E241 | Lachlan Wilmot & Karl Goodman: How to Build Your Team & Scale Your Impact

S.Y.S.T.E.M

Save YourSelf Time, Energy, & Money.

I think it’s fair to say that this is something we all want.

In the words of Karl Goodman, great systems “proceed redundancies.”  They get the processes or ideas out of your head and make them something that can be replicated by others.  

They allow you to delegate.

This is just one of the handful of “how-to’s” we hit on in today’s episode with Lachlan Wilmot and Karl Goodman.  We also discuss:

• How to identify what skills you possess that translate to other professions (23:00)
• How to recognize and define the levels of opportunity available to you (40:20)
• How to decide which tasks you can and should delegate (54:30)
• How to find the right people for your organization (1:05:30)

Lachlan and Karl are the co-owners of Athletes Authority, a set of performance gyms located in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. Lachlan is a highly respected and nationally recognized high-performance Coach, having spent 10 years in Head of Strength & Conditioning roles. He has also worked with professional athletes, as well as elite junior programs.  Karl spent his early years coming through elite sporting pathways himself, transitioning from a baseball career to building a nationally recognized high-performance brand in Athletes Authority Group. Karl brings business, branding, marketing, and strategic expertise to the team.

You can find out more about Athletes Authority via their website, or by following them on Instagram @athletesauthority.

If you feel like you could use some practice putting these “how to’s” into place, we have the perfect strategy for you in our next round of The Conscious Coaching Challenge.

Starting October 1, The Challenge is a 30-day online and interactive “minicourse” that provides you with the tools, guidance, feedback, and support you need to gain ground in your interactions.  In addition to access to the entire AOC team and other members of the AOC family, you’ll also receive tons of FREE resources AND IT’S ONLY $99.  The Challenge starts in 1 WEEK, so don’t wait! SIGN UP TODAY!

And don’t forget – we also provide you with FREE Downloadable Podcast Reflection Sheets for each episode.  If you struggle to apply the given information to your life, or simply would like a second perspective on what can be taken away from the episode, these offer a simple and pro-active strategy to make sure you’re getting as much as you can out of the content.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Dynamic Fitness & Strength, Helix Mattress and Momentous.

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Brett Bartholomew  0:00  

Hey everybody. Thanks again for sitting down with me for another episode of The Art of coaching podcast. I am here with Lachlan Wilmot and Karl Goodman, guys. Thanks for sitting down.

 

Lachlan Wilmot  0:09  

Thanks Brett. Thanks for having us.

 

Brett Bartholomew  0:11  

Yeah, absolutely. Alright, listen, there’s a lot of places to go here. And I know some interviews get right to the punch but Lach it’s just been a while and you’re a good friend of mine. And Karl, you have an exquisite moustache. So I’m just gonna say how the hell are you? And what’s been up because you guys got quite the conglomerate building over there with athletes authority. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  0:32  

Yeah, might now we’ve been good. It’s, you know, obviously, since the last time you were here, which was a long time ago now. Yeah. Which was, very nice. I don’t know how you actually got an invite didn’t dress up or anything? That’s okay. Yeah. But now maybe it was great to catch up then. And Karl has been growing his mustache from then as well. So since they actually the old mustache is grown very well, but I think it was more of a solution to his lacking of hair on top. But he tried to make up for it on the lip and the back and the shoulders. But he has actually I’m thinking a very unique situation he has actually managed to grow some hair quite well, there was there was a moment where he was going to seek a bit of assistance. And I believe the medical advice was he needed an inch of hair to be able to assess the medical requirement. And lo and behold, he’s actually grown a head of hair. So I don’t know if he’s cheating. He’s looking good. 

 

Karl Goodman  1:26  

Yeah, and I’m gonna actually provide a results guarantee. So it’s like, if you don’t get the result, you know, you will refund your money. But what they need to do is they say grow an inch, so we know what it will look like. versus, you know, walkies. So I’ve grown an inch, but in the meantime, realize it’s actually not that bad. I can probably I have managed to avoid hair treatment. I avoided the half plugs, and red going out and natural, very good. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:55  

But to answer your actual question like the business has been going well, so it’s been, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. We’ve recently announced our second facility, which will be in Melbourne. For those playing at home. That is another city in Australia, just below Sydney, Melbourne.

 

Brett Bartholomew  2:10  

Melboorne. Yeah, make sure you do an American accent. I’ve been to Melbourne. It’s beautiful,

 

Lachlan Wilmot  2:16  

Exaggerated. And yeah, we also we’ve announced as well the start of our sports management company as well. So that will specialize particularly in AFL, NRL, cricket, rugby, and a little bit of netball as well. 

 

Karl Goodman  2:31  

tautology specializes in Yeah, well of cricket. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  2:35  

But when you look worldwide at the number of sports, I would suggest that he’s a specialty Yes, of a group of fields.

 

Brett Bartholomew  2:40  

I’m going to interrupt you here because Karl that’s not a tautology, a tautology with you and your moustache is when somebody says two things that say the same thing. Like if I say I’m gonna go to the ATM machine. Well, that shits already a machine or somebody says, Hey, did you see

 

Lachlan Wilmot  2:55  

That’s oximoron 

 

Brett Bartholomew  2:55  

That’s yes, that sunset last night? Well, when else does the sunset? Now? I don’t know how it is in Australia, as Lach alluded to it’s been a while not by choice. It’s because COVID And you guys decided to become a fortress? And then laugh at all of us. Maybe Americans. But really, it was a shitshow both places. But go on. Do keep telling us about how great everything is? I’m interested

 

Lachlan Wilmot  3:14  

that Well, that’s pretty much it. Yeah. So we, we launched that which will be a great avenue for us as a company to start to delve into the professional side. Because as we know, as coaches, it’s, you know, especially our business plan as a whole, you know, we work with young athletes, amateur athletes, semi pros and pros, but a large portion of what we try and do we get athletes to the professional ranks, the ones that go there, we celebrate it, and we get excited. And they actually leave us. So as far as the business model goes, it’s pretty poor. 

 

So this is a great way for us to be able to use these athletes from the first time they come to us, as I say 11 year old we are by their side, we build them physically, emotionally, mentally, if you want to put it, we start to build them into the pros. And when they get to the pros, they don’t now get handed off and get another manager that may rip them off. Or, you know, there’s a lot of people out there that are quite money hungry. And it’s sort of our way of knowing that we can keep some relationship we can keep helping and servicing this athlete, even in the produce sector. So it’s very exciting. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

 

Brett Bartholomew  4:24  

I was just gonna say just to touch on that and then Karl back to you one thing I really have always respected about what you guys do, and there’s a lot here. But we have a wide ranging audience that isn’t all from the performance space, right. And so, but one thing that I think has always been a struggle for me is there’s so much that the performance space has to offer in terms of entrepreneurial, I would just say strategy, understanding training athletes dealing with sporting organizations very much like running a business, but it’s always irritated me that more in the performance realm strength and conditioning room didn’t really embrace that. 

 

And you see it on the stage with coaches always saying, Why are we getting paid so unfairly this and this and this. And after a while, you kind of say, Well, guys, you’re just not really understanding that nobody’s coming to save you. Nobody’s coming to save you, you need to understand about building a brand, building a business, you need some of these problems, solving skills you apply within athletics within teams, and understand that within your own finances, in your own career, and what I love about what you guys are doing and what you said, right, you could have just stuck with the route of, hey, we’re gonna own performance training. And you guys very much do in many respects on that side of the world, and probably do it better than most anywhere in the world. 

 

But for you to say now from root to the fruit, we’re going to help athletes with every part of that lifecycle, because that’s a need. And admittedly, there’s confirmation bias, as we’ve tried to do the same with coaches, even though a lot of our stuff is leadership development as a whole, we still have a lot of projects and products that are focused on helping our original base strength coaches say, Hey, dummy, come on, like, Let’s go be an entrepreneur making some money and having a good life isn’t bad. And guess what, you can help more people. 

 

But they need that guidance at every step in the journey, right? Because whether it’s for athletes, or coaches, or the everyday Joe or Jane, there’s not a lot of resources that just help them develop mentally, it’s like get rich quick, or get this quick or do this. And it’s boom or bust, isn’t it? So like, with that? I just I want to know, what was that impetus? Where you decided? Yeah, like we’re gonna go from just being mainly performance. And I know you do rehabilitation return to play as well, to know we’re going to manage this whole lifecycle, what was the need you saw there?

 

Karl Goodman  6:24  

Well, on the point of the life cycle, we realize that the athlete journey goes through many phases. And the assumption we’d always carried on as Lachy kind of allude to is that it ended at Pro, and that was probably a very unswervingly assumption to make because it doesn’t have to end a pro, there’s no real reason why we can’t venture with some innovation, new ideas into the sports management side. So it’s really a case of what is actually stopping us during the show we have to acknowledge we’re going to be the new comers in this we are the small fry, we have a lot to learn. But that can often be an asset, you know, what we realized that one of the huge assets of our brand is that we do actually have physical science and sports management. 

