Ronan, an experienced business coach and mentor, and Michael talk about business improvement strategies. Being brave, learning from your mistakes and taking advantage of widely available external resources are examples of topics covered,
Host @Michael Kerr and @Ronan Leonard a certified innovation professional and business mentor discuss Ronan's journey from an accidental entrepreneur to mentor in the small business space. The conversation delves into the;
In this conversation, Michael and Ronan explore various strategies for business growth;
Ronan shares insights from his 100-day startup challenge ( https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/start-up-to-profit-in-100-days-7231519804916912128/ )
Takeaways
Michael (00:00.129)
Welcome into edition 146 of the Small Business Banter podcast. Welcome in Ronan Leonard.
Ronan Leonard (00:12.878)
Thank you Michael, thanks for having me on the show.
Michael (00:15.231)
Excellent. Ronan, in a moment, I'll get you to give us some more of your background as amongst the things you do. You're a certified innovation professional. You're a business mentor. You're incredibly active and alive in the small business space. So what we're going to be doing today on the episode and the discussion with Ronan is Ronan's got a program, one of
his programs, it's called something along the lines of from startup to profitability in a hundred days. And we were chatting about how we could apply that to an existing business. And there's plenty of existing businesses that might do with a bit of a pep up. So that might be a bit of a framework. We're to talk a little bit about Ronan's tagline, which is helping people use resources intelligently. So I think there's some good stuff coming.
Ronan, what's, before we get underway, what's your personal and professional background? Where are from also?
Ronan Leonard (01:18.318)
look, I've, Michael, I've had an anti-career. For a decade, I traveled the world working on cruise ships and lived in India for a while. And I just decided to travel rather than have a career in inverted commas. And that was fantastic. But then I met my wife who is Australian. We working on cruise ships and I came to Australia 24 years ago.
And for a couple of years I worked back as, you know, in corporate. And then I just realized I just didn't like working for businesses that didn't really seem to have any. Passion or purpose. It was just a job. And so I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I just started a business because I was just didn't enjoy working for other people. It was as simple as that.
Michael (02:09.042)
It's a bit along the lines of the E-Myth, the entrepreneurial myth of starting something by accident.
Ronan Leonard (02:16.546)
Yeah, I love that book. It's a great first printable for anybody that's tied to business. Very, very insightful.
Michael (02:23.435)
Yeah. So you are a certified innovation professional, a mentor and a coach in terms of, is that a broad brush to the sorts of things you do with business owners and senior managers?
Ronan Leonard (02:42.894)
Yeah, I've done a number of things. the first business I started was an events company and I put my life savings into it. The first year I'd made $600 and I put $30,000 into it 20 odd years ago and I was panicking, I won't lie to you. And then I met somebody who showed me how SEO worked and that changed my business. Overnight I got a client within two weeks paying me $1,500 and I was off to the races.
But for probably about seven, eight years in that business, aside from doing a short course here in Melbourne, I actually didn't do any education. I'd not paid for coaches, mentors, nothing. And then I bumped up against, don't know what you don't know, and I bumped up against my lack of knowledge. And then something flipped and I became this voracious reader and interested in business. So the last seven, eight years, I've read 400 books.
And it allows me to have fresh insights. It allows me to join two ideas together. And then when I was going through this certification for innovation, which is a global company called Gini, so Boeing, Nassau use it. So they've taken all of the great ideas that you would have heard of in the last 10, 15 years. Edward de Bono's six hat thinking, Clayton Christensen jobs to be done.
Lean Startup, Eric Rees, all of those books are actually read, but they've put it together in a framework that allows you to sort of systematically look at how you can look at innovation. And sometimes innovation is just as simple as changing your business model. Sometimes it's as simple as putting some technology and software into what you were doing manually. So innovation isn't sitting around on a bean bag and trying to figure out, you know, the next cool product.
Michael (04:33.32)
campus.
Ronan Leonard (04:37.742)
constantly trying to figure out new, better ways to run a business.
Michael (04:44.535)
Yeah, we, want to dig into that later because there's, there are a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners out there who do, do things that they do. They're in their business pretty much. They might have staff, but they're, they're kind of on their own in a sense, and they're doing things that are normal for them, but are actually, when you, when you shine a light on them, they, they're actually pretty progressive or, or different or innovative, but it's just seems normal for them. So yeah, we'll, we'll come back to that.
Yes. So a non-traditional pathway, but very rich in life experience as well as, you know, trying your own businesses. So if we, if we were to, on that experience of yours, if you had to take a stab at the things that you think are the biggest hurdles for, for our typical small business owners, let's, let's start with what you think.
might be the biggest barriers to owners getting their business to wherever it is they want to get it to. And then we might talk about some of the things more specifically.
