EHSEN SHAH INTERVIEW
Ehsen is the founder of B-Engaged, an organisation which specialises in sports & gaming marketing activations. With over 21 athletes, and 15 brands as clients working with B-Engaged with the objective to maximise ROI through the sporting audience.
Aside from B-Engaged, he has founded and invested and is on the board of advisors for a number of other businesses. Ehsen is passionate about growing businesses within the sports industry and the green / sustainable industries through an eco VC fund vehicle created to bring like minded people and organisations together.
EHSEN’S BUILD THE INVISIBLE CHAT HIGHLIGHTS
Routines
“I don't think one person's process can completely be replicated and work for another person because each individual human is completely different in the way that their minds work, their bodies work and their attention spans work as well, so for me it was all about trial and error, and from a young age, knowing what worked for me.”
Listening
“listen more than you talk. There's not necessarily a lot of people do this, but when you listen, you're capturing information. You can then capture that information and relate in the way that you need to.”
Rest and Recuperation
“I’m not a big fan of these opinions that you have to wake up at 5am … because realistically, if you're working off five hours sleep, it's impossible for you to function anyway, so sleep is the most important part in all of that entire component…
…there's a setting on the iPhone now; it's called downtime, so you set the downtime that you need, so between 10pm-7am, other than WhatsApp and iMessage, all my other apps are blocked, so I can't use them, so that forces me not to be on my phone.”
TRANSCRIPT
DG
Ehsen, thanks for joining. We've done this a few times now, so I appreciate you having the time to talk as always and, we talk a lot actually about behind the scenes stuff in the industries that we work in generally and the habits, the stuff that sets people apart, the ability to be able to do business in a pretty difficult sector, if you call it sport or entertainment or content or whatever you want to call it generally.
You're someone that has come through the ranks, built a company, built a pretty big company, and worked probably in one of the toughest sectors in one of the most difficult times, I guess, over the last few years especially. One of my big things, is what I’m trying to write about to a degree, is building the invisible; that's almost the name of the book to a degree. How do you go about building your network, your knowledge, your expertise, how do you manage to sell to clients, so that they feel that they're getting value and they're getting expertise and everything that goes from there? I know it's a while back now, and maybe one of the questions I was thinking about asking was, how do you think about getting into the sector, how did you think about targeting it, how do you think about working in it? I know it's a little bit more by chance for you, but if you're able just to give us a few minutes background as to how you went from, effectively the student life, and maybe not thinking that sports or entertainment was for you, into probably the sweet spot of the sports and entertainment universe.
ES
I don't know if you've ever read the book Outliers? When I read that book, it resonated with me quite a lot, because at the time, when I was in university, it was always, for me, all about the financial industry. I really wanted to work my way into management consulting or some sort of role within that banking and finance industry space, about building businesses or helping build them or sell them on and so I decided to realize that wasn't for me, so it wasn't a matter of, as a teenager or in my early adulthood at university, I knew I wanted to get into sport. For me, it was all about a completely different industry, but that industry for me, I didn't resonate with once I started to work within there through internships; it was all about, can I envisage myself being that person later on in life, and I didn't want to be in that situation, so I kind of had to re-evaluate what I was looking for, what pathway I wanted to build for myself, and because I’m a person that plans and always wants to think five, ten years ahead, I was thinking that way at that age, and then from there, it opened my eyes to being, I don't want to be someone consistently stuck behind a desk in a huge office building working completely ridiculous hours, so for me, it was about shifting that understanding and researching into industries that allow me to express myself in completely different ways.
