Paul Austin-Menear: Building Customer Feedback Systems That Fuel Innovation

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The Business Owner's Journey Podcast host: Nick Berry
Production Company: FCG

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Transcript for: Paul Austin-Menear: Building Customer Feedback Systems That Fuel Innovation

00:00 Why Customer Feedback Systems Break Down

02:42 Founder-Led Business Growth Starts With Listening

05:25 Hiring for Customer Listening Skills

08:14 Building Feedback Loops Into Company Culture

11:03 The Innovation Heartbeat Customer Feedback System

13:59 Turning Feedback Into Business Innovation Systems

16:47 Scaling Without Losing Customers

19:08 Innovation as a Business Supply Chain

21:58 Why Companies Are Getting Worse at Listening

24:07 The Innovation Heartbeat Tool and Resources

28:48 Making Customer Feedback a Repeatable Habit

Paul Austin-Menear (00:00)

Companies are getting systematically worse at having conversations with customers, listening to customers, and bringing insights into their organization that are sourced from those. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

Nick Berry (00:24)

Why do so many companies lose touch with their customers right when they start to take off? Paul Austin-Menear is the founder of Six Catalysts and the creator of the Innovation Heartbeat, a customer feedback system designed to scale with founder led businesses.

we're going to explore what it really takes to institutionalize listening and turn customer feedback into a competitive advantage. Expect to learn how founders are accidentally killing customer feedback as they're scaling. What it really takes to build customer feedback systems that last. How to turn raw feedback into usable insight. Whether innovation really starts with customers at all. His take on why companies are getting worse at listening.

feedback without slowing growth And how to use listening as an innovation engine. Enjoy this episode with Paul Austin-Menear.

Paul Austin-Menear (01:06)

I've always kind of been of the belief that companies really should focus on creating customers, creating happy customers. You know, don't worry about your quarterlies. Don't worry about. Yeah, you got to worry about them. But, you know, don't let everything be driven by the quarterlies, by your earnings. If you create happy customers, everything else is going to fall into place.

And there was a chat back in the 70s that spoke about this quite a bit, Peter Drucker. And I really kind of like picked up that mindset over the years. So for me, like having really good systems to look at customer feedback is such a core part of that mission to create happy customers. You know, I just don't understand how you can hope to have a successful, thriving business without doing it.

So I got into this kind of customer feedback insights analysis thing over the years. And what I really noticed with a lot of companies was that they wanted to collect feedback. They wanted to really hear from their customers. But there was always a problem with keeping the ball rolling for a lot of companies. So when you think about small companies, you think about startups and businesses that are scaling up, founder-led companies.

You know, this and tell me if tell me if you think that this pattern is like familiar to what you've seen out in the wild. But you got a founder like company, your founders early days, super, super engaged. You know, they're right in there with everybody else. Leaves are rolled up. You know, they're really they're really working and fighting beside the team to build value, acquire customers, grow the business. So those founders, they're they're actively talking to customers all the time.

And that's great. It's marvelous. It brings so much value into the business and it really drives so much of what the business does early on and you hit some success. You get a little bit of an inflection point. You're right. Geez. Yeah, we've hit market fit here. You know, let's really double down. Let's scale this thing. Let's grow it. Let's go. It's go time. And then the founders kind of pivot out and they start to think about other things, right? How do we grow, you know, sales? What do we need to do to scaffold the sales team?

How do we grow marketing? What do we need to do to build our capabilities in marketing? How do we ink those strategic partnerships that are going to help us grow? What do we need to do on the operations side, logistics, supply chain to really put in place the planks that will let this business spin up and snowball and grow and go and go, right? But what happens about talking to the customers at that point? Founders ain't doing it anymore because they don't have time.

nothing wrong with that. That happens. You got to focus on, you know, what's in front of you. But what you really lose at that inflection point is that feedback that came in that helped you find the fit and helped you hit that inflection point and really helped you start to grow. So that's where this whole thing came from. And, know, over the years, I realized that that this was a problem and it wasn't that businesses didn't want to collect that feedback. It's that they didn't really have the the tools

