Mastering Customer Connections with Ken Hughes

Prepare yourself for a transformative experience as we introduce the extraordinary Ken Hughes, an intellectual force and thought leader in the interconnected disciplines of social science, strategic development, and motivational oratory. With the narrative skill of a seasoned stage artist and the analytical prowess of a veteran strategist, Ken  has pioneered a groundbreaking approach. He leverages intricate nuances of human behavior to forge stronger, more resilient relationships between businesses and the communities they serve.

Are you eager to revolutionize the way you engage with your customers? Then you absolutely cannot afford to miss our exhaustive discussion on the tectonic shift that is upending traditional power dynamics between businesses and their consumer base. In a world where the consumer is increasingly empowered with myriad choices and a deluge of information, Ken brings you unparalleled wisdom. He will help you understand how to captivate the modern customer’s attention and loyalty. Moreover, we'll delve into actionable strategies that can turn your most challenging setbacks into compelling narratives, effectively converting your customers into the most passionate advocates and promoters of your brand.

But that's not all. We're going far beyond surface-level insights. Join us as we probe deeper into the psychological fabric that constitutes successful entrepreneurs. What are the traits, thought patterns, and coping mechanisms that differentiate them? How does one navigate the treacherous waters of crises—be it a public relations meltdown, a supply chain failure, or an internal disruption? 

Understanding that no individual can achieve success in isolation, we’ll also discuss how to assemble a robust support system. Learn the art of identifying and connecting with mentors who can provide not just industry-specific guidance, but also emotional and psychological support. And, because a sound mind and body are the foundation of all forms of success, we'll hammer home why your investment in mental and physical wellness isn't just advisable—it's imperative.

This episode promises a blend of gritty resolve, indefatigable resilience, and an invigorating rush of inspiration. Prepare to jot down invaluable takeaways during this enlightening conversation between Ken Hughes and BACD board member, Dr. Gina Vega. If you're looking to challenge the status quo and elevate your professional or personal life, this is one dialogue you won't want to miss.

For the video versions of all BACD Podcasts head to https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_QEFI0rmiaNYJmACUGLq8Re3uZ0icAOU&si=qw2NCg1iBZ7iKBkU

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the official podcast of the British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. Whether you're a seasoned dental professional, an eager student or simply someone curious about the intricacies of cosmetic dentistry, you're in the right place. Here at the BACD, we bring together the brightest minds, groundbreaking research and innovative practices from across the UK and beyond. In each episode, we aim to delve deep, offering insights, sharing stories and demystifying the beautiful world of cosmetic dentistry. I'm Simon Chard, president of the BACD. I'm thrilled to have you join us on this enlightening journey. Let's dive right in.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Hi everybody, I'm Dr Gina Vega and today I'm super, super excited to be speaking to you. A very, super interesting person and very inspiring. Can you hear us? Hi, ken, welcome.

Speaker 3: 1:00

Thank you very much, Gina.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Well, we really wanted to have a good chat with you today because we're really looking forward to your presentation at the conference, at the BACD conference You're going to be presenting on the 9th of November. The subject is clinical, from clinical to customer centricity. So we want to know all about it. But before we jump into the subject, I would really, really would like to know what inspired you and what was your trajectory from graduating at the University College in Cork to where you are now.

Speaker 3: 1:47

You want me to sum up 30 years.

Speaker 2: 1:49

Sum up yes, please In five minutes. Yes, please, I'm sure you can.

Speaker 3: 1:54

Of course I can. So I'm a motivational speaker and when I'm asked at a dinner party what I do, I'm a social scientist. Really, I've always been fascinated by the science and the psychology of human behavior, like why we make decisions, how we make decisions, and so that brings me into the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, cyber behaviorism a relatively new area of social science. And so, yeah, ever since I did my business degree, like 30 years ago, even in that time when I was like a young 21 year old, I was really fascinated by why we did what we did. I remember in my commerce degree I really enjoyed the sociology psychology modules and then I was fascinated to discover later on that marketing and management are social sciences. Like we teach them as kind of process led things, but actually it's about understanding people. And so later on I was to run a market research agency of my own and I quickly renamed it a customer consumer inside the agency. Like we don't research markets, we research people, you know, and what people do and how they behave. And so I spent you know out of college.

