EE021 – Kelly Tyler and Helena Holrick – On Your Terms

Transcript:

Tony: Exceeding Expectations Episode 21. This week’s episode we have two guests, Kelly Tyler and Helena Holrick. Although for some bizarre reason at the start of this episode I kept referring to her is Elena, brain can do strange things Sometimes they run a Facebook group to call the connection hub, which is for speakers, coaches and authors. Even if you’re not one of those if you’re not a speaker, coach or author. I think you’ll get a lot from this episode. They have a really good mindset and they’re really good at identifying how they can help people? How they can help people find some clarity? What it is that they want to do? I recently attended a retreat that they held and I found it hugely beneficial and they- certainly gave me some clarity on some issues that I was trying to get myself unstuck. This week’s episode Kelly, Tyler and Helena Holricks.

Here we are for another edition of Exceeding Expectations and for the first time I have two people as guests tonight. There are dual comes they come together don’t come separately. Kelly and Helena. How are you doing ladies?

Tony: Kelly and Helena run well and an amazing– I was going to say an amazing business, but amazing businesses and they got something called a connection hub for speakers and authors and coaches and well I think most people in there It’s really transform their businesses. Do you want to? -Maybe both of you start with Kelly; tell the listeners a little bit about you and where you’ve come from?

Kelly: Sure. A very sink background for me, so I can go into lots of detail and all the fingers of pies I’ve had myself in but if we go back to the essence, so my interest has always been around mindset and psychology. I studied as a psychologist and was the manager of the educational psychology service in Middle-sex. In that roll it was always about teaching, training, learning and looking at how things can be done differently and supporting moody teenagers through that Education Service. What I didn’t like about it was how stuck the education system was. I was like how can I do this differently? I was a young manager, right? By the age of 23, I was managing people that had been in the business for like 30, 40 years, and they didn’t quite like that new blood. When you always talk about Exceeding Expectations, I’d come in with the mindset of what if? They’d be like, “Oh no! That’s not how we’ve always done it”. So shifted some mindsets there, but realizing that actually it was quite hard to really make massive leaps in the education system from within.

I realize why can with a lot of children with Autism and ADHD, that nutrition was a real key for them so I started to work with authors who had books to help parents and children on their health and menu nutrition on homeopathy and all these alternative things.

Suddenly after making a massive dramatic change to my own nutrition, I thought– I’m just going to set up a publishing house. So I started at a publishing house for children called Con- press where we did these interactive books for children so they learn life skills really but did it in a fun and interactive way. We accompany those books with parents say they understood the principles and also key stage three teaching resources for children- for teachers to teach them in schools. So we had this holistic integrated learning system for kids going on. It was awesome. I learned a lot, right? I went there with a BGCSE English, not understanding different paper width and binding things, spend lots of money, made lots of mistakes, but loved basically helping these roughly doesn’t change agents. Get their material out in the world in books.

Then I had another epiphany a couple of years later going, but these authors don’t know how to profile themselves. I don’t know how to market them self. They couldn’t speak on stages. They didn’t know how to get the audience to them. After again, building- feeling my way into the industry, I learned what you needed to be a public speaker and after doing that for a few years, I set up my speaker agency called service speakers. Where we help only thought leaders and change agents to get gigs, but we also help them with their marketing and positioning. that then starts with me and this new world of actually working with these people that are breaking thoughts and habits the way things are done in the world. And, I know that these creative screamed for structure, screamed for a way that actually helping them manage their business rather than just have these great ideas and nothing ever came to fruition. All of this is come to this point where a year ago myself and Helena came together and we worked and built the company called Speaker insight where we are working with speakers, authors and coaches to give them the foundations in their business. Learning of what all the industry needs of my experience of being a speaker agent, from my experience of being in publishing and also from how you run your own business to give you that structure. The bit that where Helena and I were missing is actually Helena is key strengths, which is actually that whole coaching, nurturing element, which she’s much better at that

Kelly: I’m very detailed and structure, which is actually why we are the perfect Combo for a lot of creative. We’ve been bumping into each other for about six or seven years in different guises and, then that’s when we decided to come together-

Helena: Join forces.

