Authority is the new unfair advantage for small business owners — and Trevor Young explains how to build it without becoming an influencer. This episode shows how founders can turn credibility into a real business asset by using the right mix of earned media, owned channels, and strategic content to attract clients, talent, and future buyers.
Why every business owner needs to build authority.
Michael sits down with Trevor Young—PR and communications advisor, coach, mentor, writer, author, and podcast host—to unpack why building authority is a strategic business asset for SME owners.
They discuss how founders can build credibility, visibility, and trust without falling into noisy self-promotion. The conversation also gets practical about content, earned media, owned media, and how all of this affects growth, reputation, and even business saleability.
In this episode:
The real job of PR: Trevor reframes PR as building a deeper connection, trust, and reputation with the people who matter most to a business, rather than just chasing press hits.
Why good owners stay invisible: A look at tall poppy syndrome, analogue mindsets, the fear of bragging, and the discomfort many owners feel about putting themselves out there.
Content-led communications: Trevor breaks content down into four distinct buckets:
Why owned media matters: The case for email newsletters, websites, podcasts, and other channels you control, rather than relying solely on platforms that can change their rules overnight.
Pick fewer channels and do them well: Why you shouldn't try to be everywhere, and how to build a strong base on just one or two channels (usually LinkedIn plus an owned channel).
Matching format to founder: How video, writing, and audio all have a role, and why the best format depends on the founder’s strengths, the audience, and the business model.
Thought leadership > generic utility: While answering common questions is useful, the stronger opportunity is to express a point of view and challenge the status quo.
Trust takes repetition: Why people often need to see you 7 to 12 times before they factor you into their thinking.
Authority helps sales and exits: How personal brand, business brand, and strategic communications affect acquisition, talent attraction, and the ability to build a business that can run without the founder.
Timestamps
00:00 - Why business owners need to build authority
00:58 - Trevor’s background in journalism and PR
02:12 - Why he works with credible founders and experts
05:31 - Tall poppy syndrome and the fear of visibility
07:25 - Why content paralysis happens in a noisy media landscape
09:24 - Why owners already know they need to act
11:45 - Content-led communications across owned, earned, and paid media
13:27 - PR versus marketing and why the distinction matters
16:22 - Choosing the right content format: writing, video, audio, visual
17:42 - A property company’s 350 video and live stream playbook
19:10 - Why owned media beats platform dependence
21:14 - Personal brand websites, books, and digital ownership
22:52 - The reality of omnipresence and big creator teams
24:42 - Why most business owners should focus on fewer channels
27:05 - Utility content versus thought leadership
28:30 - Why a contrarian point of view can matter more than FAQs
31:27 - How repeated exposure and personal stories build trust
34:19 - The four content buckets, including brand content
35:22 - The 80/20 rule for promotion versus value
39:42 - Why newsletters still matter, even if they are simple or curated
41:20 - Why YouTube is a major opportunity for business owners
42:42 - Building a show instead of random videos
45:57 - Beehiiv and newsletters as business assets
49:49 - Why human stories beat AI and how earned media helps discovery
51:34 - How AI tools use earned media and websites to verify people
55:38 - Why companies should make internal people into stars
57:06 - Michael Hyatt’s move from personal brand to business brand
62:49 - Using back channels and case studies to support sale readiness
64:42 - Creating heat around a brand through visibility and speaking
67:19 - Talent attraction, retention, and employer brand
68:42 - Adam Robinson’s LinkedIn growth and startup content strategy
71:41 - What Trevor would do if asked to lead small business policy
74:09 - Where to find Trevor’s website and newsletter
Notable quotes
Michael Why every business owner needs to build authority. Today I'm chatting to Trevor Young. Trevor Young, PR Warrior, he's a PR and comms guy, coach and mentor, writer, author, podcast guest and podcast host and guest. Trevor, it's great to have you into the Owner to Owner Podcast. Thank you for taking the time.
Trevor Young Thank you very much for having me, Michael. Look forward to our chat.
Michael We're gonna explore something that is dear to my heart, SME owners, and why and how some of them can capitalise on this opportunity to really build some credibility and visibility for themselves as the owner founder of a business and why it's really a strategic business asset, not just a marketing exercise that you can apply to the business while you're growing it.
And potentially and interestingly when you start to think about selling it. So you've been thirty years helping owners to earn recognition. How do you do that? And why do you do that, Trevor?
Trevor Young How do I do it? Well that changes from year to year with all the technology changes we've had. But certainly why I do it, I started as a journalist so my background is media from my early days and from there I worked in the country and then I came down to the city, the big smoke of Melbourne and joined a PR firm and then just went around different PR firms and then one day thought I could do better myself. So I got together with a former colleague and we built a quite a big agency, actually a couple of agencies, and sold those to a publicly listed company and then I set up a new one, another boutique one and merged that with the world's biggest PR firm. And I've also been very heavy in the content space and trying to work out social media and content from a PR perspective and helping my clients grapple with new ways of communicating with an audience that's changing rapidly and what that looks like.
And why I do what I do now, Michael, really is I find I work with credible people and have done for quite some years now. I mean early days when you're in a PR firm, you're told what to do when you're running your own you're working with a vast array of different organizations and companies and brands. But these days I'm a solopreneur and I can pick and choose who I work with. And my whole reason for being in more recent years has been there are so many great people, credible operators, you know, they might be professional experts or a practice leader within another organization or more likely they're a founder entrepreneur or they're a solo practice owner, more so. And they're getting drowned out. And they're the ones we want to hear from. We are at a period of time where there's so much crap coming out of us from every digital channel known to man. And the noisy ones, you know we're listening to and having to be forced, you know, they're cutting through the noise.
Trevor Young They're not the ones we want to hear from. We want to hear from the genuine people who have got something to offer who can educate us, inform us, change the way we think about a topic or issue. And I've found that they're the people that have been in the game for a lot longer, of course. They've got the runs on the board, the scars on the knuckle to prove it. But they're the least likely ones to put themselves out there. And that frustrates me in equal measure. But it also means that, you know, when I do and when I see someone who's doing it or when I can help someone gain clarity and confidence in terms of their knowledge, their expertise and their wisdom and to get them out there creating a profile and a reputation that leads to other opportunities for them, I get a really good buzz out of that. Because the key thing is again we want to hear from the good people.
We don't want to hear from the opportunists and the hucksters and the wannabes and the people who might present themselves really persuasively online and look really good, but if you scratch beneath the surface, there's nothing there. But on the flip side you get the people who are great and credible and got a lot to offer and we're not hearing from them. And that's frustrating.
