Transcript

[0:00] The businesses I know that are run by experts, but not masters and experts who are not prepared to do that kind of self-analysis work that's needed, they're, good at what they do, but they're constrained because the knowledge sits within the expert and it's not able to be shared amongst the rest of the team in a way that allows the business to grow.
This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team.

[0:39] And hit more targets with full funnel freedom.
Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, we are going to getting ideas and insights on intentional mastery from William Wist, author of a book of the same name. Now let's hear from one of our affiliate partners. When you need to hire top sales professionals, turn to a recruiting partner that speaks sales. That's Allant Workforce Solutions.

[1:10] For more details and to book an introductory call, go to www.fullfunnelfreedom.com slash That's www.fullfunnelfreedom.com.
So my guest today, William Bwist, enables business owners to become masters of their markets and operate more effectively so they can stand out from their competitors.
He is the author of Intentional Mastery, Step Beyond Your Expertise and Build Better Businesses.
He's also a keen photographer, walker and skier. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom podcast, William.
Thank you, Hamish. It's a delight to be here with different sides of the world, but we're both seeing sunshine, so that's fabulous as well. Absolutely. Absolutely.
So I've given the audience the 30,000-foot view of who you are and what you do.
Tell us the story of William, what your background is, how you got to today, and what prompted you to write intentional mastery.
Sure. And thanks, Hamish. Yeah, I had a career in the insurance industry. I was an underwriter, I worked for some of the big UK insurance companies, fairly high flying job, I ended up as.

[2:21] The chief underwriter for Lloyds TSB Insurance, which is one of the biggest personal lines insurers in the UK. And I left there in 2001, to set up my own business and to start thinking about about how to build business in a more intentional way.
And hence, it all works through to the book title of intentional mastery.
And I did that because I really had found that I'd kind of got to the part of my life where I really wanted to start helping others to develop the skills and experience that I'd had the opportunity to develop in my career.
And I've been working with small business owners ever since, working with them on strategy, thinking about things like risk management, which is a big part of my insurance work, but also things around building business properly, building business in a way that is sustainable, that is fun, that they get the best out of themselves as a business owner, as well as delivering the best to their clients.
And I think we have a responsibility as business owners, not just to deliver great value to our customers.
We should do that. But also to think about our own lives and how we're building the best person that we could be in that role as a business owner. And it's through that work and thinking about how people do become the best at what they do that I developed this journey of mastery that I write about in the book and I'm sure we'll talk about more.

[3:50] Through the course of this podcast. Absolutely. And I actually in my journal every morning and night is I am on the path of mastery, not the path to mastery because as you and I both know, mastery is not a destination, it is an ongoing journey. One of the things that stood out to me in your bio is talking about purpose and what I know I've experienced is if the purpose of a small business owner is to make money, they're usually not going to be overly successful.
So in your experience as a, whether you are a sales leader, you're an entrepreneur, founder, owner who's leading a sales team, how is the purpose of the owner critical to their success overall when they're leading their team from your experience.
I think without having that clarity about why you're doing what you do, it's very difficult for other people to get behind you and help you achieve it.
If we don't know where we're going, any road will do. It's an old saying, but it's really true.
But those business owners who have got a drive to achieve something that's bigger than themselves, something that makes a difference in the world and makes a difference to their clients, really can articulate that clearly.
So that others can go and join the party, if you like, come along and start helping that business owner to deliver what they want to deliver.
And I think we all experience that in areas of our lives where we come across a business.

[5:15] That we just like their ethos because somehow or another they make it obvious what they're trying to achieve.
And when it aligns with our own values, well, we go and buy from them.
So it just makes that whole sales process much easier.
Absolutely. And by extension, we might end up going to work for them if we really, if we really align with that owner fair.

