Episode Description
In the wrap-up of Season Two of the Troubleshooters podcast, host Michael McGrath highlights key insights from various episodes. Kelly Jamieson of Edible Blooms discusses the importance of learning from mistakes and the benefits of limited capital. Matt Stillone of Protein Supplies Australia emphasizes the value of resilience, resourcefulness, and relationships in business. Tom Waterhouse shares his journey from bookmaking to online betting and his experiences with mentorship. Tom Hardwick talks about scaling businesses and the impact of the GFC. Tim Hutchinson from Skills GPT AI discusses the practical applications of AI in workforce management and the importance of security and continuous improvement. We hope this podcast inspires and motivates listeners with real-life business stories.
About our guests:
Please find below a list of guests this season in order of episodes & their LinkedIn profiles. More information about each guest is available in the full episode descriptions.
Kelly Jamieson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-jamieson-871aa73/
Mat Stillone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathew-stillone-b4797a41/
Tom Waterhouse LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-waterhouse-a2630132/
Tom Hardwick LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hardwick-2aa81943/
Tim Hutchinson LinkedIn: https://www.oasispartners.com.au/podcast/tim-hutchinson/
Note: This has been automatically transcribed so is likely to have errors! It may however help you navigate the points of interest.
Michael McGrath 00:06
Welcome to the troubleshooters podcast with me, your host, Mike McGrath. Well, season two of the troubleshooters podcast is done and dusted, and what a pleasure it’s been for me to interview all our guests. A big thank you to all of them. I also enjoyed getting to hear their stories, and I hope you have too. Sit back and relax as we wrap up Season Two by pulling together some of the best bits and highlights. If something resonates, then the full episodes are on our website or wherever you like to listen to your podcasts. Enjoy In our third episode of season two, we spoke to Kelly Jamison, the co founder and MD of Edible Blooms, an online gifting business that delivers delicious bouquets of chocolate, among other things, to homes and offices. I love listening to Kelly’s journey, including her outlook on mistakes and how she learnt from them. Enjoy this snippet of my conversation with Kelly, where we talk about some of our business decisions, as well as how she fosters a real culture of entrepreneurship throughout the business.
Kelly Jamieson 01:10
Oh, gosh, you know, I look now at what’s available to startups, you know, the, you know, different channels for capital, and you know, there’s a lot, lot of options for people starting up now that just didn’t exist back in those early days. I remember I had one of the banks, Oh, we love your idea. We’d love to chat about your business, but they said, Oh, but you need two or three years of trading. You know, we can’t, you know, bank you until, you know. So in those very early days, when you really, you’re pretty scrappy and, you know, you’re really trying to make every dollar count. You know that funding would be really helpful, but in some ways, I think, you know, sometimes when things are a little, when you’ve got a really tight budget, you make it go a long way. We didn’t pay ourselves a lot in the early days either. That’s the other thing. You compromise your own salaries and all of those sorts of things. But you know, hopefully in the long term, it becomes worthwhile,
Michael McGrath 02:00
yes, I was, I mean, and that’s a very good point, is that whole, you know, they say necessity is a mother of invention. So, yeah, totally. Having adequate capital is great. Having too much capital is not a great idea at all, because we generally will end up spending on the wrong things. Because we’re, we’re kind of, we don’t know what we don’t know, do we in the beginning? And you’ve mentioned that in some of the stuff I’ve read that you’ve you’re very much were learning by mistakes, and you were using a feedback loop, and then you were making adjustments. And it’s difficult to get those lessons if you’ve got plenty of capital to go and express yourself with
Kelly Jamieson 02:40
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, it is. It is an interesting challenge. But I yeah, I do agree. I think you can have too much capital, and I think that’s, you know, it can be detrimental, because you can burn through cash very quickly.
Michael McGrath 02:51
And I love this quote where you say, making mistakes is gold. What do you mean by that?
