Ryan Tuckwood - SWISH Sales Coaching Founder | Proactive Podcast Ep 139

SWISH Sales Coaching Founder Ryan Tuckwood shares his perspective on the challenges faced by modern businesses, and reveals the practices that have seen him become so successful.

Video Transcript:

- Welcome to the Proactive Podcast, brought to you by MeMedia.

- Good day. Well, Chris Hogan coming to you from Swish Sales Coaching Studio in Surface Paradise on the Gold Coast. I've been getting out of the ME media studio and getting round some really popular people like Ryan Tuckwood, who is founder of Swish Sales Coaching. Okay, Ryan.

- Thanks for coming. Thanks for popping in. So it's awesome to have somebody else in the studio.

- Amazing.

- Yeah, it's cool.

- Amazing. So we're going to do a really raw and I think organic podcast here. There's, we've got some, we've got some questions that we might introduce a little later on just to have a bit of fun.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- But mostly I want people to get to know Ryan. For those who don't know Ryan, he is a, an Australian distinguished talent visa holder. Something I read recently, which, you know, who really cares? But Ryan seems to care because he wrote it somewhere

- Because it means I can stay in Australia.

- [Chris] Okay.

- That's why I care. Right.

- Okay, good. So it means you can say you're Australian now?

- I have permanent residency in Australia now. I'm not Australian citizen as yet, but now I can apply for it. I've been here 13 years. Came here as a backpacker and the, the visa that I was on was a, a defacto to my wife who's Kiwi, but that never led to permanent residency. And then about 18 months ago, I got approached by the Office of Home Affairs, a talent scout. So there's, there's talent scouts in the government that look for talent, that is the official title. And the one that approached me, she looks for talent from Israel and the UK stumbled across me and said that they offer out 500 of these visas every single year. Would you like to apply? I coach a lot of immigration agents, we are a sponsor as well. So Michelle, who is our, our agent who'd helped us sponsor other people, I rang her. She said, if you've been approached by one of the scouts, you've got it. You're done. Apply right now, help me put it through. And eight weeks later, I'm a permanent resident.

- [Chris] Okay.

- That was the quickest in the history of the thing apparently.

- The quickest in history.

- Quickest in history, not that I'm competitive.

- Yeah.

- But, but if I'm really, if I'm gonna do it, Michelle was actually on our boot camp last week and she did say I'm still, to this day, the quickest that they've ever got over the line. So, yeah. So it means I can stay in the country, which is without looking over my shoulder, cause de facto is great but if it never led to permanent residency, I didn't know if I could stay. So.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- And this is my life now. I love Australia.

- Yeah, mate. You do. And I've noticed you've really adopted Australian lifestyle.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- You know, with your kids getting out and playing, playing footy.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- Round the traps. Especially on the beach.

- Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've not read conk as far as like the, the budgie smugglers and, and all of that just yet and all the chewies.

- [Chris] No, no.

- But otherwise I'm pretty Aussie.

- [Chris] None of those are cool.

- No. So mate, you, let's touch on your bootcamp. So you just had a bootcamp last week. What, what, can you explain what the bootcamp is?

- Yeah. The, the Swish Boot Camp, it would probably be our flagship live programme that we've run. We've been doing it since 2015. It's evolved a lot. It used to be purely for sales people. And, and I'd, I'd almost take that a step further and say transactional sales people that are just hitting the phones. It's now evolved into, we've had over 10,200 people that have come through through the training. Last week in particular was the biggest one we'd ever done. We had people in the UK, Spain, Sweden, America. People were doing it through the middle of the night in bed, wherever they were on Zoom. And then we had the best part of 120 people in the room here on the Gold Coast as well. So it is designed to be a very intense, immersive experience. Three days sales psychology, day one, sales process, day two and sales execution, which sounds horrendous. Day three execution basically means they, they make sales. So they hit the phones, they jump on Zoom and they get results there. And then,

- Okay.

- That's a crazy experience. Which is pretty cool.

- Right. Does that involve prospecting as well?

- Yeah, so the, the way I position it, because it's probably important to understand that 32% of our members now are not in sales. So we are a sales coaching organisation, but as Andrew Banks, one of our investors once said that it's not sales coaching, it's communication coaching. So what that meant was our, our client base has now evolved away from frontline sales to marketing, customer service, HR, administration, reception, team leaders, managers, business owners. So they're all just wanting to articulate their message better. So during that, that we call it a power hour on the, on the final day of the bootcamp, we use the skills that we learnt on day one and day two to then drive a genuine pipeline to the surface. So we, we, we send, we've got these two text messages that we send on day one to our pipeline if you've got one. And that's designed to remove tyre kickers and highlight the genuine buyers. And then we close them on the Friday. If you don't have a pipeline, we move the needle. So, if it's prospecting, fill in the pipeline, it could be team leaders writing out their elevator pitch or refining their daily structures or their sales processes. But either way they walk out of there doing something. And I just, that was born of a bit of a frustration of delivering what we believe to be world class content over a boot camp, people going away, speak to them four weeks later and they've done nothing. And it was, I actually interviewed a guy called Jeb Blunt over in the UK, US, a sales coach. And he said on one of his programmes, he does 15 minutes of prospecting. He says I just make 'em do it before they leave. And I'm like, that's a great idea. So just decided to put in this power hour and it's, on the last one in September we did 14 million in sales in a room of 40 people, this one alone. So we measure that from the four weeks post bootcamp. So leads generated and active leads generated in the hour. So already this weekend we've done over 20 million since, since Friday.

- What?