Michael Yeah. That's a great why for you, isn't it, to support those people that are an alternative based on lots of pedigree and provenance which is something that you talked about in a recent article. And years and years of experience. So why is it that those owners aren't being heard? I mean, are the odds against them? Is it easier to be highly visible without any authority? What's going on there?
Trevor Young A couple answers to that, let's unpack it. There's a couple of reasons. One is, the people we speak of have chances are they've grown up analogue for starters. In Australia, you know, you don't want to put yourself out there, the tall poppy syndrome. A lot of us have gone through that. For my mind I've had to go through that myself. I mean I was always the one behind the scenes pulling the strings and then one day I'm out in front.
But it's something that you've got to get used to. And for a lot of people, they don't want to do it anyway, because there is that long-held belief that you don't put yourself out there because it's bragging or however you see it, we don't want to see ourselves as overly promotional. So there's that. But the other side of it is that they see what's going on around them and they see people who are very visible and they're, you know, I'm gonna be facetious here, but dancing on TikTok. You know, they're doing stuff to get notice, to gain attention. They're loud, you know, and they don't like it. And they equate visibility with those people. The ones that, you know, they'll punish you with emails if you sign up with them and they'll use every trick in the book to game the algorithm.
You know, we see them every day on LinkedIn and Instagram, and if you unfortunately sign up to something via email with them, you'll get punished on email, you know, and we see that and we don't like it. And so that has an effect anyway. And they're both mindsets which need to shift. So you need to shift those two. Then comes just the sheer challenge of it. It's never been noisier. We get our news and information from so many places now. We don't just sit there and watch the six o'clock news if at all now. We get our news and information from a variety of sources from podcasts to Substacks to Instagram to LinkedIn to, you know, maybe the nightly news on the ABC, and it's a mix. But we can't take our news and information from everywhere. So the people we want to deal with, their attention is...
Trevor Young ...splintered greatly and it's getting more so plus the fact people are distrusting. Our audience, the people we want to reach, they're so cynical and distrusting now. So you've got all of these issues that one is a mindset and held beliefs, the other is the landscape in which we operate, and people look at it and they say, I just don't know what to do. Often it is simple as I don't know what to do because it's...
Michael So it's it's...
Trevor Young You know, I've got this person telling me I've got to be on YouTube, this person telling me I've got to be on LinkedIn and this is how to do it and there's so much noise and people go into inertia because they struggle.
Michael Yeah.
Michael Yeah. So your role like I covered it very briefly, but it had the word mentor and the word coach. It sounds to me like I meet these brilliant business owners who are just chipping away at their business. It's a really good business. They don't have a lot of external perspective on how good or how well they run their business and so you gotta bring them out of that and make them believe that whatever their business is, their expertise should be taken more broadly to the world because it's really good. So they have to get to that level first where you are actually credible and you have a track record and it's something that will hold up.
Trevor Young Yeah, look, by the time people get to me, I think they're already sold on the fact they know they have to do something. So there is that aspect to it. I don't really think I can't remember that I've had a client in recent years where I've had to, you know, force to do any of this stuff. Because they've got to make up their own mind before they get to someone like me. Or, you know, whether before they do a course or you know, the same if they get a business coach, you know, they've got to want to do it at that particular time. A lot of people do DIY and that's where they go around and round in circles and they're they either go through I'm creating content, I'm doing all this, I'm running my backside off and I'm not getting anywhere, or they go into inertia, they almost go backwards. So it's either hamster wheel or backwards. The bit in between is you know creating strategic visibility across multiple channels in a way that is relevant and suits your goals, your brand, your business.
Michael And that makes perfect sense. They're coming to you because they feel like their business is underperforming. What are the triggers for them to say, I've got to do something about this?
Trevor Young A lot of them have actually been doing stuff, so they're not starting from scratch. And they just or they've thought about it a lot. Like I've had one client in more recent times and he'd been thinking about it, thinking about it, just hadn't done much at all and was ready to throw his hat in the ring on the whole thing. Or I've got someone who has been working away, chipping away, but feeling not so much they are wasting their time, but they want to make sure that they do it right because they're investing energy into something. And they just want to, okay, let's take a breath, stop for a minute, and let's make sure that if I do go forth with great enthusiasm, that I'm going down the right path. Because it's so easy to do stuff in any of this world. And let's define what stuff means. That's a technical term.
Michael Yeah, I'm just gonna start. Yeah.
Trevor Young But we're talking, I call it content-led communications. So, you know, if we look at content and communicating across our own media channels, social media channels, what we call earned media channels, which I can break open a bit more for you, but that's when you're being heard on other people's channels, other people's media outlets, like me being on your show now that I'd call that an earned media activity. And then in some cases paid, paying for media as well.
Michael So when you say they already come to you, the owners have spent time and energy and money on social media or Google or whatever it might be and feel like they're just not getting the ROI. On the spectrum of things you can do, you can pay to boost ads and you can pay to run ads.
Trevor Young Yeah.
Michael I would like you to expand on those few things because at the other end there seems to me exposure, incredible media that isn't—I think you can pay to get some of that—but sometimes it is earned and you can be featured because you have a unique perspective on something or you've done something really interesting. So there is a wide spectrum, but are you more operating at that end of it where you're not an ad agency?
Trevor Young No, no, not an ad agency at all. Let me break this down. My background's PR. Public relations to me is how do we deepen the level of connection we have with the people who matter most to the success of our business or cause or issue if that's your end game, which it is for some people. So once you look at that, well who are the people that are important to our business and how are we communicating with them? How are we developing a connection and deepening that level of connection with people. Most people think PR is let's get up on the TV news or get in the newspaper or whatever. And that's just a small part. If people think that that's PR they miss the whole picture. In fact...
Michael Well I think there's a lot of yeah, PR it's crisis management. I mean you hear that rolled out all the time as the response to something's gone bad, yeah. And...
Trevor Young Yep.
Trevor Young Yep. Yep. And the thing is, you know, a lot of what people are doing in a marketing sense is really PR, to be honest. You know, we hear content and content is part of marketing. To be honest, if you're there to build your reputation, your profile, your brand, and build trust and credibility, it's kind of if you look at it through a PR lens, is going to be different than if you look at it through a marketing lens. Now, it'd take a whole hour to unpack all that. But there's two different ways to look at it. So the way I look at it is if you can build your base of communications through your content and through your earned media and speaking and if you had a podcast, it doesn't matter. I'm agnostic as to what the tactics are, then that helps where if you are going to do some more promotional marketing activities, such as paid ads, for example. If you just rollout paid ads and you have nothing underneath to back it up you're gonna have to put your hand in your pocket for a lot longer because no one even knows who you are. They're even taking any notice. But if you've already built that credible presence with the right audience, people know you, they like you, they trust you, we hear that ad nauseum, but there's two other factors that follow on for that. It's know, like, trust and then it's being front of mind with the people who matter most to you and being talked about in a positive way. Everyone says know, like, trust. Everyone says know, like, trust, but there is more to it.
