#74 How clear messaging drives growth and scalability with Garth Jemmett from We Explain Stuff

TRANSCRIPT: THE bizval PODCAST
Guest: Garth Jemmett, Founder — We Explain Stuff
Host: Graham Stephen, CEO and Co-Founder, bizval
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garth-jemmett-we-explain-stuff/
Company: https://weexplainstuff.com

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[00:00:32] Graham Stephen: All right. Welcome back to the bizval Podcast, where we interview founders, rainmakers, dealmakers, people making a real difference.

[00:00:41] Graham Stephen: In the world, and one of the themes we talk a lot about on this show is value creation in business. And more importantly, how that value becomes transferable beyond the founder.

[00:00:53] Graham Stephen: And, you know, there’s another interesting piece of that puzzle. Before value can be measured, scaled, or sold, and put a number to that, it often needs to be explained clearly.

[00:01:05] Graham Stephen: And today’s guest is somebody who has spent much of his time helping organizations from corporates through to startups, founder-led organizations, do exactly that. So I’m delighted to be joined by Garth Jemet. He’s the founder of We Explain Stuff. It’s a consultancy focused on helping companies simplify

[00:01:24] Graham Stephen: complex ideas to teams, customers, and stakeholders. Garth, welcome to the show.

[00:01:31] Garth Jemmett: Thanks, Graham. Great to be with you today. Thanks for the opportunity.

[00:01:36] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So, I think today, Guyf, we’re going to chat a little bit firstly about your background, your upbringing, a little bit about your story in terms of your founder journey to… to re-explain Stuff, and, you know, that could probably be an episode on itself. But I think really what we want to focus on today is, as I said, the heart of value creation.

[00:01:56] Graham Stephen: or the value creation being at the heart of the business, and, you know, why it’s so important to explain that simply and clearly. So that’s where I think the focus is going to be.

[00:02:05] Graham Stephen: But just to kind of get things going. Garth, maybe if you can just kind of share a little bit about your backstory, you know? Where did you grow up? What was the environment that shaped you early on? And, you know, were you always somebody who was, like, drawn to simplifying ideas and communicating concepts easily, or was that something that kind of evolved over time?

[00:02:27] Garth Jemmett: So, just a little bit about me, kind of growing up. I’ve… I’ve always been… I’ve always kind of known I was a creative person. It sounds a bit… a bit vague, but I was somebody from a very young age that was always interested in creativity. I loved drawing, I loved…

[00:02:44] Garth Jemmett: conceptualizing stuff, and as a kid, I mean, I can remember way back when, I always used to draw and map out stuff. And, I really developed a love for it, and when I was growing up, kind of in the early days, I… I was keen on getting into film. That was kind of where I thought my career would go, but it didn’t go that route at all, because

[00:03:07] Garth Jemmett: Back in the day, in kind of, sort of early stages of apartheid South Africa, you could pretty much go and work for the TV network, which didn’t really excite me. So I… I went into advertising instead. I studied, I studied design, and then I went into the advertising market, and I…

[00:03:27] Garth Jemmett: I spent many, many great years in the advertising market, absolutely loved it, kind of honed my skills there. I used to work for a big global network. Well, eventually ended up working for a global network called TBWA, and I was one of the senior art directors there. That was kind of my background, and

[00:03:45] Garth Jemmett: I, I, I left the industry because of, of, One main thing, and believe it or not, it was… it was these things, mobile phones.

[00:03:55] Garth Jemmett: It was kind of early stages of the Nokia… the Nokia phones getting cameras on them, and because I’ve always loved to communicate visually, I…

[00:04:06] Garth Jemmett: I remember sitting there thinking, the internet’s getting faster, and mobile technology, in terms of cameras, is getting better, albeit incremental. And I thought, I want to be a part of that, because I always had a love for,

[00:04:22] Garth Jemmett: explaining things using… using visuals and diagrams and things like that. And, so I left advertising, and I decided to start this business that would,

[00:04:33] Garth Jemmett: would do this, and so I ended up working with my ex-business partner, who’s a fantastic guy, John Louie. Him and I started this business together, and what we did, because we were starting to move into that space of using film and media to explain stuff.

[00:04:49] Garth Jemmett: interesting doors started to open up. We got into, old mutual insurance, we got into Liberty, we got into the banks, Standard Bank, NetBank.

[00:04:59] Garth Jemmett: some of the asset managers, like Standard, Katie’s. all these businesses that really struggled to articulate what they were about, it was usually a whole bunch of bullet points on a page, and we would turn that into a story that was easy for

[00:05:14] Garth Jemmett: their staff to understand, their customers, and then also their frontline. If they were… if they were selling

[00:05:20] Garth Jemmett: their products and services. And I’ve often said I’m living proof that God’s got a sense of humor, because I grew up being a student that was easily distracted in class.

[00:05:32] Garth Jemmett: I… I was often quite fidgety at school. And here I am working with all these businesses that are very technical and very complicated, and helping them unpack their stuff.

[00:05:45] Garth Jemmett: So that… kind of grew me into the space of working with more complicated and technical businesses, working a lot with actuaries, with accountants, with, heads of product that were actually making these products and services. So yeah, that was my initial journey of kind of walking into this space.