- It's Tuesday now. So it's, and the majority, the best thing is the majority of those are not, the people think those leads are dead and they've just ignored them, they've just left them because they make decisions for their prospects, which they shouldn't be doing. So, so that's the bootcamp.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- It's pretty exciting. I love it. I love delivering it. It's, it's fun. The, the community's amazing. The people that come on it are phenomenal. Cause as you know, we rebranded a few years ago and from from that rebrand, from ISR training to Swish and really putting out there a consistent message of selling with integrity, selling honestly, we now attract the right people. And I know you are the other man on brand, right? And we had it wrong. We got it right. We attract the right people, we get better results.

- Oh, a hundred percent on board there. And I think we were talking off camera before we turned on the camera obviously about where I was at in business and how yeah, shedding some of that, I guess belief that I had to force growth, that I had to get that growth last year and, and put that to bed.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- That, that force growth. And, and yeah, so our tagline's building brands on purpose and, and that's exactly what's come to us is purpose led brands that are actually solving problems worth solving.

- [Ryan] Yeah

- And without even trying.

- [Ryan] Yeah. So that's amazing to me in itself. So.

- And it's, it's easier said than done. Like we, we knew what we wanted to achieve as in change the perception of sales. We wanted people to look at sales as a noble skill, a noble trait, not to shy away from it. And we wanted to empower good people. Not not dismissing the majority salespeople, but good people that had great business, good product or service, but maybe didn't know how to articulate their value. And our brand wasn't talking to those people. Like we were just a, another sales training company. And now, like the common feedback and we, I went through the reviews this morning with some of the team and people apologise. They literally come out of the bootcamp apologising because they came into it, maybe there were, I, one of the first questions I ask on the first morning is, who's here under duress? Like, who doesn't want to be here? And it's amazing that you, you'll get 10% of the room, put the hand up, I don't wanna be here.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- And then they apologise at the end because they've seen sales through a different lens, but the brand wasn't talking to them. And, and now, now they are, their partners are able to bring them along cause they're like, just give it a go. So purpose led, vision driven companies, if you can get that right front end, it's a game changer.

- [Chris] Absolutely.

- And, and achievement and fulfilment. Right? Balance. Not just achieving now. As you spoke about this this morning about vanity driven, vanity metrics. So early years just got caught up in it all. Like revenue, hundred people in a team. couldn't think of anything worse than having a team of a hundred.

- Revenues, vanity, property, sanity. Yeah.

- And easily got caught up in it. As opposed to what my, one of my coaches, Anna Samos talks about the, the jaws of margin, making sure that you've got the jaws and margin in place, not just the, the the top line number that everyone's chasing. Doesn't make any sense.

- No, no. And in there.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- So, so yeah, we we're talking a bit about, about sales and marketing and how there's this disconnect between I guess sales marketing teams, but then, you know, you went on to say that there's actually a disconnect between more than just the sales and marketing. It's customer service. It's, and, and you were talking about your program's more about a communication programme. So the challenges that I'm seeing when I'm talking to marketers in my mentoring programme is that they're getting, you know, bombarded with all these new ideas for marketing when they already have a strategy in place and it's coming mostly from the sales team saying, "Hey, we should be doing this, we should be doing this, we should be doing this." Being very reactive when the marketing team have actually gone and been proactive

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- and created a strategy and said, "Look, we've identified these key areas that we want to focus on, but they're having a really tough time like, I think calming the farm and, and want of a better term saying no, they don't, they don't want to say no, but in some cases they have to. So that's my experience.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- Are you seeing this disconnect in between sales and marketing?

- Massively. Right? It's, and I I always say that it it, in life, we get the wrong advice from the wrong people. And, and I'll, the example is like, if, if you're a parent and you've had parenting advice from a non-parent or business advice from a non-business owner, and then I always lead into mark- sales advice from the marketing team, right? We all try to give each other advice when that's, that's stay in your lane is often the, the, the phrase that is used and it causes a disconnect, but it, it, it impacts way deeper than, than just results. Like, there's people that are off sick, people that, what's the, what's the phrase where they're, there there but they're not working. It was great. Not resignation, but people are in, they're in the job.

- [Chris] Right. Sorry.

- But they're not really performing. They're just kind of hiding because they're not motivated, motivated to do so. And it is, it's a communication breakdown. And it, and it comes all the way from the top with what you teach is like understanding what drives a business, what are the values that underpin everything, what are we trying to achieve? As opposed to just having a, these are your KPIs, these are your metrics. You've got drive X number of leads in every single week, you've gotta convert it to this. It's like, why? Like what's, what what's the reason behind all of this? Having these people come through this funnel? You guys converting here, the support team backing up on the backend. What, what, what is that? What impact is that actually gonna have on the individual that we're speaking to? So I think what often happens is it's just pure data and numbers that is communicated, if anything, not feelings and emotions of where people's mental state is gonna be when each employee touches them. Every single employee can impact the experience of a client or prospect. And I think when a business truly understands that, whether it be when you walk through the door, the first person that you speak to, customer service on the backend, an accounts manager calling you up because you're late with your bill. They're all micro experiences that we have as a consumer. And if we can refine that across the board, so we're all delivering the same message, the same energy, consistency, all of a sudden sales will go up, retentions will go up, average transaction values go up, people pay quicker, people refer more. And it's not hard to do. The challenge for us initially, not so much these days, but was getting people to understand that they're all in sales. Because there's a resistance to believe that we're all in sales. But once we created content that spoke to all those different divisions, we went from bringing on board a team of five to like a team of 40, like overnight. And then the team's results are unbelievable. But like, like you don't want people leaving a company cause they feel undervalued just because it's a lack of communication.

- Yeah.

- It's such a waste of talent.