Kelly: Have our talents come together for our speakers, authors and coaches. Yeah.

Tony: Right Okay. Helena what was your, what’s your background like?

Helena: My background leading up to this point I kind of have a half-life so I started at TGI-Fridays. So my working career started at TGI- Fridays, but I’m known as Helena the trainer and actually this goes right back to when I was about four years old, so the story goes. I actually was teaching children in the playground. How to build sandcastles properly

Helena: That’s kind of the element of that runs through everything. Structure is the thing that actually combines Kelly and I. It’s one of the things that -one of the reasons that we are actually in such a good collaboration with each other. My career kind of started by working for TGI-Fridays and it was only ever going to be a- I’ll say this here because I think it’s important in terms of expectations. I had- during my interview; I had a little voice pop in my head. You know, when you get a voice in your head that isn’t your own? Like it’s just a piece of sound advice and you go, that’s so wasn’t for me. It said the day you can’t smile is the day you leave. Actually that was basically what I did So for 11 years at TGI-Fridays, I did everything I possibly could and it taught me everything and more about service than I could possibly do. I opened 17, TGI Friday’s, three of them internationally, which is phenomenal. My love of systems and structure and organizing as well as managing people and getting the best out of people is really what kind of grew there.

That foundation absolutely became what leads me to deliver brilliant service. I have always been what I would call it a need spotter. I did various training either at Fridays or then when I left; I worked for a video meeting company for about seven years. Again, it was always about spotting the needs that other people weren’t actually catering to and just kind of seeing the whole picture going, well, what else is needed here? I did the same thing at the London Fire Brigade for four and a half years. I started their training and mentoring departments. So, coaching and training and structuring things so that people understand and can make the most of things is really the kind of thread that runs through everything I do.

Eventually I set up my own company ‘called workshops that work’ and then realized very early on, and again, this is where Kelly and I started to kind of crossover. I was seeing these amazingly brilliant people who have fantastic messages that would change the world, be completely rubbish at delivering them or at structuring how that training delivery ? Or talk would actually need to go and I thought, I can help with that and I know how to energetically and caringly make that flow a lot better. That was actually what I set out to do in my innocence and then I realized that these people don’t actually know how to run businesses and I realized that when I started talking about numbers in the business and how you were actually going to make this work as a business, they would look at me like I had three heads and just go, “Huh, what does that mean?”. It was at that point that I knew I needed to take it wider and just understand how I could help them know that they needed foundations in the business. That’s gone through various iterations.

As Kelly says, we kept bumping into each other during this exploration that I was having until about a year ago when we actually kind of came together. When actually with my understanding of people and how to get the best out of people with the training background, with the flow stuff, with her love of structure actually we can support the people that we know can make a difference in the world in a really special way and so speaker insight was born.

Tony: Your aim is to help authors, speakers and coaches.

Helena: Yeah.

Tony: How has it developed since you’ve come together last year?

Helena: Oh, you want to tackle that?

Kelly: Yeah. It’s been a bit of a snowball effect really. Things have developed and I think this is this…Something that we encourage our avatar and our audience to listen to is that our business, our products and our services have grown because we’ve listened to our audience. We’ve had the idea, we know what the end goal for those we want to make them into change makers and there are certain qualities that we say a change maker has. That’s our ultimate goal for them and it’s also the ultimate goal for themselves. They just don’t really, realize it is.

Helena: They may not realize it or they realize it and doubt it in themselves. we kind of tackle it from both angles.

Kelly: So there’s lots of things that we-one of our things that we say a lot is that we don’t teach authors how to write, we don’t teach speakers how to speak, We don’t teach coaches how to coach, right? We teach you all how to run a business on your terms in those three areas, all of those areas. Even though both of us have got other companies where potentially we could do those other things. The connection hub, which is our free Facebook group. The ultimate purpose for that, which is where we started a year ago this week.

Helena: That’s right.

Kelly: We set the Facebook group up for it to be a place where we could actually give insight and knowledge we do free training in that all the time and it’s not training where it’s like a little bit of a tease and then people have to go and pay us thousands of pounds to learn more. We literally give, and that’s one of the things we know what we’re talking about today is Exceeding Expectations is that people go I can’t believe how much you give away for free.