Michael And so you do that with... Yeah and... Yeah. And when you say content, can you just—it might be self evident to some—but what could content be? For a business owner wanting more out of the investment I make into this area. What might content be for them?
Trevor Young Yeah, good question. If we break it down into the modalities of writing, video, audio, for example, or visual, that's a good place to start. Most people, there's that thing you've gotta be everywhere and look I get it, but that's not doable for a lot of people.
Michael Okay. Yeah.
Trevor Young But if you're a writer, you're gonna probably choose words. And then you've got is it Substack? Have you got an email newsletter, have you got a blog, have you got, you know, do you write opinion pieces for your industry trade journal? You know, writing obviously extends to articles or a newsletter on LinkedIn, even posts on social media. I had one client and they were just so entrepreneurial and they made stuff happen and they were a fantastic client because they just did it. They were a large company employing up to 80 people. And there are times when companies are so slow at doing things where when you see an entrepreneurial company and you're dealing with a founder, let's just do it. You know, let's do it. And they were more video. They loved video, they loved talking. There was actually four directors, three founders.
Michael Yeah. A timing opportunity.
Michael Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young And they, you know, in the property investment space they knew stuff, so much stuff they were so credible and so giving and not holding anything back, nothing back in an industry where everyone sort of holds back until they get you in the door to pitch you. And so they did a lot of video, really educational video, YouTube series. We turned it into a series. They did about 350 of those. They did Ask Me Anything type live streams on Facebook. And then they were just constantly out there speaking and doing things like that. And not holding back whatsoever. Now that's you know, there's it's gonna be different. How what you say, how you say it is gonna be different to the next guy. There's no right one way.
Michael And not holding back really by the sounds of it. They were completely...
Trevor Young You know, one way or the highway in that regard. There's a lot that goes into well, what am I going to talk about? How am I going to be talking about it? What's my voice going to sound like, all of that sort of stuff. But I'll just use them as an example that they wanted video because that's what they were good at. So they just did video. And I know people who just could not think of anything worse than video, but they love audio so they prefer a podcast. So there's, if we look at the modalities, that's the starting point. Writing is obviously a big deal right across the board anyway. It's pretty hard to get out of it without writing at all. But you know, then you've got, well is it social media? I'm an owned media guy first. I believe in having an own channel. So that's a channel you own and control. So no one can take it away. Yep. Correct. If you're doing anything on social media, they can and will change...
Michael So that's your newsletter base versus a LinkedIn newsletter subscriber base.
Trevor Young Change the rules. We've seen it with Twitter. We're seeing it with LinkedIn now in their algorithm where they're cutting the organic reach down. How many brands and companies built big, solid profiles and big audiences on Facebook and then Facebook just changed the rules overnight. Bang. And you had to pay to reach your audience. Like you have no sovereignty in that. You've lost control. And sometimes on Facebook or Instagram, they get kicked off. I know people on LinkedIn have been kicked off. They didn't do anything wrong, they still got kicked off. So I'm a great believer in for an individual anyway, but it's the same with the business, is that sovereignty that you have ownership and control. So, yes, you're right. Your email newsletter or podcast where people can subscribe to you. I put YouTube in there only because you can take YouTube out and put it on your blog, but you can't control the algorithm. So YouTube kind of sits in between social media and owned media. Your website, of course, those sorts of things. And obviously getting people onto email and continuing to deliver value via email is probably the holy grail because that means you're cutting out all the middlemen. And that's a business asset.
Michael Yeah. Yeah. And I do particularly like where I ended up with you was TrevorYoung.me. And I'm going, you know, that's the ultimate proprietary type of domain name and no misunderstanding about who that is and who owns it, yeah.
Trevor Young And sometimes we see people who've got a business and they've got the business website and that's up and running and everything, but because they're known or they may have wanted to do some speaking or write a book or something like that, your book is your real premium owned media channel. You know, they also have a personal brand website. Might not be huge, but enough to if people are searching for them. They own that piece of digital land and they're easy to find and they're verifiable. It's really important. So with content, then the question is, well, who's my audience? How can I reach them? If you know you've also got social media is the next one, and then you've got the earned media as we say. So I say you build your base with earned media, you pick probably one or two channels, you have one solid social channel that you spend a bit of time on, probably LinkedIn for most people, depending on your audience, of course. Then you might pick another one just for a bit of experimentation, a bit of fun. You don't need to be on everything.
Michael Yeah. Yeah. Although there is a temptation with all of the noise to be on everything all the time everywhere, isn't there? And you're not keeping...
Trevor Young There is. And trust me, I've tried it and I drived myself mad. But it's a competitive advantage at the right time when you have support. So we see all these big time... We see Gary Vaynerchuk, we see Alex Hormozi, I don't know if any of your listeners know these people, but they're big wheels. Codie Sanchez has come out of nowhere two or three years ago and is now the biggest thing since sliced bread and she's known for, you know, boring businesses. You know, Main Street, buying boring businesses and all of that sort of stuff. She's doing an amazing job. An amazing job.
Michael Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Main Street. Yeah.
Trevor Young But these guys have got 10, 15, 20... You know, Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. These people have got 10, 20 people helping them. It's a team. It's a they're actually a media company that actually sell products and services. They're a media company first. And, you know, in my world, I've been saying for ten, fifteen years, you've got to think like a media outlet because that's how you're going to do it. But they are everywhere because they've got people doing that work. They'll do the video once and then someone else will chop it up for them. So there is a distinct strategic advantage in omnipresence being everywhere, but it's not for everyone. I think it's better to focus beyond less channels and nail those. And if you're going down an owned media path, we might say, well I'll only just look at my newsletter first and that underpins everything. And that gets bigger, well then I might shift into a podcast. We're seeing people and now of course, you know, podcasters on YouTube. So some of the formats actually lend themselves to being redistributed or repurposed in other formats now.
Michael And yeah.
Michael Yeah, yeah. I mean, the fervor around some of those uber successful personalities that you just talked about, I think it feeds another layer which is this is how you do that. So there's a whole bunch of people below that saying this is how you be the next Alex Hormozi and this is how you... but it's just endless if you're watching and listening, it's endless pressure to keep up and it's a very brave decision to pair it back to what you capitalize on your strengths and your experience and channel it and do a really good job of a few channels versus trying to be across everything and...