Kelly Jamieson 02:58
Well, we have it. We’ve had it in our company policy from the beginning, because I really wanted to try and foster a real culture of entrepreneurship through the business, because we were very scrappy when we were starting up, and I certainly learned that I wasn’t perfect, and Abby learned the same as well. And so I think the key thing with mistakes is learning from them. So one of the things we like to do here is when we do make a mistake, is we actually talk about it, and we talk about what we can learn. And sometimes making mistakes can actually be a good thing, because it means you’re trying new things and you’re not afraid to do something a little bit different. And look, one of the great examples is going back about eight or nine years ago, we’re sending out our Christmas campaign to our corporate database. We do a lot of corporate gifting, and we’re supposed to, I think it was supposed to go out to a database of, you know, a few 1000 people, one of our smaller databases, and we accidentally sent out the corporate email to our entire customer base. So this is like 10s of 1000s. So we had the most amazing sales period afterwards, because our customers, who are consumer customers, work in offices or work in businesses, and they saw our Christmas range. And so we got a lot of early corporate inquiries. So now, every year since then, we send our corporate range to everybody. We say this is, this is what’s available this year, because we do recognize that you might be a consumer customer of ours, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t be a business customer as well. So so some that’s why I say mistakes are gold, because sometimes when you make a mistake, really good things can happen, and you can learn some great things too. So it’s not all about making a mistake in it being a bad thing?
Michael McGrath 04:42
Yeah, no. Well, certainly we hear this a lot, that that feedback loop that you get, you try something, you get some feedback, you adjust, you get some more feedback, you adjust again. And then, isn’t that the definition of continuous improvement, really, isn’t it?
Kelly Jamieson 04:57
Yeah, it totally is. And I. Yeah, also we have to move very fast in today’s business environment. Now we don’t have the time to perfect every single thing before it goes to market. So one of the things we’ve recently just innovated is we have and check out option on our website called instant gifted. And it’s a really great process, because sometimes when you’re sending a gift, we really analyze what are our friction points in the customer journey? And one of the friction points is people want to send something beautiful, or congratulate somebody, or say thank you for that referral. But you don’t always know, especially now post COVID, are they at home? Are they working in the office? What’s the best address to send it to them? What’s the best day of the week to send it to them. So we created a new checkout option, which we’ve got a trademark on the instant gifted. And it basically allows you to personalize the gift process by choosing so I might say, Oh, look, I know Mike loves chocolate dipped strawberries. I’m going to choose that box, and then I can write the gift card to you. And instead of having to then work out where you are and where it needs to go. I can send it to you by email, and then you can choose when you receive it and when it gets delivered. When we came up with that idea, the whole idea of perfecting everything, we had the process working perfectly, but we knew there were some extra bells and whistles we could add to it as we went, we said, let’s get the basic service out. Get some feedback. Get the feedback loop. What? What are we missing? What do we need to add? And so actually, one of the feedback loops that’s come back is, gee, we love that, but we’d love to do that for our employees. We don’t know everybody’s home address now, so we want to send their Christmas gifts out by email, and then they can choose when they want to have it delivered and where. So, you know. So that’s what we’re working on at the moment for Christmas this year, so that we can actually do these bulk uploads and make it really easy for people to bulk send gifts. So there’s some, you know, I think there’s some real benefits in, you know, moving quickly, getting the prototypes up and then, yeah, keeping that customer loop going, to keep improving.
Michael McGrath 07:00
In Episode Five, I spoke to Matt stilone, founder and MD of protein supplies Australia, as well as a number of other successful companies. Matt founded protein supplies Australia in his home garage in 2011 with an initial investment of just $5,000 I chatted with Matt about how he overcame adversity, built strong resilience, and found what really matters in life. Have a listen to this snippet of our conversation where we chat about finding your purpose in life and the roller coaster ride of running a business.
Mat Stillone 07:32
Yeah. Look, I am an unfiltered version of myself says, I think people are waking up in the sense of, there’s been a real, I guess, a trend which has been pushed by media that plant based diets are the savior of these epidemics in our health sector. You know, the city being one of them. And, you know, documentaries like game changers, I know, if you’re aware of that, that really set off the trend, you know, and painting that whole thing, you can be really, really healthy and strong and fit and be plant based, which you know necessarily can be true, but there’s limitations, or you need to be really careful about your diet. And I think that with like, anything in this industry, trends, it’s just trends. You know, keto, I’ve seen it all. You’ve seen it all too low. Fat, sugars, cool. Now, next minute, fats, good again. You can eat as much fat as you want. Get on the keto diet, and then you’ve got, you know, this whole carnivore movement. Now, everyone just live on meat, eat meat. Day, left, right and center. So it gets like global trends, and, you know, people realizing that it’s not as sustainable as once was. Also, you know, sort of that propaganda around it,
Michael McGrath 08:43
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s true. And I think you’re right about trends. I think the other thing that we’re seeing, particularly post COVID, as we moved into those supply chain issues and a period of inflation with interest rates rising again, is that, is that there’s a premium to pay for genuinely, if you’re talking about genuinely better for you with genuine integrity in the supply chain, there’s normally a premium map, and that premium is less attractive when you’ve got a, you know, when there’s a fiscal tightening on which we’ve got at the moment, because mom, you know people, you know that They will trade down. And if you look at all the organic food sector over the last 30 years, each time it gets momentum, Matt, we get hit with a recession or some kind of issue, some kind of fiscal tightening once or twice a decade, and it goes back two or three years, and I think it’s happening again now I think that the research suggests that people will perhaps pay a 15% premium, but they won’t pay a 25, or 30% premium, and that’s kind of what we’re facing. I mean, there’s a certain genre of consumer that will matter, but they’re not big enough to be mainstream.