Ronan Leonard (05:54.382)
I'm a firm believer that it's actually context. Information has been commoditized. Businesses are failing at the same rate as they were 20 odd years ago, 30 years ago. There's a reason behind that. It's no longer just information. 30 years ago, you started a business. You struggled to know how to set up an ABN or to create processes and systems. Now, we are awash with information.
drowning in it. But most of that information lacks context. So that might apply to specific industry or niche. And sometimes it doesn't transfer across to you. But then also the business owner is often bumping up against their own limitations or beliefs and systems. So you mentioned earlier that some people in their little siloed niches or industry are doing something pretty amazing.
then how do you kind of cross-pollinate that? How do you work with other people who are gonna give you a different insight that you just never saw? And so one thing I'm doing when I'm sitting down with a business owner, normally within the first hour, I give them an idea or something that they just have never thought of. And it's not because I'm smarter than them, it's just that I've read 400 odd books and I'm always thinking about these different ideas and it allows me to then go, here's an idea you can.
implement and give you a different perspective.
Michael (07:24.363)
Yeah, it's quite well, but also you bring so much, you know, broad experience. We all bring a different set of experiences to a conversation. I think underneath all that is, is owners, entrepreneurs wanting to take a first step to get some external counsel, an external perspective. And I think just sitting
working hard, doing your own thing at some point, you know, drives you, it drives you a bit, bit nuts. And, and, but, you know, to take that leap to say, I'm going to open up to somebody because whatever the motivation might be, my business is stagnant. My business is going crazy. I don't know how to control it, but it's that first conversation. And, and as you say in that first hour,
if you're listening and if you're engaged and interested, you're mostly both bringing, have a different perspective on the same issue. So it's quite powerful. suspect, I know we first met at a networking event, I know the term networking isn't how you do it. It was a bit more, it was a lot more sophisticated than that, but we got chatting straight away and...
And that's the power of getting out of your day to day or your business construct and just opening up and talking and also listening to others.
Ronan Leonard (08:58.732)
Yeah, you could only ever have the lived experience and the belief systems that you have. And it's very hard to change them yourself. You need that anti-perspective of, I'd never thought of that before. you know, why do you think that way? I mean, I remember the very first event that I ran, that events business. I sat down and I'd finished taking these casino tables out of this venue. And it was one o'clock in the morning. I sat in my garden and said,
I can do this. Up until then it was just theory. You I think I can start a business. Can I? I don't know. We have these limited beliefs or we have a lived experience and it's only at a certain point do we then tip over into from knowing to doing. I was just talking to a founder in New Zealand a couple of days ago and he said, me and my business partner, we started 15 different...
and businesses in a year, all these different apps. He's a very good coder and a very good developer. And he said, I knew and I've been told that you've got to find the product market fit first before you build anything. He said, but we still went ahead and did it 15 times. He said, we created stories for kids and then we pivoted to something else. And he was reeling them all off. And he said, two years later, I've now figured out that I do actually find
Michael (10:10.082)
Hahaha.
Ronan Leonard (10:21.336)
product market fit before I build something. But no amount of books or anything. Sometimes you've got to make those mistakes and you've got to hit that wall or you've got to realize I actually don't know what I don't know and reach out and ask someone else to their opinion.
Michael (10:41.697)
Yeah, he's probably, sounds like the sort of person that might well be, people are suited to different stages of business as well. And someone gets a lot of energy out of creation and building things and then, you know, probably better to hand it over to someone. that word context that you use, I'm interested, it is hard to know your context if you don't have any context. If you don't,
get out and circulate. is it typically a business problem that triggers something or is it an owner just wondering, in your experience, is it more of an owner wondering at a personal level, do I need to approach things differently? because we're talking about small businesses where the business and the founder, the owner are
are so inseparable in terms of the energy in the business is driven by the energy of the owner. I mean, as you get bigger and you scale and you introduce the other layers of management, a lot of businesses, even tens of millions of turnover can be completely owner-centric. so business issues and personal issues are one in the same.
Ronan Leonard (12:11.34)
Yeah, I've always found a business that the highs are higher and the lows are lower because you have that additional investment in it. And there's also a danger in that because if you're not achieving the revenue that you want or the lifestyle you want, you can often see yourself as a failure or, you know, I must be dumb. Why am I not able to sort of crack this nut? So there is that danger of being too attached to the outcomes, 100%.
But for small business owners, there's an intrinsic motivation which can't be taught. There's an element of that. So I was on a course about eight years ago, which was how to build software as a service. And it was $5,000 US dollars. And a lot of the marketing gurus and the experts out there, they're great at marketing, but their products and the services sell aren't that great.
So they're all saying, you you too could be like me and 10 million dollars, you know, doing nothing. And so there's a lot of hype around there and that marketing side. But the second month of this program, what they said is that you need to go out to the market and you need to speak to people and find out what their problem is before you build a solution. Going back to what I earlier did wrong. And I was in this mastermind with about eight of the people, six of them left. They paid their money.
Michael (13:17.709)
You
Ronan Leonard (13:40.536)
They said, the month before we were having these weekly sessions, they said, look, I will do anything to quit my job. I hate corporate. I hate the job. mean, do anything. And then what this course taught you was don't build something in case nobody wants it. Go out and ask the market and then build it. And all of these people that were desperate to leave their jobs did not want to cold call people or knock on doors and say, hey, I'm
I'm interested in this niche, tell me about your problems, I've got nothing to sell. And so it's that certain intrinsic motivation that makes you push through the uncomfortable, the difficult, the hard lessons, putting all your money on the line, which is what I did. And day in, day out, year in, year out, being the person that is responsible for everything, the delivery, the decisions, the...
the responsibility of things going wrong that takes a certain type of person not everyone's got it.