- You, you just reminded me of something many years ago that I used to say to people when I talked to them about selling them a website or marketing programme and how I was, look, I'm a terrible salesperson because I actually didn't want to be seen as a salesperson. And they didn't want me to be seen as a salesperson.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- So I used to say how terrible I was at it to try and, I guess lower the, the the resistance.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- Yeah. To purchase and, and also lower the resistance to being sold to.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- It's funny, it's funny that I had to do that in order to, well I felt like I had to.

- What you were doing is actually lowering your own resistance.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- So that you felt comfortable to do it.

- [Chris] Yeah, exactly.

- Yeah. Yeah. It's got nothing to do with them.

- So back to back to the, I guess the, the team working together. So sales, they're, they're at the frontline, yeah? They're frontline selling and they have valuable information for the marketing team. So have you worked out a system or, or a best way to I guess communicate those, those that, that market research that essentially the, the sales team are doing inadvertently?

- It's a good way of putting it. It is. It's market research. It's live finger on the pulse. Like what is going on? What, what are people hearing? Just, just over communicate the whole way through. So we've implemented the Rockefeller habits with, with all of our meeting rhythms. It was something that Glen Richards brought into us. It was interesting cause Glen brought it in and I didn't really implement it until he introduced me to another lady called Anna Samos. And then she reinforced it. I'm like, that's actually pretty good. Like, and, and I actually spoke at Anna's event in Sydney last week, which is Scaling Up, which is where the Rockefeller habits are from, of Verne Harnish. So having all those meeting rhythms, like every single morning we have a, a morning huddle, we have our daily feedback emails, we have our end of week whip all the Slack channels, like, but doing that as a company, not that sales over there, that's marketing over there. I think it's really important that everybody knows what everybody else has got on their plate. Keeping those huddles tight so they don't become a bitchy session or a complaint session is, that's the skill. So it's like 15 minutes. What's some good news that you had yesterday? What are you working on today? What me, what's your metric for success and what challenges are you facing? You, you're having constant conversations around wins from a client yesterday what they enjoyed was, when they came through the funnel, they liked the upsell, they liked the video that you put through. Or might be a marketing team saying, guys, how's that particular funnel working? We tried something new, did you notice that? Oh, we haven't had anybody come through that channel for a while. What I find in companies is that there's too long in between put something out there and checking the data. So we are like six data points, get it back, six data points, get it back. And that allows us to be very, very quick. I mean, we're a relatively small business so we can be nimble. It's harder for big, big, huge corporates, but it means that everybody knows what's working and not what's not working very quickly.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- I I have a meeting every single Monday with all the heads of each department. They will have what we call TCMs training, coaching mentoring sessions for 30 minutes with everybody within their team. So every week I'm getting things fed back to me. So just constant communication, something that we are going to implement, which we haven't done. It was something that Glen spoke about last week at our event is the founder or, or a middle manager calling a random customer once a week. Literally just me pick up the phone and call somebody in the field and go, how's the team? Like, not as a, let's find out what's going wrong, but just call the team as the founder.

- [Chris] What was your experience like?

- Yeah, yeah. Literally what was your experience? He said he used to do that at Green Cross Vets for many years.

- And people were just shocked that you even called, right?

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- What are you doing?

- Yeah. You got nothing else to do? But, so that works well. We also do the QC call. It is a, we use it as a follow up strategy and, and it's a great sales tool. But what it, what what it really does is it, it it gathers the genuine reasons for people not moving forward or if there's something in the process they didn't like. So basically the way it works is say you've got sales cycle of like six weeks, on week five, we would send them this text message that I mentioned on day one of the bootcamp. We send this text message. If that doesn't get any, any sort of attention, somebody else in the team would call you up and say, "Hey Chris, I know you're speaking to Steve a few weeks ago about potentially utilising blah blah blah. I don't know whether you came on board or not. And to be quite frank, that's none of my business. My job is to make sure that Steve did his job correctly. So would you mind taking two minutes to gimme a bit of feedback on Steve?" Quality control call, find out about Steve.

- I'm laughing because I've had this exact experience.

- From us?

- With Swish. Yeah.

- There you go. There you go. Hundreds of thousands of dollars because you get the genuine objection, right? You always find out the real one. The key is making sure the person making that call doesn't try to turn it into a sales call. The key is gather the information, feed it back to marketing, customer service or sales.

- And it's so funny when I've gotten those calls cause I know the process, I know your process and, and so I'm just like, yep. So should I expect a call from Ryan or Steve or somebody?

- Always, always get a call and most people don't and it's lost money on the table. Always get my call.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- And cause it goes back to the old adage of don't make decisions for your customers.

- Yeah.

- Don't assume that it's.

- Didn't you make that mistake once or was there someone in your team?

- Yeah, I did. Yeah, that was, yeah. Yeah and I'll share it.

- Well yeah.

- That was me years and years ago. Just for people that might not have heard it, there was a guy on the phone and he'd asked me what the top package was. He was literally paying, he'd given me his bank detail, his card details, and I was just about to get the expiring and CCV and he said, "What's the top package?" And I said, "Well it's a bit more expensive. It's $25,000. I dunno if that will be feasible for you right now." And he said, "You condescending little prick." Put the phone down on me. My old boss pulled me off the floor, put me in front of 40 odd sales guys and was like, tell everyone what just happened and I got the best lesson of my life. Cause he said, "Just because you can't afford something doesn't mean they can't." But we do it, we impart our own limiting beliefs on people.

- [Chris] Yeah. And it could be as simple as, I won't call them back today cause it's too soon. I won't call them back, it's end of financial year. They probably won't wanna do this because they've got a couple of kids and they won't wanna do that on the week. It's just making decisions for clients.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- Have the conversation. But it wouldn't, it wouldn't hurt for marketing and customer service to make those calls as well.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- Like all mark marketing should 100%, like Brendan will sit and he'll listen to the calls. I want him to hear the leads that he's generated, like listen to them.