Speaker 3: 2:59

I did my various jobs, I set up that agency and I always worked, kept the agency quite boutique from the very beginning I always believed that small is beautiful, that small teams are more impactful and love of the BACD audience the same. You know they have even people who own two or three clinics. They tend to enjoy working with teams of five and six and two, because you can do a lot with a small team, you know. So I always kept it small. But then I worked for some of the biggest brands in the world. You know I worked for Coca-Cola and Walmart and all the other because I was working in the States and Europe and so I kind of was always fascinated with human behavior. And then I started speaking on conference stages for marketing conferences on behalf of the agency, usually because for a client. I was an actor in my twenties. I used to love acting.

Speaker 2: 3:40

Oh, wow.

Speaker 3: 3:41

I was always used to love performing. So in the college days I did some standard comedy, I did drama, I did radio DJing, all that kind of stuff. And so when I started speaking on the conference stage then as a favor for some clients, of course it was a stage again I hadn't done acting for three or four years. I had young kids and I'd given that up for a while. And, yeah, I just enjoy performing.

Speaker 3: 4:02

And so, particularly being Irish, we're a big culture of storytellers, and so I think one of the big problems in corporate training and corporate presentation is that people forget that we're humans and as humans we tend to learn through stories. You know, it's those kids thousands of years ago. Those cave paintings are still the same. Here's what happened today, here's the story. And so when you tell people a story, they tend to remember the theme, they tend to remember the objective. When you show people 20 PowerPoint slides, they just slowly slide down their seats to a slow, cruel death.

Speaker 3: 4:32

And so I started kind of looking at the business conference circuit, thinking you know what people need? Inspiration, motivation. But they don't need it in the traditional let me stand up here and give you a speech way. And so, yeah, I started to design a product that was around inspiring, motivating attendees at events around my themes, which is customer understanding, the consumer understanding, modern economy, disruption, but doing it in a very playful, performative, acting way with lots of strong visuals and videos and stories. And so these days, the session I'll be doing in November is three hours, but the people will leave it not only how they motivated, inspired around the content, but also kind of with a bit of a fuel and an energy beneath them.

Speaker 3: 5:09

So today, yeah, what do I do for a living? I tell stories, that's it. I can tell stories, which is a mad thing to say to someone, but stories are an objective to motivate. And so I don't say I never call myself a corporate trainer, even though that's kind of what I do. I don't call myself just a motivational speaker, even though that is what I do. I'm just fascinated by humans, our behavior and, ultimately, most of my work is helping brands and businesses understand their customer, with the aim to help them grow the business.

Speaker 2: 5:39

I love the fact that you call yourself a strategist, so tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 3: 5:47

Yeah, I mean strategy. I mean it comes from the origin of that word is the art of war Like strategy is around how do you win? Looking at what you have, where you are, what you need to do to win, and so my primary degree, actually years ago, was in strategic management. So it was about you know, managing what you have in order to win the game. And nowadays I will work both with corporates, with brands and businesses, but also with high performance executives, with athletes, with entertainers, with people who live and work in the public field, with to do with life strategy, fame strategy, and also then in with for brands, brands and business strategy. So it's about where you are and what I'm really fascinated by, particularly with in medical, and I have you know, when I do work with orthodontists and dentists, I always like to use them.

Speaker 2: 6:35

Yeah, with Align.

Speaker 3: 6:36

Yeah, I've done lots of work with lots of brands all over the world. The Align are a fantastic company. Everyone I meet who owns a clinic whether you're a cosmetic surgeon, aesthetic surgeon, orthodontist, dentist you tend to be what I call an accidental entrepreneur. So very few people I meet have had an MBA or have started on the business side. They usually start on the clinical side and then they find themselves, you know, 15, 10, 20 years later running a really successful business. But they haven't actually ever taken the time to study business strategy, to study They've read some books, you know they do whereas their focus has to be always the clinical.