[00:06:06] Garth Jemmett: Full disclosure, I didn’t yet understand the concept of value proposition or value articulation. I was

[00:06:15] Garth Jemmett: Kind of all over the map, explaining change management, explaining strategy, packaging products and services, simply for

[00:06:24] Garth Jemmett: for sales teams and customers to understand them, or marketing teams. But the idea of value creation and value articulation was not kind of in my toolbox yet.

[00:06:35] Garth Jemmett: So yeah, that was… that was really my, my sort of, my… my journey into that space. It was kind of out of it, being a creative, moving into advertising, from advertising, leaving…

[00:06:48] Garth Jemmett: with this desire to… to make things visual, seeing the technology that was out, and the kind of opportunities that were there with making stuff quite budget-friendly for… for businesses using digital technology. And for many years, that was really what we did as a business.

[00:07:08] Graham Stephen: I mean, that seems to, you know, so you’ve told the background story in a few lines, and, you know, I think that glosses over, I guess, I guess, some of the learnings that happened along the way. So before we move on to, kind of, we explain stuff and value creation, and what you do there, I mean, let’s just go back to the, sort of.

[00:07:28] Graham Stephen: Early years, either growing up, or in the early days of starting your own business. You know, I think there’s a few other things there. What are some of the hard things that you experienced along that journey? You know, both in the sort of days of working with corporates, and in the days of also, you know, your first business. What are some of the things you learned about being an entrepreneur? What are some of the things you learned about yourself in those early days, Garth?

[00:07:52] Garth Jemmett: I think the interesting thing about the business, and

[00:07:58] Garth Jemmett: as I said, no one… I had had… a couple of business coaches and mentors over that time, and even…

[00:08:07] Garth Jemmett: If you’re… if you’re a business banking client, you’ll have business bankers that… that come in and engage with you.

[00:08:17] Garth Jemmett: At no stage did any of them talk about packaging and structuring your value, and, in a way that it doesn’t live with you, the founder. And so what was really, really hard for me was the business was started,

[00:08:34] Garth Jemmett: It was before I had kids, I still had hair. It was started by me in… in pretty much in, my flat in Weinberg, in Cape Town, South Africa. And what… what happened was it grew to 28 people.

[00:08:49] Garth Jemmett: Which is quite a… it’s… it’s… I mean, it doesn’t sound big in many people’s books, but in my books, it was big.

[00:08:57] Garth Jemmett: There was a lot of pressure to perform, and we were project-based, so no retainers. And the hardest thing there for me personally, was…

[00:09:09] Garth Jemmett: Plants wanted to meet me, and… I, I was really good at

[00:09:15] Garth Jemmett: I still am good, I hope I am. I’m really good.

[00:09:19] Graham Stephen: Did you say so yourself?

[00:09:20] Garth Jemmett: Yeah, I’ll say that humbly, but… I think because I get distracted easily, I listen very carefully. I force myself to listen very carefully, and my meeting notes are always really short, bullet-pointed, kind of double-spaced, so that it’s easy to remember. And I’ve always said, like, if I can’t send notes after a meeting, I haven’t listened properly in a meeting.

[00:09:41] Garth Jemmett: And what… what drove me crazy was I had 3 sales guys that worked for me, and they just really struggled. And I remember quite clearly getting quite annoyed with them, because, you know, I’m doing sales meetings with people.

[00:09:57] Garth Jemmett: Which is not kind of in your wheelhouse as a traditional creative person. You know, you’ve built this business to a stage.

[00:10:05] Garth Jemmett: As I said, my business partner is amazing. He’s a very, very good creative guy, but he’s also a very good, operation. My ex-business partner, sorry. And, so it was a perfect sort of yin-yang. You know, I was great at the client relationships.

[00:10:21] Garth Jemmett: I could meet, I could ideate and problem-solve, and he was really good with the creativity as well, so we kind of met in the middle.

[00:10:27] Garth Jemmett: But then, he was good operationally. He knew, kind of, what to do to run stuff, but the sales was always tough. Always, always, always tough. I…

[00:10:39] Garth Jemmett: I only realized much later on That, as a creative business, it’s dangerous to be in the space of selling your portfolio.

[00:10:50] Garth Jemmett: You… it’s actually the wrong thing to do, because often what happens is There’s deep tribal knowledge around why you’ve developed that stuff, and it’s hard to transfer that to a salesperson.

[00:11:04] Garth Jemmett: It’s really, really difficult to go, okay, why did you do this? What’s the story around this? Or to be able to pivot in a meeting when a client says, I’ve got this problem, and you go, oh, that’s funny. Let me show you what we’ve done for another client who’s, who’s got… has had a similar issue.

[00:11:19] Garth Jemmett: And, yeah, I mean, I’m literally… I never built that business for the pipeline. I built it purely out of relationships. I just… I just went to meet people, to introduce myself, and to demonstrate value. So that was really, really tough. It was probably the hardest

[00:11:41] Garth Jemmett: lesson I learned, and I only figured out things literally Excuse me, a few years ago, about how to actually structure

[00:11:50] Garth Jemmett: Your value in a way that it’s actually transferable. So that was probably the toughest. I think…

[00:11:56] Garth Jemmett: The other thing, and you and I have spoken about this. is to caution against scaling too fast. We… we scaled…

[00:12:06] Garth Jemmett: Year on year, we grew about 15% a year. This is actually not a bad number, but…

[00:12:12] Garth Jemmett: what we should have looked at doing was optimizing processes, instead of just continuing to add bodies. And the other thing

[00:12:23] Garth Jemmett: That’s… is really, really important for me. There’s something called Porter’s Five Forces, which talks about who kind of has control in the market, and, you know, who the disruptors, and, like, what’s happening in the market. We never paid close enough attention to that, so you can get

[00:12:41] Garth Jemmett: things that start to happen, for example, your client suddenly has more power, because now they have an internal team that sort of does what you do. So it takes away a bit of the power from you, so…

[00:12:54] Garth Jemmett: I would say Porta’s Fire Forces is something definitely to look at, but the… hands down, the hardest thing

[00:13:02] Garth Jemmett: was that sales piece. For a service business, it’s really tough. That was… that was some of the roughest thing… times that I had, was trying to get

[00:13:11] Garth Jemmett: Sales guys to understand what we were actually selling.

