[00:00:00] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: What separates businesses that thrive from those that stall? And how can leaders build workplaces where people perform at their best? Bernadette Schwerdt is a speaker, best selling author, ghostwriter, and author of the new book ‘Secrets of the New Online Entrepreneurs’. In her book, Bernadette reveals what drives successful founders from scaling strategies to spotting trends early. Then senior psychologist and managing director at Barrington Centre, Rhonda Andrews, explains why psychological safety matters more than ever in workplaces today. She offers practical ways leaders can build stronger, more productive teams. From SoundCartel, I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
From simple ideas to million-dollar brands: Australia’s new online entrepreneurs
Our first guest is Bernadette Schwerdt. She’s founder of the Australian School of Copywriting, as well as a speaker, ghost rider and best selling author. In her new book, ‘Secrets of the New Online Entrepreneurs’, Bernadette sheds light on what separates businesses that thrive from those that stall and how leaders can build workplaces where people perform at their best. For her book, Bernadette looked across more than 30 Australian success stories. So I kicked off the interview by asking her what patterns consistently separated the businesses that became category leaders from those that stayed small.
[00:01:28] Bernadette Schwerdt: I think the key ideas that came through were they started small. Some of them and others obviously had big intentions, but the gist of it was they just got a sale. You know, I think that’s the important thing is once you’ve got a sale, you’ve basically got a business. Until then, it’s just a concept. So that would be the first thing is just get started. I think the other thing is mindset in terms of understanding that there are going to be surprises, there’s going to be problems, there’s going to be issues. And Sally says this a lot that if he can be less surprised about what you are going to encounter, then you can meet those problems with equanimity and the ability to actually plan. And that would be the next thing, would be pre-mortems. That sense of identifying what could go wrong before it goes wrong. So you’ve got the risk register and all these plans in place, and the team know and understand what to do next. I think also knowing what you want in the sense of what you want from the business. So you might want to go big or you might want to have a lifestyle business. Now, you can’t always know that at the beginning, but having an inkling that if you’re going to go big and list, are you going to need international travel? You know, Matt Rockman from ct.com, he said he was away weeks out of every month.
[00:02:44] Bernadette Schwerdt: His wife was the sick widow and he was, you know, they had 10,000 clients around the world. So he was always pressing the flesh somewhere. And he said, at the end of ten years, he said, I had to make a decision. Is it going to be my lifestyle, my health or the business. And that’s when he chose to exit. He even gave Leibovich, who did catch of the day, and Menulog when they listed well, they tried to list. They were doing 70 meetings in seven days around the world, and even his day to day schedule was intense. So when you go big, I think you’ve got to be prepared for issues with your health, your relationships, and know you’re going to miss out on certain things or go small. Have a lifestyle business. Yes. You won’t do maybe the seven, eight, nine figure exits, but you’ll be there for your children’s sports day, you know, for the the birthdays. And you can still have a very good income, but you may not just have, you know, the big teams and all the accolades that come with being on the world stage. So I think knowing what you want is really critical from the get go.
[00:03:43] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: So for Australian business leaders who already have an established company, what are the biggest lessons from these online first entrepreneurs about spotting new growth opportunities early before the market shifts?
[00:03:55] Bernadette Schwerdt: I love the concept of the pendulum and as you can imagine, a pendulum swings from side to side. And what happens is a lot of attention goes where the pendulum is. And the example I use in the book is noise. Like we have a lot of noise right now, you know, both outside in terms of leaf blowers and cars and dogs and whatever. But we also have a lot of noise and phone noise and, you know, Google noise, a lot of sort of stuff coming into our consciousness. And so when that’s happening, what leaves in its wake is an opportunity. It’s the gap and that is silence. And if you look at the rise of things like the calm app, that’s worth billions of dollars, and it hasn’t even been around that long, but that’s a signal that people are seeking sanctuary and stillness. If you look at Tim Garner’s Saint Haven wellness sanctuaries dotted throughout Australia, very high well heeled clubs, very expensive memberships. But you go and you get that sanctuary, that stillness, that sort of digital detox. If you look at, you know, silent discos, Coles and Woolies are having very quiet nights, you know, in terms of sensory sensitivities. Meditation retreats like Vipassana, I meditate, I haven’t been on Vipassana yet, but it’s a ten day silent retreat that used to be a niche activity for dedicated meditators and Buddhists.
