How can you get accredited for the psychometric tools? What challenges do you have to face in getting accreditation? In this episode, Skip Bowman, the founder of Safe2Great, provides insights on creating lucrative accreditation programs and explains the Safe to Great model. The concept of the model is useful for the business. It brings people to get interested in something. Skip provides tips to draw followers into you because the business will thrive if people follow your ideas and concepts. Tune in to this episode to keep your consulting business thriving.
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In this episode, I’m joined by Skip Bowman. Skip, great to have you.
Thanks. Great to be here. Full of energy.
Yes, you are. I know you had your fifteenth cup of coffee.
Yeah, something along those lines.
Skip, for those who aren’t familiar with you and your work, you are a speaker, a writer, and a facilitator around transformational leadership. You are also the Founder of Safe2Great, a coaching consulting business that helps organizations unleash their fullest potential. You have also developed the Safe2Great model, which operationalizes the growth mindset and concept around how to integrate mindset into growth. We will talk more about that.
I’m sure you are going to do a much better job of explaining that than I just did. I want to start a little bit early on in your journey by hearing about how you got to where you are now. Take us back to the early days. I know you are originally from Australia. You are now in Denmark. What was the impetus for starting Safe2Great, your coaching consulting business?
Thanks for having me on the program. I appreciate that. I originally was trained as an accountant. I fell in love with being a diving instructor. A lot of experiences about diving shaped me. There’s a whole special relationship in terms of what you want. Most people find diving quite terrifying. Learning to build that trust between you and your students or the people you are diving with to take on exciting, challenging, and often moderately dangerous things is what got me interested in that whole psychological safety piece. I don’t think I called it that back then. We are talking about several years ago. That ability to build a connection between you and somebody else to invite them into doing a night dive on the Great Barrier Reef. You roll into the water, it’s pitch black, and you are swimming around with tiger sharks.
Turning terror into excitement is fundamentally what psychological safety is if you are talking about diving. Maybe it’s like running a business from terror to excitement. That’s a foundational experience. I wound back that I threw a course of experiences. I ended up going back to university and studying psychology here in Copenhagen a lot Danish.
I started working in corporates in leadership development. I hadn’t thought about leadership development. I didn’t even know what it was and I haven’t done anything else since, so I started internally. I started my own business about several years ago and I worked a lot with concepts. How to turn an idea into a professional set of services, that type of thing is what I have done. Safe2Great is probably my best attempt.
I have practiced a bit and some of them sucked. I think I’m getting closer to the right idea. I will let the market be the judge. I think I have seen the power of ideas that are well-constructed, generate curiosity, and generate excitement. People want to use them of their own free will. I call it contagious change, which wasn’t a very good concept around COVID. Essentially, as consultants, you can always go down the model that you want to control everything and you want to sell hours.
It’s better to work hard on customer service rather than build a new business because your customers are your best ambassadors. Click To TweetI have got a different model, which is what we call a scalable model where we sell hours, but we sell ideas and we want to enable organizations to help themselves. That is a different model. I can talk more about that, but that’s what I have learned over the years. It suits me too because I do like collaborating with customers in a different way than normal consultants would because that’s a bit more of an exploitative model. Here, I’m trying to work together with them and co-create solutions with them, which I like as a business model.
First of all, just the idea of jumping into pitch-black water with sharks swimming around you seems exciting, and that probably kicks in after the terror has drained out of your body. Not for everyone, but there is something exciting about it.
I used to tell shark stories on the back of the boat during dinner before we were preparing for the night dive, that always gets everyone. This funny thing gives you hardly ever made anything. Diving at night is often the most boring thing imaginable, but it’s the experience that matters. Often, that’s about how mentally alert and awake you are. When you dive at night, that’s usually the thing. You are a bit more tense, awake, and alive. That can make night dives very exciting, even though you don’t see anything.
Fast forward, you spent time in corporate, you launched Safe2Great. When you launched the business, where did you get your first few clients?
All clients in consultant businesses are going to be through a network. You either work with them or close to them, or they come by recommendations. It’s not a product-based industry. Although, you could say where I’m headed is a little more product-based. It’s a very fluffy, cloudy, funny, and weird thing. I can’t facilitate a workshop or coach my leaders. What the hell is that?
