Protect the Hustle: Ansarada's Sam Riley on building an intentional culture

• Building an intentional company culture as a differentiator.
• Understanding the root of what customers actually want.

Insight into the culture and product philosophy behind Ansarada.

What does your favorite flavor of ice cream say about you?

If you're a vanilla fan, does that mean that you're just plain and basically status quo?

How about Neapolitan enthusiasts?

Are those just naturally indecisive people or are they people that want it all?

This delectable treat is loved by billions, but most people are particular to their own palette or their brand and I think this tells a story about people.

When you know the story behind someone's favorite ice cream, it may not unlock the deepest meaning as far as what makes them tick, but if you do understand who someone is, it can allow you to apply your leadership situation.

Knowing about Bob's experience as a construction foreman can give you insight into why deadlines are so important to him.

Glimpsing into Becky's time as a line cook reveals why clear expectations drive her productivity.

And while no two individuals have the same story, or probably the exact same ice cream interpretation for that matter, it's those collective tales that build an intentional culture.

No one has better credentials in this area than Sam Riley.

As the CEO of Enserrata, he built a company culture unlike any that I've ever seen, and he is one of the...

top five people that I would ever want to work with out there in the world.

And I think that that's saying a lot, or at least that's saying a lot for me.

After being invited into their Sydney office, he showed us the implementation of the values that Enserada has all the way down to a stitch on the conference room chairs.

It's a skill set he has developed all the way back to his days working in an ice cream factory.

So what exactly does an ice cream factory have to do with running a SaaS business?

Stay tuned.

From Profiwell Recur, it's Protect the Hustle, where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator.

On today's episode, Sam Riley of Enserrata, we talk about understanding the root of customer wants, building an intentional culture, the leapfrog differentiator, living out your weirdness, and the secret to uncomfortable conversations.

How'd you get here, I guess, is like a good way to start.

Yeah, I don't get it.

Not physically, but like, you know, it was a story down Serata and you know...

I've always been entrepreneurial.

I was convinced when I was 16 that I would retire by the age of 20 from selling herbal life products in a multi-level marketing team.

But like, you know, that experience taught me, you know, how to prospect for business and try to develop a team.

But it failed for me.

But then me and my friend came up with like, you know...

this big health trend and you know juicers and we can do like this kind of like more medicinal take on juice and call it like a doctor juice thing and it's like you know the berry recovery and kind of make it more You feel like you're taking a medicine just for the naming.

Sure, sure, sure.

Like the cardio cleanser.

I still remember all these names we made up.

We made a lot of mistakes there.

Wrong location.

Didn't know how to run stuff.

We, you know, wrong.

It was like a physical store, right?

Yeah, it was a physical store.

And then that failed and then I'd got married and I had bills to pay.

So I had to take a job.

I was about 23 and I took a job.

part time at the ice cream factory that opened up.

Because it was like, oh, they're going to pay like $40 an hour and it's in an afternoon shift from 2pm to 10pm.

And I'm like, oh, that's good.

I can do business stuff in the morning.

And I'll do that for a month or two.

And then I'll start another venture.

And like six years later, you know, I'm still there.

But on the side, I'd started up another espresso bar and stuff, but didn't work out there too.

But I tried to progress that sort of corporate ladder.

But it was a very heavily unionised place.

You had all this management versus union.

You actually couldn't be in a managerial job unless you'd completed university, which I never went to.

So I got really, really frustrated.

So I was like 2026, 27 and I'm behind on all my big mouth promises to everyone.

On paper I was bankrupt.

Had a two year old daughter.

and I'm sort of like going look, nothing's worked out, you know, but one thing I'd always done my whole life is very avid reader of like books on could be history, philosophy, strategy, management, leadership, marketing, sort of trialling all this stuff out, but then my sister rang me up and said, oh hey, working on this deal and they need a data room to do due diligence, have you heard of that?

And I said, no, I know what due diligence is, but you know, she said, I'll come in and meet him, I'll show you and So I met the co-founders here and we just had coffee and Andrew showed me what he'd built.

You know, it's like, hey, you can set up a room, you can put information in there, you control who sees it, you can track interest levels.

You know, they use it in a deal when someone's selling, they need to let a buyer have access to stuff, but in a controlled way.

And then they want to, you know, lawyers and bankers do this all the time.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

So I was at a point where I was like very like, had to make something work.

And now I've evaluated this on more of it.

You know, back then no one had labels like SAS and all that.

And I'm like, OK, it's on the internet.