 

Typically, I know it’s different American, we’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from America, at least in Australia. And he’s been he’s very offside, it’s hands off, there’s no home with sports management, there’s maybe an office that, you know, one agent might rent, but there’s no home and we have a home here. And that is a huge asset, because we build these deep, meaningful, rich, robust relationships with athletes. And then we say, well, good luck. See you later have fun as it and it didn’t make any sense for us to end that conversation there. And actually, I can’t remember the original Spark, which which drove that agency, I think was maybe you actually meeting an agent and having a conversation. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  7:50  

But yeah, well, it’s been like, it’s been a journey. For example, one of our coaches, he’s had a long term, desire to be a sports agent or player, agent, whatever you want to call it for a number of years. So that was definitely conversations that he had, as soon as he came on board around, not necessarily us doing it, but something that he wanted long term. But then it really drove by the fact that we’ve been dealing with agents, yeah, like sports agents that they send us players. We train them, we work with them. And we became one of those go to people for agents to work with, but it sort of then started to make sense, well, why wouldn’t we then do our own agency, because we’ve built that foundation that brand and at the end of the day, we’re going to have to outsource things, you know, like financial advisors and stuff like that we need to bring them in. 

 

But there’s such a large portion of what we do as coaches and the more I start to meet agents, the more we get to understand, it’s amazing how our coaches are built for such different jobs, I think it probably leads in a little bit to what you’re saying that to being an entrepreneur, that like a coach isn’t just a coach, the way we’re designed. And when I when I say design, I mean, the education we go through, but then what we need to do to be able to service and get the best out of our athletes, we probably underestimate how much that prepares us for so many other avenues in life. Because, you know, I’m not an agent by any means. But I sat in on one of the athlete meetings and was discussing things and chatting. 

 

And then they left and the agent that we have who’s been an agent for 10 years now, so far out, you’re like the perfect agent, you’re already an agent. And I’m like, Well, I’m not an agent. I’m just a coach, like, I know how to talk to people I know I’m there to service, I want to help them. And it doesn’t feel like a sales pitch or anything because it’s a genuine discussion. And I think that’s where I probably started to click and go, You know what, actually, coaches that are really actually prepared for so many roles, in particular this management side because that’s what we’re there to do. We’re there to help the athlete we’ve always been there to help the athlete and that service mentality is such a big thing in so many areas that we probably haven’t even experienced yet.

 

Brett Bartholomew  9:56  

Yeah, no question and a little bit of a reply and add on to that followed by a question. In here, this has been something that we really had to work hard on since 2018. To help people remember that the word coach, sport doesn’t have a monopoly on that term, right? The term has been around since the 1500s. And it was about taking people on a journey. And then before it ever reached sport was then about teaching, mentoring, education. And coaching is really your problem solving, which is also what an entrepreneur is. And so I remember distinctly, when we started this company, somebody saying, Hey, you’re really going to be limited by that term. Because there’s too many people that associated with sport. 

 

And I just found it funny, because I’m like, you know, management is coaching, I own a business, you guys, you own a business, run a business, you’re coaching your employees daily, you’re making contingencies and adapting to business decisions. And I remember telling one strength and conditioning coach who wanted to cross over, you know, just like when you have an athlete that’s injured, you have to find an alternative. Well, if we have a business idea of strategy that isn’t working, we pivot, you know, we have to think about three or five year plans, but there’s contingencies within that. And so the idea of periodization is very similar to the idea of building a business model and then adapting within it, I think the thing is, is there’s some people that get into sport, that have this unhealthy previous relationship themselves with sales or money, you know, whether it’s that cognitive dissonance sensitive field, like education that inherently doesn’t make a lot of money. 

 

So then they associate it with bad or evil. And really, it’s a lot of projecting their inward insecurities of it. Now, of course, there’s one of our guests who was in video game design, and UX said, yeah, it’s tough to really, to pinpoint that exactly. But when we ask these coaches, they do say that they do just say, hey, you know, I just feel like, does it really make me a servant leader, if I’m trying to do this and doing that? And it’s like, almost like they feel bad if they win? And it’s like, no, no, you can. Two things can be true, you guys can help athletes succeed in a wide variety of areas in sport and life. And you know what you can get paid damn well at what you do, and you can help people and everybody can win in this nonzero sum game. 

 

Now, a naive question here, in the States, right? Like, it would be very hard for somebody to do what you’re doing send to the NFL Players Association, there’s an NBA Players Association. That lifecycle is very much protected that when those athletes get to that point where they’re looking at ending their career, those organizations that are created really by players and for players, give them those assets, right or there’s there’s multi multimillion dollar and in some case, billion dollar agencies here that are they have their hooks in early with Ozzy rules with rugby with any sport over there. Is there the equivalent of NFL Players Association and NBA Players Association that has those resources or not?

 

Lachlan Wilmot  12:41  

Yes, they everything that we do here is nowhere near the scale of the US. I’ll start with that. We have an NRL Players Association and AFL players association, even the Netball girls have a Players Association. So they have a governance that can look after them. what their resources are, and how much they help is probably still up in here that the Players Association, for example, the most powerful one would be the AFL players association. They go into bat heavily for the playing group, obviously, because they were represented by players as well, to get better deals, to get profit shares of revenue within TV writes and deals and stuff like that. 

 

And then also around holiday leave all these type of things, how much time they get off. When you’re an agent within AFL now, you need to be accredited with that Players Association. But that’s pretty much where it stops, the Players Association doesn’t then offer the services that that a management team would say Players Association will have recommendations if you were to call them up and need some advice on something or help. But nowhere near the extent by the sounds of it that say the NFL Players Association would have now, again, only watching TV and movies, I believe that the Players Association will also register in the NFL, like the financial advisors or financial advisor needs to be registered with the Players Association. We don’t have that here yet. It certainly could be something that evolves. But it’s only the management slash agent that will be registered with the Players Association, everything else within that management team within that company is just backed by the company or the agent. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  14:18  

Yeah. Oh, no, that makes a lot of sense. And, even if that does come there, that form of governance and that structure, I mean, you guys are in a nice power position here to have a seat at the table, because they’re still going to have to recognize it right. And I think that goes to the point of, you know, just strategic and I mean this in the positive sense of the word because meanings aren’t just in words they’re in people, the strategic exploitation of a gap there you know, and a gap that feels fits a very real need. Now tell me this, just getting to know it, you know, is that mainly Karl, talk to me and granted I know a little bit from chatting off screen but talk to me about your role in that, Lachy’s role in that and how you guys are managing this side of it, while also simultaneously managing A training side rehabilitation side your personal lives. The theme here and you know what I’m getting at. Many of the people listening are multi passionate as well. But some of them doubt themselves in one area of life, let alone being able to juggle as many as you guys are. So take that where you will. But just talk to me a little bit more about your role and how you guys manage this.

 

Karl Goodman  15:17  

Yeah, well, the first probably consolation will be to say it’s not easy. And it’s we struggle at times to juggle all Lachy’s, he’s got two kids, I’ve got two kids, we both got young families, we’ve got athletes authority that we’re very fortunate has been built to a point where it is essentially self sufficient. Now I say that, you know, very graciously, because it hasn’t always been that way. And we’re very thankful and grateful that it is self sufficient. And it does give us opportunity does give us permission to look for these strategic opportunities. And you said, and exploit them not in a negative way. But just in the in the, in the fact that, you know, we’ve got physical locations, that gives us a competitive advantage in the agency space. So very lucky in that sense, but mate it’s fucking hard. I hope you don’t mind me. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  16:05  

No, you’re fine. Listen, this is we’re pretty much the thinking man’s Joe Rogan over here. So you can say whatever you want.

 

Karl Goodman  16:12  

Beautiful, beautiful. So you know, it’s fucking hard. And if people who are trying to do the same thing, will know what that’s like. And for those that are feeling that pressure of divided attention, of deluded focus, all of those things are true. They’re real. They’re certainly what Lach and I are experiencing, we’re opening a Melbourne facility as we speak, we have you know, 25, something staff operating athletes or 30 Sydney facility, we have an education business that we run, which services, personal trainers, getting them up skilled, getting them qualified into, you know, consulting education for business owners and gym owners, we then also now have a new agency, you bet it’s fucking chaos. 

 

You know, it? It is. And kit’s just a capability, and how do we navigate the chaos? And how do we make good decisions, knowing that where the way we describe it is we’re at the pointy end of the spear where it’s bloody, right? It’s bloody, it’s messy, where we’re trying to innovate, we don’t necessarily have great modeling, in the sense that I don’t know of any other facility off the top of my head that is doing what we’re doing in all the different divisions. So you know, we don’t have a model per se that we can follow. So when making mistakes, every step of the way, you know, we’re getting caught up in the process. It’s bloody that end of the spear, but it’s also where the fun and the opportunity is. 