Michael (14:42.529)
Yeah, they could afford to spend the 5,000 probably because they had a fallback to go back to there. But it ran a bit deeper for you and you got talking about it and you've learned from it. It's been an investment that's paid back for you. That idea of product market fit, it's so sensible that you
that you try to best solve a problem and then start building the solution. It makes a whole lot of sense. I'm kind of interested in, there are a lot of businesses that are at a stage where some things have gone okay. Call them stagnant or flat.
How can you apply that kind of thinking? Because it's pretty hard to tell where success is. And I think there's a lot of businesses that are neither successful nor unsuccessful. And some reevaluation of the...
their business, the different component pieces by saying, well, what are my customers pay the most for? What do they really want? Is that a case for within an existing business to apply that approach?
Ronan Leonard (16:23.598)
Yeah, 100%. Again, I don't know how long you've been in business, I'd imagine 10, 20 years. The market evolves quite significantly in different ways. It's never been easier to actually start a business because it's actually quite inexpensive now to register a name and throw up a website. But it's figuring out really where you add the most value. And that will change over time. for example, with AI at the moment,
A lot of people in the service-based businesses can't or won't be able to charge what they have been for the last five, 10 years. So there's that seminal book, Who Moved My Cheese? It's a great little parable about, you get used to a certain client paying a certain price point and the market moves and you're no longer providing the same amount of value that someone else can do it because they're doing it better, faster, cheaper or differently.
That's what happens if you're not continuing to upskill your thinking, your business model, how you add value, staying in touch with that, then you'll wake up one day and all of a sudden, know, who's moved my cheese and my great clients and all the people who love me no longer there. Why is that? Because your model didn't stay relevant and you weren't adding value.
Michael (17:44.673)
Yeah. And you, and maybe you had your head down. were just hoping and praying that things got a little bit better or, or whatever your wish was. But is, is that, that that's a frame of mind, isn't it? That you attack and go on the front foot. I understand there are, as you say, it's, it's the most incredibly challenging time.
I think in the last 10 or 15 years, the opportunities are immense and maybe the opportunities are actually just must do's if you're going to see out another 10 or 20 years in your business because it is AI is creating so much opportunity, so much threat for a lot of businesses.
Ronan Leonard (18:37.902)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. sometimes you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If your business is only earning enough to pay you a wage, then how do you afford to employ someone else to grow? If you are sort of doing all the delivery and you've become so used to being the focal point and the only point, then where do you carve out that time to
take that step back to look a little bit at all these systems and processes while you're still doing business as usual. So yeah, there is that trap often with you are so small as a solopreneur especially that it's almost impossible to not continue to serve the businesses and do all the things that you have to do and still find the extra time to do all of the new things that are hopefully gonna change your model or help you sort of
redefine or shift on what you're doing.
Michael (19:39.585)
Yeah, I often think, yeah, I look at profit and loss statements every day and there are these businesses that don't spend much on marketing. don't spend much on, it's all for example, a referral business, there's bigger organizations have a revenue line for innovation or research and development or, know, I think it's not a bad
way to think about even a small business to it can be a component components of time and money that you allocate to keep the business contemporary contemporary. So if you're going to if you've got 10 or 20 years as your horizon to be in business to make some money and and and do what you want with your you know with your finances that carving out
some time every week, it's hard, but allocating some budget for call it innovation or call it R &D, it could be personal education, it could be networking, could be getting a coach, it could be all sorts of things, but it's a discipline to say, if you feel like things won't continue without intervention, then you need to...
allocate some time and money? Is that a way to discipline yourself to change things?
Ronan Leonard (21:12.046)
Yeah, for about seven, eight years ago, I heard the sort of 85, 10, five rules. Spend 85 % of your time on the here and now, and you know, this client's paid me for this, I've got to get that out the door. I've got obligations that I'm locked into. Spend 10 % on what does the next three, six months, 12 months look like, so the shorter horizon, and then just 5 % on the long-term horizon. Okay, what would it look like if I started to
package up my IP into some sort of program. What would it look like if I created a new revenue stream because this one has reasonably tapped out? So it's not a question of all or nothing. It's making sure that you are focusing on those other two things for a short amount of time and 85 % into your core business.
Michael (22:08.023)
Yeah, you can see how it's a challenging decision to make to the businesses demanding time of your clients demanding time of you and there's money attached to it to not deliver or to or potentially damage.
a major client or to slow down a significant project, it takes a lot of courage to say, need to do that for the medium or long term.
Ronan Leonard (22:44.942)
Yeah, sometimes you have to take one step back to take two step forward. Especially those style openers, I've done some coaching with quite a few of them. And what happens is that as humans, we hate going backwards. We dislike it intensely. So if you're running a small business and let's say you're clearing 120,000 a year, but you work in 55, 60 hours a week because you're doing everything.
You not only use service and the clients as you said, that's good money. But then you're doing the invoicing and you're up at seven o'clock at night creating social media posts. So you're doing presentations and you're terrible at, you know, visuals, but you've got to do it because you're the only person. And, and so there's a sunk cost fallacy in that. And, and, and so sometimes you have to take a step back and say, okay, well, what would it look like if I delegated or outsourced all of these tasks I hate doing.
