Karen Kirton   0:03
Welcome, Nathan. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   0:13
Thanks, Karen. Lovely to be here. 

Karen Kirton   0:15
Thank you. And do you mind just giving us the quick elevator pitch to introduce yourself today?
 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   0:20
Sure, Nathan Baws, involved in business, in lots of different businesses over the years, about 19 different ones. I’ve been on Shark Tank, done, have done a lot of private or public speaking for groups and organisations. Schools love training up little people, little entrepreneurs, our future generation, and getting them excited about business.
I guess my main focus, I’ve been in lots of different businesses, but it’s all around business growth and how we can grow businesses quickly, organically, without money and lead generation. So that’s kind of what I focus on on 80 or 90% of my day. 

Karen Kirton   0:58
Sounds like utopia, building a business without spending money. So we’ll get into that. Because one of the things that you often talk about is joint ventures. So rather than just simply spending more money on marketing, which we can all do, it feels like an endless bucket sometimes. So what exactly is a joint 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   1:02
Yeah. 

Karen Kirton   1:18
venture and why are so few businesses using that effectively? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   1:23
Good question. I do not understand because why don’t people use joint ventures? They are so incredibly powerful and they’re organic, they’re free. It’s just a bit of creative thinking that you need to do. And when I got into joint ventures originally years ago, I just…
realised it had so much potential, so much power behind it. And one of the things that I was never good at doing was bringing people to a business. So I thought, well, why don’t we find where those people, that hungry herd of people already are and go out to them instead?
and offer something amazing, create a phenomenal offer. And that’s one of the most important parts of creating a very powerful joint venture is a very, very exciting offer. And that’s very easy to say yes to, very hard to say no to. So it was all about, well, where is this hungry herd
people hanging out already, why don’t we just go to them instead of trying to pull, pull, pull those customers towards us? Why don’t we just go find them and then offer them something amazing? So that’s where a joint venture comes in and it’s just a creation of, it’s a three-way win is how I describe it. So there’s got to be that.
you as a business win, your business partner, whoever you’re collaborating or joint venturing with, has an amazing win, and their customer base also has an amazing win. So if everyone wins, then everyone’s really motivated to make a success of the package. And that’s what joint ventures is.
collaborating with another partner to bring their existing customer database an amazing offer that everyone benefits from. 

Karen Kirton   3:10
Yeah, and as you’re talking, it’s making me think about, you know, I get a lot of LinkedIn requests, I’m sure a lot of people do, saying, hey, I want to partner with you. But really what they want to do is just try and sell me their stuff to sell to our clients. So, you know, from my perspective, a lot of people don’t necessarily go
into that kind of process in perhaps the right way. So maybe can you give us an example of a simple joint venture that, you know, any small business could create? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   3:40
Yeah, and the outreach is super important as you’ve highlighted there, Karen, because everyone just wants to sell your stuff. So the benefit for you has to be massive. Like otherwise, it’s just me trying to sell you something for your customers. So everyone’s got a win out of it. That’s the rule number one. 