Nick Berry (03:55)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear (04:07)

Or the system in front of them to make it a part of a habit, you know to make it kind of a part of the business to make it cultural and That's really where it kind of clicked off in my brain. I said geez, know, we need to figure out some way to make it You know, I'm not gonna say easy because it's not easy Doing this really well, but we need to figure out some sort of way to build this into the culture the very fabric organizational DNA and make talking to customers and getting that feedback in

you know, as simple as carrying on and letting your heart beat, right? And that's where the innovation heartbeat thing came from. Because doing this really well, it involves a cadence and a rhythm that's really important. And just like building habits in your own personal life, right? The more that you build into a habit, into stuff that just kind of happens as a course of doing business, of kind of like carrying on, the better you are as an organization, doing this stuff.

Nick Berry (04:39)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. want to make it, and what I'm hearing you say is that you want to make it kind of the way that you are, right? It's just, this is the way we are within our company, our business, and early on that is the way that they are. Do you think that part of the reason that it gets lost is do you think that the founder is just kind of take for granted how much feedback they're getting at that time?

Paul Austin-Menear (05:12)

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I think and having worked with with quite a few founders who go through that period of like, you know, success and starting to scale rapidly and all the problems that ensues with that. think that it's really more a case of when you're a founder and you're leading the business, you're in the trenches. There's so much stuff swirling and going on that you you can't focus on just like one thing in a sustainable way. Right. Like you can't take your energy, your effort, your focus.

and keep it on one thing. You've got to divide yourself amongst so many different things that you really lose sight of what's not directly in front of you. And when you get into those, those other kind of areas, issues of scaling up a business, a lot of the time, talking to customers isn't what's in front of you. And a lot of founders, to their credit, they'll say, we need to have customer feedback in. But what happens is they just kind of hand it off and they say, okay, you

person in marketing, I want you to collect customer feedback. And that person in marketing, know, they might not be very well kitted out to do that. Plus they've also got their day job, right? They got to do marketing. They got to do that stuff to grow the business. So I think that what happens with most founders is that the importance of it gets diluted because it's not their focus. You know, they found that product market fit. They've picked up the ball, they're running with it. But what they're not thinking about and…

no shade had been there. You can't necessarily think about it without a system behind it. They're not really thinking about the next ball. So you you pick up this ball, you're going to run it down to the goal post as one ball. What about the next one? And that's a, that's not a fun place to be in when you run your first ball to the goal post and you realize that there's nothing coming up, right?

Nick Berry (07:07)

Yeah. And if you're, if you don't have a way to be intentional about, making this a part of how you, how your business is, then you're basically dependent on having hired, built a team of people who happen to be good listeners and who are empathetic, which would be great. but, it's like, that's the hope strategy, right? Fingers crossed.

Paul Austin-Menear (07:14)

Mm-hmm.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah,

that's you're you're you're absolutely right. And it's it's funny you bring that up. I was talking about this with with one of my clients last week. We were talking about about being intentional in hiring and figuring out what players you need on the field to be successful. Right. And one of the things that really kind of came out in that conversation was they were approaching hiring.

from the standpoint of you you write out this job description and I want three years of whatever I want an MBA I want somebody who works in the sector of that sector and there there's there's just there's that there's very little intentionality of the the underlying soft skills and the purpose of that person and you know, the purpose part for me is huge. So when you're when you're looking to to hire and to build this team of you know, like

you want to shoot for all stars. Sometimes you're all stars, you know, not necessarily within your reach when it comes to cash or it could be tough to find them or whatever else. Like you're not always going to have the perfect hires just drop in your lap. Don't work that way. But if you're intentional about who you're hiring and what their purpose is, and you think about that bigger picture of how they're going to connect to the wider organization,

and help everybody further their goals and help you drive growth in the business, better things happen. So, know, intentionality, it's a big, big part of that. And for customer feedback, you you talk about that handoff point where the founder who's done a fantastic job of really getting into the weeds, the nuts and bolts of what customers want, they hand it off to someone who's not really kitted out necessarily to do that. Plus they've got a day job. That's the part where you need to stop and say, okay,

This is a mission critical function. How am I going to pay homage to it, to its importance? What am I going to do to make sure that this critical role doesn't just kind of like die in the weeds? So then you start to think, OK, do I need to hire someone? And not always in the cards. Sometimes you have to put it on somebody's plate like an existing staff. But if you're going to hire someone, you need to think about what that person is going to do, right? And collecting feedback.