Mat Stillone 09:59
Yeah, I would agree.
Michael McGrath 09:59
Definitely, yeah. So as you said, You’ve got to be smart. Well, look, most people have enough with one business, maybe two, if they’re nuts, you’ve got four here, and you’re still going right. So where, let me ask you this, what happened to that guy in his late teens and early 20s who was struggling with mental health issues and and depression. Talk to me about about how you manage that stress now and and all the drama that goes with running four businesses. What’s been the key? Matt,
Mat Stillone 10:32
Yeah, that’s a difficult one to answer without speaking too much on about I think for me, I found my purpose in life like one. There’s two things that really drive three things, actually, that really drive me to get out of bed in the morning. That sense of like this is cliche, but sense of purpose, like feeling like I’m contributing something, and I’m important in some way. And while I’m still here, people around me are benefiting from my existence, and that’s a big driver for me of like getting out of bed in the morning. Yes, the next one is my son. So my son’s now 19 in what next week, week after so you know, that’s obviously your parent yourself. You’d know what I’ve got five kids, yeah? So I know that I know the story. Well, yeah, you know? And then lastly, like, I used to be very driven by money, okay, you know, the more I got it, the more I wanted it, because I never really had it. A lot growing up like that. So, but then in the last few years, I’ve kind of come to terms with a lot of things about myself, like I know myself so well. Now really realize that I actually, genuinely love helping people and being a part of their journey to whatever six success means for them, those things while I’m doing all those things work doesn’t, although it is extremely stressful, don’t get me wrong. And you know, in particular right now, like, obviously, all these things going on with inflation and downturn, with the economy and stuff that’s that’s very difficult stuff to kind of go to bed at night and not worry about, especially when everything’s on the line, but those sort of things for me, I think that while I feel that way, the stress, it feels like a game to me, okay, this is like an enjoyable game. Think, like with anything in life, there’s literally nothing that is worth having that isn’t challenging and like the journey. This the whole process and all the stress and all the roller coaster running, businesses and things, I actually really enjoy it. And the journey is the fun part about it. It’s not the the outcome, which some people measure by how many millions you have in your bank or what car you drive and stuff. That’s the process of journey. But I also do a lot of things, mate, like to manage this. So when I say that, you know, for any business owner out there, build a management team, get some actually, get people in your business that actually smarter than you and know what they’re talking about, and teach you things and make yourself redundant. That was one thing I try to be an octopus for so long. And yeah, I definitely had massive burnout situations where I really felt like I wanted to give up multiple times. Yes, finding balance is another cliche thing, but doing things that I enjoy, making sure that they’re important, like I respect them enough that I actually do them regardless of the workload that’s on.
Michael McGrath 13:41
Yeah, that’s great. No, no, you’ve come a long way, Matt, haven’t you? No doubt. So just while we finish up, did just talk to us about the three Rs that you like?