- You're touching onto the perfect word. And that is what I find most people aren't prepared to do, is truly listen and be open minded about the feedback that they're getting from the experience that the sales team, customer service team are having. And that they're too close minded and they're basically saying, no, this is the way we're doing it. This is what we set up.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- We can't change it. When in all reality absolutely it can be changed. And all that really needs to happen is for you to accept that there could be another possibility

- [Ryan] Yeah. in this situation. And that it's worth listening to. And sometimes in these cases where, you know, you get this feedback and go, oh that's one. You know?

- [Ryan] Yeah. That's one bit of feedback or it's one person's feedback. The ideal sample size is 130 pieces of basic data in order to decide whether or not to sway this way or that. But a minimum size is 30. So you know, you can react on, you know, 1, 2, 5, 10.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- But you know, maybe there's some metrics that you need to put in place and say, well hey, let's put that in here. And I'm talking, and when I'm saying you, I'm saying marketers, I'm saying business owners, I'm saying businesses can track, well hey, we've had this issue. It's come up a number of times now, how many of those times has it come up? And they're the only the ones that you know about too sometimes.

- But, but that's a really good point, right? So imagine a marketing person coming to a sales guy and saying, and this has come up too many times now, what is too many? Right? Then there's an education piece that needs to happen before a, a marketing plan is put in place to go, Hey guys, we're gonna put a new funnel in place. We're gonna try a new, we're gonna AB test these two videos, new copy. We know because we're specialists in our field that we need at least 30 data points, ideally 130 before we can understand if this is working. So in the nicest possible way, don't come to us until you've made 130 calls, right? So it needs to be conditioned up front.

- [Chris] That's cool.

- Otherwise there, there's a, well no I've not, I've made too many, I've made, I've made lots of calls and they're are crap, right? That's what you always hear from sales guys. The leads are crap. I'm like, how many people have you spoken to? Six. Like, like, but but the like lots is is open to interpretation, right?

- [Chris] Yeah. So you need to like lay out the parameters before we even start that so they know not to come to you. And then, then you control the communication. So you waste, so you reduce any sort of waste in pointless conversations. And then you reconvene at a point when you know you're gonna hit that ideal data point. And then we have that backup plan. If this isn't working, where are we gonna go after? And we can swiftly go into it.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- But it's the, I think it's the communication up front, which is a, a challenge. And then it comes across as confrontational. Cause the sales guys are just walking around going, this is bloody crap. These leads are rubbish.

- And you, you tapped on a really important point is that market research is, is so important to me in my business when we're doing marketing strategies, right? What does the market actually want? Now Steve Jobs says the market doesn't know what they want, the customer doesn't know what they want. So let's just do what we think's best and then we'll tell them what they want. But you know, the, the market can tell you a lot of things about maybe what they don't want. So, most people can actually.

- I, I think, I think they know what they want. I don't think they know what they need. I think that, I think that's the problem. Like when, when we created this business back in the day, like you might, you probably know this Jack and I knew we wanted to do sales training and we knew wanted it, we wanted it to be to be different to whatever else in the market. So we just approached local businesses, like pretty much our football mates that we knew were in business and said, "Hey, if we were gonna train some sales staff, what skills would you like them to have? What would you like us to teach 'em?" And it was follow up, build rapport, overcome objections, resilience so they can actually get through the challenging period. So we're like, all right, brilliant. So I went away, created a programme, created the very unsophisticated bootcamp nine years ago, was like, hey, we got this course. Do you wanna put your team on it? It's what you said you wanted. Right? So we then put them through that. Some of them were happy, some of them weren't because it wasn't what they were ne- what they needed. So there's the, then there's the argument of give people what they want to get to what they need. Or we learn to ask better questions on the front end. Because people, what they want is just a surface level fix. What caused it? They don't know, if they knew what caused it, they'd give you a different answer. So that comes down to them asking the right questions during a strategy session or for, from a sales perspective during a discovery or a consultation. But it's a, it's an ongoing battle, but it, it doesn't, it doesn't need to be as hard as it is. There's a, there's a local company and I won't know, I won't name them cause you know exactly who they are. They've got a team of like 160 sales reps and this is on the backend not marketing. They've got 160 sales reps and then they've got 60 customer service guys. We started coaching just their sales team. And we'll always try and bring 'em all together if, if possible. No, no, no, they don't need it. They're fine on the back end. Anyway, we did a year with the sales guys, sales were flying and then they were like customer support for some of the sales guys. Not all of them is just like frustrated. They're angry, they're getting all this crap, all this abuse. And there's just a few sales guys in there that are just over-promising cause they're like, get it over the line, get my commission, get it over the line. And these, all these customer support guys, massive turnover of staff, I dunno if it was depression, but they were definitely not enjoying their job. So I got the sales guys to listen, take it past that, go and listen to your clients, go and listen to that onboard. They've got no idea what they just bought because you've just barreled 'em into a sale. Like it's terrible. So there's, there's pressure from business owners on sales guys to make sales. That's, that's where that comes from cause they're not disconnecting from the outcome. They're so connected to making a sale and making a commission. And then there's a total lack of awareness or, or ignorance towards who's gonna have to support 'em on the back end. Some companies,they've never even met the customer support team and they're just handing them over and it's like, I wish you all the best. So it's, it's gotta flow all the way.

- No, that introduction is super valuable. And I've, I've seen it and I've experienced that and, and you don't feel like you've just been handballed and the buck's been passed and, and you can always go back to the original sales person if you like.

- [Ryan] Yeah. In good organisations, Hey, you know, you said this.

