Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:00:05] Entrepreneurship today demands more than hustle. It requires clarity, humanity, and support from the right people. In this week’s episode, entrepreneurial futurist Andrew Griffiths shares the qualities that underpin long term success, from curiosity to embracing what makes you uniquely human in an AI driven world. Andrew also offers sharp insights on modern marketing and future ready skills. Next up, CEO and author Anthony Moss reveals why advisory boards are a powerful yet overlooked advantage. He explains exactly when to introduce an advisory board, who to invite, and how the right advisers can help leaders break through growth plateaus. From SoundCartel. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
What does it really take to be an entrepreneur?
Our first guest is entrepreneurial futurist, global speaker and best selling author Andrew Griffiths. He joins us to share his thoughts on what it really takes to become an entrepreneur today. From embracing uncertainty to building resilience and generosity, Andrew explains why founders must lean into what makes them unique and stay human in a business world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. He begins by telling me what qualities have helped him to succeed as an entrepreneur.
Andrew Griffiths: [00:01:29] The first quality is that I’ve learned to become comfortable with uncertainty. And I think as entrepreneurs, there is no certainty. You don’t know you’re going to get a pay packet at the end of the week. You don’t know sometimes where your next customer is from. You’re also on the upside, you don’t know what opportunity is going to come in the email when you open it in the morning, so that getting comfortable with uncertainty is certainly one piece. I think the second part for me has certainly been curiosity. And I know that sometimes that can sound a little bit cliched or a bit glib, but I really do think it’s an essential part of being successful as an entrepreneur. Certainly for me, that curiosity about kind of everything that is on your radar, but particularly, I guess, the industry that you’re in, the people that you want to do business with, what you want to sell. But I think we focus our curiosity there. But if you’ve got broader curiosity, you often get great ideas to bring into your business from outside. So that really helps, I think, a bit of self-awareness.
Andrew Griffiths: [00:02:26] Know who you are. Understand your strengths, your weaknesses, the things that you’re good at, the things that you’re not good at. Because the reality is we think we’re going to get better at stuff and we’re probably not. That’s probably the stuff that we need to outsource as well. And I think the other ones that I kind of believed that have been really helpful for me are adaptability, learning to evolve. Now we’ve got to evolve so rapidly. That’s certainly sped up in the 40 years that I’ve been an entrepreneur. Resilience. Times are tough. Times are good. You’ve got to be able to do that roller coaster ride. And of course, the last one for me is that sense of generosity. I think as an entrepreneur and successful business owner, you’ve got to build value. You’ve got to have a mindset of generosity with your customers, with your team, with your community, etc.. So a few ideas in there that I reflect on quite often when I’m teaching others about being successful in business, they’re the kind of ones that seem to come top of mind for me. Grace.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:03:23] Look, I am wondering a lot of people are interested in, I suppose, how they can improve around their own marketing and brand building if they’re in the entrepreneurial space. What are your top tips around marketing and brand building?
Andrew Griffiths: [00:03:33] Yeah, great. It’s really changing a lot right at the moment as well. One of the big things I would say is you’ve got to embrace your unique what makes you different. And we can say that. And in the past, I would certainly say that when I ran a marketing company. You’ve got to embrace what you’re unique. Now, it’s not just a nice thing to say. It’s essential. Your quirks, your scars, your journey, what you do differently, etc. you really have to be able to embrace. You’ve got to be able to identify first and foremost what makes you unique. Then embrace it and then be able to share it with others. Another piece of the puzzle there is we’re living in a world that is moving rapidly towards homogenization. So same, same. We’re using AI to create copy for websites, copy for content, etc. it can’t help but start to all look the same. Even branding, imagery, etc.. So in a few years it’s going to even be more homogenized. So our greatest opportunity with our marketing is to really differentiate again. And obviously that comes back to the point I made before about what makes you unique. And probably the third thing that I would add now more than ever is this need to educate. I think that sometimes we feel like we’ve got to promote, I’ve got to promote what I’m flogging, I’ve got to promote my brand, do that kind of thing. But the reality is that our whoever our customers are, are so overwhelmed, so bombarded with information, so much information on so many platforms. It’s not their job to figure out what it is that we do. It’s our job to teach them. And I think if you reached out and asked ten people that you know exactly what your business does, odds on, they probably don’t know. They might have a rough idea. You’re an accountant, you do tax or you’re a chicken shop. You sell chickens, but they wouldn’t really be able to explain what the real differences are, what makes you unique, etc. so that education one is one that I’m really beating my drum about at the moment.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:05:29] Do you think the skills needed to succeed will change in the next, say, 10 to 15 years? And if so, how can aspiring entrepreneurs prepare?