It's multi-tenanted at scale.

You know, it's big problems to solve.

So then me and Andrew would go and showcase the product, get feedback.

People would say, oh, look.

have to have that feature and then the next guy goes, yeah, sometimes I want that feature so it should have an on off control.

It's like, okay.

But after about a year of showcasing what we built, I wouldn't say this was a deliberate strategy, but in hindsight it was critical.

They said, oh, look, I've got a deal coming up guys.

It's a small property sale.

Do you want to run it?

Because we hadn't gone and raised money at all or we didn't bother with any of that.

Like we just all put in 30 grand collectively.

And that was the start-up.

And that just got a bit of a website and some business cards.

We never hired anyone who went too far.

Mainly because of the nature of what we do, we went, no, no, this has to work.

You can't tell people, oh yeah, you can use our product to sell your $200 million company that you've built up for your whole life and your reputation as a lawyer and a banker.

Yeah, we've got you.

So it had to be good.

So that...

showcasing of features and developing software worked really well because it ended up building trust because people say, oh, we need this and you come back and do it.

So the fact they said you should do this and when you deliver it, you're listening to them and that built up enough trust to do a couple of deals, which then gave us a good answer for business development when people ask, well, who's usually guys I haven't heard of you?

And then like it in your most successful stories is an element of fortune or luck where one of our early clients said I've got another deal for you guys, but I want to I want to look into the whites of your eyes and Have a chat about it first.

So he came in and he said look this deal It's a bit different than a normal M&A deal and we're gonna fix the price at five point eight billion and it's a very high profile company and there's going to be a lot of interest and we're going to give the bidder six weeks to do due diligence or whoever gets comfortable paying the...

it's basically whoever gets comfortable paying the 5.

8 billion first.

So they're going to be very intensive around using your product and we're like, yeah, yeah, we can do that.

And, you know, that's like, you want to make sure because if you screw it up, you won't probably work again and no one will use it.

So anyway, that was very, very intensive.

The deal did got done.

It was kept very confidential.

It had a cast of thousands in there.

Wow.

And there's a very high profile media company here.

You know, that was a very good catalyst.

And then a lot of people liked the difference we made in that emphasis on simplicity in the product and automating some things and, you know, one click to do something instead of 10 or no clicks.

And they said, you know, we want to speak to you about our stuff.

And they just started cascading from there.

Yeah.

Few of those guys came on as investors.

So just their own private money, but just as a syndicate.

So not a formalised angel, a bit of angel round, but more, it's not a formalised venture capital.

So then...

Didn't really have to use your own product, sounds like.

Yeah, yeah.

Did they take care of that?

Yeah.

No, we did, but it was minor.

Like it was like not much because they were backing the people and the product really.

Everyone had a lot of contacts in London and we said, oh, let's go over there with some of this capital we raised.

We went to London and it was like hide some people and all ready to go and then like I think about a month later You know Lehman Brothers collapses and like all the deals just dry up and you know It's like that was a tough time because we were burning for a cash and there wasn't any deals to win and the competitive pool became bigger like smaller and you know so we did a bit of a I usually hate these cliched words, but we did do a bit of a pivot into using our product for insolvency and bankruptcy and corporate recovery transactions because there was a lot of that.

And it's the same process.

They're selling a distressed asset.

So there's even more due diligence because then the liquidator or the administrator A point it wants to make sure improved, they did a good job.

Yeah, that was like 2008, 2007, 2009, 2011, we went over to the States.

There's more to the product story and all the rest.

Yeah, just kind of took off from there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Me took off is like a...

Yeah, we're always doing like just incremental hiring and building a team.

Was it something where, like you mentioned the product aspects of, you know, one click instead of ten?

Like, is it that that was just something that you really, really focused on?

Like, you just knew everything else out there was super complicated, so that was like a key differentiator?

Yeah, like, I've never been one or still am not a person to go look at our competitors and say, oh, how do we do better than that?

Really just want to get really close to the customer and understand, what are you trying to achieve, ultimately, and how do you feel when you're doing that?

Or, just get really in their world and understand, well...

you know really what they want is they just want to be able to make a smart decision really quickly but to do that they have to look at a lot of info and that info is here here and here and okay so you map it all out and you go how could we just skip all the bullshit and give people what they want you know like how could you automate that so kind of just want to understand what is the outcome that matters how do you currently achieve that and then look at opportunities to make that easier or quicker or remove some of the work to get the outcome.