Would that free up my time to work just with my clients and is 15,000 a year, I'm okay with that, sort of taking that short term hit that I'm only working 40 to 60 hours and my family and my friends see more of me or again, using that time to then go, okay, well, I know I've got other goals and ambitions. I can free up my time to start to build on those and build them out.
And so we do, and I'm speaking from experience here, as small business owners, we build these bricks one by one and eventually we find we've actually walled ourselves in. We're responsible for everything. We've not built the business that we really want and then we're stuck inside it and we're walled in on all sides, but we built those bricks ourselves one by one.
Michael (24:34.061)
So how do you remove a brick? Like how do you remove the first brick? I mean, you've got to start with thinking, it must start with the owner thinking, I need to take a brick away and start to, is that your experience?
Ronan Leonard (24:50.37)
Yeah, take a break. it's obviously the right one. If you take one from the bottom, everything falls over. So you've just got to start to look at all of those important things.
Michael (25:02.473)
One at eye level where you can see outside perhaps and it's structurally sound.
Ronan Leonard (25:06.326)
Yeah, create your own first little kind of window there. Let's create a window first, because we've been bricked in. yeah, and that will be different for everybody. Like I said, normally within an hour of me sort of working with someone, I can give them an insight, an idea they haven't thought of before, which is often that kind of breakthrough through moment of going, OK, there is a different way.
Michael (25:13.291)
Yeah, yeah.
Ronan Leonard (25:34.67)
there's around about 25 different business models. And so people don't understand they start a business or I start this business. They probably haven't spent any time looking at what exactly is my business model? And is it an essential model? it a, could I create this as a stash or again, a recurring revenue? There's a number of different business models and often,
in the same industry, but if you don't know that, you end up just sort of creating the first business model you thought of or the same one that the company you worked at was. The E-Myth is a great example of electricians going, I'm sick of working for Phil's plumbing, I'm Joe and I'm going to go and start on my own. So they're not going have to do all of the plumbing for 40 hours a week, but then you're doing the invoicing and the ordering and the...
and everything else and social media, sort of a sudden you just created just 60 more hours. There's a company in the US that is a subscription model only for mosquitoes. So they don't just say, come out when you've got mosquitoes. You sign up to a subscription model and they spray prior to the season every year. And so it's a subscription model. there are...
very innovative ways of doing almost the same thing that one else is doing that are often better, faster, cheaper.
Michael (27:03.383)
Yeah, yeah. yeah, again, a lot of owners have their business and it's their business, it's just how it is. And I tend to deal with them more towards the stage where they're thinking about selling or they're actually selling or they wanna get it valued. And mostly these businesses turning over a few million dollars
five, 10 more, they're usually a conglomeration of two or three different types of businesses within the one. They see it as their business. And I look at it go, the term business model is one way to think about it. I often frame it up as you've got different business units. And so the question is, so therefore you've got three, which are...
profitable, which are not, which do you get the most satisfaction out of, which can you scale, which can't, you is going to be stagnant, which interacts with the other. So it's that, yeah, it's, it's fascinating, but you know, getting someone to think about their business like that requires someone like you as their coach or mentor, or I think there's so much value in,
in getting out and talking to other owners or other advisors in an open environment to just hear that other businesses and other owners do things differently. I think that is a powerful way for an owner bricked in who's got the seed of an idea that I need to change things is to go on
read like you, veraciously like you do, or listen to podcasts or just talk to other owners in an environment. are plenty of those opportunities to get out and physically interact with other owners.
Ronan Leonard (29:16.622)
Yeah, and I think they are far more powerful than listening to a sales or a marketing pitch because the fallacy of all of us, and again, I've been down this path as well, which I'll show you how these that once you make a decision that this is what's wrong with your business, the person you contact to fix it is coming from a position where
they're selling that solution. they're highly unlikely to ever tell you, actually, that's not what you need. your business is maybe stagnant and you think, right, I need SEO. So the second you've decided on that, it's just a question of which SEO company is going to take your money. Because almost none of them will say, actually, you don't need SEO. Your problem is you don't get enough referrals or your margins are too low. Or there could be a combination of five, 10, 15 different reasons why your business isn't growing.
but you'll then go, it's too late, you've made the assumption that the reason I'm not growing is I need SEO or I need a new website or I need PR. And then by then you've made the decision without really looking at the second order consequences and not really evaluating is this what is the main thing I need to fix in my business to grow it to the next level. And so speaking to business owners that have no dog in the fight, that are agnostic.
and have those lived experience who will say, actually, you know, this is what I've done in the past when I've done. I've been running these wine and whiteboards where we get 10 business owners into a group and everyone comes up with a problem. And then we ask the audience, the other nine people, right, tell me if you've got this lived experience or whether it's just an idea, because you're far more attached to someone who's actually solved that problem themselves than someone that says,
Here's an idea. You go, well, great, ideas are a dime a dozen. Will that work? I don't know. But having someone that says, actually, I solved that problem. This is how I did it. You go, great. Second reason as well is that they're actually not trying to sell you that service. They're just saying, this is how I solved the problem. So yeah, finding business owners that have solved the problem that you've already solved is definitely worth that investment of going out and meeting.