Trevor Young That's it.
Trevor Young Correct. Yeah, and they're spinning out stuff every day as well. Like they are prolific because that is their business. That is their business.
Michael That is a business, yeah.
Trevor Young And for someone who's running a business, they haven't got the time for that. But if they don't know what they're doing or they're trying to do everything, you know, it's hard enough running a business and now you've got to be a media proprietor as well. What the hell? But as we've seen since I've been blogging since 2007 and I've seen it since then, the benefits for the people who do it and they might not even know what they're doing at the start, but they have a crack, is immense.
Michael Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young And it takes them into a different realm, where there's more opportunities, doors are being opened, all of that sort of stuff. I've experienced I've gone through it.
Michael Yeah, you wrote about that quite a long time ago in Internet Years, right? That niching. So...
Trevor Young Yeah, well you've got to be known for something. And of course, you know, you evolve and over a period of time, that doesn't mean you're stuck with the one thing the whole time. And that positioning is probably the hardest thing people have to get their head around. Because you can't... well, you can, but you'll run yourself into trouble if you're trying to be known for too many things. And the hardest thing is to be known for one or two things and then focusing on that. And then, you know, there are...
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young Some people they get paralyzed because they're trying to position themselves a hundred percent correctly from the outset. And that's more of, to be honest, that's more of a marketing thing. But from a comms thing, it has to compliment you. But what do you talk about? What are the things that are relevant to your audience? And there's some people that want to be seen as an expert in their space. And so there's what I call utility content, which is all the questions their audience asks, their clients, their customers, what are their pain points, their challenges, their informational needs that you can help them with? And that's a really good place to start because that's where, you know, as an expert in your space, you'd know that and you can create content and then put your own voice and your own spin on top of that. And that's what will hopefully make you unique. That's where a lot of creators have started in that regard.
I guess the issue with that today is that people have been doing that for many years. And now that sort of stuff, we can just go to AI and find out that information. So the people who go down that path, it's a little bit more of a struggle today than what it was five, six, eight years ago. Today I feel it's more about and I know the word's been bastardized a lot, but it's thought leadership. And, you know, if utility content and all the content wisdom is your audience, what's relevant and of interest to them and all of that, that makes sense. But sometimes people don't know what they don't know. And thought leadership is about pushing people's hot buttons and having a contrarian view and having a point of view and a perspective in the areas and the topics that you want to be known in. And so I find that there's some people who are that way naturally inclined and they want to push against the status quo, and then there are these that they're so good, they've got depth of knowledge, and they want to share that and educate people. And I see that there's the two sides. People will veer one way or the other. It doesn't mean you can't do both, but people will veer one way or the other. And if you look at Seth Godin for example, he's not sitting there worrying about people's pain points. He's prodding and poking you in the metaphorical eye.
Trevor Young In terms of ideas and insights and different ways of thinking.
Michael Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a... we're talking about it from the point of view of a founder of an owner trying to focus their energies and efforts to grow their business and get more referrals, build more alliances or whatever it is, and so disseminating quality information in a different way. I also think there's a lot of potential clients that are feeling the same kind of exasperation about just what's coming at them. So you know it's like I was looking at I bought some Blundstone boots online the other day and I'm still getting ads and I looked at some socks I'm getting fifty ads and so you just burn out and turn off and you know do something else but it's just complete overload. So if you can get through PR, through communications, some information about what you do and how you do it in a way that people can download or can take in on their own way without a furious campaign and barrage of click here do that. You know, for some business owners in some industries it feels like they might come back around a little. If you've got the...
Trevor Young Yeah, look, yeah, I think that that's right. And people want to trust someone. So the trust is all of this is around trust. Being a trusted source of information, being a trusted provider of services, having being trusted for the product that you manufacture and sell. And people don't just trust anymore. You know, they're for starters just to cut through, there's evidence anywhere between research to show it's anywhere between seven and eleven or twelve times they actually have to see you, come across you and take notice of you, before they'll even, you know, you'll factor in their thinking. So that means that you can't just do a one and done and you're gone. That means that you've got to front up. And so people, I saw about, I heard about the other day... yeah, I saw you know and then our brain recollects a lot more.
And people want cognitive shortcuts. So if you can help them on a cognitive shortcut, yes, I trust that person. I've seen them around and I've read some of their stuff, you know. And there's other ways to build trust too, by taking people behind the velvet rope of your business. So where I talked to before about utility-based content and then leadership style content or what I call vanguard content being out in the front, there's also your personal content. And that's your personal story and lessons learned and it's just some adjacent type things to the heavier stuff you might write about. You might have just got a beautiful boardroom table in and you've tried to fix it up and put it together. You know, that's great for some social media things. You might buy an artwork for your boardroom or you put on a new employee and you might tell the story of how you'd been watching them for years before you actually employed them. I mean, one of my first hires with a smaller company that I had, we employed her off Twitter. Because we'd seen her in action. She lived in Sydney and she was coming down to Melbourne, and we knew that because we'd spoken to her on Twitter, and I'd seen her in action just helping people on Twitter and...
Trevor Young ...in the days when Twitter was an amazing social channel, the purest social channel. And, you know, we saw a lot about her, we saw what she'd blog about. I knew that she knew her stuff. And then when I met her, you got the job, you know, I didn't need to talk to anyone else. But there's a story in that. So how can we get our stories about running our business and getting it out there. Now some people will go, the whole vulnerable thing, vulnerability thing.
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young And that works incredibly well, but it's not right for everyone. Those that do it and do it with in a respectful way are really good. I'm not talking about the trauma dumpers who you've all heard about the CEO who got on LinkedIn and bawled his eyes out because he had to sack 50 people or something and he just became ridiculed. That's called, in my world, trauma dumping.
Michael Right. I hadn't heard that.
Trevor Young But you know, the vulnerability thing, the lessons learned, or I've cocked this up and we learned from it, that sort of content is good. I call that the personal content. And then your fourth bucket of content, if I just tie that bow up, is just your brand content and that's we've won this award, we've done this, we've done that. A lot of people, that's all they talk about. They talk about themselves because they're besotted with their own branded business. We've just won this award, we've just done this, we've just, you know, whatever, whatever. And the problem is that it's only about them and no one's interested because they haven't given people a reason to take notice of them.
Michael Yeah. Then what's the ratio on that? Not to try and be too mathematical about it, but I have read from time to time about that contrast between exhibiting clearly what you do and how you do it versus understanding someone's potential issues and so talking about what you do versus what they need.