Or if it's making a decision it's like what other information would help you make a better decision or where have you made a wrong decision and what's the impact been and what did you later realise?

You know, there's a lot of understanding of customers and then we kind of just noodle on that and think about it.

Sometimes we incrementally improve things but we're always trying to look for what's the What's the real answer?

I'll give you a good example.

People were saying to us, your product should have better drag and drop for moving documents around.

It's like, yeah, yeah, it should actually.

It's like, you bet why?

And we're like, we haven't had a look at all our data.

And I said, what are people actually moving around and reorganizing?

It's like, oh, that's got a date in it.

That's got a date, date, date.

It's like, oh, look at that.

When they uploaded or they bulk upload or their info.

getting set for a deal.

You know, the board minutes would upload as April, August and you're like, oh yeah, it's Alpha New Merrick because it's just named on their file system as whatever.

It's like, yeah, but really you want your board minute folder to be January, February, March and financials.

It's like, oh, they want drag and drop because they have to fix all these wrong dates.

And the dates are written in many different ways in free text in a file name.

So it's like what if we could programmatically detect different date formats and based on the folder it's in and just automagically put it in the right place?

You know, and it's like be like do you want better drag and drop or do you just want to get rid of the need to do it at all?

So that's something we released and then over the years I've learnt that to really work hard at breaking things down and just releasing things incrementally.

So turns out there's like hundreds of different date patterns.

especially when you roll in the way the US does dates for the rest of the world and you can write Q1 FY 2017 or Q1 FY 17 and we're like one of the most common ones you know they're these okay as we get one done let's release it just one because it's better that we clean up one percent of the mess and rather than zero today then next date pattern release release and now we've released a lot that we detect And, you know, that's a good example of how we try to look at the world with software.

Like, I know one of your values is like, ask why.

Or, you know, is that kind of the every time you get a feature request, it's just like, you know, doing the five whys or just kind of going deep on it.

Is that kind of how you maintain that discipline?

Because I'm sure you've had, you know, another $5.

8 billion deal coming through and they're like, oh, I really need like, really needs to be green or really needs to be this or you know something that is easy for you to go oh yeah we can just fix that but you probably want the discipline not to like tell me what like that process internally yeah sometimes we're a bit bipolar where you go you guys contradict yourself a lot because there's plenty of examples where you don't do that Sam and it's like if one of our clients we want to really look after is like in a situation in a very critical transaction and their reputations on the line and they've either made a mistake or something custom needs to be done.

We'll drop everything and do it for you.

We want to make sure you looked after.

But the moment we finish that or hang up the phone and help you, we're like, we're never doing that again.

How do we make sure we don't?

Like, not in terms of saying no, but then we go on the, we'll serve you with your critical need, but then we'll go, how did they get in that situation?

What do we need to create that make sure like, you know, we're not going to scale if we do that custom stuff.

You know, so, you know, how do we avoid that?

How do we give them what they really want to make sure they don't get in that situation again?

So that's where you go on the Y journey.

But if one of our clients is at a pub with us and goes, I've got an idea for you guys.

We might say, yeah, that's pretty cool.

And then afterwards, go, look, we'll never do that.

However, if one of our clients is going, oh, guys, like, We're really in a bit of a pickle.

We're trying to close this deal tomorrow and we should have let you know that we kind of need you to combine this room with another room in one archive and it's, I don't know if you can do it and we're like, as they're describing it on the phone, we're adding up the hours of work it's going to take and you get like, yeah, sure, we'll get it done for you.

We'll look after you guys, you know, and we will.

And then we'll go do that.

And then we'll say, well, look how do we Think about the long term of that.

Do we want to have people running multiple transactions combining them into one and that click of a button?

Some portfolio style reporting or aggregation, you know, actually, and then some someone will go actually that's quite easy and they'll think about some way of doing it.

I find it works well too with software developers and designers and PMs because they're kind of at their best when they're solving an interesting challenge.

Hey, go and look at the best drag and drop tools that are out there and can you just copy them and just do that?

Do what Dropbox does or do what?

It's like, they prefer to go, of course, how could we get rid of that?

Like, what would we do?

And everyone's, it's like, well, we could, you know, use an algorithm to detect dates and then, well, you know, and they just prefer to have an interesting challenge to solve.

I want to circle back to that piece too, because I think what's Very noticeable, you know, about, you know, just the office and, you know, at least everyone we've ever been in an act with is that like, culture is like really good here.

