Ep 78 Hunter Leonard: Creating Change Through Business

Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. My guest today is a business owner, an author, speaker, a ghostwriter and a marketer. He has also been an active advocate for ending ageism. Hunter Leonard is CEO and founder of Blue Frog Marketing.

He has authored 10 books of his own, including Amazon bestsellers The Experience Equation and Generation Experience, both of which were named as finalists in the Australian Career Book Awards. Red Giraffe was a hot new release on Amazon in several categories, and if that's not enough, he's also ghostwritten several books, and he is working on his own book number 11. The Eight Rooms of Business, Introducing a New Way to Become a Better Business Owner.

As the CEO of Blue Frog Marketing, Hunter has helped over 500 businesses drive strategic growth while also pioneering solutions for mature professionals transitioning into business ownership. Through his extensive research, bestselling books and thought leadership, Hunter challenges outdated business norms, and he offers evidence-based strategies for purpose-driven success.

In today's interview, we explore what it truly means to create change through business, from leveraging experience and wisdom to redefining leadership and workplace inclusivity.

Some of the themes we discuss include why experience is an untapped asset in business and how mature professionals can drive innovation, how purpose can be integrated into business strategy for long-term impact, the importance of evidence-based solutions in leadership and decision-making, and the role of storytelling in shaping business success and challenging societal norms. Settle in and enjoy. Hunter Leonard, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. Thanks,

Carolyn. Nice to be here. Nice to have a chat with you. Awesome. So, let's start with the big question. In your view, is there a role for love in business? Well, totally. I think anyone who tries to separate business from life is crazy because, you know, your work is part of your life. And if you're a business owner, you have to have the full human engaged with the business.

So whatever the definition of love you call it, whether it's the passion for running the business or passion for helping people or passion for doing something beyond the core business purpose, if you like, as in a social purpose, I think it's absolutely an important part of any business, for sure. Thank you. And I love the way you put it. It's about engaging the full – it's having the full human engaged in the business.

So simple, isn't it? and yet we separate all these things and create the silos and create the divisions and you leave that part of you at home. And as a result, we're poorer for it. Totally, totally. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And I think when we forget that we're a human running a business, it tends to become about the business, you know, about the money or about the day-to-day activities or tasks that you have to do.

But it's when we separate ourselves from our customers and from the people we're working from and don't have that humanity, that's when we get into trouble. Yeah, yeah, that's when we become robots. So I think this is going to be a really interesting discussion because you've got such a rich background. Like you've been doing blue frog marketing, which you're going to tell us about for some time. But it seems to me that your purpose has driven other ventures.

So I'm really excited to get into this. And I'm going to ask you, first of all, just to give us some context, can you give us a brief overview of your business focus today? Yeah, look, we basically work with business owners of pretty much every size from, you know, medium up, but we also work with some small business owners and startups and we're focused on the strategic side of things.

So our Blue Frog DNA, if you like, started out with strategic marketing, which was my background, but it's certainly evolved now into sort of a hold of business help.

So we also help business owners with the the role of being a business owner you know being that human who runs a business which can can be the source of a lot of struggle and and issues for business owners when they forget that they have a quite a broad role as a business owner across whole a lot of different skills in a business and it's not often that people have all of those skills when they first start a business so we try and help them expand their

skill set and understand what they've got to do in in different parts of the business and then i also ghostwrite for other people so i've written quite a few books of my own and that morphed into people asking me if i could help them with their business and their books and and family stories and all sorts of stuff so talk about bringing the humanity to business it's it's a service that's come from people needing help with communicating their their stories and their purpose to the

world so So that's another part of what I do, which is cool. And you are a prolific book writer. Yes. Seriously. I mean, 11 books? I'm on number 11 of my own at the moment. And in the last year and a half, I've written about 10 or 11 for other people. So, yeah, it's a fair production. Phenomenal. You must enjoy writing. Yeah, I really do love it. I mean, I... And I've been writing probably since I was a teenager. I think I started out with poems and songs when I played guitar.

And then I ended up being like the writer for our work newsletter when I was a young product manager. Ended up being the collector of stories from all sorts of people within the business. And then it's morphed into obviously a lot of business writing over the years. I mean, I've written millions of words in marketing plans and social media content and articles and all that sort of stuff.

But the books is where I share my experience and thoughts and ideas with people to hopefully help more people than I can help one-on-one in a consulting business. And now that's morphed into helping other leaders tell their stories too, which is super cool. So, you know, generational family businesses, stories about fathers who were sort of pioneers in the oil and gas industry and all sorts of really cool, cool stories. So it's good fun. Brilliant. I love that. Do you consider yourself a writer?

Yeah, totally. I mean, it's one of the hats I wear amongst the many hats. I talk about the idea of a renaissance life. So I like being good at a lot of things. So I play music, I play the guitar and I sing and I like cooking and I like photography and I do some business stuff and some writing. So I'm sort of, I suppose with my background, I'm quite curious. I studied science at university, so I've always been a bit of a curious person.