Speaker 3: 7:10

You know, like, how can I get better clinically? How can I build my clinical team? How can I do your clinical excellence? So that makes complete sense. But it's very difficult. If you ever challenge them, like how many hours you spend a week growing your business? How many hours do you spend a week strategizing around what you need to do to grow the business? The answer is very few, because there's always something else more demanding in the business for your attention. There's always a new person to be trained in HR issues, hygiene issues, logistics, building issues, just so many other things.

Speaker 3: 7:38

And as a business owner in dentistry, you wear so many hats, you know like. You have your clinician hat on, you take that off, and then you've got your HR hat on. You take that off and you've got. So how often does the strategic management hat go on? Well, not much, is the answer, and so my work is about helping people step back. So that's what the session on the day will be about. You know, three hours sounds like a lot of time. It's actually not to step back from your business.

Speaker 3: 8:05

Look at where you are, look at where you'd like to be, and strategy is as simple as how do I get there? How do I get to where I want to be? And so we're going to do a blend. I'll do a little bit of personal development along the way as well, because what I find is that people who lead businesses don't really take care of themselves enough.

Speaker 3: 8:24

You know they're in their leadership role of running the business. They're so like little hamster on a wheel. You know running, running, running, and any bit of energy they do have as a leader tends to go into their team, other people managing those people, whereas reflecting on themselves and their own innovation engine is actually quite a weak spot. So we do a little bit of work on the day to look inward and looking at our own innovation engine, what you need to bring to the table on a daily basis in your own personal life to keep going. And mentoring is probably quite a weak spot when we could talk about that for hours. But you know, I often ask the audience how many people here have a really strong mentor relationship with someone who's ahead of you for over 10 years? And you'd be surprised how few hands go up there and it's a real flaw in the system.

Speaker 2: 9:06

This mentoring thing is something that we do try to encourage the young dentists to do. We do have a young dentist committee at the BACD, and this is exactly what we want to do to be able to mentor the younger generation to follow our steps and to try to avoid the mistakes that we have done, in a way.

Speaker 3: 9:32

But also that's a little bit like an infinity loop because reverse mentoring actually, as the world starts changing so fast, I find that reverse mentoring has nearly more benefit. So there are currently members of yours who are, let's say, 50, 55, and the younger dentists who are 25,. Their ability to connect with their customer via social media and digital is way beyond where you should be. So you need what they have in terms of their understanding of modern marketing, communications and skills. They have what they need, what you have in terms of experience and making all those mistakes that you've made. And so really, it is an infinity loop and either of those parties who think that they have the answers are flawed. There's a wonderful quote if you think you're the smartest person in the room, it just means you're in the wrong room, you know, go, go, go, find, go find a room where you're not the smartest person. You know and learn something.

Speaker 2: 10:25

And so yeah absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 10:29

And there is an ego because it is as the podcast. We're not under time pressure. There's a thing I want to talk about in the medical field, particularly because obviously I work across all industries and I do find people who work in medical can be quite ego led. I think it comes from the very beginning in university, the way we, you know, there's limited places to study these things, so you're kind of heroes as having got a place, and then you study so hard it's ridiculous the amount of time that you have to study for this and you come out and so you're lucky. You know you're one of the chosen few and it's so expensive to set up the practice and so. And then there's a kind of a bullying thing in medicine too, where if you're lower down, the people above you they know better, and it's particularly in the hospital system, really obvious in medical and hospital, you know. And then so because the consultants have kind of bullied you for years, when you get to be a consultant, you feel, well, I'll do the same, and so there's this big ego. There's this ego thing in medicine where we kind of forget that we only exist because our customers have allowed us to have their money today or have their business, and so there's this kind of arrogance that sometimes creeps into and I see it in many fields, but very much in cosmetic surgery and other optics where you know you're lucky to have a slot for you, kind of you know, and that's just around the wrong way, you know. It's kind of like you know, no, no, we're lucky to have any as the beat. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 11:48

And as the direct to consumer channels grow, as smile direct grow and they become bigger relevant brands, we have to look at what we offer. Is it fit for purpose for this new generation? Do they see the value in it? And we need to do a better job of explaining what we do versus what some male direct kind of straighteners do, you know. And so it's our job. It's not that I find a lot of medical people quite defensive about those kind of brands and smile direct such rubbish. Well, actually, no, they're doing a pretty good job on marketing, doing a pretty good job on peer to peer conversations. People who go through that process talk about the product and brand and how good value for money it was. So, unless we have our conversation on our side about what we do and how relevant and important our expertise is. The customers just left thinking, well, this brand seems pretty good, I'll go with them. And so there is definitely and again it goes out to mentoring. Circling back to the conversation, some people think, well, I don't need to mentor because I know everything. And so now, yeah, we do, we need to, we need to listen to what our customers are saying.