Mat Stillone 13:50
Well, this has been a while since I did this, but resilience now stand out to me, and that’s still the one, yeah, out of all of all of the, well, there’s only three of them, but the three hours that I brought up, you know, a few years back, resilience, it’s something that you really can’t teach, but it’s something that you can learn by exposure. So when people, when you’re afraid, to avoid certain situations that cause stress or their challenges, you know, a lot of people don’t like waking up and not knowing what the day is going to bring. So that’s why some people really enjoy working for someone else and being part of their vision. And other business, business owners, entrepreneurs really get off on that idea as well. But I think building, having, exposing yourself to the most difficult and the most rewarding situations does give you thick skin, and you know that determination and having that determination to keep going when a lot of people are willing to walk away and give up, and to me, what resilience is resourcefulness as well, like that’s the other one of the other hours that you know I mentioned, you know, we talked about, said bootstrapping before. Or for me, I act like I in a business, I always say to people, let’s act like we have nothing. Like, what can we do with nothing? And how reason you become quite resourceful when you’re really driven to make something happen. You know that can mean leveraging off connections that you have, that can be working on your negotiation skills, to be able to again wording, but convince someone to maybe invest in your vision as well. Yeah, being resourceful, and, you know, investing in yourself as well. That’s
Michael McGrath 15:32
in some ways, it’s that creativity, that problem solving, you you alluded to it. It’s that, you know, there’s an old saying that says necessity is a mother of invention. And in a way, if you have to, then you will, and you know, so, I mean, I totally agree. I think that resilience, which we also think of here as persistence, resourcefulness, is about solving problems by being creative and and not getting lost in the negativity of a problem, right? You know, because we’re going to get wallet by them regularly, so just pausing and having a listen to yourself and then framing up often, we find that the seed of the solution is embedded in the problem somewhere. And if you, if you can be objective enough about looking at the problem, maybe from a different angle, often, you can find some great lessons in there. And then the last one you mentioned was relationships.
Mat Stillone 16:35
Everyone in my business, they’re like family to me, and truly, because you spend more time with them than you do your own family at times in your life, which is kind of sad in itself, but it’s true. So, you know, building relationships last, lasting relationships is really, for me, such a rewarding It’s like planting a seed and then seeing the fruit come 10 years later, because those relationships that you had at the bottom, or when you’re trying to build something great and you have a whole bunch of people trying to help you, they might move on to bigger and better things, maybe some point, and even down to, like, suppliers and all these sort of things, some point in your business career, that relationship might be the one that saves you. Yeah, and when I say that, you never know who you’re talking to, you really never know. And some the perfect stranger can come along and drop this one little dime of something that will just change your whole trajectory in life. So for me, relationships and building relationships is where I am successful because that skill set I have as well.
Michael McGrath 17:45
I love my chat with Tom Waterhouse, the founder of Waterhouse VC, Tom, hailing from the illustrious Waterhouse family, started his career in bookmaking at the young age of just 18, and quickly rose to become Australia’s top on course bookmaker. His journey is a testament to the power of mentorship, adaptability and sheer innovation. Have a listen to how Tom reflects on the mentors in his life and his journey from handling millions on Derby Day to pioneering online bookmaking. We finished up with Tom walking us through his latest venture at Waterhouse VC and how he’s bringing his 15 years of niche expertise to the investment space. I know originally you were thinking about finance, but you The story goes that you got to the track, and within 20 minutes, you’d realize you wanted to do it.
Tom Waterhouse 18:34
Yeah, look, I still finished it. I did commerce degree at Sydney union and majoring in finance. And I, yeah, I loved doing that, but the racing industry and book Making, there was just so much money there back then, 2020, something years ago, and it was just full of energy and excitement. And also, I had a big advantage in that my grandfather was biggest book in the world in the 60s and 70s, and my dad, he ran a professional betting syndicate since 1980 and was leading bookmaker. So I had a blueprint of what to do. And you’re very lucky when you’re young and you have a mentor, or a couple of mentors that can say, Look, this is how you do it, because then it’s easy. You just follow what they say. It’s a great point there.
Michael McGrath 19:15
And actually, I was going to ask you, what was it like to have famous parents and a famous grandparent like that? Well, you know, was it all advantage, or was there some disadvantages to that?
Tom Waterhouse 19:25
You You don’t even think about it, because that’s what all you know. But now, looking back on it, I think what an advantage, you know, like, what an amazing thing to be able to go into an industry that they have such a good understanding of such an exciting industry. Yeah, it’s a huge like, I’ve, yeah, I’ve been very, I’ve been blessed, you know, in terms of,and there’s always, like, slight disadvantages to your advantages, but there’s not for one second, but I don’t think how lucky I was, you know, excellent.
Michael McGrath 19:58
And look, just on that point there. And, I mean, we’re not talking just about you becoming a licensed bookmaker at age 20. We’re talking about you then became by age 28 the largest and most profitable on course, bookie in Australia. I mean, that’s phenomenal rise, really.