How did you get that? Did you send out emails to people? Did you go to a networking event?
I think going to events matters. Any activities where you can meet people face-to-face and where you can build relationships like having coffee. Things like that make a difference. I have worked very hard on customer service rather than building a new business because I think your customers are your best ambassadors. What you want is customers saying, “I like working with Skip,” and prefer that. If you can get into that position, they become your classic recommending customer, which is what you want. I have always focused a lot on that. I have taught all my consultants, “Even if you spend five hours per week extra on customer service, it’s still a lot easier than finding a new customer. I can reassure you.”
Let’s drill into that a little bit more because the concept and idea of customer service are very broad. I think a lot of people would equate that to a retail customer service experience or talking to somebody on the phone through customer service. Apply that specifically as an example. What have you done in your own business? What have you seen works best from that customer service perspective that has helped you to create that bond with clients?
We are in the knowledge business to a certain extent. Part of it is, in reality, we don’t sell anything. Our job is almost like a coaching conversation from the very outset. We are curious about them. I don’t share much about tools or approaches when I meet clients. I want to understand their business well. That’s always been one of my skills. I can talk to them, I can listen to them well, I understand what’s going on, and I invest a lot in that.
That will be the first thing I’d say to a customer. “I’m not going to charge you anything. What I’d like to do is build trust and understanding of your business. I’m very happy to do the hard work to achieve that. That can take months. It might even take a year.” That’s where it needs to go if you want to turn this into these six-digit customers, you need to be thinking like that. In those conversations, if they feel listened to, you can have those opportunities to perhaps challenge or give them insights. You need to be very careful about it.
Careful about what, when you say careful?
The thing is that customers are being told things all the time. “Do this, do that.” In my business, it’s always been about listening to the customers to understand their problems better. A lot of my sales calls end up with the customers saying, “We talked about us, but we didn’t hear who you are.” They got no idea who I am. In general, that leads to people feeling safe and comfortable talking about. When we then design solutions or we work with them, we can come up with something fundamentally more creative.
I think there is a need for that when you are doing consulting work. My characteristic is people say, “You know the business better than the people who are meant to know our business. You know it well.” It’s because I invest a lot of energy in understanding, and then connecting it to leadership development and organization development. I’m the expert in that, and my job is to bridge it. I’m supposed to say, “If you want to grow your business, if you want to get better at this, if you want to be more digital, or if you want to grow geographically here, how can I convert that into a leadership, leadership development, or learning development pathway for you? That’s my job. You just need to tell me about your business, and I could help translate that into ways that we can approach that.”
I think that’s key. We see oftentimes consultants who will rush that process and get to a proposal. When they are trying to write the proposal, they can’t communicate enough value inside that proposal because they don’t know what the buyer wants. They don’t have that full scope and understanding. I want to take us back for a moment. You mentioned that when you are talking to the people that you work with, you might say to them something like, “It’s better for you to spend five extra hours this week doing customer service as opposed to trying to go out and get a new client. That’s going to work better for you.”
Let’s take the example of a consultant or a small firm that already has clients, they are in business, they are doing fine, and they are doing okay, but they want to grow. What might you suggest to them? Very tactically, as much detail as you can, how would they allocate and spend that five hours? Are they picking up the phone to call clients that they have worked with now or in the past? Are they sending emails? Are they doing research? What does that look like? How would they spend that time?
There’s no doubt. Churning the contacts regularly and having your list of people to call with no other reason, just to check in with them and see how they are going. People want to talk about themselves, so let them. That’s an easy investment of 15 to 20 minutes. I think that’s part of that piece. Where we are headed now is the saturation of marketing material. The market is oversaturated with information about products, prices, and services because most of it is fairly generic. The battle for a lot of consultants will be standing out, finding a niche, and differentiating. I think you have to ask the question, “Why are you here? Why would anyone else care about working with you?”