[00:05:13] Bernadette Schwerdt: Now it’s standard. It’s sold out, you know, a year or two in advance. So these kinds of silent businesses and like sound cancelling headphones and hotel rooms that are quiet and quiet cafes, quiet carriages, all these things are in response to the oversaturation of noise. So to answer the question, if you know where the pendulum is heading, then you can spot where the gap is and you can be there before everyone else arrives. And what I’m seeing right now, both anecdotally, but also in the research, is the rise of slow media. A friend of mine works at RMIT and she’s in the marketing area, and she was saying that they’re pivoting now to magazines, you know, like real magazines, not things, but printed magazines, in-person activities, events, these kinds of things where closed platforms like Signal and Discord, where that sense of oversharing and performative promotion is getting a little tiresome. So that’s kind of in response to this oversaturation of, you know, being out there and being seen to be doing well. People are saying, I want to be known in my small community. I don’t have to be known by the masses.
[00:06:20] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: So many entrepreneurs focus heavily on launch, but your book is interesting because it also explores valuation, scale, and exit. So I wonder if you can tell me, Bernadette, what should founders be doing much earlier? If they want to build a business that is genuinely valuable and scales well?
[00:06:35] Bernadette Schwerdt: Yeah, this is a really interesting one for me too, because I didn’t do this with my own business. So the first thing is know your outcome. Again, you can’t always know what you want, but if you at least have an inkling that you would like to sell the business, you know, in 5 to 10 years time and, and ten years is kind of the minimum that businesses seem to need to get traction. So that’s another mental point. Can you invest ten years in this business? It’s not going to be a quick win. But even knowing the metrics about what people look for when they buy a business, Kobe cements in my book, and he sold his business for over $20 million and it was a coaching business. And he said if he’d known he was going to sell the business, he firstly would have known what those metrics were before he started. He would have employed, you know, a COO or CEO earlier and removed himself from the day to day of the business. So just knowing the metrics about what multiples are connected to your industry, you know, is it technology multiples? Is it retail multiples? Is it tourism multiples? What kind of revenue model have you got? Is it subscription? Is it recurring revenue? How are you going to remove yourself? Are you the key person that business is attracted to? You know, you don’t want to be being the only thing that’s attractive to your business.
[00:07:45] Bernadette Schwerdt: So I would say get clear about what you value and what people would value. Do your documentation to like your due diligence, because it takes over a year for many businesses to do that due diligence. So things like own your website domain properly, own your logo, own your graphic design, because most people don’t realize that the logo that you get is often owned by the graphic designer. And when people have had to sell their business, they’d have to go back and find the graphic designer from like ten, 15 years ago to get permission to release the IP for it. Things like IP. Do you own the recipes for your concoctions? If you’ve got like a wellness supplement. You know, do you own those recipes? Have you got chain of the provenance? Is it all correct? So things like slavery, anti slavery. Do you have those policies in place. Because that’s what a corporate will look for when they’re trying to buy your business. So if you know in advance these are all these due diligence activities you need to take care of. Do it early so that you don’t get surprised at the end.
[00:08:44] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: I wanted to ask a bit more about scaling and scaling mistakes. So for leaders navigating growth right now, what do you think are the most common scaling mistakes, especially around hiring leadership and in traction.
[00:08:57] Bernadette Schwerdt: If you look at Radicalise Swiss Story, they spent heavily on marketing for years. You know the big names Nicole Kidman, Ricky Ponting, Ellen, Oprah, massive names. And at some point when they decided they wanted to sell the business, they had to flick the switch and go for profit. And that took years. You know, they had to do a major turnaround on that. They had to go and organise all their new supply chains because they had like, I can’t remember the number. But in terms of supplies, in making the vitamins, there was maybe seven layers in terms of everyone involved in creating that. So they went around the world and renegotiated with those vitamin suppliers to get it down to a fraction of that so they could pocket those differences. But that took years. And one guy was on the on the road for years, going around to all these countries trying to renegotiate those suppliers. So when you scale, I think you have to accept there’s going to be a massive injection of capital marketing and it will flip the switch in terms of what the company’s focus is. So I think there’s probably the key point is it costs to scale. And if you don’t do that, you don’t give yourself the best chance of success.
[00:10:07] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: My last question for you, Bernadette. Australia has produced some remarkable digital success stories. Of course, as you know, as you’ve looked at in your book. Do you think there’s something distinctive about the Australian entrepreneurial mindset? And I wonder, how can local founders better compete on a global stage?