[00:13:14] Graham Stephen: And I guess in the sense that you experienced that problem firsthand, so you grew the business to a point.

[00:13:20] Graham Stephen: when you realize that, hey, I actually want to take a step back, and you hired salespeople, they weren’t able to keep up that momentum. So you went through that aha moment of, like.

[00:13:31] Graham Stephen: Oh, shucks, I know the business, I am the business, I can sell, but if I need other people to do this for me, they can’t. It doesn’t sit in their head. So it wasn’t a hard moment for you as a business.

[00:13:43] Graham Stephen: At what point, then, did you think, oh, wow, there must be other business owners struggling with this same thing? You know, and is that what led to, sort of, saying, well, how do I… how do I move beyond this, and how do I solve this problem for other business owners?

[00:14:00] Garth Jemmett: It’s… it’s a… it’s a great question, what, and it was a very indirect… it was an indirect way that I came to it. I…

[00:14:09] Garth Jemmett: My sister-in-law’s in change management. She’s a very, very good, very senior change management person in Old Mutual, South Africa, and I started having a conversation with her

[00:14:23] Garth Jemmett: around mapping out a business. So what kind of goes into a business? You’ve got front office, which is sales and marketing. You’ve got middle office, which is vision, mission, strategy, etc. And then you’ve got back office, which is really around your ops and your delivery and your finance… finances and stuff like that. And…

[00:14:42] Garth Jemmett: I started having a conversation with her around, can that be mapped? Can you actually put it into something that’s quite structured? And I developed a diagnostic around it. I wrote a book, as I love storytelling, and I wrote a book about coffee.

[00:14:58] Garth Jemmett: called on, I need another inspirational quote, I need coffee, and I set out a very simple

[00:15:04] Garth Jemmett: With a very simple objective. I wanted to explain it, but in 30 minutes. I wanted somebody to be able to sit down, a business owner who’s busy, and do that. And…

[00:15:13] Garth Jemmett: when I was finished with it, I was quite excited about it, but… I remember thinking…

[00:15:21] Garth Jemmett: I don’t know if this is solving the problem. Like, the problem here is… really around transferable value, as you say. It’s more of a sales… sales thing.

[00:15:31] Garth Jemmett: And so what I did is I went… I need to start looking at that quite seriously. And I, there’s a friend of mine in the UK, he’s actually living in Los Angeles now, Chris, fantastic guy. He’s XDL computers, very wise, he’s kind of late 60s. And he said something quite interesting to me. I met him through a mutual friend of mine in the UK,

[00:15:55] Garth Jemmett: And he said to me, Goth. You’ve got to pick a position on the field. So I said, what do you mean? So he said to me.

[00:16:03] Garth Jemmett: you’re doing all kinds of stuff. You’re explaining stuff, he said, but you’re doing… you’re explaining strategy, you explain change, and then you’re explaining… helping businesses explain their products and services. He said, there’s nothing wrong with that, he said, but you’ve got to really look at

[00:16:19] Garth Jemmett: Something you can dial into. And so what I did is I looked at my book, and I looked at… I took a sort of an… I did an audit of the work we’ve been doing over the years.

[00:16:29] Garth Jemmett: And I saw a lot of the work we were doing was related to helping businesses grow by explaining their value, simply. So it was always explanations around the product or the service, or the strategy related to that product or service. And…

[00:16:46] Garth Jemmett: So then, what I started doing is I thought, okay, obviously I will keep doing strategy work, I love it. I’ll keep doing change management stuff, because it’s good to do, but I will make my core focus

[00:17:00] Garth Jemmett: really around, how do I actually… distill and decant value into something that is easy to articulate for a business. Now,

[00:17:12] Garth Jemmett: the businesses I was working with, well, I still am working with, a lot of them have got what’s called intermediated… they’re intermediated businesses, so they will have a channel sales arm that is selling for that business. And those people, more often than not, they don’t necessarily understand the sort of intricacies of that product like a product person does.

[00:17:31] Garth Jemmett: So you’ve got to package stuff in a specific way. So… so what I started doing is I started going, okay.

[00:17:38] Garth Jemmett: If you have to… Structure a way to articulate your value. what are the fundamentals of that? Like, if you have to break it down into first principles, like, what are the… what are the… the kind of building blocks of value where…

[00:17:53] Garth Jemmett: you can create. almost a code… not almost, but you can create a codified system that actually can get into a founder’s head, or can get into a product marketer’s head, because I work a lot with product marketers as well.

[00:18:08] Garth Jemmett: Or someone that’s heading up, channel sales or sales enablement. And you can really…

[00:18:15] Garth Jemmett: Decant that magic and turn it into something that someone can use to solve.