That’s why I made the decision some years ago to become a mission-based organization rather than just another consultant company. I came up with a mission as I’m making organizations safe for great work. That was a decision about, how would I attract, if you like, what we call associates to the business or employees. How would we attract other businesses as clients? Say, “Why would I want to work with Skip and his team?” I like that mission. Making organizations safe for great work. That appeals to me. I want to work with them because of that. People make decisions about where they buy and where they do business based on who they are. You need to be something people would want to be.
I know that can sound funny in a consultant business, but that’s exactly what I have tried to achieve and I feel this is going to be increasingly important. The amount of marketing material that now can be spat out by AI makes everything super generic. Standing out and standing for something may not suit everyone, but you have got to have a tribe and followers. It can’t be internal. It has to be external. Somehow, your mission has to make sense in a way where there was no money involved. The client says, “I dig that because it’s a good idea. I want to be a part of it. For no other reason than it’s a good idea.”
That’s an important topic. A couple of months ago, we were running a little mastermind event for some of our clients in LA and this was a topic of it. It’s like, “What do you want to be known for?” It’s so easy to not think about that. Just think you are doing your work, you are delivering on client projects, or you are thinking about marketing. Often people are not even clear about what they want to stand for. If you don’t know that, then you are wasting so much opportunity on everything that you could be doing in terms of how you approach conversations, creating content, or developing intellectual property or programs. I think that’s a great reminder for people here.
As part of that, you talked about the mission. You have developed the Safe2Great model. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about why you developed the model itself or the framework around Safe2Great. How have you seen that be beneficial for the company? I ask that because oftentimes people haven’t taken the time to develop a model. They haven’t branded it. They don’t have a name around it. There’s no real visual. They have ideas and those ideas might work. They have services, but they don’t have a model or a framework. That’s something that we do internally. You do this as well. I’m wondering what has been your experience with this.
A bit of humor is helpful when you try to have difficult conversations about psychological safety or growing up in a difficult circumstance. Click To TweetThere are way too much price and quality pitches out there. “We are cheaper. We are better,” that type of conversation. There are a couple of aspects to this. One of which is we are selling intangibles. We are selling a service that’s tricky to quantify. It’s also an area that’s full of models, which is also the tricky part. Sounding original is difficult. I try to avoid cliché. I think you have to try to find a way of saying something new that resonates. Of course, we have to build on something like I do. Safe2Great is a combination of the very famous book, Good to Great written by Jim Collins, which is the masterpiece best-seller.
I don’t know where it came from. I was probably just daydreaming. I thought, “Isn’t it kind of like Safe2Great?” That stuck. I always think a company should be called what it does. I’m a bit old-fashioned. I remember reading that many years ago. I have had multiple company names. All of my company names have had nothing to do with me. They have always been something to do with what I do. If they say, “What’s your company?” “Safe2Great.” They will go, “What’s that?” “I had a previous company called Global Mindset.” “What’s that?” “I think I know what that is.”
Sometimes you have cute names. I have been part of business developments where they have called their company Yum or Blimp, which can be funny because it’s got a sound. That can be cool, too. I do feel in professional services, we have to try to bring, what are we here for. What are we trying to do? How can we explain that?
For me, the journey started partway into this. I just felt I have always been fond of writing and conceptual dilemma. I’m keen on that. I have seen great and lucrative consulting models that are built up around not just a simple idea, but a big idea with lots of moving parts, but extremely nicely integrated. I have been working on my version of that. It’s taken me years along with a lot of other adventures, but it’s worth the effort.
How are you using it? You have this model that you have been developing. It’s one thing to have it, put it on your website, but how have you found that it’s effective? The path to bring into life, to get a benefit, result, or value from it inside of your business.
It’s because the concept is more important than me. Some people build their business up being Tony Robbins, but there aren’t very many of them. I’m trying to create a concept that is both useful for my business, but Safe2Great is an idea that a company can take and run with. I’m not worried about that. It’s an idea that is bigger than my company. That’s intentional because, in corporate and organizational development, our biggest challenge is getting people to get interested in something, like volunteering to do something.