Like, not necessarily really good in the sense of like, oh, there's, you know, other places that are bad, but it's like very front and center.

And I'm not talking just about like, oh, you have the, you know, the posters up and things like that, but even just, you know, stuff like you describing, and I don't know if you're bullshitting me or not, but like how you do the platforms and stuff like that here, you know, as kind of like a vision piece and...

Like, is it something where, I guess we're not coming back, we'll go right at it?

Like, how conscious is every cultural, like, aspect here?

Like, how conscious is that, you know, in terms of, like, you know, the choice of you as, like, you know, the CEO or just as a company, you know, guiding the company?

Yeah, it's very intentional.

Like, we leaders have to model the behaviour, expect and create the environment you want and you can't...

say, we have a value of X and then do Y.

You know, it's really...

People see what you prioritise, what you decide to do, where you cut corners on money or not, or where you don't...

what you compromise, what you don't compromise.

You know, people are smart in all of those things.

If you're a founder or a leader, they send signals to your team about what's important and what's not.

And then we all have our cognitive biases and values that...

You know, either consciously or subconsciously you work into your hiring and you know, you're rewarding and celebrating or not, you know It sort of creates a culture so I think as well like a lot of the founders like Andrew Rachel me but you know, I'd come out of like I described that Union, verse management, us and them.

My dad ran his own business where he treated his staff really bad, but I used to observe how they spoke about him and it was just like this us and them thing.

And I'm like, just that is so terrible.

I'm like, when I have a business, like there is no us and them.

Even the other day, like it's all the things you pull up and just say to people and sit down and have a discussion on that helps them get rid of some of the stuff society embeds in you.

Like, so someone in a sort of sales leadership position here.

Yeah, just openly, Habit said to myself and the CFO, he goes, oh yeah, I told the guys I'd go into bat with them with you.

And they're like, well, what do you mean go into bat?

Like, we're not the opposing team.

Like, you don't have to go into bat for them.

I said, you probably did it your last job.

Like, we just want to understand how we can help them.

the better they go, the better we go.

So little moments like that, you know, help unwind or give permission to that person that, you know, it's okay to let you go down here or you can trust what happens.

The thing where it becomes very hard is when people say, oh, it's like a family around here.

And that is very much true, except there's one difference with a company in that family culture thing.

And that is there's no performance measures in the family.

So my six-year-old son, if he can't read and write by the time he's 12, he won't be out of the family.

But if you're a developer here or a salesperson or an accountant, if you can't balance books or write code or sell product for six years, you probably...

won't be here.

But like, no, that's what I mean, like even before then, like, you know, so there's so many things about trust and forgiveness and love and nurturing that, you know, fit that model of like a, you know, forgiveness of a family.

The difference is there's no performance measures in the family.

So it's that unconditional love in the family.

Whereas there is conditions here in this performance, we're all...

So I think, you know, we've learned in business, it's like you don't have to throw out the whole family analogy just because there's one for...

You keep that, but then there's...

Everyone uses the team analogy and the sporting analogy, like we're all players with different skills, but we're here to win.

Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff there, so I kind of, you know, gravitate to those sort of things, but don't get hung up on copying and pasting stuff into the business.

No, it's super interesting.

I actually come from a union family and every time I go home, it's always, it turns into a bit of an argument, just like most conversations about politics and things like that, but it was very us first them.

You know, it's like my dad for 30 some years, like it's always us first them, you know, with management and things.

And I I'm always trying to advocate exactly what you said, which is like, it doesn't have to be that way.

You know, it can be like a company where it is we or us, you know, overall, that kind of a thing.

So that's super cool.

It's true.

And I remember observing that, like, and I found like a lot of the union reps I dealt with, I'm like, these guys are very smart and they're good at strategy, but they're all their strategy was spent on how to outsmart management.

And what I figured out was the customer was never mentioned.

by management or the union, they were always us and them.

In my marriage, it was once where we had to go, we wanted, it's good, it's healthy, I recommended it to people, we'd go get some marriage counselling.

And she said something very interesting.

She said like, in a marriage, you've got to think of the marriage like a plant, you know?

And you're either like, with how you guys talk to each other or listen or do things or don't, you're either watering and fertilising the plant.

and it's flourishing or you're killing the plant.

And then I'm like, yeah, that's really good because it helps you remove this one-to-one thing and it's like, you know, what about the plant?

And you can focus on the third party object.