 

So that’s the trade like, that’s the two sides of the same coin. Now you’ve got a bloody and messy on one side, and then you’ve got purpose and an opportunity on the other. And both exist at the same time really well. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  17:47  

Oh go ahead Lachy 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  17:49  

I was just gonna say that it’s, I think, obviously, you’ve got a wide range of audience, but you will certainly want to have a lot of coaches that are listening that that do want to go the direction away from just being a coach, and I say, just a coach in a very endearing way. But it’s something that I think something we did very well early on is this this very fine balance. And again, to be transparent without sounding egotistical. I think as a coach, I really believe that you deep down need to believe that you can deliver your programs the best, more better than anyone else. That’s why you back yourself. That’s why people come to you and you attract people. 

 

But I think there’s also got to be that side that you believe that you can replace yourself to an extent because if you didn’t, you were never going to be able to do anything more than just coach or you’re going to have to completely change professions and not coach at all. And I think that’s something early on that we did very well, where we believed the way we did things were the best we had to that was how we had to move forward and believe in what we do. But we also had a very strong belief that we could create a strong enough system and setup that we weren’t required within that company day to day. 

 

Karl Goodman  18:58  

Yeah. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  18:58  

And that’s something that we’ve done really well, I think we can you know, again, it’s that to it, I think I could go on to the gym floor. And I’d still be the best coach there. Apologies for my coaches. But that’s what I believe, because that’s, I still believe that I want to coach, I’m a coach, that’s what I’m gonna do. But I also believe that we could go away for six months, and this facility would not catch on fire, everything would function, the same athletes would come in everything that needs to be done within this facility can be done to an extent without us. And I think that’s a really good balance to have, because that’s what’s allowed us to have confidence in opened a Melbourne facility. 

 

That’s what allowed us to go right. Well, if that glass ball that we’re juggling is self sufficient, internally, that let’s add something else that we can juggle, we’ve got that freedom to be able to do and I think when we look at the lifecycle of a coach, that there’s probably that realization where as they get better that they need to start to realize well how you know, I’ve relied on myself being a coach and delivering everything I deliver. How can I now upskill someone else to deliver what I can do Even if I believe I can still do a better, you’re still going to have some amazing people that can sit under you to deliver that product, that service, whatever it is. 

 

Because realistically, unless you’re removing things, you need to start to hand them off, to even have time to be able to do more and more, and you’re never not going to be busy. We’re always busy, you’re busy, you’re the same with 1000 things going on. But there’s no doubt you need to find ways to scale what you’re doing. And as a coach, a lot of coaches find that very hard. That concept of one on one to them semi private, that’s a huge leap for a lot of coaches early on how I’m so used to being a personal trainer one on one, now jump to one on for one on 8am, I still giving the same service, blah, blah, blah, all these type of things that sitting in your head, it’s a big jump to make. And I think for us, that was something we probably did very well early on is we just backed ourselves and said, We know we can’t be delivering our service every day of the week for the rest of our careers because there’s no way we’re going where we want to go. 

 

And from day one, we were never a gym. Although we had a gym, we were always named how’s the gym going? The gym is going well gym, this gym that we know from day one, that we were a performance brand. And that’s exactly what we’ve replicated. And you know, funny story with the Melbourne facility where we, we had a couple of people message through social media and stuff like that. They’re like, what, why are you doing it to yourself? Why do you want the headache of another facility? And me and Karl said, Why wouldn’t we like I didn’t even know how to answer that question. Like I just like, there’s no way you might end. Look, there’s a lot of people out there that do just want to have a facility and that’s fine. There’s no issue with that. 

 

But in our heads, it was never a goal of just having one facility, it was always going to expand. And I sort of sat there and we said far out. They’re gonna be blown away in a week when we announce a bloody agency. They’ve gone why would you want the headache of a second facility. And now we’re about to announce a completely separate company. And I think from our point of view, like those who know us know, we’re very different humans. But we have the exact same vision that keeps us tied together, which is why I think we do quite well, because we know where you want to go. And there’s not even a question when we started. Even today talking about profit shares and stuff, we don’t profit yet. And for us, we accept that because it’s not even a question about do you want to profit like, now I just want to put it back into the business. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  22:09  

Give me real quick contextualize that for the audience real quick. So in your context. 

 

Karl Goodman  22:15  

Yeah. So really, you can actually I might take a step back, I’ll take a slight setback just to contextualize even further, I think one of the first things you need to do if you run your own business decide on what you want. So like that is one of the most important things and I think the absence of answering that question will kind of put you in very difficult situations where you’re always looking at new opportunities, but not knowing how to navigate which ones are good, which ones are bad, which you should take, which you shouldn’t have, because you don’t have clear direction 

 

For Lachy and I, the decision that we made a long time ago, was that we were willing to sacrifice the short term for the long term. So what we mean by that, in practice is that when we say profit share, we make a good profit. Now, you know, we do very, very well. And you know, we’re very thankful for that. But we don’t actually draw that personally. We keep it in the business, and then we reinvest it into opportunities that the business presents itself. So Melbourne, the Melbourne facilities are a good example of that it costs about between 250 to half a million bucks to open a facility, then you have obviously the costs ongoing until you kind of break even 

 

We’ve collected that cash aside, to put that into this new opportunity rather than during that personally rather what we do is we pay cells a reasonable wage, but that’s built around the lifestyle, we want to Lach and I build our age around the lifestyle that we need, personally for the family. But then everything else is back into the business. And we’ll do that for a long time. Because what we want from the business and we joke around, it is you know, build a performance brand that Nike will want to buy us know if that like if we can get to the point where you know, Nike acquires us for $550 million in 10 years time we make the last dollar we ever have to make. 

 

So we would rather play sacrifices short term and sacrifice the $100,000 profit share, share left and right over the course of first couple of years, in order to try and play back in the long term. And that’s what’s important to us. But it goes back to you got to decide what you want. Not everyone wants that. Everyone wants a massive exit one day. So you’ve got to decide on what you want there. And the other to your point is quickly, I’m sure we’ll keep trudging along, you know, a business owner needs to think of the level of opportunity. 

 

And the coach delivering labor is what we call like a level one opportunity. Like it’s time for labor or time for money trade. And that’s fine. We all start there, but you have to be looking at well how do you scale the opportunity? So you know, the next step would be to actually scale someone else’s labor right? So you know now n`ow you’re not trading your labor you’re trading someone else’s No, that’s a next level opportunity. Then you know, what you do there? Well now start to like leverage your IP, trade your IP, not your time, and then you continue to look at well how do you know business? So as grow, you get to the point where you leverage things like code. You know, Facebook leverages a piece of code that, you know, creates the opportunity in the waveform, you know, and you see that Tesla, same it’s coded algorithms. So it’s levels of opportunity, and a business owner needs to look at, well, how do you continue to increase the opportunity? And that’s one way to think that 

 

Brett Bartholomew  25:20  

Perfect right, a couple quick questions here, because there’s a lot that you guys said. And this is the kind of podcast where we tag on to that conversationally, right. Not question. Question. Question. Question, but one, and just a quick one here. How much staff do you have onboard right now? Number?

 

Karl Goodman  25:36  

We have 25. Staff? 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  25:39  

Well, 26, next week

 

Karl Goodman  25:41  

Yeah 26

 

Brett Bartholomew  25:43  

All salary, contractors, whatever your version of 1099 is there are they full time salaried

 

Karl Goodman  25:49  

All employees Yeah. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  25:50  

Which is very rare. Very, very rare in Australia to have over 20 staff in a gym style kind of environment where they’re all employed. Vast majority will typically do rev share models like 4060 or 5050 hours are all employed. Yeah, 

 

Brett Bartholomew  26:09  

Commission, any kind of structure like that or just straight?

 

Karl Goodman  26:13  

Sometimes we’ve got Yes, we have a KPI structure based on the level of performance, but also that the tier that they sit in as an employer, yeah,

 

Brett Bartholomew  26:21  

yeah. And this is what’s going to lead into the next piece of talking about systems right, first, just to touch on some things Lachy talked about and then to build on this because I know our audience, a lot of them will be you know, their technical, they like everybody on that comes on. We always promised them tactical stuff, and you guys are doing great. One piece of this is Lachy just going back to a coach believing their best. I mean, spot on, you know, this is something that you see in hip hop to brain surgery, if you don’t believe you’re the best, then what the fuck are you doing? Two the nice thing is even if you’re not the best, you should have that belief. And no matter what like you, let’s say you were just like higher power, whatever people believe in boom, like he’s the best at everything. 

 

Well, we know that that’s perception by people as well. Some people think you’re the best, none of us are going to be the perfect coaches for everybody. But you should still go and be the best or some people that like crap pizza, because they met their girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, then there’s some people that love the farm to table stuff. But why would you not have the attitude, you’re the best spot on there. And that’s something that we tell people as well like go in. And especially when you create something in an emerging or an asset market, right? Like you mentioned over there. Nobody really has done what you have to you didn’t have that model to learn from something we had to navigate in art of coaching as well as we transitioned into leadership development and the messy realities of that. 