[5:36] Yeah, entirely. There's a firm here that, um, called Riverford who deliver boxes of food, uh, once a week and you can order online and it's all, um, ethically sourced.
It's all sustainably grown, all those good things.
And they've just created this whole community around them that, that do their advertising for them, you know, that are always talking about them and telling their friends and building the business for them.
And I really admire the way they've done that. It's been brilliant.
I love that. So as you are working with your clients, small business owners, sales leaders, et cetera, when you bring this topic of mastery up, because we all have, the words mean different things to different people, what's the initial reaction you tend to get from a leader as it relates to this topic of mastery?
I think quite often people think that they're, you know, they're already probably experts in what they do by the time they run their own business. The next is...
In some people's eyes, already a master. And they're not quite the same thing.
The journey I talk about starts when you know nothing about a topic.
I call that explorer.
Explorers are seeking knowledge. And as they get that knowledge, they start to want to know more about how to do something as well as knowing what that is.

[6:55] Then building skills. At that stage, they're novices. We've all been there.
We're probably all still doing some things We don't do very well, make lots of mistakes.
We're honing the skill.
Once that skill is embedded, they become what I call practitioners.
And I think a lot of business owners, a lot of the world actually are working with practitioners, people who are good at what they do, but they're not necessarily trying to go beyond that.
Most business owners though, will step beyond that and become an expert in an area of what they do.
The sales or marketing, or, uh, you know, depending on what the business is, it might be making widgets in which case they become the best widget maker in the world, they learn through experience.
And all the way up to expert, what we've been doing is filling in gaps, either a gap in our knowledge gap in our skill or gap in experience, the step towards mastery.
And as you say, it's a journey, not a destination is when we start bringing in and bringing to bear experience and skills and knowledge from other areas of our lives.

[8:02] To work on the thing that we are already really good at, that we're already expert at.
And we also do something else at that point is we kind of unpack our expertise again, so that we can train others and bring others along on that same journey, so that we can build that team around us. The businesses I know that are run by experts but not masters and experts who are not prepared to do that kind of self-analysis work that's needed, they're good good at what they do, but they're constrained because the knowledge sits within the expert and it's not able to be shared amongst the rest of the team in a way that allows the business to grow.

[8:42] But when it's led by a master, then they, they have that ability to see what does this person need?
If they brought a new member of the team into the business, they're likely to be an explorer or a novice.
And they need different things. They need either the knowledge or the skill training.
Whereas if they've got somebody who's a practitioner, they want to move to expert, they need to give them lots of experience, not be training them on how to do something, because they already know that bit.
So the mastery is about really understanding ourselves as much as anything else, and knowing how we can share what we know, what we are skilled in, what we have experience in with others, in a way that will bring them on and advance them as well.
At the same time, looking at all of the aspects of our life, what can we draw on to help us do that? What are the analogies?
I love that. It gives a good framework for how to move through those, all those stages that you're talking about.
I know for me, I find the word expert, especially when it's a self-applied label.
You know, there's plenty of people go online anywhere and you'll find lots of quote unquote experts and not anything.
To me, an expert is someone who has stopped learning.

[9:50] Because they've said, I am an expert. I have reached the destination.
Yeah. Someone who tells me that they have expertise, tells me that they're still learning.
Because they know lots, like you just described, but they are still willing to be like, I bet there's more to know, or I bet what worked for me 10 years ago, five years ago, 18 months ago, is maybe not going to actually apply going forward.
So they're continually doing that self-reflection that you talked about.
Something you just shared, which is really key from my experience, is the analogies in the other parts of our life. because we have this, to me, it's nonsense of work-life balance and separate work and life. We're a whole human being.
So when you're working with your clients, how do you support them in actually opening their eyes up to the fact that they have other areas in their life that could support them in becoming a master in the area that you're working with?
What do you do with them to help them see that or realize it?

[10:49] It's a really, really important point and thank you for raising it.
I think one of the things my clients tell me is that over time I become what they call a critical friend.
That doesn't mean I'm criticizing them, it means I'm providing them with critique.
I'm looking at what they're doing and seeing connections that maybe they can't see because they're too close to them, to be honest.
I use myself as an example, you mentioned in the introduction that I'm a keen photographer.
And one of the things with photography is that it's not just about pressing the shutter on the camera or knowing all the controls on the camera, indeed, that I learned a long time ago, that the art of taking a great picture is telling a story through the lens.
And part of what I'm doing with clients is helping them to see their story and relate the story as if it was a picture, not necessarily by taking a picture, but by describing what would be in it.
Example. It's quite an interesting exercise is, you know, if I was to be drawing your business, Hamish, what would what would appear on my artist's impression of your business? What would definitely have to be there. I'm not asking you to tell me now, but...

