0:00:00 Ben Wright: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:44 Ben Wright: Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Friends in Business podcast with my wonderful co host, Jemimah Ashleigh. I feel like saying at Jemimah Ashleigh.What’s your LinkedIn, your Instagram hashtag? Yeah, it is at Jaminaashley.
0:00:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:00:58 Ben Wright: J E M I M A H A S H L E I G H There you go.
0:01:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: And we have B E N R I T E with us.
0:01:08 Ben Wright:Oh Jemimah.
0:01:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh no, not right, not right. I’ve made a mistake.
0:01:14 Ben Wright: And you know that that’s not how.
0:01:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: We spelled W R I G H T, right?
0:01:20 Ben Wright: Yeah. I’m not a big Instagram proponent, I must say. Most of my stuff’s on LinkedIn. So nice to see you in person, Jemimah, because I know you’ve been living heavy virtual life the last few weeks. Like this could go anywhere. Tell me about it.
0:01:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: The last few weeks have been. We’ve obviously been doing a lot of catch ups via Zoom ahead of recording, but I’ve been in the middle of a virtual running race at the moment. I am currently doing a 4,000 kilometer trail. Like a goose.
0:01:51 Ben Wright: Yeah, 4,000 k’s. How many hours
0:01:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: A specific crest trail, With my current rate, nine years. No, I’m kidding. Probably about a year. Probably just a little bit over a.
0:02:01 Ben Wright: Yes. You’re doing 80Ks a week.
0:02:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, I, like I said just a bit over kill.
0:02:06 Ben Wright: Yeah, well, 80Ks is good going. I’ve never been able to get that high.
0:02:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: I did make a mistake when I got here and I went for a run yesterday last night and then I went for a run this morning and I have forgotten to log those kilometers this morning on the phone.
0:02:21 Ben Wright: Oh, little mistakes, they can be so frustrating.
0:02:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m so upset, Ben. Like, do you know how many kilometers that is? I have to go and redo them. So there’s part of me going to be like, I forgot. Can I send you the map of where I went on the phone? Because you have to log everything as you’re doing them. Do I think it’s going to Take me longer. Yes. I have two years to complete it, though, so.
0:02:38 Ben Wright: Right, okay. Still 40ks a week over two years. That’s a lot you got to do to get through that. That is good going. And I tell you what, every K here is hard work.
0:02:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Is 45 km elsewhere on the market.
0:02:49 Ben Wright: The humidity this time of year is not significant. It’s a hilly.
0:02:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: My hair is growing by the second. Even though we’re in a cooler month, it’s just. I’ve given up, and I’m just going with natural curl.
0:03:01 Ben Wright: Yeah. Wow. You should see December. Well, you have seen December. Yeah. All right, let’s get into today. What are we talking about?
0:03:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: Mistakes. I made a pretty silly little mistake, and I wanted today to. And it got me thinking as I’m looking at my phone going, I can’t believe I’ve done that. We once recorded a whole episode where. A whole episode that was unusable. We’ve made mistakes here. We’ve made mistakes in our businesses, in our personal lives. I wanted to go through business mistakes today and going, like, what’s really been one of your biggest mistakes in business? But more importantly, how do you find the inspiration afterwards? Because there is this moment when you do make a mistake where I just wanted to cry in your. Like, I can just imagine your daughter finding me crying, and she’s like, what’s wrong? At five years old, I’m like, I just didn’t turn the app on. Like, that’s. It feels like the end of the world. It’s not really.
0:03:56 Ben Wright: Yeah, look, along the journey we’ve had, all the businesses have made so many mistakes. Right. We’ve had a small goods factory set on fire, had someone run himself over in a forklift, which. Which wasn’t. It’s terrible. It was absolutely horrific. It was the worst moment I’ve had in business. It was complete user error. And we really. We were investigated pretty heavily. But certainly, see, you know, you try and learn from those. I learned the word of. I learned that biannual doesn’t actually necessarily mean every second year.
0:04:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, it can mean twice a year.