 

There are a lot of people that wanted to be like, oh, like Tony Robbins. No, we’re not rah, rah. Oh, like Jocko willing? No, we’re not trying to scare you. We’re actually using a sociological perspective of human behavior. So you can learn what the hell to do in high stress situations that doesn’t involve like a dopamine rush or something that isn’t tactical long term, right? But then there are a lot of people that want to put you in a bucket, though, but you’re a performance guy, you’re this and that. And I’m of the belief because you’re right, a lot of our audiences members are still strength and conditioning performance. I set it back in 2018. 

 

I think in the next five to 10 years, you’re gonna see more strength and conditioning coaches go entrepreneurial route than you’ve ever seen before. Because people are starting to realize that old and we all wanted it that old guard of being like, Alright, I’m gonna go to college, I’m gonna go to pro I’m gonna go to this club, I’m gonna go to that. Too many coaches, were checking those boxes, and then they’re realizing after they’ve been fired, or they moved the 12 time, Hmm, what’s the second mountain here? And what am I really trying to feed? You know, and you can only tell yourself, you’re trying to make a difference for so long, when you realize that you’re kind of, you know, changing, you got to scratch whenever he got to scratch. 

 

But think long term. You know, another piece there, we get a lot of questions about systems, right. And this ties into what Karl went off on. A good bit is, you know, with us, we’re a completely remote team. I know you guys got a good bit in house. But you have obviously as you go to Melbourne, you have a lot of different pieces, you guys can’t be everywhere, then you talked about setting good systems, those systems will look different to everybody. To contextualize when we have team meetings, right, which it sucks, but we have to be somewhat reliant on Zoom, given that Ali’s in Palo Alto, we have another gentleman in Knoxville and somebody in Dallas. 

 

But there are certain things that we can do. We don’t mix meetings, we have specific purposes for meetings, we’re able to record them. And we know what mediums we use for different things. If we do an art of coaching happy hour, that’s on one medium, if it’s a business related topic or a receipt, right, that’s got to be shared here, creating those systems of everything from chain of communication, to basic reports to hey, how do I respond to this email, you know, any of those pieces? So I know they’re endless. But what were some of the very first early day Day Zero Day One systems you had to put in place to save yourself from losing your damn mind. What were some of those earliest systems that really saved you?

 

Lachlan Wilmot  29:50  

Your look with us obviously we were at the foundation level at the beginning. We were a strength and conditioning company. Obviously, that is exchanging our time. I’m for the service of performance and training. So the first first level for us was how do we make sure that we can have multiple coaches still delivering the product. And you know, without going on too much of a tangent like, we didn’t want our athletes coming in because of myself or Karl or another coach it, it’s the brand that they come in for. It’s the athletes authority brand, because they know what they’re going to get delivered is world class. 

 

So how do we make sure that the coaches that are on the floor are coaching the same programming the same, using the same language, that was one of the first parts and that was probably stage one of our evolution of having a company is not really worrying about the company systems, because we didn’t really have much of a company just then we were just a gym. So we needed to make sure that our service was so goddamn good that when they scaled, that we could hold on to that. So that was a big part of it. First things was building our programming system, knowing how coaches can react to things and it is without, again, delving too deeply. It’s it literally is a flowchart of organizational things to do. You know, when an athlete comes in, they test these the test results, this is what we do next. 

 

This is next year, we sort of refer to just following the bouncing ball, we have enough of this framework where coaches can be creative, and still have their input. Because at the end of the day, we want to create an environment where our coaches feel valued, and they feel like they can assist and add, like we don’t want a cookie cutter approach where coaches that are simply just putting copy, paste or enter down and they don’t get to contribute. So it was a big part of creating a framework and a system where it is very guided in the direction we go and how we respond to our athletes. But the coaches can also have a bit of a say in that. 

 

So that was sort of stage one. Once we did that we realized that was flowing well, we then had our rehab system. So the rehab side comes in with us dealing with physios externally that that wasn’t functioning the way we wanted it to we, we knew they didn’t understand our systems as well and, we need an in house. So lo and behold, we bought the rehabbing side. So from that, it was about creating protocols around each of the injuries. It was creating the same programming system for those physio crew to start using a little bit of a tweak for some things. But now the physio crew are programming off the same hymn sheet so to speak, as the coaches and they start talking the same language and coaching the same direction. 

 

And suddenly our rehab model and a performance model coexist and work together to create what is effectively our facility model. The problem is, then we started to scale with more and more people. And it wasn’t actually the programming that was becoming the issue. It was now administrative stuff, right? So yoke, this is where it starts to shift over then Carl, Carl’s getting inundated with, as you know, the more people you have, like for every person that wants to put their their membership on hold, when you’ve got 60 athletes, maybe it’s one a week, when you got 300 athletes. Yeah, you do that. Then it starts to scale. And this is where the system side for Karl had to come into play of how do we start to structure some good business systems? 

 

Brett Bartholomew  33:07  

We go to Karl like Karl, right? Because you guys like this was founded in like, 2016. Right? And did you guys mean like 2017? You met in 2017. Right. And then Carl, I mean, kind of a polymath you have experience in commercial real estate, business, developmental. I mean, like, you’re an interesting guy that we’ve never really got to sit down and get like, I’m gonna like I’ve had a private investigator go deep. So I know that dark secrets, but I can’t wait to hear more about like, where you like where you’re, like wonderful, like, genius just fit in with all this stuff.

 

Karl Goodman  33:35  

It’s hard to put it into words, right? I have not an easy fit. Anywhere. I wasn’t, I didn’t finish school, which which some people find interesting. I haven’t necessarily ever thought of myself as very employable, which was part of the reason why I opened athletes authority was for that very reason I wasn’t fitting into an employment structure. And I’m interested in a wide range of things. I think something that underpins great entrepreneurship is an interest in a lot of things, you have to have a very sensitive general knowledge, you have to be interested in economics, you have to be interested in science, you have to be interested in personal development, you have to be able to navigate because you know, in business, it is all those things. 

 

So you have to be able to navigate all of it. And so to say, Lachy’s point. I like to think of systems as preceding redundancy. So what I mean by that is, when you’re identifying a bottleneck in your business with any operational task, and literally anyone, you’re going to find that it’s the absence of a system that is keeping you stuck there. It’s keeping you in the bottleneck. The system is actually what allows you to become redundant. Because once you have the system, it’s teachable. Once you have a system, it’s replicable. Once you have a system, you can pass that responsibility to someone else. And if you The absence of it you, the system is operating inside your own head reliant on you. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  35:05  

Well, that’s why they call it a system save yourself time, energy and money.

 

Karl Goodman  35:10  

That I’ve never actually heard that before. But that is brilliant. That is brilliant. It’s spot on. Yeah, it’s I’ve always thought, well, it proceeds redundancy. So as you’re a business owner trying to navigate, well, what is my next step? What’s the best allocation of the very finite amount of resources I have, you need to look at? Well, what’s the easiest to systematize that also has the lowest yield. So if you’ve got a high yield task as a business owner, but it isn’t systemized, you know, you may want to stay completing that task, because it’s high yield, if it generates a lot of revenue, or whatever it might be, you know, and that may be a reason for you to stay operating that task. 

 

But if you’re finding yourself, you know, committed to things that are low yield, like you mentioned, membership, odds, membership holds are a part of doing business, but they don’t generate any new revenue for the business. In fact, you lose the revenue when they’re on hold. So it is something that you want to try and systematize. So you make yourself redundant, because I find I’m not sure if you’re the same, but certainly for me, and no for like, there’s only so many good decisions you can make a day. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  36:11  

You know, what, would you want me to answer that? Yeah, I mean, like, 100%, you know, and then I think, to something that I’m not afraid to admit, because I think that talking about these things, just brings a relatability now that I think, you know, people kind of think like, why would you say that, you know, I find that at this point in my life, there’s only a certain amount of mental endurance that I have. And that doesn’t mean like what I’m able to push myself to write, like, I’m trying to simultaneously run a business, be a dad, do a doctor write a book, but it’s just different. When I was in, when I was just a strength coach, you know, there was only so much emotional pull on my time, even if I ran eight or nine groups, it was different. 

 

And this aligns really with intensity and volume of training as well, right? There’s a different kind of neural load of that. You can still wear yourself out physically, but it’s different. Now when I’m managing staff, and I’m running events, and we run our mastermind, and there’s so many different types of polls on my emotions, and my just intellect and all that, that, you know, it will take away even just from my physical capacities, and anybody that says that, that that doesn’t is lying, or not working in complex enough issues, right? And this is why you know, to the point, it’s like I laughed, and then I’ll turn it back to you. When when people said, Oh, why did you leave coach, I go, I’m coaching harder shit now than I’ve ever coached in my life. I mean, no offense, but like, you know what I mean? 

