly roaring and painful and, oh my God.
But I’m a firm believer in if you, if you make the, at any given moment in time, if the decision that you make is made with as much information as you have as you have available to you at the time and you are comfortable with the decision you make at that time, then it was the right decision to make. And he got to the point in the business where, you know, there’s no harm, no foul, certainly from my perspective between my co-founders on myself, but it was evident that we saw the position of our uh, software in the market and how to how to grow that, that software in the market. We saw it in fundamentally different ways and those two different ways in my mind could not coexist in the same in the same company. Uh, so because one of my co-founders had proven himself to be a phenomenal product manager.
He had to coral the development team. He was actually fundamentally responsible for disentangling in, um, our software from, from Infusion Soft, which was no, no small, no small task, no small undertaking. because he proved himself so well in that regard. And because at the end of the day it was a, the product was the company in some, in some level, uh, that it got to a point where I saw that one or either of us had to create some distance. And, and so we had a conversation and just said, you know, do you want to step up into, um, the top, the top position and take responsibility for moving the company forward. Um, uh, and he did, yeah. So do you still have, because when I said exited what I thought was it would be like a, you’ve sold your shares essentially. Do you still have an ownership in the people’s company?
I do still have a have an ownership. That was, that was what the email was about yesterday. So we just, we’re still, yeah, negotiating that I suppose okay. Kind of like silent partner at the moment then at the moment, Yeah, I’ve gotten some very mixed feedback about exiting a business. So I think a lot of, I know, uh, maybe, I suppose the positive side of it is um, like I’ve, I’ve run this for as long as I can, although it was a bit bittersweet, it was still the right time to go, if you see what I mean, That’s like one side of it, the other side of it is like, I’ve lost all the I’ve lost the reason to get out of bed in the morning is essentially the other side, the kind of negative side of of exiting a business. And it’s it’s really surprising because the exit, it’s like a successful certainly viewed as a successful thing to do, I think, you know, selling your business and moving on to the next thing, but in terms of how it actually, the reality of it seems like it’s not such a positive experience.
Have you heard any of those stories? Yeah, it’s always, always at a distance though, just reading about it in in you know, in articles or in magazines or whatever. I mean, it’s interesting that you talked about those two different scenarios if you like, and one of them being, you know, lost the kind of, the why, if you like, of the passion to get out of bed and go to work, is that the irony is that when we think back to what one of the hallmarks of a six star businesses is that it is first and foremost purpose driven, is that i I was I was always driven by purpose, inside that company that I had created with my co-founders we had whether it was purpose or a statement.
We were influenced, I think by Simon Sinek when he said that the people don’t buy what you do, they buy because they buy from you because they believe what you believe, and we have stated that we believe the world will be a better place when every human is able to deliver the highest value and that our product had had a part to play in that, because fundamentally, our product helps businesses to automate a lot of the kind of humdrum stuff which businesses often don’t think can be automated. again, when we think back to, if anyone listens to this and realise the beginning, I talked about fully embracing technology and automation is as part of a six our business as well, because it frees up the humans to be more human. that I saw I saw our our software as having a part to play with that. Obviously, now that I’ve kind of stepped away from being involved in a company that was just involved in one small area, once more principal of a six star business, and actually looking at what constitutes a six star business in its entirety, is the that the fact that my co-founders didn’t embrace the in my view, didn’t fully embrace the purpose of the software that we were, we were building.
That was what fundamentally, that was what made it in my head anyway, impossible for us to carry on in business together because there was no shared alignment of that purpose in business is everything. I know you’ve had a few people, you’ve had a few episodes on, on your podcast Thomas of people talking about, about purpose and there’s a reason, there’s a, there’s a great episode of our podcast, I’m sorry to keep talking about mine, but I’m just remembering the conversations that we’ve had, and I asked, we asked the question at one, at one point of them, it was towards the end and we said, so hang on, let me ask you a question, is it possible to have a six star business without having a really clearly articulated purpose, the kind of purpose that you guys have expressed about your businesses. And one of them replied before, the question was out of my mouth, he said no, you know, categorically not. And the other guy that was Dave Rice and the other guy, you see Lou Cannon, um, a Finnish kiwi finished guy living in in New Zealand, he said, you know, you may, you may make a lot of money, you may be incredible, incredibly profitable.
In fact, there’s a five star business, you would probably make a ton of cash, but then you’ll die. And he says that it’s like, yeah, okay, and it’s actually that purpose, which creates the, that, that, that kind of overarching reason for being a business and ultimately allows you to leave that legacy. I mean on that episode, we were talking about 1000 year old businesses, you know, there’s a business in Japan that has been going in some continuous form for over 1000 years, that’s, that’s a six car business and that ultimately come back and you think, yes, there’s, there’s purpose at the heart of that business. Do you know what it is at all? Yeah, it’s a, it’s a business that, that makes, it’s on a pilgrimage trail. So it’s on, it’s on the route to a particular shrine in, in Japan and they make one particular rice cake or, or a delicacy or something, just, they just make this one thing.