Trevor Young Yeah, look if you looked at the promotional content side of things, and really this has come out of the whole area of social media, how much should you do it on social media? Some people use social media channels, they still do, just to promote their products. I've always thought ten to fifteen percent of that, but I'm happy, depending on the industry, to go to an eighty-twenty rule. So twenty percent promotion, eighty percent adding value to the audience.
Michael Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young An eighty-twenty rule is quite good. It's a simple one to remember, one in every five. Is that right? One in every five. And Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a book years ago, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. It was all about value, value, value, jab, jab, jab. The right hook was the sell. It probably should have been... That's the eighty-twenty rule. But I think that that's still pretty sound. Now I will say that there are industries like fashion...
Michael Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah.
Michael It should have been jab jab jab jab right hook. But anyway, if the...
Trevor Young Or high interest categories, computers, cars even. You can talk about products till you're blue in the face 'cause people love it. So there are some where it is the products, the high interest categories are such that that's all people want to know. But I even then, if you're doing fashion, if you're taking fashion and you're...
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah, I agree.
Trevor Young You know, if you're a retailer, you could say what's hot and what's not and what's coming out and we've got this and da-da-da-da-da. That's adding value because you're taking people behind the scenes and this is the hottest new thing in England or such and such celebrity wore this and so many things to talk about. But if you're the actual designer, you take people into the design studio where you're doing it.
Michael Yeah, okay. So if you bring it back to a small business owner, what's it... I always think of there's the quick hit that we'd all like, you know, immediate return on your ad spend and then there's this stuff that might be about you have you talked about early in the discussion, these people that have built an incredible back catalogue of knowledge and understanding on how to do it. They're real experts and not necessarily comfortable in going on camera or sharing. It's not their natural instinct. They're about, I do a really good job, I enjoy what I do, and so it should just all flow from there. But how do you what would you say to an owner about getting from zero to thirty or forty kilometres an hour on the way to a hundred to get them started. When they're reluctant or they're burnt out from trying other things.
Trevor Young Yeah. Look, well let's look at someone who has got, you know, where their reputation is really important to their business and maybe it's the services based, and their knowledge and their expertise is their selling point. So let's corral it to that type of person, of which there's so many different types of businesses of that ilk where what you know is your key differentiator. So I mean if you pick any industry, pick accounting, pick any industry really. But if you had one that did nothing and one that was generous and visible and putting stuff out there, and you had heard about both through referral and you're checking one out against the other, you know, the one that doesn't even show the founder's face, you know, is behind the eight ball to the one that's we want to be in the other one where they've got a visible presence.
So they can be found, verified, and we can check them out. So usually I'd say, look, I like the idea of a newsletter, but to get a newsletter for people to sign you up now, you know, you've got to be adding a fair degree of value, not just about company news. Those days are kind of old, they're gone. So if wherever possible, however, you can get people onto your email list, that's a starting point. Now, if they're already clients and that side of things, you've already got a starting point there. But I'd certainly have a newsletter, even if it's once a month or a quarter, where you've just got a reason to go out to people with some good information. You might not want to be a writer and write essays or anything like that, but what you might be good is being a curator.
Michael Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young So there's so much noise in your industry. How about you curate the best stories and articles and videos? And you know, once every month or whatever, you curate a package of that. And that's valuable to people who are busy and they can ting, ting, ting, ting. Again, that's judgment and taste. That goes, you know, that's a big tick for anyone who does that. So I do think an email newsletter, I need to have an email list is incredibly important. You can, if you didn't want to go through the thing of doing it all yourself and using an email marketing service and all of that side of things like a Kit or a MailerLite. Substack is becoming quite big and so while you don't own Substack as a platform you can always download your email list and you've always got your articles there.
Michael Okay. Yeah.
Trevor Young So you could always write on Substack, but you could always repurpose your articles on a blog or start on a blog on your website and then repurpose them on Substack and get people to follow you on Substack. So that's a way again. Again, that I'm talking about writing. If I think one of the biggest opportunities for people is YouTube, because you know it's...
Michael Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young It's the number one I believe I saw the other day, it's the number one streaming service on TV now.
Michael Right. So pretty number one wide across just about every category, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young And I mean it's crazy. I mean people watching on their phone, they watch on their tablets, they watch on the computers, and now they watch it on TV. I mean all my mates, we all watch it on TV now. And I think the opportunity is to have a show or a magazine. I'm starting to think very much around editorial because we always like newspapers and magazines and radio stations and a podcast to me is editorial. You know, a substack is a publication, it's editorial. I think if you were going to do YouTube, you want to create a show, not just drop up. If all you're doing is putting up videos with no semblance of strategy or thinking, they'll be buried. Like they won't just won't go anywhere. You might say I want a show, I want to create a show, I'll once a week, once a fortnight, whatever you decide to do, you create a show, and that might be, this is my audience, this is the mission of the show, to help them achieve this. So it might be a tax accountant or a property tax or something like that. And you might say, I will unpack all the legislation and help you with non-jargon to cut through. Now, part of that might mean also when you've got new tax changes from the government, you don't just, on one hand you could educate people what this means. Some go further and have a crack at it and say this is not good or for these reasons. So, but you can understand now, once you start going down that path, you think, well, who's my audience? What's of interest and value to them? What is my point of view? What do I want to be known for? And it's like a Venn diagram. You've got to find that piece in the middle. You know, yes...
Michael Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah. I...
Trevor Young You want to talk about what you want to be known for, but it has to be of interest and relevance to a particular audience group that you're after. Not your whole audience, just a group.
Michael Yeah, two. Yeah. And in preparing businesses for sale, you look at the balance sheet and which is what I do most of the days and there's the physical assets or there's the financial assets, but the intangible assets don't get on the balance sheet. Your fans and followers, your email subscribers, your even things you might have paid a little bit of money for, your URL or your registered business name, you don't see them on balance sheets largely. But having a even a small database of past customers as a seed of a newsletter list is within reach of a lot of businesses and a lot of owners as a start point. And so to avoid feeling like you've got to be Alex Hormozi or whoever, you know, just start that way. And it's you can experiment with it. You can market your modest little YouTube channel to them and, you know, get a bit of a run on. So there's no question there are opportunities there to connect closer and when you... I've seen people leap to whatever's...
Trevor Young Yeah.
Trevor Young Correct?
Michael ...hot and popular and you don't own it. You've got to underestimate how long and how much money you've got to spend. So getting your own getting a start that's getting to thirty Ks, right? An hour on the way to, you know, getting on the freeway at a hundred. And it is an asset.