Joint ventures, they can come in so many different shapes and sizes. I’ll give you an example, like McDonald’s often does joint venture with movie companies. So they’ll do a new, I remember when Shrek came out many years ago, and they’ve done heaps of different ones with Star Wars and all sorts of things, but
You know, you could go into McDonald’s and you could buy a meal and you’d get these little Shrek figures or Star Wars figures or whatever. Now, those get kids excited because they get a meal and they, so the end user is really, really pumped because they’re getting a meal and all these little cool little figurines.
Now, the McDonald’s is excited because they’re leveraging something that’s really well known, i.e. this movie, and people are coming in off the back of that to buy the McDonald’s products. And of course, the movie theatres and movie makers are all really excited because McDonald’s is a good
chain, it’s got good distribution, they can get their products in front of people all around the world. So it’s a fantastic joint venture pitch. So that’s one example. I’ll give you another example when one of the businesses I run in Perth is Tommy Sugo.
and we were on Shark Tank for that. We do pasta and we manufacture Italian food. So we’ll joint venture with schools. Now, it could be, because we do home delivery, we reach out to the schools and we say, hey guys, do you want to help? Can we help you raise some funds? Now, that
could just be seen as us trying to sell them something, which in essence it is, but we want to make that so, so super exciting for them that it’s very easy for them to say yes, very hard to say no. So what we say is we’ll give you commission, but we do everything. Like we set up, we take the payments, we do the marketing for you. You can use all our, we’ll create social media content for you that you can just share. We know you’re super busy. We know you’re parents of kids and we know that you want to help raise funds, but we know you’re juggling 10,000 things. So we have made the process so ridiculously easy for you.
that you just slot it in, you share the link, that’s all you have to do. We take care of absolutely everything else. So people get very excited, you know, understanding the pain points that they have when you’re joint venturing with someone is so, so important to understand how you can get it across the line. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   6:39
And addressing those pain points and having a great solution is a really, really awesome way of convincing people, because they’re just like, oh, yes, yeah, you know. And I always say, the better we can explain the problem and spend a big portion of your time explaining the problem and explaining, you know, we get that you love you want to support your school. We get that you understand, you know, we understand that you’re also working full-time and you’re also a parent full-time and you’ve got all these conflicting things going on in your life and life is crazy. So what we’ve done, you know, so we understand, we demonstrate that we understand that problem so, so effectively.
that they automatically know that we’re going to bring a great solution because they resonate with that understanding that we have.  

Karen Kirton   7:23
Plus, you’re really asking them for very little, aren’t you? Like, you know, you’re doing everything and you’re just saying, just give us your customer base essentially to be able to do this with. So, yeah. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   7:32
Yeah.
Correct. Yep. So we’ll make you money. We’ll do all the hard work. You just have to literally share a link and that’s it because we’ve done everything else for you. So yeah, that’s another example of a joint venture. Another one is when we run a bookkeeping business and it’s related to business growth. So we do bookkeeping and business growth. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   7:58
And only because I built that business, because I never had bookkeepers and accountants who actually got involved in growing a business. And I always thought they should, because it was just an obvious choice. So now when we offer bookkeeping, we offer business growth and coaching because every business owner wants to grow their business. 

period. Like otherwise, what are you doing in business? So we now partner with accounting firms and we say, hey, we’ll bring, we’ll do the backend bookkeeping, but you can offer this amazing business growth service where we can coach your customers free of charge. And so that automatically positions them as a completely different accounting firm that actually cares about their customer growth. And so we do the back end bookkeeping and also provide this service that no one else does. So the accounting firm looks amazing because they’re now providing this free of charge. The client loves it because they’re getting all this additional love and care that they never got before. and we get exposure to new clients. So if you’ve got a business and you’re looking for a joint venture structure, create an amazing offer and then go out to search for another business that potentially isn’t even in the same category, but has your end user in their database. So you can then bring an amazing offer that’s not competing and you’re not going to be competing against your joint venture partner. You’re enhancing what they do and you’re further enhancing the offer. So I think it’s just an absolutely phenomenal way of growing everyone’s business very, very quickly. 

Karen Kirton   9:36
You mentioned before just about how you’re helping customers, and I know that customer service is also something that you’re passionate about. So how much business growth do you think comes from keeping existing customers happy rather than constantly finding new ones? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   9:43