I think my mum would have, she freaked out many times with what I collected and brought home and left in my room. Frogs and insects and spiders and all sorts of stuff. But yeah, I enjoy seeking out interesting things to do and then trying to be as good at them as I can. Yeah, brilliant. So looking back, what were the key moments, do you think, that shaped your journey to where you are today? Were there any defining experiences or just what were those life moments that led to where you are now?

Yeah, sure. Look, I think if I just start at the beginning of the blue frog journey, I mean, I was a scientist by training and ended up in the pharmaceutical industry because that was, so I wanted to be a ranger. I had two choices, either a ranger or a chef. I didn't like the hours that chefs did. So I thought, well, it'd be nice to be wandering around the back blocks of Australia in national parks, you know, for the rest of my life. But then worked out you didn't get paid much as a ranger.

So you have to eat. So I ended up... Can I just say, I love that, a ranger or a chef? Like there's a world of difference between the two. Yeah, it's very eclectic, but... So I ended up using my science degree because the pharmaceutical industry at the time was wanting to engage young people with science degrees to become technical sales reps, you know, selling medicines for high blood pressure or ophthalmic stuff or I launched a product in osteoporosis.

So I used my understanding of science in that as a professional sort of career and then And that transitioned from sales to marketing and then into an agency. And I think the thing that really changed the direction of my life in terms of running my own business with my wife, Nicole, was that I was having a conversation with a friend of mine one day. And he said, I've just taken on this new role and I need somebody to help with the marketing.

Can you help me detail what that person should look like? Like, what skills should they have? So I helped him kind of craft a job description, if you like, of what he needed for the business. And about two weeks later, he came back. He said, we've run the ads. We've talked to dozens of people. And we just can't find anyone with that skill set. Would you do it? And I said, well, I've got a job. I was a general manager of an agency at the time.

But I'd grown up in a family of business owners. So my dad ran his own business for many years on and off. He worked for people, but then he ran his own business. And I'd always thought I would want to have a crack at doing that. So I think it was at the age of 35, I started Blue Frog. And basically, our first contract was a handwritten note on a napkin with my mate in a cafe. He said, okay, well, I'll engage you for six months and I'll pay you this. And that was enough for me to...

Jump ship and have a crack. Fantastic. So that was probably a life-defining moment in terms of the Bluefrog journey. And that was over 20 years ago. That was 2020? 2001. Yeah, wow. Yeah. Wow. And that's a long time. You know, the agency world, as I well know, is very tumultuous. So, you know, it's a really, really long time to have that established. Yeah, it is.

And when we started it, we started with the idea of being a strategic advisor to businesses who couldn't afford to have their own marketing person. And at the time, people use this term fractional CMO these days, but at the time, no one was doing what we were doing.

So we weren't an advertising agency in the traditional sense we weren't booking ads and making money out of commission we were really making money out of helping clients write a strategic marketing plan and then put that into their business which evolved into helping them with all sorts of things and we've evolved a lot over 24 years you know we started out a lot of our stuff was direct mail which was nicole's background strategy which was my background you know print advertising tv

and radio you know we're in gold fm recording radio commercials and all sorts of stuff and and now it's obviously changed a lot to be very much focused on online and email marketing and all sorts of communication via the via the ether if you like rather than yeah stuff and not many of our clients do direct marketing all those sort of things these days although there are some that have sort of turned into the wind and using those old-school tools quite successfully these days as well.

So, yeah, so we've definitely been around for a long time, but we've definitely evolved a lot in that time as well. So I'd like to dive into an initiative that you started some years back, which is Silver and Wise, and that was a deeply purpose-driven venture. Oh, totally, yeah. It really, first and foremost, started with a purpose of helping contribute to an end to wageism in the workplace. Yep.

And it started, as many of these things do, with a random question from a mentor of mine that was helping me with my blue frog business. And we were trying to work out what our model would be going forward. We'd had lots of staff.

Sort of gone up and down in staff numbers we'd started a bespoke lead generation agency as part of the business so we were doing strategy and lead generation with a 12-seat telemarketing lead gen team at the back of our office so we had big staff and we decided that we actually would prefer to have a smaller business so we sort of downsized the business in order to.

Increase our profit really because it was a lot of running a business we weren't quite big enough to be able to start really making, basically adding costs, but not adding to our profit, if you like. So this mentor of mine who happened to be a client and somebody I respected said to me one day, well, if you're going to go down this model, which at the time we were thinking about having licensed advisors to deliver our strategic marketing.

So in other words, help consultants run their own businesses and have like a licensed network or a franchise network, if you like. And he said to me one day, have you thought about having mature age people doing this role? I said, I don't care what age they are as long as they can do the job. You know, if they're smart strategy people and they're willing to use our model, then that's fine with me.

