Episode #277: Our Best and Worst of 2023

The YCM end of year stocktake

A TIME FOR REFLECTION… AND HONESTY!

The end of year is a time of renewal. We instinctively take the opportunity to reflect on the year just gone, and reset our expectations for the year ahead.

In this episode, I want to do something that we’ve never done before: we pull back the curtain on our business, Your CEO Mentor and give you a window into our own 2023 scorecard:

• How did we do?

• What things did we focus on that didn't actually pan out the way we expected?

• Which things went really well?

I want you to see how we assess our initiatives, how we think about our failures, and what lessons we take forward. From the outside, it might seem as though everything we touch turns to gold. But, just like you, we have our struggles and setbacks, and work incredibly hard every day to try to build our business.

I hope you can relate to, learn from and, most importantly, enjoy reading about the best and worst of Your CEO Mentor in 2023.

WORST #1: PODCAST GROWTH

Over the past five years, the podcast has grown really beautifully, organically. There’s been a huge amount of word of mouth growth, and people tell us all the time, “Oh, my boss (or my colleague, or my friend, or my sister) recommended No Bullsh!t Leadership to me”.

That's obviously helped us to get to over 5 million listens, and we’re now one of the biggest leadership podcasts in the world. But this year we really wanted to focus on growing that listenership and we did quite a few things to try to achieve that. Despite this, our growth kind-of plateaued, just over the last six months.

We've stayed really consistent at the 30,000 to 35,000 downloads a week. And, obviously we're incredibly happy and grateful for all our listeners. But, personally, it’s frustrating because I know that there are so many more people out there that we can impact with what I think is incredibly valuable free content.

So, for me, the most frustrating piece of the Your CEO Mentor puzzle in 2023 is, how do we get people to share it, how do we get people to review, and comment. We believe in the podcast so much that we want to get it into the hands of more listeners. That’s what will enable them to make a change, or try something a little bit different, or to feel more confident in their leadership capability.

We’re constantly questioning whether we are still bringing the value we expect to our leadership community. We question the format: is it getting boring? Is the content quality declining? Is it a matter of people just churning through and getting onto other podcasts that are newer?

We analyze this frequently to try and make sure that we're still hitting the mark for our listeners, and we’ll continue to do so. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

WORST #2: US BRANDING

This is super interesting. When Kathy and I relocated to the US in 2021, my book was published a couple of months later, and we debuted at #2 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list. As we know, this is a combination of the book itself, and the marketing campaign we mounted, which Emma ran brilliantly.

But I never anticipated that branding would be so difficult in the US market, because our brand works so well everywhere else in the world. The difficulty is with the word “bullsh!t”--it's not universal, but certainly in the larger corporate market, there's a real aversion to any sort of swear word.

I think part of it is the political correctness wave that's taken over the world in the last few years, but also it's just a matter of sensible risk management. In larger corporations, which is my main target market for leadership performance, you've got heads of HR saying, “Well yes, we know he's awesome and we'd love to get him in as a speaker, but all I need is one complaint from an employee who’s offended by the swear word, and it's ruins my whole week.”

I think there's a level of conservatism there, which is fine, but it just means we have to go after a slightly different market than the large corporates. The same barriers don’t exist in companies that are more flexible, and want to strip away the bullsh!t to get to real leadership performance.

Ironically, the word “bullsh!t” is actually an excellent filtering mechanism: any company that balks at a word will certainly be unwilling to do what it takes to improve the company’s performance.

Our 2024 strategy is to consolidate a slightly new branding, and find that market sweet spot in the US. We redeveloped my speaking website, www.martingmoore.com, and it is just awesome. But I'm currently going through and rewriting the copy for the second time, because of this slight repositioning and rebranding.

For example, on the homepage it won't hit you in the face immediately with the bold statement, “The No Bullsh!t Leader”. We've changed the opening statement to say, “Real Leadership, Real Results”.

I’m actually developing a theory about how American culture views profanity. My hypothesis is that gun ownership and tolerance for swearing are inversely proportional. That is to say, the more guns you own, the less likely you are to accept swear words. 🤣

Of course, in deciding how to change tack, we’ve had conversations with numerous experts in the US speaker market: from highly successful professional speakers, to event managers, to the bureau agents that I partner with.

But, to be clear, I would never walk away from the No Bullsh!t Leadership brand: apart from the fact that we've built a pretty solid business on the foundations of the podcast and the book, it's more than just a brand: it's who I am at my core.  When you Google me, the first thing you’ll see is my name, with the tagline, The No Bullsh!t Leader… and that differentiates me nicely from 99% of the market!