Trevor Young Well it's an asset. It's an asset that over time you know, and over time if you can get people to open it up, that's an asset, for sure. I mean there are cases where people have let's use an example. There's an amazing don't even know what you call it now. It's like a platform for the creator economy, but it's more for business. So we've just talked Substack, but there's one called beehiiv, B E H double I V, beehiiv with the misspelled. And they're yes, they're about newsletters, and that's how they started. Now you can put your podcasts through it. Now you can sell products and services through the platform. And at a period of time where you had to join a lot of these things together, we're now seeing smart all-in-one platforms that hopefully do the job adequately across all of it. And beehiiv, the founder of beehiiv is a gun. Like he's a gun. He talks about the creator economy and newsletters in general and that side of things because that's the business. But he also takes people behind growing a business, a fast business. And he takes them, you know, when he goes overseas to do a...
Michael Right. Yeah.
Trevor Young ...a conference or they have their off, you know, he employs people from around the world and he brings them all in and he takes people through all the things he's done this week and like for those people who want that detail he gives it everything. Anyway his newsletter is I think it's called Big Desk Energy. It's growing to a point where it's tens of thousands of subscribers and people now pay to sponsor his newsletter. So he...
Michael Yeah.
Michael Yeah. Well, it's good enough.
Trevor Young His newsletter is making money for the business because he's helped close big accounts, big deals through it, with clients, with customers. It also is useful in him communicating with the venture capital crowd, so he gets funding. But he also now, it's its own media asset that he makes money on through ads, which is amazing and you know, if you...
Michael It started as an email service provider.
Trevor Young Well, it's a bit more than that. I mean it literally is Yeah, it did. And there's email service providers, but it was more you want a newsletter, you'd come to us. Whereas an email service provider isn't necessary for it you can do newsletters, but it's not necessarily for that. It's for you know, your client goes in and gets, you know, automations and all of that sort of stuff.
Michael Well no, but it is I think it started that way. I like...
Michael Yeah. One.
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah. But what I love about that is that there's a lot of individual small businesses right across the globe who are disconnected. They're trying to be connected to their customers and their staff and but you know, there's millions of them. And someone like that has the experience, the insight to say, well we can bring more to those creators or those content makers, business owners, founders. It's great. People are crying out for that.
Trevor Young But the power is, yes, he knows his stuff, and now he gets to be on conferences and podcasts and all of that. But the moment he started telling his story and he's just engaging people, he's growing, because people want to know that behind the scenes stuff. And but you've got to, you know, now that's a lot of people are prepared to do that. It's probably more in the tech startup world, but it's just an example. If it works there, it's gonna work bloody well elsewhere, you know, because a lot...
Michael Yeah.
Michael Yeah, okay.
Trevor Young ...bloody well elsewhere, you know, because a lot...
Michael It's a model. Yeah, because it's and it's been fast. Because it's you know it's hasn't been around you know a legacy company of fifty years. It's a new company and it Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young Yep. Yep. And telling those stories, that's the thing. People want to hear the stories, and that's what we can't get out of AI is that judgment and human stories and lessons learned. I will just add this to AI because I think it's very important. Some of your listeners might be aware of this or might not at this point. We talked before about the earned media, so whether you're you know, me appearing on your podcast or writing an opinion piece or being quoted in an industry trade journal or local newspaper or, you know, doing a guest blog for someone in our industry, all of those things on someone else's channel, Forbes magazine, you're in the Herald Sun, whatever it is, over a period of time you build that up. That goes towards helping you be discovered and verified through the AI tools such as Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc. And more it's it's I the stats just keep growing all the time, Michael, about how people are using it. Like we used to Google and get, you know, put one or two words into Google and get a link. And sure, people are still doing that today, albeit it's mostly sponsored, sponsored links these days. They're turning to chat or to Claude and they're asking Claude and then their query is on average something like twenty-seven, twenty-eight words. They're having conversations with it.
So there's two parts to look at that. One is they've heard about you and the service you provide and however they've found out, referral. Because a lot of listeners, you know, their businesses grow pretty much on referral. So what are they gonna do? They're gonna check you out. Of course they're gonna check you out. We all check out everyone. What will they find? And are you being found on through the I was gonna say search engines, search engines and now the AI tools. It's called GEO, generative engine optimization. It's got other words as well. But that's if they know you, but if they go back and say, if I go back and think, you know, I live in you know...
Trevor Young Bayside Melbourne, and I'm after a really good small business accountant or a tax lawyer or something, who do you suggest? Then the tools look at it in a different way. So a lot of that what they'll come up with is that they look at earn they and they all look at different things, and that's always ever changing. But they'll something like the current research is around 84% of the sources they quote, excuse me, are what we call earned media sources. So appearances in other other people talking about you. Because that's kind of third party endorsement.
Michael So it it's yeah, yeah. It it's if you're on Reddit or you're on something where you haven't necessarily paid to be there, it's probably due it's it's worthy. So yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young People are talking about you. And so you're being verified along the way. Bad or good. You know, I do it all the time. Is this person legit? And then it goes through, can't find much on them. I'm not so sure. Red flag, red flag. If they ask about a specific person, I've been doing some testing on this. Yes, the earned media stuff's all right, but your own website's not too bad as well. So we need to be aware that our own website, and I'm working with one client at the moment.
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young And we're going through all the Q&As that they do, redoing everything and Q&As on every page. That's just, you know, if people want to look at it, fantastic, but that's just for the machines. Great opportunity for people, great opportunity for people, but you've got to get your head around it.
Michael Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I... And you have to have that mindset of putting it out there and it'll come back around. I mean, some people don't have that mindset. It's like I want to close it all in and, you know, keep it and distribute it only when I've got something in advance or in return. But that anyway, that's possibly the opportunity. I wanted to get your thoughts on the there's a I've been with zeal for the last decades this idea that bonus build businesses to run without them. That's the mecca to get a business that runs without you runs under you know under management easier to sell that's the zeitgeist do you have a view on there are a lot of businesses that I'm sure you've advised and I come across call say service businesses or specialised technical businesses where the founder's personal IP is what got the business started and drives it. Is there how is there a challenge there for them to build a really strong personal profile around what they do as against if they're thinking of selling how that plays out in ten, fifteen years time when their reputation is so linked to the business?
Trevor Young I think it's gonna depend a little bit if it's a professional services and you're the total front person all the time, even though the company may have grown. I mean maybe you've grown it to twenty, twenty five people. You know, at that point. What is it up to about twenty or twenty two people? It's you know, you're still sort of around a bit, but you get past a certain point and you could probably pull yourself away a bit. No, but if I talk about...