And he just sort of smiled and he said, well, he said, based on what I know, you'll probably think a little bit different to most people. So why don't you go and do some research on mature age people? And literally two weeks later, I was in the Australian Human Rights Commission talking to the strategic advisor to the Age Discrimination Commissioner about mature age workforce, ageism. Wait, wait, wait. Two weeks. Two weeks. Hunter, just fill us in. Fill us in. What happened?

I started doing some research online and I found this report by the Human Rights Commission talking about, I think it was called Willing to Work.

And basically, it framed the fact that there were several hundred thousand people in the 40, 50, 60-year age group who were willing to work, which was the title of the paper, but were taking up to twice as long two years on average to find a new job when they were made redundant or whether they left a job the average time was double any other age group and so I started looking to that and I thought I called a few mates who are in that age group because

I'd never suffered from ageism myself because I was running my own business and lo and behold almost every single one of them said, yeah, my mate has been made redundant. He's now really worried about his future because he thought, I got the redundancy package. I went on a holiday. I came back. I'll just get another job. Has sent out hundreds of resumes and job applications. Didn't get one bite. And this was story after story after story. And so within that two weeks, I did the research.

And then I rang the Human Rights Commission and said, can somebody tell me more about this because i would like to know because i want to see what's going on i'm doing some stuff in my business so they said yeah come on in so i went in and met the strategic advisor and he went through the report with me and i realized that what we were trying to do, with blue frog could be made broader by the fact because we had all of this data on.

Business owners and what they're running into in terms of challenges because we're strategy guys right we we're not just advising on marketing we're advising our clients on their people and cash flow and strategy and business planning and all sorts of other things were coming into what we were helping our clients with so i decided to create a second business called silver and wise which the silver, by the way, wasn't about hair colour.

It was about being 25 years into the workforce because by the time you get to 45 or 50, you've spent about 25 years, which is your silver anniversary. Ah, I thought it was the silver hair. Yeah, and that's fine. That's fine. And the why is obviously after 25 years, you've probably gathered some experience and experience, soft skills, communication, loyalty, hard work. These are all sort of personal characteristics that mature age people have in abundance.

And yet those positive factors were being ignored for a focus on grey hair and wrinkles. And for women, it was a decade earlier. So they're in their 40s starting to ageism. So I think these are women that just had kids in their early 30s. They've probably got 10, 12, 14-year-old kids. And they're wanting to now go back to work because the kids are in high school and they're running into this ageism as well. So I ended up, look, cut a long story short, I wrote some books on it.

I started talking about it on LinkedIn and I started getting people reach out to me saying, what are you doing now? And two people that I've worked with, one who was a mid-60s, highly intelligent C-level executive, was running into ageism.

So he actually came on board as our chairman and as our first advisor in new south wales and then we brought on another guy who was, late 40s same thing ageism running into it and they started and we ended up picking up quite a federal government contract to deliver support for mature age people wanting to start a business as part of a thing called the entrepreneurship facilitators program and we ran that for, four and a half, nearly five years, and consulted to probably four or five thousand

mature age people wanting to start a business. Now, not all of them started a business because we were very, one of my purposes was if someone is hitting ageism in the workplace and they decide, well, I'll go and start my own thing as the alternative. And they're in their 50s, they don't have a lot of time to make too many mistakes. Well, we had all this data on what the mistakes they were going to run into because we'd been surveying 10,000 business owners over the last decade.

So we were able to sort of reverse engineer a bit of a program that said, if you're going to start a business, these are the things you want to understand about business and the skills that you're going to need as an individual. So it wasn't traditional business consulting. It was more about the purpose of how do we help these people take back control of their lives, take back control of their generation of financial, security, that sort of thing, and give ageism a bit of a kick in the backside

at the same time. Yeah, it was about them rather than the business. It was about saying, okay, what stage of life are you at? What sort of business do you want? Because this is the other thing too. Every startup incubator in Australia was all focused on people wanting to start tech startups or high growth businesses.

And this age group doesn't want to start that sort of business, they want to start a business that's going to give them, let's say, for argument's sake, $100,000 for the next 10 years until they decide to retire. So, in other words, we're talking about this gap between 50 and 65, making sure that they can continue to earn good money, whether it's $100,000 or $200,000 or $50,000, whatever.

That's not the point of saying the numbers, but it was more about saying, give them back control over their financial security and not let some... Recruitment agency or some organization make the decision for them that they were now past their use-by date in a way. So it was very much, and fortunately picking up the federal government contract meant that basically they were paying us to deliver this for free to all of these people.

So we were able to scale the number of people that we were able to reach in that period of time. And then the other books I wrote were more about life planning, like for the person to think about their house and their finances and the groups they're part of. Because when I started interviewing all these mature age people, not very many of them actually had a plan. Now, they might have had a financial advisor who'd helped them with wealth management or financial planning.

But I think the stats show that only 30% of people at the age of 65 are actually ready for retirement financially. So you can imagine that figure is a lot lower at the age of 50.