Speaker 3: 12:54

Just because you're the person in the white coat doesn't give you any kind of status or power above the customer in the waiting room, and for too long sometimes. Medicine has kind of believed that and we've all had those, those experiences, particularly in medical consulting. When you walk into the room and the consultant is too busy to even look up from their desk. We're looking at their notes and obviously, because of what I do and my age now, I would always like challenge that and say excuse me. And they say, yes, I'm here, I'm your customer, yeah, and they think what? And they give you I have only a five minutes. I think, well, do you want to reach the point when you have 15 minutes, because it's my body we're talking about, so I'd like to have some. You always kind of disarm them. They're always like what, how can you talk to me, I'm a consultant, yeah, you're a service provider, you're a human service provider and so, yeah, we need to get.

Speaker 3: 13:43

I mean, those days are kind of gone. You know, that kind of. Nowadays the customer will take their business elsewhere very fast, and so we really have to deliver something that is relevant to them, personal to them, make them feel good If we want brand loyalty. There's so many other places they can choose from today. It's such.

Speaker 3: 14:01

The nature of running a cosmetic dentistry business today is so different to what's 20 years ago. You know. They've so many other choices, they have so much information at their fingertips. They are years ago. They would look at us and think, well, I know nothing, you know everything, so tell me what I need. Today, we all know how dangerous and how annoying Dr Google is when they come in and they get. Well, I've been researching and what I need is anything. Well, okay, but yeah, you know, the power balance is tipped back and now we find ourselves in what I call a collaborative consumers and state. So we're no longer providing a service. We are basically collaborating with our customer for the smile and life they want.

Speaker 3: 14:41

Where a collaborative partner in that journey, and we should see that as a partner is really important. You know, we're not a service provider where you know I do this, this, this, and then you're finished and see you. No, no, I want to be a partner in your life. So I want to be with you now. I want to be in four years time and ten years time and, as you go through various life stages, I want to go to them with you. And then you have children and you have friends, and so you know customer lifetime value Is the word that gets thrown around, but I will challenge everyone the day in terms of how we actually building that.

Speaker 3: 15:11

You know how we building a relationship with a client. Think about it. You know I can feel the relationship. Think about the person you love your husband, your wife, your lover. Maybe you have all those things, I don't know. The the depth of relationship is so strong. When something goes wrong. If the fight, you don't pack your bags and leave the next morning, do you, cuz you have a debt of relationships. You can get over that I'm with. Business is the same unless we invest in the debt of relationship. When something goes wrong.

Speaker 3: 15:42

Over the competitor is a cheaper product or more convenient location, just leave us. Unless we've invested in a depth of relationship and we want to get to the point where it's when they get like a gene, that person's cheaper and person's closer, that person can see me sooner. I couldn't leave, gina, because you've done something over the time that gives them some kind of a motor flink to you. And this is the biggest difference between brand loyalty and transactional loyalty, and most businesses mix these up. They think, well, the key coming back to me, I see them every month, every year, my calendar. That must mean they're loyal to my business. Not necessarily there is transaction loyalty, but they're only a motively loyal to you if you've built some kind of connection. And so we need to start looking at how we're treating our customers, how we are. So I can really simple example outside your industry.

Speaker 3: 16:31

The most profitable product for a bank is a mortgage. Over the time of the twenty, thirty years you're gonna pay back so much money interest. The bank makes so much money out of your mortgage. A lot of other products they offer you over time are just designed to keep you in the relationship. But yes, even though they make all this money, they communicate with you. Once a year they send you a statement as to how much money you give them back at the end of the mortgage. They send you letters and that's it, you finished. No bottle champagne, no, thank you, no, you know. And so it's so easy for them to say like like halfway through a mortgage or a quarter way through the mortgage, send you a gift box of chocolates with cost of five euros, and to say you're twenty five percent through your mortgage, we're so lucky to have you as a customer, thank you so much. So it's those moments you want to create a long customer journey that think, well, how can we show the customer that we really appreciate their business, that we don't take them for granted and that we see them?