And pilgrims that are on the journey to the, to the shrine, they all stop at this um, at this place to, to uh, to, to buy their, um, whatever it is, I should, I love the idea of 1000 year old business say more, I should so much, I should, I should learn to learn the story. But also, I can tell you what food, food products essentially. Yeah, that’s pretty safe bet if you wanna, if you wanna be in business for a while, isn’t it? Yeah, But, but interestingly, they didn’t, they didn’t branch out and think, okay, well we, we’ve, we’ve got really good business with this this particular product, Let’s go and let’s go and do others, and let’s open up more, you know, more shops and things on another pilgrimage trails, they just, they just knew why they existed and that was to serve the pilgrims that were on the way to this particular shine. because of that, they’re still in business 1000 years after they started. Cool, so that brings us to sort of current, current day at least business wise.
Anyway, I know your life is probably a lot more complex than that, but from my perspective, you’re, it seems you’re quite passionate about the podcast, which is very cool, but you also do some stuff with marketing agencies as well, is that right? I do some stuff with marketing agencies and it’s more in the in the background really because one of the things that was fundamentally wrong in that business that I sold for a pound was that there was no monthly recurring revenue, it was every month, it was like, okay where the client’s gonna come from this month, what new projects can we get on? And one of the things that you get with a SAS business of software as a service business is you get monthly recurring revenue. So you wake up on the first of the month and you know that all your bills are covered, your payrolls covered. and what you do in the business that month can be focused on, on growing the business, on working on things that that really excite you and motivate you.
So I’ve got a particular tool set that for the right marketing agency, if I’m having a conversation cause I’m talking to people all the time, whether it be on LinkedIn or lunch club or what have you that if I’m talking to a marketing agency and I hear them talk about kind of frustrations that I know this particular toolset solves and I may talk to them about it. I sort of share my story of the pain of not having monthly recurring revenue and that often resonates with the kind of people. And then the and the irony actually Thomas is that just thinking back to the exit out of the software company at the beginning of the year. Is that how I said that me and my co-founders saw differently about how to grow the business is I absolutely, you know, I will, I will swear on whatever holy book, you know, whatever anyone wants me to swear on. and I had the slides of the presentation to prove it, that my idea was to use the white label function of our software to approach marketing agencies to allow them to white label our system and use it to create a form of monte recurring revenue for their own business, a software based form of monthly recurring revenue.
And that was what I couldn’t get to fly in, you know, with my co-founders and the irony of it coming full circle is that in in transitioning away and stepping away from my own software company, I found another software company that was set up to serve exclusively marketing agencies and serve them in a way exclusively in the way that I wanted to serve them in my own business. In other words, helping marketing agencies create a software based stream of monthly recurring revenue which can pay all their bills basically underwrite their underwrite their business interesting. So, just coming back to the podcast for a moment, why do you do it? My dear podcast, What a brilliant question. And the sign of the sales trained person in me wants to say a really, really great, great question I’ll ask you just before I do let me ask you a question, why do you podcast?
Well, um, I can tell you what I what I think is the answer. initially, because we sort of briefly touched upon this previously about the fact that you’re normally a host, but you’re a guest in this particular instance. I started going on people’s podcasts. I think I went on about four podcasts um, and I felt like I really needed to prepare and you know, I put a lot of effort into my appearance is and everything like that. And I just found that I am so much, it’s almost effortless for me to be a host, but it takes a lot of brainpower if you’d like to be a guest. I’m just to do that as much as I believe in being able to determine what kind of person you’re gonna be. I also do think that you are naturally good at certain things and you’re naturally not so good at other things. So I’m quite good as a host, I struggle more as a guest. So I switched from being a guest to a host.
And the idea originally was for the purpose of creating content, so because, you know, create content, build an audience and eventually you’ll have inbound leads. That’s kind of the um, the original intent behind it, but after a while it really just became about talking to people. I like talking to people and I like hearing about, you know, lessons that they’ve learned. and I I also found that I created some content awhile back on my own and it kind of met the same criteria in the sense that you’re producing content in order to build an audience. But I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it because I found this format much more engaging, you know, I like to meet people and I really, I do it to speak to people now, speak to interesting people and I don’t necessarily mind what the outcome is one way or the other and so I would do it if there was no outcome. So that’s my answer. Whether or not it’s a good answer is different, different.
Well, just in your answer now, I thought about something that we talked about briefly earlier on in our conversation that is about not discounting what is that comes easily to you or that you seem that there seems effortless because you mentioned that you is fairly effortless for you to be a host. You are a supremely good host of the podcast. You have made it extremely easy and comfortable to talk and to open up. the fact that that comes effortlessly to you, what I’m saying is don’t discount that. It’s a, it’s a gift that you have and I’m not surprised that as you’ve gone on with your own podcast that you really just seeing it as an opportunity to meet people and I think now that have Evelyn and I have, so we released the first episode on the 27th of March.