[00:10:24] Bernadette Schwerdt: I think we have a unique sensibility in terms of we are an island nation, and therefore we think, well, we have a market like 27 million. We’re going to go for it. You know, there’s no issues with language and currency conversions and all those kinds of things. If you’re in Europe, for example, it’s, you know, you’ve got to take those things into consideration. So I think we we have that beautiful underdog mentality where we think, I’m going to have a crack at something on the other side. I think we do have a bit of a tall poppy syndrome as well. And I wouldn’t say that’s a positive because a number of entrepreneurs I talked to faced that. When they did rise above the parapet, you know, they were shut down. So I think having that mindset to know that you might get blowback and be prepared to deal with that. And a lot of the entrepreneurs I talked about, I was very interested in that mental health component. How do you manage social media trolls? How do you manage negative publicity? People being sued, like George Calombaris, for example, is in my book. You know, he woke up one morning and, you know, the world had turned against him. Kate. Half pennies in my book. She’s a journalist. And she wrote an article for The Age and got 1000 comments back about a reverse sea change that she did and was blamed for, you know, causing the housing economy to to stall in Australia and preventing young people from buying a home. So I think there’s that. If you have the mental resilience to deal with that kind of blowback, I think that’s a massive thing you’ve got to to manage. I think also, you’ve got to have that vision to scale. Like you can start Australia and have quite a nice life. But if you do want to go and do a big exit, you’ve got to think big and you’ve probably got to think big from the get go in some respects, because that will in turn dictate the way you set up your business. So yeah, there’s a couple of ideas.
[00:12:06] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: That was Bernadette Schwerdt speaker, ghostwriter, and author.
Psychological safety: The risk of not taking action (and the benefits of taking action
Now to psychological safety in the workplace. As businesses face growing pressure to support employee wellbeing, psychological safety has become one of the most important and misunderstood issues in business today. But what does it actually mean in practice? And how can leaders create high performing teams without sacrificing accountability? Senior psychologist and managing director of the Barrington Centre, Rhonda Andrews, joins us to unpack the myths, the risks and the practical steps businesses can take to build healthier workplace cultures. She begins by defining psychological safety for me in the context of business.
[00:12:54] Rhonda Andrews: It really is saying that business owners now are accountable for both the physical and psychological conditions at work. And so overall, this means that when people aren’t addressing things like training, work conditions and people struggling with various organizational pressures, then these are the consequences. But I really want the listeners to know it’s all good news. It’s not bad news.
[00:13:24] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: In what ways are good news? Please tell us more. Any stats? Examples are always welcome.
[00:13:29] Rhonda Andrews: Yeah, yeah. And I think because there’s confusion and like any new regulation that comes in statewide and then nationally, it’s like, well, what happens? So perhaps if I just deal with some of the myth busters, because I think we need to do that one that I’m hearing a lot of is, oh, does this mean now I can’t really do any performance management. I’m just holding hands and just dealing with the the language that’s used to me dead wood. And I can tell you now unequivocally, definitely not. This is about getting peak performance from all staff. And the way to be doing that is through your good channels of performance reviews, very clear and direct feedback, and very clear around what’s needing to improve, if anything, and what’s the positive consequences of that. And so certainly this is not about saying just have soft skills and there’s no measures. Everything is about measure. So that’s a big myth buster I want to remove. And I think the good news is that this is now saying what a lot of organizations do naturally, that we’ve now got structures in place, guidance from regulators, really good resources now available to assist Organizations to set up their businesses for even improved success. And so rather than seeing it as the big stick, I’d really like a business owners to see this as a really good positive regulation that actually can be in the control of the business owner of setting up all those templates, all the training, and more importantly, the relationship with the staff that ensures a no risk and no harm environment. And, you know, we want people to have innovation. We want people to think left field. And so it’s important that they feel there’s trust and they feel there’s the support to do so. And that’s the culture that sits behind the premise of this psychological safety guideline.
[00:15:48] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: So from a business leaders perspective, why should psychological safety be a priority. Apart from the fact that it’s now regulation, for example, how does it psychological safety impact performance or productivity or the bottom line?
[00:16:01] Rhonda Andrews: Mhm. And it really does. You’re quite right when you look at it. If you’ve got an a psychologically unsafe workplace, then people are frightened to raise issues, fighting to raise about mistakes, things that are happening, or they just don’t feel like they’re being heard. So therefore they go they go underground, basically. And when that happens, then there’s no improvements. And so therefore, from a systemic point of view or organisational point of view, nothing improves. But the converse happens. And that is people are then showing signs of psychological distress through the conditions or the circumstances within the workplace. And when you get that, there’s, of course, the knock on effect that happens of people having time off from work, attrition, people voting with their feet. And also you get ultimately for a number of people, psychological burnout. And so you’ve then got a very unhealthy workplace. So if we flip it and say, in actual fact, this regulation or guideline, I like to call it more guideline than anything, actually allows people to enhance what works well and put that on steroids, basically. So that will actually improve performance and will improve productivity because people feel heard, people feel connected, people feel they belong, people feel they’re valued. And then, you know, the natural spin off occurs then of a cohesive group that are all throwing ideas around in order to make things better or come out with creative solutions.