We don't expect to stopped working at 50 so yeah it was it was a pretty cool journey and obviously i was very fortunate to have the human rights commissioner actually actually launched my book and write the forward in the book and we worked quite a bit with every age counts which was that was the experience equation yeah both both of those i think she wrote something in the generation experience as well and then i wrote a third book which was kind of like because i you know there's

still not enough action in this area, we've still got a mature age audience that is being discriminated against. I wrote a book called Maturity Blues, which was a bit of a play on that, the idea of puberty blues. It's that generation in the 60s and 70s who are now in this age group. And basically that was kind of like a manifesto that said, government, you need to do this. Organisations, you need to do this. And as individuals, you need to do this.

So it was taking those three stakeholders and saying, and I interviewed some, really smart people, you know, economists and all sorts of really interesting people to sort of put in this book a bit of a guidebook to say, how are we actually going to solve this using those stakeholders? So, it became a bit of a personal mission. It was less about making money out of that than really trying to make a decent impact on that.

I have to say, there's still a lot of work to go though. So, I was going to ask you, what were some of the challenges that you faced? Challenges are is that there's an enormous amount of, it's the best way to call it, lack of momentum. But a lot of the recruitment industry, by virtue of the way they operate, most recruiters are in that 20 to 30-year-old age group. And so they don't understand the mature age audience.

We don't have that generational connection there. So you're seeing people that don't want to employ their mum and dad or somebody who looks like their mum and dad. They want, and 60% of job ads talk about... Energy and enthusiasm and all these words, which sort of code for youth and wanting to employ. There's also horrible stats about the percentage of organizations who, although it's illegal to do so, set an age above which they're reluctant to hire.

And the highest percentage in those organizations is the age of 50. So there's some great organizations out there though. I mean, big organizations like Westpac, they really have a mature age workforce and they, They do a lot to support their mature-age workers and keep them in the workforce. So there are organisations doing it, but there's nowhere near enough.

And we have an underutilised age group, which is only getting bigger because, you know, we're coming, tail end of the baby moomers and the front end of the Gen X are getting to this age. So more and more of them are going to be there running into this issue. And so what do you think, Hunter, is the biggest piece of mistaken thinking around that? Oh, I can tell you, I can just say technology straight away. Yeah.

They think, and technology and energy, so they think that, They, the general recruitment and organisations who don't want to employ mature people, will say that people in their 50s and even 60s are technology illiterate and they don't have the energy to really, you know, contribute at that, whatever. But it's just completely false because if you look at, there's a range of surveys that have been done without going into the detail, but there's a lot of things

that mature age people bring to the equation. So, skills. Loyalty, hard work, they take less sick days, they're less interested in politics because they're not driving towards trying to push everyone out of the way so they can get into the top position. They're very loyal and they're effective from their experience. And let's not forget that most 50 and 60-year-olds have been walking around with laptops and phones for most of their adult life, you know. Yeah.

As a young 23 or 24-year-old product manager, I had a laptop. To say that that age group is, I think there's a, when people think 50 and 60, they're thinking, you know, a super elderly person in their 80s who might be technologically illiterate because they didn't grow up with it. Yeah. That's a different age group, but there's this sort of grey area where they're just treating everyone run from 50 up as.

Grandparents, which is not to denigrate grandparents because there's plenty out there who are still sharp as a whip and are still working in their 70s and 80s. And so much missed opportunity in having a multi-generational workforce and the learnings that, you know, between those generations, the experience, both sides of that and the richness of combining that is, it's such a missed opportunity.

If we just talk in numbers, which I don't always like to just talk about numbers, but we're talking about trillions in economic GDP upside. For every 5% increase in participation in the labour force of that age group in Australia, it's a $50 billion uplift in our own GDP.

Because not to even think about the other side of it, whereas if you keep people working longer, then they'll have less reliance on social security, less reliance on hospitals and health and all those sorts, so that, you know, the other side, we can reduce those costs as well. And it's such limited thinking, isn't it? Because I think it goes to the idea of there's a limited pie. So, you know, limited jobs available in the workforce rather than thinking,

come on, you know, we build a bigger, better pie. We lift more people up. We create more wealth for businesses and the economy and everything else. And it's not just older people that suffer from this. It's, you know, underserved populations. It's that pie thing is such a limitation on our ability to grow a healthy society. Totally, totally. And you mentioned the intergenerational, you know, the axis of that.

But when we see multi-generations in the workforce, we see every generation getting a benefit from it. And this is not to say young people don't also suffer from ageism because they do. Often they're picked on for not having the experience. So it's like we want our cake and eat it at all ends of the spectrum. But... The fact is, within the next 20 years, 40% of our whole population in Australia is going to be over the age of 50. So, organizations have to reflect their customer base.

So, on average, if half of our customer base, and I'm rounding up here, but if half our customer base is mature age, then that would seem to suggest that half of our workforce and half of our products and services and half of our activity and half of our investment and half of everything should be going towards supporting that part of the population in order to make sure that we're making the most of what we can as a growing country.