Helena: We catch, the knowledge, you pack in so much stuff I actually know and can go away straight away and do something in my business. That’s unheard of.

Kelly: Because not only do we teach people the why? Why it’s important to them? Then we teach them the how? How they do it? We also give them the practical downloads of actually then. We’ll know you’ll understand the concepts, here’s the actual action steps to go away and do it. Like breaking it down for them, which they go even when they do pay people to do it, they still don’t often give them that last step is still leave them hanging. This information doesn’t turn into results. Our intention for the connection hub was to create this space where we train also

Helena: Yeah, it where we actually, I mean we purposely named it the connection hub because we know that one of the things that speakers, authors and coaches need are connections to the people that can support them because actually them running that business, they’re great at speaking, writing or coaching, but they’re not great at business. Actually business is made up of lots of little things. The technical support, the graphics that are needed, the copy social media, the marketing, all of those things that allow them to go and shine their light in the way that they can. They need to be supported by this. Where do they find really good caliber people? That was part of our intention and actually setting that up as well as peer meetings obviously.

Kelly: Yeah, those people that you often look for you might just go to a Google search and there were lots of cowboys out there, so we wanted this to be, not everyone is in there as Better by us, but they’re either referred by us or they’ve been used by people in the group so they can go, yeah, this person built my sales pages person, built my website, that’s a great speaker trainer. So, we’ve got that a level of what we call like the people that we outsourced to. They actually service providers.

Helena: It’s kind of peer led and peer reviewed connections that people can trust more.

Kelly: Yeah, but then the other bit of it is actually giving you the industry contacts So because of the backgrounds that we’ve got, we’ve got speaker agents in there, we’ve got publishers in the traditional hybrid, we’ve got a literary agents in there all those types of things so that people can actually do call out posts and go, hey, does anyone know a publisher of this type of general? Does anyone know speaker agent for this area and I need to do this Gig so people can actually go in there and it’s a commission free place. We’re not bringing people in there because there’s an agenda is literally welcome to our world. Here’s a little black book of contacts. Here’s who we’d provide.

Helena: It is a sort of, I’m proud to say that we’ve built a true community that actually where people can have conversations, they can actually ask for what they need and usually get it, which is wonderful.

Kelly: Yeah, and then from that again listening to the audience about what they wanted, we’ve got a very small product range because we wanted to our business, this business specifically really simple cause like I’ve got three others and I know he’s got a couple of other businesses.

Helena: Yeah.

Kelly: We only actually work on this business one day a week. Right? We’ve felt that -from there, one of the problems that we wanted to solve for speakers, authors and coaches what Helena alluded to earlier is that you’re alone. When you run this business, you’re normally doing it by yourself. So we give them the chance to come to a connect and create day every other month where they can come and work on a project for three or four hours. Taking time out of your business. To actually dedicate three or four hours to actually get something done with pays around you that you can have for support. There’s a couple of hours of structured networking and you also get some time, 20 minutes with either myself or Helena to basically get feedback on what you’re doing or give you some advice. It’s a real productive, but it’s the energizing day for not speakers where they can meet others speaker, author and coaches learn from each other and connect. So it’s connected and creates.

Helena: Yeah.

Tony: Well and I can testify that.

Tony: I’ve been to tutor.

Tony: They’re amazing.

Helena: Thank you.

Tony: Yeah and there’s so many different directions I could go into from here for what some of the things you’ve just said. one of the things – I kind of get, there’s been some amazing transformations with some of the people you’ve been working with in the last. Do you want to talk about any of those?

Kelly: Oh, about well- what would you think your audience is most interested in? Like what areas? There’s personal transformation, there’s physical monetary results.

Helena: Where practical kind of -yeah.

Tony: any interesting ones that you think might be a value. I mean, because I know that you give way more value than is expected in so, and just where you’ve been able to help people put them on the right path and they just had some amazing results.