Through that research and through talking to other people in other industries, other sectors, speaking to people at university who are doing other courses around outside of economics and finance, I started to understand the world of marketing, that there's still a philosophy that kind of resonates because they're still massively interested in business, so it's about applying all those understandings to a marketing sector. I very much opened myself up to the marketing world more so than sports marketing and within there, one of the modules was marketing communications and within that module, there was a small segment on sports marketing and communications and I kind of started to take a bit of a lean towards that, just naturally being a sports or a football fan, and there was a company local to the university that was doing internships, so I started working with them and they had two sports branches clients; one being Nike, another one being Tennis Point, which is a tennis online retailer, so working with them, I started to realize, actually, this is far more interesting, so how can I completely dive into this? I would work there three days a week; it was a Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would go there every single day after my lectures and at some point, I started to get to a point where I wouldn't go to lectures, I would go to do that work and then I’d just catch up with the lectures online when they put it all online, so that was kind of like my cheat code to doing that, and that just opened me up to experience things in the working environment that maybe I wasn't able to experience from university.
From there, I started to have a passion for the athlete side of things, which was athlete for brands too, so why aren't people talking about it, and then that's kind of by chance, I ended up in that situation and, bringing it back to Outliers, I was of the right generation, which was the generation, where at 17, 18, Facebook, Twitter were the big things, so we're pretty much brought up on it, but we weren't brought up on it from 13, 14, 15. We were in that prime spot of social media industry which was, younger it was Myspace and MSN. As you grew older, it started to commercialize it through Facebook, Twitter and then, I think I was one of the early adopters amongst my friendship group of Instagram, when I think I just went to uni in 2010, so when we're talking about being in the right place at the right time of a generation, I was a generation of that social media and the players that I could connect with and kind of work with through the internships and through some of my friends were of that generation as well, so they had a passion for that.
Then you start to think, okay, why hasn't a company done this in the past? It was largely because they were old school organizations, so old school PR, old school marketing, or they just didn't see athletes as a commodity that you could commercialize because it wasn't really done before. Beckham was really and truly one of the only people before this generation of footballers that had done it in the UK but in the States, they were doing it for five, six, seven years, so he's looking at, okay, what is working in the states that isn't working here, and it was the ample amount of supply and demand in that industry, whereas the supply is huge in terms of players, but no one's creating that demand, so it's ultimately who can create that demand, and there wasn't really anyone that was really doing it in the UK, and you end up in a position where you work with a couple of smaller companies that are trying to do it, some work, some don't, and then you end up in a position where two years on, you're like, okay, cool, I may as well just do this myself, because no one's really cracked it. It's either because they haven't done it the right way or that there isn't an opportunity or a space in this market here for that in this culture, and it just transpired that I was in the right place at the right time, but then took that opportunity to build what we've got now.
DG
Can I ask a specific point there, because I like that everyone that I’ve spoken to, that has had some decent levels of success in the entertainment sector or the passion sectors, I call it, if it's film or TV or fashion or music or jewellery or whatever else it might be, has used the word luck a lot, which I almost sometimes think is a bit of a self-deprecating tool, almost like, I was here and lucky in the right space and at the right time, and I definitely agree to a degree that that plays its part, but what it sounded like from the things that I’ve read and people I’ve spoken to is, what actually happens is, sometimes competing ideas of things that you're either really curious, interested, passionate about, almost merge together to form the thing that then sets you apart, so if social media and being an early adopter mixed with your interest and passion for marketing, mixed with sport and mixed with all of those in that sort of fulcrum, actually then provided the competitive advantage that enabled you to be able to then push forward and turbo charge quicker than potentially others, it's almost those non-exclusive ideas that form that sort of launch pad for you.
I know it's hard for you to say, yes, I saw that opportunity and I did it, but that's what it sounds like, maybe, what I can say it looks like from the outside that then gave you quite a good starting point.
ES
Yeah and I think it's an interesting conversation around luck, because on the flip side, the people that have taken advantage of the situation that they're in and kind of built something for themselves, they've had to have a set mentality to those that weren't able to do that, because when we look at it, there are plenty of people that have the same passions as you and the same opportunity in terms of a generation or education, or whatever it might be, in terms of where you're brought up, so if we look at the UK, there's plenty of people in the same university as me, plenty of people that were interested in the same things as me, but it's about how you tackle that mentality, which is, for example, the opportunity cost at that period of time, was do I do this for no money for, I don't know how long, or do I just go down the safe route and know, okay, I will graduate, I’ll be on a grad school for forty thousand a year for two years and my progression is this, this, this, this, this; that's the opportunity cost and all of that, which is that mentality towards, do you want to risk it or do you not want to really risk it, and plenty of my friends went down that route.