[12:00] For your listeners to think about that for their business, because it helps you to describe the business in an imaginary way, in a way that people can imagine. Not imagine in the sense of a false way, imagine in the sense that people can imagine it. That exercise is the kind of exercise I go through when I hold a camera up to my eye. You know, how do I describe what I'm seeing through the viewfinder in a way that tells a story? And it's that, you know, when you see a great picture sure a great piece of artwork on the wall, it speaks to you. And that's what I want people's vision of their business to do to be that vibrant to be that full of color and light and dark and shade as well just to give the contrast and see how many photographic analogies that were just in that sentence or two that that's what I'm looking for. And that comes from conversation and being a critical friend.
I love the phrase critical friend. I also facetiously share with my clients that if you are going to a networking event at an art institution, all you need to say is, I love the interplay of light and shadow.
And you sound like, so you just sound intelligent about art and no one will ever question you.

[13:12] It's absolutely not. You're just like, I love the interplay of light and shadow in that photo.
People are like, oh, he knows what he's talking about.
And then you can move on, right? Whether you know anything about art or not.
So bonus content for the listeners today. I love the interplay of light and shadow.
That at the next networking event you attend at an art institution. William, so this idea of, you know, paint your picture, describe, you know, tell us your story. We're all story-oriented, creatures. That's how we used to share knowledge before we had writing was story.
But it's not intuitive to everybody. So what are some of the roadblocks or the challenges that you have supported your clients overcoming through this exercise that some of our audience might might resonate with as well. Yeah, sure.
I think we're often very close to our own businesses. We're involved in them every day.
We know what's wrong with them as well as what's right with them.
Sometimes that can get in the way of us being able to describe what we're actually delivering.
To break that down a bit, another exercise I ask my clients to do is to go and talk to their past clients and to ask them a really specific question.
That question is, I know what we agreed we were going to do, or I know what I sold you.
It doesn't matter what way you express that bit. I know what I sold you, but what did you actually get?

[14:38] And whenever I've asked that question to my clients, I'm nearly always surprised.
You know, I think, Oh, you know, Fred would say, dung, dung, dung, these three things, A, B, and C, and I go and talk to Fred and he says, well, sort of X, Y, and Z, three completely different things that are all valid, but I wasn't seeing those as the important things and he was.
And I think that's the critical piece is that we often focus on what we think is important.

[15:11] And actually what the client sees as important, we don't understand because we don't ask them.
But when we really understand what clients are seeing as the important parts of our work, then we can construct our narrative around those things.
And then it tends to speak more to our target market than if we focus on just the things that we think are important.
Very, very true. And asking our clients after the fact, because if we ask them in the moment to be like, well, I'm buying a coach, or I'm buying this, and it reminds me of one of my very first clients.

[15:46] In my Sandler business.
He runs an automation company. basically sells control panels for oil and gas plants, which it's a control panel for an oil and gas plant. It better do basically the same thing as every other control panel, right?
So it's very undifferentiated. So he asked for some coaching because he thought that he just won some business from a competitor. He thought that he was going to lose the business because he hadn't actually done the project to his standard, which of course was very, very, very high, higher than the client. And so I said, do you actually know why they bought from you?
Because that's a big deal to switch from a current vendor. And he said no.
So I said, well, are you OK to go ask him? He comes back the following week, and he's just vibrating.
And I said, what happened? He said, I found out why. And I said, are you going to tell me?
Because it feels like you're going to explode.
And he said, yeah. I went out to the plant manager, and I said, hey, why did you buy from us? Because it's basically a control panel.
It has to do the same thing. It has to be the same size. It's all about the same price.
And the plant manager said, because I I got to watch my son play hockey.