[00:18:21] Garth Jemmett: So that was the journey I went on. I started going, okay. what are these building blocks? And I started running ideation sessions with founders, but still with, product marketers, and I would map out and ask them questions. So I just used sticky notes in Miro and start to map stuff out. And then over time, you start to see pattern recognition.

[00:18:44] Garth Jemmett: In things, and I started to see those, and that was super interesting. So you’re working across businesses, and you’re seeing similar questions come up as people are sharing.

[00:18:55] Garth Jemmett: So, so what I did is I… I created, you can call it a value map, I guess. It’s a… it’s a 16-grid

[00:19:04] Garth Jemmett: 4×4, grid, which basically… Yeah, it’s a matrix, and it asks 16 questions, and there’s 4 categories in that.

[00:19:16] Garth Jemmett: But those, essentially, are the building blocks of value articulation. And when I… when I…

[00:19:24] Garth Jemmett: I did it. I started testing it in the actual collateral we were creating.

[00:19:30] Garth Jemmett: And I was like, holy crap, that actually works. This frickin’ works, which was quite exciting, you know? So, because for years, I had been, as I said earlier.

[00:19:38] Garth Jemmett: Creating digital content and collateral for businesses. So, a lot of sales enablement, a lot of, packaging stuff to give to people to basically go out there and sell it or market the business.

[00:19:53] Garth Jemmett: when I sort of reverse-engineered it, and kind of based it a bit on I’d read something… Elon Musk had talked about first principles, and I thought, hmm, that’s really, really interesting. I wonder if there’s a first principles concept here, because the problem you’ve got, if you look at the value proposition canvas, as good as it is.

[00:20:12] Garth Jemmett: Once you’ve mapped it out, Where do you go with it? How do you.

[00:20:17] Graham Stephen: doing that in.

[00:20:17] Garth Jemmett: your pitch deck. How do you turn that into an explainer video? How do you turn that into some kind of talk track, or sales aid, or solution sheet? People get stuck. They totally get stuck, so they get excited around the strategy session, but when it comes to the actual execution.

[00:20:34] Garth Jemmett: Which is where I’ve always… I’ve always been strong in strategy, but the execution stuff we’ve delivered for years, they go, oh, we’ve… we’ve done… we’ve done the value proposition canvas, it’s great.

[00:20:45] Garth Jemmett: But now, how do we turn that into the thing? Like, how do we actually get.

[00:20:49] Graham Stephen: Listen.

[00:20:50] Garth Jemmett: in front of. and get this into the hands of a salesperson. So…

[00:20:56] Garth Jemmett: So yeah, that was a journey for me post that other book I wrote, and…

[00:21:01] Graham Stephen: Yeah.

[00:21:01] Garth Jemmett: it, yeah, it was… it was really interesting, and I’ve pretty much based the business now, how I work.

[00:21:08] Garth Jemmett: Because I function more around being a consultancy now.

[00:21:12] Graham Stephen: Yeah.

[00:21:12] Garth Jemmett: Are pretty much based.

[00:21:14] Graham Stephen: So, in essence, I’m gonna jump in here, Garth. What you do is you basically work with Founders, owners, sales teams.

[00:21:22] Graham Stephen: And help them map out and articulate their values simply, so that they can sell better, reduce friction in terms of their processes, in terms of their internal operations, and most importantly, also.

[00:21:39] Graham Stephen: extract that value out of the… or extract the, sort of, IP out of the owner’s head.

[00:21:44] Garth Jemmett: Makes sense.

[00:21:45] Graham Stephen: so that the business can function without them. I mean, that’s at the heart of what you do, right?

[00:21:50] Garth Jemmett: Yes, yes, and you’re making it scalable, that’s the key, is it’s… it’s not… it’s not sitting in…

[00:21:57] Garth Jemmett: one part of the business. It’s sitting in everything. And I mean, the… you know, the…

[00:22:04] Garth Jemmett: The things that… If you’re happy for me to share, there was a couple of light bulb moments that have gone on for me in the last.

[00:22:10] Graham Stephen: Yeah, Beth, go ahead.

[00:22:12] Garth Jemmett: The, the one was… I read Josh Kaufman’s Personal MBA, which is a good book. It’s all about, basically, how money flows through a business, to kind of create a business. And there’s a quote in that book which really kind of

[00:22:30] Garth Jemmett: pricked my ears up. It said… I think it’s a quote he borrows from someone else, but he says, a business is a repeatable process, so repeatable, that delivers something of value, which a customer is prepared to pay a price for, which yields a profit for the owner.

[00:22:47] Garth Jemmett: So, value, so it’s repeatable, customer sees the value, prepared to pay a price, yields a profit.

[00:22:55] Garth Jemmett: So that was the first thing. The second thing, kind of on this journey, as you’re sort of looking through the lens, the second thing was, Michael Lanning is… was a McKinsey consultant in the 1980s.

[00:23:07] Garth Jemmett: he… he coined the… he was instrumental in the phrase, value proposition, the term. McKenzie kind of took it and ran with it, but…

[00:23:16] Garth Jemmett: He said a business is a value delivery system. And I was like, holy crap, that’s interesting. And what he said is, your value proposition runs across everything.

[00:23:27] Garth Jemmett: So, you’ve got vision, mission, strategy, all of that stuff, but it really kind of comes to a head in the market.