It's a science, yeah, but it's also bit an art form, right? Like you need to be able to say, all right, this person, yeah, they need to be able to write a survey. They need to be able to analyze results. They need to be able to do all that stuff for sure. But they also need to think about what questions am I gonna ask? You you need to be able to come up with very intelligent questions to put in front of your customers to uncover points that they're like feeling a little bit sticky about.

And you have to be able to uncover in those conversations, you if you're having a one to one conversation, you have to be able to to really get past people's defense mechanisms and their walls. Right. Because not everyone's going to want to hurt your feelings, especially if you've got a great relationship with your clients. You know, if you do, good for you.

Nick Berry (10:04)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And some people, I mean,

would you say that it's fair to say that sometimes they don't know how to tell you what you need to hear from them. It may be it's in there, but they just, they don't know how to answer the question in a meaningful way to you.

Paul Austin-Menear (10:31)

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, yeah, I'd say, I'd say absolutely. And that's, that's a part of the art form, right? Like you, you don't want to, as the person who's doing this kind of investigation, you know, you're seeking the customer feedback. You don't want to, to guide the answers through the way you're approaching the conversation, cause that's not super helpful, but you, do have to kind of be aware enough of the conversation and the person you're talking to, to figure out how to draw stuff out of them. Cause you know, if you're having that one-to-one conversation,

they don't probably have a lot of time, right? Like they're giving you five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes at a good will because they like what you're doing and you've asked nicely. So you got to make really good use of their time. And you've also got to figure out a way to get through that barrier of being polite, get through that barrier of like, they just, don't know what to say, like you say. And I think that's a very valid point. Like the person you're talking to, they don't know how to really communicate what…

their experience is or what their pain points are, then you got a bit of work on your hands, right?

Nick Berry (11:33)

Yeah. So, what I've heard you say is there needs to be some accountability for it. If you want to institutionalize this, if you want to make it kind of a part of your culture, then somebody has to be accountable for it. And so you most likely are going to assign that to someone. And then there's also like a met, there's a way to do this well. how do they…

Paul Austin-Menear (11:39)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nick Berry (11:56)

How do you just, how do you find out? How do you train someone on how to do it well? And how far does a business need to go? what's, how much of this do they need to bite off at one time?

Paul Austin-Menear (12:00)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So the the framework that I came up with, the innovation heartbeat, it's really kind of a three part process. You know, you you're going out and you're looking for feedback. So that's kind of pulsing. It's kind of pulsing out or pulsing in. Sorry. You know, you're expanding. You're looking for feedback. You're talking to people. You know, you bring it in. You're processing that pulse. So the information that you gathered through those conversations, you you think about it, you analyze it. You really kind of run it through.

a gating system and you kind of decide, you know, where does this feedback sit? You know, what's level of value that it brings to the organization? Is it going to be difficult to implement, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And then you pulse out and you take those insights. Now, not the feedback. You don't want to take the feedback that you collect and just shoot it out blindly through the organization. The person who's doing this work, they need to be a bit of a filter. They need to take the feedback, the raw feedback and generate

insights from it. So that's like, that's the basis of the system. So when you're, you know, when you're just starting out with this, you got to start small. And my implementation plans for this, normally what I say to clients is like, Hey, focus on one thing and let's do a 30, 60, 90. In the first 30 days, you know, you're really going to focus on building the things, the core technical capabilities that you need to collect that feedback.