Michael (31:16.29)
Mm.
Michael (31:30.369)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael (31:39.373)
Yeah, let's call it networking as a broad term. know there are few variations on the theme and ways to run those events. And it's not all about just trading opportunities. It's genuine. It's a forum where you can, over time,
perhaps build a bit of trust and share more widely. had a discussion maybe 12 months ago on the podcast and for the advisory board center. talked about, we often talk about the trigger that is needed for an owner to go, that's enough. want things to change and we can all contribute different ways to find that.
And we want to discuss those, it is, you know, the owner needs to somewhere have a burning desire to make things better or different. But we talked about the levels of support from free mentoring via government services to coaches and mentors to pop up advisory boards right through to formal boards.
That's, you know, for a business that is, and an owner that's very tuned into growth and increasing business value, you know, there are a range of ways to bring in expertise to your business without a full-time employee doing that role and another full-time employee doing that role. So, you know, there's, there are different ways to tap into excellent resources.
resources that you that bring that experience that you're after, is maybe they've been through it, know, ideally they've been through it or been often exposed to it. And I know one of the things that you're also in your armory is outsourcing. Do you want to talk about outsourcing and AI for a bit? Because there are resources that
Michael (33:59.625)
an owner can tap into what's the secret of getting the most, the best ROI out of a decision to outsource.
Ronan Leonard (34:13.582)
There are no secrets to stuff you don't know. I've learnt that just by reading it. It's the mark and speak.
Michael (34:18.029)
You
Michael (34:22.669)
Well if you can't, Rowan, you can't guarantee 10x width, we'll just move... You know... We'll do it here.
Ronan Leonard (34:26.99)
We'll just move on, yeah, guarantee 10x. It's a good point. I actually call it insourcing, not outsourcing, what we do. Outsourcing has a certain connotation, but the reality is, unless you do it all yourself, you're outsourcing. You're outsourcing your accounts to an accountant. You're outsourcing the website bill to someone else. It's impossible to do all of those things yourself. Business is way more complex than it was.
30, 40 years ago. So you pretty much have to outsource components of that. do it intelligently. What's the right cost ratio? What's the right benefit for that? And that's going to be different for everyone. What's the level of comfort in delegating? So you have those solopreneurs that hold on to everything. And by default, they never grow because there's only them.
There's others that go, OK, great. I've got a great product service. We'll franchise it and scale to 5,000 stores. Same product or service, just one person has a different vision of what they want out of it. But AI is going to be a net destroyer of jobs. Unlike my opinion, unlike the internet 20 years ago, when the internet came, people moved from high street to online.
And so there was a disruptor there, but the internet created a whole swathe of new jobs. Everything from SEO, digital marketer, social media manager, on and on and on, funnels, all of these new jobs and software and services came out of that. AI for the most part, and I was speaking to other people about this, they're going, yeah, it's, there's a, there's a great phrase out there that says, AI isn't going to take your job, but somebody using AI will.
And frankly, I think it's BS. The reason being is that if you've got an AI agent that is answering all of the phone calls at a call center, those two, 300 jobs are going to go. And what else are going to do? So how many jobs are AI going to create? A few people that consult in that space, and I do some of that. A few people that are great at doing prompts and some of the other things, but nowhere near the level and the skill set of the people that
Ronan Leonard (36:49.806)
being replaced by AI. And I often tell my clients and prospects, if you had a time machine, would you go back to 2001 and be one of the first people to build a functioning website? Everyone says yes. Would you go back to 2004 and be one of the first people to use Google Ads because it was 20 cents for a click for a product you're selling at $5,000? Absolutely. Same thing, Facebook.
2007, Facebook didn't even have their Facebook ads. And when they did come out, again, they were a couple of cents. you could drive traffic that way. So everybody with a time machine would go back five, 10 years and be one of the early adopters, in theory. And I think the same thing is true of AI right now. There are certain AI tools that can massively streamline your business, increase your productivity.
anything from sales, marketing, processes, systems. So you can sit on the fence and go, well, I'm going to wait and see how it all plays out. Or you can start to lean into it now and you don't have to go and rip up your whole business model, but you can start implementing some of these tools now that can start to save you a huge amount of time. And the other part about that is that kind of is insourcing.
Michael (38:10.741)
Yeah.
Ronan Leonard (38:16.97)
Every business owner really needs to look at everything they do, including those bricks, and saying, is this the best use of my time? And can someone else do that, which will free me up to spend more time with my clients, to build the next product, to add value here where I'm really, really in my genius zone and not doing all of the things that I don't like doing.
Michael (38:39.585)
Yeah. Yeah. The kids, the doing everything is it's so admirable and it's how a lot of businesses get started. That's dogged determination. And, but after, know, again, after a period of time that it, I've spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of owners and at some points always different. I've had enough of that. And, so there's this.