[00:23:33] Garth Jemmett: Around what exactly you’re about. And there’s lots of stuff in that, you know, like, your value proposition is based on your positioning in the market, it’s based on, like, like, the outcomes you promised, your processes around delivery, etc. But so that was the other one.

[00:23:47] Garth Jemmett: And then the… the kind of third one for… for me was… was really around,

[00:23:54] Garth Jemmett: There’s a design consultancy in the States called RDO, and they talk about

[00:24:01] Garth Jemmett: value as well, but they talk about it through the lens of, is it desirable? Is it feasible, and is it viable? So, desirable, do people want it? Feasible, can you build it? And viable, is it… is it financially viable?

[00:24:15] Garth Jemmett: Yeah. And so all of those things really, for me, got me thinking, hang on a second.

[00:24:22] Garth Jemmett: Value creation is the heart of business, and if you look even at your NPS score in a business.

[00:24:28] Garth Jemmett: If there’s friction. It’s often because you… you’re extracting value from the customer. Maybe your processes are frustrating, or whatever, so you’ve promised you’re going to deliver this.

[00:24:40] Garth Jemmett: But the process to get the customer there is frustrating. But it all ties to your value proposition. So, you know, so things like that, you start to go, okay, like, that’s really the heart of everything.

[00:24:53] Garth Jemmett: Do people perceive the value? Are they prepared to pay for it? And is it profitable? So you’ve always got to be looking at stuff through that lens. So yeah, that was…

[00:25:02] Garth Jemmett: that was kind of the big thing for me, the big kind of aha moment, I guess, and… the sort of last thing, just coming into Land Day, was there’s an interesting…

[00:25:15] Garth Jemmett: Because a lot of the businesses I work with are complex or technical, but not all of them. Not all of them. Some of them just struggle with positioning and messaging.

[00:25:23] Garth Jemmett: But there’s something called the expert’s curse, and if you look at it as a pyramid. The top of the pyramid, you’ve got the customer.

[00:25:33] Garth Jemmett: or you’ve got your sales team, they really want big picture. They just want high-level stuff. At the base of the pyramid, which is quite wide, you’ve got the expert, and the expert is really, really good

[00:25:46] Garth Jemmett: at explaining stuff like an expert. So, what ends up happening between the top, which is your customer, and the base, which is the expert, you get a… you get what’s called a knowledge gap. So, if you look at strategy execution, it’s a classic example.

[00:26:03] Garth Jemmett: Your executives are experts, they have deep knowledge in the business, but those that need to execute at the top, they’ve just got… they’ve got just big picture, you know, they don’t fully understand the intricacies of it, so…

[00:26:16] Garth Jemmett: It… it made me realize that You need to… you need to be able to package stuff at the tip of the pyramid really simply, but also be able to cascade it down to the base, where you can go into detail. So then somebody can move up and down that.

[00:26:33] Garth Jemmett: But the key there is, and I’m obviously talking about transferable value, the key there is to make it

[00:26:40] Garth Jemmett: visual, to bring in storytelling, and to make it very easy to comprehend. No matter how complicated the business is, it’s possible. So…

[00:26:49] Graham Stephen: Yeah, and I think, guys, one of the things there, I mean, I’ll just highlight that, is you mentioned the word storytelling. You look at whether it’s a good movie, or a good book, or whatever the case might be, no matter how it’s written and that, you know, the classics, all of a…

[00:27:01] Graham Stephen: have a really powerful story, and the story is really simple, but it’s the storytelling which is key. But I want to move on a little bit, and there’s one idea I want to explore here, is…

[00:27:11] Graham Stephen: you know, is… as you’ve explained it, it all seems pretty obvious. It seems pretty straightforward. You take a step back and you go, well, this is… this is not hard, and obviously that’s you doing your job at explaining the concept of simplicity, but… but why is it so hard for business owners, founders, organizations.

[00:27:31] Graham Stephen: to do this. Like, in your experience, why do people struggle to actually accept that you need to package and present and explain things simply? What’s… what’s holding them back?

[00:27:43] Garth Jemmett: I think it depends on where they are on the journey as, as, as entrepreneurs.

[00:27:51] Garth Jemmett: or businesses. I think… And I have noticed the difference working with executives, or managers, senior managers in corporates versus entrepreneurs. Executives and senior managers, they want to throw money at it.

[00:28:08] Garth Jemmett: And the reason they want it fixed is their KPIs are linked to it, so they know they need to make it happen. They don’t want to muck about, they want to get it done.

[00:28:18] Garth Jemmett: I think a lot of entrepreneurs depending on where they are on the journey, they think they can do it themselves. They think they can palm it off to maybe chat GPT, or to, you know, someone in the business that’s kind of working, like, is maybe a sort of, Swiss Army knife person in the business that can do a bit of everything. But the reality is,

[00:28:41] Garth Jemmett: What you really need is you need an expert to sit with you and extract the knowledge, because,

[00:28:50] Garth Jemmett: The issue there is, there are certain things you don’t know. And you are way too close to… to the stuff yourself to be able to actually take a step back. I mean, it’s the reason people go for therapy and all kinds of stuff. You can’t fix yourself, right? Yeah. You… you need perspective, so…

[00:29:09] Garth Jemmett: A lot of times, the founders that I work with, I mean, I worked with some tech founders recently.

[00:29:15] Garth Jemmett: And I chatted to them afterwards, and they were all in disagreement around naming conventions of certain things in the product.