 

And Karl, I’m sure you do, too. There gets to be a point. And this isn’t meant to sound any kind of way. But like running these groups of just tons of athletes, even if you didn’t have an intern, like you just get used to it, there’s this command and control. It’s like a conductor. In a symphony. It’s like any job, it shouldn’t be arrogant to say that as you get older, and as you’ve had more experience, you want more challenges and unique challenges. But the coaching we do and the decisions we have to make now, you know, are just completely different. And there are only I would say too Karl, just to add on to that. 

 

I probably only have if I’m being truthful. About 90 minutes of true productivity in a day. Like if you really banter down, there’s always yak shaving and other things you can do are productive. You lay the brick, you move the ball, but 90 minutes of like, yep. And I mean, even people like Jeff Bezos, no matter what people think about him. It’s this isn’t about like person. Like he would say the same thing yet his most intellectually demanding meeting at 10am. Because he knew after that, like he had to destructure his day. So some of the decisions were a little bit more autonomous. But I think it’s great point that you bring it up.

 

Karl Goodman  38:37  

Yeah, and because I find too, when especially when it comes to creation in you’ve, you create a lot of stuff, right? You’re You’re prolific in new creation, I can’t create things in the afternoon, I can only create in the morning. So I know that if I if I book a whole bunch of stuff in the morning, my creation capacities done, it doesn’t matter, I can leave the afternoon empty, and I’ll be absolutely useless. So you also need to know like, you know, where you can allocate energy effectively, I can probably have a team meeting where I can probably make a basic business decision, or, you know, in the afternoon, I can probably do that in the evening, I probably can’t decide where we’re going to allocate $2 million over the next two years at 9pm. At night, I need a problem. 

 

Like I need to have those decisions in the morning. So you need to also kind of know what’s within you really tight circle of competence and what is going to versus what’s going to stretch you because when it stretches you need to you can only make so many of those good decisions. So you have to outsource the basic primitive, you know, menial things as soon as you can. It’s the first I’m sure you give the same advice. It’s first advice I give to people that I consult for is I look at the plethora of responsibilities that they have running a gym. I was like cool. What are the C grade tasks that you’re doing day in day out that is sapping your mental energy and your decision made? Thinking capabilities. So much so that you feel like you’re not moving the needle? I mean, no, let’s get rid of them first. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  40:06  

Yeah, well, oh, yeah, Lachy go.

 

Lachlan Wilmot  40:09  

And I was just gonna say that I think as well for people listening that you also got to trust your gut like after everything that Karl’s just said, Then I make my best decisions in the evening when everyone else is asleep. And I’m doing work. I’m far better in the evening than I am in the morning. I think the rigors of the day actually stimulate me more than the other way around. I think. And that’s just as an individual thing. Eric Cressey actually put up a post a few years ago, which I’ve still to this day love. The mentioned now I’m paraphrasing here, obviously, but around the fact he goes, all these 20 Somethings are telling me about their morning routine of meditation of training of journaling, and he goes on got two kids under five or something, I don’t have a routine, my routine is get up, get these kids to school as quickly as possible, and then get to work. 

 

And I think it’s spot on. Like, everyone works differently. And I think in this day and age, with the amount of social media stuff that goes around, I think a lot of coaches actually feel like they need to replicate other people’s success or solutions to success. And I think it’s a crock of shit, to be honest. Like, I think you’ve really got to find what works for you. And don’t be afraid to, if you work best from nine till 11pm, depending on your your work life balance, like if that works, that works do it. Like, I’ve gotten up at anywhere between four and 5 30 in the morning, for the past 15 years for work. I’m still not a morning person. 

 

Yeah, at all. I haven’t learned to be good in the morning, I still am far better at night. If I didn’t set my alarm, I’d probably sleep till 930 In the morning, providing the kids weren’t in their house. But these like, that’s just who I am. And I think the more you battle some of those things, and the more you try and replicate other people’s solutions to things, the worse you’ll be and that then times is into your company as well you look at the decisions we make. We’ve made against a lot of what other gyms do or a lot of what other services do. And we’ve been successful because of that, because we’re not stuck in this just mundane replication of what other people do. We’re actually thinking, we’re researching and we’re responding to our environment and what we believe is going to be best for our environment. And I think as an individual as a company, you got to do that. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  42:21  

How I mean, goes back to training too, right? When people like to say, oh, growth hormone does this during the day and then testosterone, it’s like, listen, consistency is what’s most important. And it’s the same thing here and I relate a little bit to both of you. Before I go into this. One, it seems a bit odd that we are running our art of coaching apprenticeship leadership development workshop with you guys, February 25 26th. Next year, we should also be running a brand builder with how much business talk is going on here. You know, like, that’s why we created that. And so like, I know, I know, like this, it’s funny, because this is an off the air conversation, but it’s better on the air anyway. 

 

You know, like, because this is a business decision to is we’re coming over there to run that workshop, right? Well, I’m taking a colleague with me, our director of creative strategy Ali Kirshner, and we have to cost this out, right? Like inevitably, some my Aussie friends are like how long you stay in this and that it’s like, well, mate, like, listen, I you know, this is a business decision, too. So we have to cost out accommodation, we have to cost out this because I’m taking a substantial part of my workforce. Ali’s a monster, we’re off the grid for two days. And you guys know what that travel. I mean, if we left Sunday, we get there Tuesday, you got to cost us out. So then some people are like, ah, stay an extra dude. 

 

And I’m like, listen, maybe the next weekend, we’ll do a Brand Builder, Business Development Workshop, maybe even offline, we talked about doing something where you know, twice a year, maybe it’s one on one. And here, we collaborate, and we merge some of our content with that you guys merge some and we do a big four day, you know, for these things. So that’s the other thing that’s nice about entrepreneurship. Before we get into that more the messy stuff, is the thing that’s fulfilling. Outside of all the things that are draining is man is getting around other people especially like you guys who have ideas and are in it and have bled and like just the ideas and the solutions. And the way you find business to do together I think was really fulfilling. 

 

As much as I love strength and conditioning, very negative field. A lot of times very, I win, you lose, I got the job, going into the entrepreneurial realm, finding a way of like, Yo, we can both make a huge difference. You make money, we make money, we can create jobs for people and then we don’t have to worry about you know, IP doing that everybody was worried about in framing conditioning. Oh, these people have this program. Jesus guys, you don’t think people chefs all around the world know how to make lobster mac and cheese? You know what I mean? People go, it doesn’t matter. You know, real entrepreneurs, real coaches, and I’d venture to say real leaders find ways to kind of really make everybody win Oh, rising tide lifts all ships like but it’s true. 

 

And that’s something that I’ve found that like one to your point Lachy, Yes. Like find what works for you. I tend to do I do my best work if I I’m gonna do it in the morning, between like nine and 11. 12 and three are kind of like meetings and things that I have to do, then I kind of hit a circadian dip from about four to 630. And then I get my second wind at 830. And I’m like you Lachy from 8 30 to 11. We’re going, right? So there’s that. But like, you know, I think like, when you’re just in this game long enough, you start to realize that like, Guys, there’s a level of vulnerability and a level of give a shit lessness that, like, just get it done, find what works for you and get it done. Because the rest of the world is still kind of sitting there being like, people forget that great business isn’t about ideas, it’s about the execution of an idea. And that requires you just putting excuses to the side and figuring out a 1.0 and getting the shit on the road. You know? And if so, go ahead. I was gonna go ahead, Karl.

 

Karl Goodman  45:50  

Like on the point of 1.0, it’s I don’t know what I was going to say before. But that is the bottleneck, right? You know, so many people are so scared of a 1.0 iteration, because it doesn’t necessarily marry up with the vision of perfection they have in their head, yet, you know, the execution of anything is absent because the 1.0 is never good enough. And, you know, it’s crazy, because we seem to know this stuff. And everyone talks about this stuff. So, there’s so many coaches who know, I just need to roll out a first iteration. I know, that’s what I get told to do. 

 

You know, I know this is my first step, but then they can’t, they just can’t get their head around at first iteration. And sometimes the best thing you can do is actually put something to market, like, be bold enough to Suffolk and put it to market, right. And we have built the best stuff we’ve built from from an education side from whatever it is when you put the fucking thing to market. And we don’t even have the first fucking PowerPoint made, right?

 

Brett Bartholomew  46:47  

And that’s fine, because it would be crazy. But like, we’ve learned this, even with two of our workshops, we always run we get a 1.0 then we run the workshop. And it’s more than good enough to run it right. Like we wouldn’t run something that like we wouldn’t take people’s money if we didn’t think this and but like we sit there and we think let’s run this. And then let’s there’s inevitably, some things we need to cleave because we either overestimated what the audience wanted or needed. And then there’s some things that the audience generates for us. Like we see some more user generated content. 