- I struggled with that. I struggle with that handover when as I was trying to scale the business. Obviously I can't, I can't be the bottleneck, which most of us are. And then if as the founder or as the head coach, people only wanna deal with you, which is not ideal. So learning how to build value in your team is a, is a great skill. Like one thing I'll do with companies straightaway is receptionist, right? What, who's, who's, who's the first port of call, who deals with inbound inquiries or deals with the current customers? Okay, brilliant. Lemme listen to one of those calls and it's usually, good morning, it's Sarah at ME Media, how can I help you? Okay, fantastic. Wanna talk to sales team? Okay, I'll pass you through it. Right? That's the call. As opposed to framing the conversation, building a bit of value in the company, having a little statement around who I'm gonna select to hand you through to. And then reading a three bullet point bio on that individual to say, Sarah, it sounds like Chris is gonna be the best guy for you because he's been in this industry for this amount of time. This is what you are looking for. I'll pa I'll pass you through right now. And then by the time you pick up the phone, you're like an eight out of ten already. Like they are so important on the front desk to get it right, but it doesn't happen. They just get handed through and then they wonder why they're fighting uphill battles right away. Which again, doesn't need to happen.

- Sounds to me like you've not only learned a lot about sales, because you've learned a lot about leadership, passing on the baton to someone in your business so that you are not the bottleneck. Has that been difficult for you?

- Yeah, yeah. I'm, I I would say I'm not a great business owner. I never, I don't think Jack or myself, without speaking on behalf of Jack, we're great business people. We're great salespeople. So we knew how to drive revenue. We knew how to make sales, but we didn't know how to build an infrastructure.

- That's just you saying that to make yourself feel better.

- Cause we were crap.

- No, no, because that's what you said to me before when I said about I'm not a good salesperson.

- Well, Glenn Richards called it on it. So post Shark Tank, he, oh, he said, you guys are driving yourself into the ground like post Shark Tank, we had massive uptake of, for obvious reasons, but we didn't have the infrastructure to support it. And what I think we'd inadvertently done is hire a lot of Jacks, a lot of mes and no diversity in the company. Especially not from an age perspective. We were all, we were targeting like young entrepreneurs, which is great, but then they get entrepreneurial when they see you working and they go, I'm gonna go start my own business. They look at us and go, oh, if he can do it, I can do it. So we were losing these young entrepreneurs, which is great. They were starting their own businesses, but it didn't build a stable business. And then as you know, I'm an ex engineer. I was an engineer for, for eight years. So I'm a perfectionist. Like everything has to be right. I'm, there's no room for error. So my, my natural instinct is to micromanage and make sure and double check everything.

- Oh.

- Which is horrendous.

- Yeah.

- I should be on stage. There's too many variables. I I should not live in the stage world.

- Micromanagement is, is something I think you need to do, realise how bad you've done it to in order to then go, well actually.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- I don't need to do that anymore. And then.

- See how people thrive. Yeah. And then there's probably two parts to that. There's, that's the way I'd always been managed and I didn't mind it, right? Cause I didn't like getting things wrong. So I liked people watching over my shoulder. I actually liked people checking up on everything that I did. And the second part was the company I found out I was working at, when I first arrived here, the call centre, that turned out to be like a boiler room environment, turned out to be a scammy company. And I just lost trust in everybody, there's people that I was quite close to. And I'm like, you're a con artist. Like, how did I not, I was so naive to all, so I didn't trust anybody. So then I'd bring someone into my company. I don't trust you and I'm gonna watch everything that you do. Like it's a recipe for disaster. And now I've got, I've, I've, I've learned and I still have to be conscious around it, is like give trust as opposed to like saying you've gotta earn it. No one has to earn my trust. Everybody has my trust and it's yours to lose. And it was interesting, I never think I spoke about this on a podcast before. Andrew came in here, 2021 in Jan, 21 Andrew Banks. And he said to me, I know where you're at. He said, so we had, we had, I brought him in cause it was middle of Covid and everyone's freaking out. And I said, Can you come in here and just meet the team and, and have a bit of a pep talk for everyone?" And he did. And he was great. And then all the team went out and I stayed in the boardroom with him and he says, "I know where you're at." I said, "Where am I at?" I dunno

- I'm glad you know.

- Yeah. I'm glad you know, I'm freakin out. He says you need to, you need to shed some skin. He says, you need to, there's gonna be a change in the guard here. He says, I reckon 75% of your team will be gone in the next 12 to 18 months. And I'm like, okay, cool. And he goes, it needs to happen. He goes, I'm, we are talking about moving the gun from B2C to B2B, focusing on higher average size clients. What got you here won't get you there. All of that. And he goes, yeah, I think there's gonna be some big changes. And that was the best part two years ago. And we've had 80% changeover of the team. We have half the size of the team and triple the revenue. Talk about getting the right clients in. You gotta get the right team in as well. And the, I, I had the right team then, but I didn't have the right team for where we wanted to be. And that's nothing against anybody else that previously worked here. It's just that sometimes we come to the end of the road in relationships and journeys and that's, that's cool. So leadership, I'm still learning. We've got Mark Kamawi, I think you know,

- [Chris] Sorry Mark?

- Mark Kamawi on the Gold Coast. He's one of our leadership coaches. I learned a lot from him. Anna Samos who I mentioned before, she's amazing. I learned a lot from just watching people or going into the businesses that we coach. Fortunate to work with some big corporates and seeing what not to do.

- I do know Mark. Sorry. Yes.

- You would know Mark. Like, because we get, we get to lift the hood up on so many companies. We get to talk to the sales teams, the managers and we get to hear about the way they talk about their leaders. So I think that's, in a way, it's quite a fortunate position to be in. Cause we're like, oh shit, well maybe I was doing that as well.

- Yeah.

- So I'll stop doing that cause my, my team are not gonna give me that feedback, you know?