[00:29:21] Garth Jemmett: So I said to them, how are you guys ever going to have a go-to-market strategy if you’re not in alignment there? But we did a session, we mapped out stuff.

[00:29:29] Garth Jemmett: And we standardized a whole bunch of what they do, so it’s… it… I think if it’s painful enough, people will take it seriously, and the real big thing there for me is…

[00:29:44] Garth Jemmett: If you want to grow market share, and you want to grow your sales, and you don’t want to always be the bottleneck in the business, you’re gonna have to bottle your magic. You’re gonna have to…

[00:29:56] Garth Jemmett: sort of look at it and go, how do I decant this into something that I can share across my business? And the reality is, as well, you’re going to have to come back to it, because if you add another product line on, or you go into a new market, or

[00:30:10] Garth Jemmett: something else happens in the business. You have to… you’re gonna have to look at it again. So it’s a… it’s a living thing, you know, it doesn’t… it doesn’t stop… stop there, but…

[00:30:20] Garth Jemmett: What’s good about this process I’ve created is it’.

[00:30:25] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I guess what you’re saying as well, sorry to talk over you.

[00:30:28] Garth Jemmett: No, that’s fine.

[00:30:29] Graham Stephen: But, you know, his founders are almost too close to it. It’s like, you know, often the smartest kids don’t make great teachers because, you know, they’re making the connections in their mind, but when they need to explain it to somebody else.

[00:30:42] Graham Stephen: they often don’t grasp the steps that need to happen in between. So often the kids that struggle at school

[00:30:48] Graham Stephen: make great teachers, because they’ve had to think about, okay, how do I put this together? It also reminds me of another quote, I think it was Winston Churchill who said, you know, if you want me to write a long speech, I can do it quickly. If you want me to write a short speech, I’m going to need some time.

[00:31:03] Garth Jemmett: Yeah, it was… And I guess that’s the strike.

[00:31:05] Graham Stephen: you, you know, you’re dealing with here is, is…

[00:31:08] Garth Jemmett: So…

[00:31:09] Graham Stephen: He said, because Maya’s hot.

[00:31:10] Garth Jemmett: Mark Twain. It was Mark Twain. I remember I did a mini MBA, this is actually such a good, good example you’ve used. I did a mini MBA with Mark Ritson. I did one on branding, and I did one on marketing, and long story short.

[00:31:26] Garth Jemmett: he… he did… he was doing some strategic stuff for the business. I think it was, like, a strategic two-day art or whatever, and…

[00:31:35] Garth Jemmett: They took a break at lunchtime, and he went to the bar to just get something to drink. And one of the execs came up to him and said, this stuff is really easy that you do.

[00:31:45] Garth Jemmett: And, so Mark, Mark looked at him and he said.

[00:31:51] Garth Jemmett: Tell me the other guys that were in here before you got me in. He said, how did it work out for them? And this guy said, oh, terrible, we didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. They just presented us with

[00:32:03] Garth Jemmett: thick. Decks, and things that we needed to do, which we just never actioned on. So Mark said… Mark said to him, exactly. He said, simplicity’s hard. He said, I’ll make it sound simple.

[00:32:15] Garth Jemmett: Because I’ve walked a hard road to actually figure it out. But that doesn’t mean that it’s… it’s taking time to figure that stuff out, you know?

[00:32:25] Garth Jemmett: serves…

[00:32:26] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. I think just kind of coming in to land on some of these themes, you know, I’ve got two more questions to you for now, and I think we’re probably going to need to have a follow-up podcast on this, but the first question is, can you just share an example, without naming any client names or anything, where, you know.

[00:32:48] Graham Stephen: Yeah, simplifying their narrative, or their sales positioning, you were able to really change the trajectory or the course of that… of that company, or campaign, or operation.

[00:32:58] Garth Jemmett: Yeah, sure. Sure, so… so I won’t give any names away, but, big cyber business,

[00:33:06] Garth Jemmett: they… they approached me to… to do some… to help them tell their story. And the reason they needed to do it is they were getting, the big four consultancies in to help

[00:33:21] Garth Jemmett: basically roll that stuff out into business. It was all around compliance, and compliance around data privacy and stuff like that.

[00:33:29] Garth Jemmett: And when I looked at the solution that they were presenting.

[00:33:35] Garth Jemmett: It’s a platform business, first of all. There’s lots of moving parts, and…

[00:33:41] Garth Jemmett: If you’re gonna use… if you’re gonna be using, implementers to actually do this within the business. You’re going to be sharing that stuff with Pricewater Coopers, or Deloitte, or whatever. They need to know how to be able to explain this business. And…

[00:34:00] Garth Jemmett: we… we mapped it out. I’ve got a specific method that I use once we’ve distilled those blocks of value.

[00:34:07] Garth Jemmett: To actually structure the, the, the, the presentation in a way where it’s really easy to navigate. So, long story short, without getting into the technical details, it’s…

[00:34:19] Garth Jemmett: it’s an interactive PDF, and it navigates like a website, so it’s really, really powerful and really easy to use. And, the head of channel sales at the time, we engaged afterwards, and I said to him, how has this worked out? He said to me.

[00:34:36] Garth Jemmett: It’s ramped up onboarding time by 50%. He said it’s made it… not ramped up, it’s made it shorter. It’s made it quicker, so… so he said, guys.

