This week, we hear from entrepreneur, Rael Bricker, about some of this life experiences in business. He shares how he has worked to simplify processes and manage productivity through psychology and more! From launching a start up in education after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa to managing a multi-million dollar loan business. Rael’s down to earth encouragement to just get started in business is an encouraging conversation!
Welcome to Business Talk Sister Gawk! I’m Bekkah! And today’s episode title is “The Secrets to Simplifying Business.” And with us today we have someone from Australia who got up so early in the morning to be with us which we are so grateful for! From being six thousand feet underground to starting an education business that grew to over 4,000+ students to spending years working in Venture Capital we have Rael with us! He’s seen it all! He’s listed companies on two international stock exchanges and his financial services group has settled more than 3 billion in loans in the last 18 years! Thank you so much for being with us today!
Rael: Hey! Good morning! I’m rocking and rolling! First coffee down. *all laugh*
What Type of Business Do You Do?
Bekkah: Yeah, so the first question we have for you today is what do you do right now?
Rael: Right now I spend about 50% of my time in the financial services group. I still have four and a half thousand clients who still want to talk to me about building their businesses, building their retirement, building the property portfolios, and the other 50% of my time is as a professional speaker. Pre-covid I was obviously international. I was traveling the world having a great time. A little bit more Zoom-based now. I had to build a studio so I could present as if I was on stage. I run a couple of small business academies. Four-month-long, small business academies as a professional speaker and mentor.
How Did You Come to Own Many Different Businesses?
Ruthie: Nice! Okay, so give us a little bit of your background as to why you do what you do now.
Rael: My “why” is really about giving. It’s about sharing. It’s about the fact that I’m interested as a person in other people’s success and that applies equally as a professional speaker. I’ve been successful. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been in the right place at the right time in different businesses, but for me, it’s now about going in and making real change with people and seeing the change happen.
I was talking to a mentor the other day and I said to him, “The most amazing change of the 2020-2021 pandemic has been that I went from spending time on big stages where you spend an hour talking to people and you have a great experience and you get great feedback from them and you have this adrenaline high because you’ve been on stage. But truly the 2020 period where I ran small business academies for four months and I really got into the depth of people’s businesses and saw real change that made me much happier!” I still love the big stage but I really love making change and helping people become their own change agents.
Where to Start to Simplifying in Business
Bekkah: Yeah! Well, and I can definitely imagine, too, going from getting instantaneous feedback to then podcasting or getting online and having not instantaneous anymore is probably a really big change. My question with that is how do you do what you do now?
Rael: How do I do it? I have shifted my business model from keynote speaking which keynote speaking let’s face facts is great because you get paid a lot of money to be on stage and share ideas and the role of a keynote speaker is one of inspiration more than education. And I think that’s part of it. It’s lovely, it’s fantastic inspiring people but the real satisfaction comes from the education.
So how do I do it? It’s a combination of sharing ideas. I mean I wrote a book that was published in 2018 called “Lessons Learned Since Business School” and the book is based on and the title of this episode of your podcast is “The Secrets to Simplifying Business”. The back of the book says, “Business is not complicated. Business is simple just dive in and adjust your course while you’re moving.”
How do I do it? I get into people’s minds and I get into their businesses and work with them to not overanalyze. To actually make decisions based on their best opinion rather than 27 spreadsheets, because that’s part of simplifying things. It’s a part of, if you’re a true entrepreneur you’re going to back yourself and that’s what I do. That’s how I do it. I will spend time understanding your busines, understanding its positioning, understanding who their target audience is. And then being that little annoying voice on your shoulder who says, “But what about.”
You know, a classic example a client recently is in the business of she runs high-end day spas and uses some very, very high-end products. I got into the conversation with her about, “So who is your audience?” and she sort of explained it and I said, “Well, what about this?” and I threw another example at her of an audience and she went. “Oh, I’ve never really thought about them being, not necessarily an audience, but a competition,” and I said, “Well, but surely they are a competition!”
We went into that she has this exclusive day spa with these really expensive products and how does she compare her long-term relationship with her clients who come to her every month or every two months or every week for a facial using these really expensive products to someone who goes to the top-end spot at a six-star hotel and has a four-hour experience there but has no relationship with the people? They come in, they have no relationship with the therapists, or the therapists or just employed people there who may or may not be there the next month.