I was the only one out of a friendship group of about ten of us from school that decided to go down a completely different route and for the first two and a half years where you're doing something for nothing, people are questioning why you're doing this, but the reality is you've got more chances of that not succeeding than succeeding but it's ultimately how much of an opportunity do you want to create for yourself as well, so there's that element of, yes you are lucky in that sense that you were born in a certain generation or you were born in a certain country in a certain environment, culture; there's so many other different things because there are plenty of other people around this world that don't have that opportunity just out of geographical situations or economical situations for the countries that they live in, so yes that is a luck part which you just happen to be in that part, but how do you use that luck or how do you create that opportunity and turn that luck into something.
I think that comes down to the mentality of a person, whether how balancing out the opportunity cost, what is worth it for you and what isn't worth it for you. I think that that's ultimately, yes you are lucky in some certain senses, but so is everyone that lives in this country, so is everyone that has an education, so is everyone that has a roof over their head, that there is so many things that other people don't have in this world, but how do you use that and build on that.
DG
In terms of their mentality, I think one of the fascinating areas that I’m always really interested to hear people speak about is, this whole habit-making, habit-breaking, habit-forming stuff that people do; if it's the small increments, a lot of people call this the compounding effects, like very small changes over a long period of time, which compound into bigger things as a result. The parody of all of this is everyone waking up at five o'clock and doing three hours of gym, exercises, and meditation and contemplation, and all that type of stuff which is an extreme end, which certainly isn't for everybody, but I’m thinking about the types of behaviours that are maybe perhaps more realistic that normal, highly driven, successful, performance orientated, people do on a daily basis.
Are there particular things that have held you in good stead, either from people opening up some of their habits and secrets and ideas to you, or you finding your way on particular things and working out what works best?
ES
Yeah, I think it's an interesting topic because I don't think one person's process can completely be replicated and work for another person because each individual human is completely different in the way that their minds work, their bodies work and their attention spans work as well, so for me it was all about trial and error, and from a young age, knowing what worked for me, then changed to what worked for me now, and I’m not a big fan of these opinions that you have to wake up at 5am, you have to do this, you have to do certain things in a certain way, because realistically, if you're working off five hours sleep, it's impossible for you to function anyway, so sleep is the most important part in all of that entire component, but if you're not sleeping well, the rest isn't going to work, but for me, it's about what's always worked for me that I can try and implement with the team that we have as well, which is between 9-11am every day, we only do internal work, in terms of you will not externally talk to a client or a prospective client or a media entity or whatever it might be; 9-11am is all about you and your internal work, so that kind of frees up your day.
Then after 11am, you can then do your external things because what naturally happens is once you start booking in meetings, you can end up talking a lot and not doing a lot, so when people talk about starting at 5am and ending at 9am, you're just inefficient.
Actually, you can do this 9am-6pm if you structure out your day and structure out your week, so on a Monday morning, 9-11am is literally project management work, so you will not do any physical delivery of work; you will literally just work with your team, make sure that everything for the week is aligned, and then you have that in place. Something that worked for me in terms of 9-11am always internal work, we brought that to the team and helped them organize themselves, because you're actually physically putting aside two hours of your 40-hour week to organize.
If you spend those two hours, your other 38 hours are going to work far more efficiently. You don't have to wake up at 5am, you don't have to work till 9pm, it's that element of bringing efficiencies through organization, that for me has always massively helped and, coming back to that Monday thing, I always have a list of the things I have to finish by Friday, because I know this week, these are my list of things I need to do.