Anyhow, my big learning for this year came from our branding miscue!

WORST #3: BUILDING THE RIGHT TEAM STRUCTURE

As CEO of the business, Em has done a lot of work on getting the right skills, in the right places in our business to meet our future growth demands.

When you build something from scratch, structure looks easy. When you put it on a piece of paper, it all makes perfect sense, in matching structure and skills to the needs of the business. But as you go, you realize that gaps need to be filled, or the person you hired to do something isn't capable of reaching the level that you need them to.

As time goes on, the needs of the business evolve as different products and revenue streams grow. We realized that the team structure needed to evolve as well. And this year we struggled to get the right balance:

• Who do we need as permanent players?

• Which functions can we outsource?

• How does that all fit together?

• How does that feed up into our overall strategy?

Em spent a lot of time on our team resourcing and structure this year, and the structure that we came into 2023 with is very different to where we're at now… but now we’re really happy with where it's at. It's taken a bunch of trial and error to get it right, but I really feel as though we've got this right.

We've got our A players in all the roles that we need to have them. And probably in a couple of months’ time we'll go, “oh wait, we need to change something else up”. But, I think we’ve now struck the right balance between what we insource, and what we outsource. We've still got our core there.

But the annoying part is that it cost us a bunch of time and money to get it right. And I know that that's just par for the course. I understand that we can only get better at these things by actually doing them and going through the pain of incorrect hires, and not getting that structure right the first time.

But, ultimately, using the excellence over perfection principle enabled Em to make the mistakes she needed to in order to become a better CEO and a better business owner. She’s now at the point of feeling really confident with it.

BEST #1: THE NEW 1:1 MENTORING MODEL

I want to talk about my new one-on-one mentoring model, which we implemented in 2023, because I feel really good about that.

I was really frustrated with the mentoring model that I first started with. I don't do a lot of one-on-one mentoring: I only do it sporadically. Most of my life is focused on content production and speaking (with the odd leadership workshop thrown in). So that's really where I spend my time. But I do love one-on-one mentoring!

The problem I had was that, when we set the model up, we tried to offer our mentoring clients ultimate flexibility. In our original model, they would purchase a block of time, which they could use whenever they needed to tap into my mentoring advice. It was high-end mentoring, on-demand: you effectively buy a bank of credits and you work off the credits as you use my time.

The trouble with that model was that I found it was creating a scarcity mindset: “I only have three more hours left with Marty, so I want to save them up for when I really need them.”

What I began to observe happening was that I'd get something booked in my calendar, and I'd think, “Who the hell is that?”… It would be someone who was one of my mentoring clients who I hadn't actually spoken to or heard from in over six months. That was really frustrating for me because I felt the relationships were getting quite transactional.

Clients would also only book time with me when there was a big problem, instead of coming before things become catastrophic. It's hard to give quality guidance when there’s only limited time... and, often, it had been so long between meetings that I’d have to get the context all over again, just so that I could have a meaningful conversation. It’s quite difficult from a distance where you don't have proximity to the business.

When we set up our new mentoring model, we said, “Right, that's it: let’s solve these problems by offering a product with unlimited hours. You pay the fee upfront, and then you've got me at your side joined at the hip, to help you run your business as an advisor.”

So, we'd set a standard meeting every week or so, but then there'd be an email, “Hey, Marty, I need your advice on this”… or a text message, “Can I talk to you about that?”… and that worked so much better because I felt as though I got to know the businesses, and the people really, really well. Not just the individual I was mentoring, but also their executive teams and the teams they worked with, day-to-day.

I could feel the value transfer, and really see the needle moving. I was able to bring insights to business owners and CEOs that I was really proud of. And that's incredibly satisfying when you're doing one-on-one work: that’s what really excites me.

But, it does restrict who I work with even further. We only take on people who are in a position in their business where they can genuinely make a difference to how the business performs… to achieve significantly better outcomes. So, for people who aren’t yet at that level I say, “Hey, I love you, and I'd love to help you, but we have other products that are going to help you right now.”

I only work with a very small handful of one-on-one mentoring clients every year, and it’s working brilliantly for me: I'm loving the 1:1 work again, and it's reinvigorated me.

BEST #2: OUR MASTERMINDS

Our Mastermind groups were new products that we launched in the first half of 2023. You wouldn't have seen us talk about it on social, or heard about it on the podcast, because it was actually just an experiment for something that we wanted to create.

Em joined a US-based mastermind about a year ago, and she got so much value from the community element: being part of an elite group of like-minded business owners who were going through similar challenges.