What do I do next? And I agree with you on AI and I probably put it in this, in that, on your innovation line, on your profit and loss, even if it's not there yet, allocate some time and money to learn some of these tools. And you don't, as you say, don't need to radically change your business operations tomorrow, but if we look forward probably three years,
It won't be like looking back to Google in 2000, 2001. It'll be, it'll be so fast and rapid that we might, we might talk about looking forward two years and then back because so much is going to shift in that time. you, you know, good case to say, put aside half an hour a day or five hours, five hours a week or whatever it is, give yourself a budget to learn how to do something with AI that's productive.
Ronan Leonard (40:04.782)
I would also give people the permission as well. You actually don't have to learn it. You just have to learn enough to speak to someone that you can ask the right questions. So you don't need to be a website developer to ask now enough questions about someone. You're going to build it out and ask a couple of technical questions and just, you know, sort of, and just keep them accountable and honest that you don't get being burned by someone who actually knows nothing will tell you everything. So you don't, you know, if you're not a process driven,
technology buff, that's okay. You don't need to go, I need to learn AI. You don't. You just have to learn enough that go, there's this cool tool out here. So that when you're speaking to someone that might be able to help you implement it, you don't feel like a goose and no idea what you're talking about. And they don't take advantage of you because you know nothing and they'll just tell you what they think is.
Michael (40:52.62)
Yeah.
Michael (41:01.997)
Yeah, they'll sell you what they're selling. Learning AI is a very sort of incredibly high level description of it, but it is about getting comfortable that there are ways that can save you time to analyze some numbers or to do research or to kickstart a bit of content or, you
structure that, you know, it is eminently practical and I'm, you know, playing around with quite a few different AI tools and it's my effort to try to become not necessarily proficient, to think like you described to know enough to say, now, you know, somebody might work on this for me, but I kind of feel like I know what, what I'm briefing in.
It's, know, with insourcing and outsourcing, there's the knowing what to delegate. you know, is, it's not, it's not necessary. There are obvious, some obvious things and there are less obvious things to, you know, one of the, one of the, the frames of thinking needs to be what, you know, as a, business owner, what are my strengths? Am I exceptionally good at operations or am I exceptionally good at
sales and marketing. So you've got to skew your time towards the things that return you the most value. yeah, and then have that trust then to say, I've got to let go of these things and spend more time on that.
Ronan Leonard (42:48.494)
Yeah, 100%. I one of my clients, I showed the process of insourcing and how to hire directs because we're not a traditional agency. We don't put these big markups. So we charge a one-off fee and then we teach them how to do it. So one of my clients started last year. He ended up hiring five staff. He's got a 35-person business. I had five additional staff. So they weren't even replacing people. He's saving a quarter of a million dollars in payroll every year.
But on top of that, one of the persons that he hired has a degree in AI. He's got three different degrees. So this person is a business analyst, he's driving a huge part of his innovation, looking at all of the systems and the processes inside their 35 person business and driving huge amounts of change inside of that. Started off incrementally, let's just do a small project, another one, another one. And now they're pretty much taking all of their
their data knowledge of they've been in business 15 years and using a closed AI system to quickly help their clients with any tickets, they're probably any questions they've got. So they've created their own database of knowledge which someone can access, which is AI quicker than any human can. So you're capturing the unique information from that business inside of that.
But I don't know, on the other spectrum, I had a client that said, look, we get all of this information in from four or five different sources, and we data entry into that, and we're gonna hire someone, and I said, what do you pay? He said, $27 an hour. said, I can find someone that's probably $7 an hour for you. So they save $800 a week. They're not ready yet to turn that into a software process. They still needed someone manually to do that. So it's big and small.
Michael (44:15.106)
So, so.
Ronan Leonard (44:44.872)
That's that idea.
Michael (44:45.165)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I know when you tune into something on YouTube or online, you get fed more and more, but it is quite extraordinary what's feasible in terms of productivity savings for a single business owner, me. And the challenge, like we were talking about, is to say, I've got a heap of...
commitments every day to clients and to referral partners or whatever it might be, but it's just long term that I can make a shift. I really feel like I can make a shift and it's all there to be captured.
Ronan Leonard (45:34.22)
Yeah, so this particular business is a startup for me. And you touched on this earlier. So I decided to showcase the idea of zero to 100 days. Can I actually turn a profit in that first 100 days? All my outgoings and all my income. And one of them was to just then share that in public five days a week on LinkedIn. Now, for me to create content, there's a lot of
I pee in my head and there's ideas and things I've tried and failed. In a business, pretty much every time you do something, it's a hypothesis. You don't know 100 % it's going to work. It was going to work 100%. Everyone would be doing it and it would be sort of a no brainer. Every time we try something, what about this? It's an idea and it's test. What I did is I drank my own champagne. I insourced from the very start.
one and a half full-time employees with me from the start because I knew that if I was doing all myself I just wouldn't get around to all of all of these things and so my
Michael (46:43.917)
This is just for the 100 days startup.
Ronan Leonard (46:48.174)
100 is a start-up, but I'll keep one of them on definitely. one was, yeah. So yeah, five days a week I produce a piece of content that has a video, a transcript, and images all around that. And it takes my team an hour to create that content. I just do the video. It takes me five, seven, eight minutes. They sometimes produce the material prior to that that I talk to, but it's a couple of hours.