From that list, I will then divide it into, okay, this is due by Tuesday, I need to make sure I do this by end of Monday to deliver on Tuesday and then you start to have a systematic approach every Monday or Sunday night, whatever is easier for people, so to work out their week, divide that, and then you've got your week specifically planned out. If you start to overrun, then you probably need to come back and question, okay, where did that override, why was it inefficient. I think they are the most important points for me.
Then people talk about exercise. For me, 30 minutes in the morning is enough. It kind of opens my mind, opens my body, in terms of, it's also 30 minutes away from thinking about what you have to do. You can literally just focus on that 30 minutes, on something completely irrelevant, and a lot of people ignore this as well.
I think there's a setting on the iPhone now; it's called downtime, so you set the downtime that you need, so between 10pm-7am, other than WhatsApp and iMessage, all my other apps are blocked, so I can't use them, so that forces me not to be on my phone, to just watch TV, or recently with the new Call of Duty coming out, I just played Call of Duty for one and a half hours maybe at night, but you're immersing yourself into a different world, and I think people underestimate that element of you detaching yourself away from reality.
People say you shouldn't play video games or you shouldn't watch TV but it's so healthy for the mind to distract yourself away from something that isn't physically work, and I think people that work in an agency field or a service field, you can lose that so quickly, which is you always want to be on and you will naturally hit a burnout, you will naturally become inefficient, so having those two hours for your mind to turn off is so important.
DG
I couldn't speak more highly about that point generally. I find that we've talked about it a little bit before; a lot of the year, I’m always very reactive to things, obviously I’m planning and doing, or whatever else it might be, but usually after the transfer window ends in September or August, and then at Christmas time, that's more of my downtime, which is I’m not reactive to stuff as much, the workload generally starts to calm down, and after two or three days of rest, my brain waves sort of change, if that's the right way, from either going like this, to like this, or whatever the equivalent might be, so that you get back into a slightly different mode of creative thinking. That's how I try and see it sometimes and once your brain calms down a bit, even if it's short-term rest, like a couple hours off that you need to regenerate and re-energize or slightly longer periods for you to recover and be ready to assess what you need to do for a slightly longer period of time, I actually find that a very useful exercise as well.
How do you find that difference between short-term distraction of screen time versus slightly longer term habit strategy planning, when you need that longer amount or period of time, or whatever else you want to call it, to think more broadly about the things you need to be doing.
ES
Yeah, I think one of the things I’m always conscious of is consistently being on a screen because I think there's an element where you can get distracted, so you open your laptop, there's emails, there's WhatsApp, there's Slack some people use; there's so many different opportunities for you to become distracted, so when it comes to strategical things or important tasks which require complete focus and attention, I tend to use notepads, so one of the routines or a habit that I’ve fallen into is having three notepads and these three notepads will always be with me; one is for internal strategic business use, which is all about our business, our people; there's another notepad which is external, so when I meet with clients or prospective clients or whatever, whoever that might be, to only have those notes in that book; and then I have another one which is just like a sketch pad or for quick notes, and that allows me to strategically align my notes into different places, so I know when I’m working in this, if I flick back through the pages, I will only see words or notes or something which are relevant to the work that I’m doing now.
If in a client one, I flick back, I will only see notes relevant to clients and that allows my attention span to be completely focused on the topic or subject that I’m working on, so that's just one thing I’ve always found to ditch the laptop for setting tasks and use the laptop for certain tasks, but going old school and using notepads really helped me in terms of my attention and my focus, because you see a notification from an email or a WhatsApp or whatever it might be, you naturally just click, oh, let me just see what that's about, and then your focus is taken away, you're thinking about something else, you're reading something else, and then you'll be like, oh, what was I working on again; it’s counter-productive at times.