She’d never ever thought of the fact that those big hotels with their really, really fancy, slick spa experiences are competition. She saw the local beautician who has a regular stream of clients and they want a better product as a competition. And once you started positioning herself as competing with the major hotel chain with their very fancy spa it changed the whole outlook on how to market her business.
That’s the how. It’s getting into that depth with people and then you see the lights come on in the eyes! You know, at a networking function someone says to me, “What do you do or how do you do it?” and I go, “I want to see the lights come on in people’s eyes! I want to see the real change happening!”
An Example of How to Simplify Business
Ruthie: Yeah, so it sounds like you just kind of simplified her approach to looking at kind of her vision for her business! What was your first experience kind of simplifying business?
Rael: In my mortgage business – well, I’ll start with the mortgage business because that’s probably the last 20 years. And the last 20 years has seen the growth of technology and everybody sort of goes on the bandwagon of, “Oh, have you got a great CRM system? And you know how much data do you keep? And how do you use your CRM system for scheduling?” Well, I’ll go back probably 15 years and one of my PAs and there’s a whole story around why I have a number of PAs in that business or EAs or whatever you want to you call them. Mortgage assistances, but one of them had a pile of 35 or 40 files standing on her desk and she looked at me and said, “If this pile of files falls and hits the ground I’m resigning.”
I looked at her and I went, “Okay,” So the first simple thing I did was I got rubber bands. You know, elastic bands, and I made everyone in the staff put elastic bands around the paper files. Now that might sound totally silly but I looked at this knowledge, “If that pile of paper falls on the ground it’s going to take us weeks to sort out whose papers go where.” So a simple, simple thing in the business of doing that, but more importantly out of that was born something where I watched their productivity.
I saw that they would pick up the file on the top of the pile and then go, “Oh, this is too hard! I’ll just put it six files down and I’ll do the easy stuff today because I’m a bit hungover or I’ve had a late night or early morning fight to the boyfriend or whatever.” So I looked at their productivity and I found that all the hard stuff was being pushed to the bottom of the pile and so I came up with an incredibly simple system! There’s a whole chapter in the book on it called “The Monday to Friday System.” And what it is each person has a whiteboard next to their desk with five columns on it marked “Monday to Friday”.
I looked at it and I said, “Well, if they’ve got 40 files which is about the number of mortgages each assistant was processing. I broke that down into five days that’s only eight files. Then I put a shelving system in and the shelves had shelves marked “Monday to Friday.” Each of them broke down their 40 files into eight per day which made, from a psychological point of view, they would walk in and on a Monday morning, take eight files off a shelf, not 40. They didn’t see this mountain of a workload in front of them they only saw eight files! That’s all they had to do that day.
How does the system work in total simplicity? They would open a file and let’s say it’s Bekkah’s file just picking on one of your names, right? They’d say, “Right. This is Bekkah’s file.” They’d call ABC bank and the bank would say, “Oh, well! Listen we’re still processing it. We will have an answer for you on Wednesday!” Then the process would be to send Bekkah an email saying, “Hey, Bekkah, just spoke to the bank. We expect an answer on Wednesday. I’ll come back to you then.” She’d go over to her whiteboard or he would I’ve got both genders of assistance. They would write Bekkah Anderson under the “Wednesday” column, because that’s when we next have to touch that file, and take the physical paper file, and put it on the shelf marked “Wednesday.”
Simple as that. Then it’s off their mind. It’s off their pile of work. It’s gone from their workflow for that day. Exactly what we would use complicated CRM systems for. But this was incredibly simple. It predated most of the CRMs but even today we still use it even with a computerized CRM system.
It means that me as the boss or my right-hand person who’s a shareholder in the business, they can walk in as I do most days when I’m in the office and if I’m away then he does it and sits with each of the team members and looks at their whiteboard and goes, “Tell me about this person’s file, this person’s file, this person’s. Where can I serve you? Where can I add value to you in that process?” It has multiple uses. One is simplifying the workflow tremendously, but the other one was about just being able to visually see what they’re up to and see where we can help them.
Ways You Any Business Can Simplify Right Now
Bekkah: What are ways any business could simplify right now?
Rael: I mean again using an example, I went to one of the major banks in Australia. I went to the processing office just because I was invited on a tour of the processing office. I walked in and they had a flow chart of their business stuck up on the wall or walls because it was so complicated. The flow chart was five-foot-high by probably 10-foot wide. Okay, and I looked at this and I went, “I understand they’re a bank and they’re trying to mitigate risk and all those other things,” but I looked at it and I’m from my simplistic “business is simple, business is not complicated” view of the world.