Tom Waterhouse 20:14
Yeah. Look, the there were, sorry, there were a lot of things, but there were probably three main things. Obviously, my grandfather was I had him as a mentor, and we went in in a partnership, partnership when I was, like 22 or something like that. So I great learning from him. And then my dad was a form genius, so he was had this amazing like form database, so I had his form and all the learnings, I never stopped asking my dad. I still don’t stop asking him questions, asking him questions. How do I do this? What should I do here? And then also, the internet took off, and I moved to Melbourne, where you could offer different products than what you could in New South Wales. And I had the advantage of being able to access Betfair and see what the market was doing. It’s like having access to the ticket on the stock market, and a lot of the bookies hadn’t picked up, having a computer and stuff. So I had big advantages, and also the name, the brand, the family, yeah. But yeah, I thought I was going to be doing that the rest of my life, and and it was a highly profitable large business, but everything changed into 2008 2009 with a change of regulation, yeah. And then you had to pivot master pivot, yeah, because we were turning over, I think I sell $6 million on Derby Day in 2008 and like the favorite in the derby would have got half a million dollars in cash out of it as standing it. And the next year was lucky to get 5000 out of it. And I thought, well, the game’s up. I have to move online. And so, yeah, we launched on waterhouse.com in 2009 proper launch in 2000 launch in 2010 within 18 months, we had a quarter of a million customers, which was just Yeah, phenomenal growth and but to put it in perspective, we turned over more. I turned over more as an on course booking in 2008 than Tom waterhouse.com turned over as an online bookie before we sold. Yeah. Okay, so on course book Making was a big business, yeah, which is easy to forget, because when you go to the races now, there’s no one there, but it’s only 1520, years ago that it was all there.
Michael McGrath 22:09
And founding Tom waterhouse.com, right? That movement online, you were having to figure a lot of that out yourself. I presume I was effectively a digital revolution.
Tom Waterhouse 22:18
Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was an amazing learning experience, because I barely used email back in 2008 I know that, and that sounds foreign now, but I barely used email. IPhone only came out in 2008 That’s right, but you know, so I think I had a nopier before then, or something like that. And so we shifted to online, and it was a big change, but you really look at what mentors and what’s going well, and a few of the other bookies had moved online, and their businesses were booming. So the likes of sporting bets, sports bet, Cole, tidy, Alan Iskander in Melbourne, that they were all moving online. And so you could go, what are they doing? That looks like it’s pretty good. How do I sort of use that as a blueprint to copy and and to basically go in that, in that space, and then find your own little path within it. And but yeah, that was a huge learning experience, and we there was so much we didn’t know, so many mistakes we made, but those mistakes and learning, it ultimately led to us selling to William Hill and then running William Hill’s business in Australia.
Michael McGrath 23:23
In episode 10, I sat down with Tom Hardwick. Tom is an experienced CEO and entrepreneur. He has demonstrated a history of scaling businesses both organically and through acquisitions. His journey from CO founding a leading Australian child care group to launching a European inspired wine bar is nothing short of impressive, with experience spanning sectors from char clear to private equity and now into hospitality. Tom’s entrepreneurial spirit knows no bounds.
Tom Hardwick 23:53
So yeah, we did two years at BBY, and we just, we just weren’t sort of loving the environment there. So the team moved across to Patterson ordinette, and that had its own challenges, working for a Perth based group in Sydney, but yeah, what I did is I built the foundations of BBY, and then when I went to Paterson, I just had this sweet spot of and I’d sort of focused on income style products, primarily listed property trusts, the smaller property trusts that the big banks didn’t really pay a lot of attention to. And so probably raised four or $500 million over three years at Patterson’s, whether from IPOs or placements, etc. And so I built a bit of a franchise in the small property trust space, and then a couple of the big banks noticed it, and said, Hey, why don’t you come and join us? And it was sort of tempting to go into the big investment bank space, but I just, I’m not someone for, like, corporate politics and, you know, the big and I had it at cause, and so I went and, you know, spoke to one of my mentors at the time, Frank. Who was running abacus, or you founded abacus, and said, Frank, look, I’m at this crossroads. Here’s where I am. He says, Tom, why don’t you come and work for us? You’d be great, sort of, looking after our funds management, business and investor relations. And, you know, it’s one of those things that, you know, the great jobs you get in your life, you don’t normally apply to, to an ad or a recruiter. You sort of, it’s through your networks and, you know, discussions and and so out of that, you know, I went and joined abacus. And, you know, it was a great two years pre GFC, you know, building their funds platform and buying some assets and syndicating.