[00:17:47] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Are there anything else in terms of practical things leaders can do day to day to build psychological safety within teams. Where should business leaders start?
[00:17:55] Rhonda Andrews: Yeah, it’s a good one. It depends upon the size. Of course, of the organization. But if we start really small around just the your team that I’m seeing it very well done in the veterinary profession, very well done in the medical profession and the nursing profession, which is interesting. And things that they’re doing is they have what the mining industry has done for so long. And that is, you know, they call it different language, but a toolbox session where it might only be a five minute, ten minute check in of how’s everyone? What’s going on? What’s on your plate? What are the things you need from each other in order? And I keep using this language in order for you to be successful in your role. So it’s not about just the business, it’s about your success in being able to do your job. And so those quick, brief, you know, stand up, it’s not literal, although some do certainly veterinary industry do that before roster, you know, before they start their shift. And then what you’re looking at is things like that. It could be a teams meeting. If you’ve got a scattered group virtually, it could be just a check in by the team leader or the manager around just finding out where people are up to and where are the hurdles in order for them to be able to deliver on the outcomes that they’re wanting to achieve. And so it’s problem solving jointly. It’s that two way street of getting the feedback of what’s not working and what is working. And it is actually really feeling that people can put their hand up and say, this is mucked up, this hasn’t worked, or here’s a mistake in either that language or what the language is for the culture, but basically fessing up to it and knowing that there’s not going to be a really heavy hand to it, but if there are significant consequences to it, then it’s worked out together. What’s going to be the resolution rather than just throwing them to the the den? The lion’s den.
[00:20:03] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Yeah. Look. And that sounds great. And it doesn’t seem too hard to implement either. Are there any classic areas or ways that businesses can get this wrong on psychological safety? Perhaps if there are like well-intentioned approaches that can actually undermine psychological safety that you’d like to warn about or share?
[00:20:20] Rhonda Andrews: Yeah, I think inaction is actually the greatest danger that people give the rhetoric to it and do nothing different. And I think, you know, for me, that’s the part that is really, I’d like to say, because the whole thing of psychosocial risk is not new, but the tolerance for inaction is. And so therefore, there’s really important to have good structures around your performance, around your goal setting, around people’s KPIs, around people’s psychological safety. And that’s bedded into the KPIs. So it’s not a standalone, it’s part of every suite of KPIs needs to be looking at what are the objectives in each role, but also what are the things around it from the individual’s interpersonal skills and working style through to what’s the organisational structures that are required that are going to support good psychological safety? And so they are giving that support, peer support. They are reducing the effect of of harm in whatever that might be, aggressive behaviour, bullying, etc.. And a really tricky thing that a lot of organisations have found is that and this is a very generalized statement, but often those who are the highest performing can at times be unaware of their behavior, of their interaction with others because they are so focused.
[00:22:04] Rhonda Andrews: And it really is that support from the organization to actually give them that information, to give them that feedback because their success is based on a certain approach. And so therefore, don’t let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater, as I’ve heard a lot of people do say, well, we can’t keep them in the business. No, give them that opportunity of feedback and being able to manage that in a different way. And I mean, let’s get real here. You know, some people do very well just working quite independently of others. So I know great organizations that what they’ve put in is a buffer between that individual and the rest of the team. That’s an innovative solution. So, you know, we don’t have a unilateral and a single way of dealing with different personality styles in the workplace. But at the same time, we need to make sure that people feel safe and they feel that they can get up in the morning, they can go to work and they feel comfortable and enjoyable within that environment. And that, for me, is the simple measure of your authenticity, your transparency, and really being true to who you are.
[00:23:22] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Look, that sounds terrific. And listening to this, I’m feeling really inspired. I’m sure other listeners are as well. So just briefly, before I let you go for a business owner or a manager listening, now, what’s one simple action they could take, say, this week to start improving psychological safety in their team.
[00:23:38] Rhonda Andrews: To speak to individual staff members and say, what could we do together? It’s a we, not an I. What can we do together to actually enhance our culture and the way we are working together to make this place a very safe, very psychologically supported workplace? That’s it.
[00:24:03] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: That was senior psychologist and managing director at Barrington Centre, Rhonda Andrews. Thanks for joining us for 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.