Andrew Griffiths: [00:05:38] Yeah, I think that again, that’s such a big topic, isn’t it? These days we’re really we’re coming to terms with obviously the world of AI and what that looks like. And it’s such early days in the AI world that like when the internet first started, I even remember that. And and we were all told, if you don’t get a website in the first three weeks, you’re going to go broke. And when social media first started, and all of the bigger things that start, that just happen a little bit quicker each time. There’s been major technological shifts. We’ve had to learn how to do business a little bit differently. I think the fortunate part is it does take a bit longer than we think, even if it’s speeding up. And I even feel with AI now has kind of this massive uptake now it’s levelling out as we’re all getting a bit better, figuring out its strengths, its weaknesses, etc.. So the first thing I want to say is don’t panic. Don’t feel like, oh my God, I’m going to be left behind. If my business isn’t 100% run by AI in the next three days. In saying that though, I do feel that we need to develop certain skills and I believe that the real skills that are of value are going to be the human skills.
Andrew Griffiths: [00:06:44] And they’re the things like empathy, intuition, storytelling, our adaptability, personal communication, etc. and I do a lot of work in this area now, and I think that after the initial excitement of AI eases into that more, how do we use it? How does it really become that tool? Will really start to realize our point of differentiation again, becomes our humanness, and the human skills will really be that significant piece of the puzzle. So my advice there is don’t spend all of your time using AI or developing stuff behind the scenes. People still want to connect. They want to deal with you more now than ever. They want to feel like they’re individuals. They want to talk to the business owner. They want to do those things. So the dream that is often sold is set up a business, make eight figures, whatever that means. Do it all from a laptop and do it in 15 minutes a day is really a fallacy. It’s not really. It’s just stuff that’s getting sold by people that are actually doing that because they’re selling people stuff that promises to do that and doesn’t do it. Focus on the things that make you human. Focus on the things that will differentiate you. Learning about your own kind of agility to change pace, to be able to spend more time studying and researching in real time.
Andrew Griffiths: [00:07:59] What are the your competitors are doing and how your business is shaping evolving, talking more to your customers. If you’re building a community, you can’t build a community on running remotely or without any interaction and really get valuable information. So it all comes back to me again around that need to say, well, embrace your humanness, whatever that looks like when it comes to things for entrepreneurs to aspire to. I guess I always say, look, start with self work. That intersection between personal development and business is so significant. I believe very strongly if you want to build a better business, build a better person first and foremost. And that’s never to say that you’re a bad person or any of that. But we’ve got to learn to do some self reflection. And I think those kind of mirrors that we need to hold up around our value set, our where are we, you know, are we offering value? We’re building a business that matters these days that’s so significant. People want to do business with those kind of businesses that are doing good in the world. So are you doing that? Of course, the other kind of skills for me are things like getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Andrew Griffiths: [00:09:07] That’s always going to happen. The old saying growth lives at the edges. And probably another piece of this puzzle. Two things I would add. One is to invest in learning. Now there’s so much to learn. And that point I made earlier about staying curious and staying relevant. We’ve got to learn so much. We’ve got to learn about AI, we’ve got to learn about communication. We’ve got to learn about our customers. We’ve got to learn about so much different stuff that if we really need to be making sure, in my opinion, that we’re allowing time per day in your calendar to say, well, I spend 1 or 2 hours a day just learning stuff and people go, well, how do you do that? Well, you just do it. It’s important. And probably the last one, I would add that Grace would be about building relationships is really a strong point. Again, that our network, our community, the people that we’re dealing with, that building of relationships, is also getting a little bit lost. If everyone’s remotely doing stuff, we stop actually connecting and just we’re doing emails to tick a list. We’re not actually connecting and engaging like this. And I think that learning how to be better at building relationships, treating that as a priority, is only going to be of benefit.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:10:16] That was entrepreneurial futurist Andrew Griffiths.