I've taken that across to business where I find that sometimes, you know, you grow and you end up adding people in departmental structures and then you need to specialise and you go, oh, you know what, we should have autonomous multi-disciplinary teams architected around an objective rather than these departments because you know the sales and finance department have a clash and then they want to have an initiative to sales to understand finance and get to know each other.

What I've discovered unless the common thing that they're coming together on is to serve the customer better it's never going to bust.

It's all like everyone can drop their weapons for a while and shake hands and have a night out.

But then it goes back to the battle ones if the customer is not the core objective.

Whatever the issue is, whatever the problem, whatever the opportunity, it always has to be around who are we here to serve and how can we do that better?

What does finance team do that?

isn't in the best interest of the customer and sales and what could they do better and then they both come together to do this.

The customers like the plant in my amaret.

What are you doing to the customer with your fighting?

Are you fertilising and nurturing them or killing them?

That's how I think about culture a bit.

It's like, don't care what your culture is but you know, it better be watering and fertilising your customers.

It's gotta be, the outputs of your culture's gotta be adding value, you know, to, you know, people you serve and pay you money for what you do.

Otherwise your culture's just, it's not aligned, you know?

Your mission, it feels like, is the customer.

Like, you have the mission of, you know, your space and what you're trying to solve, but it feels like it's very much helping the customer solve their pain as efficiently and as, you know, dutifully as possible.

Like, we talked a little bit about your new voice, voice recognition, that kind of stuff.

I don't think any of your competitors or even people in tangential spaces are even on that level of ease of use thought.

Is that concept, it's probably not unique of Sydney, but do you think that's a very Sydney trait in other companies that you come into contact with?

you know, you see or maybe you don't even know because you know, it's just something you guys do.

I'm trying to think, you know, like Sydney, Australian culture, it's definitely a culture where you want to challenge the status quo.

I think Australians perform at their best or Sydney is like if someone tells you you can't do something, you know, like you want to prove them wrong or, you know, we don't have, you know, all, if you don't have all the opportunity and resources and environment, it's like, Well, you're forced to do, you know, how could you leapfrog?

So, you know, I don't know if I speak about the culture, but I think, look, we, one, I don't like it.

And two, we're not capitalised to play an incremental game.

I was like, you know, what's the leapfrog?

Like, what's the...

Where's this headed?

And how can we get on that track early and invest in that?

And what I've found with technology is...

Sometimes, like, you know, say with machine learning and all that stuff and personalization, recommendation engines.

You know, by the time you get on that track, the environment around there, the tools, the experts, you know, the open source stuff that becomes available just gets better and better and better and it's like you, you kind of like, you have to be leapfrogging otherwise someone's going to do it to you.

But it is around the customer.

It's interesting, though.

You could observe some things I say and do and you could go That didn't sound very customer friendly because sometimes I'd be like, no, no, they don't know what they want because they're not going to tell us to do some of this stuff.

It was like, and it might take like a year or two to deliver the outcome.

But like I said, you know, we're on the phone today serving you in that one to one reactive will give you what you want, how you wanted it, when you want it now.

But also parts of the business are locked away going, that's so silly the way they work.

It's causing them so much stress and pain.

We have to completely change that.

And you end up actually, you could say you're challenging your customers and being provocative and saying, look, you shouldn't be doing that in a year from now because they'll all be automated or you won't have to do that.

It's like this long term thing that ultimately is going to serve them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if you don't have infinite resources, it means you have to say no to a lot of more obvious incremental things that they might be screaming at you about.

But you're saying, you know, I'm not going to keep adding features around that when we know how to make that thing completely irrelevant and redundant.

But they're like, yeah, but that's not helping me next week.

And they're like, yeah, we know that next year it'll really help you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So but.

What you're saying no to is hard because otherwise it's very easy to let your mouth overload your back and cripple your resources.

Has that lost your deals?

Yeah, it has.

It's particularly like it's lost us a lot of different use cases for our product because it's got a lot of flexibility.

People who want to use it for some weird and wonderful things.

those things that are going to take us down the path and dilute strategy and resources and stuff like that.

But there's been other times when we have experimented with other people use our product for running a lot of big public tenders.

So if they say, hey, we're building a new $3.

8 billion rail line, that kind of environmental financial due diligence, running the whole tender process.

All the tenders need to do a lot of due diligence before they put in an offer to operate that, build and construct.

There's a load of information.

It's all very sensitive and it's got to be done.

It's got to be like, oh yeah, that's sort of like deals.

So we did a few of them and then we realised actually it's quite a good business here and the core features we've developed for mergers and acquisitions are very valuable there.