[00:34:49] Garth Jemmett: are taking the story we’ve created, and because it’s structured in a way, as I mentioned earlier with that pyramid, where you’ve got big picture at the top and you can drill down into detail, your comprehension

[00:35:04] Garth Jemmett: Goes through the roof, because you’re not having to like, the cognitive load is reduced, and you can actually go, geez, I understand this stuff. Not only that, it’s really easy to navigate this thing and figure it out.

[00:35:14] Garth Jemmett: So… so that, for me, was one of them, which was… which was really good. I’ve just done another piece of work, also, believe it or not, with a silo business in the States. Same story, they needed to enable their sales team, so not external partners, actual sales team.

[00:35:33] Garth Jemmett: And, I had a chat to the head of sales enablement afterwards, and she said, our reps are shooting out the lights for this thing because they can cross-sell with the tool, and it explains the story really simply and visually.

[00:35:49] Garth Jemmett: They are able to have very meaningful sales conversations. Without kind of going off track. So they can share stuff, talk about it, it’s visual, and then if the client wants more detail, they can click down into it. So those are just two examples, but there’s… there’s others.

[00:36:07] Garth Jemmett: But what I often say, just coming into land. is if the aha moment isn’t there, you’ve got a problem. In other words, if a client’s having to look and really try and understand, and the value is not immediate.

[00:36:21] Garth Jemmett: You… you’ve got a… you’ve got a challenge, and that’s why… what I said earlier, the visual storytelling, the making sure the concept is realized, and it’s clear and it’s simple is very, very important.

[00:36:34] Garth Jemmett: Sorry.

[00:36:35] Graham Stephen: Yeah, so because you’ve simplified the story and the value proposition that you… the salespeople can also use the time to build relationships. They can use the time to close, ask questions, rather than spend the time going through a detailed deck trying to explain something complex. So, as you said, it not only reduces the cognitive load, but it also

[00:36:54] Graham Stephen: It allows more time for closing, rather than, than explaining.

[00:37:00] Garth Jemmett: Totally, and I mean, Jack Welsh, another kind of instrumental

[00:37:06] Garth Jemmett: paper of my thinking was Jack Walsh. Jack Walsh, when he ran General Electric, his… his execs would come in and they would say, like, Jack, Jack, can you… can you look at this pitch I’ve got? You know, and what Jack would say to them, and I don’t know if this is… if this is hearsay, but it’s what I read in an article, he would say, great, Graham.

[00:37:26] Garth Jemmett: I’m not gonna look at your pitch deck. He said, I want you to draw it on one page for me. All the thinking that’s in the pitch deck, draw it on one page for me.

[00:37:35] Garth Jemmett: And they would apparently leave his office to have him, but the reason he did that is he didn’t want to solve their pitch deck for them, because people think in PowerPoint, and that’s the biggest mistake you can make. So they don’t actually take time to step back and actually crystallize the story.

[00:37:52] Garth Jemmett: And then, as a result, they can’t explain it on a page. And that’s the starting point of everything. You need… your articulation needs to be really crisp. Like, if you can explain it on a page, you’ve understood it.

[00:38:05] Garth Jemmett: That’s the key.

[00:38:06] Graham Stephen: And I think… I think, I think Jeff Bezos did something similar at Amazon, you know, every Amazon meeting, you’ve got to come in with a one-page memo, and that forces people to think at what is the core, what is at the heart of what I’m trying to say here? So, Garth, I mean, we… we’re almost out of time, and, you know, I think there’s so much we can unpack with this.

[00:38:25] Graham Stephen: But I kind of want to just give you the opportunity, you know, if you were to leave a founder, and then we’ll have a quick rapid-fire set of questions, but if you want to leave a founder with any one

[00:38:36] Graham Stephen: sort of thought. What would that be? Somebody listening in today is thinking, shucks, you know, like, I’m struggling with sales, I’m struggling with value articulation. What would the one thing you would leave with somebody listening today?

[00:38:51] Garth Jemmett: the… the thing that I would… I would leave them with is…

[00:38:57] Garth Jemmett: I would leave them with this. A very practical take on it. Ask your clients 3 questions.

[00:39:05] Garth Jemmett: What is the biggest value we add? Because a lot of people build stuff in isolation, but aren’t asking their clients, what is the biggest value we add?

[00:39:12] Garth Jemmett: Why does it matter? to you, because then you’re getting the motivation. And lastly, when you think of us, what one word or phrase comes to mind? So…

[00:39:24] Garth Jemmett: What’s the biggest value? Why does it matter to you? And, when you think of us, what one word or phrase comes to mind?

[00:39:33] Garth Jemmett: The reason that matters is founders work in isolation, and all the founders that I work with, it’s an exercise I take them through. They are so reluctant to ask their clients.

[00:39:42] Garth Jemmett: Value is seen through your client’s eyes, not through yours. That’s key. That’s absolutely key.

[00:39:49] Garth Jemmett: So, that’s what I.

[00:39:50] Graham Stephen: And that’s a principle in business valuation as well. We always tell that to our clients, is beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, ultimately. You know, it’s not what you think your business is worth, it’s what a prospective buyer or counterparty thinks your business is worth, and that principle applies, yeah, when it comes to selling anything, ultimately, right?

[00:40:07] Garth Jemmett: Yep, yep.

[00:40:09] Graham Stephen: Yep. Guy, I think, you know, it’s really been an invaluable discussion. I think there’s so many nuggets, and there’s so many different avenues that we can explore, but we do try to keep our podcast down to under 45 minutes, so yeah, I think we’re going to have to have a follow-up to this, but before we wrap up.