DG
I think that's totally right. There’s a bit in the book that I’m thinking about trying to write around distraction and whether actually there's a query about whether social media obviously is inbuilt to distract, but there's a slightly wider point around part of my thesis, or whatever it is, actually, because of the ubiquity of all this information that's available for people to be able to use to their advantage, sometimes you've got to see social as the positive, so long as it can be almost captured in the right way, so if you want to know more about the music industry, read three pieces of content, or effectively find three pieces of content that might be enjoyable for you to read or listen to or engage with on a particular day, but what you've got to be very careful about is, then if you're being on your phone to have that distraction away from the thing that you actually need to do, and the query being whether it's actually social media that is the most current manifestation of distraction, because it's the easy thing to do but actually distraction is something slightly different, and when I was reading this particular thing, distraction is the opposite of traction, which is staying on the path and doing the thing that you want to do, and I’ve never, in my brain, quite worked out that traction and distraction are sort of opposites to a degree, so that in a way, social and your phone is just again the latest iteration of distraction, but actually it's more to do with your own personality traits.
The idea of needing distraction for whatever trigger, emotional trigger, or otherwise, is the cause of you having to reach for your phone to be distracted to do the things, so as long as you have that under control, which granted a lot of people might not have, myself included at the best of times, then you can use tech to your advantage, but again it needs to be managed in quite a stringent way.
ES
I think it's that element of what you've just said; it hits the nail on the head because so many people will start doing something, get distracted, not finish off that article, that whatever and I think a few years ago, when I first started the business and stuff, I used to read a lot around articles to do with other businesses or the industry or industry trends, learning consumer trends, xyz, and I used to use this app called Pocket App; I would save the links in there and then when I knew that, okay, this is time I’m going to set aside to read this, all the articles are lined up, so I’m not in the space of Twitter, I’m in the space of just complete articles. Bear in mind I’ve stopped doing that now, because I’ve stopped reading articles so much, because I think they confuse or distract me more from my own vision than they do help me now, but back then, when you want to learn so much around the industry and consumers and other intricacies of the work that you're doing, that that was always quite helpful.
DG
Just a couple of the last points, so one of the points is, I don't like using the f word which is failure because I don't think failures are actually quite apt in the same way that everyone says they're passionate about stuff, but after reading particular things on passion, I’m not sometimes sure passion is the right word for wanting to get into a particular area. The more I’m reading, the more I’m thinking, actually, people are curious about things rather than passionate about things; you're curious about wanting to learn more about it and simply because when I was reading about passion, I was reading this Angela Duckworth book, Grit, and she was talking about passion being the Latin structure for passion is to suffer which I found quite interesting, granted we may suffer sometimes for the work that we do because it is quite tricky sometimes and difficult and you need to invest in the long term and all that type of stuff, and that's why I don't think I sometimes see failure as the ultimate be all and end all and the f word etc., but I think it's more to do with when there are bumps in the road and things don't go to plan, and when things become difficult and tricky and you have to try and handle things in different ways, how you manage to stay resilient, how you manage to gain traction, how you manage to stay on the path in face of things that crop up; have you got any either experiences or insights as to how you go about doing that, for either the business, for people in your team, for stuff in life generally?
ES
We have to accept everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes lead to situations which aren't planned for, so you can't ever run a business or manage the team without knowing people will make mistakes, but I think the key thing for me is always the accountability of that mistake, in terms of, unless you take accountability for it, you won't learn from it.
There's a fine balance between making a mistake, being like, yeah, I made a mistake, I’m moving on from it, or making a mistake, understanding where that mistake came from, or how it came about, and learning from it to make sure that it never happens again, so for me, you can't learn or grow unless you make mistakes, but you have to take that accountability for it to understand where the mistake comes from to then be able to know, okay, next time, this will not happen, because this is right or wrong, and this is where I will do it differently, but it's that fine mentality to be able to do that, and you have to be so resilient in knowing that you've made a mistake, because some mistakes can be extremely small, some can be extremely big.