We need these sticky, inspiring, and contagious ideas. I know they work. I have tried lots of them. I know some of that work and some that don’t. Sometimes being a bit accidental, but when you get to these sticky ideas, you need to give them to the clients because when the clients get excited about them and use them. I’m wearing one of them, which is the No Hippo Zone, which is about a campaign against the no jerk rule. I have the No Hippo Rule. The reason why I use that is because a hippo’s funny. Not funny to be called a jerk, but hippos, anyone who’s worked with me will remember me over the last several years for talking about hippos as being the toxic leaders and people in our organizations.
That idea spreads. Ideas that can spread are incredibly powerful and useful for consultant companies. I think it’s bringing that sense of branding to leadership and organizational development, which I do. How can you create a fun idea that people want to use the words themselves? It’s not like some technical term. I want a word that people say, “Hippo. I like that idea. I understand what it means.” They then start talking and using it. If I can create those kinds of vocabularies and ways of talking, then I’m showing organizations, how do you create change. How do you create living vibrant learning organizations where people want to do hard things? Like trying to make a great culture. It’s quite difficult to do.
That’s something I have seen and it translates into a whole series of other things. Psychometric tools, books, articles, white papers, leadership development programs, and lots of physical training materials. These are all things we have built over the years to give richness to the way we do it and humor. I try to bring a little bit of that wonderful Pixar Monsters, Inc. kind of world to it because that works. People love that stuff. A bit of humor is helpful when you are trying to have difficult conversations about psychological safety or growing up in a difficult circumstance. That’s why it matters.
As you have been building out the model or the framework that you have found has not worked, like anything that you have tried. Looking back, you go, “That definitely didn’t work and now we got it back on track by doing this other thing.” I’m interested in terms of the lessons learned that others may be able to avoid or benefit from.
Not being generous enough. I built some concepts way back in my first entrepreneurial guys. I had a big client who said, “We like that guy. I made them a game. I modified it to suit their business.” They thought it was amazing. It was pretty costly to use it all these years later. They said to me, “Could we use it?” Instead of saying, “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” I went, “It will cost you.” I lost a massive client where what I should have said was, “When you are selling consulting hours, which I do, don’t get caught up on the tool. Don’t get worked up about it.” You took ten days to make it. Don’t worry about it. If it gets you a hook into a customer that’s going to put a six-figure consultant business in your way, don’t get caught up about it. Be generous. Let them try it. Let them use it.
In hindsight, what would be the move that you would make now if you could do that all over? How would you position that? How would you have that conversation?
I would have said, “Here it is. Go for it. Give me some feedback about how it worked. I have got more where that came from,” which is not what I did.
I’m putting this out there as an idea. You wouldn’t go and say, “You can use it. Let me take you through it,” as part of some engagement or you would give it to them and let them run with it.
In general, I could have done that. I think the client would have seen it as a gesture of goodwill. I have been close to that mistake again where I have chosen a different path. At the end of the day, yes, I have got IP and it’s valuable. If you are working with somebody who’s going to steal stuff from you, they will do that. It’s better to focus on, “This could be the client who says, ‘Thank you for letting us use it. We appreciate it. Could you come and run this with our executives? We don’t feel so confident doing it.’” You can open up a door. At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships, not about IP.
Although I have an IP model and that’s an important part of where we are headed with Safe2Great. I think you need to be careful about getting too much. You have to pay for every small inch of it. The huge difference in our business is that we make money when we do live stuff. We don’t make money on the records. We only make it on the live performance. Sometimes you are going to have to think about a model where you are not giving it away, but you make it easier for your customer to get hooked into your world and into what you are doing.
I would I’d be much less concerned, but I think there’s a way of doing it. I think you need to approach generosity from a position of strength rather than, “I’m giving away because I don’t have many clients,” but showing, “We have got lots of business. I’m very happy to share this with you on a trial basis. As long as we can have a conversation in a month after you have had an opportunity to try it, do it that way.” I tried some computer software on a free trial. It’s amazing. I bloody well bought it. The fact that it was easy to buy and easy to start using all the services, it’s a great model. I think there’s something to be learned from that because if you don’t have trust, sometimes that try before you buy is a good idea.