Like a low trust, high risk environment.

M&A and dealing with sensitive stuff and anything that's sort of similar worked So we kind of figured out like what kind of it's not so much use cases like what kind of problems to solve for what kind of people That's that's where we do well.

No, it's super interesting is it I guess the managing the potential loss of like because you know, you're not venture funded You know, you had early investment and now you've obviously flourished and I'm sure there's tons of champagne problems that you have to still deal with, but is it managing the focus on the customer, the ironic focus on the customer that might not mean giving them the vitamin now to cure their medicine later?

That kind of stuff.

Is the net denominator on all that just vision?

Like is it just...

No, it's really vision.

That's the other thing.

Like I'm not really motivated by...

Money is a good scorecard, revenue growth, customer acquisition.

It's a very good scorecard and how smart are you operating, how efficient can you scale.

But really, you know, the motivation is to make a big difference to the way things are done.

We know that companies are going to raise money, they're going to be bought and sold to the end of time.

And we're like, you know, if we could remove stress and time and risk, and accelerate that and that would be a great thing to achieve that would benefit millions of people forever and increase the flow of capital, get people home at 8pm instead of midnight on some stressful transaction, take away a lot of the manual work that's done that's kind of janitorial, kind of level data work, should be automated.

like we're driven by that vision and then that sort of expanded to well in in deals at the end of the deal ideally that's the state a company should have been in and benefited from like you know so we're like how could how could kind of this big risk and opportunity assessment they do and they find out at the end of their life what they should have kind of acted on or known earlier so we're like how can we take some of the wisdom that comes out at the end and help people apply it at the beginning and throughout their business.

So, you know, breaking down the process into things that are more nurturable and digestible and, you know, get the benefit always.

So, when that vision emerges, it's like, yeah, let's do that, you know, that's, um, because that's going to help deals anyway if you start with the end in mind.

How big are you guys now?

How many people?

I'm around 190, 200.

Okay, so you have about 200 people, five offices?

Yeah, five offices and then we've got a few people in business development functions in a few other cities.

So sort of a little bit of remote, five offices, 200 people, not a...

not a picture perfect straightforward customer because you got multiple different types of customers and No funding to at least in the world well no funding at all, but you know now you're kind of got some nice revenues at your back How do you maintain like communicating that vision and like the values and you know making sure that that whole customer first concept like across all those you know different pieces that could very, very easily get away from you.

And I'm sure it's not...

Well, I do.

But I think it's in everything you do.

Of course you've got to get up and tell, share the stories and metaphors and your storytelling and make the vision very clear and actionable and cascade it and talk about it until people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it.

That's one thing, but it's also the actions and decisions you make.

Better compliment what you're talking about because they're reinforcing it like you know every interaction is an opportunity to either highlight that for your You know words or deeds or not now I'm not saying we always get it right because you can sometimes have like you know a cash flow pressure or some Some immediate need you need to solve or some something's happened in the business where?

You can get just focused on that and inadvertently you can send a message to people that some of those values aren't important if you don't handle that, if you prioritise things above that.

So, now there's all sorts of reward and recognition things we do based around values.

There's multiple, like you even mentioned one before, like even the office designs designed around values.

So, like we're very open and transparent, so that's a value we've It's more of a servant-based leadership model here.

So I could have a corner office with a viewer that's in the opera house if I want it.

But all the best space, the best views is available to anyone and it's very democratic.

Like you can...

It's not reserved based on hierarchy.

You know, everyone just sits...

Like, desking is not hierarchical.

You don't even have a desk, right?

I sometimes do, but then sometimes it gets taken and...

Like...

Yeah, I think I've got one at the moment.

But that sends a message as well, just the physical environment like that influences people and it says what you care about.

Like even these chairs you're sitting in, like they have one, there's a green stitch like on one arm, that's it, not the other arm.

Because like we are an important part to, you know, our clients, but we're not everything.

Like, you know, we're involved and we want to help you.

But we want to remain a bit more humble and you know, there'll just be there supporting you, but you know, it's not about us, it's more about you.

Those little design cues in the office have a purpose behind them.

Or that door has no handle and it kind of just pivots.

That sends a message like with software or UI design, like you know, if you don't need to put a button somewhere or a hand, does that, does a door really need a handle?

Like...

Wouldn't it be simpler or look better if you need to go in the boardroom and you know where it is?

You just push and it opens, but if you don't it just looks so clean and simple.