Yeah, although the exciting bit for me is new lead generation, the reality is keeping those customer services, customers happy with great customer service is way more economical than finding new leads. You know, the lead generation process can be expensive, although I love to do organic and free wherever possible, but the reality is keeping a customer happy is so much easier than trying to bring in a new customer. And I was just briefly sharing with you an experience that I had. I’m a massive advocate of good customer service. And I had an experience a couple of weeks ago where I was actually thrown off
a flight for bringing the airline’s attention to the fact that they weren’t looking after their customers. And there was absolutely no aggression, there was no swearing, there was no anything. But some businesses don’t want to hear when they’re not
doing things to customer benefit. I was walking into the flight and in the middle of the aisle there was an elderly lady and she was asked one of the airline hostesses for help to put her bag in the overhead locker. And this is a great example of what not to do with customer service. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   11:23
Now, this airline has policies in place. Policies is one thing, but people is another completely different thing. And how you execute on or deliver a policy makes or breaks a business. So this lady said, can you give me a hand with putting my baggage in? And the lady immediately snapped and said, no, we don’t get involved in customer luggage.
And I just couldn’t believe it. Being a massive advocate of customer service, I jumped up, I grabbed her bag, I put it in the overhead locker, and I turned to the airline hostess. I probably shouldn’t have said this, but I said, this is another example of what not to do in customer service. And she got really upset and I got thrown off the plane. literally for that. And there was, yeah, so because I voiced it in front of other customers, they didn’t want to hear it. But the point is, I will always stand by customer service. It is such an essential thing. It’s a way of keeping your customers 

Karen Kirton   12:10
Wow.. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   12:26
you know, we want to exceed expectations and being very, very careful with delivering policies and procedures without that love and care factor can be so destroying, damaging for a business. So, yeah. 

Karen Kirton   12:37

Yeah, I guess from my perspective, you know, I would assume that that air host is probably not really happy in her job, probably isn’t really loving the company. And so that comes through then in the way that you interact. Whereas if you had someone that was really highly engaged and loving the job, they go, yeah, okay, that’s the policy, but you know what, I’m going to help you because I love what I’m doing. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   13:01
100%.
So true. 

Karen Kirton   13:06
and I’m having a great day. And even just like removing you from the flight, that just seems like incredibly heavy-handed.  

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   13:14
It was put down as a, we were considered a risk, a safety risk, okay? So the fact that we were helping prevent that safety risk of that poor lady, you know, hurting herself, totally different. But you’re absolutely right about if she’s having a bad day, if she’s not enjoying the culture of that whole airline was phenomenal. All these air hostesses came together and ganged up and they’re very, very aggressive, very quickly. And it’s funny, we went on to, so we got thrown off that, my sister and I, she was just sitting in the seat and next to me and we were asked to be removed. And then we went and booked a flight with Virgin. And my goodness, what a different culture. It was so phenomenal. And I didn’t think there was much difference between airlines until you have that experience. And, you know, people in Virgin, we went up to the counter and they were joking and they were happy and they were laughing. and we went straight through and it was just chalk and cheese. So, you know, knowing that the culture, probably from the head down, is so influential on the business and, you know, it’s just… 

Karen Kirton   14:26
And now you’re going to be flying Virgin Australia for ever. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   14:36
I am. And I’m telling everyone, I think there are, you know, obviously not mentioning the other company, I don’t think that’s right. But, you know, when you see someone excel and understand and notice the difference, man, I’m in love with these guys. They have exceeded my expectations. And 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   14:55
I think they’re phenomenal, so yeah. 

Karen Kirton   14:57
Yeah, I was thinking that as you were talking, because I have been flying Virgin for years now. I can’t remember when I changed or why I changed, but I did. And they’re always super helpful with luggage. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   15:08
Ah.
Gorgeous, absolutely lovely people. And you can tell they enjoy their job and the culture is phenomenal. It must be. And they’ve taken out all these other little things that upset the customers because they know their pain points and they’ve obviously consciously made those decisions to make it a really enjoyable and pleasurable experience and it’s like, wow, love this. 