Because you you absolutely can't just like hire one person and then say here's a clipboard go and talk to people I'm work so well So you need technology tools to help you really like scale and professionalize this in the first 30 days You want to do that? You also want to talk about internally the value points that you're targeting So if you have a strategic objective for the next 12 months or whatever, you know, how do you tie? The activities of your feedback system to those strategic objectives

You want to have a good handle on that before you start this program. Within 60 days, you're going to want to see the program operating. And you're also going to want to have in place the framework for taking the insights that you've distilled from this feedback and spreading them out through the org to key stakeholders. So in small teams, super easy, right? You've got like 10 people in a company. It's a micro business to start up.

Your solution is just to have a once a month meeting with all 10 people for 30 minutes or 45 minutes and talk about the stuff that's coming in. Super easy. In bigger organizations, you gotta be a little bit more systematic about it, right? You gotta identify your key stakeholders, you gotta identify the people that are gonna benefit from the insights that are generated, and you've also gotta tie that to what you want to do with the innovation part of your business. And really, a lot of companies don't connect

directly, feedback, and innovation. But when you're building a product company, your sources of innovation are typically employees, right? Like the ideas of your team. And that's great. People who are really curious, people who are building those products and really generating innovation from their own kind of mental energy, fantastic, but not always sustainable. And

There also can be problems with that in that your team of people who are innovating suffer from the burden of knowledge. So because they know how it's supposed to work, they skip over the things that your customers might not skip over and might get a little bit stuck on. So you can take that feedback. You can bring it into your business, run it through this process. And culturally, if you're smart about it, and if you take

real care to build a culture of curiosity and innovation from anywhere, this is magic. Because that customer feedback is not directly going to fuel your innovation. Your customers aren't going to say, wouldn't it be great if we had this amazing thing that made the magic carpet clean itself or something like that? That ain't going to happen. But the feedback that comes in, the insights you generate from it, it will inspire your team.

people who are innovating. So this is really like a bulwark, a foundation of building a business based on innovation and growing that moat that makes it a lot more difficult for competitors to erode your value over time.

Nick Berry (16:30)

Yeah. When I looked at the innovation heartbeat and I used the tool that you shared and it was very eye opening. Immediately the light bulb came on for me. It's institutionalizing listening. It ⁓ is basically programming your company to have their ear to the ground, ⁓ which is probably a bigger gap.

Paul Austin-Menear (16:42)

Yep.

Yep.

Nick Berry (16:50)

we all want to think that we're listening and hearing our customers. You don't know many who say like, we don't give a shit about them. But, but, but until you've seen it done, at a high level, you don't really know how much better you could be doing it. I love this angle and it was super simple too.

Paul Austin-Menear (16:53)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nick Berry (17:11)

I'll let you paint the picture, but it seems like there's a clear path from taking that feedback, then bringing it in house and creating value with it. how is this being used? Well, can you give some examples and tell some stories about, who, you who does this really well?

Paul Austin-Menear (17:19)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. there's so you think about you think about big companies in kind of down in the US like I would say that the probably one of the best examples that flies under the radar for a lot of folks is Procter and Gamble. The guys at Procter and Gamble are masters at this. You know, they've they've been doing.

I would imagine they have their own kind of system and it operates a little bit differently. It's probably been micro optimized for their divisions and whatnot over the years. But the core concept is the same. Institutionalize listening, like you said, and really make a culture out of taking those things that you hear when you're talking to customers and when you're observing behavior, in the case of Procter & Gamble, and using it to create innovation, using it as inspiration.

for your own team of curious people. They're absolute masters at it. There's a book called Playing to Win written by the chap who kind of spearheaded Procter and Gamble's 20 years ago or so. For anybody who hasn't read it, go buy yourself a copy of Playing to Win and read that book. It's just, it's super eye opening. So those guys, they do it really well. A more kind of current example in a different industry I'd say is the folks at Shark Ninja.