I went, “When you get a new employee in if you want to make them productive. The first thing you’re going to do is put them in front of that chart for three weeks and they have to memorize it!” That’s just crazy! You can’t run a business on that. So I encourage people around to try and work out their business on a single sheet of – I was going to say A4 but in the US you call it “letter”. Letter paper, that’s it! A simple piece of paper out of your printer. You should be able to draw out the entire process of your business on one piece of paper.
Now each block on that process may be another process in and of itself, but I bring it down to simple terms. If you’ve got a new staff member starting on Monday morning at eight o’clock by nine o’clock you should have been able to explain to them at a high level how the entire organization works no matter how big it is. So that’s one way of simplifying your business is making sure, then at each step, you need an external third party and that’s not an advert for coaches or consultants or anything that I do or mentoring, but you need an external third party who looks at it and goes, “Why?”
That’s a question a lot of entrepreneurs don’t ask! They go, “Oh, we’ve always done it like that!” Or business owners, “We’ve always done it like that so we’ve never thought of asking the question ‘why’.” So that whole simplification process has two parts to it. It’s trying to explain your business to a new employee in one hour in terms of how it works and then when you’re doing that questioning each and every step in the process and saying, “Is there a better way we can do this or why do we do it this way?”
Ruthie: That is so cool! I love that! Being able to put all your processes on one page and then so when you go through that process as you’re kind of starting out as a business owner what would you recommend starting with as you try to simplify your business?
Rael: Well, the thing that often we get caught up in is technology. This is I’m talking 2021, you know, this is the last 10 years. As our workforce becomes and I hate using generational terminologies but as our Baby Boomers retire and as our Gen-Zs and Millennials become the majority of our workforce, who are technology-driven, who make notes on iPhones as opposed to pieces of paper, the challenge we have is that the natural reversion of people is to technology. But yet we need to start with paper.
What do I mean by that? And that sounds very old school, it dates me a lot, but it’s not. It’s about that simplicity. If you try and go for the technology solution before you’ve – so say you start building a business, right? And you go, “Oh! I need an app to do this!” Well, maybe the business is driven by an app and that’s okay. You need an app, but if it’s a business you know, a traditional business model – buying a product and selling a product or selling a service – yes, you do need some technology in the background to run the business. You need your Microsoft Suite or whatever it is.
I’ll give you another example. When I talk to people about presentations, corporate presentations, a great friend of mine who’s a professional speaker who talks about efficiency in the office taught me a process. Because I was falling victim to the same thing. I would want to prepare a new keynote or a new presentation, the first thing I would do is open Powerpoint and start my creative process in Powerpoint.
In other words, working out the slides as I went and she said, “No, start with a piece of paper. Write down your three key points and for each key point write down three more points that you want to use to explain that. Then if you’re doing a half-day or a day of a seminar, then another three points on each of those three points.” That gets complicated you’ve got too many three points in there. But the same thing applies to business you know, you find your key things that you want to get done. Maybe a little bit of simplification and you do that on paper.
I mean, I do that all the time I’m drawing. Okay, I use my laptop a lot of the time I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop and I’ll flip the screen over and take out the pen and I’ll draw on the screen. I’ll draw pictures because pictures make the most sense to me to work these things out. Then I’ll translate that into a technology solution or another form of a solution in the office. The answer is to keep it simple, keep it real. You know, training and I know that, Ruthie, you work in financial consulting and financial coaching, so one of the things I’ve taught my team in mortgages over the years is to never use a computer in front of the client.
I mean, yes, if you want to check up interest rates you say to the client, “Yes, I’m going to go and check on the computer for the interest rates,” but I taught the team to draw pictures on pieces of paper with different colored pens and talking not “bank speak” but in “real-person speak” to simplify it. Then say to them, “Look I have to check for the interest rates or the whatever on the computer,” but they’ve got to understand you as the person. I think that’s where we forget in business is there are people involved and keep the people don’t just dive into the tech solution.
Bekkah: Yeah, oh, it’s so funny because we actually talk a lot about how even in our personal lives, I take notes on a notebook. I always make my task list for the day on a notebook. I don’t use technology because it’s so easy to get distracted even if you’re on your phone or whatever having that in front of you all of a sudden something’s dinging and trying to get your attention somewhere else. If you can just keep it all on paper it’s so much easier. I laughed, too, because I when you were saying, “Oh, use different colors.” I literally have a binder of just colored pens that I use and I switch between them all the time and plan out everything so we totally agree!