Karen Kirton   15:31
That’s what we’re all looking for with our businesses, right? It’s like, how do we make those frictionless experiences for our clients? And, you know, you said you built, you know, 19 businesses or been involved with 19 businesses across different industries. So, you know, what lessons do you see about growth that apply no matter what kind of business you’re in. Sorry, it’s a really broad question, maybe. Maybe pick one or two. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   15:54
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think spending time on growth is what every business owner should be spending 80 or 90% of their day doing. And that’s an area I absolutely love. And when you love something, you know, you’re passionate about it and you do it and it’s a pleasure to do it. So you can burn those hours very easily without realizing.
So, I think everyone, you know, no business fails if it has amazing sales, and lead generation is the first part of that concept, and there’s really no problem you can’t fix with more sales, as in, you know, if you’re profitable, you can really help.
any problem within the business. So I think the majority of time any business owner should spend should be on business growth and focusing on how can we increase our sales, which can be a bit challenging for some people because they’ll often go into business as an operator, not as a sort of a business growth strategist.
And it depends on the level and you have to often get creative in how can you grow businesses? How can you dedicate that time? If you’re really in that operational mode and that spending all your energy and time running the actual business rather than working on the business, then you’ve got to start getting creative in how can I asking those
How can I questions where, how can I spend more time on business growth and a little less time on the operational stuff, but still maintain the quality of all the operational side? So I think that’s a good tip for business growth. 

Karen Kirton   17:24
And for some people, they have a lot of discomfort in that though, because they’ve started the business because they’re a cybersecurity expert or they’re an accountant or whatever. And so they want to stay within their lane, so to speak. And I’ve seen that happen where they’ve got a good product and good services, so the business starts growing and all of a sudden, but they’re still doing the delivery because they actually they’re not like-minded in that way. So have you seen that happen? And you know, what’s a good strategy you think if anyone’s listening going, yeah, that’s me, I don’t really want to do that. I want to do the actual stuff. Yeah, what’s the answer? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   17:56
All the time.
Yeah.
Just find people that love doing the stuff that you don’t love. Whether it’s a joint venture, which is absolutely a phenomenal way of doing it, or if it’s employing team members. I mean, personally, I’m not a huge fan of bookkeeping, which I might have said this year at the beginning.
But I know the importance of it. And I know that, you know, every time tax time came around, I used to really be uncomfortable because there was a lot of work ahead. And I thought, this is ridiculous. I love selling. I love growing businesses. I’ve got to find someone that loves that, the bookkeeping side.
And there’s always someone that loves the stuff that you hate doing, and why not collaborate with those people? So either bring them into the business and have them do that stuff that you don’t love, because that’s very energy destroying when you’re spending time doing something you absolutely hate. compared to when you’re spending time doing something you absolutely love, you’re going to grow like crazy if you can focus on that stuff that motivates you and floats your boat. And it’s really going to draw your energy down and slow your pace down if you are spending time on stuff that you don’t love. But the good news is there’s always someone out there that loves.
The crap that you don’t like doing, and as they’re as passionate, and it’s just a question of finding them and surrounding yourself with teams of people that are passionate about doing the stuff that you’re not passionate, and then can you imagine the strength of the business that you can create by all going forwards with   

with what you absolutely love. Now, if you can’t do that as a, you know, if your funds are limited and you can’t employ a full-time bookkeeper or whatever, think about joint ventures because, you know, it can often be a strategy that you bring people together and you it’s a great opportunity for those sort of things. 