Their CEO, know, it's I think the shark and just probably held I think but they've been doing this for 20 years or so and they in kind of the household appliances consumer electronics space You know, they're they're kind of taking similar concepts like institutionalizing Listening and they focus a lot on passing insights between different Different divisions or different kind of product teams in their company. They do it really well. I would say, you know smaller

There's a couple of companies that I work with here in Toronto that are, pardon me, that are at that kind of startup scale up phase where they've got maybe 20 people working for them, that sort of thing. And they've got a bead on who their audience is, who their customer is. They've got a bead on the products that they're working on. And what they're doing is they're going out and they're taking the products that they're developing. both hardware companies, consumer hardware companies.

they're taking those products into people's homes and doing kind of evaluations and they're listening by observing. So they've really got kind of the groundwork there. And the payouts for that, for doing that for an early stage company are, you you, you, you avoid wasting money on the wrong stuff when you're developing a product, like really taking in a lot of feedback and using it to generate insights early on saves you a ton of money.

And it seems like it's going to cost you money because you got to spend time on this. But the payoff over like a year is it's hands down. You save so much money by doing this. Then you look at a bigger company. What's the value of being able to bring something to market that is carving out its own little space inside a crowded category? You know, like that's a lot of value that you generate from something like that over the course of 24 months, 36 months. So a lot of companies that are doing this and doing it really well.

they're creating unique value for themselves in their markets and they're really kind of like running with it. And once you have that thing that you've hit, and you know, think Shark Ninja is a pretty good example of this. When you take something from a crowded category and you create your own space that's just adjacent to that, you win. Like, a lot. Think about vacuum cleaners. Vacuum cleaners are

Nick Berry (20:52)

Yeah

Paul Austin-Menear (20:57)

Boring. Shark Ninja now has like the number one selling vacuum cleaner in America because of the work that they've done that really rests on this fundamental theory of listening to customers and making that a part of your innovation pipeline. And I do want to say, you know, think about innovation as a supply chain. All the other business owners that are going to be listening to us. Innovation is absolutely a supply chain. You know, it's as critical as getting your stuff from your manufacturer into the hands of your customers.

Nick Berry (21:25)

in general, our company's getting better at doing this, at taking, like hearing their customers and taking their feedback or worse. So then the opportunity is even bigger every day.

Paul Austin-Menear (21:30)

No.

They are getting worse. Customers?

Exactly. Exactly. So that's what I say to people that I advise on this topic. Companies are getting systematically worse at having conversations with customers, listening to customers, and bringing insights into their organization that are sourced from those. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

One of those things that kind of drives the disaggregation of feedback from the core value of a company was outsourced customer service. Your customer service teams, they go from being in your company, sitting beside your product guys and having conversations over the water cooler or over coffee or whatever, like, I was talking to this customer this other day and they told me this and I don't know what to do with it. It's really kind of weird or whatever.

And then your other person's like, oh, that's actually really interesting. And then they'd be left to their desk and they go think it through and talk about it. And it comes into something. That doesn't happen when you're outsourcing your, or it doesn't happen as frequently, I should say, as easily. You're outsourcing your customer service to somewhere overseas. AI is, of course, kind of another wave of that as well. You've got customer service people being displaced by chat GPT, by whatever AI tool you're using for your customer service.

You know, I'm not saying that using AI to enhance customer service is bad. It's very good. But a lot of companies haven't really connected the output of that kind of AI driven conversation to the core of the company. It's more about like, Hey, somebody's knocking on the door. They got a problem. Let's put a robot in front of them and make that problem just kind of go away. Right. So they're missing some value there. Customers are getting work companies. I should say are getting worse at this. So what you said was that makes the opportunity even greater. Absolutely.

You know, there is a fundamental rule in business. Like I really take this to heart. Fundamental rule in business when you're competing, do what others aren't. When you do what other companies are not doing, you're staking out your own claim on the mountain, right? Right by the river prospecting for gold, do what other people aren't. You're staking out a claim. If fewer and fewer companies are having high quality, high value conversations,

with their customers, that's an opportunity for you to start doing it. Imagine what you'll bring in by doing what others aren't.