Michael (46:50.18)
I-
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Ronan Leonard (47:17.588)
And so then how do you do that at scale? It's just, it's that combination. And we're using a couple of AI tools. In fact, this one of the posts this week, I showed a hundred tasks that you can delegate. I'd use a combination of ChatGPT, a new software called Napkin AI, which creates these cool little visuals. And we put it into Canva. So when I say we, my team member did. And I just did a little tweaks in it.
Michael (47:43.595)
Yeah. Yep.
Ronan Leonard (47:46.478)
So I created an ebook in, it cost me under $50 to create an ebook that I can now give away as a piece of asset to prospects, to people I know. And so that's the power of combining intelligent resourcing with other people that really good at what they do and some AI tools.
Michael (48:09.505)
Yeah, and not to mention Ronan, just you are an entrepreneur and when you have, it's really hard not to see things have their full chance of success by getting them in the market and seeing what happens. I think that's, they're lost opportunities because...
you thought about doing it all yourself or you want absolute perfection and this is another reminder of to get things out there and to use other resources to help you do that.
Ronan Leonard (48:51.63)
Yeah, for the small business owners, they say, our kind of clients love us and are really good at what we do. But they're often in the equivalent of witness protection program. No one else knows about them except them and their existing clients. And for whatever reason, sometimes it's just that they've either been burned by marketing before or they don't know it. So they just stick to what they know. And it seems hard and comfortable.
Michael (49:01.485)
You
Ronan Leonard (49:18.69)
And that's just one example, and marketing isn't the be all and end all. It's just one example of ways where you just afraid to try new things, test a few things, work on something and continue to grow and innovate and change what you do. honestly, once you try the first couple of times, you get quite excited and...
addicted to it and it becomes almost second nature to try and disrupt your own business model and try and find new ways to be innovative.
Michael (49:55.541)
It was, you know, it's, it's, people are doing it and it's exciting. can be exciting. can be stressful and can be, it can miss, but, you know, if you, if you have that nature or, or you just, you know, wondering, what might be, you know, there's plenty of, you've just described in half an hour or what, at 45 minutes, you know, many different ways to, think about making it better and different. might be,
a good time. We didn't really get you to talk about the couple of organizations that you particularly are involved with. mean, they've all, what we've chatted about are all related to what I know of you and the things you're involved with. But can you just talk really quickly about each of those?
Ronan Leonard (50:45.55)
Yeah, so I'm involved in a program called Mentoring Men. In the middle of COVID, I reached out. I realized that I never had a male role model in my life. My dad divorced, my mom divorced my dad quite young. He was a function alcoholic, have no brothers. And so I realized I actually had no male role model in my life. And, you know, got some life experiences that I was happy to share with the people. So I mentor a young guy through that.
The group you came to, we also, through Common Sense, last year we ended up sponsoring 10 young entrepreneurs to go through a program that's completely free to them to help them to start their entrepreneurial journey. So I'm a huge proponent of abundance and giving back and business has to be more than just making money because at the end of the day, money doesn't grow a community. doesn't...
create a society that is fully functional. It requires people to be more than just, I make a million, five, 10, 300 million. OK, well, that's great. But if you're not contributing and not building a society, then it all falls apart. So yeah, I'm used to
Michael (52:04.151)
So common sense events runs, many, it seems like it runs a lot of events of different types each year. I've been to, I think two, it is many regular events.
Ronan Leonard (52:22.24)
So we were running up to six events a month, including Wine and Whiteboard, regular networking, those kind of things. But the IGEN Foundation that we supported, when we started Common Sense in 2021, right in middle of COVID, we said that 10 % of our membership would go towards this Young Entrepreneurs Program, not when we made money, but from the very first time we started collecting money.
Michael (52:26.592)
Wow, yeah.
Ronan Leonard (52:50.092)
So we built that into the process and a lot of our members are abundant as well in that small business space, but willing to donate time or money or both, support other people, mentor others. And so in a world where lots of things are transactional these days, including almost everything, we've lost the commons, we pay for water, we pay for childcare, we pay for all these things that were free 100 years ago or part of the community.
I'm a huge proponent of, and it doesn't need to be big, just finding small ways that you can add value to people and give back.
Michael (53:28.055)
Yep. And also mingle regularly with others who are doing similar things because you'll pick up so much. And we'll call it networking for one of a better term. what else? I know that there's other things running just as we close out. Because you've got your 100 day challenge, which is on LinkedIn from
Ronan Leonard (53:45.39)
Yeah.
Michael (53:57.975)
from start-up to profit in 100 days? Can people join that 40 days in?
Ronan Leonard (54:04.878)
Well, I think I'm over halfway. So what I'm potentially going to do is use my staff member and sort of bundle it into something a bit more digestible. I mean, I'm still figuring out, I've got probably another about three weeks to go before the end of 100 days. And I guess by the time this comes out, that'll be finished. LinkedIn, terrible platform for newsletters. I mean, it got 1,800 people on there, but it's...
Michael (54:07.082)
okay.
Ronan Leonard (54:31.756)
It's a terrible user experience to read a newsletter. So I'm going to sit down with my staff and figure out how we can potentially put this into a quite possibly free, a short little program that you can sort of go through. Because it's got some really interesting things in there like ideal customer profile, your whole journey from awareness, someone's aware of you, right through to how do they become an advocate, the nine A's we call it.