It’s a key point for many consultants who are often in a place where they hesitate to give value or to share their ideas, but that’s what people are buying. The sooner you can deliver that value, you increase your trust, and you increase your credibility and authority. It’s much easier for somebody to feel comfortable moving forward and engaging with you. The other thing that is distinctive or different with your business from many other consulting businesses, is that you have also a model or a structure around accreditation. Can you talk a little bit about what that accreditation structure is? Why did you decide to use that inside your business?
In the business that I work with, which is in the leadership development or people development business. This model is very well-known and it’s been around for a long time. It has generated a lot of money. I know what the global market for it is, but it’s billions. It’s proven extremely powerful and done well to a lot of clients in a nice position, a clickable business that has a lot of reliability about it. That’s essentially what I’m aiming at.
Define what it is so people have an understanding who aren’t familiar with that accreditation model.
You must approach generosity from a position of strength. Click To TweetIf you take the classic tools that a lot of people might try, it would be like DISC or Myers-Briggs, they all use the same model. In other words, there is somebody who owns the IP, and then they have built up a system where you can take the tool and you pay when you take the tool. The people who can debrief the tool or talk about the tool are all accredited. The accreditation typically costs quite a few thousand dollars and they pay a yearly fee to stay updated. There’s a nice model here. It’s essentially like a franchise, but there’s no building or hamburgers involved. Essentially, it’s a very similar idea.
What was the key part of that? For those who might be thinking, “Is this a model that might work for me?” It sounds like the core of this is having a very valuable IP. Something that people would find value in. They want to invest their money and time. They can see a positive outcome from That IP needs to be there. From the practitioner or the other consultant or the coach that wants to become accredited in this, how are you getting those people to come to your business and want to pay you money to become accredited in this tool? Is it that you are going to generate leads or opportunities for them? What’s the main value that they are seeing in their mind?
If we are talking about an important customer for me, which would be a smaller consultant company, most of the time, they don’t have any differentiating IP. They can’t go into the market and don’t have the horsepower to say, “In what way do I have, is there some guarantee of the quality of the knowledge and expertise that I’m offering?” We generate that via certifications. You can go through various training programs. There’s no difference between being accredited in Safe2Great and taking a program and coaching accreditation. It’s a similar idea.
The difference here is that it’s connected to a business model around the buying and selling of, in our case, four different psychometric tools. When I say psychometric, they are in principle personality tests connected to the Safe2Great idea. That’s a good model. In the corporate world, these things are quite valuable and they can give you an advantage when you are doing your coaching. It improves your ability and branding capability. Of course, what I provide is all the IP, the know-how ways of doing things in a brand. That’s why the book has such a big role to play.
My job is for people to think that the Safe2Great concept is the best hamburger in town. Therefore, all the people who are selling should go and work with them. I’m adding a little twist to it, which is a bit different, which is the whole mission piece. We are trying to differentiate quite a bit on the sense of community. We are here to make human-centric organizations, we are here to make sure we are not overrun by robots, and we are here to make sure that climate change doesn’t ruin our communities. That are the important goals that we have.
None of the other models, which use this concept have that goal. I think this is a new way of looking at it. We are trying to build a tribe of consultants and practitioners around the world who share those ideas and give them a business model, which enables them as sole trader to be able to step into the market and be able to pretty much from day one, have something strong and firm to differentiate in the market with. I think that matters. If you are a consultant, you need something to hang on to.
Like I did when I started. I was working with a different accredited system before, but I wanted to create my one. It did help because I felt too, that I had somebody behind me helping me step into these organizations and say, “I know something special, unique, and different. I can help you in a special way.” This accreditation helps me feel like I have got my Superman suit onto the day. To be able to step into that relationship, feeling strong and knowing I have got somebody behind me who can support me with materials of a book or a keynote, online materials. I got all that social validation stuff as well. “Who the hell are you?” The book is crucial. You can’t do this. Often, these systems start with a book. If you take Radical Candor, which is a popular book, they converted it into an accredited system as well.
StrengthsFinder or EOS.
All of the Clifton stuff. The same idea. None of those organizations have any purpose at all. It’s about, “We have a better tool to explain human behavior.” I’m saying, “We have that too, but we are also trying to use our tools to create something better, like a better organization.” I think that’s a slightly different pitch.