I made a huge mistake pre-Covid, which was the expansion of the business. It was done in a way which maybe reflecting back on it, was naïve, in the sense that you weren't accounting for different situations that can come around, which are out of your control. People always say to me, but you could never have seen it coming, but that's not the point. The point is that this could have been something else which may not have been a global pandemic, it may have been something else; recessions, we had one in 2008, it's not too far since we had one, so you should, as a business owner, always be mindful that there will be different external factors that will hamper you, but that unless I took accountability for it, unless I understood where I went wrong, and unless I actioned something about it, you're just going to be completely naïve to what's going on and you'll make that same mistake again and again and again, and at some point it's really going to hurt you.
For me, it's always about their accountability and always about the learning from that mistake, because they're inevitable; no human’s perfect.
DG
One thing I learned from the great book again that features quite heavily in a lot of my thinking is called Mindset by a lady called Dr Carol Dweck, and she talks about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.
The growth mindset effectively being, yes, I’m accountable to my mistakes, but I’m not owned by my mistakes or the equivalent of it, which is I’m not defined by them and so long as someone believes that their abilities are not fixed, that they can effectively grow their own brain, that they can get better, that things can be learned, and you can excel over even a short or medium to long term, that contrasts with a fixed mind-set which is, I’m only as good as my last piece of work and I’m completely defined by it, which means if my work is failing, then I’m a failure, and there's nothing much I can do about it.
Whereas on one side, it's accountability for your own mistakes, it’s almost like, yes, these are the things that I can do better and I can improve on as a result, rather than, no, it's someone else's fault and it's things that are out of my control, which were the result of things that can happen, and usually from reading lots of things, it is that growth mindset person, which is, I can get better, and also the things that I can get better with, I can control more of, or feel that I can be in control more of that is likely to lead to a more positive outcome as a result.
ES
That's exactly the part behind all of this, which is, unless you learn from it, it's a pointless task to be doing something that you're not going to learn from or grow from, because it's like you mentioned, that fixed mindset in terms of, you set a ceiling for yourself and you're probably not going to go beyond that ceiling, whereas if you take that growth mindset and that accountability factor and, not everyone can do that; I’ve come across people within our team, people that I’ve worked with externally, that something goes wrong, oh, that wasn't my fault, okay, but it was, but if you just took accountability for it, the situation would be far easier to deal with, than you just saying, that wasn't my fault, because there is a generational problem within certain generations, which is that it is someone else's responsibility, it's outside of my day-to-day, so that's nothing to do with me, but I think that's just a mind-set thing again.
DG
A few people have talked to me about people that have had impacts on their careers or otherwise. We've talked a bit about mentorship or people giving advice to you over the years or otherwise; has any of that featured prominently in your progression to date or has it almost been a conscious decision to do things in a slightly different way?
ES
For me it's always been to live and breathe my own mistakes, so my point has always been to myself that if you make a mistake yourself, you're more likely to learn from it and not do it again, than listen to someone else's mistake, because it's not relatable to you, and for me, it was all about, if I’m going to do this, I want to do it in a way which I can never have any regrets, so it was all about choosing not to have a mentor or choosing not to have someone that's done it in the past or someone that's been successful in something else because they've been successful off their own opportunities or their own gut feeling or their own instincts, and when you can ask as many questions to make your decision, but what I would never do, is put myself in a situation where I say to someone, can you make a decision for me.
I know that’s not what a mentor is meant to do, but I do feel that mentors or people, especially when it comes to running a business, they don't live and breathe your business, they don't live and breathe the everyday challenges between personnel, between functionality, between processes, between clients, between a vision, ultimately only you as the business owner or the people that run the business can do that, so it was all about, okay, I will read, I will listen, I’ll adapt information back towards what we are doing as myself or as the business, but most importantly, always learn from my own mistakes rather than someone else's mistakes, because maybe we're not in that position to make that same mistake, and you can become a bit too focused on not making a mistake than doing something good.