Michael McGrath 25:33
It is again that there was a movement. Was a bubble. Yeah, we didn’t know it was a bubble. But there was, you know, I remember the guys in London Oasis were saying, selling a bit, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Yeah, yeah. Boy, did it change, and it’s never gone back, actually.
Tom Hardwick 25:49
No, it was interesting. We were so we went to Macquarie had this Global Road Show. So he went to London for a few days, and then New York, and they got all these investors to hear the stories of these Australian Property Trust. And when we’re there, a few people in London were saying, Oh, are you in the US? They’re saying, Are you having trouble accessing debt? Yes, you know, what are you talking about? It’s all fine in Australia. And they were just seeing the start of, you know, the crash. And then, you know, a couple of months later, Centro couldn’t get its debt refinanced in the US, and bang. It just well changed pretty cool, yeah, and that didn’t happen quickly. That was, that was probably one of the scarier times being in a business that big with, you know, we had 2 billion of assets and going, geez, where’s the cash gone? And, you know, the banks want us to deliver and, you know, it was, that was pretty
Michael McGrath 26:37
Who were the guys in investment banking that were helping you? Like, was it sink or swim you or in fact, you know, were you taken under anybody’s wing?
Tom Hardwick 26:46
It was so tough the investment banks were, you know, they were really focusing on the big guys. Frank, basically got an introduction to a very wealthy man in South Africa, left Australia on Christmas Eve, went and spent Christmas day with him in South Africa, and within 24 hours, basically negotiated an underwritten rights issue to, you know, restore abacus his balance sheet. And, you know, basically Frank and Nate. He did it themselves, and then they bought him one of the investment banks to wrap it up a little bit, right? But no, it was Frank. Frank had to go and save his his company. And, you know, it was a public company with a board, and yeah, so the little guys were the least, the last to get any love. But, you know, he got off his backside and he solved the problem.
Michael McGrath 27:33
Yes, yeah, no, look, that was a, that was a unique time in finance. I mean, what was emerging of private equity, which wasn’t a lot in Australia at that point, it was very small that just disappeared overnight. They kind of ran for the hill, yeah, banks started get out of the investments had made. And funnily enough, we just started in Australia at that point, yeah. Okay, so, you know, we had two years in nothing, and so we had to get fairly creative, trust me, so that’s interesting. You you enjoyed that that time in investment banking, you were with abacus, and so you’d been in there for best part of a decade, yeah, sort of five or six years investment banking, four years at abacus, yeah. And then you’d had maybe the best part of eight or nine years in law, yep. So, so at that stage, we’ve got, we’ve got to, you know, some skills emerging, haven’t we?
Tom Hardwick 28:27
Yeah, and it was, I think, when I look back at the success of guardian, it was this sort of breadth of experiences over 20 years that I felt gave me a very good platform to be a CEO, and but it did take a bit of courage, because every three or four years, I’d get a bit bored, and I tended to jump into things that were quite new. And, you know, so there’s I had a I remember talking to Greg Paramore, who was one of the great property, right, you know, CEOs. And he said, Listen, son, just back yourself. Yeah, if you think it’s a good thing, jump off the deep end and have a crack at it. And what’s the worst thing can happen? It doesn’t work. And like with the logistics business, right? I jumped out of a partnership in a law firm. It failed, but, yeah, it was a good experience, and without that, I wouldn’t have got the next opportunity. So
Michael McGrath 29:22
on that point then, so you, you kind of, when did you decide that you’d had enough at abacus?
Tom Hardwick 29:28
What had happened was we had started building Guardian as a bit of a side project. Yeah, my wife was in childcare her whole life. Right when we came back from America, we bought our first center in noir Warren in Melbourne.
Michael McGrath 29:41
So for those who don’t know, and we’ve got a few international listeners, yeah, they might not know who Guardian is. So for those two listeners, tell us what Guardian is, sure. So Guardian early learning group was a childcare business that we built. I basically started from scratch in about 2004 that, you know, I eventually joined full time in 2010 from abacus into that and there’s, you know, tell that story. And then over those years, from 2010 we essentially up until 2010 we managed other people’s assets for a fee. In 2010 we raised private equity to buy some assets that abacus had put together. In episode 13, I sat down with Tim Hutchinson, co founder and CEO of skills GPT AI is currently being talked about extensively. Many of us are bemused by what it all means. I spoke to Tim about his journey from zoology to the world of AI. Quite a jump. Tim now helps companies tap into the power of AI to better manage their workforce, highlighting real world applications in sectors such as energy, he emphasizes the need for continuous learning and collaboration between developers and business owners. Here’s a preview of our conversation where we explore some of the disruptions Tim is seeing with the emergence of AI.