She recognized the gap in our product suite: we didn't have anything between Leadership Beyond the Theory (which is priced at A$2,750) and one-on-one mentoring (which is priced at US $50,000 for six months).

Em came up with the model to create a high-value product between those two offerings that would allow us to go deeper into the challenges that top leaders are grappling with.

Having spent a number of years as a member of the CEO Institute in Australia, I learned a lot from that experience, in terms of how to structure these types of forums. Em and I knew that our masterminds had to be more than a forum for sharing our experiences, and so we created a really structured approach to improving business performance: developing the right strategy; getting the right org structure in place; making the right C-level appointments; understanding the value drivers of the business well enough to go after them in a disciplined way.

We created two masterminds:

• The Career Accelerator Mastermind, for senior leaders in large or fast-growth organizations; and

• The Business Accelerator Mastermind, for business owners and CEOs who really want to scale their business and take it to that next level.

This was probably our favorite thing of the year. It turned out to be so fulfilling, personally, for both me and Em, because it made such a huge difference to the leaders who committed to it. We could see the value the Masterminds created every single week: that’s the most fun you can have in business!

Both masterminds have just been incredible, working with the most epic leaders. It's just been such a fun way to watch experienced leaders and business owners have those pie-in-the-face moments in every session.

A lot of people work on the assumption that others know way more than they do, and often they're just not confident enough to say, “I don't know that”, or “How would you do that?”.

We’ve built mastermind groups that are happy to demonstrate their fallibility, and tap into each others’ experience, strengths, and successes. They’re always happy to ask questions: “What do you think?”… “How did you do it?”… “What's your perspective on it?”… it's been amazing watching these super-switched on people help each other really get into the nitty gritty.

So, we’ve proven the model, and now we've got dates for the next cohort of the Business Accelerator Mastermind, which is for a small number of CEOs and business owners.

If you're keen on finding out more about that, we're starting our next mastermind in March. Just shoot us an email hello@yourceomentor.com and we'll work together to find out if it's a good fit.

BEST #3: NEW PRODUCTS

We released a number of new products in 2023, and have a number still in development. Being able to release the Landing Your Dream Job short course was just fantastic.

Leaders in our community are emailing us constantly saying, “I'm in job search mode, can you please give me some advice on X, Y, or Z?”. Of course, our primary focus is on leadership, but I realized how much expertise we also have in career development. At the same time, we really didn’t have any on-demand educational products.

Our two public cohorts of Leadership Beyond the Theory are scheduled to run in fixed time windows, and we didn't really have anything, outside of the podcast that was just ready to access when you needed it.

The origins of this product are interesting. I was in Sydney in February, after doing a keynote speech in Singapore. Em and I were walking her dog, Lenny, and it was bucketing down with rain. We started talking about how to structure our next online course, how to set yourself up for success in your first 90 days in a new role.

We sketched the product out pretty thoroughly, and when I got back home to Boston, I started to work on it. I realized quickly that the first lesson in that program, which was about how you get the job in the first place, was actually a course in itself. And the rest is history: we produced an awesome product that came out of nothing. It just evolved based on the needs of our leadership community.

We've got a couple of other evergreen courses, which we're so excited about, coming up in 2024. We're also developing a really high-end program on strategy. This will be a game changer for companies, everywhere, and I suspect it might put strategy consultants out of business, as we give you the tools to develop your own strategy!

On top of this, we’re working on a course partnership with a very well-known media platform. Many of you would listen to No Bullsh!t Leadership each week on this platform.

It's super exciting that we've been chosen for this, because it shows that the quality of our online course content is truly some of the best in the business. I can't wait to share more with you in the next few months. Needless to say, it's going to be in the same vein as our other short, bite-sized learning content: practical, high-value, and easy to consume.

LEARN ADAPT, AND MOVE FORWARD!

2023 was an awesome year. It had its ups and downs and, I must say, I miss being in Your CEO Mentor Global HQ in Sydney. Em and I are committed to improving the quality of leaders, globally. We’ve learned from our mistakes in 2023, and we’re doubling down in 2024 to reach even more leaders around the world, with the most valuable, practical leadership development content on the planet!

RESOURCES AND RELATED TOPICS:

• Ready to follow my roadmap that will take your career to the next level? Check out our BRAND NEW short course: Landing Your Dream Job

• The NO BULLSH!T LEADERSHIP BOOK - Here

• Explore other podcast episodes - Here

• Take our FREE 5 Day Leadership Challenge - Start Now

• Check out our 8-week online leadership program, Leadership Beyond the Theory - Learn More

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