Michael Yeah, the yeah. I don't know what exact yeah, what exactly it is, but there's...
Trevor Young You know, like in professional services, you know, if you're employing people, part of I would say the content and your communications would be to feature your own people internally and make stars of them. That would be something that I'd certainly be all over. Who are your stars and make heroes of them? Because yes, you can be the front person all the time, but you're right, at some point does that, you know, people want you. So they ring up, da da da. No, I want, you know, I want Michael because he's the only one I know. I think, you know, yes, that's how you grow quickly. I'll give you an example. Michael is a guy called Michael Hyatt. And Michael Hyatt grew a really big blog, wrote a book early 2013, I think, called Platform, around that period of time. Yeah, and he became...
Michael Yeah, members already that, yeah.
Trevor Young ...very much around leadership, productivity. He started expanding into a number of areas, but leadership was his big deal and productivity is something he's focused and productivity is something he's moved more towards. And he got a huge profile and made you know a multimillion dollar business off the back of him. And he was doing all the content, he was the front man. And in more recent years he's taken his name off, he's killed off his website. And I think the name of the company now might be Full Focus. Correct me if I'm wrong. And he produced a video content why they did it, why he took a step back from all the personal brand stuff. And now it's a company, because it was always a company. He had people behind him. He had all of these products that he was selling. And he made that decision to to pull back a bit and take his, you know, there's no michaelhyatt.com anymore. And I thought it was a really, really interesting thing. And he did say in that video: if you want to grow quickly from a low base, it's all personal brand. If you want to build to sell, it's not, it's the business brand first. And I agree with that. I agree with that. I think you can have personal brand and business brand together because they both feed each other. But...
Michael Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young You've got to know you've got to know your goals though, don't you?
Michael But there's a point there's a point there's a point there. Absolutely, and you gotta you've gotta understand that the cycle you're at, the time in the cycle you're at. So, you know, building going fast. So we're saying you can be adaptive. I suspect he probably was adaptive. Maybe it got to wipe a personal website, maybe that was linked to the next phase of the business, which is...
Trevor Young Correct. Yeah.
Michael ...he may well have been at a point where I don't want any of this anymore. I just want I want some cash, I want to get out or I want the business to go on without me. And that's being conscious as an owner through your key advisors about where you are and fast growth, don't think because you might contemplate selling in fifteen, twenty years, having your name on the door is necessarily a terrible thing. Like you've got to make it valuable in the first place. You've got to grow it. And he's just he's adapted that. So it's interesting and kind of what I was after with that question because a lot of these businesses start as one, two, three people and your biggest asset is your IP, your knowledge, your connections.
Trevor Young Correct. Yeah.
Trevor Young Yeah.
Michael So make the most of it, but just be conscious where it crosses over to you know the longer term where you need to be out. So championing the others in the firm or you know when you get to 15, 20 people. Interesting. The other thing which relates directly to the exiting and selling of businesses, how do you use...
Trevor Young Yeah.
Michael PR. My theory is that there's this world, some businesses, the most appropriate place to sell them is on a business for sale website. There's a few of them and they list and they're kind of retail or food, turnkey operations, and anybody might buy those businesses because they're they're not...
Trevor Young Turnkey operations. More.
Michael They can be highly successful, but they're not specialized to the point like you know, particular medical things or professional services. So for those businesses, there's a lot about the businesses that are highly specialized, they do sell. Mostly it's within the industry, within the supply chain. And I have a lot of discussions where we're setting up.
Trevor Young Correct.
Michael ...one of those business owners for a sale two, three years out. And I talk about positioning the business for sale. And the likelihood is you'll get a call from someone unexpectedly about we want we're interested, we're monitoring you and we like your business, we want to buy it. Or you figure out the most likely buy is going to come from the industry, the supply chain so how do I put position the business to be so that people do come to me and I you know I often think about the media that is focused on that sector or that industry how you utilize that to tell a story about the evolution of your business and are you starting to think about the next phase of your personal life and the business as being great? Yeah, I'm interested in your take on using communications or PR to position a business within a fairly defined niche.
Trevor Young And you're saying that they want it known that they want to be for sale or just to build the brand so people get excited and want to approach you?
Michael The latter but driving that is rather than saying we're for sale, which doesn't put you on the back foot, but having someone come to you because they recognise that this is a good acquisition and it'll make a lot of sense, arguably slightly more preferable. But you know, the end game is that when you're sitting on a business you want to be out in three to five years and you know that there's...
Trevor Young Yeah.
Trevor Young Yeah.
Michael ...only so many buyers in Australia or internationally for your business. And how do you use smart comms to flag that? And not just, you know, one ad. I'm talking about, you know, stories. Mm.
Trevor Young Yeah. No, no, I get it. I mean, a part of a lot of PR, having a coffee with the right person at an association or something like that is PR. And to my mind, you know, a lot about letting people know that you might be for sale would be something really done behind with coffees with people in the industry and you're just seeding the word, by the way, I might get out at some point, that I don't know. I mean, personally that would be the way I'd do it, is more in the back channels.
Michael Yeah.
Trevor Young On the other side to attract people to you, you know, it's all about being desirable and a hot brand. And look, obviously it'll come down to the money you're making and everything like that. But if you're attracting the right clients. I mean, there might be that there are certain types of clients. I know when I had an agency that you know, we had a lot of consumer brands and we always knew that we'd be sold to someone who wants a lot of consumer brands and we had all the big blue chips. And that is part yes, it's part of growing the business because you get into one big company and get across their brand portfolio, which made life a bit easier. You didn't have to pitch for everything all the time. But there was a strategy underpinning it, which was everyone knows these brands and if you're attracting them, we want you, sort of thing. So sometimes the type of clients you go after is a strategic decision as well. But then how do you get that known that you've got those clients? Is where the comms come in, whether it's through case studies or things like that. So there are strategic things you can do, but that's not always the easiest part. My one is you're public, people know you, you're speaking at events...
Michael Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young ...particularly in industry events, you're visible at conferences. Hopefully you're on stage in those conferences, on panels. You've just got a bit of heat around the brand. And that's a technical term, Michael. There's some heat generated. People are talking about you. Everything that I've spoken about today is about giving people a reason to pay attention to you, which is really hard to do today, and to talk positively about you.
Michael Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young And eventually, particularly if it's in a smaller, normal niche industry, that will get noticed by the right people. And sometimes if we talk about if we go back to pitching the media, for example, some people think, I want to be in the media, I want to be on the newspapers or something. If you haven't done the work beforehand about what's your point of view, are you actually out there? Can we see you? Can we verify you? Can we check you out? And are people talking about you, then when you pitch it's a little bit harder.