So you know that's sort of a cue to designers like can you build the form and page, you know different elements and components like that?

It's like gives a bit of cues.

That's next level.

I love that.

Like the stitch?

Like that's...

I'm kidding.

Like...

Yeah, yeah.

So like, is that...

Like...

You know, you worked at the ice cream factory.

You know, you had...

What's the data?

Yeah, yeah.

Is it...

Where do you think you became very aware of these things?

Like, and I'm sure it's not just you, you know, it's your team and everything like that, but...

Is this something where, you know, just...

Just, you know, observing or, you know, just kind of...

over the cauldron of just learning every single year and the different jobs that you had.

I think it's that cauldron effect and then there's this natural curiosity.

I think making ice cream helps because you're just sitting there for like eight hours watching like this literally they're supposed to be identical going out.

It can be boring so you've got to entertain yourself and you're like, you know, how could we make more?

Or, you know, when was the last era that sort of broke this machine down and you know you start to analyse things and you know How come you know these all these ice creams are one Milliliter over how could we get it perfect and and then you start playing around with all the sums like oh we make about 300,000 of these a day so one milliliter adds up to you know, so you just try to perfect and optimise everything and It's good training ground actually looking back.

You might think it's so boring, but it's like If all the distraction and noise is taken away and you're doing something for eight hours where there's only like three variables, you get very good at like figuring out what you can tinker with to improve the process.

That's awesome.

I love that.

That's amazing.

And is it like how do you clone that?

You know, obviously you got a higher...

I don't know if that's clanable.

Like what we end up doing, we do a lot of stuff on like even at hiring point, but you know, what are people's values?

Like we work a lot with John Maxwell Company and they've got a great set of cards on leadership, you know, practices, but one of them is a deck of values, 50 values like loyalty, integrity, wealth, fitness, family, like loads of them, creativity.

We sit down with everyone and we go, I'll tell you my values and why, the story.

Look, get these down to your top five values and you just put the deck into least and most.

You end up with five values and it'll be like, why is integrity important to you?

Like, what happened in your life?

And it's like, well, yeah, my dad left when we were about three.

And then like my mum's boyfriend would always say he would do stuff but never follow through.

And I'll just remember how painful that was.

And, you know, like, you know, I promised myself I would always do what I said because...

That's why integrity is important to me.

So when you know the story for the person, you can be very situational with your leadership and then try to get leaders to do that and be aware of that where like, you do know if you tell Bill, you're going to do something that you better do it right because that kind of means a lot to Bill, like based on him and his story.

Leaders here and people getting to understand each other's values and there's more importantly the story behind them and then we do like a lot of strengths and personality like you know, there's lots of them around but You know you more of a driver personality or an influencer or you know, where where's your natural traits?

Yeah My leadership coaches like you mentioned to start with why I think we're big on that over the years I've learned I think before you start with why you should start with who Who are you?

Like what shaped you?

What are your natural traits?

What are the things you've always known about yourself?

When are you at your best?

What do other people tell you you're great at?

When do you naturally get energised?

What's your story?

Because based on who you are, that determines your why.

The why that's really going to tap in and connect with you.

Because you can reference Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King and all the rest of them, but they're wise.

were very much based on who they were and their story and what happened to them, shaped them.

Even though we say start with why, then how, what, no.

And we add to how, what, no, so you actually action things.

So why is this done like this?

Well, how could you fix it and what are you going to do?

But there's a lot around emphasis around understanding and treating everyone for who they are.

and letting them be who they are, letting them be authentic and you don't have to fit into a little box and we don't want you in a box.

My coach taught me, I encourage everyone to look this up, but the definition of weird, if you go look up the definition of weird, it will actually tell you it's a person's destiny.

So your weirdness, living out your weirdness, like what you're great at and your weird stuff, That's where your destiny lies.

That's what you're created to do.

That's what all your good and bad experiences in life have been creating potential value.

But you've got to live that out.

Otherwise you do what I call you diss yourself, like D-I-S.

D-I-S or diss means to negate something or to go in the opposite direction.

So if you don't be you and you don't be weird, you actually become disappointed, discouraged, disgraced, disabled, dispassionate.

No one wants to be that.

So, you know, don't negate yourself or go in the opposite direction.

And I actually did have four months off where I was nearly burned out, very frustrated here, through lack of achieving the vision and having a lot of setbacks and...

But what made it worse is I went down this road that leaders should never go down, which is, you know, who do I have to be for the organisation and I am going to be that.