0:04:25 Ben Wright: Twice a year. Yeah. And I go on a sizable contract around some maintenance requirements there. I mean, tens of thousands of dollars for each. Each type of service. I think that mistake cost us quarter of a million dollars at one point in time. So I’ve made lots of those. But I would have to say the one that has stuck with me the most. And for those people listening who work with me and have had an experience around me advising on this, you’ll really understand at this point in time why I do. So for me, it’s placing too much emphasis on the relationship. And what I mean by this is expecting that the strength of relationship will lead to more sales happening, will lead to problems being resolved, will lead to one party not doing the wrong thing by the other. And I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve learned in all three of those instances, I’ve had sales not go ahead because either myself or team members have relied on the relationship. I have had issues arise because I relied on the relationship, not allowing them to escalate. That is, do you know what, we’ve got a strong relationship. They’re not going to mind about this issue. We can carry on, right? And I’ve walked past it rather than going to hang on, walked it in.
0:05:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: And said, we’ve got a problem here.
0:05:43 Ben Wright: Yep, yep. And I have had people I do business with who I expected would do the right thing by me, prove that the relationship is only worth so much. And that last one in particular I’ve really suffered on, right? Expecting that people would look after me. And what I learned, and, you know, perhaps I was a bit naive, but what I learned is the hierarchy is really clear, right? It’s. It’s other people, their families, their pockets. Then things like your relationships start to come in, right? And there’s a lot of times when themselves, their families, their pockets, right, Will be far more impactful to them. And it might be disproportionate, right? It might be a small amount of money or a small impact on them, but a huge impact on you. And my experience is that even good people still find some of those decisions really hard. So I’ve learned the hard way there. I’ve seen people in business, I’ve seen people who work for four companies. I’ve got a really good friend who was given equity in a business. The contract was a little bit loose. I advised him to tighten it up. He didn’t. He said, the relationship will be fine. He got absolutely worked over. I’ve had a client recently who bought a business. I helped him with his DD. He left two or three things out of the contract because the buy and sell period was getting a little bit longer. In the truth, he left a few things out and said they’ll do the right thing by me. And my advice was, no, no, this is going to absolutely blow up. And it is blown up 3, 4, 5, fold over even what I expected to happen. And for me, it’s just relying so heavily on a relationship blinds you or Put your blinkers on is probably a more appropriate stance. Doesn’t blind you to the big things, but it’s certainly, you know, you’re running down that track or you’re racing on that track and you’re not seeing the signals that are coming in your peripheral vision.
0:07:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And I think all of this stuff is incredibly valid. And I think anyone that’s done business with friends or has relationships with people they’ve gone into, you have to understand that at the end of the day, people are going to always go for their own best interest. And you have to plan for the worst on that. I know you and I, we. You and I have very, very similar values. Very, very similar sense of humor, but incredibly different as humans. What’s made this really enjoyable is both of us went in going, okay, let’s see how the other one. Like, we’ve matched each other on this one. When you come in with an established relationship, which we didn’t really have too strongly of, established relationship coming into this, ours has developed that way. We came with an initial friendship and then started to do something together. You and I both took the same approach of, let’s just make sure everything is down the line. It’s 50, 50. We’re never going to cross out of that. That’s the plan. That’s what we’re doing. There was that verbal agreement and that when you’re coming in with an established best friend, very close relationship, you know, the person, they’ve got my back, be very careful with that. It is so incredibly dangerous to just assume that the relationship will be what it is.
0:08:33 Ben Wright: Yeah. And look, I think for me, the way that I’m handling this these days, and look, I will say openly that I don’t think I’m perfect either, but I certainly have had a scenario where doing the right thing by my business and the people in my business cost me millions of dollars or it was going to cost me millions of dollars. That was the scenario. Do the right thing by 80 families or do the right thing by me. Make a couple of million right or not lose a couple of million was probably a better example. And in the end, I chose to do the right thing by the business, and I don’t regret it. But how much it cost me, I don’t know. But it’s certainly.
0:09:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Don’t do the math. You’ll just get sad.