 

Like one time we were run into them, we got way too in depth of the business weeds. And what they found is or one of our key differentiators is, they’re like, Hey, you guys really specialize in the sociology, psychology, I want to see more of that consumer psychology element. So we’re like, alright, let’s scale this back. Now let’s talk about day one. Why do people buy things? Why do they do the things they do? Both eudaimonic he donec all this because people realize when they zoomed out at their brand, or their idea, or whatever it was they’re trying to build, they would forget that first. They’re always thinking it’s utilitarian, that they build things with logic, assuming everybody uses logic to commit to something and as you guys know, they don’t, right like you could have the

 

Karl Goodman  47:54  

sale emotion makes the sale and then it’s justified rationally. Right,

 

Brett Bartholomew  47:58  

right. And so this idea I think, just perfect is always overrated. You know, and I think athletes learn that as well. Like, what is perfect movement Lachy, you always do a great job talking about this. I mean, listen, everybody, there’s this bandwidth, there’s this continuum, there’s these and you don’t make one athlete try to look like another athlete. You don’t do this shit. So it makes me ask one question, one area that I really struggled and I’ll admit, I got emotional about it for a couple years. You guys you watch billions, right? Watch billions. You ever watch billions

 

Lachlan Wilmot  48:27  

I’ve watched one, to be honest. It wasn’t selfish. I thought I get into I got I think it was season two and I just drifted off. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  48:34  

Yeah, that’s okay. The point is, is you know, you understand Wags, right, like, there’s a right everybody’s got a right hand man, a right hand woman, a right hand person. And for a while with what I was doing, man, it really took me. You know, there weren’t coaches, it was tricky, because so much of my network. What were people in strength and conditioning, right? And it wasn’t like, you know, you listen to Guy Roz and how I built this. And you’ll try to glean insight as to how somebody started, like a way travel or some brand. And it’s always somebody being like, Well, I had an idea. And then a friend of mine who works for Amazon logistics just quit a job and came and you’re like, oh, fuck off. 

 

Like, that doesn’t happen. I don’t have a friend that so I’m like, I’m sitting here telling Liz like, I gotta find a number two or a code number one or whatever. It takes so long to find that person. You guys have clearly found a lot of great people and I’m not insinuating it’s easy. I’m asking how you went about it. And what were some of the ways that you maybe made mistakes early you got an arguments disagreements, like how did you navigate just finding good people that would stick with the damn mission and take accountability?

 

Lachlan Wilmot  49:41  

Well, I think it started with the two of us and I think what a lot of people make the mistake with an officer there’s a few times that you know, if I’m a personal trainer on the gym floor, and I’m chatting away and there’s another personal trainer we get along because we have the same interests. We enjoy the same things. Our ideas are similar. 

 

Karl Goodman  49:58  

We get thoughtful check. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  49:59  

Yeah, we get We get revved up and we’re like, oh, we should open gym together. And it’s just I get it because we all agree it’s fucking happy. We have the same thoughts and ideas and then we sit down go, oh, well, we probably should get some marketing out and it’s like, oh well how do you do that? I don’t know. Well, it’s some funnel. I’ve never done that, to get what else we need to build a website we’re never close. So these similar strengths and traits that created such good friendship is actually then the curse because you have the same weaknesses and the same downfalls. And I think it’s one of those people always say, Yeah, friends in business, all this other stuff. But I think the thing that makes us quite powerful is we are so different. And we literally Yeah, we were acquaintances beforehand. We weren’t friends in not because we didn’t like each other. But

 

Brett Bartholomew  50:46  

you guys met in the strip clubs, amateur night in Darwin

 

Lachlan Wilmot  50:50  

It was a brothel. Yeah, we will always come in who’s coming out? Yes. How are on the table? But yeah, it was our relationship probably started more around a communal vision, rather than Karl loving the same footy team as me and therefore becoming friends and all this type of stuff like that sort of saying that everyone has to go out and find that perfect meat, like, the old meat cue just happens, however, it’s going to happen. But for us, it was far more about the vision, the direction, what we can do. And the understanding that we actually did have different skill sets. Now, there’s no secret to that, like, unfortunately, that there is no secret to you just going, Oh, I’m gonna find someone like that. 

 

But I think when you understand that, when you’re having these opportunities at present, you can probably identify them a little bit better, because I think people should very, very, people should be very careful around selecting people that they go into business with based on the fact that they just get along well, the right, there’s no doubt culturally, that that you do need to get along well, you can’t have someone you dislike. Put it that way. Because that’s never going to come well. But you need to find people that are unique to you like that. We joke, all the time that we’re completely different people and we have different ideas. And that’s exactly right. Like we should look at something. 

 

And both myself and Karl go, we want to perform with brand great. But then there should be cow should have some idea that I look at and go What the hell is this bloke talking about? And it should be left field the same as when I’m talking about with Karl to be like, Oh, I didn’t really think about that outcome or that. Yeah, that’s fair point, as he did not didn’t even come into it. And we haven’t all the time we have it so often that we will be texting each other. And I will think he’s talking about something else. And he’s talking about something completely different. But we’ve just misinterpreted because we think differently, the way we talk is different. So things like that I think people look at and think oh, it’s not compatible with the opposite. 

 

I think it’s fantastic. Because ultimately, we always tend to meet in the middle. And I think that’s probably another powerful thing about the two of us is we have very thick skin. We take nothing personally. We’ve had blow ups we’ve had discussions with Karl stormed out crying, but right good windows. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  53:03  

Yeah, it’s just like he’s singing Backstreet Boys. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  53:07  

Yeah, well, that’s just a Saturday night. And so that, for us is a powerful part of what we’re about. Now. The next part is in how do we actually recruit people under US that are going to replicate that now that is, and that is,

 

Brett Bartholomew  53:21  

and then onboard them right like that. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  53:24  

Exactly. And, we’ve made those mistakes with, we’ve had a number of coaches and physios that we have presented. And when we say presented, they did our course out we have a three day course that presents all of our business and systems as our business systems and coaching systems for the three days,

 

Brett Bartholomew  53:43  

Can you consider it as an online course 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  53:46  

that we teach that, no that’s a face to face. But in our heads, we’re thinking, Could there be a more perfect onboarding setup? Absolutely not. That’s everything. They have sat through it. We’ve gone through questions left, right and center. And the next week, something happens. We’re like, how the hell did that slip? Like? How do they not know that? What I don’t understand. So? Yeah, so our onboarding process has had to improve on that, because our assumptions that were created in this, our love of this course, thinking while it is going to get it, there is so much organic information that fills the gaps in our heads because we’ve been through it for the past five years, that we forget to onboard that segment and that segment, yeah, links to big objective ideas together that that, you know, can create an issue if it’s not done properly. 

 

So that has been a big weakness. So for us, again, we believe our internship that’s a great way of doing we have a six month internship we hire from our internship because we get to see how these coaches how these physios get put under pressure, how they respond. They have six months of learning all of our systems, seeing it in action, not having responsibility. So if we’re talking about the operational side of bringing someone on, well, that is a big part of what we do. We love of hiring from our internship, from that perspective is also trying to work out how do we build the culture that we want. And we say all the time, one of our coaches used to say, culture isn’t what you say it is, it just is what it is. And I think it’s a great philosophy that we have that, like, we enjoy going out for a drink with each other. 

 

Yeah, we do that often, we put on a bar tab, we go and enjoy ourselves, our coaches band around like, we are not a senior accounting firm that you walk in, and everyone’s in suits, and stiffen and structured. Like our coaches, their personalities come through our physios, they want their personality to come through. If they’re addict, we get rid of them. But we do want their persona to come through because that’s what connects to athletes. And that’s what allows us to produce the best environment that we can, because people connect with our personalities, our environment, and that’s exactly what we want to try and promote. 

 

Karl Goodman  55:53  

And for what it’s worth, we’ve got it wrong. Just just just for clarity, for clarity, we fire a lot of people, and we’ve taken responsibility for those incorrect appointments, because it’s was on us, we made mistakes on selection on on best fit. And we’ve got it wrong many, many times. And we’ve had to have difficult conversations to unravel that and unwind that because we’ve haven’t met someone’s expectations, or they haven’t met ours or potentially a combination of both. So we’ve got it wrong many, many times. But I think the point is, you have to keep going. Because it’s like a bit of an 8020 rule, no 20% of your team, probably regardless, to watch fractal, you’re looking at whether it’s 10 of you 100 view 1000 of you, there’ll be about 20% Who are the overachievers and then there’s a 60% in the middle who will do a reasonably good job and there’s 20% who stood out for being garbage, right? 