- [Chris] Yeah. They might get somebody external.

- Yeah. Yeah. It is a great position to be in when you can see into other people's businesses, see how they're operating and go, all right, yeah, maybe I shouldn't do things that way myself and do things more that way.

- We did, I tell you what we did, which was quite interesting. A few years ago we did an anonymous survey of the team. It was a founders survey. It was about Jack and I. And the standout bit of feedback for me on areas to improve was just tell us what you want. Stop beating around the bush. Like I've always been.

- I think I've got exactly the same thing 10 years ago. Yeah.

- And it, I dunno if it comes from a desire to be liked or not wanna upset people, but I've, I've always been of the belief that if, but, and I, and I know now it probably comes across as passive aggressive more than anything that just surely they'll figure it out. Like if I keep, if I keep dropping enough little comments, they'll get at what I mean. Whereas people are like, can you just just tell me like, if if I'm doing something wrong, just tell me. Whereas I'm like, do you think you could have done that any better? I think it came across as maybe it was the way I was delivering it back in the day. So I've learned to just cut through the noise now and just tell people if I don't agree with something or just, and, and I've had to become a better decision maker as well. Especially since Jack exited three years ago. The team need a leader. Right. You, you gotta step up and they need to know you at least appear to have your shit together at some stage. Glenn Richards said it, he says that during Covid, he goes, right, your job right now Ryan, is to absorb everybody's fear and exude confidence.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- And, and the way you do that, and he says, you can, you can exude confidence by saying, I dunno what's gonna happen as long as you have clarity in that. And I did. I came back in, told the team, I was like, guys, I dunno if we're gonna survive. And I didn't. I I have no idea. But what I do know is we're gonna do everything in our power to make sure that we do.

- [Chris] Yeah. And every single client that we've got on board gets a world class experience still.

- Yeah. That experience was empowering for me. I, during, during the, during Covid, I'd previously been through GFC 1.0 and I was calling that GFC 2.0 and then, yeah, I had my bout of depression and, and I felt, and that's actually when I was out of, out of my depression. So Covid hit and I went and I've gone, I've been through the ringer that many times.

- [Ryan] Yeah. That this shit ain't even gonna touch me. You know? And, and I learnt also that our marketing methodology and just marketing advertising in general, when you, when you actually go harder during those tough times, you actually come out much better. And it was actually my client who, who described the analogy to me, which is the the American bison, so, or American buffalo, however you want to talk, talk about 'em. They, when they see a storm coming, they're different to cows. So cattle will actually run away from the storm and try and outrun the storm, whereas the American bison will run straight headfirst into the storm and they come out of it quicker.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- Cause they obviously head down straight through it. Right? And, and so that we use that terminology so much, that, that story so much now. And it worked, it worked. And I did the same with the team. And to be honest, because I had built so much resilience through eating shit sandwiches in business those other times, it was like, everybody else is feeling shit, well, hey, I I've, I've been there.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- I know exactly how to get through this.

- [Ryan] You've got perspective, right.?

- And and it was fan and uplifted the team. Everyone was on Zoom. I was the only one in the office. And it was like, who's done their exercise this morning? Who's, you know, who's eaten a healthy breakfast? Who's drinking water? You know, like those essential ingredients to having a great day. And then like, all right, let's go. Who's speaking to the clients? Who's getting this done and blah, blah blah, blah. Yeah. And was so positive. And I had comments from the team that who were thinking it was all doom and gloom saying, wow, this is so uplifting.

- Yeah, you, you pulled me through that. I, I always talk about like the, I always say don't forget your arm. Like in, in anything like your actions, your actions and your mindset. Right. The, we can control in any environment what we do, what actions we take, whether it be going to the gym, drinking the right amount of water, eating the right foods, going for a walk in the morning, dials on the phone. We can control all of that. We can control the way we react to certain situations. And you get those two right? You control your mindset, but most people don't. They let external factors creep in. And even just through osmosis, it will go in eventually if you're hearing the same crappy stories long enough.

- There's a lot of, I think wisdom that's come about through age and experience isn't there, you know, nine years in business yourself. 40 something.

- Just turned 40. Don't, don't give me too many more than that. Just turned 40 in October. Yeah.

- Good. And, and sometimes, well I've heard people say that, you know, the first 20 years of your life is just the training. Now you're ready. Now you're ready for the real, real battle

- I was, I was,

- [Chris] Now you're prepared.

- Weirdly, I don't know, I had a little bit of a moment when I turned 40. I'm like, is it, I'm like, I gotta take life seriously. I got a personal trainer, started eating right. Like I've got, I'm like, is this my midlife crisis? Is this what it looks like? And I remember having a conversation, I actually interviewed here, Theo.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- From Usher group. And we finished the podcast and was sitting just having a conversation with him over there cause he's quite spiritual and, and I said to him, I says, oh, I'm not religious and I'm not overly spiritual in that either, but I said, I'm, I'm thinking about it more, more frequently. And he goes, how old are you? And I says, I'm 39. He goes, yeah, that's about right. And I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, yeah, you go through the cycle like 20. And I'm like, oh, don't tell me I'm just falling into the exact same that everybody does. But it makes sense. Like you do start questioning things and, and looking at, looking outside for, I dunno, I dunno what it is, but I've got kids and I wanna make sure that I, I'm the best version for them. I don't want to come in into the team and be be stressed. I want, I often talk about that battle of fulfilment versus achievement. I've earned lots of money. I wanna love what I do every day. I want to enjoy it. And Andrew Banks said something really profound on Wednesday last week. He said he had this epiphany, was the way he explained it, that this is not his body. He said, this ain't my body, this is just rented. And the same as I was renting a car, then I'd have to look after it and service it. And, and it was funny, all three of them had the same theme of health and fitness and mental health and what they do their, their, their daily structures and in place. And, and I hadn't really done that since I finished playing football about four years ago. And I'm, I'm never gonna be a, a fatty, I don't think I'm gonna put on lots of weight, but my PT called me skinny fat, so it doesn't mean I was healthy, but I definitely know that getting up early, looking after myself, I come in here and I'm a better version for all of them and hopefully for the kids and that as well. So. It's it's a journey isn't it?