Helena: I think, you know, sort of there’s one person that springs to mind who literally was looking at not running the business at all and it was through a lack of.. She had, I don’t want to be too personal because it is a personal transformation kind of story, but she had got to the end of her tether with her business and actually was thinking about giving up on it entirely going back into paid employment, even though that was filling her with dread. she was kind of thinking, actually, I don’t think anyone’s going to employ me, but I think that’s what I needed to do. So, it was actually using some of the tools that we’ve provided through the training’s to actually bring her back up to the point where, particularly so we run one at one of the things that we talk about is the ideal client what we call the Avatar. That particular exercise really helped her to just take a look at things from a different perspective, which then allowed her to reposition everything that she was offering. wasn’t that she changed the services necessarily, it was just they were repackaged a little bit more for the clients that they were actually that they were meant for, if that makes sense. So her efforts were being put in the wrong place and we just -it’s a tiny tweak a lot of the time. That actually now means that she is looking at publishing her next book, she is looking at running workshops for the rest of the year. She’s added two extra products to her product line and things are going really well and she’s beginning to speak on stages. The confidence is back but on top of that, the business just has been restructured in such a way that she’s loving it, and creating some amazing financial and visibility results.

Tony: The great thing about that as well as I can tell in your voice and from your faces that you clearly love does that as well. You’d love seeing those results. So it’s not- I think that’s a common thread with a lot of the people that I’ve spoken to on this podcast. Everyone’s had this mindset of it’s not about the money. It’s about really going out of their way to give people and an amazing experience in whatever way they’re able to.

Kelly: Yeah, I think that’s when you’re in the personal development industry, which I’ve been in- well we both been in for a long time and I think it’s changing now, but the has been that whole sausage factory scenario where when you’ve got the big hitters, the big names, and you’ve got the seminars that people spend thousands of pounds and they go for three or four days and they’re all hyped up and it’s great, but then nothing happens at the end because how can that person serve a thousand people in the audience to a level of actually knowing exactly what they want? I think a lot of people think that the personal development industry has been quite cookie cutter approach where it’s a one size fits all and you learn this tactic and you go away and you can be a millionaire like me. of course there are elements of that strategy that will work. A lot of it comes with actually molding. It’s your situation, making it bespoke, having the accountability. The thing which I think is missing is the fact that a lot of those people-

Helena: Don’t care.

Kelly: That’s the feedback that we get. Like we were being interviewed on a summit last month. She was basically saying the fact that you know, all of your clients by name, you know, their personal situations you talk you about them like they’re your friends and actually you haven’t met some of these people that are in your membership group but you’ve never met them.

Helena: That right.

Kelly: It’s that element that we really do care. We get the joy of course yeah we need to earn money and that’s what everyone needs to do but it’s, as you said, it’s a by-product or mission is the whole supporting change make. Make a positive impact in this world and we can do that by cheer leading them, giving them the platform, given the structure and support to go and share their message and reach a wide audience while we’re then having this great message and having a room of 50 people, it’s really disheartening knowing how much difference they can make with that support.

Tony: One of the areas where I know you really exceed expectations. You do this weekly Facebook live every Tuesday. Yes. I find enough my episodes come out 12 o’clock Tuesday and your one o’clock Tuesday.

Helena: That’s true.

Tony: I don’t know-you so exceed expectations in- I mean I don’t know what people’s expectations are from the Facebook live, but, and I haven’t- I finally listened to, I don’t know, five or six of them and they’ve been amazing not just good. I mean, amazing.

Helena: Thank you.

Tony: One of the ones I can think off the top of my head, the full intentions one that you did, I’ve shown that to some people who aren’t speakers or if there’s, or coaches or anything like that and they loved it. Then nothing to do with any. What was-how did you-what made you start doing it in the first place and what were you hoping to achieve from doing that?

Helena: Wow! what made us start in the first place was, so one of the things that we are doing our best to do in starting this business is to be transparent and actually show speakers, authors, and coaches who are either at the start of their journey or who are shifting how they’re doing? What they’re doing? Even wanting to scale in some ways so one of the things that we wanted to do was actually to highlight that you can go from nothing to something quite with easy. We also wanted, so one of the things that we talk about is running a business on your terms and it’s an acronym for us. It’s a framework for us that, that we actually teach a lot about. One of the things that we wanted to do was run this business because Kelly runs three. I run another two, you so time is finite for us. We thought what is our best way of building a community in a way that we can help people understand what standards can actually be in place? What is possible? The best way that we know how to do that? Is to teach so for us it was like, what if we share? What we know works?