Michael Yeah.
Trevor Young But if you pitch a radio station and the producer goes back and checks you out, okay, well, I get you, I see what you're talking about. You're good talent, I've seen your videos. It's a bit the same if someone's going to buy you, they want to de-risk. anything, you know, any acquisition is a risk. They want to de-risk. Same as a journalist, same as a radio producer. They want to make sure that there's, you know, they're mitigating risk that you'll be a good interview. Or you'll be a good company to buy. And part of that is being an open company, being seen. And as the front person, as the ambassador, the cheerleader, that's the owner. So if they've got other people in the organization out on the footpaths talking and doing conferences and stuff, that is a great thing as well. So the thing is it it...
Michael Yeah, I think it's also yeah, it's completely in alignment with what you said very early on and right the way through, which is don't be afraid to share the good work that you're doing and that it will get noticed. And even if not for necessarily new customer acquisition, it might be, it could actually be setting the seeds of where this business for owners at a particular stage of their ownership cycle where they start to plant the seed in a subtle way that we're you know we haven't taken the foot off the accelerator, the business is growing, but yeah, you know, I guess someday I'm gonna have to think about getting out or selling down or whatever it might be. So yeah, it's smart use of the good work you do.
Trevor Young Look, I think there's a couple of things on that. I just want to finish that bit up, Michael, because one client at one point, they didn't want more business. They wanted talent. They were in the war for talent. That was their goal. So our comms was around attracting graduates. Being the employer of choice, having an employer brand, as they say, in that space. And if everyone wants to work for you, not go to this competitor, you know, that's powerful. If people go from your company into big jobs and big brands and other companies, that comes back on you as a great employer. And so when people buy you, they're not just buying your client list, but they're buying your brand. They're buying your employer brand and the people you're attracting. And if you've got people there that, you know, have been with you for five, six, seven years, you've got longevity in an industry where they turn people over. And we can see those people, they're up on stage talking or they're writing an opinion piece. That is that they are all little messages to the right people. So it's not just about customer acquisition as much as that's critically important for growth. It's customer retention. It's talent acquisition. It's talent retention. It's all of these and maybe stakeholders and opportunities with other people. You know, some earned media opportunities, but do people want to partner with you because you are of who you are and what you do? So those things are incredibly important. I'll just I know we're hard on time at the moment. Quickly one story. There's a guy called Adam Robinson who I interviewed on my podcast a couple of years back, and I interviewed him because in about seven or eight months over that period he'd grown his LinkedIn quite big, up to 22,000 people, having not had a presence before. And he runs a tech company, he's a SaaS company, which is quite unusual for them not to be on social media. Anyway, now he's up to about 156,000. I just checked before we came on. But he's just focused on LinkedIn and he's got about three SaaS companies now. And he bootstrapped his first one and he got to about 20, 20 million.
Trevor Young ...monthly retainer, I think. Or annual, whatever. It was quite big. It was probably more annual in three and a half years. So I think it was twenty million ARR if that's the right language. And I've watched his journey and he did a lot of video and he's writing a lot and he's a bit like the guy from beehiiv where he's taking people along for the journey and he's we've really messed this up and he's very much around the tech startup SaaS area. And so he's built a profile in that. But...
Michael ARR. Yeah.
Michael Yeah, yeah, that'll take that.
Michael Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Trevor Young I remember him saying when I was talking to him, and I've seen him say elsewhere in his content that he's now he's got venture capitalists always knocking on his door. He's got potential employees who want to work for him, you know, and he's got three companies now. Like he's doing from where I see pretty well and he's really hitting...
Michael Yeah, yeah.
Trevor Young ...the content hard just on LinkedIn. That's I don't know if he's doing much else. Maybe he's doing YouTube as well. But yeah, it's a good case study, yeah.
Michael Yeah. Excellent case study and Yeah. Yeah. All right, Trevor, can I thank you. It's been a ripper chat. Can I finish with a standard question on you got plucked to go to Canberra and run Australia's federal small 'cause The Owner to Owner Podcast is only in just about growing the small business the vitality of our small business economy and its place in the overall economy. So they said Trevor, we want you to counsel Trevor Young.me and come to Canberra and be the head of federal small business department. What are the few things you would do once you put your feet under the cabinet desk on next Monday morning with a good Canberra coffee.
Trevor Young Certainly prioritise and I'd prioritise Victoria first given that the Victorian business community is taking hit after hit after hit after hit and they don't trust government at all and for good reason and I think that those relationships need to be repaired but that is the thing is...
Michael Ha ha
Michael That means that yeah.
Trevor Young You'd almost find out where everything would have to be repaired because I think even at a national level, the relationship between business or businesses and governments all over are broken down. And I think that they're not trusted and I think that that would be the key because you can go out and do so many things but and have all these initiatives and programs, but if people don't trust you, then they're really not going to they'll only be surface level noise. So my thing would be to see and go and talk to all the business organizations and employ others to do I'd ask for more budget and employ others to literally go out and listen and talk to all the chambers of commerce and the industry associations and the professional associations and just listen and learn and do a real listen and learn thing because from that you'll create, you'll get your insights, your data, your information, and from that you'll then be able to build some sort of a program. But until you've got that information, I don't know, you'd just be yes, you can create a great initiative or a great ad campaign, but it'll be all for...
Michael Yeah.
Trevor Young ...For naught. I think you need to really build the base of the pyramid and that comes down to trusted relationships.
Michael Go listen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trust is also important and connection. This term came up in the last interview I think it was compulsory small business service for pollies, which I'm gonna keep talking about. So yeah, what's it like to actually work in and own one of these things. So excellent, Trevor. Look thank you for your time. It's great to spend this time, catch up again after a long break. So I wish you well with the great work you do. How do people get to you most easily?
Trevor Young Well as you've nicely mentioned that, my website TrevorYoung.me, which I've had for many years, but I have a Substack newsletter. Just go to earntheright.co, earntheright.co, and that'll take you to my Substack newsletter where I'm publishing every week on all of these types of topics and pushing hard on some things that I think people need to think about.
Michael I read the LinkedIn posts you do. I find them genuinely insightful and thoughtful and helpful. So yeah, good stuff. Yeah, yeah. So that's where I get mine. That's where I get my Trevor. All right. Good stuff. Thanks so much for your time, Trevor.
Trevor Young Thank you. Same articles, repurposed.
Trevor Young Excellent.
Trevor Young Thank you very much, Michael.