- Mmhmm

- Like, I dunno if it'll ever stop.

- No. But it's natural for us at 40 because, you know, our metabolisms slowed down double the amount from when we were 20.

- [Ryan] Makes sense, yeah.

- And, and we now we're starting to see the physical signs, or feel the physical signs

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- of, of that that change in age. And my sensei, he said he was reading up about the stoics and they said that, I think it was Mark Marcus Aurelius said that even if we lived to a thousand, when we reached the age of 800, we'd be worried and concerned about the amount of things that we hadn't done.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- And, and, and that we needed to really get on with life. And so if all it's natural for us, you know?

- And you combine that with what's happened in the last two work two years, three years, it's accelerating people's thoughts. There was, you know, like personality profiling DiSC and all of that. So I did my accreditation through a company called TTI in Sydney. And when I first did it, they explained that we have our natural personality type and that will, that will never change. You have your default position and short of a traumatic event or a near death experience, maybe you lose a loved one or something like that. Your natural personality type will never ever change. Your adaptive can swing, but your natural doesn't change. But in the last two years since Covid and they've done 35 million profiles over 30 years, they've had the biggest change ever of natural personality types. Covid has acted, even if you didn't lose anyone, it has acted the same as a traumatic or, or life-threatening event. So people's natural personality types have changed, which is causing people to go, screw it, I'm gonna go and do something new. I'm gonna go and live in Bali.

- Yeah.

- I'm gonna go and whatever. But people are actually changing because of what happened around the world.

- Now that was the same in my experience, life experience and research around values, which is exactly the same thing. Personality types, you know, attitude. That your, your values don't change unless you, you, you meet with a adverse life event.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- And yeah. So yeah. The amount of people that went, you know what work doesn't matter being in an office doesn't matter. You know, all that matters to me is that I'm happy and healthy and I'm with my family and yada yada yada. You know, you know, I don't need the house. Look I'm going and live in a van. You know, like.

- Yeah. I've seen loads of it.

- Loads. Right? Loads.

- I, I, it'd be interesting to see in four or five years time, if that goes full swing. And then we default back to materialistic things or, or whatever it was before, when people realise that we do still need some money. Like we, we do live in an economic world.

- I believe it will, everything happens in cycles and even even with the advent of, you know, the internet, you know, we've, it's nearly a 30 year cycle. You see fashions, you know, come around again.

- I wear all of 'em at the same time I will.

- So yeah, you do. Yeah. You normally have a, sometimes I see you in cut, cut open jeans and then suit jacket.

- [Ryan] Flares.

- So fashions, fashions is a really popular one. Music is another one that you can see. So it is the nostalgic event comes back around to relive itself. But the internet's done a funny thing where it's actually mould, like merged a lot of, I guess, what's the word? I guess nostalgic events. Because people can dial up any song that they want. They can dial up any look that they want and you know, you do you is a actual saying. Right? You know? So just be you. You know, and people becoming more used to, okay, yeah, just be me, everybody else is taken. You know, so, so there's, people are becoming more I guess accustomed to that. But I think it will happen in cycles just like it did with our parents. You know, I was one of the lucky kids. I lived a very privileged up upbringing, you know, I'd never faced adversity.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Really in my entire life until such time that I've faced undiagnosed depression. But it was still, I was, you know, I didn't really want to get outta bed, you know, I was pretty shit. And it lasted around two years.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Wow.

- So that, that moment in my life helped me reframe things and helped me, you know, find the values that are important to me. And, and so these kids that are growing up now, they, they're not experiencing much adversity really. Like yes, definitely definitely, there's different, you know, I, I guess socioeconomic areas that are, that are occurring and hey, some people even say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, right?

- [Ryan] Yeah. So, but if you look at it generally, there's, you know, we're going to go through potentially another recession, right? So that happened in the nineties. I was oblivious to it all.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Of course.

- Oblivious. I was riding my bike around, you know, hanging out with my mates, having a great old time.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Life's good.

- Yep. My parents were, were very, I don't know, lucky or smart at the time that they had a housing commission loan, which means they didn't actually experience the 19% or 17% interest rates. So they had a fixed rate, interest rate at 6% for the life of the loan when everyone else copped it hard, dunno how they did that or whatnot. But yeah, they, they managed it really well on the proactive up front where I saw people having a sale and all that sort of stuff.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Wow.

- So this experience is definitely going to impact everybody as the homeowner now. And so what's that gonna look like for the kids? Are the kids gonna go, well home ownership's not important, you know, material stuff's not important or are they just gonna go, it just goes over their head? I remember when I was young. Yeah. Like, as I said, it just went, I was oblivious to it all.

- Well it's a tough one cause we, we spoke about our kids having a very different upbringing definitely to my childhood.

- [Chris] Yeah. Like where I'm fortunate enough to live and business and all of that jazz. Like I didn't, I didn't have any of that, but I was very well loved. My parents were, they were fantastic. They were always there for me, but we didn't have a lot of money. So wanna make sure that our kids experience different cultures, hence the reason to go over to Bali in April and expose them to just different things. Not, I mean, we're not gonna live in a slum. We're not gonna, we, we'll probably still stay in a nice villa or something.

- No, but they will see, they will see the goings on. Yeah. It's fantastic. And smell different stuff too.