That allows speakers, authors, and coaches, because actually a lot of people out there, as Kelly was just alluding don’t necessarily give you the how? They’ll tell you. Why? You should do something. They’ll even tell you what you should do according to them, but they won’t tell you how? That for us was a real frustration. We were like, well, actually the way that we know we make an impact with all of the people that we’ve both individually kind of made an impact on. It’s by showing them how? And telling them how? So what if we did that? On a regular basis and just show people how they could actually begin to build those foundations into their business and that’s really how it kind of grew.

Kelly: Yeah, that transparency I think is a bug bear for Helena and I were, when we see lots of people in this industry Oh, you can do it this way. They only take them so far. Even when they’ve paid them.

Helena: You leave people hanging.

Kelly: We just wanted to be like the greenhouse effect and go, look, we’re just going to tell you everything.

Helena: Yeah.

Kelly: Because what we know that actually wants people know what’s expected ahead of them. They can then make that conscious choice of have they got the resources, the energy, whatever it is to go do it.

Helena: Yeah.

Kelly: Then the bit that they need help with is the accountability and the bespoke hand holding through that journey, which is the bit that we step in with our membership site, right? So we will do that, but we know you want quite an intimate basis. We didn’t set this business up to be like, you know, taking over the world and like to do it so we can be on a beach in Bali and never speak to anyone again because this is what we love. We would never stop doing this even if we didn’t have to. Right?

Helena: It’s true.

Kelly: But, that whole thing about let’s just tell everyone how it is in the industry. That’s just all these myths or these things gift you guys the knowledge. So you can then make that conscious decision if he wants to do something about this or not.

Helena: Because it’s hard running a business, like anyone will tell you, running a business is hard. It can be lonely; it can be soul destroying at times. It can also be one of the most exciting and amazing things. And, you know? Sort of like to see the impact that you’re making. What can we do to make it easier? What can we do? And actually with the years and hours and hours of learning and training and knowledge that we actually have, we have something that we can actually help people feel better about their business with. What if we shared that? Because actually what if we transition people from having to learn to actually implement it? that’s really the purpose of the, the one o’clock on a Tuesday is what can we shine a light on today that allows you to take a step, an actual step in your business that allows you to then go out in the world and do something because otherwise it’s just wasted.

Tony: I think I should make clear for anyone listening who isn’t familiar with the Facebook group, the connection huh of these Facebook lives actually free. There’s no, paying any money for this. And you’ve been doing it almost every single week for last year covering,

Kelly: Coming up to week 52.

Helena: Yeah.

Tony: Cover sorts of topics. Do you want to say some of the things that you’ve come in?

Helena: Wow!

Kelly: Well, every single one that we’ve ever done has involved knowing your ideal client, knowing your Avatar, because it’s one of our key messages that we talk about. You can’t run a business without knowing who you’re serving in detail.

Helena: Yeah.

Kelly: We’ve done things from how to get gigs on stages? To, you know, marketing funnels to know your key messages, how to create two years’ worth of social media content?

Helena: One of the things I want to it- I mean it really does kind of sit around how to automate? How to market? How to position yourself? Really, we talk about you at the heart of your business. That little piece for us is how do we help? Put you at the heart of your business without your business subsuming one of the things that I think people really enjoy, and that seems to be one of the ways in which we are making an impact is that we kind of come at it from an inside out perspective. We actually kind of look at you as the person, again, not cookie cutter, because we’re all unique human beings. Here is a concept here is what might go on for you as an individual. Then let’s teach you how you as an individual? Can use this concept out in the world and that is actually so whether it is marketing, positioning or indeed something like the tools. So we have explored the foreign tensions is one of them I’ve known for senior is another, you know, we have a lot of-Kelly was just saying sometimes we’ll actually do an active sheet that’s a download that people can actually have so they can get going with the Avatar for example or sort of actually describing what their ideal day is and actually being able to plan that. Those are the practical things that we know get in the way for people. We basically kind of sit with our pool, amount of knowledge and just go what else gets them stuck and what can we teach them?