[16:44] And my client's like, what the heck are you talking about? And the plant manager said, with the previous vendor, there was always malfunctions. I couldn't travel to road games or tournaments. I was afraid if I went to a home game, I'd have to abandon my son at the arena and try to get my wife to come get him or have a parent take him home because I get called out to the plant to deal with something. Since I started working with you, I've gone to a bunch of tournaments, most road games, and I've been to every home game. And so having that understanding of why our clients truly buy from us is really critical to understanding what are we actually selling. So thank you for bringing that up. Now that we're on this journey, right? So paint a picture. We've gone through the roadblocks. We actually gone out and interviewed the buyers.
Where do we go from here on this journey of intentional mastery? What's next?

[17:31] So what's next, I think, particularly for salespeople is to think about where their clients are in that same journey. And once you've really got to grips with that journey from explorer to novice to practitioner, expert, and then master, because it allows you in a sales conversation to start providing the right part of that journey to help them, you know, genuinely feel that you're moving them towards a better solution and moving and help them to achieve something that they've come to you to talk because they think you might be the solution.
And now let's make sure that they know that we're the solution.
And I think the way that happens is, let's say, through recognising, through just listening to what they say, predominantly. I'm a great believer in.

[18:16] The best salespeople are also the best listeners. If you're not listening to what is being said in a sales meeting, you're not going to win the sale. So listen hard and work out where you think that client is on their journey of mastery and how what you're offering can move them one.

[18:34] Step or 10 steps or 100 steps further down that journey because that's, I think, what people will recognize very quickly as something that they need and then they'll buy.
Fair enough. They're not buying, what's the cliche about, they're not buying the quarter inch dobrit, they're buying the quarter inch hole, something like that, right?
So when we understand what our client's journey of mastery is and they can see that we can support them in getting closer to where they're trying to go, that makes a sale, not a sale, that makes it almost an order because they say, where do I sign? So William, journeys are great.

[19:09] Right? And processes and steps are great. I'm sure you have experienced a client or someone you've talked to say, hey, William, I get that. I get the process, da, da, da. I want to go from zero to 100 in like one move. How can you get me there? So when we're looking at this path of mastery, what are some of the shortcuts, if any, that you have discovered as you've worked with your clients? And if there aren't any, that's okay too, but help us understand a bit about those shortcuts or those jumps that you've helped your clients make.
Yeah, sure. And it's a question I get really commonly, you know, how can I shortcut this?
How can I be a master tomorrow? And I've got, and I'm sorry, I've got some not necessarily bad news, but not great news. Yeah, you can't short circuit it completely. But there are some things you can do to mean that you focus your learning and your development in the right way at the stage you're at that will accelerate the time you spend getting through that stage.
So if you're genuinely going to do something completely new, you know, let's say you wanted to learn a new language, a language you'd never heard any of before, and you wanted to learn it.

[20:17] You know you're going right back to the beginning. You've got to have the explorer mindset and think about what knowledge do I need in order to learn this language?
That can be quite quick because if you are a linguist and you've already learned several is the speed to learn the next one tends to speed up because some of the rules of language are the same. And if you've learned, that's great.
If on the other hand, you're, uh, you know, you've got some experience, you know, that you're reasonably good.
And I see this with business owners, every business owner has to, at some point face the fact that they've got to do accounts and they may not be good at accounts, but when you've worked at it a few times and issued invoices and recorded bills and all of that So it gets a bit easier because you've got the knowledge.
So now you're an explorer.
What you need to do is get help.
With the skills that you need to do it. And that's best done with training.
So, you know, if you know you need to develop a skill, go out and buy the training for it.
That'll move you on fastest. If you're already good at that bit, you're a practitioner, and now you want to move to expert, that's about experience.
So that's about finding ways to do what you do in a variety of different situations.
So when some clients in a slightly different market than you normally operate in, so you see a different side of things.
I'm a speaker, I've worked with the Professional Speaking Association in the UK here.