[00:40:28] Graham Stephen: We always have a rapid-fire question, just to get to know our guests a little bit more. So, top of mind, first answer that comes to mind.

[00:40:36] Graham Stephen: I’ve got about 5 or 6 questions for you. So let’s start with the first one. What’s the best business book that you’ve read recently?

[00:40:43] Garth Jemmett: best business book recently, there is a very interesting book on the 2008 crash called Super Crash.

[00:40:52] Garth Jemmett: by Daryl Cunningham. It’s a graphic novel on the 2008 stock market crash. I highly recommend it. He’s a… he’s a British author. It’s absolutely brilliant, so… and it’s business-related. It’s really, really interesting. It talks about futures and how they work in the market.

[00:41:08] Graham Stephen: Awesome, super crash, okay. Super crash. What concept do you… what concept do you think more people in business should understand?

[00:41:17] Garth Jemmett: Make simple notes. It sounds crazy, but… A lot of people vomit notes on a page. If you can bullet point your notes and make them really short and sweet, it shows that you’ve understood, and for me, that ties directly into active listening.

[00:41:34] Garth Jemmett: If you’re working with a customer, make sure your notes are crisp and clear, and it shows you’ve understood. So, I would say those are linked for me really, really.

[00:41:46] Graham Stephen: To put a controversial take in here, a lot of people nowadays are outsourcing that to AI, and I think, you know, my personal opinion on that is that’s a real danger, because you have a conversation, you’re not actively listening, you’re thinking.

[00:41:57] Graham Stephen: something else is going to summarize it, but that’s a whole separate conversation. So, we Gen X, I guess, so maybe the Millennials and the Gen Zs will disagree with us.

[00:42:08] Graham Stephen: That’s true.

[00:42:08] Garth Jemmett: Andrews.

[00:42:10] Graham Stephen: Yeah, something founders overcomplicate.

[00:42:17] Garth Jemmett: strategy. I would say strategy needs to be simple. It’s about choice, and it needs to be… it needs to be super simple. I think founders overcomplicate it.

[00:42:31] Graham Stephen: Awesome. Okay, 3 more questions. One company that you admire for their clarity of strategy?

[00:42:39] Garth Jemmett: There is a shoe company, started by two French guys, called Veja, V-E-J-A, And

[00:42:48] Garth Jemmett: what I really like about them, long story short. They left their business in shoes to start a shoe business, went to China, they saw sweatshops, they decided they were going to actually create a sustainable business, ended up working with local farmers in Brazil, and they’ve developed their full value chain around that.

[00:43:10] Garth Jemmett: And everything in their business is all about that. right down to the fact that you can return your shoes to them, and they will repair them and give them back to you. So, what I like there is, although it’s a shoe business, and it’s not a tech business, the story is very clear, and it ties to their strategy.

[00:43:31] Garth Jemmett: And it also has emotional resonance. When you look at it and you listen to it, it’s great. Plus, they share the journey of that story and all the mistakes they’ve made on their website. So the stuff-ups they make, they share it all, boy. They’re like, we tried this, it didn’t work.

[00:43:47] Garth Jemmett: So, I would say Vejo, for me, is a really interesting story.

[00:43:52] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. Okay, two really easy questions to end off. Coffee or tea?

[00:43:56] Garth Jemmett: I’m a coffee guy, black coffee.

[00:43:59] Graham Stephen: So you’ve been in the UK for 5 years, you haven’t become a tea drinker yet.

[00:44:04] Garth Jemmett: I used to drink a lot of tea, but I prefer coffee black, no sugar.

[00:44:09] Graham Stephen: Awesome, and morning person, I know the answer to this one, morning person or night owl?

[00:44:13] Garth Jemmett: I’m a morning person. I’m up at 5, so…

[00:44:18] Graham Stephen: 5AM clap. You get your… Before everyone else comes up.

[00:44:22] Garth Jemmett: Exactly.

[00:44:25] Graham Stephen: Garth, I mean, I think this has just been such a great conversation.

[00:44:29] Garth Jemmett: Thanks for having me.

[00:44:30] Graham Stephen: me, one of the key takeouts is just, yeah, I mean, the importance of simplicity and clarity, whether it’s sales, whether it’s transferring value to build systems and processes, there’s so many applications of this.

[00:44:43] Garth Jemmett: Hmm.

[00:44:44] Graham Stephen: If anyone listening wants to find out more about your work, or they want to get hold of you, what’s the best way to reach out?

[00:44:52] Garth Jemmett: They can find me on LinkedIn, if they want, just have to look up Garth Jennett on LinkedIn. I’ve been a bit slack on LinkedIn lately, I’ve been very busy. Otherwise, they can email me, Garth at weexplainedstuff.com. That’s just my name, weexplainedStuff.com. Otherwise, they can fill in one of our web forms on our website, so…

[00:45:12] Graham Stephen: Fantastic, Garth, and to everyone listening, thanks for joining us on the bizval Podcast today. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe on our YouTube channel and share it with somebody else who’s

[00:45:23] Graham Stephen: building a business, or needs to hear this message. Ultimately, you know, if you want to create a business of value, you’ve got to understand value, you’ve got to be able to articulate that, and you’ve got to, you know, understand the key drivers behind that. So, thanks for listening in today, and hope to see you on a future episode of the bizval Podcast.

[00:45:40] Graham Stephen: Ciao, everyone.

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