Kelly: That inside out approach is quite unique and that’s what we get a lot of feedback on because yes, we could talk about, I don’t know, practical tips on how to actually get gigs on other people’s stages. But if you’ve got a lack of self-confidence, a lack of self-worth, or you don’t actually know your own key-notes or your positioning and your messaging, then there’s no point that’s just teaching the tactics of how to contact people to get gigs because you’re going to get in your own way first of all. So that the whole way we look at it is we look at it from you and the outside world so that we’ve joined them together. Actually thinking you just, you don’t get in your own way.

Helena: Which means that sometimes the training’s are, for example, like a couple of weeks ago we did one on, what’s the golden thread that links everything you’ve ever done so that people can actually take a look at their full experience and think, oh hang on a minute, I have got something to offer and I get that this is the thing. When I said earlier on Helena the trainer that’s honestly it, you know, sort of like that’s the golden thread that runs through everything I’ve ever done. Because once you know that and that’s an inner peace, that’s, that’s the thing of how did you keep on ending up in one particular position?

Kelly: Yeah.

Helena: What’s the thing that you want to teach out in the world? What’s the thing you want to change in the world? All of that is highlighted by, in this instance, the golden thread. That’s why we come at it from the inside perspective because that you can now go and apply some of the other things that we teach and go, I can build a business from what I do on the inside.

Kelly: Your USP could come from that. Another point.

So it goes on and on. It really does.

Helena: We’re beginning to find, I think now because we’ve got a good 50- good pool of the training’s we’re actually finding that as we do a training, we can link it back to a training. people are beginning to actually kind of really match up the points and build better businesses, which is really what we set out to do.

Tony: It’s very difficult- a lot of people say that it’s a problem they have is that you’re trying to exceed people’s expectations often involves in that initial meeting when you’re dealing with a prospect, telling them everything you’re going to do and then there’s no surprises if you just send them everything you’re going to do. How do you go about trying to exceed your- the people you’re working with their expectations try, how’d you over deliver? And he’s that something you intentionally do?

Kelly: It’s not intentionally, but it’s what we do naturally, which I think, which is what comes across what people like the most because it’s not seen as it’s doing it because it’s going to get something as a result. It’s the hasn’t got an agenda related to it. I think the thing, there’s a couple of things that people are always giving us feedback on how we over-deliver. One of them is time. we give people time as in our physical time, but we also give them time to actually be heard and be seen.

Helena: We listen.

Kelly: In the connection hub people always say to us, you guys are the most responsive group that I’d ever been in. People will put a comment on a question up. You were out there, even though the community, your answers as well, it’s not always down to us. You just feel like you’re constantly got our back. You’re constantly there for us. And if you don’t know the answer, your tag somebody else in the team who will be able to answer it for us.

Helena: Some of that comes down to sometimes just people commenting on the length of that answer that you just gave. Like you truly cared and you had no reason to do it. We didn’t, the implication that you hear underneath it is you didn’t get paid, you must have spent a whole bunch of time writing that, there’s care in it so you must have thought about it and like it’s that, and actually I think that’s the simple answer to your question is we care.

Kelly: Yeah gone back to the caring thing then in our membership group, again from a time perspective and what Helena to said, we offer our members a chance to upload any piece of document or work every week, which we will give feedback on because again, that was the thing that they felt that they needed that support, that constant mentoring that I don’t know if this sales page is supposed to look like that. I don’t know if that title of that book right, who do I sound board it’s off? They put it in there and again, like the feedback goes, you gave us not just a couple of lines of feedback, you gave us so much details and think about and that’s in time element.

Helena: What’s interesting for us is that there’s a slight selfishness to it in that hole and I don’t mean this kind of rudely, it’s like by giving you a long answer other people in the group actually learn from that as well. the other thing I think that runs through everything we do is never miss an opportunity to teach. Like, because actually if we teach you this, then if somebody, the next week, in inside the membership is asking a similar question, not only do they get their own answer, but we can refer them back to this opportunity as well. that whole reinforcing is what helps people go, wow, this is just massive.

Kelly: Yeah and the other thing is, again, going back to the time is that if we see people that are having a wobble or their stock will come get on a call with them.