 

I’m an always kind of the weakest link. And you have to continue to pursue the fact that you’re going to make some mistakes, you’re gonna get those weak links, there will always be a weak link in your team, just by definition, like there will always be some cause you can get rid of the weakest link, and then someone will take their place, relatively speaking. So now we’ve got it wrong many times, and you’ve just got to keep going, you’ve got to not kind of lose sight of the big picture. Because that would be the biggest mistake is to not rehire is to go back in your shell to take on all the responsibility again, whatever that might be. Because you’re afraid of making the same mistake, you just have to if you’ve got a team, if that’s part of your strategy, then you’re gonna make mistakes every once in a while. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  57:33  

And you got to make the decision quickly as well. I believe like, I mean, the worst person to have is a great human, that’s terrible at their job. And I think we’ve all known them we’ve all seen especially in in the professional sport world are these people that describe humans, everyone connects with, but they tell that their job and no one actually has the heart to fire them or move them on. Your best is a great human who’s great at their job. That’s perfect. The next best is someone who’s a terrible human and terrible at their job, because you don’t even lose sleep over moving them on. But it’s the one that’s a great person, but actually terrible at their job. Now, look, we haven’t had people that are terrible at their job, but people that are not 

 

Brett Bartholomew  58:08  

Point’s well made. Yeah. Yeah. 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  58:10  

And so that’s where it’s where they’re the ones that probably you deliberate longer on than you should. And once the decision is made, and you move on, you’re like, we should have done it months ago, would it? So I think, yeah, when you look at that the 20%. That’s at the bottom, I think as managers as employers, you got to make the decisions quickly. As soon as you start to identify this, you look for solutions. Obviously, you see what you can do to improve? Have I missed anything? Have we missed anything as an organization? Can we approve it? Still no solution, you got to make that call. It’s also unfair, it’s fair to keep them there. Because if it’s just like you’re dragging them on your they’ve got no real long term career prospects with your organization. You’re not giving them responsibilities, because you don’t want them to fuck it up. 

 

Like they’re, it’s actually unfair on their development. And that’s what we’ve realized now is we’re probably quicker to identify when something’s not working. After dragging things on far too long, historically, were quick identify, look, this is gonna work, this is unfair for you to stay, because you deserve an opportunity. You’re 30, you’ve got kids on the way whatever it might be, you need to get you need to find an opportunity that’s got really good long term growth potential, and you don’t have it here. So it’s unfair for you to stay and drag this on. So that’s maybe something that might some of your listeners might find valuable.

 

Brett Bartholomew  59:27  

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, one thing that we had to figure out what the quickness is, we had to get really good at identifying intangibles because we’re not able to really hire from an intern program, not like I could when I was a strength coach, right, being a remote staff, not a central hub. You know, for people that come there’s three key parts to our business. There’s the live events, there’s digital mentoring, and what we do with our art of coaching virtual coaching program, and then you know, there’s the online courses and then we’ll do a lot of inservices and retainer agreements with organizations because a surprising amount of organizations don’t have programs where they can continue to coach their coaches and leaders, right. 

 

And all of them can’t, you know, and that’s part of why you know that that arm of our business exists. But it’s interesting when I was a strength coach, you could see people on the floor, you get an idea of their capability, you could get an idea of their character. Now, it’s not like somebody’s going to come out to our house or this place, or that and insurance. So we’ve had to create a lot of trip wires, we’ve had to create, you know, hey, there’s there’s 90 Day probationary periods within these contracts, and it’s just a degree of agreement that we’ve got to have this fit. And then you know, by and large, to a degree, there’s some element of trying to just really, really, really through knowing who you are, be so blatantly honest that you almost scare people out of it to see if they’re gonna stick around. 

 

You know, and it goes back to knowing when you guys talked about morning routines and everything, like, it goes back to even why our organization, it’s funny, strength coach, I could be very active on social media, our product now is not really one that like would show well over social media. You know, you’re talking about going to events and leadership development stuff, where people are doing intensive role playing like we’re the one we’re going to do in Sydney. I mean, you’re seeing firefighters, doctors strength coaches getting they’re evaluating like this stuff, aside from a trailer here and there doesn’t look awesome on social sort of like, okay, let’s not worry about that. Let’s focus on podcast newsletter, this this this. 

 

Same thing, if certain things don’t work for you at hiring a staff is one organization, find another thing, but you’ve got to have and you guys spoke to your example, you’ve got to have trip wires. For us people have to take one of our online quizzes to get a general idea of drives personality. Obviously, that’s not foolproof, because even if we make the questions in it, counterbalance, because we know people will answer in an aspirational way. So we account for that. And sometimes that scores a certain way, they’ve got to send in videos of them teaching or demonstrating certain pieces, they won. Definitely coming to our events as a huge one. And the Aapprenticeship probably more than most people that come to our Apprenticeship workshop. By and large, we found through the surveys say they come because they’re ready to do the hard shit. 

 

We don’t get kind of the bright eyed, wide eyed person who’s just trying to kind of do the easy, superficial stuff. So that does give people an edge, you come to our apprenticeship, we’re gonna see really well how vulnerable you get how you do under pressure. And then through our like proprietary evaluation that gives us there was somebody that just reached out there at our one recently. And they’re like, are you guys hiring and Ali and I looked at ourselves and we’re like, this is somebody we would hire balls out locked in tough calm. And what’s nice is you can literally put them in any kind of conversation and role playing scenario that you want. 

 

And you’re going to see, I mean, it’s not going to tell you everything, but you’re going to see a lot of aspects of who these people are. So just find a system that fits. What do you guys do as it pertains to continual coaching, you know, you’ve done the onboarding, I love that you have the three day I love that you have such a thorough process. And I want to respect your time. So this will be one of the last questions. But what do you do given that you unlock can’t be everywhere? Even if you create a robust digital kind of thing, right? You’re there. inevitably there’s going to be hit and miss there. How do you guys approach that continuing to coach coaches?

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:03:02  

Yeah, so we, we do it via the setup of our two main managers. So our senior staff, we’ve been ahead of medical services Kylie, who runs all of our physios and then we’ve got our head of performance Tom, who runs all of our coaches. So it does mean that when you start to disseminate a little bit of an org structure, it means that for example, my focus on the coaching the physio side is with Kylie and Tom. So it now means that when I’m working with them, the same colleague, Tom also do our sales because they run the program. So when Karl’s working with a sales side of things, teaching them he can focus on those two, not necessarily the entire 25 person staff. 

 

So that then gets disseminated down. So our personal development slash professional development setup is we lock it in trying to keep it consistent 130 every Wednesday, and physios and coaches will do things separately. But we also have crossovers with physios and coaches work together for a lot of their PD as well. So they’ll do a range of case studies example, case studies, they work through particular injuries that might be new, they work through their programming, what’s been coached on the floor, what are they noticed all this type of direct feedback will also when a general feedback sort of thing is our performance reviews with our coaches, which, again, something we didn’t get, right we had coaches in for ages, and we never actually reviewed their performance in a in a setup framework, which when you’re young, and you’ve got only a handful, and as a young as a company, very good a handful, you see them on the floor. 

 

So you’re talking with them engaging but it’s amazing how quickly you lose that as that team expands. And you kind of don’t think how quickly a month goes two months ago and they haven’t had that feedback. So that’s something that we as a senior staff put in place only a few months ago where we actually need to lock in consistent six month feedback and a part of that will be KPIs a part of that will be as their managers, but a large part of that is actually us getting feedback from the athletes. So the athletes will actually fill out questionnaires based on the coaches or the physios they’ve worked with, and give an idea of well, what’s the perception being from them? How are they interpreting the coaches and the way they train? 

 

Because the end of the day perception is reality, isn’t it? Like we can say the X’s and O’s you know everything about, but you’re actually not communicating that to the athlete. And that’s how they’ve interpreted they don’t think you know, anything that’s I call very knowledgeable person, but doesn’t communicate it very well. So we have started to lay in a lot more of these probably fixed dates and outcome driven things. So we can be accountable. Because the simple act of me or Karl floating on the floor chatting with what once was three staff members. That is no more, you know, it’s far bigger framework now that we have to build out. 

 

Karl Goodman  1:05:42  

Yeah, the other thing to add is probably what we’ve done with self directed development. So wedge, what we really try and do is once a time period has elapsed, and the coach is settled. And we’ve ideally, what potentially that their strongest skill set, whether that’s coaching pertaining coaching, like energy system development, or speed work, or whatever it might be, we’re really going to try and find a way where we can get them to build a course or build something that allows them to lean into those interests, and develop themselves. So not only is there some financial remuneration on the back end of that, 

 

But that forces them to really direct their own development, because as you know, you build a course. And more often than not, you collect information, you gather resources that help you inform on the material that’s going to be in our court. So you end up doing directing your own development in that way, as well. So that’s the other thing that we do. And that was facilitated by that three day immersion that we spoke about our three day onboarding, because our speed guy teaches the speed stuff, our marketing guy teaches the marketing stuff, our sports science guy teaches the sports science stuff. So they are getting some self directed learning and development the same time because they’re responsible for teaching it. And as you know, you know, if you want to get some bloody good at something, you know, hold a gun to your head and teach it, that’s one of the best, that’s one of the best ways to figure it out. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:07:13  

Oh, go ahead. I was gonna say Well, with that it’s, and that’s something that I’m excited I notice even my wife, who’s our Director of Operations and Ali and more of our staff do, we’re hosting for the first time ever, we’re creating a facilitator course, so that anybody else that wants to teach anything related to what we have, under our suite of services at art of coaching, they can now go right, but they’ve got to come out for similar, it’s going to be three full days. And it’s interesting, though, you know, and you guys will get a chuckle out of this, we had announced this kind of under the radar. 