Nick Berry (23:58)

Okay. you talk a little bit more about the heartbeat innovation tool and how can the audience go and take a look at that?

Paul Austin-Menear (24:07)

So the Innovation Heartbeat Plan. There is a special landing page on my website that I kind of spun up, an exclusive to folks who listen to the show. If you go to 6catalysts.com/nickberry slash Nick Berry, you'll see all the stuff there. You there's some resources that kind of talk you through the Innovation Heartbeat more. There's an ebook that you can download, kind of share with your team, take away. There's also a planning tool that I built. You know, you click in, you open it up.

It asks you a series of questions, takes about 10 minutes to do, give or take. And then it takes your answers and puts together a customized plan for you. And you can just see it right there on the landing page. You don't have to pay for it. You don't have to give me your email or anything like that. It's just there. So you go through that process. gives you a starting point. And it really helps orient you towards how to build this concept into your business and what you stand to gain from it.

If you do, now if you have questions, like email me, know, if you put in your email address, you'll get a copy of it to your email. If you got questions, email me back. I really don't mind answering some questions. That's totally cool. I just want you to take this concept, build it into your business, be successful, use it to create value for your customers because you know, lots of businesses operating in communities means better communities, stronger, resilient, more prosperous communities, better country.

better society. I want to do my part for us all to live in a world where we're happy, healthy, we're making money.

Nick Berry (25:39)

I think you're doing pretty well. I think one other thing that hit me with the, the, innovation heartbeat, when I got my plan. So what it does really well is it conveys the concept, right? So as I was reading through it, I could see the picture of the flywheel in my head. It it's pretty simple. It's really well explained and

Paul Austin-Menear (25:54)

Mm.

Nick Berry (25:58)

you take feedback. Here's how you determine what feedback to take and how to take it. What matters and matters enough. Here's how that gets dispersed and shared. So it's more, it's closer to common knowledge within the organization. And then here's how you monitor what gets put into practice and then creates more

Paul Austin-Menear (26:03)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nick Berry (26:19)

And if you're still the founder in the trenches, don't take for granted that all of the R &D conversations you're having every day when you are.

talking to a prospect, talking to a client, delivering the service, like you are the R &D department right there. You're doing the research. Do not take that for granted.

Paul Austin-Menear (26:28)

Mm-hmm.

that's a really great perspective to take on all of this. a lot of us tend to think of research and development as technology centric stuff. You know, hey, if I've got an R &D department, I got engineers, you know, I got researchers, I got whatever else. And we kind of also tie that word innovation to that same thing. It's like innovation is for big tech, it's for technology companies, it's for…

You know, the AI, the self-driving cars, the robo taxis, the drone copters, whatever. We tend to anchor the word innovation to that. But those two assumptions are fundamentally flawed. Research and development happens in any organization that provides something that they created to someone else. Because you got to build that product or service, right? That's research and development. You got to figure out what you're actually going to build, what you're going to put out there. That's research and development.

So this ain't the domain of engineers and MBAs and people. It's the domain of all of us. We've got to own it. And then you also think about, well, I talked a little bit about innovation. You think about innovation kind of being like, I'm building a product. I'm building this marvelous technological breakthrough that's going to be the next best thing since sliced bread. And it's going to sell like trillion widgets over the next six months. The addressable market is like here to the moon.

Yeah, that's innovation. But also innovation is serving your customers 5 % better through a process change that someone that works with your organization and say like supply chain came up with because they were like, well, this person out there said that they don't like how this operates. And I can directly tie that to how we like process orders.

So I'm going to make this change and that'll make it better for them. That's innovation. You know, like we don't, we don't just don't let yourself get hung up on innovation being like the big sexy innovation happens all the time. And the more the orient your culture towards creating positive change for your customers and your stakeholders and your partners, the more you're growing innovation. You know, a key of this is really like empower people to be curious, empower them to solve.

problems and to serve others. That's really where the magic kind of happens. So, know, this and it and you know, we're kind of having this conversation and and it it sounds kind of blue sky, you know, big picture, like very happy and whatnot. And I hope that it is. But the reality is that this is not as complicated as a lot of as a lot of folks, lot of experts make it seem, you know, it's like you make the effort to talk to customers, to partners, you'll listen to them.