Helena: I’m very -so I of course wearing the coaching and sort of caring hat from that perspective. When I walk my dogs, it is very not uncommon for me to actually just have my headphones in and be walked talking somebody through an issue that they’ve actually got. When I’m a, because- I actually commute up to Kelly on Tuesday for when we actually do our things. So that gives me an hour in the car each way. it is not at least once a month am I talking to someone who’s ga- who’s having a wobble. If we see someone in the group, you know, sort of like, occasionally I’ll just reach out and go, how you doing? you’re either being really quiet or you’re beginning to say things that really worries us so, just jumping on a call, you know, I might cut out now and then, but like, do you want to just jump on a call? So it’s this additional bit of time that actually.

Kelly: Makes them feel like they care for.

Helena: Exactly.

Kelly: There not a number in our business, They’re not a digital on the spreadsheet, There’s somebody that we really want to support and we are, we have got their backs. Yeah.

Tony: Wow, it sounds like your dogs are knowledgeable?

(Laughing)

Helena: Those dogs can do therapy, I’m telling. Yeah… They’re good.

Tony: Something else that comes across and I wonder how? So everyone-most of the people in the connection hub you know, or speakers, coaches and whenever, and many of them also need to often start a community to get people to sign up for their workshops or whatever it might be. I wonder how many of them are really watching what it is that you are doing? how much value that you’re giving some?

Helena: I can actually answer that one what like, like I am now watching some of the communities actually that, that our change makers for sure. So the membership sort of people are setting up, but even people inside the connection hub. I’ve seen similar rules two hours up here. I’ve seen similar posts, I’ve seen similar name posts Cindy.

Kelly: We love it and it’s even like crazily we said this year that we’re actually, because we teach people to actually build initially on one social media platform and ours was Facebook. ‘Cause that’s where we did the research that our avatar hung out at the most. once we nailed that and we’ve got consistency and we’ve got a good following and we felt quite comfortable, we said, okay, this year, this is our second year in business, we’re going to branch out into another platform, but we’re also going to embrace the world of email a lot more than we weren’t doing. Actually this month was our first newsletter. I don’t know how many people that have launched a newsletter, get feedback on their newsletter, get people posting the newsletter in the group to say, I’ve never received a newsletter like this before. This is how I’m going to do my newsletter? You’ve raised the bar. This is the standard. We were blown away. We love it. Right? Sure, you’re take care and stuff. But I think what we inadvertently are doing are changing industry standards of how things are done. Yeah.

Helena: We didn’t set out to do that, but it’s beginning to happen simply because people are looking at it. It’s like any good thing when see something that works, you’d go, how could I do that?

Kelly: But not from copying exactly what I said before, the cookie cutter. It’s the structure. Understanding why? And how? You’re doing something that people don’t get initially and they just do it because they think they need to have a group. Yeah but people don’t know the difference between a page and a group. Yeah. So we teach them that and then once they know the Greeks propose.

Helena: Oh! I see what I need to do, okay, well I could do this with me in mind way in this way. So, so it really is that whole, we talk a lot about structure and frameworks and processes because actually that everything had to, I talk about coat hooks, sort of like so you can hang coats on a coat hook, but you need to get the coat hook in the right place with the right amount of hooks in order for people to be able to utilize them. And that’s really, I see us providing coat hooks to everybody so that they can actually go, oh, I can hang one up here. Yeah. Thank you very much.

Tony: Wow time has flown by.

(Laughter}

Kelly: We can talk right?

Helena: Yeah we can. Part 2 coming up later.

Tony: I hold u to that.

Helena: Okay, fair enough.

Tony: Before we finish. If each of you could give your thoughts on why? Maybe is a good idea to try to really give your customers a great experience. What are your thoughts on that?