If you bring it back to football, you might not want to play a forward pass because you don't want to make the mistake that someone else has made a mistake in the past by consistently giving a possession away, so what you do is just pass it sideways and backwards. Again you're not going anywhere with that, however my point has always been, okay, if you want to change in an industry or you want to change mentality of consumers or people in that industry, we can only do that by doing things differently to what other people have done before in the past, so rather than being too focused on other people's mistakes, I’d rather focus on what we're very good at and what we want to achieve within the industry, and when we make mistakes, not if we will make mistakes, when we make those mistakes, to learn from them and I think in the past four years, there's been a complete rapid growth of being engaged as a business, and the team internally always say this, every project we learn so much from it, not necessarily because of mistakes but because of new ideas, new ways of working with people, new ways of collaborating with people, new feedback, whatever it might be; every project we grow
The day we stop doing that, we as a business aren't going to be succeeding as well as we do, so it's always about, yes, when people say, you guys are growing fast, you're doing this, you're doing that, I take that as the compliment to the team, which is they are learning so fast every single day, they are learning something new and that part is the most rewarding out of it, rather than having a mentor tell me, oh, your team could do this or maybe you should put that person in that place.
We've had external consultants come in and help us on that but when I hear the advice, I’m like, okay, but you haven't really understood the person, the person that has a dynamic behind the professional, that this person, one, may be they’re parents, or there's something going on in their personal life that you've ignored, all the personal factors too, because you've just come in, asking business questions, giving me a business answer, and that's the complete humane side of all of this, so I’d rather know the people, push them into a position where they can learn as professionals. That is probably a better process than having mentors.
DG
I completely understand that. I’ve been lucky enough because I’m in much more of a structured law firm environment with more process driven ways as well, that you end up gravitating towards people and trying to take bits and pieces away from people who are more senior than you, that are in quite a hierarchical structure as well, that sort of resonate in lots of different ways, but I could completely see that is definitely more difficult in the creative sector, and especially in the business that you've been running, which although it's growing rapidly, is not in the same way as me, like the seven or eight hundred lawyer European law firm, which probably in the past would have been a bit different, so I completely see that.
Last question for you, and thanks again for your time, which is, you've got this massive billboard that you could say anything to inspire others with, and you're allowed to have a couple of sayings if you want to, what would they say?
ES
The first one we always say in the office, bring solutions not problems. If you're going to highlight an issue, be prepared to bring a solution with that issue, which is productive. If you're just bringing a problem and not maybe highlighting some sort of analysis around it, pretty much you’re moaning about something which is completely counterproductive, because you can influence someone else's opinion of someone, something, or whatever it might be, in a negative way and that's just got a spiral decline with it.
The second one would be, listen more than you talk. There's not necessarily a lot of people do this, but when you listen, you're capturing information. You can then capture that information and relate in the way that you need to. We've both spoken about a book in the past, actually I think you may have given it to me, how to make friends and influence people, and that book kind of epitomizes that philosophy, which is actually, the more you listen, the more you can take information, analyse it, understand that person, their way of thinking or their philosophy or whatever it might be, and you can adapt what you need to talk about to them, and make them interested in you, because I have it so many times, so often, where someone will just talk at me, and it'll be a case of them just talking about themselves or their service or whatever it might be, and I’m just completely switched off because they haven't asked me a question to relate it back to me, and although I run a business, I hate selling to people.
I will only talk or I’ll get to the point with what I’m trying to do and the only way I can do that is by listening to that person, understanding, or asking the right questions to get the information that I need. People lose that element of, actually, listening more than you talk is probably one of the most valuable things that you can do as a professional.
DG
I totally agree. I’m realizing that for all marketing and business development and relationship building, the less I talk, the better, and then it becomes a question of recalling the important information at a later time for you to use to benefit the other person, which will also hopefully benefit yourself as well.
ES
Exactly, again you're bringing a solution to someone, might not be a problem, rather than just talking at them in a sales pitch.
DG
Correct because otherwise you end up selling what you want to sell them, rather than what they need, and that's quite a big difference.
ES
Yeah, a lot of the time.
DG
Ehsen, thanks very much for your time on that, lots of interesting stuff to contemplate, and I appreciate your time as always.