From a community perspective, it keeps community, it keeps generations connected. We all know through the Royal Commissions on Age and Elder Abuse. It's a continuum, right? So they get into a nursing home and they get fed crap food and given drugs to keep them quiet when they're in their knees. We come back 30 years the start of it is you're too old to work for me yeah that's the start of it the continuum yeah you need to connect the dots on that as well yeah yeah yeah the same time.

Supporting the energy and enthusiasm of the younger audience to learn from this this audience who has been in the industry for 20 or 30 years you know imagine the corporate the other side of corporate memory corporations around australia so we lose knowledge and intellect when somebody leaves don't lose it pass it on keep them there collect it help them have have reverse mentoring so have older people being mentored by

younger people and vice versa all of these things are all part of i think what you might what used to be termed a civil society where we look after at every age group and every sub-segment, if you like. Yeah, yeah. Like culture, gender, whatever, you know. Absolutely. It's all part of a bigger problem, but that was one part of the equation that we decided to have a crack at. Yeah. And I think we had a pretty good impact while we were doing it.

Enjoying the podcast? If you're looking for more inspiration, head to our website, thecauseeffect.com.au. For more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good. Or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest. So you really pioneered this area, didn't you? Like there was not much of an offering, if any, in mature age.

In the business side of it, for sure. Yeah. There were people talking about ageism in a more general sense. So from the idea of just in society, there were some people talking about mature age workers. So there was a couple of platforms where you could, if you're older, you could go and seek jobs out.

But Bunnings was doing some good stuff on mature age workers, but no one was looking at how do we help these people start a business or start their own thing or self-employment or mature age gigging, the gig economy. It's interesting when somebody who's mature age with experience parts out their time to companies, the ageism disappears. Companies will take on somebody for 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week or for three months to fill a CMO role or a CFO role as a 55-, 60-year-old.

Which for me is like, wow, okay, so they're happy to take them for a short period of time, but they just don't want to be tied to them, which is kind of weird. But anyway, there you go. So tell me, Silver and Wise ran for eight years? Yep, 2016. I spent every evening for a year and a half doing the research and building the courses and the books and all that sort of stuff. And this is alongside Blue Frog Marketing, which is still going, yep. Yeah, so if you want to talk….

For love and money. I mean, I basically worked in Blue Frog during the day and then at five o'clock or six o'clock I'd have dinner and then I'd basically write the books on Silver and Wise and write the curriculum, if you like, because at the time we were actually thinking about having a mature age university. That was our first border call. Oh, wow.

Yeah, so a year and a half of doing that and then we ran it with the advisors 2017 to 2023 when the federal government changed and abolished the program. So that was kind of like the end of the cycle. The natural end of the cycle. Yeah. We've now transitioned the intellectual property that we have to help businesses in a broader level of business. But a lot of them end up being mature age anyway because the average age of a business owner in Australia these days is about 45.

So still mostly our audience. So all that work and investment you put into it has had value coming out of it as well. Totally. Totally, yeah. Yeah. And look, I still get calls because our chairman went on the Insight program on SBS about two and a half years ago, I think. And they keep replaying the program every six months or so. They put it on again.

And every time I can see the spike in our website visitors and calls from people saying, you know, can I have a copy of the book or what are you doing in terms of programs and stuff like that. So we've still got all of that resource that we...

Generally gift it to people now actually i just send my book to someone if they're looking to start a business and at another level there's a lot of people still starting ventures in this area of helping mature age people and i often get calls from people to sort of share this same story to help them kick off so there's a guy by the name of simon pemberton who started a thing called worker which is like a community

for mature age people he's doing that online and that's going to help people with mature age work. So another business called Maturious, which does some mature age recruitment. So there's a number of organizations that have sort of started to really come out of the woodwork, if you like, and help in this area. And that's much needed because the conversation will be continued.

Absolutely. And I just want to point out to our listeners, like when you were talking about how you were running Blue Frog Marketing and then in the evening, writing your books, doing the work on Silver and Wise. Energy? Did someone say lack of energy? And it goes back to when you are driven to create that kind of change through your work in society, whatever it is, you're emotionally invested in that. And that's where energy comes from.

Totally. And going back to your first question, is there a room for love in business well if you define love as passion it's something that i will say to every business owner i speak to is you have to unlock what you're passionate about in terms of the products or service you're delivering now whether you're making violins or mowing lawns or helping someone with their accounts or doing marketing strategy like i do you have to love it because if you get the day where, you know,

you have days that things don't go right or a mistake is made or a client's unhappy or whatever, the passion is what gets you through. If it's all about just the money and the doing of the tasks, you'll drop it like a hot potato once things get tough. But if you're passionate about it, you'll push through and persist. That old saying, you know, when you love what you do, you don't work a day in your life.