Ruthie: It looks like a giant coloring book! You turn from one page to the other and it’s like explosive creativity!
What Is The Most Valuable Advice You’ve Ever Received?
Bekkah: Yeah so we totally get what you’re talking about and that’s really valuable advice that I guess we don’t even realize that we do too that is really helpful for us. When you first started what was probably some of the most valuable advice that you received?
Rael: It was interesting when I started say in the education business – that’s a classic of what I was talking about with overthinking things, so we put that into context in a year context, it was 1990 in South Africa. The significance of 1990 in South Africa was the fact that I got married. No, that wasn’t a significant date that year, *all laugh* but it was a very significant date in my life. But the date I got married actually was significant in South African history because I got married at 4 p.m. the 11th of February, 1990 and Nelson Mandela was released from jail at 4 p.m. on the 11th of February 1990.
Bekkah: Wow!
Rael: And so we were married on my wife’s farm, which was about – using miles about 50 miles – out of Johannesburg and we had 250 guests on the farm. A big marquee up and everything else and you know we’re talking 31 years ago the TV service in South Africa was pretty awful and the standard sort of TV was about 12 inches wide. Until, you know, 3:59 in that afternoon we had most of the guests crammed into the farmhouse watching this little TV because nobody had ever seen who Nelson Mandela was.
Sorry that was just kind of a side story. I know you like side stories in your podcast, but that same year we started a business and this is the big mistake we made. Jonathan and I who started the business, my business partner and lifelong friend, we’ve known each other since we were 14. He had finished business school in 1987. I finished business school in 1988. We were fresh-faced, 26-year-olds and we thought we would tell the world how to run their businesses. There’s only one problem with that, we’d never run a business ourselves.
We’d come out of this business school with a level of arrogance and a level of “we can do anything.” Which was very wrong. It took me many years to kind of beat that out of myself, but anyway we started this business and it didn’t really work out. We won one contract and that sort of paid the bills for a few months, but what we did discover was that there was this need for education.
The majority black population in South Africa had been suppressed for many, many years Nelson Mandela’s release had really released this hunger to be successful. We morphed our business into a college. We had 20 students in 1990 who signed up and explaining this to you we worked from Jonathan’s lounge room. People walked through the garden where the dogs – he had two labradors – had been using it as their facilities. They had to step lightly through the garden to make sure they didn’t step in anything.
They came to the house to sign up with two 26-year-olds who’d never even run a school before, but yet we managed to get 20 students signed up for that year. That’s when I’m saying, “Don’t overthink things in your business!” and that was the advice we were given was just to dive in and go. We didn’t ever think. We didn’t even realize when we started, who the two biggest competitors were. We only kind of started and then went, “Oh, we’ve actually got two very big players we’re competing with! And we’re this small nothing!”
But suddenly we grew to be one of the biggest players because we thought differently. We thought outside the square. We did different levels of advertising. We didn’t have a lot of money so we had to use our money very efficiently. The advice given to us at the time was just to go for it!
We had friends who did the MBAs with us who said, “Just add us to your list of lecturers! Even if we never lecture for you, we’re just going to add credence to your business by having all these MBA graduates and all these you know people with lots of experience on your team.” So we just reached out to friends who were really, really supportive, but they also knew about business! They thought we were mad, but that’s okay! Most entrepreneurs have an element of madness otherwise they wouldn’t be entrepreneurs in the first place!
Ruthie: Wow! It has just really been so enjoyable getting to hear your story and like all these incredible things that you’ve done so thank you so much for sharing with us! I really appreciate it a lot and I know you’ve gotten up super early to be with us and we just wanna acknowledge that we’re really thankful for all the stuff that we’ve learned from you already! Can you tell us how our listeners can find you and then we’re gonna transition to the sister gawk portion of our episode.
Rael: How do they find me? I mean I’m fairly active on social media. Probably not as active as people younger than me, no, I am fairly active on LinkedIn. I mean Rael at raelbricker.com is the easiest way to get a hold of me. Raelbricker.com is my website. Excellencepodcast.com is the podcast website and otherwise, on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Not a fan of Twitter. One of those things that I just never got into but those are the best ways of getting a hold of me!
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