You think about what they say. You figure out how that relates to your colleagues, your coworkers, your teammates, and you put it in front of them. The biggest missing piece is the repeatable aspect. It's not a habit for a lot of companies. If you make it a habit, you're in a good place. And that's really what this planning tool kind of hopes to do, right? Like, you you answer the questions, you get the output or whatever.

Nick Berry (29:33)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear (29:39)

And it gives you a plan that says, hey, this is kind of what it looks like. It's your size of business. And this isn't just for huge businesses. I've run this program with companies that have 10 people in them. And it works great. In a lot of ways, it's a heck of a lot simpler to do this for a 10-person company. And it's a heck of a lot easier to build the habit of doing this when your company is small. So I actually encourage small companies to be more like,

was gonna say something kinda rude, but I really encourage small companies to be more particular and more kind of like assertive about doing this early on. Because as you grow, it's already a habit. How much more expensive do you think it would be to try and build a habit like this when you're at 25 million versus when you're at 250,000 a year?

Nick Berry (30:21)

Mm-hmm.

yeah.

I mean, anybody who's ever tried to implement change in a big organization probably gets that.

Paul Austin-Menear (30:35)

Sure. Yep.

Nick Berry (30:38)

Okay.

Paul Austin-Menear (30:38)

So if you want to get your own innovation heartbeat plan, you know the tools free to use it's on my website listeners and Nick Berry show here the business owners journey go to six sixcatalysts.com/nickberry slash Nick Berry and it'll run you through it. Like I said, free charge. Don't even have to put in your email address if you don't want to unless you want to like keep a copy. I don't keep a copy of any of the information that you put in on my server. It's meant to be kind of privacy centric and that's intentional. I want you to feel.

free to be as honest as you possibly can when you're using that tool to generate your plan without worry of me kind of looking over your shoulder. That's not what it's all about. generate your plan. If you got questions, get in touch with me. Totally happy to answer some of those questions. But take this tool. Build it into your practices. I promise that it will pay off dividends for you in the medium to long term, if not immediately.

Nick Berry (31:29)

Well, thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. The resources are fantastic. Your content is great. You're an excellent writer. you articulate your points really well. Like you keep the things simple that can be made simple. three or four minutes back, you

Paul Austin-Menear (31:34)

Thanks.

Thanks.

Nick Berry (31:45)

went through like the, in its simplest form, it's really, you know, you need to be able to start a conversation and then listen and then extract what's what matters. When you lay it out like that, there's no excuse to not do it. Right. ⁓

Paul Austin-Menear (31:45)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's one of those things like, you know, any, any businesses that, you know, whether it's the entrepreneurs, founder teams, senior leadership, anybody that I've worked with on this topic, who they don't do it well, it's, it's honestly not because they don't want to, like you do get the odd person who's like, just, I don't want to hear feedback because they, they, they take it personally and they don't want to, they don't want to feel beat up. And I absolutely get that too.

You know, that's that's another thing entirely. Like you got to you got to feel you got to figure out how to deal with that mentally and emotionally on your own terms. So you can take that feedback in and you want to seek honesty, even if it's uncomfortable and ugly. But most, you know, most most most people who don't do this well, it's not because they don't want to. It's because there are so many competing priorities and they lack a system to make it easy to make this a priority. Like that's the missing nugget.

Nick Berry (32:27)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Austin-Menear (32:52)

And that's what this plan, that this process and framework is all about. It's all about making the system easy to repeat so that it's habitual and you don't have to fight to go out and get feedback.

Nick Berry (33:04)

Yep. thanks again, Paul. This is fantastic. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing the resources. It's great information.

Paul Austin-Menear (33:12)

Yeah, my