It's not quite true, is it? Because there are days where you've got to do shit and you don't want to do it. But because you're connected to why you're doing it and why it's important, you will get it done. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, and we have, you know, we've embedded purposes within Blue Frog as well. It's not as if Silver and Wise was the onion. Yeah, so let's talk about Blue Frog. and you've spent more than two decades helping businesses with their marketing.

What's been the driving mission behind Blue Frog Marketing? Really, the driving mission is for business owners, the people I love and I work with, are just doing better in their lives as a result of having a business that's running more smoothly. So it's far more than just getting a marketing strategy right. It's just so that they can be more successful, make good money for themselves. Expand, flourish and prosper and do well.

And look, I've got clients that we've been working with since 2003 and 2002. So they've been around for a long period of time and we've grown up ourselves and grown alongside those clients.

As well and so that that's the business purpose is deliver really great market insights strategic insights based on market understanding that delivers a good program that works okay that that's the service but the purpose is to help them live a better life by being better at what they do as a business owner and that the silver and wise experience of the eight rooms which we've talked about the eight rooms which is my latest book is that i'm trying to help business owners make

the job of running a business easier so that they get out of the business what it was designed for, whether that's the business purpose or the social purpose or whatever it is. And let's face it, most small business owners in Australia also give back. A great majority of them are helping local footy clubs in their local environment or they're supporting the environment I go out and I plant trees and dig weeds and help land care with strategy. That's what we do.

We try and preserve danger. You're living the ranger lifestyle there, are you? There you go. So it all comes back to where you started. Absolutely. I live in an environment with trees that encircle our entire area, and we've got 14 national parks within 20 minutes' drive. So I think you always stay with your roots of what you love, and I love the environment and that's how we help. We protect Daintree Rainforest every time we onboard a new client.

We protect 10 square metres of Daintree Rainforest. We've found the thing. You're a supporter of the organisation I support as well. Oh, there you go. Rainforest Rescue. I remember we had a chat about it. Beautiful organisation.

Totally. Yeah. So, and whatever it is, you know, if you want to, if you're a business owner that just wants to support the local footy club or if you're trying to have an impact on domestic violence or you want to protect the environment or whatever it is, small or large, as a business owner, you've just got to unlock what that is. And then if you've got a business where you've got lots and lots of staff, which many of my clients do, it's about how do you then get them to share that passion?

How does the love get sort of, you know, I love your hourglass with the heart and the dollar sign, but that hourglass could also be how do you trickle the love down into the rest of the business? And are you employing people that buy into that thing? Because then if you can align 50, 100, 500 staff behind that same purpose, the power is phenomenal. Phenomenal. It is phenomenal. The energy you unlock is phenomenal.

The innovation, agility, resourcefulness. Yeah, we speak the same language on this. Phenomenal. And untapped in many organisations. I think it is, and it all, you know, what we know, and you don't have to look at too much research to know this, if people are enjoying and are passionate about what they do, it goes, again, they're like a mini business owner within their role. They're going to stick around.

They like the organisation, they like the culture. The odd day where they have an upset with a staff member or a client or a mistake in their job or whatever is going to become less important And when there's this broader or higher purpose, which is bringing the whole human to work, they will bring their whole human to work. They're not just going to bring the bookkeeper who sits there and, you know, grinds through the stuff or the tech person who is setting up the website or whatever.

They'll bring something else. So that really stands out to me in what you do and what you've been doing, this idea of bringing the whole human to work or supporting businesses so they can bring the whole human to their, you know, business owners can bring the whole human to their lives.

And I love your giving back, but I think, so for me with purpose, one of the big challenges I find is so many business owners, I know you don't, but so many business owners think of purpose as that's our giving back strategy. You know, we're here to run our business, make money, and then we give back. And giving back has a really important role.

But what I love about, I don't know, it seems to infuse everything you do, Hunter, is if you take it back to love, I look at purpose in a really simple way. It comes down to the change you want to create in the world, which is inspired by love of people and or planet, right? And that to me, it's like that love of people and planet is, is infused in what you do, like love of people.

You see the challenge that mature age people were facing, and you want to be able to help unblock that and help them unleash their value. With the businesses that you support through Blue Frog Marketing, you want to support them so they can thrive and bring their whole selves to their lives, which includes, you know, giving back, enjoying their lives, creating vibrant communities. It's, that's, that's where it lives, right? That's where purpose lives. And giving back is a small part of it.

Yeah, totally, totally. Because that whole idea of, like I mentioned in, in Blue Frog, with the purpose of just trying to have business owners running them, make it, sorry, making the job of running their business easier because they've sorted the marketing problem or they've sorted the strategy problem sorted the people problem i i like business owners because they actually take a whole order of responsibility above somebody who just works for a business,

and i've done it's not that's not meant to denigrate employees at all but business owners generally and on average take responsibility for three to four families because that's the average number of employees three or four for a small business yeah so the person owning that is taking a lot of risk and so my view is that's a person taking risks they're looking after a bunch of people how can i help make their life better and if that means bringing some expertise

on how do you actually put a strategy together you know instead of making assumptions about your customers how do you do a survey so you really know what they want you know all this, technical marketing stuff is all below the purpose of how do i make that person's life better not see them as a yeah they're a client they pay me money but that's such a low level.