What’s been the most challenging part of this accreditation model for you to this point?
The market is still saturated. In leadership development, you are up against some very big incumbents. The Harvards of the world have this huge machine nowadays. McKinsey for that matter. You are up against some very big players and I’m still in the gorilla phase of building a business where I can find a space in that market.
In reality, how can we have an impact marketing-wise on the customers in a way that is very different from our size? How do we punch massively above our weight and find strategies to do that? Whether it’d be digital or whether it’d be activities like talking to you. The book’s coming, start creating, “It’s not just a one-off. There’s something more in this idea.” I’m working hard at doing whatever I can to learn about and get better at all of the social media digital marketing, key leadership, and thought leadership that needs to be done here. That’s clearly my role here.
Is there one thing inside of all the things that you tried to this point that you feel has produced the best results or shown the greatest signs of promise and potential?
You can do this without it, but it’s very hard. Even though you could say our book’s old-fashioned or whatever it is, we are looking for that credibility and stamp of something. A book is a very important phase in that. I think there are lots of ways to be able to get help to do that if writing doesn’t come naturally to you. I don’t think necessarily ChatGPT is ultimately the way to go. I think you need to get help to define a message that’s strong. I can see it matters in so many ways.
Also, my social media outreach, it changes because you got a different way to talk to people. Instead of talking to people, I have got something to sell you. If you are saying, “I have got something I want to share with you,” it’s a different pitch. That can start that connection, which can lead to business. Maybe not, it’s hard to say, but it’s a bit easier to open that door because people are so bombed by marketing, cold-calling, and things like that.
I’m hoping that I meet them and say, “I’m primarily interested in sharing ideas. How are you making sense of AI in your business? How are you making sense of the disconnected post-COVID workplace? How are you making sense of some of the most disruptive business conditions we have seen probably in our lifetimes?” That’s what I’d like to talk to them about.
Here you are. You mentioned several years in. If you look at what has had the biggest impact in growing your business, where you have seen it’s added significant revenue or profit to help you to get to that next level. What stands out for you as one activity or one focus that you have had that has provided outsized gains?
I think you have to partner with the best professionals you can find.
Give an example of that.
In my case, whether it’d be digital marketing or content production, it’s through freelancers. They are good solid people because you can’t know everything you need to know. Sometimes you got to find a way of partnering. If I look at my publisher or my keynote speaker agent, these are people who add a lot of value because they say, “Skip, no, don’t do that. That won’t lead anywhere. You spend a lot of time at ENGIE and it won’t go anywhere.” What I have seen is by getting solid advice about how to position yourself right and so on makes a huge difference because otherwise, you can spend so much time doing something which doesn’t lead anywhere.
People follow the first follower. Click To TweetI don’t think you have to have it all under your own business. I think there are an amazing amount of skillful people, whether it’d be videographers or people who do eLearning content. As small businesses, we need that network of other businesses to help us. Hopefully, they are not charging too much because that can often be a challenge here, but there are some good people.
In my case, all of my team are probably in the UK, the US, or in Asia. It depends on what I’m looking for. I think there are so many opportunities to learn something. That’s helped a lot. I was doing silly things. I’m trying to market this way, and the digital market guy says, “Why do you do that? It doesn’t make any sense.” He said, “You can do less and have a bigger impact.” I think that’s important. I have learned a lot about that. Particularly at the moment with marketing. I’m on a steep learning curve with how to build that knowledge leadership around the book. I’m getting a lot of good advice around that and we are executing on it. We can see the difference it’s making in terms of the leads and the relationships we are developing. It’s great.
As you continue to expand and grow the business to the point where it is now, what’s one challenge that you have had either inside the business or maybe even saying that because of what’s happening, the business has bled over into the personal side? What’s one thing that you have been dealing with, have overcome, or maybe you are still deal dealing with?