Why advisory boards are crucial to success as a CEO
Now to the topic of advisory boards. One powerful way to transform your business is simply getting the right people in the room with you. That’s according to Anthony Moss, director of Lead Your Industry, who says advisory boards are an often overlooked power tool for leaders at every stage. Drawing on his experience as a full time CEO and the principles outlined in his new book, the CEO Game Changer, Anthony explains how advisory boards can sharpen strategic direction and combat what he calls commercial loneliness. To kick our interview off, Anthony tells me what sparked his belief in the power of advisory boards and why so many CEOs still overlook them.
Anthony Moss: [00:11:06] It was only in my third CEO role when I was CEO of Bonds Careers in Sydney, that I joined a peer to peer advisory group via the CEO Institute, and I found that an incredibly valuable experience with my peers really becoming my co advisors, if you like. And eventually, when I joined my consulting practice back in 2003 and started consulting and working with CEOs and setting up advisory boards, I really started to see the incredible value that they can have. The reality is that CEOs are what I describe as commercially lonely, which means that they are the fountain of inspiration and motivation for their team. And whether that’s their leadership team or whether it’s their fellow shareholders or indeed whether it’s their board. And the reality is, along with that is an obligation that there’s a sense that from all of those others, that the CEO actually has all the answers all the time. And the reality is there are only human. And sometimes because decisions are very often gray. Ceos don’t have all the answers or don’t have the confidence immediately. And having a team of experienced, objective advisors that understand your ambition, understand your appetite, understand your capability, who enable you to have safe and confidential conversations with is extremely valuable. So it really is a game changer. The reason why CEOs don’t do it so much is still. And this is why I wrote the book, because it’s still not that well known of kind of what an advisory board is, how it works, and how easy it is to set up. And so I think there’s that lack of knowledge, but then there’s a sense of even if they do have the knowledge, maybe it’s really difficult to set up. And that’s kind of why I wrote the book, which is talking about the why. And then the second half is very much the how.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:13:06] I wanted to also ask. I suspect that some, you know, smaller businesses might not think that an advisory board is for them. So for small to midsize businesses who may think advisory boards are only for large corporates, perhaps when is the right time to introduce an advisory board? And what does a starter advisory board look like?
Anthony Moss: [00:13:24] Okay. Throughout my consulting kind of experience, I’ve built a model where I talk about four levels of maturity for businesses. And those four levels, firstly, are the kind of early stage. The second level is what I call the sort of fighting for position stage. And the fighting for position stage is a stage where a lot of businesses get trapped. You’re kind of you’re established, you’ve got customers, staff, leadership team, etc. but you’re kind of bouncing. Your results are going from sometimes good to sometimes not so good. The third stage I talk about is this transforming stage where you’re really clear and the strategy set and you kind of know what you’re looking to achieve, and you’re not saying yes to every opportunistic or opportunity that comes your way. The fourth stage is what I call industry leadership. And what I mean by industry leadership is that you are known in a market for something, whether that’s a particular product, whether it’s a particular service, business model, whatever that is. Others in the industry are looking at you saying, wow, that’s interesting. So I think the the ideal time to appoint an advisory board is in that fighting for position, transition into that transforming stage, because an advisory board can help you get that strategy right, which is, in my view, the key to break out of that fighting for position role, being really clear about what your value proposition is, who your target markets are, actually putting all your resources into those things. That’s when an advisory board can really help. And in those next two stages where you can access on a fractional basis, if you like, that expertise that’s necessary to enable you to do that leap, that step, change out of that fighting for position mode.
Anthony Moss: [00:15:19] The second part of your question was about what an advisory board might look like. Look, I guess, you know, my passion for these things is for all CEOs to get advice. There’s a I describe in the book about CEOs are typically commercially lonely, which means that they’re the fountain of inspiration for their teams, etc. even the fellow shareholders and even their board, you know, but sometimes they’re only human and they don’t have all the answers. And so, you know, in that environment, it’s actually really beneficial for a CEO to be able to consult with external people who have the right skill sets and objectivity. They’re not emotionally attached to the business because all CEOs are not they’re all emotionally attached to their business. They can’t help but not be attached to their business. And so I guess an advisory board light would be perhaps join that peer to peer advisory board, which as I did, I told you back in 2000 when I joined my first peer to peer advisory board, that was a great eye opener for me. It can also be putting together a small group of people who who have a lot of commercial experience with whom you respect. But the one thing I would say is it’s not about having casual catch ups. The key is to have consistent meetings, and that there is some degree of obligation on your advisors to kind of show up and help. So that’s probably the light version.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:16:48] Let’s take a little bit more into the how for I suppose not just the light version or the starter version. So many leaders struggle with who to invite onto an advisory board. And so this is a big question. What criteria should CEOs use when selecting members, and how can they avoid simply choosing people who think like them?