 

And inevitably, we get tons of people pouring things in, and we say, Hey, you have to have actually gone to one of our events to be eligible for this. And that’s just our, that’s our standard, right? Like, and this person, this guy just loses it. And he says, I don’t understand that and I go, you think we’re gonna have you out there teaching something, you haven’t gone through your nuts, you know, but like, it’s great, because, you know, I get sick and tired of myself, like the rest of the world does. And so now, you know, I’ve told Ali and Liz, I’m like, Hey, you’re gonna own some parts of this three day course. 

 

Because by and large, you know, I’ve created it all, you know, and I don’t want that no good business as you guys have alluded to, once, that thing to be about them or this and that and more importantly, even the things that I have created, I want other people to go teach, but there’s that earn trust, right and even our staff now, Nate and Becca as they continue to work through, it’s great, they’ve created a study buddy system, they’re very new. Hey, let’s get more familiar with the products. Let’s do this. And I said, guys, to your point, Karl, don’t just get familiar with what is document what you’re going through, then create a resource off of that because there’s people in other companies Becca, who are taking a chief everything Officer role, there’s people in other companies Nate, who for the first time are taking a director of business development role. 

 

And you forget because of that curse of knowledge and our own inherent egocentric bias, that what you know, or what you go through organically is critically valuable. So I love this self directed education because it’s not I know that sounds cruel. It’s not always your guys’s job nor my job to continually develop staff. They have got to do that. And I don’t think that’s often said a lot because people think they’re gonna turn the pitchforks No, like, I don’t know about you, like I don’t know about you, like I’ve never had a mentor just hold in my hand teaching me how to do shit, navigating how to do like, to some point, like people have just got to remind employees and members of a team. This is up to you, your ascension to a degree, we can give you a platform, we can give you some tools, we’re certainly going to give you love and support. But after a point, you know, baby giraffe walks on its own go get it, you know.

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:09:52  

And I think it’s a big thing that we’ve noticed as well. There’s no offense to our staff. But we have had, you know, examples of people that there may have worked for a little bit of time and then go, oh, what’s next? Like, well, what’s my next step? And you’re like, What do you mean? You’ve been here for three months? Like, what do you mean your next step? Like, why don’t we just get good at what you’re currently doing? Like, Let’s nail that and build that out a little bit more like, they’re always looking for what other people can offer them for the next step. And I think, based off that, we’ve created a very good tee system in our coaches, the coaches know, where they stand and where they can go to. 

 

And there is a limit to that, you know, like, our header performance is sort of our top range, and TSM is ahead of medical. And if you want more than that, well, unfortunately, we’re not the organization for you. And we can’t try and be the organization for everyone. Because otherwise, we’re gonna have the national, no offense to the American Crew over there. But you guys love a vice president of something like that. All these presidents Vice Presidents and Vice President of Marketing and director, like Director of Sports Science, when there’s no one else with the Sports Science Department, it’s just a single person, that’s part time, but they don’t have the Director of Sports Science. 

 

Like they just adding terminology to things. And it’s like, well, there’s gonna be those roles. No doubt about it. Yeah, we’re directors, we have our heads and everything. But we’re not just going to keep adding we’re not going to just go okay, well, you’re a head of performance. So next year, you’re now the vice president of performance. But your role actually doesn’t change. We’re just trying to gift you something to make it feel like you’re moving up the ranks I think you get your key positions. You get the managers your directors set. And that’s your system, you don’t start adding all these does weed layers that actually don’t add it into your business, 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:11:34  

Karl, he’s so bitter about America all the time, just something about America, 

 

Karl Goodman  1:11:40  

Because he’s married to one. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:11:42  

When we do the role playing for the apprenticeship, every single one of Lachy scenarios is gonna have to be so good this you’re interacting with an American and his

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:11:54  

You’ve been given the vice president role of performance

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:11:57  

in America. Well, guys, listen, you’ve been more than gracious with your time supremely tactical. There’s this is one of those ones where I wish it was long for you three hours, but this is why we continue a friendship and continue the relationship and build on it. Karl, especially nice to see you get to learn more about you can’t wait to spend more time with you over in Aus and maybe offline. Let’s talk about that the weekend, if it makes sense. And if you guys believe there’s a market for it. The weekend after the apprenticeship, which we believe they’re complementary, one being leadership development, tough conversations, things people are going to have like we always say, Hey, can you like in sport performance, despite competence in our abilities Lachy? Right, we couldn’t guarantee for everybody that every single program was going to get them better. There’s a lot of complexity, right? 

 

We can guarantee that, you know, poor communication with people not working on it is pretty much likely to make nearly every situation worse. And so you know, I appreciate you guys for hosting us people are going to be able to see your wonderful facility. I’m anxious to see it. I mean, I’ve been following it from afar. I’m a huge fan. But yeah, maybe there’s an opportunity to, to help other coaches on their entrepreneurial journey or management journey and figure out a way how do you figure out what you’re amongst the best in the world at how you can get it to more people and how you can serve others. So if you guys are down to that and keen for it, let’s chat more is you guys get the final words? The final send off, so make it good, Make it good,

 

Karl Goodman  1:13:19  

Wow, here we go. much pressure you start off? 

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:13:22  

Oh, I was gonna say, I think obviously at the large following is over in the US. I think one correction aims because it’s bloody ridiculous directors and vice presidents should be reserved for for very special areas. So

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:13:33  

that’s a soundbite right there.

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:13:35  

Ridiculous. But now I think might look at the end of the day, there’s a big difference, I think between coaches that believe they’re the best and don’t want to get better. And coaches that believe they’re the best and can keep getting better. And that small differentiation is the difference between a very egotistic coach and what I believe is a confident, very strong willed and very directional coach. I’ve always liked the phrase of, of being south of arrogant north of confident and I think in business in life in coaching. It’s a great place to live.

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:13:49  

Yeah, great, great point there, Karl, try to top it.

 

Karl Goodman  1:14:12  

I don’t think I can, but I’ll give it a crack. That way

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:14:15  

Put your shirt back on Carl put your shirt back on.

 

Karl Goodman  1:14:20  

Honestly, maybe to the to the point earlier if you’re running a business and it doesn’t feel chaotic, if it doesn’t feel bloody, if it doesn’t feel messy, if it doesn’t feel like you’re in over your head, if it doesn’t feel like things are you know, one coin toss away from everything falling apart. All of those feelings are completely valid. They are normal. It’s and it means you’re in the right place. It means you’re in the right place because that is that’s the growth opportunity. That is where you want to be. 

 

And it’s what should drive you if indeed you’re entrepreneurial and your sense of purpose is garnered by the creation of new opportunity, new value and that’s really what entrepreneurship is, right? It’s the creation of new value. So you can’t do that easily. And that doesn’t come from, you know, staying in the fields playing it safe. So for you all the all the business owners, all the leaders, on entrepreneurs who are feeling that way, you’re actually in the place you need to be. So keep pushing on.

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:15:21  

I think that’s wonderful for folks that are over. I mean, first of all, anybody in Aus already knows about you. But for anybody, internationally, any listeners, everybody, give them the website, the number one place they should go to, to get more familiar with you guys and support you. 

 

Karl Goodman  1:15:35  

Okay, so from the business side, and probably a lot of your guys would love this, I send out probably three to four ATMs a week on everything that’s going on in my head, everything that’s going on in the business. I do sometimes offer the newsletter and stuff that are paid services to that. So if you’re scared have ever been pitched to don’t sign up to the business email. But if you do want my thoughts and my ideas and the tribulations along the way, if you do go to our website, athletes authority, and then just go to education, go to business, and then you know, you will be able to subscribe there, that’s a free email that, that I send out three to three to four times per week. So just that’ll be athletesauthority.com.au. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:16:14  

Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes. All good. Yeah. 

 

Karl Goodman  1:16:18  

But that’s probably the best way to stay in touch. And obviously, Instagram is great for keeping track of the essence of these athletes authority.

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:16:26  

Perfect. Well, guys, if you’re listening, depending on when you’re listening to this, we are going to be over there teaming up with them. On Saturday, February 25, and 26th 2023. Just go to artofcoaching.com/events we have early bird discounts. Please do not ask me the next time I’m going to be in Australia. This happens all the time. I’ll go to Boston somebody will be like when’s the next time you’re in Boston? Like guys, we’re going over there. I’d love to take and go there 30 times a year. I have a wife and kids and plus just the world can’t really handle the three of us getting together that often it would just get pretty

 

Lachlan Wilmot  1:17:00  

volatile. I can’t handle it. I don’t know if I’m gonna last if you’re hanging around for the week, to be honest, and hopefully got your own hotel room. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:17:08  

Hey, Karl, by the way, what do you say just for an extra 500 Cool 500 We just do an after hours out on ticket to that, you know, 

 

Karl Goodman  1:17:15  

Yea love that. Yeah. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:17:16  

All right, guys. In all seriousness, the dulcet tones of Karl Goodman, the boyish former good looks of Lachlan Wilmont and my annoying ass voice. Brett Bartholomew and the rest of the crew here signing off.