- Yeah, yeah. Genuinely. And I think that's like, you, you wanna try and prepare them best for the real world and not, not kind of sugarcoat anything. Cause the real world's bloody hard. Having conversations with people at certain times, especially around depression or anxiety. That's tough. Like I, I even in sales sense, I also to the team, like give yourself a chance, do everything you can to give yourself a chance, should a sale need to be made, right? You don't go in there to make a sale, but you do everything right to give yourself a chance. I think parenting's the same. You just do everything you can to bring the best little humans up into the world and give them the best chance of, of being a great human once they reach adulthood. At some stage you gotta kind of let them go. Like anything, like any sort of leadership.

- Yeah.

- I say that now. Mine are only four and two, so

- Yeah, no,

- see if they wanna move to the UK, not a chance. I haven't got passport. Sorry. Yeah, you were never English.

- No, it's, it's interesting. And as they grow older, you keep on trying to do that exactly what you're doing. I've got 17, 14 and 7.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Wow.

- Three girls. So yeah, it doesn't get easier.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- At least in my case. But it does get more interesting and I've learnt to be really accepting of that change and and rolling with the the punches so to speak of teenagehood. So mate, that's pretty much time. I wanted to ask you one last question, which I don't know why this is important for me.

- I'm so scared.

- [Chris] Where's your spirituality at now?

- Probably still the same. Curious, and when I say spirituality, like I'm getting, I am curious around meditation and breath work. I dunno if that's, I dunno if it even fits in the same world. I don't know.

- I think it does. Yeah, it does. Well it's, it's tapping into earth's energy.

- I think. I think I've just become a more aware, and hopefully this comes across the right way. The more elite performers and and there's a lot of people out there that are blagging business that are telling you they're doing this and they're not doing anything and they're so focused on money. And I, I'm, I'm becoming more aware of those that are, have genuinely achieved at a high level over a consistent prolonged amount of time. But they also have other life things going on as well. It's not just all business, which is, I, I don't, I don't want this to define me. I would love this to be my legacy. I'd love to be known as the guy that created Swish and and ethical sales.

- Well, that's already done mate. So what's your next trick?

- Oh, I hope so. So, so then I'm like, okay, what's the common denominator? And every single one of these people, they, they do seem to practise some sort of breath work, meditation. They tap into something deeper.

- Where are you at with ice baths?

- I've done it a couple of times. No, I haven't done it frequently. I've done it twice.

- Yeah. It's alright. I'm feeling great through training, through, through through gym. I know I'm never gonna be a massive bloke, but I feel, feel good for it.

- [Chris] Yeah. And I dare say that, that this is what I've noticed. That the more I streamline this business, the more trust I put into my team, the faster it grows without me, the more time I get to work on me. So that when they do see me again, better version of me. I used to always get sick on boot camps. I used to always get sick leading up to big events or past event just after the event. Cause I was like stress, stress, stressed. I was so worried about everybody else and everything being in place, like going around, checking the workbooks and the, I just turn up and deliver the content now. The team are unbelievable. Like getting that right, getting the right people around me, I often talk about creating your circle of inspiration. I used to call it create a hit list of people you wanna get out of your circle. So like reducing my exposure to people or the conversation with certain people that doesn't add value to me.

- Yeah, I call that a no dickheads policy.

- Yeah. Yeah. Which is hard because usually it's like family members or people that are really close to you. So that's why I change it to like reduce your exposure to clients. Yeah, that's, that's true as well. And that has allowed me to find or make more time to, to, to train and, and to, I, I just go and take the dog for a walk in the morning after training and just sit and do a bit of breathing. But it's just probably where I'm at right now.

- Cool. One final question I ask everybody on the podcast. Where have you been most proactive and how has that benefited you?

- [Ryan] Most productive?

- Proactive.

- Proactive. It's gonna be a really boring answer. I love the what if scenarios as in I don't like risk. So I'm proactive in thinking about worst case scenarios all the time, right? In any, anything. So what if that marketing plan doesn't work? What if this employee doesn't work? What if this boot camp fails? What if Zoom goes off halfway? Like it's more of a practical and literal proactive nature that I have of making sure things don't go wrong. And I think that saved us a lot of time over the years. A human version of that would be understanding human behaviour. I think one of the best decisions I ever made was to go down the behavioural science, emotional, intelligent route. Not just from a sales perspective. I mean that is a game changer there.

- That's fascinating isn't it?

- Just pe- you don't need to understand sales, you just need to understand people. You understand how people tick. What, what? I don't like the word manipulate, influence or con- hate the word convince the first three letters don't sit well with me. I like the word inspire. If you can inspire somebody to do something for positive change, that is cool. So I think being proactive to be fascinated around that and, and just consume has been great for me. Dunno if that's answer you wanted, but.

- No, that's been, no,

- [Ryan] That's my answer.

- It's your answer. I had a massive list of questions here that we were gonna have fun with, but we've run out of time. It was absolutely fantastic talking to you mate. And thank you so much for watching the Proactive podcast. I'm here with Ryan Tuckwood and he's a legend and he did found Swish Sales Coaching and that's what he's well known for. So you need a new, you need a new dream, mate.

- Okay, another business?

- No, just a new dream.

- [Ryan] Okay.

- Thanks for watching. You can see us on YouTube. Search for ME Media. We've put these podcasts on my website, memedia.com.eu and it's all over Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Search for Proactive podcasts with Chris Hogan. Thanks for watching. Cheers mate. How do people follow you?

- LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. Ryan Tuckwood Official. You got on TikTok if you want. Dunno what I'm doing. But there's some content on there. Or swishsalescoaching.com for the company.

- Okay, thank you. Cheers guys.