So it’s coming up to April, May, June, July, I can’t do a month, I can’t do month math in my head. it’s 55 months now that we’ve been releasing one or two episodes a week. It’s funny, we went with one and we’re having so many great conversations that we wanted to have more of them. So we said, let’s go to two episodes a week. So we did that very quickly realised that we just didn’t have the capacity of the resources to do the editing and everything else. So we kind of scaled back, we’ve had conversations now with, with close on 70 people because our, our former is to host two guests per, per episode. and we do it now because it’s an excuse for us to contact anybody on the planet that we want to have a conversation with that is in any way in alignment with being better, doing better. and because I think it was Jim Rohn said that you become what Jim Rohn said, you become like the five people you spend the most time with for my perspective, the more, the more time that I can spend around six are people, people that think about life and business in 1/6 our way, the more likely I am to be continually challenged to raise my standards, raise the bar do better tomorrow than I did today.
So that’s ultimately why we do the podcast and it’s also a great um, so we, we went from an idle conversation between you and me to do in the podcast and that evolved into the community because what we found at the end of our conversations with our amazing guest was we don’t, we get like 45 minutes in and the conversation would change gear, and we start to, to go deeper and it’s like, well, well we’ve got to stop, so we created a community where we can carry on the conversation with our guests and our guests can connect and learn and trade with other people that, that are, you know, obviously an alignment in some way with the sixth, our business principles and then so what we’re doing now is at the end of every episode of the podcast, we, we invite the guests into, into the community, so we’re kind of creating, creating the environment, have and I are creating the environment for us to to be all that we can, can be great answer, I love it, you’re basically choosing who your peer group is.
Yeah, well, I kind of feel like we’ve just done what, what you said, which was, I feel like we could go on with this conversation, especially given the fact that you mentioned Jim Rohn and I got loads of Jim Rohn quotes that I, that I like to pull from, but I said initially I was going to ask you about your goals, So Pete, what are your goals? So our current goal at the moment is to publish the first volume of a three volume book called How to be a six star business. So one of the, one of the things that we’ve done inside the community collectively as a community is uh, we asked ourselves the question, what is a six star business? So we’ve had these brilliant conversations on the podcast. There’s lots of themes and ideas and topics which are coming up, but it’s still very kind of ethereal and vague and you know, not something that you got to put your finger on it and it kind of disappears. So what is the sixth our business? So he posed that question to the community and we did a collaborative exercise which was facilitated by, you see who I mentioned earlier, who’s just a gifted facilitator.
And out of that process, we came up with the model of, of a six car business. That’s where the purpose of love and impact comes in and each one of those pillars, if you like, has principles around the outside. Uh, and then when we got, when we got sort of clarity on what makes a six our business that really lit a fire under having me and other people in the community to say, well, what can we do to get to get this message about what, what is a six star business? Both, what is it how to how to be it and what you can expect as a business owner when your business is six star, how do we get out of that out too, as many businesses as possible? Uh, so we put our heads together and we came up, well, why don’t we, why don’t we collectively write a book? Why don’t we collaborate on putting a book together, which kind of starts to um, to codify and describe how to be a six star business.
So we’ve got seven authors shy of 25 authors for the 24 chapters in the first volume. And our goal is to publish out before the end of end of October we’re working with a publisher in Houston, so we’re looking at global distribution in bookshops as well as Amazon. You know, we’re not we’re not taking the easy route of just self-publishing with six star, it’s hard to be a six hour business, so we’ve got to approach it from a six star perspective, that’s our, that’s our one thing at the moment, you know, for any of your listeners that familiar with that, that book. Um, one thing is, is get the book published, Well, you have a buyer here, so if you’re doing some sort of, I don’t know, email list launch or something like that, feel free to put me on it. Happy to buy because it would be an interesting read, no doubt, but for other people for the sake of other people, where is the best place that they can find you. Um, well, anyone is welcome to a one month guest pass of the community, they can, they can come in, they can experience the accelerators that were six star accelerators that we run every two weeks, so they are by members.
Four members where a member will present for 2030 minutes on an idea or concept or strategy or tactic about tangibly moving a business towards six stars on, you know, be on that on that six star journey. they’re promoted both internally in the community and externally on LinkedIn. So we’ve effectively created a platform for six star business community members to kind of let their genius shine if you like to the world. so that’s one of the things that goes on inside the community and that’s a guest pass dot six, our business dot community and it’s always the numeral six to guest pass 60.6. Our business community is probably the best way. Yeah, happily look forward to welcoming anyone that wants to come and knock on the door.
Brilliant, thank you very much for your time today, Pete I’ve enjoyed it.
Not half as much as I have, Thomas, I can assure you