Kelly: I’m going to go back to the care thing, right? So people will remember you, they’ll trust you, they’ll come back to you when they know that you can actually care about them. ..it’s that- I’m very passionate about people being of service. When you’re in a role of service you literally cannot do wrong. You get yourself out of your own way, your ego, your insecurities and stuff. When you’re focusing on how you’re going to help the other person? As long as your intentions are pure, as long as your intentions are at least a win but in my ideal a win scenario, then you are literally in that journey with that person to do that dance. That relationship you have given take is so beautiful that you don’t worry about sales tactics and all these types of things cause it just naturally happens. Then when you’ve got that relationship with your client they are always raising your bar because you’re always having to think, I can’t do what I did last year because they’re still my client. And they know that’s going to happen if they come to that event. So how do I raise my standards? Which means that you’re always going to be at the top of your game because they’re making you push and you can’t say stagnant when you’ve got that relationship and that hiring your bar all the time. So I love that, but they push us, they challenge us, but they also win as a result of that. Yeah.

Helena: For me, I’m always going to come back to what does this person in front of me need? And actually just a lot of the time that’s about me getting out of the way and just holding a space and simply showing, sharing through space, though.. Listening, through simple questioning, saying, what do you need? What do you need next? And sometimes that’s an inner listening. I think we do this very well because we’ve been in the industry for a very long time and we’ve seen a lot of things so we can hear the need even if somebody else isn’t in there. But giving somebody the space for them to recognize their own needs actually is enough because that provides a level of service that is untold at back to TGI Fridays where I learned everything I have to say, they used to give you wow pins. As part of a team he used to give you wow pins and wow pens used to stand for walk on water. If this wasn’t actually a podcast, if this was video, I would actually be literally showing you. how to you to do (inaudible)

Kelly: Thought going say u walking on water.

Helena: The whole point about that is that’s actually what you’re doing for people. You are showing them how to figurative , walk on water, showing them how to do something that seems impossible yet becomes possible. You’re offering them that gift and so that’s really, you know, how do you exceed people’s expectations? You hold a space for them, you believe the best in them and you get them to believe that they can walk on water because actually they kinda can.

Tony: Wow! It’s been a yeah fantastic episode. So before we go, what,- how, if people went to find out more about you, where should they go to? individually, if you want to talk about the connection, I’ve also you individually.

Kelly: Yeah. So the connection hub on Facebook is just, and that’s what it is. It’s the connection hub, facebook.com forward slash connection hub.Our membership platform is change-maker central. That’s where we basically have a nice day course in that expert interviews from industry professionals, peer interviews, and also we did the feedback Friday and lots of exciting stuff in that group. So if you want to check that out, it’s just change maker central.speakerinsights.com and then we also offer, if you’re a change maker, if you’re a connection hub member, you get a month free. So you can come and test this out for free. No subscription need.

Helena: If you want to just test us out before getting involved in a group or if you’re thinking, but I’m not a speaker, author or a coach and this sounds kind of delicious and I want some event. actually just on again on Facebook, because that was the first place where we kind of began. If you just look for speaker insight, you’ll see Tuesdays at one o’clock you can come and listen in to the training’s. And just because you’re not a speaker, author, coach doesn’t mean you can’t be in the group. Because if you’re a supplier to any one of those, we need you. They need illustrators, graphic designers, web developers, you sort of like all of those. There is a wide variety of people inside that community and I think Kelly’s right when, when she says that, you know, we didn’t necessarily, we set out to kind of help speakers, authors and coaches. what we’re beginning to realize is that we’re rocking standards industry wide and across many industries at the moment by just raising the bar. We’re welcoming people in to just do what connections. Do you actually kind of want?

Tony: Thank you for so many great stories and some great examples of what people can do to better experience. I was planning to do those links you just mentioned in the show notes.

Kelly: Thank you.

Helena: Thank you.

Tony: Thank you for your time.

Kelly: Thank you having us.

Helena: Yes.

Tony: Next week in episode 22, I speak with Allister greener. He worked for 16 years on cruise liners and visited 153 countries during that time. On 14 different ships is since we work in as a TV presenter, he does presentation skills training is a master ceremonies and a lot, lot more than he tells some really fascinating stories so that’s next week’s episode. Allister greener. If you liked this episode, why not share it with people you know who, who might find it useful? Maybe, a hairdresser, a plumber or someone who will find somebody in this information useful that they can adapt to their business in some way. Please do join the Facebook group, which is called Exceeding Expectations, and it would be great if you could leave a review, a podcast review on iTunes or Google play or whatever. hope you have a fantastic week and be back here same time next week for another edition of Exceeding Expectations.