0:09:11 Ben Wright: My life for the next six months was horrible. Really, really horrible. It culminated in an emergency appendectomy. Right. That’s how stressed I grew up. And most of the people in that business don’t know this and never know one of them might be listening. But I had a couple of people in that business that really stood by me, a couple that didn’t. And for me, I don’t regret how I worked through that, but certainly have learned from it. And what I’ve learned is that if you rely on the relationship, you’re putting yourself at the risk of someone else, someone else’s decisions or behaviors, which means you’ve lost control. So for me, what I do now when I have strong relationships is I extra disciplined to treat them as any normal relationship would. Right. And then if you need to do anything extra on top of that, you just do it. Right. I work with people I know now and they’ve been very gracious to allow me into their businesses. But I am super vigilant with these people to make sure I’m professional. I go the extra mile and I deliver the results to the best of my ability. Right. I can’t always guarantee results, but I’m so grateful for them putting their faith in me that I actually want to work extra hard. But for me, my advice is if you have really close relationships out there or you’re doing business with family or you believe things are going on in your business that will be okay because of the relationship, just to dig a little bit deeper and look into ways that you can protect yourself, protect your business, protect your friend or the other side of the relationship if it’s a long term customer, a long term business partner. Right. And protect all of you. And then if something does go wrong, you’ve just got a default baseline to fall onto. But above everything else, both parties know that default’s there. Right. So they can’t necessarily agree.
0:10:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: The key things I need you to know before we go into this relationship is X, Y, Z, A, B, C. Do you agree to this? Yes. No. So, yeah. Yeah.
0:10:53 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah And a great piece of advice I got from one of my friends, Russell was Settle the divorce before you get married.
0:10:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:11:00 Ben Wright: Whether it’s with customers, whether it’s with business partners, whether it’s with funding providers, staff. Right. Get it all written down so you know that if something does go wrong and really unfortunate that it does happen that you know how you’re going to behave.
0:11:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: So we also, we also put that in place fairly early on as well. We’ve got emails back and forth of like, you know, we’ve got that in place. Like that’s how seriously we take this because both of us, and my story is not dissimilar. To yours. We put that in place very, very early on. Like, if something happens, this is what’s going to happen. It was just. It was very quick and easy to do, but it was like, we settled how this will end way before it started.
0:11:34 Ben Wright: And we have an off site starting shortly.
0:11:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, right.
0:11:36 Ben Wright: We will formalize that, of course. Right. Once that starts. And I mean, that’s my bread and butter. Right. So we’ll roll it out pretty quickly. But I think that’s my biggest lesson and what I’ve really learned from. And maybe a little bit different to what people expected to hear, but tell me about yours, please.
0:11:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, mine not dissimilar. So we didn’t swap stories before we sat down and you said, oh, mine’s about relationships. I was like, oh, God, mine is too. Because I think that’s also the most volatile thing about what we do. So can’t probably give too many, many details about this, but I was working with a female person who we did a collaborative effort together where I made the mistake. We had, again, the same things. You, very, very solid relationship. We had some agreements in place what that would look like. We never set expectations of what we were trying to get out of it. And this became extremely problematic down the road. So this person and I had a podcast together which was going really well. The issue that we ran into was we got a very good sponsorship deal on the table worth very good money. And I said, I don’t care how much it is. I mean, the other person said, actually, it has to be this value or above. And that number was not insignificant. So I said, look, I’ll float that. If that’s worst case scenario, I’ll float 10 grand or whatever just to make this problem go away so we can sign the deal. And it was like, no, that’s way less money than what we’re asking for here. This was a really significant thing and we just had to have this conversation. Like, we’re in such disagreement about what this could look like. I just saw this as such a marketing opportunity. They were like, this has to be the business and it has to make this much and it has to do this. I’m like, we should have other businesses outside of what we’re doing. And it was just really different view of. And we had just drifted from the original idea and where we’d made the mistake. And this was just exactly like, what is the expectation here? And that’s the conversation even you and I had early on, like, what’s our plan here? This is great, but what’s Next. This is brilliant. What else do you want to do with it? And it was just not having that clear, concise, and enough information at the time and enough expertise in business to go, actually, what I want and what you want is now extremely different. And then we’re at this really, really interesting crossroad of, well, this is going really well, but we’re actually not in this together anymore. We have taken very different routes. And having that discussion was really difficult because it felt like a breakup and it felt like almost a divorce going, oh, God, what do we do here? Like, we’re in totally different mindsets. Do we dissolve this? Does one of us buy it? What does that look like? It was a really difficult time to kind of go, what do we do here?