That's a dangerous road because you then start suppressing or trying to create and raise things that you're not good at, you don't enjoy, and you kind of, the good attributes you had, you kind of stopped doing them because you think they're causing problems and you end up basically chipping away at yourself until you actually lose some of your identity and your passion and I personally think it leads people into depression and anxiety and I'm like have to get back to like no who am I, when am I at my best and who needs to benefit from me what situations do I need to be in and who needs to benefit from me because I need to be me in you know 4k 3d colour you know yeah so That was a journey where I did this myself by negating my strengths, chipping away at who I was.

For good intent, not for bad intent, I was trying to be what I thought others needed and adapt.

But then everyone just starts being quite artificial and not authentic and kind of coming back to normal instead of rather an environment where you have permission to be weird.

Be yourself.

We want to find exactly what you're great at and make sure you're in that role and you have that challenge to solve or whatever.

Servant leadership, huge fan.

See you in the leadership.

What?

Well, there's other leadership models, but there's me that see anyone.

Yeah, I mean the inverted pyramid and like so the the Robert K Greenleaf Center is actually in Illinois where I went to school.

Yeah, so it was like something where I thankfully got taught that when I was in school rather than you know needing to discover it later.

But yeah, that's good.

What happens when someone isn't like fitting that mold or they're, you know, the kind of like you said, if you're, you know, if your son didn't learn to read by the age of 12, like, you know, those types of folks, like, how do you determine if someone's just not a good fit and they're just not working out?

Like, is it, do you have a litmus?

Is it just obvious, you know, normally?

Like, what do you think?

Well, I think when the culture's operating, like, when things are operating really strong, you know, yeah, it does become obvious, but...

I think there's a lot that goes into that, like you can, you know, frequency of conversations, really good questions and everyone, like over the years I've gotten much quicker and better at saying just, you know, sort of what, you know, there's books on this stuff like Radical Candle or Crucial Conversations.

It's like, have the conversation, you know, just say, look, I'm a bit concerned for you.

It might be, everything might be fine, but it seems like you know, you're a bit frustrated with what's happening and your energy looks a bit lower, you know, it's everything all right, you know, like what's going on, like talk to me, like, because there's a couple of expectations I've had that have kind of not been met and I just want to have a chat about it, it's nothing big yet, but you know, let's talk, you know.

But quite often those conversations are left unsaid and you know you should have them and people delay them and then an infection becomes a disease.

and instead of like being able to treat a small infection the longer it goes on and it's not said then you might have to amputate the leg or do something where you go look what how did that get to that stage?

It's probably because the conversation wasn't had.

So people like the willingness to give and receive feedback is critical like I think you've got to have an environment it's always hard but you know the more willing people are to receive feedback the easier it is to give it.

You know, so that's another thing leaders should model.

You know, I was just thinking I try to do this more but after any sort of interaction on something of significance I say hey can you tell me two things I could have done better there and then if a few leaders say that then that gives permission to other people to say it.

You know and then if people are asking for feedback the whole giving it thing becomes pretty easy.

You know, it's like you got to get good at giving feedback.

It's like, yeah.

What about, you know, we talk about receiving feedback as well because, you know, because otherwise the skill level to give it needs to be very, very, very high if the receiving is very low.

You know, so that kind of thing.

I think, you know, even if like sounds like, you know, you can work everything out, but.

Let's say you worked out the perfect way to run your business and the culture was just awesome today.

What's going to happen is tomorrow someone's going to get married, someone's going to have a baby.

Life is going to happen and it's going to change people's priorities and some things that become more important, less important to our team.

Technology is going to change in the world, our customers are going to change and there's going to be all sorts of influences going on.

So it's like you have to have a philosophy, like you never arrive, you've never figured it all out.

You know, there's always something going on, you've got to be, you know, just like I used to go like, oh man, I thought I had that nailed.

And it's like, yeah, you probably did.

But like three months later, like it either becomes greater or worse, depending on the influences on that thing.

Just trust your work it out, trust your team and, you know, just trying to stay open to learning and.

listening and understanding and that's nice to say but you're going to stuff that up half the time but don't beat yourself up.

It's just all you're on a journey you know.

That's my philosophy you know with business and life really is like you never arrive you're never going to figure it out.

Just do the best you can with what you have.

Special thanks to Sam Riley for giving his time to this interview.

Now you have what it takes to develop culture We talked about understanding the root of customer wants, building an intentional culture, the leapfrog differentiator, living out your weirdness and the secret to uncomfortable conversations.

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