Speaker 3: 17:25

And brenny brown Anyone who works in any kind of business needs to study up a little bit on relationship theory and understand the nature of relationships. And brenny brown is a relationship guru. She's a wonderful Netflix documentary called the call to courage, so ask any listener to have a look at that. On that fix, it's really good, even for your personal life and relationships really good. But she defines connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued. So your personal, personal, private relationships, you know you wouldn't really stay with a partner as you feel seen, heard and valued. The moment you don't feel valued system, the kind of the fraying and start, you know, same in a business relationship. How do we make our customers feel seen, heard and valued and that kind of like oh well, I know better than you are.

Speaker 3: 18:13

So my daughter had her hair done just fifteen, sixteen, on Friday, yeah, friday, and her hair, you know, typical comes out of the hairdressers, highlights not exactly the way she wants and that kind of few days like I wanted. I said to her to go back into the hairdressers and tell them what you did want. And I can't do that because you know they've done this to me now I can't go back. And that's typical reaction. Actually, most people think you know that moment in the hair salon happy, are you happy? You go, yeah, looking at the back, you're going, and so yeah, yeah, and she's gonna go back in tomorrow. I'll go with her, just give her a little bit of support. But she's scared because she thinks that this is again the ego thing. The hairdressers kind of will brush her off. Where is what we need to understand? Is that? Well, find the consumer. It's my hair, my journey and I want this right.

Speaker 3: 19:01

And really, what's interesting about most businesses? If a customer represents not happy, we see them as an issue, a problem, as opposed to seeing them as an opportunity, seeing them as well. Someone's come back and they're not happy. That's our ability now to make a real difference. What we do in crisis, what we do in failure, what we do in moments where customers are unhappy, actually define our brand and allows them to have a store, have a story to tell you know and to say, oh wow, look, you fix this, amazing.

Speaker 3: 19:29

I was dealing with a company called ball dot com. They're like a Dutch Amazon, they're an online retailer and they have a huge thing around customer experience and correcting failure. And once a father or a trampoline for his daughter's birthday or ninth or tenth birthday trampoline didn't arrive on time for her party and you know, stop their fault logistics issue. But they heard about it and he complained and so they thought welcome, you do. And they call them up and they ask them to take his kids away for a day out of the house and they came in the building entire trampoline park in his garden, a huge inflatable trampoline park, massive thing. Obviously, it's a marketing viral and all that so you can see it on youtube.

Speaker 3: 20:08

And then there's a big moment of reveal and display and the point is we drop, we failed you, so let us help, let us make that up to you and let us do it in a way that's like way beyond your expectation. What happens then is that the customer becomes your biggest marketing asset. The moment the customer starts talking about your business with their friends, with their peer group, in a positive way, then you don't have to actually Market your business anymore, because they're gonna do it for you. They become a tribal brand fan, and the question every business owner has to have is about what did you do today, then, to make people tell your story At the end of every journey and we say the before and after pictures or whatever, but at the end of every journey, what have we done to help the customer share their story on their socials, share and even their journey as we go with us? It might be a three month journey, a six month journey, a nine month journey. We want to be their partner on that journey, but we also want them to talk about us afterwards. We have to become a friend, a colleague, a friend. To do that.

Speaker 3: 21:10

You have to actually walk around your business physically, look at the assets and think well, how can we do here? I'm always fundamentally so disappointed by waiting rooms. My God, it's like a time warp to the 1980s. It's still the same. The magazine might be gone, but it's still the same thing. You're sitting in a chair there. We have to work out how can we physically change the nature of the relationship. Then, digitally, how can we up our game there, where again they're tagging us in stuff on their own socials because they feel like we're one of their friends Again, I meet some people or the Dante's and Dentist who are really good at the social media game, but they tend to be the exceptions. Most people are against and they're a hap to wear, isn't it? People often ask me at the end of these sessions God, how can I be a marketing director, a social media director, all these things? The answer is you're not supposed to be. You're supposed to outsource these things You're supposed to have us be Delegate.