Motivation if i if i do my job great then yes they're going to pay me on time, yeah yeah so i actually look for those sorts of clients too i look for business owners who are, wanting to just do better at themselves but they they also i do look for people that are social and are looking to become more sustainable or give back or they're doing stuff a bit broader than making money if they're just about money then they're probably not going to fit with me as a as a human anyway.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about the eight rooms of business, so the model that you've created that you're now writing about. So it's actually the same model that we used in Silver and Lies, but... Very, very, very short summary of it is we surveyed 10,000 business owners, which you can appreciate as a pretty big survey. Absolutely. Over a decade across a wide range of sizes of business and industries.

And it turns out that there's really only about eight categories of problems or challenges that keep business owners awake at night. And, you know, I won't go into the detail of the whole eight, but basically they either They have problems with setting and achieving goals. They have problems with attracting customers and keeping them. They have problems with money, not unexpected. They have problems with the people that they work with. So if they're bringing

staff on, it's either hiring them, managing or exiting them. Quality control. And in today's 21st century fast-paced environment, they have trouble keeping up with change. So we basically just reverse engineer. We said, okay, there's 10,000 people. They've told us all these problems. or categorized it into these eight things.

And so I basically just created the analogy of eight rooms and said, well, okay, as a business owner, if you just think of there's eight doors that you can go into and when you go into that door, which let's say it's the marketing door, when you're in that room, all you focus on is understanding customers' market and competition and putting together some way of attracting customers to your business.

And the other side of it was that you're going to run into these problems because 10,000 people have told us and they're all running into them and they've been doing it for a decade and it doesn't matter whether they got a billion dollars in sales or a million dollars in sales they're all running into the same challenges so it's sort of, gears the person up to understand that you've got to spend time in those eight rooms in order to run a successful business.

And if you don't spend time in the room, it's probably that room that's going to. Yeah, right. Yeah. The one you want to avoid. That's right. So if you say, I can't get enough customers, have you spent any time in your marketing room lately? I've got a cash flow issue. What are you doing with money? Are you not invoicing on time or are you not collecting the debt, or have you got too many clients who are paying you on too long a terms,

or are you spending money twice, which business owners do? Oh, I've got $5,000 in my account. I think I'll go buy a new computer. Oh, that's right. I've got a tax bill. So it's all very foundational sort of stuff. But interestingly, it's like common sense, right? It's not common.

We find it very rare for a business owner to have a picture of those things all across their business and to be actually operating in all of them and actually working on them all of them have got some challenge cash flow getting or strategy or there's been a legislative change and that or a technology change and so they're now running into problems trying to run an outmoded business model or whatever so that's what that's what we now do with businesses we either go deep in marketing

or we go broad and help them become just better at what they are as a business owner. So tell me, given the, you know, over two decades that you've been operating and the many, many business owners you would have worked with, is there one insight that stuck with you about what makes a business truly sustainable, as in successful? Yeah, it comes back to the topic of this. It's a passion for it.

You know, the guys, the guys and girls, I use that as the royal pronoun, but the ones I work for actually care about what they're doing. They're not in it for money. They're in it for making a difference to their customer and making a difference to their team and making a difference to their community. So, you know, I've got one client who for 20 years we've been working out, of the 24 we've been running the business, 20 years we've been, 21. Wow, that's insane. We've been working with him.

You can imagine the marketing planning has changed dramatically in that period of time. But I cannot recall one meeting in 20 years with him where he hasn't brought his whole self and his passion and his interest and his care to that meeting to try and find a solution. So even if something was going to shit, he will come to the meeting and say, okay, well, it's not so good, but what are we going to do to solve that for our people or for our customers or for the marketplace or whatever?

And he just brings it. He brings himself. And I've seen all his life stages. I've seen him having kids, growing up, moving from one place to the other, moving to regions, closing shops, opening shops. Going through financial struggles when he was trying to finish the purchase of the business, which was a generational business that he was purchasing from his father, to having no money, to being very profitable and succeeding.

And throughout the entire phase, he has just showed up with an interest in keeping this beast that his business was operating. And that general care for everyone involved in it, including me as a contractor, but his staff and his customers and all that sort of stuff. So it's recognising and respecting the value of all stakeholders in the business. Yeah. And I care for all of those stakeholders beyond just what they're trying to achieve. And that's got to be a common issue.

I've had another client who's gone across four or five different businesses, all very large industrial businesses. And every time he moves to a new business, he'll give me a call and say, okay, saddle up. We've got this challenge. Let's, you know, and it's far broader than just marketing. He might be interviewing his leaders or whatever else or facilitating a workshop.