Tim Hutchinson 31:08
Let me give you an example then, which is probably not probably would be a combination of those two broad sources of data you touch on, a lot of our work as skills. GPT is really trying to find opportunity and disruption for organizations, particularly around their workforce. Now, what I mean by that is we’ve got some fairly massive disruptions happening. They macro disruptions. So AI, emergence of AI, of course, people are concerned about what that means to jobs.
Michael McGrath 31:44
So give an example of kind of some of the disruptions that you’re seeing. So that’s binary, really, you you’re not talking,
Tim Hutchinson 31:47
I’ll give you an example from a conversation yesterday where,yeah, a client in the energy sector, because a lot of our work is is, is moving to sectors such as under transition. So the transition to clean energy from Legacy sources, okay, is a brilliant example of workforce disruption, okay? Because you’ve got, fundamentally, you’ve got legacy jobs rolling off in simple terms, from, you know, the coal gas industries, yeah, and you’ve got an increasing demand for people with knowledge and skills around renewables, okay, you know, making connections to solar, to wind, etc.
Michael McGrath 31:49
I mean, the disruption there is. You’re not switching a workforce. It’s an it’s a new workforce and a new well,
Tim Hutchinson 32:00
so that that’s, that’s a big external disruption that’s happening from, I mean, from a tech perspective. So sorry, I was going to explain even in that instance. So there’s, there’s that sort of macro disruption, yeah, and then they sothere are challenges there in terms of finding the right staff. They don’t actually exist at scale with those renewables experience. Okay, so they’re starting to look at efficiencies in the existing workforce as a starting point, yeah, even if you can find one or 2% efficiencies, it all helps. Okay, so you know, at one point in time, recently, they’re looking for more people with scheduling, rostering, planning experience, yeah, but two or three months down the track, recognize that some of the AI tools are able to perform that task, right? So as opposed to needing people with rostering experience, right, you pivot, and what you actually need is people with the ability to right size those AI rostering models, right? So that and this, this, these are they different kinds of people. So they’re used talking about technical people versus, you know, project management type people, in simple terms and this. And this is where you start to think, Well, what actually is, where does knowledge fit for people? Is it is it functional knowledge? Is it technical knowledge? Yeah. And this is, there is no answer to it, because this is a rapidly moving piece. We’re not building product at this stage. No, we’re not building out of the box SaaS product, because in most cases, we’re trying to find a highly effective point solution for a priority problem around workforce, and then to develop from there.
Michael McGrath 34:21
Look, I mean, I suppose the real challenge is that, I mean, you know, most of probably listen to this podcast are small business owners, right? About 40% of them are, apparently. So there’s, you know, hundreds of small businesses that are going, you know, they hear AI, they get the fin review. You know, they really articles like, will I be a bust and and, surely not the binary, the binary press, yeah. And so we’re looking at, okay, how do I harness this? How what’s in it for me? Because, you know, you think about walls or coals and all their data, and you go, Okay, well, you. You can think, you can play the long game. You can, you can invest in this. There’s such a business case there. I mean, you can already see from the amount of data they must have, if you could start to do something with that dynamically and get insights. And the the the proven ROI, is already massive, yeah. So it’s off the charts, yes. But was it? You know, your small business, they employ 50 people, and they’re trying to think through, okay, well, how do we harness this thing, other than we’ve got chat GBT on the desk and or Microsoft co pilot, and we’re just plugging in questions, yeah?