[21:41] And one of the things that young and new speakers tend to have is that they can stand on a stage and speak, but they haven't got all the technique, they need experience. The key thing is to, you know, take gigs that don't pay a big fee or take opportunities to go and talk to networking groups maybe for no fee, you know, just because it gives you that opportunity to get experience it and keep improving and improving.
When you want to get to master, I think you've then got to look at finding somebody who's got some level of mastery themselves, maybe in a related topic.
That you can share insights with and find a group of peers who, you know, are also extremely good in their job, but maybe unrelated to what you do.
And again, look for common ground and places where you can share insights with each other.
And that kind of mastery group, if you like, I don't think you can do that last bit alone.
I think you need the people around you who are already experts and masters in their own right and in their own field.
And just chew the fat a bit, get to know them and listen carefully and unpack exactly what they're doing.

[22:52] And seeing what of that can I take and use with what I'm doing to lift me up even further.
And then when you've done that, lift it up again. And when you've done that, lift it up again.
Just keep pushing to be ever better because there is always more that we can do.
There's always more that we can do.
Absolutely. I have always maintained I never want to be the smartest person in the room or the most knowledgeable person in the room because that means that I'm probably stuck.
I'm probably stagnating because I'm not challenging myself. I don't have others challenging me.
So that absolutely resonates and moving along that path to mastery.
So William, I have a few questions as we are wrapping up today, but before we get to those, one of the things that we coach the leaders that we work with to do is ask themselves and ask their people every quarter, am I doing the right things?
Am I doing enough of the right things? And am I doing the right things right?
So if we say, yeah, we're doing the right things, but we're not getting the results, what do you coach your clients to do to actually keep going on that path and get the results that they're looking for.

[24:00] Yeah, doing the right things right is really, really vital, isn't it? And I think part of that is about coming back to that point about purpose. If you know what to do, and you know how to do it, but you don't really feel like it's that important, we're never going to put heart and mind and body and soul behind it. So we're never going to deliver that great work. We've got to have all three. But quite often, we only have two, we might know what to do, but not know exactly how to do it. And, you know, I see a lot of people tend to describe them as driven, because they will just, they'll try one way, doesn't work, try another way, doesn't matter, try another way, doesn't matter, didn't work, try another way. Suddenly there's a way for it to happen. And, you know, one of the things that I liken that to is, you remember the, you and I both old enough to remember it live probably, but the Apollo 13 moonshot. Well, they had a big incident halfway to the moon, They didn't even know at that point when they could bring everybody home safely.
A lot of the time in that environment, there were people who knew exactly what needed to be done. They knew why it was important, but they didn't know at that point how.
They had to sit and work in the back rooms and work out how to do it because they had one shot.

[25:12] Now we're not often under that level of pressure, but if you don't know how to do something, find the person who does and get them to help you. On the other hand, you might know how to do lots of things, but not know which of them missed the right thing in that moment.
And that I think is where good mentoring, good coaching can be really helpful.

[25:31] So depending which it is, if you know how to do it, but you're not, you've got this.

[25:35] I don't know, really know why it's important. You might need a coach to help uncover the purpose.

[25:40] If you know what to do and why it's important, but don't know how you probably need training.

[25:44] And if you know how to do something and why that's important, but don't know what all the things you could do, which is the right one. I think that's a coach and a mentor's role to help you unlock, which is the right thing to do. So that was quite a long answer to a short question.
But I love it. I do the same thing. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that with us, William.
So as we are getting toward the end of our visit today, and I'm sure we could visit about mastery and the journey all day long. The first one I'm curious about is if you could go back and talk to younger William, you can go back however long you want, could be even six months ago and say, hey, younger William, you're going to be an author, you're going to be working with great business owners, but you're also going to be someone with a lot of scar tissue and a lot of of bumps and bruises. What would you coach younger William to do or say differently to arrive at the same place, but maybe with a little less scar tissue and fewer bumps and bruises?
It's become really clear to me over many, many years that I wish, I really do wish I could have gone back and told my younger self, ask for help a bit earlier. It's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. Knowing that you need some support from others to help you be the best you can be, that's not a sign of weakness, that's the sign of somebody who wants to get where they're going. And too often I see people who are kind of, I need to work out what I need to do before I can go and ask for help.
To do it. It's kind of like, well, why don't you get some help to work out what you need to do?