Speaker 3: 22:02

Absolutely. Maybe there's someone in your team that's good at it, but even not, there's hundreds and thousands of freelancers out there that will take your social media business and they will be your social media voice every day, all day, for a very small fee. Similarly for marketing strategy all these things you wouldn't expect your neighbor who works in IT to come in and do your teeth, would you? Please don't. Why do you, as the owner of the business, expect yourself to do and maybe you probably don't do your own accounting? You outsource that to an accountant. You don't do your own legal professional services, you outsource that to a lawyer. It's the same marketing strategy, I think. Because we have our own social media accounts, we think, oh, I can do that myself. There is a little bit of a nice person, but most famous people, for instance, don't run their own social media accounts. You think they do, but they don't.

Speaker 2: 22:57

It's very cleverly done by somebody else.

Speaker 3: 22:59

That's it.

Speaker 2: 23:00

They're very personal.

Speaker 3: 23:02

It is. That's a really good point there. Personal, I mean, everything you do has to feel like they're the only customer, that they're the only one that exists in the world. A really good example right now and I'll use it on the day is Taylor Swift. I'm a huge Swifty.

Speaker 2: 23:20

I've been sucked in. I've read that about you. You have.

Speaker 3: 23:25

You have, but I use her a lot because I think she's a really good example. Look at the moment Beyonce, rihanna, lady Gaga, pink they're all big, huge female superstars, but they're nowhere near Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has just come off. She's midway through her E-Rest tour now. It's going to bank about $12 billion globally for local economies. By the time the whole thing is finished, it's going to earn her $1.5 billion in revenue herself in income. How has she got to this point? How has she become the biggest grossing concert tour of all time, the biggest pop icon?

Speaker 3: 24:00

The answer is she's been genuine, authentic and personal for the last 10 years. So for the last 10 years, she's been on tumblr and Instagram and chatting to fans. From the very beginning of her journey, you could always chat to Taylor and she was always sick. She's the girl next door. She's who I could be. You can't be Beyonce or Rihanna because they're like up here there are, you know, some diamond crusted. You know this is my life and I'll sing down to you. Whereas Taylor, actually, the reason she's packing the stadiums and she could pack them again and again it's because everyone thinks, well, she's just like me and that authenticity, that authenticity is the result of 10 years of investment in customer experience. She's tried to surprise and delight fans. She's got to know her fans. She chats to her fans Now it's an illusion, of course, because you know you can't just chat to Taylor tonight because you know there's millions of people can't talk. But her social media game has always been good. Her surprise and delight games always been good, little treasure hunt studios for fans about what will happen when and now.

Speaker 3: 24:57

The Tribe owned the brand and the tribe talk and if you've ever met a real Swifty, it's a bit like a cult. You know it's a bit scary the way they talk about her. You know they talk about her as if she is the new, the new second coming, you know, like and so that Belonging that she's generated. That's what we want for our brands. We want people to talk about us, to talk about us in a way that and even if we drop the ball at some point that they allow that because they were again, they have a deep connection emotionally with us. And then people start to challenge me in the game. I'm just a dentist, like you know. I'm not Taylor Swift, no, no, you are, you can, you can Taylor Swift, your business, you know, and I like that, I like that phrase, taylor Swift.

Speaker 3: 25:38

Taylor's version. You can have your your brand Taylor's version.

Speaker 2: 25:42

So, ken, for a lot of us that doesn't really know you, is there something that probably no a lot of people know about you that you would like to share with?

Speaker 3: 25:52

us. Oh, what a teaser. And how could I tell you? But I suppose, yeah, I mean, I do a lot of work outside of corporate with individuals and personal development and A few years ago, at a serious accident myself, I was on my roof where I shouldn't have been a two-story roof Repairing a tile slipped and fell 30 feet to the concrete, broke 32 bones, hands Bought my back in four places, my leg shattered into 26 pieces.