Tim Hutchinson 35:34
Well, yeah, but, but even that, actually, I mean even, even that part. So, you know, if you think about chat GPT, and I’m sure listeners are using it for various tasks at home and, dare I say, at work. But with the security concerns, very quickly, small organizations start to get their own sort of secure instance through 365 so they therefore can have that conversation with chat GPT securely, and it’s a good point, because actually organizations, you start to the people whoefficiently are finding good use for it are the workers. If you actually ask people what they’re using it for, and have an open, honest conversation, that’s where you learn the insights and people will be using it for report writing. They’ll be using it for structuring reports. They’ll be using it for planning their week. Every possible sort of entry level use, if you like. But I think what’s happened is, I think you mentioned the newspaper there. You know, we have this strange binary press whereyou have to go through a hype cycle, don’t you where, first of all, it’s, it’s incredible. It’s, it’s, it’s going to solve all the problems in the world, and then a week later, it’s going to, going to be the end of all work. Yeah, Autopsy gun at least. I mean, to let that pass, and then, you know, now we’re at a stage where companies are trying to, or beginning to understand what’s possible, yeah, trying to find these practical solutions. However, you know, there is, I mentioned cost earlier, and actually, for SMEs, there is a cost factor. And in many cases, to, you know, to have a we get a lot of requests from people who are, I think I’ll think of one very close to home. The other week, a recruitment company who said to us, Hey, we’ve of course, got a CRM with 100,000 candidates on it. Could we,you know, put that in their terminology, put that into AI and find interesting things right now, the answer is, yes, absolutely, okay. Does it come at a cost? Yes, absolutely, yeah. And because of this pace of change in the world, you can’t, in good conscience, stitch somebody a solution together and leave it with them. You actually need to then sort of offer a managed service, yeah, to continually help that model develop. Because it’s a continuous improvement thing, you know, there’s, there is a difference between um, so I’d say two things broadly, and they’re not, they’re not, they’re objective, hopefully not in any selfish interest. One is with, with AI, the best thing to do is to get started. Now, I buy that. Let me clarify. I don’t mean get started. Start throwing money at the problem. I mean, start learning about it. Start reading about it, start trying to at least understand what it is. If anyone wanted to reach out on LinkedIn afterwards, I’ve, we’ve got various resources that point to, you know, a nice, a nice checklist of 20 resources they can go to for free to start that learning journey. Yeah, because I think you need to understand it first of all, yeah, you know. And then, and then the other piece is probably to to talk, to talk to existing staff, because people will be using chat GPT and rather than pretending they’re not, from a security perspective.
Michael McGrath 38:58
So tell me about the security risk, right? So you know someone in a small business, so there’s 20 staff, and half a dozen of them start, you know they, you know that they’re using, uh, chat, GBT, and they haven’t told anyone. So where are the risks for the business there?
Tim Hutchinson 39:14
Well, I think, I mean, the the risk is that you are essentially sharing information publicly. So very I remember quite early on we had, and it feels like a lifetime ago, but it but it was a year ago, a CFO was stood up in a meeting we were in and sort of, um, laughing about it, said, Ah, I’ve uploaded the annual accounts, and I’ve started to get some insights. Okay, really, really, not a good idea. Now,generative AI chat. GPT is not a search engine, so as such, that packet of information that set of accounts isn’t sitting there to be accessed in its entirety. However, it’s something of an unknown as to what aspects are. So absolutely you shouldn’t be sharing sensitive information. But as we all. Know, straight censorship is not an answer to anything. So I think you need a discussion with staff and really understand, yeah, okay, because that’s again, going to that point about it originates in the boardroom, not the server room. Take the workforce as a proxy for the boardroom. Find out what people are using it for. Find out where the efficiencies are. And the other thing I’d say, I quite like this is I’ve got a colleague, Ray Fleming, who tries to explain generative AI in simple terms, and says, treat it as an intern. Okay, I quite like it because if you think about an intern, you get the best out of them by giving them the best direction, simple, structured direction. You find value in the work, typically quickly, but you typically, or should check the work, and that’s very much the same with generative AI. You know, there are phenomenal insights, but I think you do have to also take it with a pinch of salt, because of hallucinations people will have heard of and make certain that you’re either applying your own critical thinking, or the guys who’ve built the models for you have hought about what how the information that surfaced is verified and against what
Michael McGrath 41:28
Well, there you have it. I hope you’ve enjoyed season two, and this little wrap up. Thanks to you, our listeners, who’ve been with us since day one, and if it’s your first time here, you’re very welcome. Hit subscribe and look out for season three, as we bring you another round of genuine business troubleshooters to inspire and motivate you to keep going even when the going gets tough. Don’t forget to subscribe, and if you enjoyed any episode, leave us a review. Thanks for being here until next time
Link to previous episodes: https://www.oasispartners.com.au/troubleshooters-podcast/