Karen Kirton   20:08
Absolutely. Now you mentioned you don’t like spending money on marketing and lead generation. So what’s the strategy that you’ve seen it’s quite common that business owners take to grow their businesses, but you just think, well, you’re just wasting your money doing that. 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   20:09
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean a lot of people think you have to spend money. We’ve done a lot of guerrilla style marketing stunts over the years. They are time consuming, but they are also, they can be incredibly lucrative. They can also be a little bit embarrassing and some people like to sit behind the scenes and not have that exposure to the front end. To give you an example, we did a little stunt quite a few years ago where we were in London. It was just during the financial crisis and the banks had stopped lending. And we had a property, we joint ventured with a lady who had a
beautiful property in Kensington, couldn’t sell it for love or money. So we did this little stunt where my sister and I, we had these big ugly yellow boards. We hand wrote by my flat. It was a payment plan and our phone number, a bunch of spelling mistakes and very ugly handwriting in there.
And we walked across Tower Bridge and we, it was a bit embarrassing. It was a bit uncomfortable. And we had buses pulling up in the middle of the street with the bus drivers hanging out saying, what the hell are you doing? And people with cameras, et cetera. So the end result of that was that
We got into a bunch of newspapers that went all around the world and our phone rang off the hook and within 48 hours we’d sold the property and we lined up another 20. It was phenomenal. So we understood the power of knowing your numbers, as in we understood that if we walked across there, there was a bit of discomfort and a bit of embarrassment, whatever, but to us that was worth 40 odd 1000 pounds to do that little stunt. So often knowing your numbers can be a great way of understanding if you’re wanting to do a gorilla sort of stunt, then you know, there’s some, it could potentially be worthwhile if you put that time into it. 

Karen Kirton   22:31
Cool. Now, if we don’t all want to run across the Tower Bridge.
What’s one thing if someone said to you, you know, I really want to grow my business over the next 12 months, what’s one thing they could do over the next week that will help them to get down that path? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   22:36
Yeah.
Mhm.
The direct messaging is a great strategy that doesn’t cost any money. Direct messaging, reaching out, as you mentioned before, you’ve got to be careful with it because it shouldn’t just be a sales pitch. I want to sell your stuff. So a direct message that is human natured, as in not generic and really boring because you probably get 10,000 of those messages every day as does everyone else. People just wanting to sell you stuff. So an offer that’s really, really well stacked is massive benefit driven for the end user, for whoever you’re reaching out to, and that’s totally different to anyone else’s offer would be really useful for getting engagement and booking appointments. You know, first step would be potentially to, let’s jump on a call, I’ve got this amazing offer, it’s unlike anyone else’s, this is what I can do, and then reaching out to people and doing lots of direct messaging. 

Karen Kirton   23:45
Excellent. Now, the question I like to ask people at the end, because we’re coming to time, what is one thing that you wish that you knew earlier about leading a team or running a business? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   23:46

Leading a team, I think we focus on doing 3 minute calls with almost as many of my team members as I can on a daily basis. So connections or meetings or stand up meetings. So connecting and being on the same page to me is really, really important with the team. And so that you’re all working together on and going forwards together. Otherwise, it’s very easy when there’s not enough connection. It’s very easy to end up accidentally going your own way. So that’s something that I bring into the team on a daily basis. 

Karen Kirton   24:30
Yeah, I love that because I think that people underestimate the value of stand-up meetings. I even say to people, you know, you don’t have to physically do it at the same time. You can even just have like a thread set up in Teams or Slack or whatever and just have everyone type something in every day. But, you know, it’s just getting that connexion is really important, especially now when so many people are working remotely or, you know, not in the same space together. So look, thank you so much for joining me, Nathan. It’s been a great conversation. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about so many different things that I didn’t realise that I would in such a short amount of time, especially the next flight that I’m taking, which is actually tomorrow.  

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   25:00
Thanks, Karen.
Just don’t complain. Whatever you do, don’t complain. Yeah. 

Karen Kirton   25:18
But I’m going to watch and just say, okay, yeah, how are things looking? Is the team looking pretty happy today?! 

 So, but thanks for joining. What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you? Is it through the website or LinkedIn or what’s your preference? 

Nathan Baws – www.nathanbaws.com   25:22

Yeah, either or, website or LinkedIn. Yep, happy to connect. Yep. 

Karen Kirton   25:33
Excellent.
Okay, great. And we’ll put those into the show notes as well. So thank you so much for joining me. For those who are listening, if you perceive value from this episode, I’d love it if you can leave a rating or a review over Apple Podcasts or Spotify so someone else can also find the episodes to help with their business.
Episodes are released on Mondays, so click subscribe and you’ll be notified of when that’s available. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, head on over to Amplify HR.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.