Speaker 3: 26:18

It was a bit chaotic. It was a mortal fall. I should have killed myself, but I didn't. I was lucky, but it did result to me in the hospital for four days being briefly paralyzed until they fixed my back and, from a perspective shifting, it was amazing. And then I spent 18 months in physio and recovery, had to learn how to, how to do everything, how to sit again, how to stand, it's, how to walk, and it was a slow recovery and thankfully I'm great.

Speaker 3: 26:40

Now I can't run, but Me in my late 40s I shouldn't run my knees, they're bad and but you know. So that journey was really interesting for me because I help a lot of people in their own lives, deal with issues that come their way in crisis and the psychology. That's fascinating, but until you kind of gone through it yourself. It's difficult to empathize, you know, and so having gone through that perspective shift and realizing how fragile life is, but also what the kind of Strength you need to have mentally in times of crisis, is really interesting. And so now I do a lot of work with individuals.

Speaker 3: 27:12

I do feel that people who run their own businesses are never really appreciated for that, you know, and so anyone who's at this session. They run their own business. There's huge pressure on you, and people who don't run their own business never really understand all the Subconscious pressures that you carry. People think, oh, it's probably hard financially because they're always worried about the business. But no, it's way beyond that, because you're you're worried about your staff, your HR issues, you're worried about your building, worried about insurances, you're worried about your patients, you worried about your family. Are you spending up time with them and you're putting all these directions and no, really looks after you, you know. So I do think that we could spend and I could do another whole three or four our session with you Maybe I'll come back from our time for that and on.

Speaker 3: 27:52

You know, how do you motivate yourself through times of crisis, how do you deal with things. I mean and cove was a great example of that when we all shut for so many months, you know there was two types of people people who kind of did nothing and people who use that time rolled up their sleeves and did loads of strategy work on the business they'd never had time for before. And so there's there's ten qualities that makes People who survive things they shouldn't survive. There's loads of books on on people who have ended up in situations that they should have been killed but yet they survived, and the psychology of that, of those situations, is really interesting. And if you study all those situations, that their floats to the surface ten personality attributes that those people all share, and Studying those, understand, understanding those and trying to mimic them in your own self, then is how you make yourself, you know, ready for that disruption, because you never know what that disruptions going to be, of course. And and so, yeah, I mean I've been through that journey and come out the other side of it, and now my work with people who are high performance athletes and everyone carries the point here is really important. Everyone, no matter who they are, carries their own load.

Speaker 3: 28:52

And so we spoke about Taylor Swift earlier on. You know even her, someone who's going through the peak of her career right now. You know I can guarantee you, at the end of those LA concerts, when she finished her US leg, we all think she comes off stage and bounces off her. You know she closes her door behind her and is quite lonely and is exhausted after her performance and is angry. She can't go out anywhere without five thousand people following her and she's, you know, in her relationship she's, she's angry that she can't meet just regular people and date like regular people and meet someone who she can love without it being in the glare where everyone, you know so everyone carries their own thing, as do we as Business owners, and so it's a case of how do we support yourself?

Speaker 3: 29:32

How do you build your own mentor network, mental health network? Who's looking after you? Because if you expect to bring your business to the next level, you have to be the one performing Fantastically every day and you have to invest in that. You know you've to invest in your mental health, your physical health, and you has to, has to be. You know someone's got to be. You gotta be accountable for that. And so unless you put procedures in place and people in place and team in place to help you do that. It's really hard and so reach out to people, reach out to other people to help you and actually you know, sometimes, if your business is doing well, you should have the money to be able to help you. Get a nutritionist in your life, get a physical trainer in life, get a mental health mentor in your life and Go to seminars and challenge yourself, because unless you're investing in self, how is the business gonna run itself?

Speaker 2: 30:13

So, yeah, it's been amazing talking to you, Ken. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. I'm sure all our listeners are going to be really looking forward to to your session. I think three hours is not enough about.

Speaker 1: 30:28

I come back.

Speaker 2: 30:30

Well, maybe in the future. Yes, that would be lovely to come back. There is lots of things that you can talk to us about, so we really looking forward and thank you.

Speaker 3: 30:39

I see you in November. Bye Gina.