So we broke that down. We've got simple things like product market fit and understanding why people buy, the emotional and levels of awareness. So it's got a whole heap of ideas and things and stuff that I've learned from other books. And so some of that stuff is applicable to startups and some of it's just great for business owners to, if they're looking to reboot or change what they're doing to just sort of.
have a look at some of these tools and figure out, know, the business model, is this the right one?
Michael (55:33.941)
I scanned it before we came on again and there wasn't anything that isn't applicable to any existing small business. That's great, you know.
Ronan Leonard (55:46.67)
Now, one of the things I, in most of those videos, what I say is, here's a hypothesis. I'm trying this, I don't know if it's gonna work out. I'm fairly hopeful that it will, otherwise I wouldn't have started, wouldn't put time and effort and resources into it. But let's try an assumption. If that works, great, we'll do more of it. If it doesn't work and we're given a reasonable amount of time, let's drop it and try something else.
Michael (56:11.083)
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I keep thinking about this line in the P and L and a chunk of time in your diary that is, I'm going to call it innovation and R and D for every owner to just to potentially think about doing things differently. Your two things to finish that you also do, do you through the innovation, Ginny, is that, you say you're, you're a certified
practitioner of their methodology. So you work with businesses using that and also as a coach and mentor.
Ronan Leonard (56:52.994)
Yeah, so the program was the certification of knowing that you know your stuff. So it's one thing to go out and say, I'm a coach or a mentor, or I know my stuff. It's another to then sit down and do the practical exam. So yes, the book is 800 pages long, it's like this. But as I said, it's got all of the best books over the last 10, 15 years on human-centered design and all of those things.
That allows me to sit down with a business owner and say, okay, what are you looking to achieve? And start to figure out, it feasible? Is it viable? Is it needed? And then help them build the hypothesis and the tests in amongst that. And the beauty of the framework is that often there's a go, no go. You're creating something new. And if you don't get the product market fit or the validation, you can't. Going back to the startup idea,
One of the reasons that so many startup fail is because people have built something and then they try and sell it. And the reason they do that is that it's much easier, it's progress. You've thrown a website out, you've got a logo, you've built this software, does all of these other things. It's much harder than go to someone and say, would you pay $100 for this or $500 or $1000 and get no? So humans hate being rejected.
core thing of ours that we hate being rejected. And so most startups build something because that's easy and the rejection comes later when they then try and figure out, actually got to try and sell it rather than go for the rejection first and going, phew, I've just saved myself two years of my life and half a million dollars.
Michael (58:37.537)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like the 15 times guy who finally got it right from New Zealand, but you all power to him for, for hanging in there. I want to ask you for your, your, best recommendation on a book, but I just want to kind of reiterate that mode of thinking for, in call it innovation. It's.
It's possible and it's probably mandatory in every business to really think hard about its near term future because it is so disruptive at the moment. I often think in some ways for an existing business with some existing customers to innovate with them, I'm not saying it's safer, but
You've got some of the component pieces of an established relationship and to ask them what else can we do or can we do it differently or how about this? It's another great place to start up in the sense of getting into a business that's established, may not be a world beta, but has some customers, has some history in anyway.
If you wanted to encourage a small business owner to read one book that really could ignite them basically, you've read five, what's it, 500, the one that comes top of mind or two that might be a first port of call for an owner to really reignite the way they think about their business, what would it be?
Ronan Leonard (01:00:32.622)
I'll use a quote from it and then I'll share the book. So mistakes are inevitable in business, but learning is optional. so give yourself permission to make mistakes, it's whether you learn from them not. And that's, I'm paraphrasing The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. So that's one of my all time favorite books. There's been some amazing books and each has their own insight, even books that I don't like, you kind of learn from them.
but The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham is my favorite one. And just for the audience as well, and you put in the show notes, if they're serious about, or they're interested about insourcing, I'll give a free salary guide so you can start to figure out that, okay, well, if I want to hire a business analyst, it's going cost me 28,000 a year instead of 130. If I want to hire someone to do all my marketing and social media,
it's probably going to cost me about 16, 17 rather than 60. So there's a number of just tasks and roles that if someone's looking to grow and scale their business, but doesn't quite have the money to employ a full-time person in Australia, that salary guide will hopefully help them start to think about different ways.
Michael (01:01:48.971)
Okay. So it's a traditional cost versus an in-source cost. Okay. That's a good prompt to think about why shouldn't I be doing these? We all carry around things that we know we should be doing. excellent. All right, Ronan, what's the easiest way for people to reach you?
Ronan Leonard (01:02:16.244)
I'm active on LinkedIn, So Ronan Leonard, pretty easy to find on there. Or the website is IntelligentResourcing.co.
Michael (01:02:19.243)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael (01:02:27.103)
Excellent. Ronan, very much appreciate your time. One hour discussion, we covered a fair bit of ground, but I really got a lot from it, I'm sure those listening will. Thanks very much.
Ronan Leonard (01:02:43.448)
Thanks Michael, thanks for being on the show.
Michael (01:02:45.675)
All the best.
Ronan Leonard (01:02:46.926)
Thank you.