[27:12] We're humans. We're not on this planet to do things on our own. We're on this planet to do things together. We're a tribal species. We need to reach out to the people who can help us. And, you know, the one of the things I love about things like podcasts and the technology we have around us and people like yourself having an issue with hosting podcasts is that we've got that opportunity to offer help so that people can hear it and see it and put it into practice.

[27:38] More easily than perhaps ever before. But I still would really push my younger self to have asked earlier. Fair enough. That's actually one of my, I have three mantras and one of them is I ask for help before I need it because I know I've gotten that trap of, I got to do this by myself. And yes, I've got family and friends and a team and they all care about me, but I got to do it. And And it's like, no, actually, you don't when you when you step back and go, hey, listen, I'm really struggling. It's amazing how many times people will say, oh, yeah, I'm absolutely willing to support you in this small way or this big way or whatever it might be.
So, William, as an author, you are also someone who is very focused on your own professional and personal development. What are you reading, listening to or watching right now that the audience may want to check out to support their own development?
So one of the, one of the things I do is I run something I call an unbook club. I love reading.
And I like reading business books cause they help stretch my knowledge and thinking.
And I know that I get a lot of insights from it. So my unbook club means that you can, I'll read the book for you.

[28:44] And you get, you get the option to come along once a month to a call where I'll talk about what I've learned from it and where I think it can be applied.

[28:53] Thank you.
For small businesses. So that's my book club. I've been reading a couple of books and I knew you were asking this question, so I brought them along with me.
This one is called Grit. I just finished that one by Angela Duckworth.
It's a really good book, I think, for entrepreneurs, especially if you feel like you're having to work super, super hard and you don't really know why it's not coming together.
But it's about passion and aligning with your values and recognizing that some things are hard.
The other one that I've just started is a book by a friend of mine who's sadly no longer with us, a lady called Jill Marsden. It's a book called Keep Stepping, a leadership book.
And it's really about essential ways to lead yourself.
And I thought she unfortunately died a couple of years ago and I have recently met up with her son who's carried on her work.
And that's fabulous to see as well. So he'll be joining us on the call for that, which will be in early July.
Excellent, well, we'll put links to both of those in the show notes.
My condolences on the loss of your friend. So as we, last question, William, what would you like to plug? What would you like to leave us with as a final closing thought or insight? The floor is yours.
Thank you. I recognize that many small business owners are often faced with this multitude of things they need to work on, especially when they're trying to move themselves mastery.

[30:19] All sorts of bits of the business that need some attention. So I've put together an audit.
It's available on the website at audit.williambuist.com.
I'm sure we'll pop links to that thing later. It's trending questions very quick, but it doesn't produce an automated report. It produces some insights for me and I'll take a look at those.
A lot of the report is templated. I'm not going to say that I write a totally individual report but what I'm trying to do is to look for Where are the key areas where if you put your focus in that bit of the business, you'll be able to accelerate it and then free up some time to be able to focus on the rest of it.
So it just helps people to identify the quick wins. That's free.
And it's one of the things that I love doing because it allows me to give back to the widest community I can.
So as I say, audit.williambuse.com.
Awesome, and we will certainly put a link to that in the show notes.
So I strongly encourage you to invest the time and at least get the insights on where you could be sharing more, spending more time effectively in your business.
So William, absolutely enjoyed visiting with you. Look forward to carrying on our conversations offline.
So thank you very much for being a guest on Full Funnel of Freedom today.
Yeah, thank you, Hamish. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

[31:33] You've been listening to the Full Funnel of Freedom podcast.
I've been your host, Hamish Knox today, getting ideas and insights on the path from expert to master from William Bwist, author of Intentional Mastery. The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. Do you seek to dominate your niche and desire to scale sales sustainably? Go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash howtosandler for more details on how Sandler Calgary supports their clients in doing just that and the book of 15-minute initial call. Thanks for listening.
Leave us a rating and review. Share this episode with a sales leader that you care about who's in your network. And until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[32:30] Music.