0:14:10 Ben Wright: And what happened? Did you get the sponsorship?
0:14:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: No, because it was going to. The sponsorship that was offered was with a extremely well known yogurt brand, and it was extremely. It was a lot less money than the other person was expecting. And the deal got blown.
0:14:26 Ben Wright: Podcast.
0:14:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Sorry. Dissolved. Yeah, pretty much immediately afterwards. Yeah.
0:14:30 Ben Wright: Wow.
0:14:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And it was just. It was an incredible opportunity. I could see the opportunity in going, this is just marketing that we can’t even pay. And it was like, no, we need the dollar value. And so that was just going, oh, we didn’t actually clarify enough what the other person needed from this. And there was this like, I need this or I’m not doing it. And whereas I am, let’s just see what happens. Like, I’m a bit loosey goosey with this stuff. I had another successful business sitting in the background. We were making cash, we were good. And this was like, no, it has to be this dollar value and what that looks like. And I think that really bought a lot of issues to a head. But that was the fundamental kind of issue we faced.
0:15:08 Ben Wright: Yeah. Right.
0:15:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: Later.
0:15:09 Ben Wright: And what have you learned from it?
0:15:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: Biggest lesson for me was setting real expectations very, very quickly and also knowing that when you’re starting any collaborative project, that felt like, what happens next? What’s next plan? When do we dissolve? When do we. And being very honest about that conversation and taking emotions out of it, because this felt very emotional and it actually shouldn’t have been. It was a very easy cut and dry discussion, but because of the relationship, it muddied the waters.
0:15:38 Ben Wright: Okay. Okay. All right. So advice for people out there.
0:15:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: If you’re going into business relationship with someone that you know, like, trust, care about, you have to plan for the end. Now you have to have that discussion if we’re gonna sell this. What does that look like? How much money do we. Are we. What are the benchmarks? So great that we’ve done a podcast for a year, but we’ve always talked about doing off sites, which are happening shortly. We knew going in, okay, this is what this is gonna look like. You have to have an intention, even creative ones, which arguably this is a little bit. You need to have that driver ready to go, but also have exit ramps. You have to have. If we had like sold any of these off sites and no one had bought them going, okay, well, this has been a really fun adventure. I’ve had a hoot. Let’s maybe have a look at different ways of doing this. We’d had that discussion early on. I think you plan for the end. So am I going to sell it? Do we close? Do we liquidate? You need to make sure that you have. You’ve taken care of yourself and knowing what your expectations are and knowing when you’re going to cut and run if needed.
0:16:45 Ben Wright: Yeah. That piece around planning for where that end journey is. Yeah, it’s really important. And then that helps you, I think, stay aligned when you’re picking up those pots of gold that I talk about all the time right along that journey. So. Okay, excellent. Well, we’ve had reasonably similar mistakes. I think for you, it’s come from get really clear on expectations and get aligned on what you want out of partnerships. For me, it’s around documenting. Right. What you do within your partnerships and not treating friendships as not giving them too much weight in business decisions. Still putting in good principles and processes. And I mean, today I’m very heavy on systems and processes. Right. Perhaps that’s driven that.
So, okay. Two really good, really good pieces of learnings I think that hopefully will help those out there listening. Right. My advice from this today is have a think if you have any of those scenarios in play in your business at the moment. Right. And what you might be able to do to stop future problems. Right. Use current person to not piss off future person. Make sure current Ben doesn’t do something that future Ben’s going to regret. Right. Get angry with or be annoyed about it being a mistake. So, excellent. Good topic today, Jemimah, forward to seeing you. Our next few episodes are actually starting to roll some guests in. Yeah. Which I’m excited for. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. So until next week, we’ve been your friends in business. Bye for now.