In any business, what we are trying to do is create followers. I know that sounds a bit weird to say it like that, but for example, I’m currently negotiating a distribution arrangement in the UK and the Middle East with a company. I keep saying to myself, make it easy to follow because the companies that take onboard your concepts and ideas and want to sell, it’s not about the money. Make it where they feel like this is good for them. You want to incentivize it, but you want to make it easy. If they say they want to go this way, don’t say, “No, that’s not how we do it.” Give them some equity, ideas, decision, and equity in where they want to take it.
This is important because I’m in no position to dictate terms. That would be silly early in this. Particularly, in this accreditation phase, we are fairly early in this distribution phase. Make it easy to follow. This is their business. You want to inspire them. You want them to feel that they want to be on board. They are all business owners themselves. They are independent and passionate people, too. Make it easy for them to want to jump on board because these followers, in the famous video called The Crazy Dancer, people don’t follow the leader, which is, in this case, me, they follow the first follower.
Is that the video of someone at a music festival, he starts dancing, and then by the end of it, everybody’s gone up?
It’s how you encourage the first follower because people follow the first follower, not the first idiot of what they called the crazy dancer. The crazy dancer is Skip Bowman with the Safe2Great concept. The first followers are the distribution and the accredited practitioners that signed up. These are the people who need to feel confident because they are the ones everyone’s going to follow. They are going to be drawn to. “It’s them that are the key.” I have got to keep reminding myself of that because we become so narcissistic and caught up in, “This was my idea.”
You have got to open up. It’s a famous principle of community-based development. If you want to create a community purpose-based driven idea, you have to unleash it. You have got to let it go. You have to have some business principles and commercials in place. If you get too caught up and there’s no equity, there’s no room for them to make decisions about where they want to market or how they want to sell it, then why would they bother? Particularly small business owners are looking for a choice. They are looking to make decisions. Some of them might be good. Some of them might be less good. If they feel that they are part of something important and you have got the commercials right, make it easy to follow.
Before we wrap up, I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, your book, and everything you have going on. Before we do that, one question that I often like to ask people is, over the last few months, what is one book that you have either read or listened to, could be fiction or non-fiction, but it’s something that you enjoyed and that you might recommend to others?
You are asking a guy who’s just written a 200-page book and has read loads of books.
We will get to your book in a moment, but any other books.
Carol Dweck’s Mindset book has inspired a lot of people. I’d also recommend a book like The Fearless Organizations, it’s a great book. Radical Candor by Kim Scott. These are good books with people who know a lot about the business and a lot about how to create success. Some of them built more research. Those are books that I might read, but those are ones that have been around a while, but they are still good reads and inspiring reads. Satya Nadella changed his company based on Carol Dweck’s book, so it was good enough for him. It’s probably good enough for a lot of other people.
Those are great recommendations. Some very solid books in there. Let’s now turn to you and your book. Let people know where they can go to learn more about you, your company, and your model. Where should they go to check all that out?
The book Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership, Skip Bowman. If you type any of that information in, it will appear. It’s on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a number of other providers. It’s in a pre-order phase, so it’s available. We are putting the very final touches on the book cover at the moment. I’m dying to see it in physical form. That’s the best way to do that. I do have an offer in the pre-order phase. If you want to confuse the hell out of Google and Amazon, what you do is you get lots of pre-orders. That makes you have a good day. When the book finally gets released, there’s a chance of becoming a best-seller.
Any support I could get to pre-order? What I’m doing is I’m not only matching the value of the pre-order that people are making, I’m doubling it in terms of doing a keynote, some coaching, or something like that for them. Just send me the confirmation of a pre-order and I’m very happy to meet that value in some way. I’d appreciate the help because as small business owners, we don’t have that superpower that some of these bigger players have.
Any of the support I can get from anyone in particular who’s interested in the book and interested in making organizations safe to great work, love to get a pre-order and I’d love to follow that up by doing a little coaching session, doing a little inspirational speech for a team, or something like that. That’s how I’d like to do it.
Thank you for coming on and for sharing some of your journey and everything that you are working on and I look forward to continuing our conversation.
Yeah, thank you very much. Have a great one.
Important Links
- Safe2Great
- Good to Great
- Radical Candor
- Mindset
- The Fearless Organizations
- Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership
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