Anthony Moss: [00:17:06] Yeah. Great question. It’s really tough not to hire people that look like yourself. So for me, who is on your advisory board falls out of that strategy. If I sort of think about an organization that fighting for position mode, the way they get out of that fighting position mode is getting really clear about strategic direction. And when you really have a clear strategy that identifies gaps, gaps in terms of, you know, your market opportunity, gaps that you need to close, but it also identifies gaps in terms of skill sets that you as a CEO or that your leadership team has. And so for me, the skill sets that are needed on the advisory board falls out of that strategy, and they’re designed the advisory board members are designed to fill those gaps. But as I said, kind of on a fractional basis rather than on a full time basis. So whether, you know, your strategy is international expansion, but nobody within your team has done an international expansion strategy before. Whether it’s improving your global supply chain as you shift into international markets, whether it’s building a digital transformation kind of process. So the advisory board skill sets that are required falls out of that strategy. Now, I do talk about you have to talk about the chair, first of all, because the chair needs to help you build that advisory board. And they need to be the right person to certainly with a specific domain expertise that’s relevant to the strategy, as I’ve talked about, but also has a broad enough commercial expertise to be able to kind of understand the context of where you’re at and where your business is at. And interestingly enough, when you look at this, you know who needs to be on my advisory board using this lens. It’s actually, in my experience, been relatively easy to kind of identify people who should be on that advisory board.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:19:03] I’m just wondering, beyond industry expertise, what other, perhaps soft skills or mindsets make someone really effective as an advisory board member?
Anthony Moss: [00:19:12] Yeah, that is a great question because we’re talking about an advisory board, a role which is not the same as a board of directors. There isn’t that same degree of control in an advisory board. The CEO is the person that retains 100% control for the decision making, for who’s on the advisory board, for how frequently it meets, etc. the CEO is kind of in charge, and so the advisors that need to be on an advisory board need to be very comfortable in that advisory role. And what I mean by that is quite often they are, you know, CEOs or ex-ceos themselves, and they’re probably quite used to taking control and making decisions, etc.. And so the soft skills that are really important for advisory board is to have people who recognize that they are actually not in control, that their job is to provide a perspective based upon their experience to the CEO, but also to be mature enough to be able to accept the fact. When a CEO says, well, that’s really interesting. I really appreciate that advice, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do this. And, you know, that’s tough for some people. So I have had experience in some advisory boards where, you know, a particular guru has come on to an advisory board that we thought was going to be fantastic because of their industry experience. But who could not just adjust to that mode out of moving, out of being directive to being advisory?
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:20:44] My final question is really for leaders who have never built an advisory board before, what is the biggest mistake that you see when forming an advisory board, and how could they avoid it?
Anthony Moss: [00:20:53] The biggest mistake is not getting advice. The reality is all CEOs are commercially lonely and all CEOs have bias. We know what we know. We know what we’re good at. The challenge is that we don’t know what we don’t know. And sometimes that means that the decisions that we make might not, in fact, be the best because we don’t have broad perspective. So the first mistake is kind of leaving your head in the sand and saying, I’m going to figure all this out. But the reality is, there are many people that already have walked the way that you want to go. Why not stand on their shoulders and kind of see the horizon from a different perspective? So step one is make sure you’re committed to getting some advice and perspective, whether that’s in the lite version, as we talked about, or a proper structured kind of advisory board. The second mistake that I see sometimes with CEOs, that they don’t see an advisory board as an investment, which is what it is. It’s an investment of time and of money. And therefore the CEO needs to ensure that they maximize the value that they get from that advisory board. And sometimes CEOs lose that commitment in terms of preparation, in terms of reflection and in terms of kind of implementing decisions, etc.. And so some advisory boards can kind of wither on the vine. So my message there is if you’re going to set an advisory board, really commit to it and really articulate the value that you want out of it.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:22:25] That was Anthony Moss, director of Lead Your Industry. Thanks for joining us on this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