But again, he, every time he moves into a new role, he's unpicking it to find, how can How can I utilize all these amazing people that I'm working with to get a job done beyond just the numbers of blah? Brilliant. Yeah. Brilliant. I want to touch on your writing. Your own book writing, but also the ghost writing you've been doing and your role in helping people uncover their unique business story. I guess. How do you help businesses sort of uncover?

Because I bet the whole process is a bit of uncover, you know, you uncover insights that they probably weren't even aware of. Yeah, totally. Totally. How do you go about that? As you would expect from me, I have a process.

But it starts with literally just talking and interviews and talking with the person about why why are they trying to share their story what what's the purpose of that you know and for many people it's because they've, have got this desire to either share the story of somebody that they were inspired by, in other words, a parent or a grandparent who might have started the business. It could be a business or it could be a personal family story.

Or there's somebody who has achieved something or solved some puzzle and they want to share it with somebody else. And in many cases, it's not about selling books or the ego of being an author or having a book or whatever. It's just because they just want to share. I went through this. I got some blood noses, as I call challenges, and I've come out the other side and I've solved a piece of the universal puzzle.

Now I want to put it in words so that somebody else can get something out of it, which is super cool when you can help another human do that, particularly when they look at a computer and say 40,000 words and they start to get a tick.

I couldn't do that So that's where I come in Because I'm happy to sit down And look, it's a level of complexity Above writing your own book I can tell you Because you've got to I bet Listen, duplicate, And then get down on paper Something that sounds like them Because no one would ever Yeah, find their voice And reflect their voice That must be incredibly challenging But it's fun It's fun And I had a, Obviously, no one will ever know that I wrote that book for them.

But I had one today. I was just on with a customer who probably had 15 interviews to help write their book. And he was sharing that he just felt really great about the process, not just the words on the paper, but the ability for him to get what was in his head out into a story was almost cathartic in a way for him. And I see that happen quite a lot with my clients, that they've had this idea

and they want to get it down on paper. and I'm able to sort of be the conduit to that happening is a lot of fun. Fantastic. Hunter, tell me what legacy would you hope to leave through the work you're doing? And who knows where you're going to go with it over the next five years, right? I get that sense of it could go anywhere, you know, depending on where your passion goes.

But where you are today with what you know today you know what what can you hope to achieve in the future what sort of legacy would you like to leave through that work it's interesting isn't it that word legacy is not something i really think about too much i just i just want to help people and i'll just keep helping people whatever i'm doing whether i'm ghostwriting or strategic consulting or marketing or whatever or playing a bit of music for people Like that's what I like to do.

I just like to learn something well enough to be able to share it with somebody else and it makes a positive difference to them. I think legacy, you probably get judged by people after you go rather than during. So for me, it's just about take the next person, help them. One at a time. Love it. Love it. And last question I have for you, if you had to give one piece of advice to business owners who do want to align their work with their deeper purpose, what would it be?

Yeah, look, I mean, obviously, you have to find out what it is, because the business is a tool. At the end of the day, a business is just a tool. It's a tool that's created to either provide financial security for somebody or to deliver products and service to customs or whatever. So whoever started it had an idea that that business was a tool towards some financial security if it's a for-profit business.

If it's a for-profit, for-purpose business, then you've got to find out what it is the business can do to contribute to that purpose. Now, whether that's a percentage of money towards a foundation or, you know, it doesn't even have to be that formal. If it's a business that's providing money for you to then drive the purpose, right? Yep. But if it's also a case of, because it could be the time of you and your staff.

You know, there's a business locally here that I think twice a year they send their staff out with 500 trees to plant the trees. So they give their staffs time as well as money. And then you have to find out what change, what is the change you're after? So is it 1,000 hectares of bushland saved forever? Yeah. Is it... 500 less women suffering from domestic violence because of what you've done.

So I think you have to put a number on it because while we're dealing with our heart, you have to be able to measure your impact because otherwise you could just be pushing forward. And like anything in business, if you don't know how you're tracking towards whatever goal it is, you're going to struggle to keep yourself motivated. Absolutely. It's just about writing checks, as you said, giving back. Well, that's not the thing. It's like, what is the change I want to see?

So in our Selvin Wise business, to go back to that, we set some specific numbers of the number of people we wanted to impact. Yeah. So, yeah. Wonderful. Hunter, it has been a joy getting to know you better through this interview. We've known each other for a while, but I've really enjoyed this chat with you and learning more about what motivates you.

And this whole, you know, unleashing the whole person, the whole human is something, it's a theme that has threaded its way consistently through our discussion. And I've really, really enjoyed it. Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners before we sign off? No, I'd just like to return the compliment. Thank you. It's been lovely to chat to you.

And I think what you're doing with corporates and organisations to get them to rediscover a higher purpose is so important to the future. Because if we all get reduced to the bare minimum of running a business to make money, then I think we've lost the game. Beautiful. Thank you, Hunter. You're welcome. Music.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the for love and money podcast if you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au and remember doing good is good for business so if you're not doing good then what are you doing.